The victories of the Duke of Marlborough and of Prince Eugene spread consternation at court. When, in 1704, the news of Blenheim oozed out at Versailles, the king’s grief was piteous to see. Scarce a noble family but had one of its members killed, wounded, or a prisoner. Two years later came the defeat of Ramillies, to be followed in three months by the disaster at Turin. The balls and masquerades and play at Marly went merrily on; but at news of the defeat of Oudenarde and the fall of Lille, even the reckless courtiers were subdued, and for a month gambling and even conversation ceased. At the sound of an approaching horseman they ran hither and thither, with fear painted on their cheeks. Wildest schemes for raising money were tried; a large sum was wasted on mining for gold in the Pyrenees; taxes were levied on baptisms and marriages. Sums raised for the relief of the poor and the maintenance of highways were expropriated, and the wretched peasants were forced to repair the roads without payment, some dying of starvation at their work. The coinage was debased. King and courtiers, with ill-grace, sent their plate to the mint. A plan for the recapture of Lille was mooted, in which Louis was to take part, but, for lack of money, the king’s ladies were not to accompany him to the seat of war as they had hitherto done.[139] The expedition was to remain a secret; but the infatuated Louis could withhold nothing from Madame de Maintenon, and she never rested until she had foiled the whole scheme and disgraced Chamillart, who had concealed the preparations from her.

The court had now grown so accustomed to defeats that Malplaquet was hailed as half a victory; but, in 1710, so desperate was the condition of the treasury, that a financial and social débâcle was imminent. The Dauphin, on leaving the opera at Paris, had been assailed by crowds of women shouting, “Bread! bread!” He only escaped by throwing them money and promises, and never dared show his face in Paris again. To appease the people, the poor were set to level the boulevard near St. Denis, and were paid in doles of bread—bad bread. Even this failed them one morning, and a woman who made some disturbance was dragged to the pillory by the archers of the watch. An angry mob released her, and proceeded to raid the bakers’ shops. The ugly situation was saved only by the firmness and sagacity of the popular Marshal Boufflers. Another turn of the financial screw was now meditated, and, as the taxes had already “drawn all the blood from his subjects, and squeezed out their very marrow,” the conscience of the lord of France was troubled. His Jesuit confessor, Le Tellier, promised to consult the Sorbonne, whose learned doctors decided that, since all the wealth of his subjects rightly belonged to the king, he only took what was his own.

Grand Palais and Pont Alexandre.
Grand Palais and Pont Alexandre.

Towards the end of the seventeenth century, the quarrel between the Jansenists and the Jesuits concerning subtle doctrinal differences had grown acute through the publication of Pascal’s immortal Lettres Provinciales, and by Quesnel’s Réflexions Morales which the Jesuits had succeeded in subjecting to papal condemnation. In 1709, Le Tellier induced his royal penitent[140] to decree the destruction of one of the two Jansenist establishments, and Port Royal des Champs, between Versailles and Chevreuse, rendered famous by the piety and learning of Arnault, Pascal and Nicolle, was doomed. On the night of 28th October 1709, the convent was surrounded by Gardes Françaises and Suisses, and on the following morning the chief of the police, with a posse of archers of the watch entered, produced a lettre de cachet, and gave the nuns a quarter of an hour to prepare for deportation. The whole of the sisters were then brutally expelled, “comme on enlève les créatures prostituées d’un lieu infâme,” says St. Simon, and scattered among other religious houses in all directions. The friends of the buried were bidden to exhume their dead, and all unclaimed bodies were flung into a neighbouring cemetery, where dogs fought for them as for carrion. The church was profaned, and all the conventual buildings were razed like houses of regicides; the materials were sold in lots, and not one stone was left on another; the very ground was ploughed up and sown, “not, it is true with salt,” adds St. Simon, and that was the only favour shown.

Two years after the scene at Port Royal, amid the heartless gaiety of the court, the Angel of Death was busy in Louis’ household. On 14th April 1711, the old king’s only lawful son, the Grand Dauphin, expired; on 12th February 1712, the second Dauphiness, the sweet and gentle Adelaide of Savoy, the king’s darling, died of a malignant fever; six days later the Duke of Burgundy, her husband, was struck down; on 8th March, the Duke of Brittany, their eldest child, followed them. Three Dauphins had gone to the vaults of St. Denis in less than a year; mother, father, son, had died in twenty-four days—a sweep of Death’s scythe, enough to touch even the hearts of courtiers. In a few days the king gave orders for the usual play to begin at Marly, and the dice rattled while the bodies of the Dauphin and Dauphiness lay yet unburied. Well may St. Simon exclaim, “Are these princes made like other men?”

In 1712, some successes in Flanders enabled Louis to negotiate the Peace of Utrecht. France retained her old boundaries, and a Bourbon remained on the throne of Spain; but she was debased from her proud position of arbiter of Europe, and the substantial profits of the war went to England[141] and Austria.

