PARIS OF RICHELIEU
Henry IV’S death left France with a nine-year-old king, Louis XIII,
(1610-1643), whose Italian mother, acting as regent, had small sympathy
with her adopted land. Sully she soon dismissed and the court witnessed
a greedy scramble for money and preferment between imported favorites
and French nobles. In the brief period of four years the financial state
of the country was such that it became necessary to summon the States
General to see if any way out of the trouble might be found. France’s
regeneration under Henry of Navarre had been a growth too rapid to have
roots firm enough to withstand rough handling.
The Assembly was to accomplish nothing for it. It was in the autumn of
1614 that the Estates met in a hall in the Hôtel de Bourbon just east of
the Louvre. The body was a unit in demanding reform, but unity ceased
with that demand. The nobles were indignant at certain encroachments on
their aristocratic rights, the queen having given privileges to some
middle-class professional people for a financial consideration. The
clergy were shocked at the suggestion that they pay taxes--an idea not
to be considered, they said, for it would be giving to man what was due
to God. The Third Estate had a just grievance in the fact that upon them
fell all the expenses of the government, and their representatives,
speaking kneeling as was the dispiriting custom, succeeded nevertheless
in giving some caustic warnings.
The only result of all this quarreling was that a petition was sent to
the king asking him to give his attention to the questions under
discussion. The only reply from the Louvre was the information that
greeted the deputies when they gathered the next day that the queen
wanted their hall of meeting for a ball and that the Assembly was
therefore disbanded. It was a hundred and seventy-five years after this
brusque treatment before it met again just before the outbreak of the
Revolution.
Richelieu, Paris born, Sorbonne educated, and at that time a bishop, was
a member of this Assembly of 1614. When he became Marie de Medicis’
adviser, and, diplomatic and inflexible, imposed his will upon the
country, the situation cleared. There was need of high-handed action at
first. The minister had the greedy Prince of Condé arrested within the
palace of the Louvre and sent to the Bastille; a force was sent against
other hungry and violent nobles; the king himself, though then but a lad
of sixteen, felt the bracing atmosphere of this change and ordered the
arrest--possibly the death--of the Italian Concini, who, with his wife,
Leonora Galigaï had ruled the nation through the queen. Concini was shot
as he was crossing the bridge across the eastern moat of the Louvre, and
the king looked on from a window. Leonora was beheaded and burned as a
witch on the Grève.
Richelieu, become a cardinal, ruled with wisdom and vigor. He treated
high and low with equal impartiality, even causing the execution of some
of the greatest nobles in the land for the breaking of the law which
forbade dueling. The Place de Grève witnessed the punishment for the
sport of the Place Royale. Legalized struggles by the Parliament in the
palace on the Cité, underhand plots by men very near the throne--all
were met and overthrown by the sagacious premier, and his every act
tended to confirm the strength of the crown. He fought sturdily against
the Huguenots and conquered them with the fall of La Rochelle, a
conquest which the church of Notre Dame-des-Victoires was established to
commemorate, the original building serving as the sacristy of the
present edifice. He confirmed Henry of Navarre’s Edict of Nantes,
however, giving to the Protestants religious liberty and civil rights.
Abroad the cardinal’s policies brought territory and prestige to the
crown.
Louis lived but a scant half year longer than Richelieu. The king’s
whole life was passed under the domination of a determined mother, Marie
de Medicis, and a masterful prime minister. It would have required a
stronger personality than his to make itself felt, though Rubens has
recorded in a series of pictures now in the Louvre the quarrels and
reconciliations of the royal family. His only interests were hawking,
drilling soldiers, and craftsmanship in leather. He was terribly bored
most of the time, apparently without any initiative toward remedying the
situation. His court reflected his own disposition and was incredibly
dull, though ordered in etiquette and brilliant in garb.
It is to the regent and the cardinal and not to the king that Paris was
indebted for the many embellishments of this reign and for any impetus
that it gained toward the standards of art and literature which rose to
their climax in the next reign.
