FRANCIS I.--THE RENAISSANCE AT PARIS
The advent of the printing-press and the opening of a Greek lectureship
by Gregory Tyhernas and Hermonymus of Sparta at the Sorbonne warns us
that we are at the end of an epoch. With the accession of Charles VIII.
and the beginning of the Italian wars a new era is inaugurated. Gothic
architecture had reached its final development and structural
perfection, in the flowing lines of the flamboyant style.[97] Painting
and sculpture, both in subject, matter and style, assume a new aspect.
The diffusion of ancient literature and the discovery of a new world,
open wider horizons to men's minds, and human thought and human activity
are directed towards other, and not always nobler, ideals. Mediævalism
passes away and Paris begins to clothe herself in a new vesture of
stone.
The Paris of the fifteenth century was a triple city of narrow, crooked,
unsavoury streets, of overhanging timbered houses, "thick as ears of
corn in a wheat-field," from which emerged the innumerable spires and
towers of her churches and palaces and colleges. In the centre was the
legal and ecclesiastical Cité, with its magnificent Palais de Justice;
its cathedral and a score of fair churches enclosed in the island, which
resembled a great ship moored to the banks of the Seine by five bridges
all crowded with houses. One of the most curious characteristics of Old
Paris was the absence of any view of the river, for a man might traverse
its streets and bridges without catching a glimpse of the Seine.
The portal of the Petit Châtelet at the end of the Petit Pont opened on
the university and learned district on the south bank of the Seine, with
its fifty colleges and many churches clustering about the slopes of the
mount of St. Genevieve, which was crowned by the great Augustine abbey
and church founded by Clovis. Near by stood the two great religious
houses and churches of the Dominicans and Franciscans (Jacobins and
Cordeliers), the Carthusian monastery and its scores of little gardens,
the lesser monastic buildings and, outside the walls, the vast
Benedictine abbatial buildings and suburb of St. Germain des Prés, with
its stately church of three spires, its fortified walls, its pillory and
its permanent lists, where judicial duels were fought. On the north bank
lay the busy, crowded industrial and commercial district known as the
Ville, with its forty-four churches, the hôtels of the rich merchants
and bankers, the fortified palaces of the nobles, all enclosed by the
high walls and square towers of Charles the Fifth's fortifications, and
defended at east and west by the Bastille of St. Antoine and the Louvre.
To the east stood the Hôtel St. Paul, a royal city within a city, with
its manifold princely dwellings and fair gardens and pleasaunces sloping
down to the Seine; hard by to the north was the Duke of Bedford's Hôtel
des Tournelles, with its memories of the English domination. At the
west, against the old Louvre, were, among others, the hôtels of the
Constable of Bourbon and the Duke of Alençon, and out in the fields
beyond, the smoking kilns of the Tuileries (tile factories).
[Illustration: RUE ROYALE.]
[Illustration: TOWER OF ST. JACQUES.]
North and east and west of the municipal centre, the Maison des Piliers,
or old Hôtel de Ville on the Place de Grève, was a maze of streets
filled with the various crafts of Paris. The tower of St. Jacques de la
Boucherie, as yet unfinished, emerged from the butchers' and skinners'
shops and slaughter-houses, which at the Rue des Lombards met the
clothiers and furriers; the cutlers and the basketmakers were busy in
streets now swept away to give place to the Avenue Victoria. Painters,
glass-workers and colour merchants, grocers and druggists, made
bright and fragrant the Rue de la Verrerie, weavers' shuttles rattled in
the Rue de la Tixanderie (now swallowed up in the Rue de Rivoli);
curriers and tanners plied their evil-smelling crafts in the Rue (now
Quai) de la Mégisserie, and bakers crowded along the Rue St. Honoré. The
Rue des Juifs sheltered the ancestral traffic of the children of
Abraham. At the foot of the Pont au Change, on which were the shops of
the goldsmiths and money-lenders, stood the grim thirteenth-century
fortress of the Châtelet, the municipal guardhouse and prison; further
on stood the episcopal prison, or _Four de l'Evêque_ (the bishop's
oven). Round the Châtelet was a congeries of narrow, crooked lanes,
haunts of ill-fame, where robbers lurked and vice festered. A little to
the north were the noisy market-place of the Halles and the cemetery of
the Innocents with its piles of skulls, and its vaulted arcade painted
(1424) with the Dance of Death. Further north stood the immense abbey of
St. Martin in the Fields, with its cloister and gardens and, a little to
the west, the grisly fortress of the Knights-Templars. This is the Paris
conjured from the past with such magic art by Victor Hugo in "Notre
Dame," and gradually to be swept away in the next centuries by the
Renaissance, pseudo-classic and Napoleonic builders and destroyers,
until to-day scarcely a wrack is left behind.