In May 1714, the Duke of Berri, son of the Grand Dauphin, died, and the sole direct heir to the throne was now the king’s great-grandson, the Duke of Anjou, a sickly child of five years. On September 1715, the Grand Monarque made a calm and an edifying end to his long reign of seventy-two years, declaring that he owed no man restitution, and trusted in God’s mercy for what he owed to the realm. He called the young child, who was soon to be Louis XV., to his bedside, and apparently without any sense of incongruity, exhorted him to remember his God, to cherish peace, to avoid extravagance, and study the welfare of his people. After receiving the last sacraments he repeated the prayers for the dying in a firm voice and, calling on God’s aid, passed peacefully away. None but his official attendants, his priest and physicians, saw the end: two days before, Madame de Maintenon had given away all her furniture, and retired to St. Cyr.

The demolition of what remained of mediæval Paris proceeded apace during Louis XIV.’s lifetime, and, at his death, the architectural features of its streets were substantially those of the older Paris of to-day. Colbert had taken up the costly legacy of the unfinished Louvre before the petrified banalities of Versailles and Marly had engulfed their millions, and, in 1660, the Hôtel de Bourbon was given over to the housebreakers to make room for the new east wing of the palace. So vigorously did they set to work that when Molière, whose company performed there three days a week in alternation with the Italian opera, came for the usual performance, he found the theatre half demolished. He applied to the king, who granted him the temporary use of Richelieu’s theatre in the Palais Royal, and his first performance there was given on 20th January 1661.

Portion of the East Façade of the Louvre from Blondel’s Drawing, showing Perrault’s base.
Portion of the East Façade of the Louvre from Blondel’s Drawing, showing Perrault’s base.

Levau was employed to carry on Lemercier’s work on the Louvre, and had succeeded in completing the north wing and the river front when Colbert stayed further progress and ordered him to prepare a model in wood of his proposed east wing. Levau was stupefied, for he had elaborated with infinite study a design for this portion of the palace, which he regarded as of supreme importance, and which he hoped would crown his work. He had already laid the foundations and erected the scaffolding when the order came. Levau made his model, and a number of architects were invited to criticise it: they did, and unanimously condemned it. Competitive designs were then submitted to Colbert, who took advantage of Poussin’s residence at Rome to send them to the great Italian architects for their judgment. The Italians delivered a sweeping and general condemnation, and Poussin advised that Bernini should be employed to design a really noble building. Louis was delighted by the suggestion, and the loan of the architect of the great colonnade of St. Peter’s was entreated of the pope by the king’s own hand.

Bernini came to Paris where he was treated like a prince, and drew up a scheme of classic grandeur. Levau’s work on the east front was destroyed, and in October 1665, Bernini’s foundations were begun. The new design, however, ignored the exigencies of existing work and of internal convenience, and gave opportunities for criticisms and intrigue, which the French architects, forgetting for the moment all domestic rivalry, were not slow to make the most of. The offended Italian left to winter in Rome, and was never seen in Paris again. A munificent gift of 3000 gold louis and a pension of 12,000 livres solaced his pride.

Among the designs originally submitted to Colbert was one which had not been sent to Rome. It was the work of an amateur, Claude Perrault, a physician by profession, whose brother, Charles Perrault, was chief clerk in the Office of Works. This was now brought forth, and a commission, consisting of Levau, Lebrun, and Claude Perrault, appointed to report on its practicability. Levau promptly produced his own discarded designs, which won Lebrun’s approval, and both were submitted to the king for a final decision. Louis was fascinated by the stately classicism of Perrault’s design, and this was adopted. “Architecture must be in a bad state,” said his rivals, “since it is put in the hands of a physician.” The new wing was raised and found to be seventy-two feet too long, whereupon the whole of Levau’s river front was masked by a new façade, rendered necessary to correct the mistake, if mistake it were, and the whole south wing[142] is in consequence much thicker than any of the others which enclose the great quadrangle. Poor Levau is said to have died of vexation and grief. Even to this day the north-east end of Perrault’s façade projects un-symmetrically beyond the line of the north front. Perrault’s work has been much criticised and much praised. It evoked Fergusson’s ecstatic admiration, and is eulogised by another critic as one of the finest pieces of architecture in any age. Strangely enough, neither of these ever saw, nor has anyone yet seen, more than a partial and stunted realisation of Perrault’s design (which involved a broad and deep fosse), for, as the accompanying reproduction of a drawing by Blondel demonstrates, the famous east front of the Louvre is like a giant buried up to the knees, and the present first-floor windows were an afterthought, their places having been designed as niches to hold statues. The exactitude of Blondel’s elevations was finally proved in 1903 by the admirable insight of the present architect of the Louvre, Monsieur G. Redon, who was led to undertake the excavations which brought to light a section of Perrault’s decorated basement, by noticing that the windows of the ground floor evidently implied a lower order beneath. This basement, seven and a half metres in depth, now buried, was in Perrault’s scheme designed to be exposed by a fosse of some fifteen to twenty metres in width, and the whole elevation and symmetry of the wing would have immensely gained by the carrying out of his plans.

Hotel des Invalides.
Hotel des Invalides.

