PANORAMA OF PARIS.

TWENTY CENTURIES
OF PARIS

BY
MABELL S. C. SMITH
ILLUSTRATED
NEW YORK
THOMAS Y. CROWELL COMPANY
PUBLISHERS

Arms of the City of Paris.

Copyright, 1913,
By THOMAS Y. CROWELL COMPANY.
Published October, 1913.

TO
M. P. G.
——
Un rayon de soleil a ses entrées partout.
Sardou

CONTENTS

MAPS AND ILLUSTRATIONS

Map of Paris

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[Largest version. (1.5MB)]

Twenty Centuries of
Paris

CHAPTER I
EARLIEST PARIS

FRANCE has been inhabited since the days when prehistoric man unconsciously told the story of his life through the medium of the household utensils and the implements of war which he left behind him in the caves in which he dwelt, or which his considerate relatives buried with him to make his sojourn easy in the land beyond the grave. From bits of bone, of flint, and of polished stone archæologists have reconstructed the man himself and his activities through the early ages. Of contemporary information, however, there is none until the adventurous peoples of the Mediterranean pushed their way as traders and explorers into the heart of Gaul, and then wrote about their discoveries. The Gauls, they said, were largely Celtic in origin and had displaced an earlier race, the Iberians, whom they had crowded to the southwest. They were brave, loyal, superstitious, and subject to their priests, the Druids. Their dress showed that they had made great advance in knowledge over the cave men, for they wore colored tunics—which meant that they knew how to spin and weave and dye—and brazen helmets and shields and gold and silver girdles—which meant that they could work in metal.

Such industries prove that the nomadic life was over, and, in truth, there were many towns throughout Gaul, some of them of no mean size, furnished with public utilities such as wells and bridges, and surrounded by fields made fertile by irrigation. An independent spirit had developed, too, for in about the year 500 B.C. the chiefs and nobles rebelled against the lay authority of the Druids. Then these chiefs and nobles seem to have ruled “without the consent of the governed,” for Cæsar relates that before he went to Gaul in 58 B.C. the lower classes had rebelled against the upper, and, with the aid of the Druids, had beaten them.

It is from Cæsar, too, that we first learn something about Paris. “Lutetia,” he calls it, “a stronghold of the Parisii,” who were one of the three or four hundred tribes who dwelt in Gaul. Lutetia—“Mudtown” Carlyle translates the name—was not much of a stronghold, for its fortifications could have been nothing more than a stockade encircling the round huts which made up the village occupying an island in the Seine, the present “Cité” (from the Latin civitas), and connected with both banks by bridges. It was only about half a mile long and an eighth of a mile wide. It was large enough and strong enough, however, to serve as a refuge for the tribesmen in time of war. Probably such a haven was not an unusual arrangement. Not far from Paris is another instance in Melun which has grown around the village which the Romans called Melodunum, built in the same way on an island in the river.

In the spring of 53 B.C. Cæsar summoned delegates from all the tribes of Gaul to meet at Lutetia, but the rebellion of the year 52 in which the Parisii joined determined the Roman general to destroy the town and crush the tribe. He sent Labienus with four legions to carry out his plans. The Gauls chose as their leader Camulogenus of the tribe of the Aulerci, an old man, but skilled in warfare. He took advantage of the marsh on the right bank of the river and so stationed his troops as to prevent the approach of the Romans to the little town. Labienus first tried to make a road across the bog by laying down hurdles plastered with clay. This proved too much of an undertaking, so he slipped away “at the third watch” and retraced his steps to Melodunum. There he seized fifty ships which he filled with Roman soldiers and with them threatened the town so effectually that it yielded to him. Then he repaired the bridge, crossed to the left bank, and once more began his march toward Lutetia. When the Lutetians heard of this move from refugees, they burned their town and destroyed its bridges. Labienus put a Roman knight in command of each of the fifty ships which he had captured and ordered them to slip silently down the river for about four miles under cover of darkness. Five steady cohorts he left to guard the camp, and another five he despatched up the river after midnight with instructions to carry their baggage with no attempt at quiet. In the same direction he sent certain small boats whose oars were to meet the water right noisily. He himself led a body of soldiers in the direction which the ships had taken. When the Gauls were informed by their scouts of the seeming division into three bands of the Roman army they, naturally but unwisely, made a like division of their own men. In the battle that ensued—probably near the Ivry of to-day—the Gauls resisted with such courage that very few took refuge in flight, preferring to fall with the valiant Camulogenus. The Gauls left to watch Labienus’s camp tried to aid their fellows when they heard of the battle in progress, but they could not withstand the attack of the victorious Romans, whose cavalry cut down all but the few who managed to escape to the wooded hills.

