_Paris under the Regency and Louis XV.--The brooding Storm_
Under the regency of the profligate Philip of Orleans, a profounder
depth was sounded. The vices of Louis' court were at least veiled by a
certain regal dignity, and the Grand Monarque was always keenly
sensitive, and at times nobly responsive, to any attack upon the
honour of France; but under the regent, libertinage and indifference
to national honour were flagrant and shameless. The Abbe Dubois, a
minister worthy of his prince, was, says St. Simon, "a mean-looking,
thin little man, with the face of a ferret, in whom every vice fought
for mastery." This creature profaned the seat of Richelieu and
Colbert, and rose to fill a cardinal's chair. The revenues of seven
abbeys fed his pride and luxury, and his annual income was estimated
at 1,534,000 livres, including his bribe from the English Government.
Visitors to Venice whose curiosity may have led them into the church
of S. Moise, 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 at Paris 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 seethed in a ferment of
speculation. The offices of the Bank 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_ foot-man, 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 practice
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 Conde 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 _fete_ 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,[151] 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.
[Footnote 151: It extended as far as the entrance to the quadrangle
opposite the Pont des Arts. Blondel's drawings show a double line of
trees, north and south, enclosing a Renaissance garden of elaborate
design: a charming _bosquet_, or wood, filled the eastern extremity.]
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 Paris, died and
was canonised by the popular voice. Miracles were said to have been
wrought at his sepulchre in the cemetery of St. Medard; 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:--
"_De par le roi defense a Dieu
De faire miracle en ce lieu._"[152]
[Footnote 152: "By order of the king, God is forbidden to work
miracles in this place."]
Before Louis sank irrevocably into the slothful indulgence that
stained his later years, he was stirred to essay a kingly _role_ 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 promise 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 Conde 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-Aime; 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 this warm-hearted
people.
The brilliant victories of Marshal Saxe, and the consequent Peace of
Aix-la-Chapelle, brought some years of prosperity. Wealth increased;
Paris became more than ever a centre of intellectual splendour and
social refinement, where the arts administered to luxurious ease and
to the fair frailties of passion. But it was a period of riotous pride
and regal licentiousness unparalleled even in the history of France.
Louis XIV. at least exacted good breeding and wit in his mistresses:
his descendant enslaved himself to the commonest and most abandoned of
women. For twenty years the destinies of the 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, and under the influence of the
Pompadours and the Du Barrys a crowned _roue_ allowed the state to
drift into financial, military and civil[153] disaster.
[Footnote 153: In 1753 between 20th January and 20th February two
hundred persons died of want (_misere_) in the Faubourg St. Antoine.]
"Authentic proofs exist," says Taine, "demonstrating that Madame de
Pompadour cost Louis XV. a sum equal to about seventy-two millions of
present value (L2,880,000)." 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 mad extravagance of
the court that to raise money recourse was had to 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 Greve, 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, secularised its members and confiscated its
property.
The closing years of the Well-Beloved's reign were years of
unmitigated ignominy and disaster. 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 royal dotard 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 sensual stupefaction that he only murmured: "Well, it will last my
time," and with his flatterers and strumpets uttered the famous
words--"_Apres nous le deluge_." So lost to all sense of honour was
Louis, that he defiled 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 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 and neglected queen, Marie Leczinska died. The
court sank from bad to worse: void now of all dignity, all gaiety, all
wit and all elegance, it drifted to its doom. Six years passed, when
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.[154] 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."
[Footnote 154: Some conception of the insanitary condition of the
court may be formed by the fact that fifty persons were struck down
there by this loathsome disease during the king's illness.]
The degradation of the monarchy during the reign is reflected in the
condition of the Louvre. 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 facade was hidden by
the half-demolished walls of the Hotels 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 facade 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 a pied et a cheval_." Worse still, an army of
squatters, ne'er-do-wells, 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 facade. 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
mansion; 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 Hotel de Ville. In 1754 Madame de
Pompadour's brother, M. de Marigny, 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 in 1758
by clearing out the squatters and the accumulated rubbish in the
quadrangle, and evicting the occupants of the stables. The ruins of
the Hotels de Longueville, de Villequier, and de Bourbon were
demolished and 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 floor 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:--
"J'ai vu le Louvre et son enceinte immense,
Vaste palais qui depuis deux cent ans,
Toujours s'acheve et toujours se commence.
Deux ouvriers, manoeuvres faineants,
Hatent tres lentement ces riches batiments
Et sont payes quand on y pense."[155]
[Footnote 155: "I have seen the Louvre and its huge enclosure, a vast
palace which for two hundred years is always being finished and always
begun. Two workmen, lazy hodmen, speed very slowly those rich
buildings, and are paid when they are thought of."]
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. The beautiful fifteenth-century stalls, the
choir screen, and 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
destruction of the rose windows was deemed too expensive, and they
escaped. 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.[156] 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.
[Footnote 156: The aspect of the west front with Soufflot's
"improvements" is well seen in _Les Principaux Monuments Gothiques de
l'Europe_, published in Brussels, 1843.]
[Illustration: SOUTH DOOR OF NOTRE DAME.]
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. But before the temple
was consecrated, the Revolutionists came, and noting its monumental
aspect used it with admirable fitness as a Pantheon Francais 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 Catholic and
Revolutionary reactionaries. In 1806 Napoleon I. restored it to
Christian worship; in 1822 the famous inscription--"_Aux grands Hommes
la Patrie reconnaissante_" 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 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 huge 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."