The construction, begun in 1665 was, however, interrupted in 1676, owing to the king’s abandonment of Paris. Colbert strenuously protested against the neglect of the Louvre, and warned his master not to squander his millions away from Paris and suffer posterity to measure his grandeur by the ell of Versailles. It availed nothing. In 1670, 1,627,293 livres were allotted to the Louvre; in 1672 the sum had fallen to 58,000 livres; in 1676 to 42,082; in 1680 the subsidies practically ceased, and the great palace was utterly neglected until 1754 when Perrault’s work was feebly continued by Gabriel and Soufflot.

Two domed churches in the south of Paris—the Val de Grâce and St. Louis of the Invalides—were also erected during Louis XIV.’s lifetime. Among the many vows made by Anne of Austria during her twenty-two years’ unfruitful marriage was one made in the sanctuary of the nunnery of the Val de Grâce, to build there a magnificent church to God’s glory if she were vouchsafed a Dauphin. At length, on 1st April 1645, the proud queen was able to lead the future king, a boy of seven years, to lay the first stone. The church was designed by F. Mansard on the model of St. Peter’s at Rome, and was finished by Lemercier and others. The thirteenth-century nunnery had been transferred to Paris from Val Profond in 1624, and was liberally patronised by Anne.

A refuge had been founded as early as Henry IV.’s reign in an old abbey in the Faubourg St. Marcel, for old and disabled soldiers. Louis XIV., the greatest creator of invalides France had seen, determined in 1670 to extend the foundation, and erect a vast hospital, capable of accommodating his aged, crippled or infirm soldiers. Bruant and J. H. Mansard[143] among other architects were employed to raise the vast pile of buildings which, when completed, are said to have been capable of housing 7,000 men. A church dedicated to St. Louis was comprehended in the scheme, and, in 1680, a second Eglise Royale was erected, whose gilded dome is so conspicuous an object in south Paris; the Eglise Royale, which Mansard designed, was subsequently added to the church of St. Louis, and became its choir. Louis XIV., anticipating Napoleon’s maxim that war must support war, raised the funds needed for the foundation by ingeniously requiring all ordinary and extraordinary treasurers of war to retain two deniers[144] on every livre that passed through their hands.

The old city gates of the Tournelle, Poissonnière (or St. Anne), St. Martin, St. Denis, the Temple, St. Jacques, St. Victor, were demolished, and triumphal arches, which still remain, erected to mark the sites of the Portes St. Denis and St. Martin. Another arch, of St. Antoine, was designed to surpass all existing or ancient monuments of the kind, and many volumes were written concerning the language in which the inscription should be composed, but the devouring maw of Versailles had to be filled, and the arch was never completed. The king for whose glory the monument was to be raised, cared so little for it, that he suffered it to be pulled down.

RIVER AND PONT ROYAL.
RIVER AND PONT ROYAL.

Many new streets[145] were made, and others widened, among them the ill-omened Rue de la Ferronnerie. The northern ramparts were levelled and planted with trees from the Porte St. Antoine in the east to the Porte St. Honoré in the west, and in 1704 it was decided to continue the planting in the south round the Faubourg St. Germain. The Place Louis le Grand (now Vendôme), and the Place des Victoires were created; the river embankments were renewed and extended, and a fine stone Pont Royal by J. H. Mansard, the most beautiful of the existing bridges of Paris, was built to replace the old wooden structure that led from the St. Germain quarter to the Tuileries. This in its turn had replaced a ferry (bac) established by the Guild of Ferrymen, to transport the stone needed for the construction of the Tuileries, and the street which leads to the bridge still bears the name of the Rue du Bac. The Isle Louviers was acquired by the Ville, and the evil-smelling tanneries and dye-houses that disfigured the banks of the Seine between the Grève and the Châtelet were cleared away; many new fountains embellished the city, and ten new pumps increased the supply of water. The poorer quarters were, however, little changed from their old insanitary condition. A few years later Rousseau, fresh from Turin, was profoundly disappointed by the streets of Paris as he entered the city by the Faubourg St. Marceau. “I had imagined,” he writes, “a city as fair as it was great, and of a most imposing aspect, whose superb streets were lined with palaces of marble and of gold. I saw only filthy, evil-smelling, mean streets, ugly houses black with dirt, a general air of uncleanness and of poverty, beggars and carters, old clothes shops and tisane sellers.”

It is now time to ask what had been done with the magnificent inheritance which the fourteenth Louis had entered upon at the opening of his reign: he left to his successor a France crushed by an appalling debt of 2,400,000,000 livres; a noblesse and an army in bondage to money-lenders; public officials and fund-holders unpaid, trade paralysed, and the peasants in some provinces so poor that even straw was lacking for them to lie upon, many crossing the frontiers in search of a less miserable lot. Scarcity of bread made disease rampant at Paris, and as many as 4,500 sick poor were counted at one time in the Hôtel Dieu alone. Louis left a court that “sweated hypocrisy through every pore,” and an example of licentious and unclean living and cynical disregard of every moral obligation, which ate like a cancer into the vitals of the aristocracy.