With the Italian campaigns of Charles VIII. and of the early
Valois-Orleans kings, France enters the arena of European politics,
wrestles with the mighty Emperor Charles V. and embarks on a career of
transalpine conquest. But in Italy, conquering France was herself
conquered by the charm of Italian art, Italian climate and Italian
landscape. When Charles VIII. returned from his expedition to Naples he
brought with him a collection of pictures, tapestry, and sculptures in
marble and porphyry, that weighed thirty-five tons; by him and his
successors Italian builders, Domenico da Cortona and Fra Giocondo, were
employed. The latter rebuilt the Petit Pont and after the destruction of
the last wooden Pont Notre Dame in 1499--when the whole structure, with
its houses and shops, fell with a fearful crash into the river--he was
employed to replace it with a stone bridge, which was completed in 1507.
This, too, was lined with tall, gabled houses of stone, seventeen each
side, their façades decorated with medallions of the kings of France,
which alternated with fine Renaissance statues of male and female
figures bearing baskets of fruit and flowers on their heads. These
houses were the first in Paris to be numbered, odd numbers on one side,
even on the other, and were the first to be demolished when, on the eve
of the Revolution, Louis XVI. ordered the bridge to be cleared.
[Illustration: PONT NOTRE DAME.]
Worthy Friar Giocondo wrought well, for the bridge still exists, though
refaced and altered. Louis XII., with his own hand, entreated Leonardo
da Vinci to come to France, and his great minister, the Cardinal of
Amboise, employed Solario at the château of Gaillon.[98] But the French
Renaissance is indissolubly associated with Francis I., who in 1515
inherited a France welded into a compact[99] and absolute monarchy,
inhabited by a prosperous and loyal people, for the twelfth Louis had
been a good and wise ruler, who to the amazement of his people returned
to them the balance of a tax levied to meet the cost of the Genoese
Expedition, which had been overestimated, saying, "It will be more
fruitful in their hands than in mine." Commerce had so expanded that it
was said that for every merchant seen in Paris in former times there
were, in his reign, fifty. Louis introduced the cultivation of maize and
the mulberry into France, and so rigid was his justice that poultry ran
about the open fields without risk. It was the accrued wealth of his
reign, and the love inspired by "Louis, father of his people,"[100] that
supported the magnificence, the luxury and the extravagance of Francis
I., the patron of the Italian Renaissance. The architectural creations
of the new art were first seen in Touraine, in the royal palaces of
Blois and Chambord, and other princely and noble chateaux along the
luscious and sunny valleys of the Loire. Italian architecture was late
in making itself felt in Paris, where the native art made stubborn
resistance.
[Illustration: PORTRAIT OF FRANCIS I.
JEAN CLOUET.]
The story of the state entry of Francis I. into Paris after the death of
Louis XII. is characteristic. Clothed in a gorgeous suit of armour and
mounted on a barbed charger, accoutred in white and cloth of silver, the
young king would not remain under the royal canopy, but pricked his
steed and made it prance and rear that he might display his
horsemanship, his fine figure and his dazzling costume before the
ladies. "Born between two adoring women," says Michelet, "the king was
all his life a spoilt child." Money flowed through his hands like
water[101] to gratify his ambition, his passions and his pleasures.