So it happens, rather humorously, that the earliest written account of Paris is that telling of the destruction which left its site a clean slate upon which the Romans might begin to write its story. For five hundred years they wrote, until the Frankish invasion swept its destructive might across Romanized Gaul.

In five hundred years much may be brought to pass, and the Paris that Sainte Geneviève saved from Attila the Hun (451 A.D.) and in which Clovis established himself (481) was a town vastly different from the stockade-defended hamlet which Labienus set out to destroy. While its position was selected by the Gauls because it could be easily defended, it was evident in later and more peaceful times that the city could be developed into a valuable commercial station. The Seine and its tributaries, the Marne and the Oise, proved highways on which the products of a large district could be carried to the distributing center, Lutetia, whence they could be packed north or south or to the coast provinces over the masterly roads which always made an important feature of the Roman colonizing policy. There are Paris streets to-day which follow these same roads into the country.

Roman civilization made its last stand in Gaul, and Paris became one of the flourishing places which the Romans knew how to encourage. As soon as the strength of the builders permitted, the town ceased to be confined to the island and spread on both sides of the river. A bridge, fortified at the mainland end, connected the island with the right bank and with the road threading its way northward to avoid the marsh whose name (Marais) is still given to a district of the city. Where now on the north shore is the square in front of the Hôtel de Ville there has always been an open place, originally kept free for the landing of merchandise from the river boats. This open place was called the Grève or Strand, and the busy scenes enacted upon it sometimes included quarrels between the masters and the longshoremen. Such a dispute came to be called a grève, the French word to-day for a strike.

Where now the Palais Royal rises on the right bank, a reservoir held water to supply the public baths. Tombs clustered along the roads leading north and east, for cemeteries were not allowed within Roman cities. Otherwise the north side of the river with its unwholesome marsh was but scantily populated.

Far different was the southern or left bank, sloping pleasantly to the Seine from Mons

Lutetia under the Romans.

Lucotetius. This hill is now known as Mont Sainte Geneviève and is crowned by the church, Saint Étienne-du-Mont, that holds her tomb, and by the Pantheon, long dedicated to her, but now a secular building. This southern district was drained by the little stream, Bièvre, whose waters in later times were believed to hold some chemical properties which accounted for the brilliancy of the tapestries made in the Gobelins factory situated on its banks. Fields, fruitful in vines and olive trees, clustered around villas which the Romans knew well how to build for comfort and beauty, and which the conquered Gauls were not slow to adopt, modifying the form to their needs as they modified the Roman dress, covering with the graceful toga the business-like garments of older Gaul.

The later emperors came often to Lutetia. They, too, saw the beauty of the river’s left bank connected with the Cité by a fortified bridge. Some one of them, probably Constantius Chlorus, built a palace of majestic size with gardens sweeping to the river bank, and here in Lucotecia, Lutetia’s suburb, Constantine the Great and his two sons lived when they visited this part of Gaul. Constantine’s nephew, Julian, called the Apostate because of his adherence to the old philosophies, spent parts of three years here.

“I was in winter quarters,” he wrote, “in my dear Lutetia, which is situated in the middle of a river on an island of moderate size joined to the mainland by two bridges. The winter is less severe here than elsewhere, perhaps because of the gentle sea breezes which reach Lutetia, the distance of this city from the sea being only nine hundred stadia. This part of the country has excellent vineyards, and the people cultivate fig-trees which they protect against the winter’s cold by coverings of straw.”

In the huge palace where Julian found himself so happy his physician, Oribasius, prepared an edition of the works of Galen, the first book published in Paris; and here it was—or perhaps in the palace on the Cité—that in 361 the rebellious Roman soldiers proclaimed Julian as their emperor. Of the palace there is left to-day what was probably but a small part of the original building, but which is, in reality, a section of no small size. It was that portion of the structure which contained the baths, and it gave its name to the building—Palais des Thermes (Palace of the Baths). One room, preserved in fair condition and showing the enduring Roman brick and stone-work, is sixty-five feet long and thirty-seven feet wide and springs to a vaulted height of fifty-nine feet. It is used as a museum of Gallo-Roman remains. The baths were supplied with water by an aqueduct some eleven miles in length, fragments of which have been found at various parts of its course. At Arcueil, a town three miles from Paris, named from the Latin word arculus, a little arch, there still remain parts of two arches whose small stones are held by the extraordinarily tenacious Roman cement and are varied by occasional thin, horizontal layers of red tiles. At present they are built into the walls of a château which has recently been bequeathed to the town for an old men’s home.