Henry IV had made Paris so pleasant a place to live in that the city was
constantly growing. Rivaling the Marais in popularity a new section
became fashionable, the Quarter Saint Honoré on the northwest of the
town. By way of protecting this rapidly enlarging district Louis swung
the city wall so far west as to include the Tuileries gardens. It was in
this newly popular quarter that Richelieu built for himself the Palais
Cardinal which he bequeathed to the king and which then took its present
name, the Palais Royal. He encountered difficulties in the construction
of his new home for his ideas of what he wanted did not harmonize with
what he could have. The _hôtels_ of other men were in the way and
sometimes even the cardinal’s expressed desire was not enough to make
them turn over their property to him. When they were citizens of small
account he brought pressure, not always honest, to bear upon them; when
they were people of importance he sometimes had to keep his wishes in
abeyance. The result was an irregularity of outline that was not
beautiful. To secure a symmetrical garden Richelieu did from within what
few of the city’s enemies ever have succeeded in doing--he pierced the
king’s new wall. After the cardinal’s death the queen-regent, Anne of
Austria, moved into the palace, and in its garden Louis XIV grew up, a
rather forlorn little figure so uncared for that once he was found after
dark asleep under a bush.
Outside of the city wall running along the river bank was the Cours la
Reine laid out by
[Illustration: THE ARCHBISHOP’S PALACE.
Beyond the bridge, the old Hôtel Dieu.]
[Illustration: RICHELIEU’S PALAIS CARDINAL, LATER CALLED PALAIS
ROYAL.]
Marie de Medicis as a parade ground for the satins and velvets, the
flowing cloaks and plumed hats of her courtiers. A similar sight was to
be seen in the gardens of the left bank palace which Marie, disgusted
with the gloom of the Louvre which she could not believe was really the
palace when she first came to Paris, had rebuilt on the site of an old
residence of the dukes of Luxembourg. To-day, with that combination of
thrift and love of beauty which characterizes the Frenchman, the Senate
occupies one part and the President of the Senate lives in another
section. The national museum of contemporary art is housed in a modern
building adjoining. The garden is still carefully ordered, the only
renaissance garden in Paris, and is a fitting adjunct to the beautiful
and varied Italian edifice which looks down upon it. The grounds are
dotted with statues of eminent men and women, most of them portraits. To
the east of the palace is an elaborate Florentine fountain and basin
called the Fountain of the Medicis.
It was in Louis’ reign that Paris became the seat of an archbishop who
used as his episcopal residence the bishop’s palace on the south side of
Notre Dame. Of a half-dozen religious houses founded or enlarged at this
time the best known is the Val-de-Grâce, made prominent by its gift from
Louis’ wife, Anne of Austria, of a handsome church, a thank-offering
for the birth of a son after a childless wedded life of twenty-three
years. This son ruled as Louis XIV, the “Grand Monarque.” The church of
the Val-de-Grâce was dome-crowned in the fashion set by the left bank
monastery of the Carmelites and followed in the construction of the
near-by palace of the Luxembourg, of the chapel of the Sorbonne in which
is Richelieu’s tomb, of the Church of Saint Paul-Saint Louis, in whose
graveyard Rabelais was buried, and, in the next reign, of the College
Mazarin (the Institute) and of the Dome of the Invalides beneath which
Napoleon sleeps. The popularity of the dome continued far into the next
century, for Sainte Geneviève’s church, now called the Pantheon, is
topped in the same majestic style.
Now was the beginning, too, of the so-called “Jesuit” style, seen to-day
in not undignified form in the façades of Saint Paul-Saint Louis near
the Place de la Bastille, Saint Thomas Aquinas, the left bank church of
fashionable weddings, Saint Roch on the rue Saint Honoré, from which the
crowds watched the daily passing of the tumbrils during the Revolution,
Saint Gervais, east of the Hôtel de Ville, which cherishes a crucifix
from the ancient abbey of Sainte Geneviève, and the Oratory also on the
rue Saint Honoré, now a Protestant church and serving as a background
for a fine group of statuary representing Admiral Coligny between
Fatherland and Religion.
The main feature of these façades is the superposition of columns. All
three orders are used in Saint Gervais, the simplest, Doric, at the
bottom, the Ionic above, and the most florid, the Corinthian at the top.
The others employ but two orders, always with the more elaborate above.
Decoration was of the heavy style called _baroque_ which developed later
into the slightly more acceptable _rococo_, so called from its use of
rocks, shells, and foliage combined with conventional scrolls. Louis’
addition to the Louvre, however, of a part of the eastern courtyard,
reproduced the _renaissance_ decorations of the constructions of Francis
I and Henry II to which they were attached.