CHAPTER XVI

PARIS UNDER THE REGENCY AND LOUIS XV.—THE BROODING STORM

Visitors to Venice whose curiosity may have led them into the church of S. Moisè, will remember to have seen there a monument to a famous Scotchman—John Law. This is the last home of an outlaw, a gambler, and an adventurer, who, by his amazing skill and effrontery, plunged the regency into a vortex of speculation, and for a time controlled the finances of France. He persuaded the regent that by a liberal issue of paper money he might wipe out the accumulated national deficit of 100,000,000 livres, revive trade and industry, and inaugurate a financial millennium. In 1718 Law’s Bank, after a short and brilliant career as a private venture, was converted into the Banque Royale, and by the artful flotation of a gigantic trading speculation called the Mississippi Company, the bank-notes and company shares were so manipulated that the latter were inflated to twenty times their nominal value. The whole city of Paris seethed in a ferment of speculation. The premises of the Banque Royale in the Rue Quincampoix were daily besieged by a motley crowd of princes, nobles, fine ladies, courtesans, generals, prelates, priests, bourgeois and servants. A hunchback made a fortune by lending his back as a desk; lacqueys became masters in a day, and a parvenu footman, by force of habit, jumped up behind his own carriage in a fit of abstraction. The inevitable catastrophe came at the end of 1719. The Prince of Conti was observed taking away three cartloads of silver in exchange for his paper. A panic ensued, every holder sought to realise, and the colossal fabric came down with a crash, involving thousands of families in ruin and despair. Law, after bravely trying to save the situation and narrowly escaping being torn in pieces, fled to poverty and death at Venice, and the financial state of France was worse than before. Law was not, however, absolutely a quack; there was a seed of good in his famous system of mobilising credit, and the temporary stimulus it gave to trade permanently influenced mercantile practices in Europe.

In 1723, Louis XV. reached his legal majority. The regent became chief minister, and soon paid the penalty of his career of debauchery, leaving as his successor the Duke of Bourbon, degenerate scion of the great Condé and one of the chief speculators in the Mississippi bubble. A perilous lesson had two years before been instilled into the mind of the young Louis. After his recovery from an illness, an immense concourse of people had assembled at a fête given in the gardens of the Tuileries palace; enormous crowds filled every inch of the Place du Carrousel and the gardens; the windows and even the roofs of the houses were alive with people crying “Vive le roi!” Marshal Villeroi led the little lad of eleven to a window, showed him the sea of exultant faces turned towards him, and exclaimed, “Sire, all this people is yours; all belongs to you. Show yourself to them, and satisfy them; you are the master of all.”

The Infanta of Spain, at four years of age, had been betrothed to the young king, and in 1723 was sent to Paris to be educated for her exalted future. She was lodged in the Petite Galerie of the Louvre, over the garden still known as the Garden of the Infanta,[146] and after three years of exile the homesick little maid was returned to Madrid; for Louis’ weak health made it imperative that a speedy marriage should be contracted if the succession to the throne were to be assured. The choice finally fell on the daughter of Stanislaus Leczynski, a deposed king of Poland and a pensioner of France. Voltaire relates that the poor discrowned queen was sitting with her daughter Marie in their little room at Wissembourg when the father, bursting in, fell on his knees, crying, “Let us thank God, my child!” “Are you then recalled to Poland?” asked Marie. “Nay, daughter, far better,” answered Stanislaus, “you are the queen of France.” A magnificent wedding at Fontainebleau, exalted gentle, pious Marie from poverty to the richest queendom in Europe; to a life of cruel neglect and almost intolerable insult.

The immoral Duke of Bourbon was followed by Cardinal Fleury, and at length France experienced a period of honest administration, which enabled the sorely-tried land to recover some of its wonted elasticity. The Cardinal was, however, dominated by the Jesuits, and both Protestants and Jansenists felt their cruel hand. During the persecution of the Jansenists in 1782 a deacon, named Pâris, died and was canonised by the popular voice. Miracles were said to have been wrought at his sepulchre in the cemetery of St. Médard; fanatics flung themselves down on the tomb and writhed in horrible convulsions. So great was the excitement and disorder that the Archbishop of Paris denounced the miracles as the work of Satan, and the Government ordered the cemetery to be closed. The next morning a profane inscription was found over the entrance to the cemetery:—

Colonne Vendome.
Colonne Vendome.

Before Louis sank irrevocably into the slothful indulgence that stained his later years, he was stirred to essay a kingly rôle by Madame de Chateauroux, the youngest of four sisters who had successively been his mistresses. She fired his indolent imagination by appeals to the memory of his glorious ancestors, and the war of the Austrian succession being in progress, Louis set forth with the army of the great Marshal Saxe for Metz, where in August 1744 he was stricken down by a violent fever, and in an access of piety was induced to dismiss his mistress and return to his abused queen. As he lay on the brink of death, given up by his physicians and prepared for the end by the administration of the last sacraments, a royal phrase admirably adapted to capture the imagination of a gallant people came from his lips. “Remember,” he said to Marshal Noailles, “remember that when Louis XIII. was being carried to the grave, the Prince of Condé won a battle for France.” The agitation of the Parisians as the king hovered between life and death was indescribable. The churches were thronged with sobbing people praying for his recovery; when the courtiers came with news that he was out of danger they were borne shoulder high in triumph through the streets, and fervent thanksgiving followed in all the churches. People hailed him as Louis le Bien-Aimé (the Well-Beloved); even the callous heart of the king was pierced by their loyalty and he cried, “What have I done to deserve such love?” So easy was it to win the affection of his warm-hearted people.

