PARIS OF THE “GRAND MONARQUE”
History repeated itself when Louis XIII died, leaving as his heir a
child of five, Louis XIV (1643-1715), whose kingdom was ruled by a
regent, the queen mother, Anne of Austria, who took as her adviser
another cardinal, the Italian, Mazarin. This newcomer to power was a
different sort of man from his predecessor, Richelieu. “He possessed
wit, insinuation, gayety and good manners,” says de Retz, but “he
carried the tricks of the sharper into the ministry.”
War with Spain brought success at the beginning, but the Parisians were
all too soon quarreling over the finances, and in the thick of a civil
war. The people resented the arrest of a member of Parliament, Broussel,
which had been accomplished while the general attention was engaged by
the celebration at Notre Dame and in the streets over the victory at
Lens. De Retz, who was at that time archbishop suffragan of Paris, went
to Anne to ask for Broussel’s release. The queen laughed at him and so
roused his wrath that he joined the insurgents. He did it
whole-heartedly, for for some time to come he fought in the
streets--alternately with trying to calm the people--and once was seen
at a sitting of the Parliament of Paris with a dagger carelessly
protruding from his pocket--“the archbishop’s breviary,” some wit called
it.
After de Retz’s failure the Parliament sent a delegation to the regent
at the Palais Royal to demand the release of Broussel. Anne refused and
the burghers tucked up their gowns and clambered over the street
barricades to report their failure to the people. Half way across town
they were met by a mob who declined to accept any such decision as
final, and once more the envoys turned about and made their laborious
way back to the regent.
Anne finally yielded her prisoner, but her action did not end the
struggle, which was carried on for some years and was called the Fronde
(sling) because the members of Parliament behaved like the
stone-slinging youngsters of the faubourg Saint Honoré who gave way
before the king’s archers, but renewed their sport as soon as their
backs were turned. The contest seems to have been rather absurd, for
while the personal courage of the Parisians was unquestioned there was
no organization, and the troop that rode gaily out to meet the royal
regulars was pretty sure to ride back sad and bedraggled.
The little king was taken to Saint Germain for protection during this
year-long commotion, and it was not until peace between the warring
parties had been formally proclaimed that he returned to Paris.
This peace did not last long, for the _bourgeoisie_, some members of the
nobility and even a few princes of the blood royal were among the
disaffected Parisians. Anne and Mazarin adopted high-handed measures,
but they soon found that imprisoning men like the Prince de Condé of the
Bourbon family did not ingratiate the court with the people or advance
its cause. Two years later on a summer’s day Mazarin took the child king
to the top of the hill on which is now the cemetery of Père Lachaise
that he might watch a battle between his own troops under Turenne and
those under Condé just outside the city walls on the east. Condé’s force
was out-numbered and it looked as if he were going to be crushed between
Turenne’s army and the wall when the Porte Saint Antoine was suddenly
opened and the guns of the Bastille were used against Turenne while
Condé’s army gained this unexpected refuge.
It turned out that the king’s cousin, the Duchesse de Montpensier, known
as “La Grande Mademoiselle,” had taken upon herself to give the orders
which defeated the royal troops. This strong-minded young woman was the
bachelor girl of her time, and a “character.” What she would do next was
the constant guess and the constant diversion of the court. Although she
was eleven years older than Louis he was so captivated by her vivacity
that the cardinal thought it judicious to keep the cousins apart, and
gave her apartments at the Louvre. At one time during the siege of
Orléans she made her way across the moat in a small boat and squeezed
her way into the town through a postern gate. At love she scoffed and
she refused every offer of marriage that was made to her until she was
of an age ostensibly of discretion when she fell madly in love with an
adventurer. Her marital experiences undoubtedly made her return to her
earlier beliefs in the foolishness of love and marriage.
The court retreated to Saint Denis. The city was given over to internal
dissension for some of the city officials were accused of sympathizing
with the hated foreign cardinal and his party, and the Hôtel de Ville
became the center of violent scenes, its besiegers men who wore in their
hats a tuft of straw, the badge of the Frondeurs. It was only when Anne
consented to send Mazarin away that the Fronde came to an end and once
again Louis could return to Paris.
With such youthful experiences of his chief city it is small wonder that
Louis XIV had no great love for it as a place of residence and that he
spent most of his life at Versailles. The hunting lodge which Louis XIII
had built was the nucleus of the huge palace which his son made large
enough not only for his family and retinue but for a large number of the
nobles whom it was his policy to gather about him so that he could keep
his eye on them. By this means the power of the nobles was decreased on
their own estates while their respect for the king, on whose words and
smiles they hung, was enormously increased. A lord was grateful for a
room at Versailles even though it were so far from private as to be used
as a passage-way. Many of the nobility paid handsomely for positions in
the royal kitchens. Later in the reign these offices were held by
_bourgeois_, for the finances of this class improved as those of the
upper class lessened on account of decreased revenues from their
neglected estates. The burghers aped the nobles in manners and in dress,
and by favoring them, from whom he had nothing to fear, Louis gained the
friendship of an important body. He raised no objection when the
citizens took nobles into business partnership, for that served him both
by lowering ancient pride and by providing money upon which he could
make some demand.