Far to the east of the city Louis’ physician started a botanical garden
which developed into the present huge Jardin des Plantes with its
connecting collections of animals. One of the sights of the garden is a
spreading cedar tree which the famous eighteenth century botanist,
Jussieu, is said to have brought from the Andes, a tiny plant, slipped
under the band of his hat.
An important addition to the Paris of Louis XIII’s time was the
construction of what is now called the Île Saint Louis to the east of
the Cité. This island was made by uniting two small islands, one of
which had belonged to the bishop and the other to the canons of the
cathedral. With bustling Paris only the cast of a stone away on each
bank these two islets were devoted to such rural uses as the pasturage
of cows and the whitening of linen. One of them, however, in Charles V’s
time, had been the scene of a strange combat between a man and a dog,
the property of his enemy whom he was accused of murdering from the fact
that the dog attacked him whenever they met. Lists were enclosed on the
then barren island and the king and a great crowd of men from court and
town stood about to see the outcome of the “ordeal.” The man was allowed
a stick; the dog had a barrel open at both ends into which he might
retreat and from which he could plunge forth. When he was loosed he
rushed about his enemy, evading his blows, threatening him now on one
side and now on another until he was worn out, and then flew at his
throat and threw him down so that he was forced to make confession of
his crime thus proven by the “wager of battle.”
Henry IV built a chapel which became in the eighteenth century the
present church of Saint Louis-in-the-Island, whose delicately pierced
spire shows glints of sky through its openings. The first union with the
main land was by a
[Illustration: PALACE OF THE LUXEMBOURG.]
[Illustration: COURT OF HONOR OF NATIONAL LIBRARY.
See page 272.]
bridge to the right bank. An engineer named Marie conceived the idea of
joining the two islets, and now the island is a unit and only the name
of a street indicates where the Seine once flowed between.
Once begun, this new residence section rapidly became popular among
people who wanted to live somewhat remote from the turmoil of many
streets. To-day the island is covered from tip to tip with dwellings and
such few shops as are needed to supply the daily needs of the people,
but there is still the atmosphere of remoteness that made its charm for
Gautier and Baudelaire and Voltaire, and which induced Lambert de
Thorigny, president of the Parliament, to build the superb mansion,
still standing and restored to its original beauty, on whose decorations
all the best French artists of the day lavished their skill. To cross
one of the bridges on to the island is to find one’s self transported to
one of the provinces. It is as true to-day as when it was written a
hundred and thirty years ago that “the dweller in the Marais is a
stranger in the Isle.”
Louis XIII cared little for letters. Richelieu, on the other hand, made
some pretensions to being a literary man himself, recognized ability in
others, and was able to understand the usefulness and the power of the
pen. It was, in part, his encouragement that made the success of the
literary meetings at the Hôtel de Rambouillet near the Louvre where the
“precious” ladies and gentlemen conversed and wrote in a language whose
high-flown eloquence was a reaction against the rough language of the
military court of Henry IV. Corneille came to the fore in Louis’ reign,
and, for his own political purposes, Richelieu organized a group of
writers who had met for their own pleasure into the French Academy whose
members, the forty “Immortals,” assume to-day to be the court of last
resort on the literature and language of France.
The two succeeding sovereigns, Louis XIV and XV added other
academies--of Inscriptions, Sciences and so on--which, after the
Revolution, were combined as the Institute and established in the
Collège Mazarin near whose dome a tablet now marks the former site of
the Tour de Nesle.
It is quite probable that when the great cardinal died, Paris not being
gifted with prophetic vision, drew a sigh of relief. His was indeed a
master spirit. Beneath the rush of the city’s life there was no one of
whatever class who did not know that he was neither too high nor too low
to receive the premier’s attention if he drew it upon himself.
Richelieu’s word meant his making or his breaking. If Richelieu
stretched forth his hand he might be raised to prominence: if Richelieu
frowned he might be sent to a prison from which only Death would release
him.
Cardinal de Retz, who analyzed Richelieu’s qualities with impartiality
and intelligence said of him “all his vices were those which can only be
brought into use by means of great virtues.” Claude le Petit
(1638-1662), author of “_La Chronique Scandaleuse ou Paris Ridicule_,”
in describing the Palais Royal, wrote:
Here dwelt old Claws and nothing lacked,
John Richelieu by name,
A demi-God in local fame,
Half-Prince, half-Pope in fact.