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 Abbé 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. His profanity was such
that he was advised to economise time by employing an extra clerk to do
his swearing for him, and during a fatal operation, rendered necessary
by a shameful disease, he went to his account blaspheming and gnashing
his teeth in rage at his physicians.
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:--
"_De par le roi défense à Dieu_
_De faire miracle en ce lieu._"[147]
[Illustration: 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."
[Illustration: 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:--
"J'ai vu le Louvre et son enceinte immense,
Vaste palais qui depuis deux cent ans,
Toujours s'achève et toujours se commence.
Deux ouvriers, manoeuvres fainéants,
Hâtent très lentement ces riches bâtiments
Et sont payés quand on y pense.[150]"
[Illustration: 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.
[Illustration: MONT S. GENEVIÈVE FROM L'ILE S. LOUIS.]
[Illustration: 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 Coeur, 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.
[Illustration: 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."