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Paris from the Earliest Period to the Present Day; Volume 1

by William Walton · English · Gutenberg #30651 · 472,804 chars · public domain (US)

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Title: Paris from the Earliest Period to the Present Day; Volume 1

Author: William Walton


        
Release date: December 11, 2009 [eBook #30651]

Language: English

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*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK PARIS FROM THE EARLIEST PERIOD TO THE PRESENT DAY; VOLUME 1 ***




Produced by Juliet Sutherland, Chuck Greif and the Online
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PARIS

FROM THE EARLIEST PERIOD TO THE PRESENT DAY

VOLUME I

[Illustration]

[Illustration: THE SEINE AT BOUGIVAL

PHOTOGRAVURE, AFTER THE PAINTING BY JULIUS L. STEWART]


_IL FLOTTE SANS ÊTRE SUBMERGÉ_

[Illustration]

PARIS

FROM THE EARLIEST PERIOD TO THE PRESENT DAY

[Illustration: WILLIAM WALTON]

_VOLUME I_

PHILADELPHIA

GEORGE BARRIE & SON, PUBLISHERS

COPYRIGHT, 1899, BY GEORGE BARRIE & SON






CONTENTS


VOLUME I


INTRODUCTION


CHAPTER I

GALLO-ROMAN AND PRE-MEDIÆVAL PERIODS


CHAPTER II

THE COURT AND THE UPPER CLASSES


CHAPTER III

THE BOURGEOIS AND THE LOWER CLASSES




INTRODUCTION

[Illustration: THE MARTYR; MEROVINGIAN PERIOD. By F. Bac, from a
tapestry.]


If the capital of the French nation, situated on the river Seine, were
simply the most beautiful, the wittiest, wickedest, and most artistic of
towns, if--as has been so often asserted (and not exclusively by the
citizens thereof)--the most commonplace and the most brilliant of human
manifestations alike take on new qualities, texture, and interest the
moment they become Parisien, then, indeed, would this city be entitled
to be considered only with that mild offence which is the proper
intellectual attitude before all so-claimed earthly superlatives. But
Paris is by no means to be so disposed of. The very peccability of her
wit is demonstrated by the extravagant claims which it permits itself.
No God-given institution proclaims itself as such,--at least, noisily.
It is the shadings to this brilliant picture, the exceeding width and
depth and blackness of the sun-spots on this luminary of civilization,
which relieve us from any easy toleration and compel us to the liveliest
attention. One of her many qualities is that of representing and, too
often, of acting for the whole country,--indeed, _la centralisation_ is
one of the four great evils (the others being the abuse of _alcool_, _la
pornographic_, and the stationary birth-rate) which are recognized by
its own citizens as menacing the nation. So that, in a general way, for
both good and bad, Paris reads France.

Well, the heights and depths which we are called upon to contemplate are
not unendurable, but they are certainly in many respects unexcelled.
"France," says one of her most eloquent and dignified historians, "has
justly been termed the soldier of God;" "Other continents have monkeys,"
says a learned German philosopher; "Europe has the French." Any
community or locality which offers, or is considered by intelligent
observers to offer, such a range as this, is certainly worthy of high
renown and deep research, and it is not too much to say that Paris
justifies her fame. Within her walls the human mind has displayed its
loftiest development, and the human passions their most insane excesses;
her art and her literature have erected beacon-lights for all the ages
to come, and have but too frequently fallen into the depths of more than
swinish filth; her science of government has ranged from the Code
Napoléon to the statutes of Belial himself; her civilization has
attained an elegance of refinement unknown to the Greeks, and her cigars
and lucifer-matches are a disgrace to Christendom!

Happily, as in several other human institutions, there is more of good
than of bad. The so-called "seamy side" of cities is not like that of
flour-bags,--equal in extent and importance to the fair outer surface
that meets the eye. Much as has been published of the depravity of
Paris, it is not that, but the splendid activity of her material and
intellectual civilization, the serious confronting of the heavy problems
of humanity, the intelligent accumulation of the treasures of the mind
and the hand, legislation, literature, art, science, that impress the
intelligent visitor. Moreover, it is the annals of unhappy nations only
that are said to be interesting, and it is impossible that a quick human
interest should not attach to the contemplation of this capital which
has attacked so many problems, maintained so many struggles, and endured
such crushing reverses. In the light of her most troubled history the
import becomes clear of the galley on her shield, and her motto:
"_Floats, but sinks not._" But few capitals have been more frequently,
apparently, on the point of being submerged. Even as these lines are
being written, it is agitated by the protracted and cumulating effects
of a military and social agitation which, in the language of the
President of the Cabinet of Ministers, "is deplorable, which paralyzes
all commerce and creates a situation intolerable to all."

[Illustration]

Indeed, it may be said that the present moment is the most critical, the
most dramatic, in the long history of the city and the nation, and that
an entirely new interest will henceforth attach itself to this crowned
capital which sees herself in the inevitable future forever uncrowned.
Never before has the pitiless march of events, the pitiless accumulation
of irrefutable evidence, the testimony of so many observers, at home and
abroad, so seemed to demonstrate that all the methods of government had
been exhausted, and that the nation had attained her summit of power and
was doomed to steady decline. Down to Louis XIV, her hope was thought to
lie in the consolidation of the royal authority and the suppression of
the feudal power of the nobles; down to 1789, in the _tiers état_ and
the States-General; after the Commune of 1871, in the maintenance of a
Republic supported by universal suffrage. The ideals of 1830 and of 1848
have been practically attained; there are, finally, no new and more
liberal political expedients to hope for,--and never has France seen
herself so distanced by her neighbors. Her contemporary literature
groans with the accumulation of these facts--from the ineptitude of her
rulers, national and colonial, down to the dependence upon the
foreigner for wood for her street pavements and the canned provisions
for her army. Behind that "gap in the Vosges" upon which, as one of her
statesmen remarks, she cannot forever fix her gaze, she sees her great
and hated rival doubling in power. In 1860, Germany had the same
population as France; to-day, she has that of France and Spain combined.
"Never has such a displacement of power been so quickly produced between
two rival peoples. And no one among us seems to regard it, though not
one of the problems which torment us is as grave as this one. Our
agriculture, our industry, our commerce decline; we seem to be in
decadence! How could it be otherwise? There are, in the neighboring
hive, beyond the Rhine, sixteen millions of workers who were not there
forty years ago,--that is the explanation of the progress of our
neighbors as well as of the stagnation of our own activity. All the more
that the quality of the French tends to diminish with their quantity;
... we can foresee the day when there will be two Germans against one
Frenchman, and this prospect fills us with fear for the future of our
country, for we cannot comfort ourselves with illusions, we cannot
believe in the perpetual peace, we know that history is a _Vie Victis_
continual."

Therefore, let us hasten to contemplate this great and most admirable
Babylon before Cyrus comes.

_Paris, Rue Boissonade._




INTRODUCTION

GALLO-ROMAN AND PRE-MEDIÆVAL PERIODS

[Illustration: DISTRIBUTING BREAD, TWELFTH CENTURY.

Water-color by George Rochegrosse.]


Lucotocia, says that somewhat inexact geographer, Strabo, "is the city
of the _Parisii_, who dwell along the river Seine, and inhabit an island
formed by the river." Ptolemy, who has been thought to have been
somewhat better informed concerning the Parisii than with regard to any
of the other small tribes of Gaul, calls their capital LUCOTECIA; but
both they and their town appear for the first time in history
fifty-three years before the birth of Christ, when Cæsar, in his
_Commentaries_, relates, himself, that he summoned a general assembly of
the Gauls at LUTETIA, the capital of the Parisii. At this date, he was
already master of the greater part of the country now called France.
More than four hundred years later, Julian, surnamed the Apostate,
nephew of Constantine the Great, after having passed more than two years
in this city, which he called "his dear LEUCETIA," was proclaimed
emperor here by his soldiers, who refused to obey the orders of
Constantius and return to the East. It is surmised by the scholars that
the imperial author of the _Misopogon_ adopted this form of the name of
the town on the Seine through an affectation of deriving it from the
Greek, in which language he wrote, and, as is still evident in those of
his works which have survived, in a style remarkably pure.

Lutetia, of which the modern French make Lutèce, is supposed to have
been derived from the Celtic _louk-teih_, which signified the place of
morasses; and the name of the Parisii from the Celtic _par_, a species
of boat, and _gwys_, in composition _ys_, man, whence _parys_,
boatmen,--these islanders being supposed to have been skilful
navigators. But they are said to have called themselves
_Loutouchezi_,--that is to say, a residence in the midst of the waters.
Other etymologists cast doubts upon all these deductions, and the matter
is not very important. The early Parisians were one of the smallest of
the Gaulish tribes, and preferred the islands to the mainland as a safer
place of residence; they were surrounded by the Carnutes, Senones, and
other, stronger people whose names have not been perpetuated. Of their
ten islands and sand-banks, which were preserved until late in the
Middle Ages, there are now only two remaining, the Ile Saint-Louis and
Ile de la Cité. The ancient town, like the modern one, lay in the centre
of a "tertiary" basin, about sixty-five mètres, or two hundred and ten
feet, above the level of the sea, broken here and there by low hills.
The modern historian, Duruy, quotes Strabo as finding a proof of divine
providence in the fortunate configuration of the soil of Gaul; and that
writer testifies that the whole country was inhabited, even in the
marshes and woods. "The cause of this is, however, rather a dense
population than the industry of the inhabitants. For the women there are
both very prolific and excellent nurses, while the men devote themselves
rather to war than to husbandry."

The antiquity of the inhabitants of Gaul is now pushed back by the
learned far beyond the days of Cæsar. M. A. Thieullen, in two
communications addressed to the _Société d'anthropologie_ at Paris
(January and February, 1898), maintained that the chipped flint
arrow-heads found at Chelles and Saint-Acheul, which have been
considered as the earliest works of prehistoric man, are, in reality, in
common with the polished stone hatchets of the Neolithic age, the
products of an industry in a high state of development, the result of
successive essays by numberless generations. In this theory he is
supported by other scientists, among them the English geologist,
Prestwich; and in this insistence upon the artistic quality of the
chipped and polished flints and the prodigious number of rudimentary
utensils which have preceded and accompanied them is found another
argument in favor of the great antiquity of man and his existence in the
tertiary period. The soil of Paris has furnished many of these superior
flints, and the comparative state of civilization to which the locality
early attained is further testified to by the discovery, in the early
months of this year, 1898, by an enterprising proprietor on the edge of
the forest of Fontainebleau, of the site of a prehistoric pottery on his
grounds. This locality, opposite the village of Ecuelle, was already
noted for the menhir, or prehistoric upright stone, standing on the
right bank of the canal. The ancient potteries seem to have occupied a
space about five hundred mètres in length and two hundred in width; at
the depth of sixty-five or seventy centimètres below the surface there
is found "a black sand, burned, beaten down, trodden, which gives forth
a resonant sound when attacked by the pick-axe; this arises from the
fact that it has been, through a long series of centuries, tormented by
the incessant passage of men and the innumerable fires of the furnaces."
From the specimens of pottery extracted from this sand, it is concluded
that this manufactory had been maintained from the Neolithic age down to
the Gallo-Roman period. In the little village of La Mouthe, in the
department of the Dordogne, farther south, have been discovered within
the last few years, in a cavern, very curious and not unskilful outline
drawings on the rock, sometimes touched up with color, of now extinct
animals,--the extreme age of these works of art being demonstrated by
the fact that they are in many cases partially covered with stalactites.
The learned scientists who have uncovered and photographed these incised
drawings conclude, from their appearance and from the fragments of
animals' bones found in the cavern, that they are the work of men of the
Neolithic age and the Palæolithic, which preceded it. In short, there is
every reason to believe, on the strength of all the testimony which
modern science has wrested from the unwilling records of the past, that
the earliest inhabitants of the islands of the Seine were contemporary
with the mammoth, the cave-bear, the auroch, and the rhinoceros with
cleft nostrils.

[Illustration: FRAGMENT OF ROMAN AQUEDUCT, STILL IN EXISTENCE, ON THE
PROPERTY OF M. RASPAIL, AT ARCUEIL.]

It is not to be supposed, however, that these very ancient texts are
read without the necessary stumbling over obscure passages and much
upsetting of cherished historical truth. The finest presentations of
ancient records that we find in grave historians are now set aside by
learned archæologists in communications to the _Académie des Sciences à
Paris_ or the _Académie des Inscriptions et Belles-Lettres_. Even the
original number of islands in the Seine and Cæsar's statements
concerning the Gauls and their manners and customs are now disputed.
When it comes to the origin of things and of peoples, the erudition is
profound. M. G. de Mortillet proposes for the epoch _quaternaire_ or
_pléistocène_ four successive divisions,--in their order of antiquity,
the _Chelléen_, the _Moustérien_, the _Solutréen_, and the
_Magdalénien_; M. Perrier du Carne thinks that the traces of the Solutré
and of the Madeleine show them to have been derived from two races long
contemporary on the same soil, of which the former were autochthonous
and the latter, immigrants, who came in with the reindeer and followed
him when he retreated northward. M. Piette objects to the word
_Magdalénien_, and proposes to replace it by _glyptique_, for, during
this period, man learned to carve bones with flint instruments; after
the _Solutré_ he places the epoch _Eburnéenne_, and after that, the
_Tarandienne_, characterized by instruments in reindeer's horns. After
the quaternary period, Professor Alexandre Bertrand, of the École du
Louvre, places the _Mégalithiques_, whom he thinks belonged to the great
ethnological family of the Touranians which preceded the Aryans in
Europe, and who erected the great stone monuments, dolmens, menhirs,
cromlechs, etc., formerly called druidical, found in various parts of
Europe. Several of these _monuments mégalithiques_ have been discovered
in Paris and its environs,--a street of the Faubourg du Temple owes its
name of Pierre-Levée (raised stone) to the fact that at its opening, in
1782, an enormous ancient rock was found artificially supported on two
others, the funerary tumulus, or mound, which formerly covered it having
disappeared.

As it is impossible to attribute any longer these prehistoric monuments
to the "Celts," or to "their priests, the Druids," so do others of our
historical illusions vanish. M. Duruy, in his learned _Histoire de
France_, states that at the dawn of history the country known as Gaul
was "divided between three or four hundred tribes (_peuplades_)
belonging to the three great families,--the Celts, the Iberians, and the
Belgians." M. Guizot says that "in the south were Iberians or
Aquitanians, Phoenicians and Greeks; in the north and northwest,
Kymrians or Belgians; everywhere else, Gauls or Celts, the most numerous
settlers, who had the honor of giving their name to the country." M.
Salomon Reinach, in his detailed description of the monuments in the
Museum of Saint-Germain-en-Laye, under the general title of _Antiquités
nationales_, declines to recognize the _race celtique_; in accord with
the science of anthropology he distinguishes various Gaulish types and
is aware that they nowhere present themselves in a pure state. Professor
Bertrand "superposes" upon his _Mégalithiques_, whose distinguishing
trait in Europe is their use of polished stone, another race,
numerically inferior and much less ancient; these are the "_tribus
celtiques_ or _celtisées_ of the Aryan race." When they arrived in Gaul,
they were already familiar with the use of metals, especially bronze,
beginning to be acquainted with iron; they were pastoral and
agricultural, and burned their dead. About the sixth century B.C.
appeared a third group, the _tribus galatiques_, Helvetians, Kymrians,
Belgians; they were wandering bands of warriors, who used iron
implements only and buried their dead. "From the superposition, rather
than from the fusion, of these divers elements has resulted that which
is called _la nation gauloise_ or _celtique_."

Naturally, the religions of these varied nations were as diversified as
their origins. The Druids, according to Professor Bertrand, so far from
forming the priesthood of a practically homogeneous race, can be said to
have had no influence upon the religion of the people, who were alien to
them and who remained faithful to their own worship of the spirits or
powers in nature and to their superstitious practices. "Druidism was,
then, neither a dogma, nor a religion, nor a particular theogony, but a
social institution with an organization analogous to that of the great
abbeys of Ireland in the fifth and sixth centuries, or to the Lamaism of
Thibet. The Druids lived in communism, like the Lamas." Moreover, M.
Bertrand refuses the Druids all their fine old qualities,--human
sacrifices; worship of stones; solstitial ceremonies, such as the
Yule-log and fires on the eve of Saint John; the herbs of Saint John;
the worship of fountains; the worship of trees, and medical
prescriptions. Even more, what Guizot calls their "noblest
characteristic, a general and strong, but vague and incoherent, belief
in the immortality of the soul," was less a particular doctrine of their
own than a sentiment innate in the race; "they had only to develop ideas
the germ of which had not been imported by them." Nevertheless, so well
organized was their communal order that they were, before the Roman
epoch, the only central, definite power capable of consecutiveness in
its conceptions and of unity in its views, and their influence over a
gross and ignorant people was proportionally great.

To the _chamanisme_, or belief in the spirits that pervade nature, and
in the power of man over them by magic arts, of the original Touranians,
the Celtic tribes brought the worship of natural forces,--the sun, fire,
torrents, tempests, mountains, etc.; but neither they nor the Druids had
any human figures or symbols in their pantheon. The invasions
_galatiques_ or _kimrobelge_, on the contrary, brought in from the
Orient a cult already strongly anthropomorphous, and with these symbols,
traditions, and divinities those of the Greeks and Romans became mingled
to a greater or lesser degree that it is impossible to determine,
because, as it appears, all that we really know of the Gaulish religion
before the Roman conquest is reduced to a few lines in Polybius, in
which can be found the name of _Perkunas_, the Perkun of the Slavs.
Cæsar identifies the gods of the Gauls with the Roman ones, Mercury,
Apollo, Mars, Jupiter, and Minerva; and M. André Lefèvre, in the _Revue
mensuelle de l'École d'anthropologie_, asks, without being able to
answer: "How is it possible that such men as Cæsar and Tacitus were able
to confound with Mercury the supreme gods of the Gauls and the Germans;
but, still more, how is it that the Gaul should have adopted with
enthusiasm the Latin name and forgotten the Gaulish name of his supreme
god?" M. Reinach is considered to have proved beyond a doubt that the
god with the mallet, the Dispater of the Gallo-Roman period, was a sort
of copy, in Gaulish attire, of the Egyptian Serapis; and the
inscriptions of the imperial epoch testify to the diffusion of the
worship of the divinities of Alexandria from Arles and Nîmes, in the
extreme south, to Besançon, almost on the borders of Switzerland, and
Soissons, northeast of Paris. Nevertheless, those archæologists who have
thought they found traces of the art of Egypt and Babylon in that of the
original cave-dwellers are now considered to have been deceiving
themselves; and M. Reinach has modified the opinions he held a few years
ago on the early religious art of Gaul. "In short, what we know of
Gaulish mythology amounts to nothing, or practically nothing."

Various rude images and fragments of altars found under the modern
pavements of Paris at different dates and localities--among others,
under the choir of Notre-Dame in 1710--have revealed the names, if not
the characters, of some of the ancient divinities of the soil, _Esus_,
_Jovis_, _Volcanus_, _Tarvos trigaramos_, _Cernunnos_.

But if the scientists grope doubtingly in these twilights of history,
the romancers relate boldly. One of them, M. Henri Lavedan, has been
calling up the Parisienne of the Lacustrine age, "_gran' maman
archi-centennaire_" of her of the present day. This is how she was.
"Large, thick, and short, with a vigorous figure, shaking out coarse and
matted hair, the feet bare, the arms bare, the breast half bare and
unrestrained under her species of primitive corset. The body is that of
a handsome and robust decent human animal, a tanned skin, somewhat
hairy. The feet are large and powerful, like the hands, with cutting
nails, square and hard. The visage, high in color, with features that
are simple and elementary, is lit up by eyes grey or blue, eyes limpid
and tranquil, which regard without vivacity, without appearing and
disappearing lights, without surprise, the eyes of an animal under the
yoke and resigned to it, eyes only too well acquainted with the eternal
landscape which they have been reflecting ever since they were first
opened. The step is slow, sure, heavy, and majestic. Under her petticoat
of sombre color may be divined two great legs, the legs, almost, of a
man, two legs of labor and of endurance. She sings naturally, this
woman, when she is alone, vague songs, sort of fugues of savages, very
simple, which seem to have neither beginning nor end, but in the company
of others she is almost taciturn, replying by gestures, by signs,
accomplishing her task with a passive regularity. She scarcely knows the
lighter shades of sentiments and expressions. She laughs or she weeps.
No smiling. When she laughs, it is with a large display of the solid
white teeth of a carnivorous animal; when she weeps, it is with the deep
sobs of a beaten child. She is strong and patient like the ox, she runs
like the horse, she resists cold, heat, and fatigue; her sleep is
profound and without dreams. She is more mother than wife, in the animal
sense of the word; she is capable of courage, of rude goodness and of
devotion, but all of these naturally and by instinct. Her life may be
hard and long, she may retain until a very advanced age the plenitude of
her vigor, and die splitting wood or turning the mill.