In manners, dress and literature this reign was increasingly formal
following upon the example of Louis who was formal because he honestly
believed himself godlike and insisted on formality as appropriate. His
was a grand manner and his an incomparable selfishness. His belief in
the divine right of kings stretched until “right” meant the right to do
whatever he chose however unkind or immoral. Beneath the gorgeousness of
the court was a life of hypocrisy, self-seeking, and crime almost beyond
belief.
The godlike sovereign certainly had a more than human appetite. It is
related that at one dinner he ate:
Four plates of different kinds of soup
A whole pheasant
A partridge
A large plate of salad
Two large slices of ham
A bowl of mutton with gravy and garlic
A plate of pastry
Fruit
Several hard-boiled eggs.
In theatrical parlance, he was “playing to capacity.”
Upon Mazarin’s death the king, then twenty-three years old and ignorant
of independent action, had made known his intention of conducting
affairs himself. For the rest of his life he worked hard every day at
the affairs of the state, comforted when things went wrong with the
refreshing thought that the fault was not his because he had acted with
God-given intelligence. The early part of his career was marked by such
advance in the condition of the finances, the laws, education, the army,
and industrial achievement that, provided he blinded himself to the fact
that in Colbert, Vauban and Louvois he had exceptionally efficient
administrators, he might well think himself a paragon of intelligence.
Great generals won his battles; great writers praised his power; great
artists and architects built grandly in his honor. It is not strange
that he thought himself what others called him, the “Grand Monarque” and
the “Roi Soleil.”
Centralization was the basic policy of Louis’s career. In Paris it took
the form of substituting a law court under royal control for the local
courts in different parts of the city, and in making the municipal
offices purchasable from the king. Municipal improvements made the city
pleasanter to live in. An effort was made--not very successfully from
the modern point of view--to keep the streets clean, and at night a
lantern was hung midway between cross streets and burned until midnight.
As the number of lights installed was but 6,500 and Paris at that time
covered some four square miles of territory it may be seen that the
illumination was not dazzling. It was enough, however, to be of
assistance to Louis’ new police force, and to make visible in the
evening as well as the morning the two gates--of Saint Denis and Saint
Martin--erected by the admiring Parisians to do honor to his early
victories. The fire department became a lay institution at this time
for, rather curiously, fire fighting had previously been the work of a
religious house. The population is estimated at between eight and nine
hundred thousand.
Two new squares of this century were the Place des Victoires, in front
of Notre Dame des Victoires, and the Place Vendôme, north of the rue
Saint Honoré. By a city regulation no change is permitted to-day of the
façades of the buildings on these two open places.
At the extreme eastern end of modern Paris the Place de la Nation is the
former Place du Trône, which received its name when in 1660 Louis sat
upon a temporary throne beyond the city wall to receive congratulations
upon having secured the Peace of the Pyrenees.
The poet Scarron, husband of Françoise d’Aubigné who, after his death,
became the governess of the king’s children by Madame de Montespan, and
who later was married secretly to Louis, has left a description of Paris
in the “Great Century.” The translation is by Walter Besant.
Houses in labyrinthine maze;
The streets with mud bespattered all;
Palace and prison, churches, quays,
Here stately shop, there shabby stall.
Passengers black, red, gray and white,
The pursed-up prude, the light coquette;
Murder and Treason dark as night;
With clerks, their hands with ink-stains wet;
A gold-laced coat without a sou,
And trembling at a bailiff’s sight;
A braggart shivering with fear;
Pages and lackeys, thieves of night!
And ’mid the tumult, noise and stink of it,
There’s Paris--pray, what do you think of it?
An epitome of society this. Paris was indeed full of adventurers, of
criminals even among the high-born, of gamblers so mad over games of
chance that special laws had to be passed driving them out of the city.
There is still standing near the Hôtel de Ville the Hôtel d’Aubray where
lived the famous poisoner, the Marquise de Brinvilliers.
A glance at the career of this woman shows a social condition amazing in
its calm iniquity. The marquise herself, of seemingly guileless charm,
acquired from a lover the destructive skill which she utilized in
removing from her path her relatives and any other people who interfered
with her in any way. Her trial is a “celebrated case” not only because
of her own rank but because other people of note were suspected of being
in collusion with her. Torture was abolished under Louis XIV but not
until after Madame de Brinvilliers had been made to drink many buckets
of water and to be sadly bent across wooden horses.
She was beheaded on the Grève, her body burned and the ashes thrown to
the winds. At about the same time accident disclosed an astounding
number of cases of poisoning or attempted poisoning. Mme. de Montespan
undoubtedly tried to make way with the father of her children, the king,
and rumors were constant of many other instances. “So far,” said Mme. de
Sevígné’s son, “I have not been accused of attempting to poison little
mamma, and that is a distinction in these days.”