The brilliant victories of Marshal Saxe, and the consequent Peace of Aix-la-Chapelle, brought some years of prosperity to France. Wealth increased; Paris became more than ever a centre of intellectual splendour and social refinement, where the arts administered to luxurious ease. But it was a period of regal licentiousness unparalleled even in the history of France. Louis XIV. at least exacted good breeding and wit in his mistresses, but his descendant enslaved himself to the commonest and most abandoned of women.

For twenty years the destinies of the French people, and the whole patronage of the Government, the right to succeed to the most sacred and exalted offices in the Church, were bartered and intrigued for in the chamber of a harlot and procuress. Under the influence of the Pompadours and the Du Barrys a crowned roué allowed the state to drift into financial, military and civil[148] disaster.

“Authentic proofs exist,” says Taine, “demonstrating that Madame de Pompadour cost Louis XV. a sum equal to about seventy-two millions of present value (£2,880,000).” She would examine the plans of campaign of her marshals in her boudoir, and mark with patches (mouches) the places to be defended or attacked. Such was the foolish extravagance of the court that to raise money recourse was had to an attempted taxation of the clergy, which the prelates successfully resisted; the old quarrel with the Jansenists was revived, and soon Church and Crown were convulsed by an agitation that shook society to its very base. During the popular ferment the king was attacked in 1757 by a crack-brained fanatic named Damiens, who scratched him with a penknife as he was entering his coach at Versailles. The poor crazy wretch, who at most deserved detention in an asylum, was first subjected to a cruel judicial torture, then taken to the Place de Grève, where he was lacerated with red-hot pincers and, after boiling lead had been poured into the wounds, his quivering body was torn to pieces by four horses, and the fragments burned to ashes.

A few years later the long-suffering Jansenists were avenged with startling severity. The Jesuits, to their honour be it said, shocked by the infamies of the royal seraglio in the Parc aux Cerfs, made use of their ascendency at court to awaken in the king’s mind some sense of decency: they did but add the bitter animosity of Madame de Pompadour to the existing hostility of the Parlement of Paris. Louis, urged by his minister the Duke of Choiseul, and by the arts of his mistress, abandoned the Jesuits to their enemies; the Parlement suppressed the Society in France, secularised its members and confiscated its property.

The closing years of the Well-Beloved’s reign were years of unmitigated ignominy and disaster to France. Her rich Indian conquests were muddled away, and the gallant Dupleix died broken-hearted and in misery at Paris. Canada was lost. During the Seven Years’ War the incapacity and administrative corruption of Madame de Pompadour’s favourites made them the laughing-stock of Paris. In 1770 the Duke of Choiseul refused to tolerate the vile Du Barry, whom we may see in Madame Campan’s Memoirs sitting on the arm of Louis’ chair at a council of state, playing her monkey tricks to amuse the old sultan, snatching sealed orders from his hand and making the foolish monarch chase her round the council chamber. She swore to ruin the duke and, aided by a cabal of Jesuit sympathisers and noble intriguers, succeeded in compassing his dismissal. The Parlement of Paris paid for its temerity; it and the whole of the parlements in France were suppressed, and seven hundred magistrates exiled by lettres de cachet. Every patriotic Frenchman now felt the gathering storm. Madame Campan writes that twenty years before the crash came it was common talk in her father’s house (he was employed in the Foreign Office) that the old monarchy was rapidly sinking and a great change at hand. Indeed, the writing on the wall was not difficult to read. The learned and virtuous Malesherbes and many another distinguished member of the suppressed parlements warned the king of the dangers menacing the crown, but so sunk was its wearer in bestial stupefaction that he only murmured: “Well, it will last my time,” and with his flatterers and strumpets uttered the famous words—“Après nous le déluge.” So lost to all sense of honour was Louis, that he soiled his hands with bribes from tax-farmers who ground the faces of the poor, and became a large shareholder in an infamous syndicate of capitalists that bought up the corn of France in order to export it and then import it at enormous profit. This abominable Pacte de Famine created two artificial famines in France; its authors battened on the misery of the people, and for any who lifted their voices against it the Bastille yawned.

In 1768 the poor abused, injured and neglected queen, Marie Leczynski died. The court went from bad to worse: void of all dignity, all gaiety, all wit and all elegance, it drifted to its doom. Six years passed, and Louis was smitten by confluent small-pox and a few poor women were left to perform the last offices on the mass of pestiferous corruption that once was the fifteenth Louis of France.[149] None could be found to embalm the corpse, and spirits of wine were poured into the coffin which was carried to St. Denis without pomp and amid the half-suppressed curses of the people. Before the breath had left the body, a noise as of thunder was heard approaching the chamber of the Dauphin and Marie Antoinette: it was the sound of the courtiers hastening to grovel before the new king and queen. Warned that they had now inherited the awful legacy of the French monarchy, they flung themselves in tears on their knees, and exclaimed—“O God, guide and protect us! We are too young to govern.”