"Should the wife cease to please her husband, he sells her again; should
she commit a fault, he strips her (the garments will serve for the new
spouse); then he takes her by the hair and smothers her in the marsh.
Nevertheless, however miserable may be her condition of a domestic
animal, this creature has passions. Tacitus informs us that adultery was
not unknown to the purchased wife. The male children belonged to the
father, and always remained with him; as to the aged, the old relatives,
useless and cumbering, they were put 'in a place apart,' a sort of
hollow in the neighborhood of the hole for the hogs or the enclosure for
the cattle, and there was thrown to them the remnants of the meals. The
family sentiment, the voice of kindred blood, did not, as yet, make
itself heard very distinctly."

[Illustration: THE BATHS OF THE EMPEROR JULIAN, CORNER BOULEVARDS ST.
MICHEL AND ST. GERMAIN. Restoration.]

This information may be supplemented by various extracts from the
ancient historians, who give us the usual picture of early man in the
barbarous stage, bellicose, blood-thirsty, brutal, having the one virtue
of courage. Cæsar says that when a man of importance died, his wives
were tortured and put to death by fire if suspected of being
instrumental in his taking off; but a short time before his conquests it
was the custom to burn with the defunct his slaves and his favorite
clients. It was also said that the women were not constrained in their
choice of husbands, and that the latter were obliged to furnish an
equivalent for the dowry brought by the wife. Human sacrifices were
offered on certain great occasions, and it was thought possible that one
of the upper stones of the great sepulchre discovered at Meudon in 1845,
indicated one of the sites dedicated to these offerings.

Of the many attempts that have been made to restore the primitive man in
his environments, one of the most learned and interesting is that shown
by M. Cormon, the painter, in his series of large decorations for the
_plafond_ and walls of some ethnological museum, exhibited in the Salon
of 1898. But an artist is an impossible archæologist; the more of an
artist he is, the more will he be unwilling to represent the merely
bestial, as the scientist finds it; and though the original inhabitant
of the valley of the Seine and other favored spots may have circulated
in some such early landscape, and have garbed himself and tattooed
himself somewhat as the painter here paints him, it is probable that
there was far less of the picturesque and presentable about him, of
grace of attitude and whiteness of skin in his women-folk, than in any
artist's presentation on a self-respecting canvas.

The habitations of the early Parisian were equally unlike those familiar
to the Cook's tourist. On the pedestal of an antique statue of Melpomene
of heroic size in the Louvre is a relief representing the head of a
supposed Gaul defending his house against a Roman soldier, and this
sculpture, confirmed by others on the column of Antoninus at Rome of
those of the German barbarians, gives this dwelling as a species of
circular, upright hut, covered with a conical-shaped roof constructed of
branches and reeds, or thatch, or perhaps of a half-spherical piece of
wood.

In the soil of the tertiary, or quaternary, basin in which Paris lies
are found traces of marine plants, oyster-shells, skeletons of fish,
etc., which indicate that it has risen from the bottom of the sea. As
every one knows, the Seine, flowing in a general direction from east to
west, curves toward the north to traverse the heart of the city, the
former Palais de l'Industrie, but just demolished, having occupied
nearly the centre of the upward curve of this bow. On the south, the
river receives the waters of the Bièvre, a feeble stream which flows
through a narrow valley, and, farther eastward, those of the river
Marne. Under the Roman domination and that of the first Merovingian
kings, that part of the city lying immediately south of the river seems
to have become the most populous and important almost as soon as the
narrow limits of the original islands became too confining. The pride of
the Faubourg Saint-Germain may date itself back for some fifteen
centuries. A central, principal street traversed the city from south to
north, entering it in the general direction of the Rue Saint-Jacques,
passing on the east side of the imperial palace whose ruins may still be
seen in the Musée des Thermes, at the corner of the Boulevard
Saint-Germain and Boulevard Saint-Michel. Under the Rue Saint-Jacques
remains of the ancient pavement have been found at a great depth, and a
fragment of it is preserved in the Musée de Cluny. The Roman street
crossed the small arm of the Seine on a wooden bridge, near where is now
the Petit-Pont, traversed the Ile de la Cité, at the western end of
what is to-day the Place du Parvis-Notre-Dame, and crossed the larger
branch of the river near the site of the present Pont Notre-Dame. On the
northern shore, it followed for some distance nearly the course of the
present Rue Saint-Denis, and then forked,--one branch continuing in a
general northerly direction toward Senlis, and the other turning off to
the northwest, in the direction of the Bourse, toward Clichy,
Saint-Ouen, Saint-Denis, and, finally, Rouen by the valley of the
Montmorency.

Of the stately buildings erected by the Roman officers sent to govern
the city on the Seine and the province of which it was the capital, the
only remains now above ground are those preserved in the Musée des
Thermes, in somewhat curious juxtaposition with the late
fifteenth-century Hôtel de Cluny. These ruins represent the great Roman
baths of the palace, the _frigidarium_, the _piscine_, the _tepidarium_,
and, somewhat deeper, the _hypocaustum_, or furnace for heating. By
their size and importance, these ancient walls testify to the dignity of
the imperial palace which rose on this site, and, surrounded by its
gardens, extended along the southern bank of the Seine. Of the date of
the erection of this _Palatium Thermarum seu Thermæ Parisiaci_ nothing
definite is known; it is generally ascribed to Constantius, surnamed
Chlorus, "the pale," father of Constantine the Great, who died in 306
A.D. It is considered certain that it was occupied by Julian, and by
Valentinian I, and Valens; after the expulsion of the Romans by the
Franks, it served as a residence for the kings of the first and second
race, and was still an important edifice in 1180 when Philippe-Auguste
presented it to his chamberlain, Henri. About 1340 it passed into the
possession of the Abbé of Cluny, Pierre de Chaslus.

These very antique walls are preserved by the national authorities in a
manner that might be considered as more satisfactory to the lovers of
the picturesque than to the archæologists. They are exposed to all the
disintegrating influences of the sun and rain, much blackened by the
Parisian climate, which darkens everything exposed to it, and largely
overgrown with creeping vines. They are constructed of squared stones
interspersed with layers of brick, with rectangular and arched niches,
filled-up arches at the base of which may be seen still the remnants of
the prows of ships, and in the niches are still the remains of the
earthenware pipes that conveyed the water to the baths. The student of
architecture is interested to observe here that the Roman bricks were
much longer than ours, and only about an inch and a half thick. Their
original, cheerful red still shows occasionally through the Parisian
blackness. He will, however, probably be somewhat disturbed by the fine
indifference of the authorities to styles and chronologies. In the place
of the missing wall of the _piscine_ is set the arched porch of the
cloister of the Benedictines of Argenteuil; inside the enclosures are
tumulary stones, with inscriptions in Hebrew, found on the site of the
publishing house of Hachette. In the pleasant green garden in front of
these ruins, and in which the bare-legged Parisian children play at
soldiers or at digging gravel in the paths, are more incongruous
mediæval bits of architecture and sculpture,--placid Madonnas and
Annunciations, much defaced by time; gargoyles from the church of
Saint-Germain-l'Auxerrois, in what may be called the size of life,
agonizing and tormented by queer little beasts like weasels under their
throats or bellies, and, guarding the gateway at the angle of the
boulevards, three great, deformed figures of the animals of the
Evangelists, the Lion, the Eagle, and the Ox, from the tower of
Saint-Jacques-la-Boucherie, where they have been replaced by copies.

For a number of centuries these ruins were forgotten, and were even
concealed until 1810 under hanging-gardens constructed above them. In
1819 it was proposed to establish in the Thermes a museum for the
Gaulish and Roman antiquities discovered in the soil of Paris; but this
project was not carried out until 1836, when, through the action of the
Prefect of the Seine and the Conseil Municipal, the remains of the Roman
palace became the property of the city. Seven years later, the State
having acquired the Hôtel de Cluny and the collection Sommerard, the
city offered the Palais des Thermes to the national government, and the
two museums were united in one national one. The project of M. E. du
Sommerard, of clearing away all the surrounding modern buildings,
opening the new streets and planting the garden, was finally put in the
way of being realized in 1856.

The site of this palace, the ruins of which are among the most important
in France, was on the lower slopes of Mount Lucotitius, afterward the
mount of Sainte-Geneviève, overlooking both the city and the Roman road
to Genabum (Orléans). Its dependent buildings and enclosures seem to
have extended as far south as the Rue Soufflot, in front of the
Panthéon, ruins of foundation-walls having been located at various
periods in this quarter. Its magnificent baths were probably preserved
during the earlier Christian centuries, when the civilization of the
Romans had not entirely disappeared, until the siege of Paris by the
Normans in the ninth century. On this (southern) side of the river have
also been discovered the ruins of an amphitheatre, traces of a quarter
or barracks for soldiers, another establishment of baths, the aqueduct
of Arcueil, a great cemetery on the southern slopes of Mount Lucotitius,
secondary roads, and a port on the smaller arm of the Seine. In the
Luxembourg garden have been unearthed at various periods numerous
fragments of painted walls; seven hundred large Roman medals in bronze
and two hundred in silver, all enclosed in a species of chest of tiles,
and covered with a silver plate, and supposed to have been the treasury
of a rich Gallo-Roman country-house; a statuette of Mercury; a bust of
Cybele; pits to preserve grain, etc.

Another of these important palaces or suburban villas was seated on the
northern slopes of the Butte Montmartre, which rises some hundred mètres
above the level of the Seine, on the other side of the river,--a site
which gave it an admirable extended view over the city and the
surrounding plains. The most important ruins which have been discovered
north of the river are the remnants of the aqueduct to convey water from
Passy, large basins on the site of the Palais-Royal, various highways
branching off to the north and east and extensive cemeteries near these
roads, and numerous Roman medals and coins in various
localities,--sufficient to demonstrate the existence of an extensive and
important population. Montmartre is supposed to have derived its name
from having been the site of a temple of Mars (_Mons Martis_); or from
having been the scene of the martyrdom of Saint Denis, the first bishop
of Paris, and his companions, A.D. 270 (_Mons Martyrum_).

Buried under the modern pavement of the Ile de la Cité, the Gaulish
_Oppidum_, are many vestiges of the Roman occupation. In 1847 numerous
remains of the construction of houses during this period and of what
was considered to be a church dedicated to the Virgin were discovered
under the open place in front of Notre-Dame; of these, careful drawings
were made, engraved, and published in the _Statistique monumentale de
Paris_ and the structures then covered up again; in the following year,
excavations made in the course of enlarging the Palais de Justice
brought to light in the court of the Sainte-Chapelle and under the
houses to the south of it remains of walls of the ancient Roman palace.
The old historians of Paris, indeed, relying upon the testimony of
Ammianus Marcellinus, state that one of the two Roman palaces was
situated in the western end of the island which formed the ancient
Lutetia. In 1844 the laying out of a new street between the Palais de
Justice and the Hôtel-Dieu revealed two portions of edifices the use of
which was unknown, but which, by the thickness of their walls and the
nature of their construction, were supposed to have formed some part of
the public structures. It has been considered that these various
vestiges of important buildings situated in the centre of Lutetia
indicate that they surrounded an open market-place or commercial
exchange.

But the discovery of one of the most important and interesting vestiges
of the Gallo-Roman city was reserved for the latter part of the year
1869, when, in laying out the Rue Monge, on the eastern slopes of Mont
Sainte-Geneviève, there was revealed the ancient amphitheatre, with
which no Roman city of importance could dispense. Although these
important vestiges lay only some twelve mètres below the surface, and
though at least two passages in mediæval chronicles were known which
alluded to the locality, this contribution to the history of the city
was delayed to this late date. Alexandre Neckham, a professor in Paris,
writing in 1180, mentions, in the course of four verses, the vast ruins
of a Roman amphitheatre, dedicated to Venus, which was situated near the
Abbey of Saint-Victor. Adrien de Valois cites a _cartulary_, or registry
of a monastery, dated in 1310, in which mention is made of three
sections of vineyards situated in the district known as _les Areinnes_.
A date for the construction of this amphitheatre was conjectured by M.
Adrien de Longpérier, from the bringing together of three of the broken
stones of the edifice--selected from the sixteen bearing inscriptions
now in the Musée Carnavelet and from twelve others bearing similar
inscriptions and evidently from the same source, but which were found in
1847 in the Parvis-Notre-Dame, having been taken in later days to
construct the wall of fortification of the city. By placing three of
these fragments in order, M. de Longpérier was enabled to decipher the
names of two of the Gaulish emperors who lived in the second half of the
third century of our era, from which he concluded that it was a portion
of the imperial inscription, and that the construction of the
amphitheatre accordingly dated from this period. The pride of the
Parisians, however, took offence at this interpretation, and it was
considered as highly improbable that the Romans "should have delayed for
more than two centuries and a half to construct, for the use of the
population of a city as important as Lutèce had become, a monument
similar to those the ruins of which have been enumerated in more than
fifty Gallo-Roman cities,--a figure which shows how much the diversions
of the amphitheatre and the theatre were relished by the Gauls." M.
Gourdon de Genouillac, in his history of Paris, decides that the
structure dates from the second century.

[Illustration: REMAINS OF ROMAN AMPHITHEATRE, RUE MONGE, DISCOVERED IN
1869.]

It may be observed that, in the third century, Roman Gaul became a
practically independent State,--from A.D. 258 to 273, from Posthumus to
Tetricus, its connections with Italy ceased, and it maintained its own
emperors and its own legions. This was in sympathy with the rising
spirit of nationalities, awakened throughout the empire by Septimus
Severus, but in this ephemeral empire of the Gauls the old Celtic
influence had but little part. "If there took place," said M. Camille
Jullian before the _Académie des Inscriptions_ in 1896, "as we would
willingly believe, a Celtic renaissance at the opening of the third
century, it was entirely superficial, and doubtless slightly factitious;
it resembled that reaction in the life, the language, the traditions of
the provinces which the French Romanticism brought about in 1815. Like
that, it in no way changed the ideas of the nation, it had no influence
upon the political and social destinies of Gaul." With regard to the
fondness of the ancient Gauls for histrionic and spectacular
performances, we may quote M. Reinach again: "The qualities and the
defects of the present inhabitants of France may all be found again
among the Gaulish contemporaries of Cato and Cæsar. The warlike humor,
the facility of elocution, the curiosity--often turbulent, have
remained, throughout the centuries, the portion, more or less enviable,
of the inhabitants of Gaul."

An important publication in folio by Firmin-Didot, _Paris à travers les
Ages_, gives the following description of the amphitheatre of Lutetia.
"But few constructions are visible around the arena, elliptic in shape
and measuring fifty-four mètres on its long axis and forty-seven on the
short one. This was the space reserved for the combats of animals, for
the hunts and other spectacles. A podium, or enclosing wall, surrounded
this arena in its entire circuit, and the thickness of this wall was
such that it resisted the thrust of the sides of the Mount Lucotitius,
on the eastern slopes of which the edifice was constructed. The places
arranged for the spectators of the games, around the arena, were
evidently placed, on the west, on the slope of Mount Lucotitius, where
have been found walls converging toward the centre of the structure to
support the tiers of seats running in the contrary direction. The
benches may have been supported by constructions which have now
disappeared; the various fragments of architecture discovered in the
excavations must have formed part of the decoration of the edifice, as
well as the stones that were employed in the military wall of
fortification of Lutetia during the later period of decline."

The discovery of these ruins caused much excitement among the savants of
Paris at the time. The Société de Numismatique visited the excavations
in a body, several archæological and antiquarian associations united in
drawing up a paper, which was presented to the Emperor, advocating the
preservation of this "antique theatre of the popular festivals of the
Gauls, the arena in which had perished for liberty of conscience the
ancestors of the French nation, the field in which sleep the martyrs of
Lutèce." A petition was likewise addressed to the Chamber of Deputies;
Napoleon III visited the locality in person; but the Municipal Council
hesitated before the expenditure of 300,000 francs for this purpose, and
the ground was actually purchased by the Compagnie Générale des Omnibus.

This interesting excavation, but little known even to the Parisians, has
now been transformed into a public garden, in the quarter between the
Panthéon and the Jardin des Plantes, and is well worth visiting. The
ancient Mont Lucotitius still heaves itself under the modern Parisian
pavement, and the grades frequently become so steep that they have to
be abandoned, and terraces and retaining-walls substituted. Although
much less than a half of the oval of the original arena has been
uncovered, the explorations have reduced the houses on the Rue Monge to
but little more than tall façades. From under their rear walls emerge
the amphitheatre and some of the curving rows of seats in stone, the
latter much restored. In the walls of the arena are two rectangular,
barred entrances, and one lower, arched one, from which we may imagine
the gladiators or the wild beasts emerging. The floor of the arena is
left in a roughly gravelled condition; at present, nothing more
formidable is to be encountered there than three very little French boys
making mud-pies in the puddle formed by last night's rain. A fourth,
still smaller, is at some distance, absorbed in some dry engineering of
his own at the foot of the old wall. Seated in the steep little green
park which rises above the terraced seats, crowned with trees and
shrubberies, and vocal with a prodigious twittering of birds, are three
or four idle, bare-headed young women in "shirt-waists," one with a
lover, and an old gentleman with a red ribbon reading his morning
newspaper. The traveller can place himself on one of the benches in this
pleasant little greenery, look down on the infantile engineers below,
and make appropriate reflections.

A still more important architectural feature of the ancient city was the
great aqueduct which supplied the baths of the palace on the river, its
fountains and those of the populous quarter around it. The waters of
three or four small streams to the south of the capital were united and
conveyed in a channel, lined with cement, 19,100 mètres in length, which
traversed the slopes of the hills on the eastern side of the Bièvre, and
remains of which have been found at various points. To cross the valley
and the stream, an aqueduct was constructed on arches at the locality
which took the name of Arcueil, and where some of the masonry is still
preserved in modern construction, "this aqueduct being some four hundred
mètres long and fifty (?) high." It is computed that a supply of
twenty-four cubic mètres of water was furnished every twenty-four hours.
Remains of other and smaller aqueducts have been discovered at various
points in the city. At Passy, surrounding the present Trocadéro, there
were springs of mineral waters, which were conveyed to the city by
terra-cotta pipes, passing along the banks of the Seine. In 1781, in the
gardens of the Palais-Royal, were discovered the remains of great basins
which are supposed to have been the piscines of the hygienic baths.
Remains of Roman aqueducts have been found at various other localities
in France, at Nîmes, at Lyons, at Metz, etc., and that over the Gard is
still standing in part.

Among the bridges constructed by the Gauls, Cæsar mentions that of Melun
on the Seine; one on the Allier, near Vichy; that of Genabum (Orléans),
and that of Lutetia, over the larger arm of the Seine, on the site of
the present Pont Notre-Dame. Of that over the Allier and of the Parisian
one, some of the ancient piles have been found in the bed of the rivers.

Remains of the ancient wall of fortification of the capital have also
been brought to light, at various localities and at different dates. The
excavations in the Parvis-Notre-Dame in 1847 discovered a section of the
Roman wall twenty-six mètres in length, as well as the substructure of
the porch and the front portion of the nave of the original basilica,
constructed by Childebert and dedicated to the Virgin. These latter
foundations, some thirty-two mètres in front of the present cathedral,
demonstrate by their position, and by the probable width of the
primitive edifice in proportion to its length, that they were
constructed to the west and inside of the enclosing wall of the city, a
portion of which had been found under the choir of the cathedral. The
basilica constructed by the son of Clovis probably rose on the site of
the altars consecrated to the Roman or Gaulish gods, Jupiter, Vulcan,
Esus, and others, and which, before the construction of the city wall,
were visible from all sides. The enclosing wall, on the contrary, fenced
in the basilica, since it was necessary to protect this part of the
city, as well as all others. The somewhat unimposing aspect of
Notre-Dame, which was founded in 1163, may be ascribed in part to the
raising of the level of all the surrounding soil, for, as the histories
tell us, so late as 1748, it was reached only by ascending a flight of
thirteen steps, whereas now it is on the ordinary street-level.

This wall of defence was not commenced till about 406, when the
barbarians began to invade Gaul, and was apparently constructed in great
haste, if we may judge by the manner in which materials were borrowed
from surrounding buildings of all kinds. It is described as being
something over three and a half mètres in thickness at its base, which
was constructed in rough stone, frequently of small size, and sloping to
a height of two mètres. On this was erected a wall of dressed stones,
each successive layer set back, like a step, so that at the top it was
only some two mètres in width. It might be thought that this manner of
building offered considerable facilities to an escalading enemy.