Doubtless his interviews with Da Vinci at Amboise, where he spent much
of his time in the early years of his reign, fired that enthusiasm for
art, especially for painting, which never wholly left him; for the
veteran artist, although old and paralysed in the right hand, was
otherwise in possession of all his incomparable faculties.
[Illustration: CHAPEL, HÔTEL DE CLUNY.]
The question as to the existence of an indigenous school of painting
before the Italian artistic invasion is still a subject of acrimonious
discussion among critics; there is none, however, as to its existence in
the plastic arts. The old French tradition died hard, and not before it
had stamped upon Italian Renaissance architecture the impress of its
native genius and adapted it to the requirements of French life and
climate. The Hôtel de Cluny, finished in 1490, still remains to
exemplify the beauty of the native French domestic architecture modified
by the new style. The Hôtel de Ville, designed by Dom. da Cortona and
submitted to Francis in 1532, is dominated by the French style, and it
was not until nearly a century after the first Italian Expedition that
the last Gothic builders were superseded. The fine Gothic church of St.
Merri was begun as late as 1520 and not finished till 1612, and the
transitional churches of St. Etienne and St. Eustache remind one, by the
mingling of Gothic and Renaissance features, of the famous metamorphosis
of Agnel and Cianfa in Dante's Inferno, and one is tempted to exclaim,
_Ome come ti muti! Vedi che già non sei nè duo nè uno!_[102]
[Illustration: WEST DOOR OF ST. MERRI.]
[Illustration: TOWER OF ST. ETIENNE DU MONT.]
After the death of Da Vinci Francis never succeeded in retaining a
first-rate painter in his service. Andrea del Sarto and Paris Bordone
did little more than pay passing visits, and the famous school of
Fontainebleau was founded by Rosso and Primaticcio, two decadent
followers of Michel Angelo. The adventures of that second-rate artist
and first-rate bully, Benvenuto Cellini, at Paris, form one of the most
piquant episodes in artistic autobiography. After a gracious welcome
from the king he was offered an annual retaining fee of three hundred
crowns. He at once dismissed his two apprentices and left in a towering
rage, only returning on being offered the same appointments that had
been enjoyed by Leonardo da Vinci--seven hundred crowns a year, and
payment for every finished work. The Petit Tour de Nesle was assigned to
Cellini and his pupils as a workshop, the king assuring him that force
would be needed to evict the possessor, adding, "Take great care you are
not assassinated." On complaining to the king of the difficulties he met
with and the insults offered to him on attempting to gain possession, he
was answered: "If you are the Benvenuto I have heard of, live up to your
reputation; I give you full leave." Cellini took the hint, armed
himself, his servants and two apprentices, and frightened the occupants
and rival claimants out of their wits. It was at this Tour de Nesle that
the king paid Cellini a surprise visit with his mistress Madame
d'Estampes, his sister Margaret of Valois, the Dauphin and his wife,
Catherine de' Medici, the Cardinal of Lorraine, Henry II. of Navarre,
and a numerous train of courtiers. The artist and his merry men were at
work on the famous silver statue of Jupiter for Fontainebleau, and amid
the noise of the hammering the king entered unperceived. Cellini had the
torso of the statue in his hand, and at that moment a French lad who had
caused him some little displeasure had felt the weight of the master's
foot, which sent him flying against the king. But Cellini had done a bad
day's work by violently evicting a servant of Madame d'Estampes from the
Tower, and the injured lady and Primaticcio, her _protégé_, decided to
work his ruin. When Cellini arrived at Fontainebleau with the statue,
the king ordered it to be placed in the grand gallery decorated by
Rosso. Primaticcio had just arranged there the casts which he had been
commissioned to bring from Rome, and Cellini saw what was meant--his
own work was to be eclipsed by the splendour of the masterpieces of
ancient art. "Heaven help me!" cried he, "this is indeed to fall against
the pikes!" Now the god held the globe of the earth in the left hand,
the thunderbolt in the right. Cellini contrived to thrust a portion of a
large wax candle as a torch between the flames of the bolt, and set the
statue up on its gilded pedestal. Madame entertained the king late at
table, hoping that he would either forget or see the work in a bad
light; but when the king entered the gallery late at night, followed by
his courtiers, "which by God's grace was my salvation," says Cellini,
the statue was illuminated by a flood of light from the torch which so
enhanced its beauty that the king was ravished with delight, and
expressed himself in ecstatic praise, declaring the statue to be more
beautiful and more marvellous than any of the antique casts around. His
enemies were thus discomfited, and on Madame d'Estampes endeavouring to
depreciate the work, she was grossly mocked by the artist in a very
characteristic and quite untranscribable way. Benvenuto was more than
ever patronised by the king, who did him the great honour of accosting
him as _mon ami_, and approving his scheme for the fortification of
Paris. The artist often remembered with pleasure the four years he spent
with the _gran re Francesco_ at Paris.