Place du Châtelet and Tour St. Jacques.
Place du Châtelet and Tour St. Jacques.

The degradation of the monarchy during the reign is reflected in the condition of the royal palace in the capital. Henry IV.’s great scheme, which Louis XIII. had inherited and furthered, included a colossal equestrian statue, which was to stand on a rocky pedestal in the centre of a new Place, before the east front of the Louvre, but the regency revoked the scheme, and for thirty years nothing was done. It had even been proposed under the ministry of Cardinal Fleury to pull the whole structure down and sell the site. The neglect of the palace during these years is almost incredible. Perrault’s fine façade was hidden by the half-demolished walls of the Hôtels de Longueville, de Villequier, and de Bourbon. The east wing itself was unroofed on the quadrangle side and covered with rotting boarding. Perrault’s columns on the outer façade were unchannelled, the capitals unfinished, the portal unsculptured, and the post-office stabled its horses along the whole of the wing from the middle entrance to the north angle. The royal apartments of Anne of Austria in the Petite Galerie were used as stables; so, too, were the halls where now is housed the collection of Renaissance sculpture. The Infanta’s garden was a yard where grooms exercised their horses: a colony of poor artists and court attendants were lodged in the upper floors, and over most of the great halls entresols were constructed to increase this kind of accommodation. The building was described as a huge caravanserai, where each one lodged and worked as he chose, and over which might have been placed the legend, “Ici on loge à pied et à cheval.” Worse still, an army of squatters, ne’er-do-weels, bankrupts and defaulting debtors took refuge in the wooden sheds left by the contractors, or built others—a miserable gangrene of hovels—against the east façade. Perrault’s base had been concealed by rubbish and apparently forgotten. Stove-pipes issued from the broken windows of the upper floors, the beautiful stone-work was blackened by smoke, cracked by frost and soiled by rusting iron clamps; the quadrangle was a chaos of uncut stone, rubbish and filth, in the centre of which, where the king’s statue was designed to stand, the royal architect had built himself a large house; a mass of mean houses encumbered the Carrousel, and the almost ruined church of St. Nicholas was a haunt of beggars. Such a grievous eyesore was the building that the provost in 1751 offered, in the name of the citizens, to repair and complete the palace if a part were assigned to them as an Hôtel de Ville. In 1754 Madame de Pompadour’s brother had been appointed Commissioner of Works, and Louis was persuaded to authorise the repair and completion of the Louvre. Gabriel being made architect set about his work by clearing out the squatters and the accumulated rubbish in the quadrangle, and evicting the occupants of the stables. The ruins of the Hôtels de Longueville, de Villequier, and de Bourbon were demolished, grass plots laid before Perrault’s east front, which was restored and for the first time made visible. The west front, giving on the quadrangle, was then repaired and the third order nearly completed, when funds were exhausted and it was left unroofed. An epigram, put into the mouth of the king of Denmark, who visited Paris in 1768, tersely describes the condition of the palace at this time:—

SOUTH DOOR OF NOTRE DAME.
SOUTH DOOR OF NOTRE DAME.

During Louis XVI.’s reign little or nothing was done. Soufflot was making feeble efforts to complete Perrault’s north front when the Revolution came to arrest his work. So lost to reverence and devoid of artistic sentiment were the official architects of this period, that a sacrilege worse than any wrought by revolutionists was perpetrated at the instance of the canons of Notre Dame. Louis XIV. had begun the vandalism by demolishing the beautiful old Gothic high altar and replacing it by a huge, ponderous anachronism in marble, on whose foundation stone, laid in 1699, was placed an inscription to the effect that Louis the Great, son of Louis the Just, having subdued heresy, established the true religion in his realm and ended wars gloriously by land and sea, built the altar to fulfil the vow of his father, and dedicated it to the God of Arms and Master of Peace and Victory under the invocation of the Holy Virgin, patroness and protector of his States. Many of the fine old Gothic tombs of marble and bronze in the church, the monuments of six centuries, were destroyed. But to the reign of Louis the Well-Beloved was reserved the crowning infamy: in 1741 the glorious old stained-glass windows, rivalling those of Chartres in richness, were destroyed by Levreil and replaced by grisaille with yellow fleur-de-lys ornamentation. Happily the replacing of the rose windows was deemed too expensive, and they escaped destruction. The famous colossal statue of St. Christopher, the equestrian monument of Philip le Bel, and a popular statue of the Virgin, were broken down by these clerical iconoclasts. In 1771 the canons instructed Soufflot to throw down the pillar of the central porch, with its beautiful statue of Christ, to make room for their processions to enter. The priceless sculpture of the tympanum was cut through to make a loftier and wider entrance, and the whole symmetry of the west front was grievously destroyed.[151] This hideous architectural deformity remained until a son of the Revolution, Viollet-le-Duc, restored the portal to its original form. After the havoc wrought at Notre Dame, Soufflot’s energies were diverted to the holy mount of St. Genevieve. Louis XV. had attributed his recovery at Metz to the intercession of the saint, and in 1754, when the abbot complained to the king of the almost ruined condition of the abbey church, he found a sympathetic listener. Soufflot and the chapter, who shared the prevalent contempt of Gothic, decided to abandon the venerable old pile, with its millennial associations of the patron saint of Paris, and to build a grand domed classic temple on the abbey lands to the west. Funds for the sacred work were raised by levying a tax on public lotteries. The old church, with the exception of the tower, was finally demolished in 1802, when the rude stone coffin which had held the body of St. Genevieve until it was burnt by revolutionary fanatics, was transferred to St. Etienne du Mont.