On the largest stone of those discovered in 1711 under the choir of
Notre-Dame was deciphered an inscription which recorded the erection of
this altar to Jupiter, "very great, very beneficent," in the reign of
Tiberius Cæsar, by the corporation of _nautæ_, or mariners, apparently
the most powerful in the city, and the prows of the ships at the foot of
the arches in the ancient palace of Thermes are supposed to have been
connected with the same guild, though this architectural ornament is by
no means uncommon in ancient art. It is from these _Nautæ Parisiaci_
that the modern city derives its arms,--a vessel with distended sails.
(If any doubting tourist inquire concerning the maritime commerce of
Paris, he will be proudly referred to the barges which may be seen at
all the quais, and, even more, to the little steamers from London which
contrive to get under the bridges.) In some of the modern records this
ancient corporation is given great importance--with many _sans doutes_
and _il paraîts_--in the history of the city, both before and during the
sway of the Romans. Cæsar found it "fully organized," though it was
founded on the Roman corporation of the _Nautæ Tyberis_, navigators of
the Tiber, composed of senators, magistrates, and knights, which
transported grain and other merchandise from the port of Ostia to the
capital; and it was the original of the later _maison de la marchandise
de l'eau, de l'hôtel de Ville et du conseil municipal_ of Paris. The
activity of the Lutetian shippers and navigators covered the territory
bathed by the Seine, the Marne, and the Oise, all of them quite
navigable. The ruins of the Gallo-Roman buildings discovered in the Cité
in 1844, at the opening of the Rue de Constantine, were the remains of a
market or forum for the sale of provisions; and the corporation had,
near the port, an office or bureau for the regulation of this river
commerce. Opposite the port, on the northern side of the Seine, they
controlled also another point of landing, at the Grève, where, later,
was established the _prévôté de l'eau_, which developed into the
Parisian municipality. The port on the Cité, on the larger arm of the
Seine, received in the Middle Ages the name of Saint Landri, this bishop
having had an oratory, and perhaps his residence, in the neighborhood.
Under the Later Empire, in the reign of Posthumus, the northern suburb
having increased in size and importance, a market was placed at the
Champeaux, on the site of the present Halles Centrales, and the port of
the Grève became, as it has remained ever since, a point of landing for
merchandise coming from the upper Seine. The port on the southern side
of the river, near the great road from Genabum, was established on the
site of the mediæval _Quai de la Tournelle_, the great tower which
replaced that of the southern wall of fortification of the city built by
Philippe-Auguste. This quai still serves at the present day as a
landing-place for the barges.

[Illustration: FLIGHT OF LEUDASTE, A MEROVINGIAN. From a drawing by Jean
Paul Laurens]

In the reigns of Louis the Fat and Louis VII, the successors of the
_Nautæ Parisiaci_ were known as _mercatores aquæ parisiaci_, and they
were the origin of the municipal body charged with the policing of the
river navigation and commerce. Later in the Middle Ages, this small
species of Hanseatic League had a commercial station at
Marsons-sur-Seine, and its maritime jurisdiction extended as far as the
city of Mantes, situated on the western limits of the territory of the
Parisii. The sources of the Seine, near the farm of the Vergerots in the
commune of Saint-Germain-la-Feuille, were held in great veneration in
Gallo-Roman times, and a temple, the remains of which have been found,
was erected in their honor. In 1867 the Municipal Council of Paris set
up a monument "to the sources of the river which has given its name to
the department of the Seine, and to which Paris owes its ancient
prosperity."

The overrunning of Gaul by the barbarians, the latest historians tell
us, did not present the imposing spectacle of a great invasion in which
armed hosts of valiant and robust warriors trod down the effeminate and
corrupted civilization of the Romans, pillaged and ravaged the seats of
refinement and luxury in city and country, slew and carried into
captivity without respect for age or sex.

Long before the invasions of the fifth century the Germans had been
established in the empire, both as colonists and as soldiers. The
legions composed of Germans are said to have been even more amenable to
discipline than the Roman ones. The first who established themselves in
Gaul were the Visigoths and the Burgundians; the former, flying before
the Huns, appeared as suppliants on the frontiers of the empire in the
closing years of the fourth century. Ataulf (Ataulphus), the successor
of the imperial puppet Attalus, set up by the conquering Alaric, came
into Gaul early in the fifth century, became the ally of the Emperor
Honorius, married his sister Placida, and marched to the conquest of
Spain. The Visigoths, being thus installed in Gaul, admitted the
Burgondes (Burgundii) in a neighborly manner; we are even told that they
considered themselves as honored by the friendship of the Romans, and
pretended that they had a common origin. Their kings proclaimed
themselves lieutenants of the emperors, and fed their vanity by the
Roman titles with which they invested themselves. The historian Orosius
says the Burgundii were a quiet people, with gentle manners, respecting
the civil authorities, and living in friendly relations with the Gauls.
Both Visigoths and Burgundii promptly abandoned their national religions
and traditions and adopted Christianity, but they followed the Aryan
sect,--"unfortunately," says Duruy. Some modern French historians, on
the contrary, attribute the greatness of France to this circumstance.
The Gallo-Romans were orthodox.

When the Huns, driving the Germans before them or passing over their
bodies, appeared on the frontiers of Gaul in the year 451, they were met
by an army commanded by a Roman, Aëtius, but composed of Romans,
Burgundii, Visigoths, Franks, and Saxons, which defeated them at the
famous battle of the _champs catalauniques_, over the locality of which
the historians are still disputing. When the Franks appeared, at the end
of the fifth century, the army of Clovis contained a large number of
Romans, and from the time of the sons of Clotaire, the entire
population, without distinction of race, was called upon to do military
duty. It is even said that it was only the Gallo-Roman chiefs of the
armies who acquired military renown. Notwithstanding all this, there are
still historians of the present day who speak of "the catastrophe of 406
breaking abruptly the bond which attached the barbarians to the Empire
of the West." Some of these latter are disposed to see in Clovis, after
his conversion, the founder of modern political society, a creator of a
nationality, a maker of civilization,--titles which are freely denied
him by others. His success was owing, it is said, not to his victories,
but to his conversion. He was baptized by the Bishop of Reims, Remi, on
Christmas Day, 496. "From that date, he had the alliance of the bishops
throughout all Gaul against the Visigoths and the Burgondes, and his
reign was assured."

This conversion, it is said, had been earnestly desired by his wife
Clotilde, a niece of Gondebaud, King of the Burgondes, who had
stipulated with her royal spouse that her first-born should be
"consecrated to Christ by baptism." It also contributed greatly to his
final establishment in Paris, a capital which he had long coveted and
from which his predatory attacks had been constantly turned aside by the
efforts of a virgin, Sainte-Geneviève, whom the Parisians still honor as
their patron saint. The central position of this city, between the Rhine
and the Loire, enabled him to keep a watchful eye upon Brittany,
Aquitaine, the Burgondes, and the Frankish tribes of Belgium.

At his death, his kingdom was divided among his four sons, Paris, with
Poitiers, Périgueux, Saintes, and Bordeaux, falling to the lot of
Childebert. From the confused records of these barbaric times the names
of two women issue, and have remained permanently engraven upon the
tablets of history,--one of them as that of a personification of
Christian and feminine virtues rare at any age and doubly so in these
dark ages, and the other that of a monstrous queen whose crimes have
made her immortal. Radegonde was a daughter of Bertaire, King of
Thuringe, killed by his brother Hermanfried at the instigation of the
wife of the latter; the murderer invited Thierry, King of Metz, and
Clotaire, King of Soissons, sons of Clovis, to invade the kingdom, and
in the partition of the booty, Radegonde fell to the share of Clotaire.
Charmed by her original beauty, the king had her educated with unusual
care, and, later, married her, but the queen sought only to forget her
earthly dignities in ministering to the poor, in pious meditation, and
in long conversations upon the Scriptures with some learned prelate.
"She is a nun," said Clotaire, "and not a queen;" and he ended by
killing her last surviving brother. Whereupon she fled to Noyon and
implored Saint Médard at the altar to give her the protection of the
Church; Clotaire threatened and protested, but finally permitted her to
found a church and a convent at Poitiers, in which she immured herself
till her death, in 587,--thirty-seven years. "During this long seclusion
she constantly mingled with good works and with the austerity of
religious exercises the culture of letters; constantly also did she
guard her cherished traditions of the domestic hearth, and we find her
living again in the awkward verses of the greatest poet of that time,
Fortunatus, who had himself ordained priest that he might never be
constrained to leave her."

At the death of Clotaire, the monarchy was again divided into four
kingdoms, those of Paris, Soissons, Metz, and Burgundy,--soon reduced to
three by the death of Charibert, King of Paris. The Burgondes were under
the sway of Gontran, the Austrasien and Eastern Franks under Sigebert,
and the mingled population of Franks and Gallo-Romans which were called
Neustriens, or the Westerners, under Chilpéric. Aquitaine was divided
between the three, and Paris was already of so much importance that none
of them was willing to yield her to the others, and it was agreed that
no one should enter the city without the consent of the other two. The
royal authority was weaker in Austrasie, now Belgium and Lorraine, the
petty chiefs stronger, and the manners and customs more Germanic and
barbaric; in Neustrie, now Ile-de-France, Normandy, etc., there were
more ancient cities, mere remnants of the Roman civilization and
vestiges of imperial administration. To the political rivalry to which
this disparity gave rise was added the personal animosity of the two
queens, Frédégonde and Brunehaut.

While Sigebert was fighting the Avars, barbarians from Asia, on the
eastern frontier, his two brothers amused themselves by pillaging his
western provinces. Chilpéric had taken, for a most unwilling bride, a
younger sister of Brunehaut, Galswinthe, daughter of a king of the
Visigoths, notwithstanding the fierce jealousy of his mistress, or his
first wife, Frédégonde; her empire was, however, soon regained, and
Galswinthe was strangled in her sleep. Brunehaut incited her husband,
Sigebert, to a war of vengeance; Paris was taken, and Chilpéric only
saved from ruin by his wife, who despatched two assassins against the
King of the Neustriens. The rights of inheritance of her son, Clotaire,
were impaired by the existence of two sons of Chilpéric by a former
marriage. One of them, Mérovée, imprudently married the widowed
Brunehaut, and his step-mother sent him to rejoin Sigebert. The Bishop
of Rouen, Prétextat, who had already narrowly escaped with his life, in
Paris, from the terrible queen, had blessed this marriage; he was killed
on the steps of the altar while celebrating mass. Clovis, the brother of
Mérovée, followed; then one of his sisters, and Audovère, the mother.
The king left Paris for Chelles one afternoon, for the chase; he had
previously entered his wife's apartment while she was occupied with her
toilette and struck her playfully on the shoulder with a light
wand,--the queen mistook him for another, and answered, without turning
round: "_Tout beau!_ Landry," and other words of great familiarity. Then
she perceived her error, and the king went out without a word; as he
dismounted, on his return, some one slipped a knife into his heart, "and
no one thought it worth while to run after the murderer."

Charibert, the short-lived king of Paris, had in his royal palace a serf
named Leudaste, who, when a fellow-servant, Markowefe, attracted the
monarch's favor and was made queen, contrived to ingratiate himself with
her to such an extent that he was made grand equerry and, later, Comte
de Tours. In his administration he proved himself capable of every
outrage; but the death of Charibert compelled him to seek refuge with
Chilpéric, and he endeavored to win Frédégonde's favor as he had
Markowefe's. When Tours fell into the hands of Chilpéric, in 574,
Leudaste was re-established in his office and resumed his old practices;
two years later, upon a petition addressed to the king by the bishop,
Saint Grégoire de Tours, he was dismissed. Thereupon he hatched a plot
against the bishop and against the queen who had not interposed to save
him; he declared to the king that the former had conspired to deliver
Tours to the King of Austrasie, and that the queen had done him an even
greater wrong, and he offered to produce witnesses. But his case fell to
the ground; the king, threatened with excommunication by the clergy for
bringing false charges against the revered prelate, threw all the
responsibility upon Leudaste, and that individual, diligently sought
for, had prudently disappeared.

He was accordingly solemnly excommunicated and declared anathema "from
the crown of his head to the sole of his feet." After some two years
passed in pillage and debauchery at the head of an organized band of
brigands in the domains of Gontran, he obtained permission to return to
Tours, and had the audacity to come and seek his pardon at the court of
Neustrie. Chilpéric tolerated his presence, but advised him to avoid the
queen. As the sovereigns were one day attending mass in the basilica of
Paris, Leudaste entered boldly, traversed the crowd, and knelt at the
feet of Frédégonde, imploring her forgiveness. The king had him expelled
from the church, but, instead of taking warning, he lingered in the
shops around the market-place in the Cité, selecting jewels and rich
stuffs with which to propitiate the queen; when she issued from the
church and saw him, she despatched her guards to arrest him; one of them
was wounded, and another gave him a sword-cut over the head; as he fled
across the Petit-Pont, he fell and broke his leg. The manner and quality
of a torture that should be appropriate for him were carefully discussed
by the royal pair; he was tended by eminent physicians that he might be
duly strengthened for it; but when Frédégonde learned that gangrene had
appeared in his wounds, she had him dragged from his bed, stretched on
the pavement with his neck on a great iron bar, and his head crushed by
another heavy bar in the hands of the executioner.

After the murder of Chilpéric, the people began to murmur, and the
gentle King Gontran, according to Saint Grégoire of Tours, "in order to
put an end to the evil custom of killing kings, went one day to a church
where all the people were assembled for the mass, commanded silence
through a deacon, and said: 'I conjure you, men and women who are here
present, keep for me an assured fidelity, and do not kill me as you have
lately killed my brothers. Allow me to live at least two or three years,
that I may educate my young nephews, for fear that, after my death, it
should happen that you should perish with these children, since there
will remain of all my family no man strong enough to defend you.'"

Nevertheless, he had the courage to raise doubts as to the legitimacy of
Frédégonde's son, Clotaire, and to postpone his baptism till she
produced three bishops and three hundred other witnesses in his favor.
Brunehaut's son, Childebert, was threatening the queen with an armed
force; he and Gontran agreed to be each the other's heir in case they
died without children, and on Gontran's death Childebert endeavored to
take possession of Clotaire's domains also. Frédégonde had him poisoned:
the dreary series of civil war and family murders began again; Clotaire
II became in the end sole king of the Franks, and his mother died in her
bed, "full of years." Her rival, Brunehaut, less fortunate, betrayed by
her own followers, was, by Clotaire's orders, tied naked to the tail of
a wild horse and dragged to death.

Such were the manners and customs of the Mérovingians.

[Illustration: DEATH OF SAINTE-GENEVIÈVE. After the mural painting, in
the Panthéon, by J.-P. Laurens.]

There are various accounts of the two patron saints of France and Paris.
It is to Grégoire de Tours that we owe our first knowledge of Saint
Denis, who, according to his statement, came to preach Christianity in
Lutetia in the year 245, with the friar Rustique and the deacon
Eleuthère. Dionysius, bishop of the Parisians, he says, full of zeal for
the name of Christ, suffered many persecutions, and finally martyrdom.
Other historians assign to Saint Martin, rather than to Saint Denis, the
glory of having converted the Gauls to Christianity; some place his
mission even before the year 100, and the Abbé Hilduin confounds him
with Saint Denis the Areopagite. But, according to Grégoire, Denis,
Rustique, and Eleuthère were beheaded in the year 272, by order of the
préfet Percennius, on a mountain situated near Paris, which accordingly
took the name of the Mont des Martyrs (Montmartre). The préfet had given
orders to have the bodies thrown into the Seine, but a Roman lady, named
Catulla, although not a Christian herself, caused them to be sought for
in the night and piously buried in a locality known as Catolocus. Grain
was sown over the graves, and when the fury of persecution was passed,
they were disinterred and deposited in a tomb.

According to the popular legend (to which the municipal and national
authority has given a sort of official sanction by M. Bonnat's very
vigorous and realistic presentation on the walls of the Panthéon), after
having had his head struck off, the saint arose on his feet, picked it
up and walked away, carrying the severed organ in his hands, to the
great surprise of the spectators. In this manner he traversed the space
of a league, till he came to the spot where his church now stands, the
angels meanwhile chanting around him _Gloria tibi Domine_, and others
repeating three times the _Alleluia_. It was this unusual promenade that
gave rise to the well-known proverb that it is only the first step that
costs.

In 286 the weight of the Roman yoke and the persecutions of the
Christians had become so cruel that there was a rebellion, headed by
Salvianus Amandus and Lucius Pomponius Ælianus, who put themselves at
the head of the slaves and the _colons_ of Paris and Meaux, were
elevated on bucklers, and proclaimed emperors near the site of the
present Hôtel de la Ville. To them were speedily joined the _bagaudes_
(insurgents) of the surrounding country, and it required a very serious
effort on the part of the Roman troops, under the command of Maximien
Hercule, associated with Diocletian in the government of the empire, to
restore order.

Sainte-Geneviève, the patron saint of the Parisians, also perpetuated
with her legend on the walls of the Panthéon, originally her church but
now dedicated to the _Grands Hommes_ of the nation, was born at
Nanterre, near Paris, in 422, and guarded in the fields the flocks of
her parents, Sévère and Gérontia. She is said to have known Saint
Germain d'Auxerre, and to have promised him to devote herself to the
service of God; her reputation for sanctity, confirmed by several
miracles accomplished, was such that when the city was thrown into a
panic by the approach of Attila and his terrible Huns (begotten, it was
asserted, in the deserts of Scythia by the union of sorceresses and
infernal spirits) her voice was listened to as that of one qualified
from on high. Nevertheless, there were certain obstinate ones who
doubted her assurances of safety; there was even question of stoning her
for false counsel; but she, mounting a little eminence, assured her
fellow-citizens that, though Attila was indeed advancing, he would not
attack their city; this she stated in the name of God. That was
convincing, and, indeed, the dreaded conqueror turned his march toward
Orléans, and was preparing to pillage it when he was vanquished by
Aëtius and Théodoric.

A second time she came to the rescue of the capital when it was suddenly
attacked, in 476, by Childéric at the head of his Franks. His first
efforts were directed toward cutting off all supplies by the river, and
in this he was so successful that the Parisians speedily found
themselves reduced to a diet of fish and roots, with no bread at all.
Geneviève was touched by their sufferings, she embarked on a little
flotilla of fishermen's boats, and succeeded in escaping through the
enemy's lines in the most marvellous manner. Her return was anxiously
awaited; for nine days there was no news of her, and the famine grew
more cruel; finally, the lookouts on the towers perceived something in
the distance on the bosom of the river; it approached; it was she, with
eleven vessels filled with provisions of all kinds, of which she herself
superintended the distribution. Each one of the nine days had been
marked by some miracle, in the pursuance of her object. Monsieur Puvis
de Chavannes has recently devoted a large mural painting to this pious
legend. Nevertheless, Childéric took the city, in which he dwelt but
very little.

Pagan though he was, he partook of the general veneration for the
saintly virgin, and could refuse nothing to her earnest entreaties. It
was during his reign that she conceived the idea of building a church to
Saint Denis on the site of his tomb; by her prayers and entreaties she
succeeded in inducing the clergy and the people of Paris to raise the
necessary funds, and she commissioned a priest by the name of Genès to
construct the edifice. Clovis, son and successor of Childéric, had no
less consideration for her, but the basilica which he erected, in
connection with his wife Clotilde, and in consequence of his vow made
during the war with the Visigoths, was originally dedicated to Saint
Peter and Saint Paul, and did not take the name of Sainte-Geneviève
until later. It was completed after his death by Clotilde, who caused to
be interred in it the bodies of her spouse and the saint.

The famous _châsse_ (shrine or casket) of Sainte-Geneviève, preserved in
the abbey bearing her name which was completed in the reign of
Philippe-Auguste, and enriched by successive gifts of various
sovereigns, was constantly appealed to during many centuries, taken
down, solemnly carried in procession through the streets escorted by
barefooted clergy, whenever any of the innumerable evils from the hand
of God or man afflicted her good city of Paris.

[Illustration: A MEROVINGIAN QUEEN. From water-color by F. Bac.]