Somewhere south of the palace and not far from it was a garrison to protect the suburb and the Cité from southern invasion. That it was not greatly needed during this peaceful and prosperous period seems proved by the fact that Lutetia’s amusement ground was not within its easy reach, but on the eastern slope of Mons Lucotetius. Here at some time during the Roman occupation, perhaps during the second or third century, an amphitheater was built, and here emperors and generals and merchants, Romans and Gauls, gazed upon the pageants and contests of the arena. Christianity wrought a milder mood in her believers and even before the invasion of the Franks the stone seats of the ellipse had been converted to other uses. Enough was discovered, however, some thirty

INTERIOR OF THE ROMAN PALAIS DES THERMES.

AMPHITHEATER OF LUTETIA AT PRESENT TIME.

years ago to permit an adequate idea of the original appearance.

To Julian has been attributed the rebuilding of the Cité, and excavations at different points have unearthed remains unmistakably of Roman workmanship, which show that the island was completely surrounded by a wall. Probably some of the stones of the amphitheater went into it. This fortification has been related to the fourth century, and it is known that on the spot in the Cité where the Palais de Justice now houses the law courts, an administrative building of some kind has stood since this same early date. One of Julian’s successors, Maximus, erected a triumphal arch near the cathedral in 383, and it is probable that other pretentious structures justified the erection of the protecting wall.

The cathedral was a church dedicated to Saint Étienne, modest as compared with its medieval successor, Notre Dame, whose sacristy is placed on the same spot, yet showing that concentration of the arts in their expression of religious spirit which has made the churches of Europe at once the treasure-house of the student and the devotee, the inspiration of the poet, and the joy of the lover of color and of line. Both of these Christian churches have stood on ground already dedicated to religion, for under the choir of Notre Dame there was discovered in 1711 a pagan altar, now the chief relic of the museum in the Thermes. The inscription on the stone places it in the reign of the emperor Tiberius (14-37 A.D.), the successor of the great Augustus. Its inscription reads: “When Tiberius was emperor the Parisian Watermen publicly raised this altar to Jupiter, best and greatest.”

The Nautæ Stone.

These Watermen (Nautae) seem from early days to have been an important guild, first as carriers of merchandise and later as an administrative body. In the twelfth century the band was called the Brotherhood of Water Merchants, and its head the Provost of the Water Merchants, a name given in shortened form—Provost of the Merchants—to the first magistrate of the city up to the time of the Revolution at the end of the eighteenth century. Even to-day such of the duties of the Prefect of the Seine as apply not to the Department of the Seine but to the city of Paris alone are comparable to those of the Provost of the Merchants. From the seal of the Nautae, a boat, has developed the present coat of arms of the City of Paris.

It was about the middle of the third century that the altar to greatest Jupiter began to be deserted by its worshipers, for it was then that Saint Denis came to Paris to preach the new religion, and with his coming and the Emperor Constantine’s conversion Christian churches began to be built. Even the martyrdom of Saint Denis, who, according to Gregory of Tours, “ended his earthly life by the sword,” was no check to believers. Legend has it that his head was stricken off on Montmartre, the hill towering above Paris on the north, and to-day crowned by the pearl-white dome of the basilica of the Sacré Coeur gleaming, mysterious, through the city’s eternal haze. The hill’s name has been said to mean “Mount of Mars,” because of a pagan altar raised upon its summit, or “Mount of the Martyr,” referring to the death of Saint Denis. Either derivation may be defended, and neither contradicts the story that the holy Bishop of Paris, decapitated, picked up his head and carried it for several miles before a kindly-disposed woman offered him burial. Over his remains a chapel was raised, restored about two centuries later by Sainte Geneviève, and replaced in 630 by the basilica which Dagobert I (602-638) erected to house fittingly that most holy relic, the head of the saint. The existing church was begun about five hundred years later by Suger, the minister of Louis VI who adopted the oriflamme of Saint Denis as the royal standard of France. The flag hung above the altar and was used only when the king went into battle himself. Since the English victory on the field of Agincourt (1415) it has not left the church. The banner (in replica) stands to-day in the choir behind and to the left of the high altar. Throughout the church are the tombs of the Kings of France from Dagobert to Louis XVIII—twelve centuries of royal bones.