Mont S. Geneviève from L’ile S. Louis.
Mont S. Geneviève from L’ile S. Louis.

INTERIOR OF ST. ETIENNE DU MONT.
INTERIOR OF ST. ETIENNE DU MONT.

On 6th September 1764, the crypt of the new St. Genevieve being completed, the Well-Beloved laid the first stone of the church. Scarcely was the scaffolding removed after thirteen years of constructive labour, and the expenditure of sixteen millions of livres, when it became necessary to call in Soufflot’s pupil Rondelet, to shore up the walls and strengthen the columns which had proved too weak to sustain the weight of the huge cupola. Before the temple was consecrated the Revolutionists came, and noting its monumental aspect used it with admirable fitness as a Panthéon Français for the remains of their heroes; the dome designed to cover the relics of St. Genevieve soared over the ashes of Voltaire, Mirabeau, Rousseau and Marat. Thrice has this unlucky fane been the prize of Christian and Revolutionary reactionaries. In 1806 Napoleon I. restored it to Christian worship, and in 1822 the famous inscription—“Aux grands Hommes la Patrie reconnaissante” (“A grateful country to her great men”)—was removed by Louis XVIII., and replaced by a dedication to God and St. Genevieve; in 1830 Louis Philippe, the citizen king, transferred it to secular and monumental uses, and restored the former inscription; in 1851 the perjured Prince-President Napoleon, while the streets of Paris were yet red with the blood of his victims, again surrendered it to the Catholic Church; in 1885 it was reconverted to a national Walhalla for the reception of Victor Hugo’s remains.

The Pantheon has the most magnificent situation and, except the new church of the Sacré Cœur, is the most dominant building in Paris. Its dome, seen from nearly every eminence commanding the city, has a certain stately, almost noble, aspect; but the spacious interior, despite the efforts of the artists of the third Republic, is chilling to the spectator. It has few historical or religious associations, and it is devoid of human sentiment. The choice of painters to decorate the interior was an amazing act of official insensibility. The most discordant artistic temperaments were let loose on the devoted building. Puvis de Chavannes, the only painter among them who grasped the limitation of mural art, has painted with restraint and noble simplicity incidents in the life of St. Genevieve, and Jean Paul Laurens is responsible for a splendid but incongruous representation of her death. A St. Denis, scenes in the lives of Clovis, Charlemagne, St. Louis, and Jeanne d’Arc, by Bonnat, Blanc, Levy, Cabanel and Lenepveu, are all excellent work of the kind so familiar to visitors at the Salon, but are lacking in harmony and in inspiration. The angel appearing to Jeanne d’Arc seems to have been modelled from a figurante at the opera.

St. Sulpice
St. Sulpice

In 1618 the Grande Salle of the Palais de Justice, the finest of its kind in Europe, decorated by Fra Giocondo, was gutted by fire, and its rich stained glass, its double vaultings resplendent with blue and gold, its long line of the statues of the kings of France from Pharamond to Henry IV., were utterly destroyed. Debrosse, who built the new Salle in 1622, left a noble and harmonious Renaissance chamber, which, again restored after the fire of 1776, endured until its destruction by fire during the Commune. The old palace was clung to by a population of hucksters, whose shops and booths huddled round the building. The Grande Salle, far different from the present bare Salle des Pas Perdus, was itself a busy mart, booksellers especially predominating, most of whom had stations there, much as we see them to-day, round the Odéon theatre. Every pillar had its bookseller’s shop. Verard’s address was—“At the image of St. John the Evangelist, before Notre Dame de Paris, and at the first pillar in the Grande Salle of the Palais de Justice, before the Chapelle where they sing the mass for Messieurs of the Parlement.” Gilles Couteau’s address was—“The Two Archers in the Rue de la Juiverie and at the third pillar at the Palais.” In the Galerie Mercière (now the Galerie Marchande) at the top of the stairway ascending from the Cour du Mai, lines of shops displayed fans, gloves, slippers and other dainty articles of feminine artillery. The further Galeries were also invaded by the traders, who were not finally evicted until 1842. Much rebuilding and restoration were again needed after the great fire of 1776, and the old flight of steps of the Cour du Mai, at the foot of which criminals were branded and books condemned by the Parlement were burnt, was replaced by the present fine stairway.

The Grande Chambre (now the Tribunal de Première Instance) entered from the Grande Salle, was renamed the Salle d’Egalité by the Revolutionists, and used for the sittings of the Revolutionary Tribunal. As the dread work increased, a second court was opened in the Salle St. Louis, renamed the Salle de Liberté! Here Danton was tried, whose puissant voice penetrated to the opposite side of the Seine.