THE COURT AND THE UPPER CLASSES

FROM THE OPENING OF THE MIDDLE AGES TO THE PRESENT DAY


[Illustration]

Any one traversing the handsome, formal garden which now occupies the
site of the ancient palace of the Tuileries, official residence of the
rulers of France after the red days of the Revolution, may perceive in
the midmost of the central alley, directly in the axis of the long vista
between Napoleon's two arches of triumph, that of the Carrousel and that
of the Place de l'Étoile, an important marble group by the sculptor
Mercié, set up on a high pedestal. This monument represents a vanquished
and wounded French infantry soldier, with bandaged feet, sinking and
clutching for support at the skirts of a robust peasant woman wearing
the typical head-dress of Alsace-Lorraine, who snatches the real
Chassepot, whitened to imitate marble (furnished by the courtesy of the
Minister of War), from his failing grasp. The whiting is wearing away
from the real Chassepot, the grime of the Parisian weather is settling
into corners of eyes, under noses, etc.; the pathos and sentiment of the
work suffer accordingly, and it may be doubted whether any pathetic, or
would-be pathetic, work of sculpture is ever really effective, even if
wrought by a very clever contemporary French artist. But it is to be
noticed that on this national and historic site, in what might be called
the physical centre of the nation, the most prominent monument
commemorates, not the national glories and triumphs, but a humiliating
and overwhelming national disaster. Facing the square of the Carrousel,
between the arch and the Louvre, is the much vaster monument of Gambetta
in marble and bronze, with long extracts from his orations in the evil
days of '71 engraved on the tall shaft which rises behind him,--a most
ostentatious commemoration of defeat. Farther west, the great Place de
la Concorde is surrounded by handsome pavilions and balustrades, with
eight stately, seated female figures of heroic size typifying the
principal cities of France. To one of these the traveller's attention is
at once directed by the funerary contributions in which she is half
smothered,--draped flags, great wreaths and disks of immortelles and
black bead-work, similar to those seen on the tombs in the cemeteries,
with commemorative inscriptions: "From the Societies of the Inhabitants
of Alsace-Lorraine;" "14th July, 1898" (the day of the national _fête_,
commemorative of the fall of the Bastile); "_France! Souviens toi!_" on
a huge yellow circle like a life-preserver, and, on a circular disk at
the feet of the statue:

[Illustration QUI VIVE! FRANCE! L. D. P. QUAND MÊME]

This curiously-garnished statue is that representing the city of
Strasbourg, which is no longer a French city; and of all the others,
which illustrate nothing particularly mortifying or mournful in the
national history, no proclamation whatever is made. In the centre of the
handsome court-yard of the new and imposing Hôtel de Ville, the statue
selected as the central jewel of this _écrin_, as it were, is Mercié's
_Gloria Victis_, the vanquished here being, again, France. (It should be
stated, however, that if any work of contemporary sculpture is worthy of
honor and of proud municipal recognition, it is this admirable bronze.)

Many of the great public places in the city of Paris, moreover,
commemorate, more or less openly, what might be called the great stains
on the history of the nation. The Place de la Concorde is that of the
Guillotine, and the Luxor obelisk is the monument of the more than
twenty-eight hundred victims beheaded by that axe. The Place de l'Hôtel
de Ville was formerly the Place de Grève, famous in all hangmen's
annals,--burnings alive, tearings asunder by horses, breakings on the
wheel, decapitations, hangings,--from Catherine de Médicis' Huguenot
chiefs and the unlucky Comte de Montgomery; Lally-Tollendal, Governor of
the Indies; Foulon, _contrôleur-général_ of the finances and his
son-in-law, hanged to the street lanterns by the mob, down to the famous
regicides and the obscure and ignoble multitude of criminals of all
ages. The Place de la Bastile commemorates the fortress-jail of that
name,--one of the worst of all jails and one to be discreetly forgotten;
the column of July, in the centre of this place, was erected in memory
of the victims of the Revolution of 1830. The statue of Henri IV on the
Pont-Neuf marks the spot where the Grand Master of the Templars and one
of his officers were burned at the stake; on the _carrefour_ of the
Observatory, that of Marshal Ney, the locality where that brave soldier
was shot by order of the Chamber of Peers; from the little bell-tower at
the side of the church of Saint-Germain-l'Auxerrois, back of the Louvre,
the signal was sounded for the Saint Bartholomew. The Châtelet and the
Conciergerie were famous prisons; the ruins of the palace on the Quai
d'Orsay have been but just removed, to make room for the new depot of
the Orléans railway, after having stood since 1871 a most eloquent
monument of the excesses of the Commune. It was even proposed to leave
the shattered walls of the Tuileries as a permanent record of the
follies of an unbridled democracy!

[Illustration: ARMED PARISIANS MEETING THE KING, 1383.

From an illuminated manuscript in the National Library, Paris.]

This expansiveness, this frank parading of unseemly things, is
supplemented by other public demonstrations of the passion of the hour.
For some years after the fall of the Commune the national emotions found
solace in stencilling in big letters on every possible wall or _fronton_
or pediment, public or private,--_Liberté._ _Egalité._ _Fraternité._ The
harassed citizen of the new republic looked up, or down, or sideways, at
this official assurance of the sentiments breathed by all, high or low,
and found comfort. Only, the wits of the agitated capital--who perceive
some, but by no means all, of the opportunities which their
fellow-citizens afford them--took occasion to read this text with the
punctuation-mark--(.) _point_--after each noble word. _Point_ is also
the strongest of negations, so that the official declaration of faith
was reduced to nullity,--"Liberty, none; Equality, none: Fraternity, not
the slightest!"

All this seems to constitute a curious national trait, and in
literature, in the daily journals, the observing traveller is again
impressed with this unbosoming, which the Parisian himself would
probably brand as _naïveté_ if he could perceive it. It flourishes
perfectly side by side with his vanity; in fact, it probably has its
origin in his vanity. "The Causes of Our Defeat in 1870," under various
titles, have furnished and are still furnishing matter for interminable
publication. In municipal affairs, the unshakable conviction that Paris
is, simply, the only capital in the world does not in the least
interfere with frank admissions concerning its limitations, which the
least public-spirited villager in other climes would neither believe nor
admit. Here, the journalist, the romancer, the historian, find in the
most simple human demonstration, if it take place in the capital,
something peculiarly and most admirably _Parisien_. Balzac, _e.g._, in
the _Double Famille_, if we remember aright, brings two of his
characters together late at night in a dusky street; the younger man
thinks he recognizes the elder, but is not certain; he therefore
approaches him doubtfully "as a Parisian does when he is undecided."
This endless and childish delight in everything appertaining to his
town, and the accompanying frank indifference to everything, pretty
much, outside of it, is, in fact, so well known abroad that it has even
brought down upon the Parisian's unconscious head the epithet that he
would consider the uttermost of insults--"provincial!" He provincial! he
who has invented those two withering words, "the provinces" and
"bourgeois."

Nevertheless, this capital of all possible civilizations does not
hesitate to admit that it must by all means do all in its power to
attract the wealthy tourist of other nations, on whom its prosperity is
so largely dependent, especially since it has no longer the attractions
of a royal or imperial court to offer. No presentation of the city of
Paris at the present day would be complete without documents giving the
opinions of its own cultured and intelligent classes on its general
characteristics and its most urgent needs. With regard to this question
of dependence upon strangers, endless quotations might be cited, and two
or three may well be printed here as more valuable contributions to this
contemporary history than any speculations by mere foreigners. The
_Revue Encyclopédique_, published weekly by the great house of Larousse,
has a column which it devotes to _ideas of general interest_,
underscored, and in this column appeared, in the issue of January 23,
1897, the following communication: "For some time past the Avenue de
L'Opéra, at Paris, has been lighted by electricity by means of
incandescent lamps placed along the central axis of this great
thoroughfare. This very handsome illumination serves only to accentuate
more strongly the monotonous melancholy of the double row of commercial
establishments the fronts of which are invariably closed at eight
o'clock in the evening.... And sorrowful reflections are awakened of the
brilliant evenings of thirty years ago, the movement of foreigners along
the boulevards, the crowd of promenaders constantly changing before the
dazzling show-windows of the end of the Second Empire. Why is not some
effort made to revive this brilliant past by creating attractions
capable of arousing the curiosity of the Parisians and, above all, of
the foreigners? Could not some arrangement be made among all the
shop-keepers of the grand boulevards and of the principal adjacent
streets (Rue de la Paix, Rue Royale, Avenue de l'Opéra, etc.), that one
evening a week be devoted to the exceptional adornment of their
establishments?" And the writer goes on to suggest, with Parisian
ingenuity, that a jury of artists might even be constituted to decide
which display was the most brilliant and the most worthy, and to award
suitable recompense. "By this means it is probable that the street and
the boulevard would resume their former animation, to the great profit
of the trade in articles of luxury, so profoundly affected by the
desertion of the foreigners."

In the year of grace, 1898, the Parisian world was greatly agitated by
the fact that the Grand Prix de Paris was run at Longchamps on the 5th
of June, and that, consequently, the Parisian season was brought to an
ending most unreasonably early. These complaints were so insistent that
they found voice in the Municipal Council and were brought before the
Prefect of the Seine. It was contended that the treaty between the city
and the _Société d'encouragement_ of improvement of the equine breed,
its lessee at Longchamps, had been violated, inasmuch as the great event
had taken place before the middle of June. But the _Société
d'encouragement_ proved conclusively, by the terms of its lease from the
city, that the date and the regulations of the race were left to its own
judgment, and that, in point of fact, it had always taken place before
the 15th of June. "But that which it is above all important to observe
is, that the date of the Grand Prix is determined, not according to the
whim of the _Société d'encouragement_, but indeed by that of the English
Derby, which regulates also that of the French Derby. It is necessary,
in fact, that the same horses should take part in the three trials. The
English, having set the date of their Derby this year on the 26th of
May, the French Derby, which precedes it, had to be run on the 22d of
May, and the Grand Prix de Paris, which occurs regularly ten days after
the English Derby, could only be run on Sunday, the 5th of June. It is
impossible, moreover, in any way to postpone this date, for the reason
that the horses cannot be maintained in racing condition for any longer
period of time."

Notwithstanding this conclusive reasoning, _Le Temps_, one of the most
eminent and dignified journals of the capital, devoted a long article in
its largest type, two days afterward, to the duty of the _Conseil
municipal_ in the matter. "This date is not, in fact, a matter of
indifference to the interests of the city. It is, or it is considered to
be, the moment selected for a general exodus of foreigners and even of
Parisians in comfortable circumstances toward the seaside and other
rural resorts. The shop-keepers therefore consider that they have cause
for complaint if this moment arrive too early. The municipal councillors
who have constituted themselves the spokesmen of their griefs have
demanded and obtained a vote on a resolution having for its object the
designation of the third Sunday in June, at the earliest, as the date of
this equine solemnity.

[Illustration: TWO DAYS BEFORE SAINT BARTHOLOMEW'S.

Facsimile of a German copperplate engraving of the period.

LITERAL TRANSLATION OF THE LEGEND.

    _Here is to be seen what is set forth_
    _To lose their lives, young and old,_
    _At a wedding in Paris._
    _So that to judgment shall be sure,_
    _There were killed the Admiral_
    _With his nobles altogether._

    _So, together with the servants, it is thought_
    _That three thousand were destroyed._
    _The King of Navarre, also Conde,_
    _Is taken likewise of nobles more._
    _The Huguenots, man, woman, child,_
    _Were rapidly disposed of._

    _Of whom the total number was found to be five thousand._

    _On the 22d day of August, in the year 1572._
]

"Whether this date may or may not be adopted, it seems to us that the
interest which it awakens is entitled to unqualified commendation. The
Municipal Council in no way goes outside of its proper sphere; on the
contrary, it is well within it, when it concerns itself with the general
interests of the city of Paris, when it seeks for means of retaining in
it and attracting to it the largest possible number of foreigners and of
very wealthy individuals whose presence and whose habits have for result
the circulation of a great deal of money and the constant vivifying of
the Parisian industries, which are, for the greater part, the
industries of luxury. The Municipal Council understands perfectly that
this question of the sojourn of strangers amongst us is in the highest
degree an economical question which concerns the labor and the wages of
the Parisian workmen, as it does also the general prosperity of the
finances of the city. Therefore, far from criticising it for
deliberating upon this question and others of a similar nature, we
should rather regret that it has not turned its attention upon them with
more constancy and consecutiveness.

"It is not, in fact, a simple matter of detail like that which has
occupied the Municipal Council, which can ameliorate or even guarantee
the situation of Paris in so far as it is a rendezvous or a residence
for foreigners. These will not continue to come here and to remain here
unless their sojourn is made agreeable and peaceful for them. This is
something which should be considered, and it is a question which is
closely connected with the general functions of our ædiles. It is not to
be imagined that with a few indirect measures this foreign colony, so
essentially susceptible and flitting by nature, can be constrained to
remain among us and expend its money against its own will. These are not
birds that can be put in a cage, and, above all, retained there. Even
those whose passion for the races is well developed will easily find a
method of being present at the Grand Prix without domiciling themselves
among us. They will only pass through; we shall see them no more. The
essential point is, therefore, to watch with the utmost care, every day,
that Paris shall never lose in their eyes its prestige and its
attractions. From this will ensue, if we wish to deduce from it,
practical regulations for the administration of the great city."

And the editor goes on to regret that the municipal authorities, so far
from occupying themselves exclusively with these details of public
hygiene, street lighting, facility of transport, etc., should so
frequently expend themselves upon "violent discussions of _politique
pure_." "Is it not true that in what concerns the general progress of
urban life, whether it be the question of transportation, or that of
gas, or that of electricity, we are behind, and very greatly behind,
the condition which has been attained in London, in New York, in Berlin,
and even in Geneva and in some of our cities of the provinces?" These
reflections appeared to be especially opportune on the evening of the
election which was to replace in the Municipal Council those members who
were about to leave it for the Chamber of Deputies. "The electors who
are interested in the aspect under which the city will present itself to
foreigners in 1900, at the moment of the Exposition Universelle, will
not allow to escape this opportunity of manifesting their sentiments
upon this subject.... All those who labor to augment its prosperity
accomplish much more--be it known--for the amelioration of the condition
of the work-people than the dreamers of national confiscations and of
obligatory collectivism, and their efforts, if they are in the majority,
will be otherwise efficacious in retaining the foreigners than by the
moving forward some fifteen days of the date of the Grand Prix. Although
it is not to be despised, a season of fifteen days' duration is, taking
it altogether, but a slight gain. The foreigners flock hither the whole
year round, and it is the whole year round that it is necessary to make
them find it safe and agreeable to visit here, visits to which they are
inclined and from which the entire city derives such great benefits."

[Illustration: CHATELAINE; END OF SIXTEENTH CENTURY.

From a drawing by Adrien Moreau.]

This exposition may be considered as an authentic, contemporary
document, and, as has been premised, these opinions are coeval and
coterminous with an admirable civic self-satisfaction. It is perhaps
scarcely necessary to stipulate that in these general observations it is
the frame of mind and the mode of speech of what are known everywhere as
the upper classes, the more intelligent and refined, which are taken
into account,--the Parisian workman, day-laborer, and semi-criminal,
though they figure very largely in the results of the general elections
(worse luck!), do not necessarily appear in the discussion of these
questions of high importance. It may be remembered that, at the period
of this much-discussed Grand Prix, there was much contradictory
testimony as to the existence of a general feeling of hostility toward
America and the Americans among the French because of the Spanish war.
Many depositions were made on both sides, but there was a general
consensus of opinion among the heads of the larger Parisian commercial
and manufacturing establishments as to that of their work-people. "Their
political views and manner of looking at things have no other horizon
than that of the newspaper they are in the habit of reading," said one
chief of an important house, "they take no notice of the effect which
such crises may have upon their work." "We believe them to be absolutely
indifferent," said another; "I can assure you that the workmen take not
the slightest interest in this question, and they probably would not
understand it if it were put to them," testified a third. "As to the
working-class," said a merchant in the Rue de Rivoli, "they occupy
themselves with their own affairs, and nothing beyond. Apart from the
social question, all they want is to earn as much money as possible, and
do the least work possible for it." One of these sons of toil
corroborated these statements very frankly. "I can assure you," said he,
"that neither my comrades nor myself side with one or the other. I
assure you that it matters nothing to us. We have something better to do
than to gossip about the war."

Much the same conditions have obtained in the formation and development
of this superior intellectual and aristocratic Parisian society as in
that of other civilized nations. We are all more or less familiar with
the general demonstrations by which the historians demonstrate the
development of the wealthy classes, by the aid and support of which
alone the letters and the arts arise and flourish. In the earliest
stages of society, the struggle for life absorbs all possible energy; a
little comfort and security, and consequent leisure, bring in the arts.
The half-starved hunting-dog follows the game steadily, stealthily,
without a superfluous sign or motion; _after_ the chase, and the
subsequent feast and the subsequent luxurious slumber, he awakes to
indulge in unpractical gambols and barkings around his master,--it is
the dance; Art is invented! The three superior social classes, the king,
the clergy, and the nobles, which were definitely established in France
at the outbreak of the Revolution, were the legitimate development of
the feudal system, and had, apparently, legitimately conquered their
position. They had been the protectors of the people even before the
Carlovingian epoch, and when the people finally arose and overturned
them, it was only because they had completely forgotten their high
mission through a long course of years.

To Stendhal's observation, that, in the tenth century, a man considered
himself lucky if he were not killed, and had a good leathern jacket for
winter, Taine adds, and a woman, if she were not violated by a whole
band of ruffians. In those truly Dark Ages the peasant accepted quite
willingly the hardest feudal obligations as a harbor of refuge from the
ills that menaced him on every side. The sixth and seventh centuries of
our era are considered to have been among the worst that the world has
seen; it was declared that it was not with water, but with His tears,
that God moistened the earth out of which He made man. After the fall of
the Romans, it was the Church alone that saved human society from "a
Mongol anarchy;" in the last years of the Empire, the cities, illy
defended by their natural protectors, gave to their bishops, with the
title of _defensor civitatis_, the principal municipal authority. The
Church alone retained any influence over the conquering barbarian;
before the shaven monk or the mitred abbot, the wolfish and ignorant
chief, long-haired, filthy, and half-clad in furs, hesitated, listened
to his words in the council, stooped before his altars,--"like Saint
Lupicin before the Burgonde king Chilpéric, Saint Karileff before the
king Childebert." In his moments of repose, after the chase, or the
battle, or the feast, the menaces of the prelate began to stir in his
guilty soul,--aided, perhaps, by the reproaches or the advice of his
wife or his concubine; he hesitated to violate the sanctuary lest he
should fall dead with a broken neck on the threshold; if he had been
carried away by his passions, and committed murder or robbery, he
repented and made reparation, sometimes a hundred-fold. The cloister
offered a refuge to those who fled aghast from the world and sought
meditation and solitude; the abbey was not only an asylum, but a haunt
of learning and practical industry, a seat of instruction for the
farmer, the workman, the student. "Thus the most evil centuries of the
Middle Ages," says Duruy, "were acquainted with virtues of which the
finest ages of paganism were ignorant; and thus, thanks to a few souls
of the elect, animated by the pure spirit of Christianity, humanity was
arrested on the edge of the abyss in which it seemed about to
precipitate itself."

Nevertheless, this historian admits that Christianity, which had not
modified the manners of Roman society, was itself an element in the
dissolution of the Empire, and that the Church itself acquired some of
the rudeness of the barbarians with which it came into such intimate
contact. "Germans and Franks aspired to the honor of the episcopate, and
carried into the basilicas customs and manners which were strange there.
The great intellectual movement which had formerly animated religious
society slackened, then ceased; the shadows descended upon the Church
itself."

[Illustration: CAROCHE, COVERED WITH LEATHER, STUDDED WITH GOLD-HEADED
NAILS, PERCHERONS; PERIOD, END OF SIXTEENTH CENTURY.

From a drawing by Adrien Moreau.]

After Charlemagne's short-lived empire, the universal dissolution set in
again. Against the bands of brigands, four or five hundred strong each,
that traversed the country, any defender was welcome, and a second
upholder of society arose,--the stout warrior, skilled in arms, who
gathered retainers around him, secured a hold or a castle, and offered
protection in return for service rendered. His title or his lineage
mattered but little in the tenth century, his defence was much too
welcome for any carping about his arms or his ancestry,--he was an
ancestor himself. The original source of many noble houses is more than
doubtful,--Tertulle, the founder of the Plantagenets; Rollo, Duke of
Normandy; the ancestors of Robert le Fort; the Capétiens were said to
have been descended from a butcher of Paris. "'In these times,'" says
Taine, quoting the Spanish chronicle, "'the kings, counts, nobles, and
all the knights, in order to be ready at any moment, kept their horses
in the hall in which they slept with their wives.' The viscount in the
tower which defends the entrance to the valley, or the passage of the
ford, the marquis thrown as a forlorn hope on the devastated frontier,
sleeps on his arms, like the American lieutenant in a blockhouse in the
far West, among the Sioux. His house is only a camp and a refuge; some
straw and a pile of leaves are thrown on the pavement of the great hall;
it is there that he sleeps with his horsemen, unbuckling a spur when he
has a chance for repose; the loopholes scarcely allow the day-light to
enter,--it is important, above all, that the arrows do not. All
inclinations, all sentiments, are subordinated to the service; there are
posts on the European frontier where the boy of fourteen is called upon
to march, and where the widow, up to sixty years of age, is compelled to
marry again. Men in the ranks, to fill up the vacancies, men at the
posts, to mount guard,--this is the cry that issues at this moment from
all human institutions, like the call of a voice of bronze." Thanks to
these stout defenders, some form of society is again made possible.

A later historian, M. Flach, in his _Origines de l'ancienne France_,
finds the germ from which sprang the whole feudal system in this
_patronage_, the system of defence of the serf and vassal by the landed
proprietor. In the great disorganization of the Roman Empire, a portion
of the public authority passed into the hands of individuals; when the
Frankish kings invaded Gaul, they found there a system of patronage
similar to their own. These great proprietors were maintained under the
first Merovingian kings, who kept them in due subjection; but as this
regulation gradually weakened under the growing power of the land-owner,
the private individual found himself ground between these two
millstones. A private patron then became his only defence, and thus was
hastened the strictly feudal system. With regard to the royal function,
which crowned this feudal system, the historian cites two quotations in
support of his thesis: "Under Louis d'Outre-mer, the legate of the Pope,
Marin, defined the royal authority,--he called it patronage
[_patrocinium_]. Forty years later the decisive argument of the
Archbishop of Reims, Adalbéron, in sustaining the claims of Hugues Capet
to the throne, was: 'You will have in him a father. No one, up to the
present time, has invoked in vain his patronage [_patrocinium_].'"