The canonization of Martin, bishop of Tours, the soldier saint who did not hesitate to divide his cloak with the shivering poor, received early recognition in Paris, where, indeed, he has always been popular. In what was in Roman days the country but is now well within the city limits a chapel was reared in his honor on the spot where he stopped to cure a leper when he was on his way to Paris. In the eleventh century it was replaced by the Priory of Saint Martin-des-Champs, which developed into one of the huge monastic establishments which were each a little world in itself during the middle ages. Another chapel to Saint Martin rose at the mainland end of the bridge leading from the island to the right bank.

It was a fair and prosperous city that the world conquerors had nursed beside the Seine; it remained for time to prove whether its five centuries of growth had made it strong and sound or whether its heart was rotten and its roots uncertain of their hold.

CHAPTER II
MEROVINGIAN PARIS

THE reading of Cæsar’s “Commentaries” makes us know that the Gauls with whom he contended were worthy opponents, ingenious in planning warfare and enthusiastic in fighting. Even the trained Roman legions had to work for their victories. Granting possible exaggeration, which is a sore temptation to a conqueror, eager to magnify the difficulties of his conquest, it is nevertheless clear that a radical change had transformed these fierce Gauls and irresistible Romans of a half century before Christ when, five hundred years later, a band of less than 10,000 “barbarians”, led by Clovis, swept across a comparatively unresisting Gaul.

What had happened in Gaul was what had happened in other parts of the Roman Empire. Money had concentrated in the hands of an insatiable few. To supply them and the government every stratum of society was squeezed of its smallest coin, until good men of middle-class position were willing to sell themselves into slavery to avoid the insistent demands of self-seeking tax collectors, and the government was meanly willing to accept the sacrifice because the supply of slaves was not being kept up since the victorious eagles had ceased to perch upon Rome’s banner.

In Paris conditions were not different from those in other parts of the province. The town was good to look upon with handsome Roman buildings, and it was ordered with due respect to the laws for whose making Rome had undoubted genius; but beneath this fair outside there shivered the soul of the dependent grown cowardly from abuse, lacking loyalty for what was unworthy of loyalty. The Gauls, who had adopted the language and manners of their conquerors, had become weak from overmuch reliance on the stronger power; the Romans had softened during years of peace. So it happened that when the barbarians from the north and east threatened Gaul they were bought off with gifts of land, and when, in 451, Attila, the Scourge of God, led into the north his fierce and hideous Huns whose only joy was bloodshed, the people of Paris prepared themselves for flight when he was still a long way off.

For every vital crisis in the life of the individual there is given a counterbalancing power of endurance; to groups this power is taught by the man or woman whom the circumstances develop as a leader. In this emergency, when the dreaded shadow of the hawklike Hun fluttered the citizens, and they were making preparations for deserting the town and taking into hiding such of their goods and chattels as they could, the leader developed in the unexpected form of a woman—Sainte Geneviève. Some say that Geneviève was, like Jeanne Darc a thousand years later, a peasant girl. Saint Germain of Auxerre, the story goes, on his way to “quenche an heresye” across the Channel, chanced to visit Nanterre where his prophetic eye espied the divine spirit in the little maid and his holy hand sealed her unto God. Another version insists that Geneviève belonged to a prominent family in Paris and that her family’s influence accounted for her sway over the people.

For sway them she did. At her bidding the women of the city fasted and fell on their knees and assailed God with prayer. Nearer and nearer came the foe, and the unbelieving reviled the maiden; but Saint Germain reproached them for their lack of faith and the miracle came to pass—the “tyrantes approachyd not parys.”

All quarrels were lost in the apprehension of this attack of a common enemy, and by the united effort of Gauls and Romans, of Burgundians, Visigoths and Franks, the dreaded Attila was defeated near Châlons in a battle so determined that the very ghosts of the slain, it was declared, continued the fight.

Freed of this menace to the whole country the victorious tribes again fell to quarreling among themselves. The Franks proved sturdiest and most persistent. Descended from Pharamond, who, perhaps, was legendary, their king, Mérovée, had led them against Attila. Now his son, Childéric, attacked Paris. Again Geneviève rescued her townsmen from famine, herself embarking upon the Seine, which probably was beset by the enemy along the banks, and returning with a boatload of provisions which, by miraculous multiplication, revictualed the whole hungry and despairing garrison.