"The French are remembered in Italy only by the graves they left there,"
said De Comines, and once again the Italian campaigns ended in disaster.
At the defeat of Pavia, in 1525--the Armageddon of the French in
Italy--the efforts and sacrifices of three reigns were lost and the
_gran re_ went captive to the king of Spain in Madrid, whence he issued,
stained by perjury and three years later, signed "the moral annihilation
of France in Europe," at Cambray.
[Illustration: BOULEVARD ST. MICHEL.]
During the tranquil intervals that ensued on this rude awakening from
dreams of an Italian Empire, and the third and fourth wars with the
emperor, the king was able to give effect to a project that had long
been dear to him. "Come," says Michelet, "in the still, dark night,
climb the Rue St. Jacques, in the early winter's morning. See you yon
lights? Men, even old men, mingled with children, are hurrying, a folio
under one arm, in the other an iron candlestick. Do they turn to the
right? No, the old Sorbonne is yet sleeping snug in her warm sheets. The
crowd is going to the Greek schools. Athens is at Paris. That man with
the fine beard in majestic ermine is a descendant of emperors--Jean
Lascaris; that other doctor is Alexander, who teaches Hebrew."
The schools they were pressing to were those of the Royal College of
France. Already in 1517 Erasmus had been offered a salary of a thousand
francs a year, with promise of further increment, to undertake the
direction of the college, but declined to leave his patron the emperor.
The prime movers in the great scheme were the king's confessor,
Guillaume Parvi, and the famous Grecian, Guillaume Budé, who in 1530 was
himself induced to undertake the task which Erasmus had declined. Twelve
professors were appointed in Greek, Hebrew, mathematics, philosophy,
rhetoric and medicine, each of the twelve with a salary of two hundred
gold crowns (about £80), and the dignity of royal councillors. The
king's vast scheme of a great college and magnificent chapel, with a
revenue of 50,000 crowns for the maintenance (_nourriture_) of six
hundred scholars, where the most famous doctors in Christendom should
offer gratuitous teaching in all the sciences and learned languages, was
never executed. Too much treasure had been wasted in Italy, and it was
not till the reign of Louis XIII. that it was partially carried out. The
first stone was laid in 1610, but the college as we now see it was not
completed till 1770; before the construction the professors taught in
the colleges of Treguier and Cambray. Chairs were founded for Arabic by
Henry III., for surgery, anatomy and botany by Henry IV., and for Syrian
by Louis XIV. Little is changed to-day; the placards, so familiar to
students in Paris, announcing the lectures, are indited in French
instead of in Latin as of old; the lectures are still free to all, and
the most famous scholars of the day teach there, but in French and not
in Latin.[103]
How dramatic are the contrasts of history! While the new learning was
organising itself amid the pomp of royal patronage, while the young
Calvin was sitting at the feet of its professors and the Lutheran heresy
germinating at Paris, Ignatius Loyola, an obscure Spanish soldier and
gentleman of thirty-seven years of age, was sitting--a strange mature
figure--among the boisterous young students at the College of St.