Quite apart from these valid, historical reasons, the British "love of a
lord" is by no means confined to Great Britain. The Parisians, also,
have a certain fondness for titles and distinctions of all sorts. For
the English aristocracy they profess a genuine admiration, as affording
the best example of the success of a certain _élite_ in affecting the
social conscience. They quote approvingly John Bright when he admits
that his folk--trades-people and commoners--are quite willing to have
their public affairs managed by a superior class, specially trained,
enjoying an independent and commanding social station. Their titles and
their pride of ancestry give them robes and plumes, and a troop follows
its officers more readily when they are gorgeously uniformed. Only, it
is required that this privilege shall not be abused; no favor to
mediocrities, no nepotism. Victor Hugo was more proud of his title of
_vicomte Hugo_ than of his greatest work, and Balzac's obstinacy in
clinging to his particle of _de_ has lately been shown to have been
completely unfounded. To Sainte-Beuve, who infuriated him by constantly
speaking of him as _M. Honoré Balzac_, he wrote: "My name is on my
register of birth, as M. Fitz-James's is on his." So it is, but without
any _de_. In 1836, at the period of the legal process to which one of
his works, _Le Lys dans la vallée_, gave rise, he wrote: "If my name is
that of an _old Gaulish family_, it is not my fault; but my name, De
Balzac, is my name patronymic, an advantage which is not enjoyed by many
aristocratic families who called themselves Odet before they called
themselves Châtillon, Riquet before Caraman, Duplessis before Richelieu,
and which are none the less great families.... If my name resounds well
in some ears, if it is envied by some who are not content with their
own, I cannot therefore renounce it.... My father ... found in the
_Trésor des Chartres_ the concession of land made in the fifth century
by the De Balzacs to establish a monastery in the environs of the little
town of Balzac (department of La Charente), a copy of which, he told me,
was, by their action, enregistered by the Parliament of Paris." It
appears that there are existing no Merovingian records of any kind
dating earlier than the seventh century; and a keeper of archives, M.
Ch. Portal, in the department of Tarn, in which the death of the great
novelist's father, "Bernard-François Balzac, born at Nougaïris," is
recorded, having looked the matter up, discovered that his ancestors
were simple country-people, laborers, who had never dreamed of a _de_
before their name, which, in fact, was really Balssa or Balsa!

The French have no word in their language which exactly translates
"snob," so they adopt with enthusiasm the English syllable
(mispronouncing it fearfully); and this curious weakness in so great a
writer and so keen a student of humanity would be even more remarkable
if it were not so very common among other civilized people. M. Jules
Lemaître, a couple of years ago, read before the five Academies of the
Institute a careful study of this particular social class; there were
said to be a crowd of amateur playwrights besieging the managers with
plays with this title, and the pretentious claimer of things that are
not his in the great world, "the great nephew of Mascarille in the
_Précieuses ridicules_," was honored with more analysis, comment, and
reconstruction than he was probably entitled to.

[Illustration: ASSASSINATION OF HENRY IV, RUE DE LA FERRONNERIE, MAY 14,
1610. From a drawing by L. Marold.]

In addition to the three great classes that have ruled over France, and
which, with the commons or serfs, have been known to almost every
European nation, a third class, the _tiers état_, still in process of
formation elsewhere on the Continent, but which arose in Paris and other
great cities in the thirteenth century, is claimed by the historians of
this nation as peculiarly French.

Previous to Pepin and Charlemagne, Paris was generally recognized as the
capital, though the wandering and barbaric Frankish kings much preferred
as places of residence their great country-houses or _villas_, when they
were neither hunting nor fighting. The court of Charlemagne, in the
later years of his reign, was held at Aix-la-Chapelle, his favorite
abode. In 775 he was present at the dedication of the new church of
Saint-Denis, and the Parisians are said to have made a _fête_ of the
occasion. Louis le Débonnaire, his son, more monk than king, also
neglected the city, excepting in the matter of founding churches and
increasing the privileges of the clergy. But under the last of the
Carlovingian emperors, Charles le Gros, the capital redeemed its right
to that title by its gallant defence against the Northmen, or Normans,
and its valiant count, Eudes, having brought the sluggish emperor to the
heights of Montmartre only to see him conclude an unworthy peace with
the invaders, founded himself the first national dynasty when his fat
suzerain was deposed in the following year. "One of the greatest figures
of the Carlovingian decadence," says M. Faure, in a recent monograph,
"he continued the monarchy of Charlemagne without changing anything in
the institutions, and he gave a precise form to a power that before him
was still undecided, that of duke of the Franks."

The royal authority waxed and waned, the turbulent nobles exhausted
themselves in war, in struggles amongst themselves and against the king,
but the wealth and power of the Church steadily increased. Occasionally
only, when its interference was too flagrantly unjust, its authority was
defied. The first Capétiens, like the first Carlovingians, whether from
motives of self-interest or sincere faith, were its faithful allies.
Hugues Capet liked better to wear his cope as Abbot of Saint-Martin de
Tours than his crown, and he restored to the Church several abbeys which
he possessed. His son, Robert the Pious, was almost a saint, and the
princes of this dynasty, on the whole, merited the title which Rome gave
them, of "eldest sons of the Church." Their piety was not altogether
without reward: the bishops of the Ile-de-France and the abbots, chiefs
of the abbeys founded by royal grace, brought more than once not only
earthly weapons but a spiritual one, that of excommunication, to the
defence of the sovereign.

Robert's first care, after his accession to the throne in 996, was to
rebuild the church of Saint-Germain l'Auxerrois and the monastery of
Saint-Germain-des-Près, which had been destroyed by the Northmen. He
also erected in his palace a chapel dedicated to Saint Nicolas, which,
in 1154, entirely restored, became the Sainte-Chapelle. He washed the
feet of the poor, he fed, it is said, sometimes a thousand of them a
day; nothing was too sacred for them, neither the silver ornaments of
his lance nor the gold fringe of his robe. He was constant in his
attendance on the church services, he composed hymns, himself, which
were long retained. Nevertheless, having espoused his cousin Berthe, he
found himself excommunicated by the Pope, Gregory V. Among the earliest
works of the painter Jean-Paul Laurens, long in the Luxembourg, is a
graphic presentation of this unhappy couple, clinging to each other in
the poor, bare splendor of the very early mediæval throne-room, the
overturned great tapers of the excommunication service on the floor
before them, the smoke rising like anathema, and the last of the
implacable ministers of the Church departing through the open doorway.
Every one deserted them, as though plague-stricken; only two poor
domestics remained to serve them, and they purified by fire every vessel
from which the unhappy monarch had taken food or drink. But Berthe was
_enceinte_, and the king loved her, and so clung to her and would not
obey. One morning as he went to pray, according to his custom, at the
door of the church of Saint-Barthélemy, into which he was forbidden to
enter, Abbon, Abbé de Fleury, followed by two women of the palace,
carrying a great silver-gilt plate covered with a linen cloth,
approached him, and announced that Berthe had been delivered. Then he
uncovered the plate:

"See!" he exclaimed, "the effects of your disobedience to the decrees of
the Church, and the seal of anathema on the fruit of your guilty love!"

And Robert recoiled in horror before a little monster with the head and
neck of a duck! (_Canard_, it may be noted, in French, signifies both a
duck and a highly improbable story.)

So the poor queen was repudiated, and Robert married Constance, daughter
of the Comte de Toulouse, who made his life a burden to him. He hid
himself from her to say his prayers, and feared her so much that he did
not hesitate to deny his charities and good deeds to her,--though he had
such a horror of falsehood, that he had made a casket of crystal,
mounted with gold, but in which he was careful not to put any holy
relic, so that those who took their oaths on it before him might not
perjure themselves.

His son Henri I, who succeeded him, married a daughter of the Grand Duke
of Russia, in order that he might be certain of not taking a wife within
the degrees of consanguinity prohibited by the Church. This princess,
Anne, claimed to descend through her mother, daughter of the Emperor
Romanus II, from Philip of Macedon.

The queen Constance brought with her from the Midi some of those
troubadours whose romantic airs and graceful verses were so appreciated
in the little courts of the south of France and, later, in the gloomy
castles of the nobles of the north. Great was the prevalence of ennui in
these fortresses, in which there was but little sunshine and a great
dearth of all other refining and civilizing influences. It was
impossible to be engaged in warfare or the chase all the time, and the
wandering pilgrim, with his tales from afar, or, still more, the
wandering minstrel, _trouvère_, as he was called in the north of France,
was a welcome relief to the deadly monotony of the days of peace.
"Seated at the hearth of the seigneur, he sang, during long evenings,
the tragic adventures of the Dame de Fayel and of the Sire de Coucy, or
the marvellous exploits of the Knights of the Round Table, of Renaud,
and of Roland, of Charlemagne and his Twelve Peers; unless, indeed, his
audience, in a livelier mood, demanded of him some sarcastic _fabliau_,
or the fine tricks played upon Master Isengrin by his shrewd gossip,
Master Renard."

[Illustration: Louis XIV, FOR THE FIRST TIME, RECEIVING HIS MINISTERS.
From a drawing by L. Marold.]

But these Aquitains in the train of Queen Constance, when they first
appeared in the court of the good Robert, were singularly offensive to
the Parisians by their elegance, their luxurious habits, and their
light manners. "As soon as Constance appeared at the court," says Raoul
Glaber, "you could have seen France inundated by a species of folk the
most vain and the most frivolous of all possible men. Their fashion of
living, their garments, their armor, the harness of their horses, were
all equally fantastic. Their hair descended scarcely as low as the
middle of the head [the northern French still retained the long flowing
locks in the German fashion]: true theatricals, in whom the shaved chin,
the small-clothes, the ridiculous boots, ending in a curved beak, and
the whole outward appearance badly arranged, betrayed the disorder of
their minds. Men without faith, without law, without shame, whose
contagious example will corrupt the French nation, formerly so decent,
and precipitate it into all kinds of debauchery and wickedness."

Notwithstanding Robert's piety, his reign was signalized by a cruel
persecution of the Jews, in revenge for the destruction of the church of
the Holy Sepulchre at Jerusalem by the Fatimite caliph of Egypt, and by
the first execution of heretics in France. Throughout the whole of the
Middle Ages, the Jews, forbidden to hold any landed property, were
constantly persecuted, plundered, and outraged, banished only to be
called back again at the price of further exactions. The first thirteen
heretics were burned at Orléans in 1022; one of them had been the
confessor of Queen Constance, and as he passed her on his way to the
stake, she put out one of his eyes with a long rod she held in her hand.
Nevertheless, the historian Duruy considers that this certain mental
movement, these deviations of the human intelligence from the beaten
track, demonstrated that the period in which all thought seemed dead had
passed, and that the first Renaissance began in this (eleventh)
century.

A more recent writer distinguishes this century also by "that revolution
in feudal France," the development of the commune. The great social fact
was the disappearance of the three classes, serfs, semi-freemen, and
free men (_libres_), which had existed since the ninth century, and
their unity under subjection to the seigneur. This domination of the
seigneur, at first justified by the protection afforded, lost its
authority when it began to consult only its self-interest, and, toward
the close of the century, stirred up revolts which led to the
establishment of all kinds of popular associations, guilds,
confraternities, charities, communities, etc.

The only church erected in Paris during the thirty years' reign of Henri
I was that of Sainte-Marine, founded about 1036, and whose patron,
according to the story, was a young virgin named Marine, who conceived a
strong desire to be a monk. So she disguised herself as a man, and
became Brother Marin in a convent. One of her duties was to go to the
city for provisions, with an ox-cart, and on her journeys she frequently
passed the night in the house of the Seigneur de Pandoche, whose
daughter was found to be with child. To screen her lover, a soldier, she
laid the blame on Brother Marin, and he was accordingly driven from his
monastery. However, he took the child, which was sent him, nourished it,
and the monks, touched by his meekness, finally received him back in
their fold. Not till his death was his secret discovered, when he was
interred with great religious pomp and canonized under his true name.
Consequently, in the church of Sainte-Marine were celebrated all the
forced marriages of couples found living together without the sanction
of law, the public authorities compelling them to appear before the curé
of Sainte-Marine, who wedded them with a ring of straw, slipped on the
bride's finger.

[Illustration: BATH-ROOM OF A LADY OF QUALITY, SOFA OF SILVER;
SEVENTEENTH CENTURY.

After an engraving by Saint-Jean.]

Henri's son, Philippe I, contrived, like his grandfather, to get himself
excommunicated because of his marriage, but for the space of ten years
he seems to have concerned himself but little about the wrath of the
Church. He had repudiated his wife, Berthe, and taken Bertrade, whom he
had carried off from her husband, Foulque, Comte d'Angers. Finally,
wearied of her, he presented himself as a penitent, barefooted, before
the council of 1104, Bertrade doing the same; they protested their
horror of their past conduct, their resolve to sin no more, and were
accordingly absolved. It was this monarch who, by his unseemly jest
concerning William the Conqueror, of whom he was both jealous and
afraid, nearly brought down upon the Parisians again another Norman.
"When is that fat man going to be delivered?" inquired Philippe, with
the delicate humor of the Middle Ages. To which the Conqueror replied
that he was coming to Paris for his "churching," with ten thousand
lances instead of tapers. And, as was his fashion, he started to keep
his word: his advance guard was burning villages up to the gates of
Paris, when, according to the story, his horse stepped on some hot
cinders at Mantes and in his sudden recoil so injured the monarch that
he died soon after at Rouen.

The great national assemblies which Charlemagne had so often consulted,
and even those convocations of the great lords and bishops which had
been so frequent in the tenth century, fell into disuse under the
Capétiens, in consequence of the rise of the feudal power and the
decline of the royal authority. The king, by his constant donations to
his _leudes_ or great vassals, had, in course of time, very nearly
stripped himself of domains, and these _bénéfices_ were retained by the
lords and made hereditary in their own families. It was the same with
the public charges and the titles of dukes, counts, etc., which carried
with them an authority delegated by the prince, and which ended by
passing entirely out of his hands. Charlemagne had been able to check
the greed and ambition of the feudal lords, but his feebler successors
were unable to do so. Even the right of coining money was claimed by the
great seigneurs, and in this century there were no less than a hundred
and fifty in France who exercised this privilege. Most of them refused
to receive any coinage but their own, and the confusion and difficulty
in conducting trade may be imagined. The nobles, solicitous to increase
their power, founded new towns and took them under their protection,
granting certain privileges to the inhabitants, even that of holding
land, and under the cover of these privileges, as under those of the
communes, the _tiers état_, or third estate, was gradually formed.
Similar grants were made to some of the ancient cities, including Paris
and Orléans, which seemed to have received all their franchises from the
Middle Ages and from the kings, excepting, in Paris, the corporation of
the Nantes, already referred to, whose privileges were confirmed by
Louis VII.

This monarch, father of Philippe-Auguste, fixed the number of peers of
France, the great seigneurs who held directly from the crown, at
twelve,--six laic and six ecclesiastical. The first were the dukes of
Burgundy, Normandy, and Guyenne, the counts of Champagne, Flanders, and
Toulouse, and, to counterbalance these puissant lords, six
ecclesiastics, all the more attached to the king that they were without
landed property and consequently without much temporal power, the
Archbishop of Reims and the bishops of Laon, Noyon, Châlons, Beauvais,
and Langres. The Court of Peers was, however, not regularly organized
before the beginning of the thirteenth century. Notwithstanding the
weakness of the royal authority, it still retained elements of strength
and superiority which time eventually developed. The king was nominal
head of the whole feudal society, he was the chief suzerain, and all the
great lords were his vassals and owed him homage. He was the supreme
justice of the nation, and the vassals all were bound to appear before
the "Court of the King." This court was not only a great council, but
also a court of justice; the great vassals had the right to demand a
trial by their equals, or peers, and in this case the court became the
Court of Peers. The fief, held from the suzerain, could not be
diminished or impaired in any way--just as the modern tenant has no
right to damage his landlord's property; at the death of the vassal, the
suzerain inherited, and in case he left infant children, the suzerain
was the guardian.

Two incidents recorded by the chroniclers of the reign of that very
capable monarch, Louis VI, called le Gros, or the Fat, will serve to
illustrate the manners and customs of the times from two points of view.
A short time before the marriage of the king with Adélaïde de Savoie, he
had, in the exercise of his royal authority, demolished part of a house,
the property of the Canon Duranci, in the Rue des Marmousets, because it
projected too far out into the street and obstructed the circulation.
But the chapter of Notre-Dame protested in the name of its privileges
and of its immunities; the king admitted his error, and agreed to pay an
indemnity of a denier of gold; the chapter insisted that this should be
done on the day of his marriage, before he could be permitted to receive
the nuptial benediction, and the crowned culprit was obliged to consent
that a formal record of the affair should be placed on the registers of
the chapter. It was recognized that he had no right to demolish any
house, except for the purpose of erecting a church on the site: this,
although the narrowness and crookedness of the streets, as well as
their foul and miasmatic condition owing to the lack of all paving and
sewerage, were the constant sources of epidemics.

On the 13th of October, 1131, the king was riding with his son on the
hillock of Saint-Gervais (to-day the site of the Mairie of the IVth
Arrondissement, on the Rue de Rivoli, a little beyond the Hôtel de
Ville), when a wandering pig ran between the legs of the young man's
horse, causing him to bolt and throw his rider, who was so badly injured
that he died in a few hours. This led to the promulgation of a royal
ordinance forbidding the proprietors of swine in the city to allow them
to run at large, under penalty of confiscation for the benefit of the
executioner of Paris. This regulation was several times renewed,--in
1261 under Saint Louis, in 1331 under Philippe VI, and in 1369 under
Charles V, and extended to the faubourgs of Paris and the surrounding
districts. The decree of 1331 gave the sergeants of the city authority
to kill all those which they found wandering at liberty, to keep the
head for themselves provided they transported the body to the
Hôtel-Dieu. The pigs of the abbey of Saint-Antoine alone were exempted
from this regulation, and, that they might be recognized, they bore a
bell marked with a cross.

Louis le Gros, already occupied with measures to repress the growing
power of the great nobles, commenced the fortifications of Paris, which
were not completed until during the reign of his son, with a view of
guarding his capital against any sudden attack. It is recorded that he
adopted the habit of the great Caliph of the _Arabian Nights_, of
traversing the streets at night in disguise and mingling familiarly with
the people,--but with the design of drawing from them their complaints
against their feudal lords and their knowledge of their machinations.
They were not without their grievances against the king himself, and it
was not till the reign of his son that was abolished the right of the
royal officers, when the king came to Paris, to enter the houses of the
bourgeoisie and carry off for their own use the bedding and the downy
pillows they found therein.

During the long reign of Philippe-Auguste, which even the modern
historians call "glorious," the power of the nobles was seriously
impaired. The _Cour du Roi_ retained the organization it had received,
but its importance increased with that of the royal authority, and the
most powerful vassal of the king of France saw himself dispossessed of
his fiefs by its decree. The feudal power was attacked in one of its
most cherished rights, that of private warfare, by a royal ordinance
compelling the observance of a truce of forty days after any injury, so
that no one might be assailed without warning. Any seigneur might be at
once vassal and suzerain, but when Philippe acquired the fief of the
Amiénois, for which he was to render homage to the Bishop of Amiens, he
refused, saying that the king of France should be the vassal of no man.
"To the feudal contract, between man and man, symbolized by the homage
and the investiture, the thirteenth century saw succeed the democratic
contract between a man and a group, between seigneurs and subjects,
carrying an engagement written and public. Then began the conquest of
liberty,--liberty of the person, of the family, and of the property;
liberty administrative and political; economic liberty.... Of the total
sum of partial contracts intervening between the king and the provinces,
cities and corporations, has been formed the great national contract
tacitly concluded between him and the people." (M. Imbart de la Tour.)