Paris was lively enough during this reign, for Versailles was not so far
away but that its people could go to town for city diversions, and as
Louis grew more serious with age and court etiquette more rigorous and
burdensome, the town made its call more and more insistently. Louis
himself, hugely bewigged and elaborately elegant, however, does not
often appear in the picture. Once he took part in a gorgeous
_carrousel_--a carnival chiefly of equestrian sports--which took place
in the large square--now called the Place du Carrousel--lying between
the Louvre and the Tuileries. Once, twenty-five years later, he was
entertained at the Hôtel de Ville at a dinner at which the city
officials waited upon him in person. Yet neither of these pictures
lingers in the memory like that of the bewigged monarch usually most
punctilious in his dress for occasions, appearing in the palace of the
Cité before the Parliament, booted for the chase, arrogantly careless of
any courtesy toward the body he addressed and haughtily insisting with
the full force of his sincere belief that he and the State were
one,--“_L’État c’est moi_.”
Power was dear to the king’s heart and he so impressed his magnificence
on his people that they thought it only fitting that he should have a
rising sun carved on the buildings which he erected, such as that part
of the Louvre which he built to complete the eastern quadrangle. (See
plan, Chapter XXII). The eastern exterior of this section, facing the
church of Saint Germain l’Auxerrois, shows the superb colonnade designed
by Perrault, a sort of universal genius, who was both a physician and an
architect. Another piece of his work was the Observatory, still in
active use on the left bank near the University. The king’s appreciation
of splendor demanded completeness, and so his handsome buildings were
placed in the setting of stately gardens, his chief designer being Le
Nôtre whose work is still to be seen encircling the palaces in the
environs of Paris. In the city he laid out the gardens of the Tuileries,
and that superb avenue, the Champs Elysées, which leads from the broad
Place de la Concorde to Napoleon’s Arch of Triumph. The four hundredth
anniversary of Le Nôtre’s birth was celebrated on March 12, 1913, when
Parisians recalled his work with almost unanimous approval because of
its harmony with the impressive buildings which it supplemented.
Other important buildings of Louis’ reign were the Invalides or
Soldiers’ Home with its church and its later addition, the work of
Mansard who gave his name to the curb-roof which we know. Beneath
Mansard’s beautiful dome the body of Napoleon now lies “among the people
whom I loved.”
Louis’ contest with the pope over the king’s position as head of the
French church tended to lessen his interest in the establishment of
religious institutions, but the famous church of Saint Sulpice, whose
twin towers are landmarks on the left bank, was begun by him, together
with the seminary whose square ugliness is soon to house the overflow
from the near-by Luxembourg museum. Since the quarrel between church and
state in 1902-03, the building has stood bleakly empty except when it
was used to shelter some of the refugees made homeless by the Seine
floods a few years ago.
The Abbey-in-the-Woods, removed by Louis from Picardy to Paris and made
famous by the residence there in the middle of the last century of the
witty Madame Récamier, has been until very recently one of the chief
historic “sights” near the celebrated left bank department store, the
_Bon Marché_.
The Church of Saint Nicholas-du-Chardonnet is interesting chiefly
because of the tomb which LeBrun, the painter, designed in honor of his
mother, a sepulcher opening at the summons of a hovering angel.
Among Louis’ good works must be counted the union of several hospitals
into one known as the Salpêtrière from its occupying the site of a
saltpeter manufactory, and devoted to-day to the care of nervous
diseases and insanity.
The tapestry manufactory of the Gobelins family was received into royal
favor by Louis and then as now did its work only for the government. Its
products to-day, painstakingly made by skillful workmen who have given
their lives to this task as did their fathers before them, are never
sold, but are used for the decoration of public buildings and as gifts
for people whom the state wishes to honor.
Of comparatively small houses belonging to this century the best
remaining instances are the Pavilion of Hanover, in which is the Paris
office of the New York _Times_; the Hôtel Mazarin which now contains the
fine collection of books known as the National Library; the Hôtel de la
Vrillière, now the Bank of France, with an _échauguette_ (observation
turret) by Mansard; the Hôtel de Soubise, used with the Hôtel de
[Illustration: HÔTEL DES INVALIDES.]
[Illustration: SAINT SULPICE.
From a print of about 1820.]
Clisson to house the national archives; the near-by Hôtel de Hollande,
once the Dutch embassy; and the Hôtel Beauvais from whose balcony the
queen-mother, the Queen of England, Cardinal Mazarin and Turenne watched
the entrance of Louis XIV and his bride, Maria Theresa of Spain.
The latter part of Louis’ reign showed a constant decline in power
resulting from a decline in common sense no less than from the loss of
able advisers. Taxes brought the peasants to poverty, famine killed them
when disease did not. Territory was lost. As a last burst of stupidity
the revocation of the Edict of Nantes drove out of the country the best
class of artisans who took their intelligence and skill to the
enrichment of other countries. The beginning of the eighteenth century
found France with a selfish nobility, and a disordered _bourgeoisie_ and
a peasantry in whose hearts was smoldering the fire of bitter hatred
that was to burst forth into flame at the Revolution. During the winter
of 1709, six years before Louis’ death, the cold was so severe that five
thousand people died of their sufferings in Paris alone, and the
scarcity of food was so pronounced that the purveyors of the court had
difficulty in securing enough for the king himself to eat.
So ended in suffering and sullenness the reign of the _Grand Monarque_.