Barbara, patiently preparing himself for dedication to the service of
the menaced Church of Rome; and in 1534, on the festival of the
Assumption of the Blessed Virgin, a little group of six companions met
around the fervent student, in the crypt of the old church at
Montmartre, and decided to found on the holy hill of St. Denis'
martyrdom the first house of the Society of Jesus.
In 1528, says the writer of the so-called _Journal d'un Bourgeois de
Paris_, the king began to pull down the great tower of the Louvre, in
order to transform the château into a _logis de plaisance_, "yet was it
great pity for the castle was very fair and high and strong, and a most
proper prison to hold great men."
The tall, massive keep, which darkened the royal apartments in the south
wing, was the tower here meant, and after some four months' work, and an
expenditure of 2500 livres, the grim pile, with its centuries of
history, was cleared away. Small progress, however, had been made with
the restoration of the old château up to the year 1539, when the heavy
cost of preparing the west wing for the reception of the Emperor Charles
V., induced Francis to consider a plan which involved the replacement of
the whole fabric by a palace in the new Renaissance style. In 1546
Pierre Lescot was appointed architect without salary, but given the
office of almoner to the king, and made lay abbot of Clermont. Pierre
Lescot was an admirable artist, who has left us some of the finest
examples of early French Renaissance architecture in Paris. But Francis
lived only to see the great scheme begun, most of Lescot's work being
done under Henry II.
From the same anonymous writer we learn something of Parisian life in
the reign of Francis I. One day a certain Monsieur Cruche, a popular
poet and playwright, was performing moralities and novelties on a
platform in the Place Maubert, and among them a farce, "funny enough to
make half a score men die of laughter, in which the said Cruche, holding
a lantern, feigned to perceive the doings of a hen and a
salamander."[104] The amours of the king with the daughter of a
councillor of the Parlement, named Lecoq, were only too plainly
satirised. But it is ill jesting with kings. A few nights later,
Monsieur Cruche was visited by eight disguised courtiers, who treated
him to a supper in a tavern at the sign of the Castle in the Rue de la
Juiverie, and induced him to play the farce before them. When the
unhappy player came to the first scene, he was set upon by the king's
friends, stripped and beaten almost to death with thongs. They were
about to put him in a sack and throw him into the Seine, when poor
Cruche, crying piteously, discovered his priestly tonsure, and thus
escaped.
Public festivities were held with incredible magnificence. When the
English envoys entered Paris in 1518, there was the finest triumph ever
seen. The king, the royal princes, five cardinals and a train of lords
and dukes and counts, with a gorgeous military pageant, met them and
conducted them to Notre Dame, whose interior was almost hidden under
decorations of tapestry and of cloth of silver and of gold. A pavilion
of cloth of gold, embroidered with the royal salamander, _moult riche et
fort triomphante_, supported by four columns of solid silver, was
erected, and was so large that some of the masonry between the choir and
the high altar had to be removed to give it place. The banquet by night
at the Bastille was the most solemn and sumptuous ever seen; the whole
courtyard was draped and the edifice lighted by ten thousand torches;
words fail to describe the triumph of the meats and table decorations.
The feast ended at midnight and was followed by dances of moriscos
attired in cloth of silver and of gold, by jousts and princely gifts.
The extravagance of Francis was prodigious; a Venetian ambassador
estimated the annual ordinary expenses of the court at 1,500,000[105]
crowns; another describes the people as "eaten to the bone by taxes."
Cellini declares that the king on his travels was accompanied by a train
of 12,000 horse.