Notwithstanding war, famine, and pestilence, Paris had outgrown the
fortifications of Louis le Gros, and, before he departed for the
Crusade, Philippe-Auguste ordered the bourgeois of the city to construct
a new wall, solidly built of stone, with towers and gates. This was
commenced in 1190; the faubourgs were surrounded with a wall of more
than two mètres in thickness, faced with masonry, flanked by five
hundred towers and pierced with fifteen gates. Its course can be traced
on any good map of modern Paris, and the size of the mediæval city thus
compared with that of the present one. On the right bank of the river it
began with a tower that was called "the tower which makes the corner,"
and which stood near the northern end of the present Pont des
Saints-Pères. Thence it passed to the Porte-Saint-Honoré, near the
present Oratoire and the statue of Coligny on the Rue de Rivoli, which
was defended by two towers, struck northerly to the site of the present
square formed by the intersection of the Rues Jean-Jacques-Rousseau and
Coquillière, just north of the Bourse, where was a gate called Bahaigne.
Here it turned eastward, cut off the commencements of the Rues
Montmartre and Montorgueil, traversed also the Rue Française, and,
following the direction of the little Rue Mauconseil, arrived at the Rue
Saint-Denis, where was another gate called Porte-Saint-Denis, or Porte
aux Peintres. Continuing in this direction, it traversed the Boulevard
Sébastopol and the Rue Saint-Martin, enclosing the Rue aux Ours,
followed the Rues Grenier-Saint-Lazare and Michel-le-Comte, traversed
the Rue du Temple, and came to a tower erected nearly on the site of the
Mont-de-Piété of to-day, between the Rues des Francs-Bourgeois and des
Blancs-Manteaux, opposite to the Palais des Archives. Remains of this
tower were discovered in 1878, in demolishing some old houses to make
way for the enlargement of the Mont-de-Piété; it served to enclose a
circular staircase. The wall continued to follow the Rue
Francs-Bourgeois to another gate, the Porte Barbette, at the
intersection of the Rue Vieille-du-Temple with the Rue des Rosiers;
then, beginning to trend south, it followed nearly the Rue Malher to the
Place Birague, not far from where the Rue de Rivoli becomes the Rue
Saint-Antoine. Here was another gate, the Porte Baudet or Baudoyer.
Thence the line of fortification, crossing the locality of the present
church Saint-Paul-Saint-Louis, descended to the river in the direction
of the Rue des Barres, and ended on the quai, at the Porte
Barbel-sur-l'Yeau. Vestiges of this tower were also found in 1878.

On the south side of the river the wall was not commenced till 1208,
when that on the northern side was completely terminated. Instead of
making a close junction with that on the other shore, it took its start
somewhat to the eastward of the "corner tower," at the famous Tour de
Nesle, on the locality now occupied by the right wing of the
Bibliothèque Mazarine and the Hôtel des Monnaies. It crossed the Rue
Dauphine and halted on the Rue Saint-André-des-Arts at the Porte Buci;
crossed the Boulevard Saint-Germain, where was another gate, the Porte
des Cordeliers, afterward Porte Saint-Germain; descended the Rue
Monsieur-le-Prince to the Boulevard Saint-Michel, where was the Porte de
Fert or d'Enfer, which became the Porte Saint-Michel under Charles VI.
From this gateway the wall continued southeasterly to that of
Notre-Dame-des-Champs, between the Rue Soufflot and the Rue des
Fossés-Saint-Jacques, just south of it, enclosed the Place du Panthéon,
crossed the Rue Descartes at the Porte Bordet or Bordel, crossed the Rue
Clovis, and traversed the locality at present occupied by the buildings
of the École Polytechnique. Continuing in a northerly direction, it
reached the Porte Saint-Victor near the present junction of the Rue
Saint-Victor and the Rue des Écoles, and finally arrived at the Quai de
la Tournelle by following a direction parallel to that of the Rue des
Fossés-Saint-Bernard.

It was to Philippe-Auguste also that the city of Paris was indebted for
its first paved streets. In 1185, five years before the wall of
fortification was begun, he was in one of the great halls of his palace
in the Cité, and approached a window whence he was in the habit of
watching the traffic on the Seine. Some heavy wagons or carts were being
drawn through the streets at the time, says the historian Rigord, and
such an insupportable odor was stirred up from the mud and filth that
the king was obliged to leave the window, and was even pursued by it
into his palace. From this occurrence came his resolve to carry out a
work from which all his predecessors had shrunk because of the great
expense involved, and which, indeed, discouraged the bourgeois and the
prevost of the city when the royal commands were laid upon them. Instead
of carrying it out for all the streets and by-ways of the capital, they
appear to have contented themselves with paving the environs of the
palace, and the two streets which traversed the Cité from north to south
and from east to west, and which were called the _croisée de Paris_.
This paving was effected by means of square stones fifteen centimètres
long and fifteen to eighteen thick. The bourgeoisie found the expense so
heavy that under Louis XIII half of the streets of Paris were still
unpaved.

In 1204, the king charged the _prévôté_ of Paris to pay to the prior and
the monks of Saint-Denis de la Chartre thirty sous parisis for the
privilege of building on their land, and he commenced the construction
of the Louvre. The site had long been occupied by a sort of suburban
house of entertainment, and the king resolved to erect a strong château,
commanding the Seine. This château was square, the thick walls pierced
with small windows and loopholes arranged without order, surrounded by
wide and deep ditches, and completed by a great tower rising in the
middle. Over the pointed roof floated the royal banner, and within were
confined the State prisoners, and the royal treasures, crown-jewels, and
_Trésor des Chartres_. In 1200, this indefatigable monarch conceived the
idea of uniting all the different schools established in Paris under one
head, but the corporation of the Université was not constituted until
twelve years later.

The life and reign of Louis VIII, son of Philippe-Auguste and father of
Saint-Louis, have recently been made the subject of special research by
M. Petit-Dutaillis, whose history may serve to give his short reign of
three years a greater importance in the eyes of subsequent students than
it has received. He surrounded himself with the same political advisers
that had served his father, and was inspired by the same political and
administrative principles: the death of King John and the birth of the
infant Henry III caused his expedition to England, while still Dauphin,
to fail, and in his attempt to unite the crowns of Hugues Capet and of
William the Conqueror he had against him the influence of the Pope. His
energetic and persevering obstinacy won for him the surname of "the
Lion;" and, moreover, he was haunted "by those visions of sanctity and
of power to which the clerical and classical education gave birth, the
sole general ideas which enlightened and enlarged the darkened and
narrow brains of the men of the Middle Ages." The French historians are
of the opinion that it was to his father's victory of Bouvines that
England was indebted for her Magna Charta.

His entry into Paris after his coronation at Reims is described
enthusiastically by the chroniclers of the times. "The whole city
turned out before him; the poets chanted odes in his praise, the
musicians filled the air with the sound of the vielle [hurdy-gurdy!], of
fifes, of tambours, of the psalterion and of the harp." Another admires
the richness of the garments: "It is a pleasure to see the embroideries
of gold and the coats of jewelled silk sparkle on all the public places,
in the streets, in the squares. Old age, the flower of life, petulant
youth, all stoop under the weight of the purple. The servitors and the
domestics abandon themselves to the joy of being covered with
adornments, and forget their condition of servitude on seeing the
splendid stuffs which they display on their persons. Those who had not
garments worthy of figuring in such a festival procured them by
borrowing."

On the occasion of another procession which took place during this
reign, and in which, as in so many other mediæval demonstrations, the
devout participants walked barefoot, the religious zeal of these latter
was so great that they appeared, most of them, in their shirts, and very
many quite naked. This did not prevent the three queens, Isemberge,
widow of Philippe-Auguste; Blanche, wife of Louis VIII, and Bérengère,
Queen of Jerusalem, from watching the procession with great interest.
This chronicler, Guillaume Guiart, records another instance of the
manners and customs of the period, in which Queen Blanche again appears.
It was the custom, at mass, when the officiating priest pronounced the
words: "The peace of the Lord be with you!" for each worshipper to turn
to his neighbor on the left and give him the kiss of peace. On one
occasion, the queen, having received this chaste salutation, bestowed it
in her turn upon a girl of the town who was kneeling next her, but whose
dress was that of a respectable married woman. Greatly offended, she
procured from her royal husband an edict that, in future, these
_coureuses d'aiguillettes_ should be forbidden to appear in robes
with trains, in falling collars and gilded girdles. Saint-Louis, Queen
Blanche's son, for all his sanctity, appears to have been the first king
of France to introduce a royal falconer into his court.

[Illustration: A LADY AT PLAY; EIGHTEENTH CENTURY.

From a water-color by F. Bac.]

Concerning this monarch, "in whose grand figure," says M. Henri Martin,
"is summed up all that there is of pure and elevated in the Catholicism
of the Middle Ages," we have, fortunately, abundant information in the
chronicles of the Sire de Joinville, his secretary and intimate friend,
who, with Villehardouin, is one of the first in date and in merit of
these national historians. The piety of the king--like that of most
other truly sincere mortals--had about it something simple and ingenuous
which Joinville records with equal frankness. When they first embarked
on their voyage to the Crusade, the clerks and the seigneurs were
fearfully seasick and much repented themselves; when they had somewhat
recovered, the king would draw them into serious conversation. On one
day, says Joinville:

"'Sénéchal,' said the king, 'what is it that is God?' 'Sire, it is so
sovereign and so good a thing that nothing could be better.' 'Truly,
that is very well replied, for this response is written in this little
book which I hold in my hand. Another question I will put to you, that
is to say: 'Which would you prefer, to be leprous and ugly, or to have
committed a mortal sin?' And I," says Joinville, "who never wished to
lie to him, I replied to him that I would rather have committed thirty
mortal sins than to be a leper. When the brothers had all departed from
where we were, he called me back alone and made me sit at his feet, and
said to me: 'How have you dared to say that which you said to me?' And I
reply to him that I would say so again. And then he says to me: '_Ha,
fou musart, musart_, you are deceived there, for you know that there is
no leprosy so ugly as that of being in mortal sin. And I pray you, for
the love of God in the first place, and for the love of me, that you
retain this in your heart.'"

The king's piety did not prevent him from showing an unyielding front to
the turbulent nobles and duly strengthening the royal authority at their
expense. By enforcing the regulations of Philippe-Auguste, he well-nigh
put a stop to the private wars and the judicial duel; he decided that
the royal coinage alone should circulate in the kingdom; at his death,
"Royalty already appeared as the unique centre of jurisdiction and of
power, and the _tiers état_ amassed every day more science and more
riches--which always ends by giving also more influence." The French
language, disengaging itself from its Latin idioms, had become the
language of legislation; it was that of the _Assises_, or laws of the
kingdom of Jerusalem. The poetry of the troubadours had perished in the
atrocious crusade against the Albigeois, but, "north of the Loire, the
_trouvères_ were still composing the _chansons de geste_, veritable epic
poems which were translated or imitated by Italy, England, and Germany.
So that we are quite justified in saying that, from the twelfth century,
the intellectual domination of Europe appertained incontestably to
France."

The formation of the collection of manuscripts known as the _Trésor des
Chartes_ is due to Saint-Louis. These archives he gathered together and
placed in the Sainte-Chapelle,--founded to receive the true Crown of
Thorns which he had received from Baldwin II, Emperor of Constantinople.
He restored and protected the great hospital of the Hôtel-Dieu; and when
his chaplain, Robert de Sorbon, in 1253, being at that time canon of
Paris, conceived the design of erecting a building devoted to the
instruction, by a certain number of secular ecclesiastics, doctors in
theology, of poor students, who, at that period, were frequently obliged
to live in the utmost poverty in order to pursue their studies, the king
purchased for the purpose a building situated in the Rue Coupe-Gueule
before the Palais des Thermes. The canonization of the monarch was
celebrated with great pomp in the spring of 1297, under Philippe IV; all
the nobles of the kingdom, clerical and laic, were invited to the
capital, the body was placed in a silver casket and carried in a
procession from Saint-Denis to Paris, where it was transferred to the
church of Saint-Denis. Some time afterward, one of the ribs was placed
in Notre-Dame and a part of the head in the Sainte-Chapelle.

It was under very different circumstances that these earthly remains
were first carried from Paris to Saint-Denis. The king had died in his
second Crusade, under the walls of Tunis; his son and successor,
Philippe III, re-entered Paris in 1271, bringing with him five
coffins,--that of his father, of his brother, of his brother-in-law, of
his wife, and of his son. He insisted upon carrying, unaided, upon his
shoulders, the body of his father from Paris to Saint-Denis, and at the
localities upon the road where he was obliged to stop and rest, crosses
of stone were erected, and remained for several centuries. Fortunately,
this was the last of the Crusades.

This filial piety did not save the young king from much tribulation.
Soon after his second marriage, with the princess Marie de Brabant
(during the rejoicings attending which the Parisians consumed an
inordinate quantity of wine, it is said, because the _cabaretiers_, in
revenge for the renewal of an old tax the year before, had put more
water than ever in their casks), his eldest son, the child of his first
wife, died. The king's chamberlain, the surgeon Pierre de Labrosse,
accused the young queen of having poisoned the prince. The queen
protested her innocence; the nobles of her train asserted, on the
contrary, that Labrosse was probably the murderer, as he was jealous of
the confidence which the king bestowed upon her, and which the
chamberlain had previously enjoyed. The king was unable to believe
either of them guilty; the medical science of the day was quite unequal
to the task of determining whether there had been any poisoning; the
queen demanded that Labrosse be put to the torture, and, to decide this
doubtful question, appeal was had to the judicial duel. The duke, Jean
de Brabant, arrived to maintain his sister's innocence in the lists; if
he were vanquished, she would be burned at the stake. While the unhappy
king was sending messengers to a celebrated _béguine_, a species of nun,
in Brabant, who was reported to have the gift of revelation, and
receiving only obscure replies, a certain man suddenly fell ill in a
convent in Melun, after having confided to a monk a sealed letter to be
sent to the king. The king received it, read it, showed it to his
council, which declared that the seal and the writing were undoubtedly
those of Labrosse. Whereupon the chamberlain was arrested, accused of
high treason, correspondence with the enemies of France, peculation,
everything except the real offence, and finally hung upon the celebrated
gibbet of Montfaucon,--the first mention of it in history, though it had
been long in existence.

It was in the first year of the reign of this monarch that the first
Parisian was ennobled,--Raoul, "called the Goldsmith," the king's
silversmith. Philippe afterward extended this privilege to several other
worthy bourgeois who had distinguished themselves in the arts.
Restricted as the space enclosed within the wall of Philippe-Auguste
had been, it still contained many cultivated fields and other
unbuilt-upon tracts of land; the numerous religious edifices and
university establishments erected since that reign had occupied these
waste spaces, and the population had even over-flowed in several
directions and congregated around the abbeys that had been constructed
outside the walls. When Philippe IV, the Bel, succeeded his father in
1285, four principal streets were paved,--those leading to Saint-Denis
and to the Portes Baudet, Saint-Honoré, and Notre-Dame. The bourgeois
successfully resisted the demands of the _prévôt_ of Paris that they
should pave more.

Under Philippe IV, the conditions regulating the acquisition of the
rights of bourgeoisie were definitely determined. Any free
_colon_--_i.e._, stranger, sojourner--could go before the _prévôt_ of
the city with two witnesses, engage himself to contribute to the
finances of the city, and to build or to purchase within the space of a
year a house of the value of, at least, sixty sous parisis; on these
conditions he was recognized as a bourgeois of Paris, and, in
consequence, was obliged to reside within its limits from the day of
Toussaint to that of Saint-Jean, in the summer, or at least to leave his
wife there, or his valet, if he were a bachelor. The population of Paris
was thus composed of the clergy, of the nobility,--of which the king was
the chief,--of the bourgeois or proprietors _roturiers_, of the
colons,--free or still _vilains_,--and of a few serfs of the soil whom
their owners had obstinately refused to emancipate.

One of the strongest grievances which this population had against the
king was his repeated debasements of the royal coinage, and on one of
these occasions their discontent was so menacing that, notwithstanding
he had hastily caused some specie of legal weight and value to be
struck, he left his own palace and sought refuge with the Templars. The
establishment of this order had greatly increased since they had first
found an asylum in Paris under Louis VI; the ancient gate of the tower
of the Temple was demolished as late as 1810. Within their walls was
asylum for all, as in the churches, and the king was none too prompt,
for the angry multitude was soon at the gates. Before these frowning
walls, they hesitated, but a few of the more hardy pushed past the guard
at the portal and penetrated as far as the kitchens. "What do you want
here?" inquired the _mâitre-queux_, the chief cook. "To know what is
going on here," replied the boldest of the invaders. "Why, the dinner of
our dear lord, the king." "Where is this dinner?" "Here it is." And he
presented an appetizing dish to his interlocutor, who passed it on to
his comrades, saying: "Here, all of you, it is the King of France who
gives the feast." By this time the alarm had been given, and the
intruders would have paid dearly for their enterprise had not Philippe
ordered that they be allowed to depart unmolested. However, though they
went away very proud of having eaten the king's dinner, a few days later
the bodies of twenty-eight of their number were seen hanging in a row
along the ramparts of the town. It was rumored that the Templars had not
been altogether ignorant of the gathering of this popular tumult, and
that if the entrance to their fortress had been so easily forced it was
not altogether without their knowledge; their ruin is said by some
historians to have been determined in the king's mind from this date. On
Friday, the 13th (!) of October, 1307, the Parisian population were very
much surprised to learn that the grand-master of the order and all the
knights had been arrested, their entire property confiscated, and the
Temple occupied by the king and his court. In this nefarious enterprise
Philippe had taken care to secure the co-operation of the Pope, Clement
V; the wildest charges, of idolatry, magic practices, cruelty and
outrage, were brought against the order; fifty-six of the knights were
burned alive at a slow fire at Vincennes, and, finally, in 1313, the
grand-master and another dignitary, on the little Ile aux Vaches, to-day
the platform of the Pont-Neuf, in the presence of the king and all his
court. A popular legend asserts that as the figure of the grand-master,
Jacques de Molay, disappeared finally in the smoke and flame of his
pyre, he was heard, in a solemn voice, to summon his executioners to
meet him before the bar of God, the Pope within forty days and the king
within the year. Certain it is that both these potentates died within
the appointed time.

The provincial synod which had condemned the fifty-six Templars had been
presided over by one of Philippe's confidants, the Archbishop of Sens,
brother of the king's minister of finances, Enguerrand de Marigny. It
was this latter who set the melancholy example of being hanged by his
royal master's successor, which was followed by other finance ministers
in two succeeding reigns. His innocence, however, was formally
recognized by the king, Louis X, before the end of his short reign of
eighteen months, a sum of ten thousand livres was granted to his
children, "in consideration of the great misfortune which has befallen
them," and his principal accuser, the Comte de Valois, stricken with
paralysis ten years later, made amends by a general distribution of alms
to the poor of Paris, with the request that they would "pray to God for
Monseigneur Enguerrand and for Monseigneur Charles de Valois." Much the
same fate awaited Gérard de la Guette, minister of Philippe V, le Long,
who reigned for six years after Louis X,--only, as he had expired under
the torture, this minister was hanged after death, and his innocence
duly acknowledged in course of time. Pierre Remy, successor of Gérard
de la Guette and treasurer of Charles le Bel, who succeeded Philippe le
Long, was arrested by Charles's successor, Philippe de Valois, even
before he had been crowned, and hanged on the gibbet of Montfaucon, like
his predecessors. He was at first intended for the little gibbet of
Montigny, reserved for the vulgar, but on his way there--whether moved
by sudden remorse, or by ambition for higher honors--he accused himself
of a multitude of new crimes, among others, of high treason against the
king and against the State. He was accordingly transferred to
Montfaucon, where he had the distinction of being hanged above all
others. This was in 1328.

"The amount of his property which was confiscated," says the historian
Félibien, "was estimated at twelve hundred thousand livres, which was
the produce, as well as the proof, of his pillaging; but this example
and that of several others of a similar kind did not serve to render any
more moderate those who have since had charge of the finances,--as
witness Macé de Manches, treasurer-changer of the king's treasury,
executed, like Pierre Remy, in 1331; Réné de Siran, director of the
mint, treated in the same fashion in 1333, and some others."

Louis X, Philippe V, and Charles IV, the three sons of Philippe le Bel
who reigned in succession after him, and who ended the elder branch of
the Capétiens, were even more unfortunate in their wives than in their
treasurers. These three Burgundian princesses, Marguerite, Jeanne, and
Blanche, were of an exceedingly dissolute character; the eldest and the
youngest resided in the abbey of Maubuisson and had for lovers two
Norman gentlemen, Philippe and Gaultier d'Aulnay. The king, Philippe le
Bel, being informed, caused the two Normans to be arrested, in 1314;
they confessed under torture, and were condemned to be flayed alive,
mutilated, decapitated, and hung up by the arm-pits. The two
princesses, after having had their heads shaved, were conducted to the
Château-Guillard, where they were most ingeniously persecuted. When the
husband of Marguerite ascended the throne, in 1315, as Louis le Hutin,
or the Quarreller, he disposed of his unworthy spouse by smothering her
between two mattresses, or, according to the local legend, strangling
her with her own long hair.

Neither Brantôme nor Villon gives the name of the sanguinary princess
who is said to have inhabited the Tour de Nesle, attracted handsome
young men passing by, and in the morning had them strangled and thrown
into the Seine, but romance or popular report has ascribed these doings
to Marguerite de Bourgogne, though it is certain that she never lived in
the Tour de Nesle. Other romances have designated Jeanne, wife of
Philippe le Long, as the princess celebrated for her amours with
Buridan, rector of the University in 1347; but this story is equally
unfounded, as she died in the Hôtel de Nesle in 1329, leaving behind her
a great reputation for gallantry, royal widow though she was. The Hôtel
de Nesle occupied nearly the site of the present Mint, adjoining the
Institute.