Childéric’s son, Clovis, leading about 8000 men, in 481 made himself king of northern France with Paris as his capital, thus establishing the line of monarchs who called themselves Merovingians. “Paris,” he wrote in 500 A.D., “is a brilliant queen over other cities; a royal city, the seat and head of the empire of the Gauls. With Paris safe the realm has nothing to fear.”

Clovis had married an orthodox Catholic wife, Clotilde, who was eager for his conversion. Her arguments are said to have been far from gentle, but they seem to have been suited to her husband’s nature, for he was almost persuaded to make the great change at the time of the birth of his eldest child. The baby died within the week, however, and the king looked upon his loss as an act of vengeance on the part of his deserted gods. When the second child recovered from a serious illness he was convinced that Clotilde’s intercessions had saved its life, and again he inclined toward Christianity. An incident determined his acceptance of his wife’s faith. In the battle of Tolbiac against the Germans Clovis begged the aid of “the God of the Christians” to determine in his favor a wavering victory. He won the fight, and it is easy to believe the joy of Sainte Geneviève, when the monarch was baptized in the cathedral at Rheims. He seems to have been of simple mind. The fittings and the ceremonies of the vast church touched his spirit to submission. “Is not this the kingdom of heaven you promised me?” he asked of the bishop. Again, when he listened to the story of the crucifixion, he is said to have cried with an elemental desire for vengeance, “Oh, had I been there with my Franks I would have avenged the Christ!”

Sainte Geneviève died in 509 and the citizens of grateful Paris over which she had watched in wise tenderness for fourscore years, made her their patron saint. The hill that had been known as Mons Lucotetius they called Mont Sainte Geneviève, and on it they built a chapel to honor and protect her grave. Clovis replaced the little oratory by a church as long as the mighty swing of his battle-axe, dedicated to Saint Peter and Saint Paul and serving as the abbey church of a religious establishment which bore Sainte Geneviève’s name. Except for a dormitory and refectory this monastery was torn down in the middle of the eighteenth century to give place to a new church of Sainte Geneviève, secularized to-day and known as the Pantheon. The abbey church, built and rebuilt, was destroyed during the Revolution, the tower (called the Tower of Clovis, but really belonging to a later period) being all that is left of these historic structures. The reaction against religion in those turbulent revolutionary years made it no sacrilege to burn the good saint’s bones on the Grève, but some of the devoted preserved the ashes which rest now in a stone sarcophagus, elaborately canopied, in the neighboring church of Saint Étienne-du-Mont built in the twelfth century as a church for the dependents of the Abbey.

The comparatively peaceful and prosperous Roman period of five hundred years was followed by five centuries of strife and disaster at the hands of the northern tribes. The Roman Empire had found in Gaul the last stronghold of its civilization. There were large cities, fine buildings, public utilities, institutions of learning. To the barbarians, a youthful race at the destructive stage, these represented but so many things to be destroyed. Terrible and repeated onslaughts ousted the Romans, and then the victors became embroiled with new tribes who sought to drive them out. Palaces and houses were destroyed, fields and vineyards were laid waste. Paris, the stronghold of the early Merovingians, suffered less than the other important towns of Gaul, but the Franks had no standards of fair living, and they did not build up where time or their own ferocity had cast down. Tottering walls were bolstered with rough buttresses, new dwellings were square hovels of the same heavy stonework, farming languished, commerce died.

The successors of Clovis for one hundred and fifty years tricked their wives, murdered their rivals, and assassinated their nearest of kin if they stood in their way. Clovis divided his kingdom among his four sons. One of them was killed in battle soon after and left his three children to the care of their grandmother, Clotilde, with whom they lived in the great palace on the left bank. Just like the wicked uncles in many a fairy tale two of Clovis’s surviving sons obtained possession of the little boys by stratagem and took them away to the palace on the Cité. Then they sent to Clotilde a messenger who bade her choose between the shears and the sword—the shears which should clip the children’s locks and thereby sever their claims to the throne and send them into the Church, and the sword of death. In a passion of indignation Clotilde exclaimed that she would rather see them dead than shorn. Claiming this cry as their authorization the two men set about the murder of their nephews. Childebert, king of Paris, proved somewhat less brutal than his brother (he loved flowers enough to plant a garden at the Roman palace) and would have saved the children—they were hardly more than babies—but Clotaire stabbed two of them with his own hand. Then he married their mother. The third boy escaped, came under the tutelage of Saint Séverin and entered a Benedictine monastery. When he was a man grown he established a religious house at a spot a few miles from Paris called Saint Cloud from his name, Clodoald. Here, on a height above the river, stood the château where Napoleon effected the coup d’ état that made him First Consul, and whence Charles X issued the decrees that brought about the Revolution of 1830. The building was burned during the troubles of 1870, but the park with its fine allées of trees and its fountains is one of the playgrounds of modern Paris.