After the defeat at Pavia, the king became excessively pious. By trumpet
cry at the crossways, games--quoits, tennis, contre-boulle--were
prohibited on Sundays; children were forbidden to sing along the
streets, going to and from school. Blasphemers[106] were to be severely
punished. In 1527 a notary was burned alive in the Place de Grève for a
great blasphemy of our Lord and His holy Mother. In June of the next
year some Lutherans struck down and mutilated an image of the Virgin and
Child at a street corner near St. Gervais; the king was so grieved and
angry that he wept violently, and offered a reward of one hundred gold
crowns, but the offenders could not be found. Daily processions came
from the churches to the spot, and all the religious orders, clothed in
their habits, followed, "singing with such great fervour and reverence,
that it was fair to see." The rector and doctors, masters and bachelors,
scholars of the university, and children with lighted tapers, went there
in great reverence. On Corpus Christi day the street was draped and a
fair canopy stretched over the statue. The king himself walked in
procession, bearing a white taper, his head uncovered in _moult gran
révérence_; hautboys, clarions and trumpets played melodiously.
Cardinals, prelates, great seigneurs and nobles, each with his taper of
white wax, followed, with the royal archers of the guard in their train.
On the morrow a procession from all the parishes of Paris, with banners,
relics and crucifixes, accompanied by the king and nobles, brought a new
and fair image of silver, two feet in height, which the king had caused
to be made. Francis himself ascended a ladder and placed it where the
other image had stood, then kissed it and descended with tears in his
eyes. Thrice he kneeled and prayed, the bishop of Lisieux, his almoner,
reciting fair orisons and lauds to the honour of the glorious Virgin and
her image. Again the trumpets, clarions and hautboys played the _Ave
Regina cælorum_, and the king, the cardinal of Louvain, and all the
nobles presented their tapers to the Virgin. Next day the Parlement, the
provost and sheriffs, came and put an iron trellis round the silver
image for fear of robbers.[107]
Never were judicial and ecclesiastical punishments so cruel and
recurrent as during the period of the Renaissance. It is a common error
to suppose that judicial cruelty reached its culmination in the Middle
Ages. Punishments are described with appalling iteration in the pages we
are following. The Place de Grève was the scene of mutilations,
tortures, hangings and quarterings of criminals and traitors, the king
and his court sometimes looking on. Coiners of false money were boiled
alive at the pig-market; robbers and assassins were broken on the wheel
and left to linger in slow agony (_tant qu'ils pourraient languir_). The
Lutherans were treated like vermin, and to harbour them, to possess or
print or translate one of their books, meant a fiery death. In 1525 a
young Lutheran student was put in a tumbril and brought before the
churches of Notre Dame and St. Genevieve, crying mercy from God and Mary
and St. Genevieve; he was then taken to the Place Maubert, where, after
his tongue had been pierced, he was strangled and burnt. A _gendarme_ of
the Duke of Albany was burnt at the pig-market for having sown Lutheran
errors in Scotland; before his execution his servant was whipped and
mutilated before him at the cart-tail, but was pardoned on recantation.
On Corpus Christi day, 1532, a great procession was formed, the king and
provost walking bare-headed to witness the burning of six Lutherans--a
scene often repeated. The Fountain of the Innocents, the Halles, the
Temple, the end of the Pont St. Michel, the Place Maubert, and the Rue
St. Honoré were indifferently chosen for these ghastly scenes. Almost
daily the fires burnt. A woman was roasted to death for eating flesh on
Fridays. In 1535, so savage were the persecutions, that Pope Paul III.,
with that gentleness which almost invariably has characterised Rome in
dealing with heresy, wrote to Francis protesting against the horrible
and execrable punishments inflicted on the Lutherans, and warned him
that although he acted from good motives, yet he must remember that God
the Creator, when in this world, used mercy rather than rigorous
justice, and that it was a cruel death to burn a man alive; he therefore
prayed and required the king to appease the fury and rigour of his
justice and adopt a policy of mercy and pardon. This noble protest was
effective, and some clemency was afterwards shown. But in 1547 the
fanatical king, a mass of physical and moral corruption, soured and
gloomy, went to his end amid the barbarities wreaked on the unhappy
Vaudois Protestants. The cries of three thousand of his butchered
subjects and the smoke from the ruins of twenty-five towns and hamlets
were the incense of his spirit's flight.
[Illustration: LA FONTAINE DES INNOCENTS.]