When the question of deciding upon a successor for Louis X arose, the
famous _Loi Salique_, by which at least one modern historian, M. Duruy,
thinks France has profited but little, was revived. Louis le Hutin left
but one child, a daughter; a posthumous son, Jean, lived but a week.
"Should his sister take the crown? A text of Scripture reads: 'The
lilies spin not, and yet Solomon, in all his glory, was not arrayed like
one of these.' This evidently signifies that the kingdom of the lilies
shall not fall under the sway of a distaff. In the fourteenth century
this was a reason. There were others: it was not to be desired that a
foreigner should acquire France by a marriage; and the States-General,
applying to the Crown the rule of succession formerly established for
the Salic domains, excluded the daughter of Louis X from the throne.
Thus the right of inheritance recognized for daughters for the fiefs was
denied for the Crown."

Philippe le Long, also, had only daughters, and their uncle, Charles IV,
accordingly succeeded, only to see the same fate befall his children. On
his death-bed he said to his barons: "If the queen give birth to a son,
he will be your king; if a daughter, the crown will belong to Philippe
de Valois, whom I declare your regent." Another branch of the Capétiens,
the Valois, thus assumed the sceptre. But this interpretation, thus
three times renewed in twelve years, was contested abroad. Philippe VI
of Valois was a cousin of Charles IV, nephew of Philippe le Bel and
grandson of Philippe III. Edward III, King of England, was a grandson of
Philippe IV by his mother Isabella, and he protested against this
decision and asserted his right to the throne of France, mildly in 1328,
on the accession of Philippe VI, and strongly eight years later. Thus
came about the Hundred Years' War, and, incidentally, the residence in
Paris, as if in his capital, of an English king.

Unfortunately, the French nobility were divided in these evil days
coming upon the capital and the nation. In 1329, the Comtesse de Mahaut,
who held the comté d'Artois, died in Paris, poisoned. Robert d'Artois, a
prince of the blood, one of the _royaux de France_, claimed the
succession, but the king awarded it to the queen Jeanne, widow of
Philippe le Long; a month later, as she was about to take possession of
the comté, she also died suddenly, poisoned by one of the officers of
her table, in the hippocras, or medicated wine, which he handed her.
Whereupon Robert produced documents, duly signed and sealed by his
grandfather, Robert I, in which he was designated as the successor to
his title to the comté; these letters were recognized as forgeries, and
Robert was banished from the kingdom forever by the Court of Peers, and
his property confiscated. The false witnesses whom he had suborned were
arrested,--a demoiselle, Jeanne de Divion; his clerk, Perrot de Sanis;
his _fille de chambre_, Jeannette des Chaînes, and Pierre Tesson,
notary. All this made a tremendous sensation in Paris; a Jacobin, called
as one of the witnesses, refused to reveal the secrets of the
confessional; he was threatened with the rack by the Bishop of Paris;
the doctors in theology assembled and decided that he must testify, in
the interests of justice, which he did, and was accordingly confined in
prison for the rest of his days. The demoiselle La Divion was burned
alive on the Place of the Marché-aux-Pourceaux, in the presence of the
_prévôt_ of Paris and a great multitude of people; the same fate finally
befell Jeannette de Chaînes, after having concealed herself in various
localities, in 1334, on the same place; eight other false witnesses were
condemned to the pillory and other punishments, the notary to perpetual
imprisonment, and others to make _amende honorable_.

This ceremony, so usual in the Middle Ages, consisted in the culprit
walking in his shirt, bareheaded and barefoot, conducted by the public
executioner, a rope around his neck, a candle of yellow wax in his hand,
a placard explaining his crime on his chest, another on his back, to
some public place, usually the Parvis-Notre-Dame, and there, in an
audible voice, avowing his crime and professing repentance. No rank of
society, not even the monarch himself, was exempt from this punishment,
which frequently was only the prelude to execution. The chief criminal,
in this case, took refuge in Brabant, and there, to revenge himself,
_envoulta_ the king's son.

This was the familiar process in witchcraft by which an image of the
person attacked being made in wax, baptized, and the _voult_ duly
performed, with a mass said and religious consecration, it is then
melted before a fire, or in the sun, or pierced with a needle. This was
discovered. Robert, afraid of prosecution for sorcery, thought himself
too near France and escaped to England, where he urged Edward III to war
against his native country.

Notwithstanding the national troubles, the court and the Parisians
seemed disposed to give themselves up to pleasure. The marriage of the
king's second son, Philippe, with Blanche, daughter of Charles le Bel,
was celebrated with great pomp, and with a tournament at which assisted
the most illustrious knights of France and many from abroad. Among these
was the Duc de Normandie, against whom the king pitted the Seigneur de
Saint-Venant, and the duke was overthrown, horse and man. The Comte
d'Eu, Constable of France, received a lance-thrust in the chest, from
which he died that night. These casualties were only too common in these
celebrations, which were constantly discouraged by the popes, and even
forbidden by some of the kings of France. At the close of these
particular exercises, Olivier de Clisson, the Baron d'Avangour, Geoffroi
and Georges de Malestroit, and other Breton chevaliers were arrested and
conducted to the prisons of the Châtelet on charges of high treason and
of conspiring with the king of England.

The historian Mézeray declares that in the capital the sumptuousness of
apparel, the lascivious dances, the multiplication of entertainments,
were common both to the court and the citizens. Nothing was to be seen
but _jongleurs_, _farceurs_, and other actors and buffoons,
extravagance, debauchery, and constant change. "All the misfortunes of
the nation did not serve to correct them; the spectacles, the games, and
the tourneys constantly succeeded each other. The French danced, as it
were, on the bodies of their relatives. They seemed to rejoice at the
conflagration of their châteaux and their houses, and at the death of
their friends. Whilst some of them were having their throats cut in the
country, the others were feasting in the cities. The sound of the
violins was not interrupted by that of the trumpets, and there could be
heard at the same time the voices of those singing in the balls, and the
pitiful cries of those who perished in the flames or under the edge of
the sword."

Another chronicler, Robert Gaguin, writing in the fifteenth century,
dilates on the constant changes in the Parisian fashions in 1346. "In
those times, the garments differed very much from each other. When you
saw the manner in which the French clothed themselves, you would have
taken them for mountebanks. Sometimes the vestments which they adopted
were too large, sometimes they were too narrow; at one period they were
too long, at another, too short. Always eager for novelties, they could
not retain for ten years the same style of apparel."

[Illustration: LOUIS XVI ON THE LEADS OF THE TEMPLE.

After an engraving of the period.]

Jean II succeeded his father Philippe in 1350, and has preserved his
surname of le Bon, or the Good, though his reign was one of the most
disastrous in history. One of his very first acts was to cause the
arrest, in the Hôtel de Nesle, of Raoul, Comte d'Eu, Constable of
France, whom he accused of high treason, and, without any form of law,
had him beheaded at night in the presence of the Duc de Bourbon, the
Comte d'Armagnac, the Comte de Montfort, and several other high
personages of the court. All his property was confiscated, his comté was
given to the king's cousin, Jean d'Artois, and the king kept the rest.
In the following year he founded an order of knighthood, in imitation of
that of the Garter, established by Edward III in England, and which, in
its turn, served as a model for that of the _Toison d'Or_, the Golden
Fleece, instituted in 1439 by the Duke of Burgundy. King Jean gave to
his order the name of _Notre-Dame de la Noble maison_, but it was more
generally known as that of _l'Étoile_, the Star. According to
Froissart, it was "a company after the manner of the Round Table, which
should be constituted of three hundred of the most worthy chevaliers."
They took an oath never to flee in battle more than four arpents,--about
four hundred perches,--and there to die or to yield themselves
prisoners; the king gave them for a residence the royal lodging of
Saint-Ouen, near Paris. "True chivalry was departing, since the kings
endeavored to create an official chivalry."

Ten days after the battle of Poitiers, in which the king and his
youngest son, Philippe le Hardi, were taken prisoners, the Dauphin
Charles, Duc de Normandie, returned to Paris, took the title of
lieutenant of the King of France, and convoked the estates, which
assembled in October. The bourgeoisie, irritated at the ineptitude of
the royal power, assumed the authority under the _prévôt_ of the
merchants, Etienne Marcel, and the civil war followed. On the side of
the dauphin were the nobility and all those attached to the court; on
that of the _prévôt_, the bourgeoisie, the shop-keepers, artisans, and
common people. The latter extended the fortifications, especially those
on the northern side of the city, so as to include all the buildings
erected outside the walls of Philippe-Auguste. The dauphin, with a force
of seven thousand lances, occupied alternately Meaux, Melun, Saint-Maur,
the bridge of Charenton, and shut off all the supplies coming from the
upper Seine and the Marne. The attempt of Marcel to deliver the city to
Charles le Mauvais, King of Navarre, was discovered, the _prévôt_ was
killed at the city gate, and the dauphin entered Paris triumphantly two
days later.

In 1364, he succeeded to the throne, under the title of Charles V, and
by his wise administration, his prudent conduct of the war, and the
judicious management of the finances, secured for himself the surname
of "the Sage." He rendered the parliament permanent, instead of
occasional, and he gave it for its sittings in the Cité the ancient
palace of Saint-Louis, which became the Palais de Justice. A royal
ordinance, which remained in force till the Revolution, fixed the
majority of the kings of France at thirteen years of age, and provided
that the regent should _not_ be the guardian of the young prince;
another, dated in 1370, authorized the bourgeois of Paris to wear the
spurs of gold and other ornaments of the order of knighthood, and a
third, of 1377, awarded titles of nobility to the _prévôts_ and
_échevins_, or aldermen, of the city. In 1369, the authority of the
_prévôt_ of Paris was officially confirmed in regard to all offences and
misdemeanors committed within the city by any person whatsoever.

Among the many important buildings which this king erected or commenced
was the Bastile, founded in 1370, to replace the old Porte
Saint-Antoine, and consisting at first of two towers, united by a
fortified gate; the Louvre, repaired and enlarged; the fortifications of
the city; the Hôtel Saint-Pol, the gardens of which descended to the
Seine; the chapelle of Vincennes, and several châteaux in the environs
of the city. Nevertheless, and in spite of the encouragement given by
Charles V to letters, the capital and the nation shared in the general
decadence of the century, in morals, in intellect, and even in physical
force. It has been estimated that while the average duration of human
life was thirty years during the Roman Empire, it had now diminished to
seventeen. The readers of Voltaire will remember that in _The Man with
the Forty Écus_ his "geometer" gives it as twenty-two or twenty-three
years for Paris, and contrives to reduce this brief span to practically
two or three years of active, enjoyable life,--ten years off the
twenty-three for the period of youthful immaturity, ten more for the
decline of old age, sleep, sickness, work, worry, etc.!

Duruy cites two instances of feminine peers of France. In 1378, the
Duchesse d'Orléans writes to excuse herself from coming to take her seat
as a peer in the Parliament of Paris; the Duchesse d'Artois, Mahaut, had
been present at the coronation of Philippe V, and had supported, with
the other peers, the crown on the head of the king.

The need of funds was so pressing at the very outset of the following
reign that the young king, Charles VI, under the tutelage of his uncles,
the dukes of Anjou, Burgundy, and Berry, entered into serious
negotiations with the bourgeoisie of the city of Paris with a view of
persuading them to accept a new tax on commodities. The people were
obstinate in their refusal; a statute forbade the imposition of any new
duties without previous public proclamation, and, in the actual
condition of affairs, this proclamation was likely to lead to a popular
outbreak. On the last day of April, 1382, however, a public crier
presented himself on horseback at the Halles, where these proclamations
were usually made, sounded his trumpet, and when he saw the people
assembled around him, lifted his voice and announced that the king's
silverware had been stolen and that a liberal reward would be paid for
the discovery of the thieves. Then, profiting by the general surprise
and commotion, he proceeded: "I have still another proclamation to make
to you; to-morrow the new tax on produce will begin to be levied." After
which he put spurs to his horse, and disappeared at full speed!

Early the next morning the tax-collectors accordingly presented
themselves at the Halles; one of them claimed the percentage on a little
_cresson_ which an old woman had just sold, the old woman raised an
outcry, the unhappy collector was beaten and thrown in the gutter,
another was dragged from the very altar of the church of
Saint-Jacques-l'Hôpital and killed, and the mob rushed to the Hôtel de
Ville, where it was known that Charles V had caused to be deposited the
_maillets_ or mallets of lead which he had had made in anticipation of
an attack by the English, and armed themselves with these
weapons,--whence their name of Maillotins. But the new tax was
withdrawn, and the popular fury speedily subsided.

When the young king attained his majority, in 1388, the former
councillors of his father, the petty nobles, or _marmousets_, as the
great seigneurs contemptuously called them, resumed the direction of
affairs, but, with all their prudence and ability, were quite unable to
restrain the prodigal wastefulness of the prince. The entry of the
queen, Isabeau de Bavière, whom he had married three years before, was
made the occasion of extravagant processions, pomps, diversions, and
mystery-plays in Paris, as was the marriage of his brother, the Duc
d'Orléans, with the beautiful Valentine Visconti, and the conferring of
the order of knighthood on the children of the Duc d'Anjou. When,
finally, worn out with dissipation, with the license of unlimited power
from the age of twelve, the king went mad, his uncles resumed the
regency and the marmouset ministry prudently sought safety in flight.
The Duc de Bourgogne, Philippe le Hardi, died in 1404; his son, Jean
sans Peur, wished to succeed to his father's authority in the State, but
found himself opposed at every turn by the Duc d'Orléans; the old Duc de
Berry interposed and effected a formal reconciliation; three days later
the Duc d'Orléans was assassinated in the Rue Vieille-du-Temple by the
bravos of Jean sans Peur, who did not fear to do murder on a prince of
the blood.

[Illustration: LOUIS XVI, WITH HIS FAMILY, IN THE LOGOGRAPHIC BOX AT THE
ASSEMBLY, WITNESSING HIS DEPOSITION; AUGUST 11, 1792. From a drawing by
Georges Cain.]

In the civil war which followed, the Parisians profited at first by the
concessions which were made to them in order to secure their
support,--open opposition to all new taxes, restoration of their old
free constitution, the right to elect their _prévôt_ and other officers,
to organize their bourgeois militia under officers elected by
themselves, even that of holding fiefs like the nobles, with the
accompanying privileges, provided they were well born, and of Paris. The
nobility, on the contrary, were even less disposed to pardon him for
thus seeking the aid of the populace than for having compromised the
seignorial inviolability by laying violent hands on a brother of the
king. The Comte d'Armagnac, father-in-law of one of the sons of the Duc
d'Orléans, placed himself at the head of the opposing party; both
parties made advances to the English to secure their aid on different
occasions, but it was the Armagnacs who fought Henry V at Azincourt and
sustained that disastrous defeat; the Duc de Bourgogne secured
possession of the queen and proclaimed her regent; negotiating first
with one and then with another, he finally ended by being assassinated
in his turn by Tanneguy Duchâtel, _prévôt_ of Paris, and other servants
of the dauphin, on the bridge of Montereau, at the confluence of the
Yonne and the Seine.

"That which neither Crécy nor Poitiers nor Azincourt had accomplished,
the assassination on the bridge of Montereau did,--it gave the crown of
France to a king of England." In the following year, 1420, the treaty of
Troyes, concluded between Henry V, the Queen Isabeau, and the new Duc de
Bourgogne, Philippe le Bon, recognized the King of England as regent and
heir to the throne of France, he having married Isabeau's daughter,
Catherine of France. "All the provisions of this treaty were read
publicly, in a general assembly held by the Parliament on the 29th of
April. The governor of Paris, the chancellor, the _prévôt_, the
presidents, counsellors, _échevins_, merchants, and bourgeois, all were
unanimous in accepting this treaty." On the 30th of May it was formally
ratified in another general assembly, and on the 1st of December the
bourgeois turned out in great state and with much pomp to receive the
two kings, who entered, walking side by side, Charles VI on the right.
"The streets were richly decorated and tapestried from the Porte
Saint-Denis to Notre-Dame, 'and all the people cried _Noël!_ to show
their joy.'" The English king, with his two brothers, the dukes of
Clarence and of Bedford, were lodged at the Louvre; the poor French
king, at the Hôtel Saint-Pol, and the Duc de Bourgogne, in his Hôtel
d'Artois.

The madness of Charles VI was intermittent, but apparently hopeless; it
had been greatly aggravated by all the tragic circumstances of his
reign, including the terrible _bal des ardents_, in which he had been
saved from being burned to death, with several other maskers disguised
as satyrs, by the coolness and courage of the Duchesse de Berry. The
queen, Isabeau, was openly dissolute; on one occasion, the king,
returning from visiting her at Vincennes, encountered her lover, the
chevalier Louis de Bois-Bourdon, had him arrested on the spot, put to
the question, sewed up in a sack, and thrown in the river. Probably with
a view to her own security, she had placed in the king's bed-chamber "a
fair young Burgundian," Odette de Champdivers, and it was this
demoiselle who, in his periods of frenzy, was alone able to soothe and
persuade him. It is related that they played cards together in his saner
moments, this amusement having recently been brought into fashion again.
Even the powers of magic were tried in vain to effect his cure.

[Illustration: FEMME-DE-LA-COUR AND FOUNDLING; EIGHTEENTH CENTURY. From
a water-color by Maurice Leloir.]

Nevertheless, few monarchs seem to have been so sincerely mourned.
"All the people who were in the streets and at the windows wept and
cried as if each one had seen the death of the one he loved the best.
'_Ah! très cher prince_, never shall we have another so good! Never
shall we see thee again! Cursed be Death! We shall have no longer
anything but war, since thou hast left us. Thou goest to repose, we
remain in tribulations and sorrow.'"

Queen Isabeau, in addition to disinheriting her son in favor of her
daughter, was held responsible by her contemporaries for setting the
fashion in wasteful and absurd extravagance in dress. The ladies wore
the _houppelande_, the _cotte hardie_, tight around the girdle, and
looped up their sleeves _excessivement_ to show this _cotte hardie_;
they also had openings in the surcoat to show the girdle. These openings
the preachers called "windows of hell." "They made their stomachs
prominent, and seemed, all of them, _enceinte_: this mode they clung to
for forty years." "The more the misery increased, the more the luxury
augmented; at the Hôtel de Bohême, inhabited by Louis d'Orléans, there
were chambers hung with cloth of gold _à roses_, embroidered with
_velours vermeil_, of _satin vermeil_ embroidered with arbalists, of
cloth of gold embroidered with mills.... And, during this time, the
grass grew in the streets, say the historians of the period, the wolves
entered the city at night by the river; the imagination of the people,
exalted, saw already in Paris a new Babylon, the ruins of which would
presently become the repair of the beasts of prey."

When the remains of what might well seem to be the last of the kings of
France were interred at Saint-Denis, a herald-at-arms recommended the
soul of the defunct to the prayers of the assembled multitude; then he
cried: "_Vive Henri de Lancastre, Roi de France et d'Angleterre!_" At
this cry, all the officers present reversed their maces, rods, and
swords, to signify that they considered themselves as no longer
exercising their offices. The English king was not crowned in Paris till
nine years later (1431), but his representative, the Duke of Bedford,
left his residence in the Hôtel de la Rivière, Rue de Paradis, and Rue
du Chaume (to-day the Rues des Francs-Bourgeois and des Archives), to
establish himself in the Palais de la Cité. On the 8th of September,
1429, Jeanne d'Arc, having brought about the crowning of the sluggish
Charles VII at Reims in the preceding July, presented herself at the
head of a French corps under the orders of the Duc d'Alençon before the
northern walls of Paris, and herself directed the assault on the Porte
Saint-Honoré. She surmounted the first entrenchment, constructed in
front of the pig market there established on the Butte des
Moulins,--afterward suppressed to make way for the opening of the Avenue
de l'Opéra,--drove in the English, sounded the depth of the moat with
the staff of her banner, and fell wounded with an arbalist shaft through
her thigh, in front of what is now the entrance to the Théâtre-Français.
The chronicles of the time differ as to whether the French chiefs failed
to support her through jealousy, or fought with _acharnement_ to save
her from falling into the hands of the besieged. The attempt was
abandoned, and the Maid was carried to Saint-Denis to have her wound
dressed.

In Paris, opinions were very much divided, and even those who favored
the French king felt that they were too much compromised to open their
gates to him without some stipulations. Two years later, Jeanne having
been duly burned at Rouen, and the consecration of Charles VII, at
Reims, "to which he had been conducted by an agent of the demon, being
in itself and of its own nature null and void," the English monarch
entered his city of Paris to receive an orthodox and irreprehensible
coronation. As he rode by the Hôtel Saint-Pol, he perceived the Queen
Isabeau on the balcony; he doffed his hat to her and she returned his
salute, then burst into tears. On the 17th of December, he was anointed
and crowned in Notre-Dame by Cardinal Winchester--which gave great
offence to the Bishop of Paris--and surrounded entirely by English
lords; there was no liberation of prisoners, no largess to the people,
no removal of taxes. "A bourgeois who marries off his daughter would
have done the thing better," said the Parisians. However, he manifested
some desire to secure their good-will by confirming a number of their
minor privileges, their right to acquire titles of nobility, etc.