Clotaire had done away with the possible rivalry of his nephews but he had a bitter enemy in his brother Thierry. This amiable relative plotted his assassination. He invited him to a feast and stationed his desperadoes behind a curtain whence they should spring out upon their victim. Some friend of Clotaire’s, chancing to pass by, noticed below this apparently innocent screen a row of feet unaccounted for, and guessed the project of their owners. Warned of his danger Clotaire came amply guarded and caused his brother extreme annoyance by his evident knowledge of his plan and its consequent frustration. Thierry gave him a silver dish by way of souvenir of this pleasant occasion, but he repented him of this generosity as soon as Clotaire was out of sight and sent his son to replevin the gift.

One of Clotaire’s sons, Chilpéric I (who died in 584) gave his daughter in marriage to the son of the king of the Visigoths in Spain. A great train came to Paris to fetch the bride, and the appearance of these rough Goths and the thought of her approaching separation from her parents and friends so afflicted the young girl that her father determined to secure companionship for her. He commanded some chosen young people—girls and youths of her own age—and also some entire families to go with her into Spain. So great was the opposition to this high-handed proceeding that it became necessary forcibly to seize the unwilling recipients of the honor in order to be sure of their presence when the expedition started. Some of those who were to be separated from their kindred committed suicide in despair over their banishment. “In Paris there reigned a desolation like Egypt,” says sympathetic Gregory of Tours. Robbed of their children the rich Parisians found the country also robbed of gold and silver vessels and of handsome raiment, for the queen heaped into her daughter’s bridal coffers the treasures that she had obtained from the nobles in the course of years under the guise of revenue. So loath were the princess’s attendants to follow her fortunes and so lacking were they in loyalty that her retinue on arriving in Spain was lessened not only by the daily desertions of all who could manage to escape, but by the defection in a body of no less than fifty men.

Frédégonde, the bride’s mother, was a woman of forceful will and of unbridled passions. The list of deaths for which she was responsible reads like a roster of the royal family. Although of low birth she attracted the attention of the king, Chilpéric, and induced him to put aside his wife, Audovère. Chilpéric then married Galsuinthe, sister of Brunehaut, wife of his brother Sigebert. Frédégonde soon compassed Galsuinthe’s death and then achieved her ambition and became queen herself. Brunehaut naturally was indignant as well as sorrowful at her sister’s death, clearly the work of an assassin. She urged her husband to vengeance and he declared war against Chilpéric. His activity was not of long duration, however, for he, too, fell a victim to Frédégonde’s ferocity. Brunehaut saved her life only by claiming the asylum of the cathedral of Paris. Not long after she married Mérovée, a son of Chilpéric and Audovère. Then Frédégonde disposed of her by inducing Sigebert’s subjects to claim their queen and by insisting that Chilpéric should deliver her over to them. Mérovée, at her command, was shorn and imprisoned and hounded until he sought death at the hands of a servant. His brother was stabbed. Their mother, Audovère, was not safe even in the cloister, for she was murdered in her retreat. Chilpéric himself was the next victim, killed by a knife-thrust as he returned from the chase. He was succeeded by an infant son, Clotaire II (613-628), and Frédégonde spent the rest of her life in alternations of affectionately fierce devotion to his interests and in scheming against the authority of his guardians.

Brunehaut outlived her enemy, Frédégonde, by many years and finally met her death at the order of Frédégonde’s son. After a stormy career during which she compassed much good for the subjects of her son and grandsons and earned her share of hatred from the nobles whom she opposed, she was captured by Clotaire. Her extreme age—she was eighty—did not save her from a brutal end. She was stripped and displayed to his army, then bound by a foot, an arm and her hair to a wild horse which kicked her to death. This hideous deed was done in Paris where now the rue Saint Honoré crosses the rue de l’Arbre Sec, and not far from the site of the house wherein Admiral Coligny was slain, the first victim of the Massacre of Saint Bartholomew.