It was through Debrosse’s restored Grande Salle that the Girondins trooped after condemnation to the new prisoners’ chapel, built after the fire, and passed the night there, hymning the Revolution and discoursing of the Fatherland before they issued by the nine steps, unchanged to-day, on the right in the Cour du Mai, to the fatal tumbrils awaiting them.

The pseudo-classic church of St. Sulpice, begun in 1665 and not completed until 1777, is a monument of the degraded taste of this unhappy time. At least three architects, Gamart, Levau and the Italian Servandoni, are responsible for this monstrous pile, whose towers have been aptly compared by Victor Hugo to two big clarionets. The building has, however, a certain puissante laideur, as Michelet said of Danton, and is imposing from its very mass, but it is dull and heavy and devoid of all charm and imagination. Nothing exemplifies more strikingly the mutation of taste that has taken place since the eighteenth century than the fact that this church is the only one mentioned by Gibbon in the portion of his autobiography which refers to his first visit to Paris, where it is distinguished as “one of the noblest structures in Paris.”

CHAPTER XVII

LOUIS XVI.—THE GREAT REVOLUTION—FALL OF THE MONARCHY

CROWNED vice was now succeeded by crowned folly. The grandson of Louis XV., a well-meaning but weak and foolish youth, and his thoughtless, pleasure-loving queen, were confronted by state problems that would have taxed the genius of a Richelieu in the maturity of his powers. Injustice, misery, oppression, discontent, were clamant and almost universal; taxes had doubled since the death of Louis XIV.; there were 30,000 beggars in Paris alone. The penal code was of inhuman ferocity; law was complicated, ruinous and partial and national credit so low that loans could be obtained only against material pledges and at interest five times as great as that paid by England. Wealthy bishops and abbots[152] and clergy, noblesse and royal officials were wholly exempt from the main incidents of taxation; for personal and land taxes, tithes and forced labour, were exacted from the common people alone. No liberty of worship, nor of thought: Protestants were condemned to the galleys by hundreds; booksellers met the same fate. Authors and books were arbitrarily sent by lettres de cachet to the Bastille. Yet in spite of all repression a generation of daring, witty, emancipated thinkers in Paris were elaborating a weapon of scientific, rationalistic and liberal doctrine that cut at the very roots of the old régime. And while France was in travail of the palingenesis of the modern world, the futile king was trifling with his locks and keys and colouring maps, the queen playing at shepherdesses at Trianon or performing before courtiers, officers and equerries the rôles of Rosina in the Barbier de Seville and of Colette in the Devin du Village, the latter composed by the democratic philosopher, whose Contrat Social was to prove the Gospel of the Revolution.[153] Jean Jacques Rousseau, the solitary self-centred Swiss engraver and musician, has described for us in words that will bear translation how an ineffaceable impression of the sufferings of the people was burnt into his memory, and the germs of an unquenchable hatred of their oppressors were sown in his breast. Journeying on foot between Paris and Lyons he was one day diverted from his path by the beauty of the landscape, and wandered about, seeking in vain to discover his way. “At length,” he writes, “weary and dying of thirst and hunger I entered a peasant’s house, not a very attractive one, but the only one I could see. I imagined that here as in Switzerland every inhabitant of easy means would be able to offer hospitality. I entered and begged that I might have dinner by paying for it. The peasant handed me some skim milk and coarse barley bread, saying that was all he had. The milk seemed delicious and I ate the bread, straw and all, but it was not very satisfying to one exhausted by fatigue. The man scrutinised me and judged by my appetite the truth of the story I had told. Suddenly, after saying that he perceived I was a good, honest youth and not there to spy upon him he opened a trap door, descended and returned speedily with some good wheaten bread, a ham appetising but rather high, and a bottle of wine which rejoiced my heart more than all the rest. He added a good thick omelette and I enjoyed a dinner such as those alone who travel on foot can know. When it came to paying, his anxiety and fears again seized him; he would have none of my money and pushed it aside, exceedingly troubled, nor could I imagine what he was afraid of. At last he uttered with a shudder the terrible words ‘commis, rats de cave’ (“assessors, cellar rats”). He made me understand that he hid the wine because of the aides,[154] and the bread because of the tailles[155] and that he would be a ruined man if it were supposed that he was not dying of hunger. That man, although fairly well-off, dared not eat the bread earned by the sweat of his brow, and could only escape ruin by pretending to be as miserable as those he saw around him. I issued forth from that house indignant as well as affected, deploring the lot of that fair land where nature had lavished all her gifts only to become the spoil of barbarous tax-farmers (publicans).” The elder Mirabeau has told how he saw a bailiff cut off the hand of a peasant woman who had clung to her kitchen utensils when distraint was made on her poor possessions for dues exacted by the tax-farmer. It is related in Madame Campan’s Memoirs that Louis XV., hunting one day in the forest of Senard, about fifteen miles south of Paris, met a man on horseback carrying a coffin. “Whither are you carrying that coffin?” asked the king. “To the village of ——.” “Is it for a man or a woman?” “For a man.” “What did he die of?” “Hunger,” bluntly returned the villager. The king spurred his horse and said no more.