The discontent grew among the citizens; no coronation of a king of
France could be as sacred as that celebrated according to the ancient
ceremonial at Reims; the English garrison felt constrained to take such
strong measures of precaution as to forbid any one to leave the city
without passports, or to mount upon the ramparts under penalty of being
hanged. It was not till the 29th of May, 1436, that six citizens, whose
names history has preserved, contrived to open the Porte Saint-Jacques,
in the quarter of the Halles, to their countrymen outside; the Constable
of France, Arthur de Bretagne, Comte de Richemont, with the Comte de
Dunois and some two thousand horsemen, were waiting for them; the first
twenty men introduced through a little postern gate opened the great
doors and let down the drawbridge, all the cavalry trooped in without
meeting the least resistance. "Then the Maréchal de l'Isle-Adam mounted
upon the wall, unfurled the banner of France, and cried '_Ville
gagnée!_' [City taken!]."

Captain Willoughby, who commanded the English, finding the whole
populace rising against him, was compelled to take refuge in the
Bastile with some thousand or twelve hundred men, and soon after
capitulated and left the city by the Porte Saint-Antoine, pursued by the
hootings of the people. Charles VII made his triumphal entry in the
following November, and was received with abundant demonstrations of
welcome. It was, however, a city devastated by pestilence and famine and
with troops of wolves in all the suburbs. Bands of brigands, largely
made up of unpaid soldiers, and called, from their outrages,
_escorcheurs_, traversed the country and the environs and were more
feared even than the wolves. The universal demoralization caused by the
war had removed all bounds to the cruelty of the nobles, and the
chronicles of the time are replete with murder, open and secret. "The
Duc de Bretagne caused the death of his brother; the Duc de Gueldre,
that of his father; the Sire de Giac, that of his wife; the Comtesse de
Foix, that of her sister; the King of Aragon, that of his son."

"Above this feudal aristocracy was placed another aristocracy, that of
the princes, which royalty had elevated with its own hands, in
constituting vast appanages for the _royaux de France_, the title given
to the sons, the brothers, the relatives of the king. Hence those
powerful houses of Bourgogne, of Orléans, of Anjou, of Bourbon, which
joined to the spirit of independence of the ancient feudality the pride
and the pretensions of a royal origin, and which said by one of its
members: 'I esteem so much the kingdom of France, that, in the place of
one king, I should like to see six.'"

[Illustration: NAPOLEON AND MARIE LOUISE ENTERING THE GARDEN OF THE
TUILERIES ON THE DAY OF THEIR MARRIAGE, APRIL 2, 1810.]

Valuing only that which was acquired by the sword, or professing to do
so, this feudal aristocracy affected to look down with disdain upon the
great merchants and bankers,--whose large fortunes, indeed, were not
always acquired with the strictest probity,--and they viewed with
indifference the king's infamous robbery of his minister, Jacques
Coeur, which, with his abandonment of Jeanne d'Arc, constitute the
blackest stains upon his character. The _gens de petit estat_, the
councillors of humble origin, with which the king surrounded himself,
and who served him so well, were also a source of offence to these proud
nobles. M. G. du Fresne de Beaucourt, in his exhaustive history of this
monarch, in six octavo volumes, dwells at length on the constantly
increasing influence in the grand council, during the period of national
reorganization in the latter part of the reign, of these humble
councillors. "And it was, above all, the people of France themselves,"
says M. Funck-Brentano, "who, in the midst of all the secular struggles,
acquired, little by little, the sentiment of its unity, of the common
solidarity of the public welfare. The day on which they were found
grouped, admirable in their energy and devotion, around the royal throne
which, for them, was the concentrating point of these sentiments, the
cause of the foreign enemy was lost."

Son though he was "of an imbecile father and a debauched mother,"
Charles VII did not lack for intelligence, and in his diplomacy,
directed during the first part of his reign against a foreign enemy and,
in the latter part, against a domestic one, the Burgundians, he gave
proof of the highest qualities. He had a taste for letters, and
was--"unique, doubtless, in this among the kings of France"--a good
Latin scholar. His mistresses, of whom Agnès Sorel was only the first,
were imposed upon his wife, Marie d'Anjou, and upon his court with
unusual effrontery. The queen was even obliged to distribute gifts to
the "_filles joyeuses_ who followed the court in its peregrinations."
This moral depravation, naturally, extended downward to the whole court.
M. Brentano, who is one of the few French historians who venture to lay
disrespectful hands on the grand _Roi-soleil_, says: "Charles VII was
the original source of the crapulous debauchery of the last Valois; he
traced the way for the crimes of Louis XIV, and the turpitudes of Louis
XV." This, although the higher clergy of the reigns both of Charles and
of Louis Quatorze did not fail in their duty, and did denounce openly
from the pulpit the sins of these all-powerful monarchs.

On his re-entry into Paris, Charles did not take up his residence in the
Hôtel Saint-Pol, the sorrowful lodging of his father, but in the
Tournelles, which he made a "delightful sojourn," and where his
successors installed themselves until François II, who established his
dwelling in the Louvre. In the time of Louis XI, however, the Tournelles
partook of the sordid and melancholy character of its master. "The king
lived there alone and stingily," says the historian Michelet. "He had
had the odd taste to retain some servitors whom he had brought from
Brabant; he lived there as if in exile.... As soon as he was king, he
assumed the pilgrim's habit, the cape of coarse gray cloth, with the
gaiters of a travelling costume, and he took them off only at his
death.... If he came out of the Tournelles, it was in the evening, like
an owl, in his melancholy gray cape. His gossip, companion, and friend
(he had a friend) was a certain Bische, whom he had formerly set as a
spy on his father, Charles VII, and whom afterward he kept near the
Comte de Charolais, to induce him to betray his father, the Duc de
Bourgogne."

The king had, indeed been one of the worst of sons,--at the period of
his accession to the throne he was almost in open rebellion against his
father, and had sought refuge at the court of Burgundy. The great nobles
consequently looked with complacency upon his coming into power, and
were very far from foreseeing that through him their privileges and
authority throughout the kingdom were to be finally ruined. During his
reign, the capital prospered,--"the king made of it his refuge, his
citadel and his arsenal for all his enterprises against the feudality."
In one respect, he followed his father's example and even bettered
it,--his counsellors were chosen by preference among the _tiers état_,
and frequently even among men of base extraction. When occasion
required, he did not disdain any of the arts of the demagogue: on
entering Paris after the indecisive battle of Montlhéry, with the
Burgundians, almost under the walls of the capital, he took supper with
the principal ladies of the city in the house of Charles de Melun, and
so moved them with the recital of the dangers he had undergone that all
the dames bourgeoises wept. He was in the habit of visiting familiarly
the principal bourgeois, seating himself at their table or inviting them
to his own, and interesting himself in their private affairs. By this
means, he endeavored to ascertain their opinions concerning his
political measures, and the amount of obedience which they were likely
to render to them. In 1471, "he honored the city by starting the fire
with his own hand in the Place de Grève, the evening of Saint John the
Baptist." On a mast, twenty-five mètres in height and surrounded by
combustibles of all kinds, was hung a great basket containing a dozen
black cats and a fox, symbols of the devil. "The more the grilled cats
cried, the more the people laughed."

For all his craftiness, "he had not reigned four years when all the
world was against him," says Duruy. "The people forced to provide, by
paying a great many imposts, for the necessities of the government which
they did not as yet comprehend, the bourgeoisie wounded in its
particular interests, which it did not know how to sacrifice to the
general interests, the clergy menaced in its property, the lesser
nobility in its rights and in its dearest habits, the higher aristocracy
in its pretensions to sovereignty,--all these classes, so widely
diverse, so often hostile one to another, found themselves for the
moment quite in accord upon one point,--the necessity of limiting the
royal authority." The _Ligue du Bien public_ was formed by the great
nobles through compassion for the miseries of the kingdom "under the
discord and piteous government of Louis XI." Thus threatened by the
aristocracy, it was a question of the utmost importance for the king to
retain his capital; he wrote to the Parisians in the most cajoling
phrases before Montlhéry, and after, hastened to arm the bourgeois and
accepted, as an aid and support, a council of six bourgeois, six members
of the Parliament, and six clerks of the University.

The festivals and processions in the streets of Paris were not so
numerous in this reign as in many of the preceding ones, but some of
them have remained memorable. On his entry into the city on the occasion
of his accession to the throne, August 30, 1461, he was richly dressed
in white satin, and rode between the old Duc de Bourgogne and the Comte
de Charolais. Over the Porte Saint-Denis was the representation of a
ship, "emblem of the arms of Paris (which are, gules, a ship _équipé_,
argent, on a sea of the same; _au chef cousu d'argent_, sown with
_fleurs-de-lis d'or_). From this ship descended two little angels, who
placed a crown upon the head of the king. The fountain of Ponceau ran
wine; and at this fountain three beautiful maids, quite nude,
represented sirens; 'and this was a very pleasant thing,' adds the
chronicler, Jean de Troyes; 'they discoursed little _motets_ and
_bergerettes_.'" Other demonstrations, in the fashion of the time, were
given at other points of the route; all the streets through which the
king passed were hung with rich tapestries, and when he arrived at the
Pont-au-Change, the bird merchants of Paris launched in the air "more
than two hundred dozen birds of all kinds."

[Illustration: GRAND SALON OF THE TUILERIES, 1810. After Percier and
Fontaine.]

A very good painter, M. Tattegrain, in one of his recent _envois_ to the
annual Salon, has represented with great detail and much historical
accuracy the incident of the three pretty sirens, quite nude. According
to his story, they were only bared to the waist, and the king, very
gallantly, checked the procession and rode out from under his canopy to
hear their _motets_ and _bergerettes_.

On the 15th of May, 1468, there was a fine tilting at the Hôtel des
Tournelles between the gentlemen of Paris and those of Normandy; "they
were valiant champions, superbly apparelled in hacquetons embossed with
gold." Of the four Norman chevaliers who came expressly for this
occasion, three were wounded, so that "all the honor of the jousts
remained with those of Paris." On the 19th of November, the conclusion
of the treaty of Péronne, between the king and the Duc de Bourgogne, was
announced by trumpets in all the public squares of the city, and popular
rejoicings ordered; as also for the birth of the dauphin, afterward
Charles VIII, June 30, 1470, and the victory of Henry of Lancaster, King
of England, over his competitor, Edward. These two events, the king
directed, should be celebrated by a cessation of work of all kind for
three days, and public prayers. Not long afterward, the queen of Henri
VI arrived in Paris with her son, the Prince of Wales, and was received,
by order of the king, with all the honors due her rank.

Amidst all these splendors it was Louis XI himself who frequently
presented the reverse side of the medal. The registers of the Chambre
des Comptes mention, about the time of the English queen's visit, a
disbursement of twenty sols for the insertion of a pair of new sleeves
in an old pourpoint of the king's wearing. He was considered to have
gotten much the worse of the treaty of Péronne with Charles the Bold,
and he had a mistress named Perrette, so that the Parisians trained
their parrots, magpies, and other speaking birds to ask Perrette to give
them a drink, among other ribald phrases. Consequently, the king issued
a royal commission "to a young man of Paris named Henry Perdriel, in the
said city of Paris" to take and seize "all magpies, jays, and chevrettes
being in cages or otherwise, and being private property, in order to
bring them all before the king, and have written down and registered the
place where he had taken the aforesaid birds and also all that they knew
how to say, as: _larron_; _paillard_; _fils de p---- _; _va hors, va_;
_Perrette, donne-moi à boire_, and several other words which the said
birds know very well how to say and which have been taught them." In
this same year, 1468, he caused to be confiscated in Paris and brought
to him at Amboise all the deer, does, and cranes which the rich
bourgeois were in the habit of keeping in their gardens. "This dispensed
with the necessity of his buying them," adds the historian.

A Bohemian periodical, the _Nation Czech_, has recently published a
condensation of the very curious journal kept by a certain Seigneur Léon
de Rozmital, brother of the queen Joan, wife of Georges Podiébrad, King
of Bohemia, during his travels in France in the year 1465. At
Meung-sur-Loire he met Louis XI, who received him with much honor,
though he appears to have quite declined to listen to the seigneur's
proposals of a treaty of alliance between the two nations; he
accompanied the king to _Kand_ (perhaps the château of Candes,
Indre-et-Loire), where he was presented to the queen and all her train.
Her Majesty received him cordially, "and every one kissed him on the
mouth. It was the king who had ordered it, and who wished it so.
Afterward, the queen gave her hand to every chevalier and was very
gracious with all." Louis invited his guest to come to visit him in
Paris, but the latter fails to record his doing so.

In the year 1470, it may be mentioned, Ulric Gering, Michel Friburger,
and Martin Krantz set up the first printing-press, in the college of the
Sorbonne, and printed a book: _Epistolæ Gasparini Pargamensis_ (Letters
of Gasparin de Bergamo). Other works appeared, the first of which was a
Bible, offered to Louis XI in this same year.

The universal demoralization of manners resulting from the long wars
against the English and between the Burgundians and Armagnacs, the
English occupation of the city, the presence in the capital of a
multitude of drunken and debauched soldiers, did not serve to check the
extravagance and license among the wealthier bourgeois against which the
clergy thundered in vain. One of the boldest of these preachers was a
Cordelier named Olivier Maillard, who appealed to the multitude by the
freedom of his language and his images too frequently borrowed from the
vernacular, and who--although he bore the title of _prédicateur du
roi_--did not hesitate to denounce the monarch himself. He accordingly
received an intimation that if these attacks did not cease very
promptly, he would be tied up in a sack and thrown in the river. "The
king is master," replied Maillard, "but go and say to him that I would
go quicker to paradise by water than he with his post-horses." A species
of crusade was organized by the mendicant friars against the
extravagance of the costumes and the indecency of the manners; the evil
had assumed such proportions that to be modestly and decently dressed
was to be, in the language of the people as well as in that of the
preachers, "clothed without sin." "To the ferocity, to the barbarity of
feudal times had succeeded the vices of a semi-civilization, whilst
waiting till manners and customs should refine themselves under the
action of the Renaissance."

[Illustration: BONAPARTE AND THE GRENADIER.]

One of the first acts of the new king, Charles VIII, was to hang Olivier
le Dain, _valet de chambre_, barber, counsellor, and, finally,
ambassador of his father. His property was confiscated and given to the
Duc d'Orléans. This act afforded a lively satisfaction to the Parisians
and to the nation at large. Another favorite of the late monarch, Jean
de Doyat, was somewhat more fortunate, though he was arrested, publicly
whipped in the streets, pilloried at the Halles, where his tongue was
pierced with a hot iron and one ear cut off, then sent down to Auvergne,
his native province, flogged again, robbed of the other ear, and all his
goods confiscated. Later, however, the king quashed the judgment and
restored him his property, if not his severed members.

By his marriage with Anne de Bretagne, December 13, 1491, this monarch
united the last of the great fiefs of France to the crown, and
disappointed several powerful foreign suitors, English, German, and
Spanish. On the 9th of the following February the royal couple entered
the capital in state, and the stately and haughty carriage of the Breton
princess was greatly admired by the populace. The bourgeois and
merchants of various conditions who rode, two by two, to meet her had
all "magnificent costumes, robes of satin _cramoisi_, of damask _gris
cendre_, or of scarlet cloth on a violet ground. They had had made a
dais the canopy of which was of cloth of gold, embossed, sown with
lilies and roses. They carried it alternately from the Porte Saint-Denis
as far as Notre-Dame."

When the king set off on his ill-advised expedition to conquer the
kingdoms of Naples and Sicily, he was very short of funds and wished to
borrow a hundred thousand écus from the Parisians, but met with a flat
refusal. Consequently, when a deputation of the notables of the city
took the liberty of remonstrating with him concerning this Italian war,
he received them very badly and requested them to keep their advice for
themselves, as he had no need of it. But, after having conquered the
Milanais and lost it very soon afterward, he applied again to his city
of Paris for a vessel of war; Jean de Ganay, president of the
Parliament, presented to the _prévôt_ of the merchants and to the
_échevins_ at the Hôtel de Ville the letter which the king had written
on this subject. In order to deliberate on it weightily, they assembled
all the councillors, and a resolution was adopted that the Messieurs of
the Parliament and of the Chambre des Comptes and the Bishop of Paris
meet in a general assembly at the Hôtel de Ville. But the progress of
political events having rendered this vessel unnecessary, nothing came
of all these deliberations.

Louis XII, on his accession to the throne in 1498, resolved to cross
the Alps in his turn, and on his solemn entry into Paris after his
coronation an elaborate machine was contrived to delicately flatter his
pretensions to Genoa and Milan, and appear in the royal procession. This
consisted of an apparatus mounted on wheels, in the form of a terrace,
on which was seen a porcupine, moving all his quills at once, and a
young virgin, habited in Genoese fashion and throned on a seat of
cloth-of-gold _cramoisi_. But unluckily the machine would not function,
and after remaining immovable in one place, finally disappeared "in
great mortification." The Parisians seem never to have lost their
fondness for processions and displays, and were always ready to welcome
a new king with the firm belief that all their griefs would speedily be
remedied under the new régime. As there was a possibility of the widowed
queen, Anne de Bretagne, carrying her rich dower, now returned to her,
out of the kingdom, Louis XII secured a divorce from his wife Jeanne,
third child of Louis XI, and so very plain in countenance that her royal
father could not endure the sight of her. Thus it happened that _la
Bretonne_ made her second solemn entrance into Paris as a newly-wed
queen of France, in 1504; and at her death, ten years later, the king
"during a whole week did nothing but weep."

Her obsequies, at Saint-Denis and Notre-Dame, gave rise to a scandalous
discussion over the possession of all the objects which had figured in
them. The abbot and the monks of Saint-Denis demanded the restitution of
the dais, of the effigy and of the garments of the queen, of the cloth
of gold, of the velvet which had served to decorate the chapel, and of
all the offerings made by the assistants. The nuns of La
Saussaye-lez-Villejuif wished that there should be given them all the
linen of the late queen, body linen and table linen, the ornaments of
gold and of silver, and all the mules, palfreys, horses of state and
others which had drawn the chariots, with all the harness and the
collars. The grand equerry of the queen, Louis de Hangest, pretended,
for his part, that the horses, the canopy, and the cloth of gold all
pertained to him in virtue of his office, and, whilst awaiting the
decision, he insisted that the horses, chariots, and harness should at
least be turned over to him provisionally in order that he might conduct
the ladies and the pages of the late queen. But it was feared that he
would keep them under any conditions. The king-at-arms and the heralds
wanted all the mouldings and all the stuffs of velvet and of silk which
were on the walls of the chapelle ardente; and the chaplains of the
cardinal, the sum of all the offerings made both at Notre-Dame and at
Saint-Denis. The Parliament devoted a week to endeavoring to bring the
disputants into accord, and in the meanwhile ordered an appraisement of
all the horses, carriages, etc., which were confided to the grand
equerry, and all the linen, ornaments, dais, etc., were sequestered and
placed in the hands of Jean du Val, receiver of pledges, and of Ragerin
Le Lieur, merchant bourgeois.

In addition to his grief over his wife's death, the king found himself
very much embarrassed in his finances till his good city of Paris came
to his relief with a donation of twenty thousand livres. He had even
sold his vessels of gold and silver, for the sum of two hundred thousand
livres. Being thus relieved, with the inconstancy of men, he began to
think of another wife, and in September, 1514, the magistrates of the
city went out in state to meet the ambassadors of England who had
arrived to negotiate a match with the Princess Mary, daughter of their
sovereign. For this fickleness (which, however, was partially dictated
by political considerations) Louis XII was destined to pay dearly; he
was fifty-three years of age and his bride was eighteen; to please her,
he changed all his habits of life, and even the hours of his repasts. He
had been in the habit of "dining" at eight o'clock, and he now dined at
noon; he had been accustomed to go to bed at six o'clock in the evening,
and now it was often midnight when he retired. So that he died at the
Palais des Tournelles on the first of the following January, 1515, and
the death-criers, sounding their bells, paraded the streets, calling
aloud: "The good king Louis, father of the people, is dead!"

It was the States-General of the nation, speaking through the
representative of Paris, which had given him this fine name, _Père du
peuple_, and which, by his care for their interests, his economy in the
general administration, his suppression of abuses, he had well deserved.
"The third part of the kingdom," says a contemporary, "was opened to
cultivation in twelve years, and for one important merchant that had
been known in Paris, in Lyons, or in Rouen, there could be found fifty
under Louis XII, who made it more easy to go to Rome, to Naples, or to
London 

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