Of all the Merovingian kings only Dagobert I (628-638), son of Clotaire II, proved himself a man of strength, incongruously fighting and praying, massacring captives and building churches, living a vicious life in private and governing with justice and intelligence. “Great king Dagobert” he was called, and he was regarded impartially as a “jolly good fellow” and as a saint. He lived in the palace on the Cité, and he rebuilt the abbey of Saint Denis, invited distant merchants to visit Gaul, dealt out justice to poor and rich alike in unconventional and hearty fashion, and hammered his enemies with the same vigor and enthusiasm.

In the century following his the Merovingian line degenerated into a race of “Rois Fainéants” (“Do-nothing Kings”), dissolute, lazy, leaving the task of government to their Mayors of the Palace while they rolled slothfully in ox-carts from the debaucheries of one country house to the coarse pleasures of another.

The only upbuilding accomplished during the Merovingian two centuries and a half was the establishment of churches and religious houses. The Frank was not aggressive in the less active relations of his duties as a victor. He was content to learn the language of the conquered race and the mysticism of religion spoke to him winningly. Throughout the years when nothing that fell was restored and the hand was busy striking, at least one kind of constructive impulse was manifest when Clovis built the church in which he was buried on Mons Lucotetius, when his son, Childebert, reared an abbey on the south bank to protect the tunic of Saint Vincent, when on the north bank a church was dedicated to the same saint and another to Saint Laurent, while the south side was further enriched by edifices sacred to Saint Julien and to Saint Séverin, the tutor of Clodoald. It is not the original buildings that we see on these sites to-day, but it is a not uninteresting phase of the French spirit that has reared one structure after another upon ground once consecrated, so that a church stands to-day where a church stood fifteen hundred years ago.

The story of the foundation of the church of Saint Vincent is interesting from several points of view. Clovis divided his possessions among his four sons, giving Paris to Childebert. Childebert had no notion of staying cooped up in this northern town, and he went as far afield as Saragossa in search of war. During the course of his siege of that city he beheld its citizens marching about bearing what seemed to be a relic of especial sanctity. It proved to be the cloak of Saint Vincent in which they were trusting to save them from their assailants. It did not betray their trust, for Childebert became filled with eagerness to possess a relic which could inspire such confidence, and offered to raise the siege if they would give him the tunic. When he returned to Paris Saint Germain of Autun persuaded him to build a church for its protection and to establish an abbey whose members should make it their first duty to pay honor to the relic. This abbey was called later Saint Germain-des-Prés, the name which the abbey church bears to-day. It stands no longer in the meadows, but raises its square Merovingian tower above one of the busiest parts of Paris. Except for this tower the church was burned in the ninth century, but it was rebuilt in the eleventh and twelfth centuries and the nave with its semi-circular arches is one of the few remaining examples in the city of the Romanesque architecture of which this was a characteristic. The choir shows in its arches and windows the hand of a later builder who was inclining toward the pointed Gothic.

The Merovingian kings were buried here. After the founding of Saint Denis the royal remains were removed to that abbey church.

The north bank church of Saint Vincent also received the name of Saint Germain, but this was to honor Saint Germain l’Auxerrois, the friend of Sainte Geneviève. This early edifice also was destroyed, but was rebuilt by Robert the Pious, and the later building held the bell which rang for the massacre of Saint Bartholomew a thousand years later.

These churches and monasteries were the means of preserving whatever of learning persisted through this period of return to primitive living. Every one of them was a center of information, and every one of them taught freely what it knew of agriculture and of the homely arts. Further the Church was thoroughly democratic. A bishop’s miter lay in every student’s portfolio, as a marshal’s baton hid in the knapsack of each one of Napoleon’s soldiers.

SAINT GERMAIN DES PRÉS.

Of larger government, however, the bishops had small knowledge, and Paris, left to their guidance while the kings roamed abroad, lost her high prestige. She did not regain it under the next dynasty.

CHAPTER III
CARLOVINGIAN PARIS

WHILE the nominal kings were losing their powers through inaction, activity was developing a race of strong rulers in the Mayors of the Palace—originally the royal stewards. Pépin d’Héristal (who died in 714) is accounted the founder of the family which was to oust the Sluggard Kings from the throne that they disgraced. Pépin’s son, Charles Martel—the Hammer—(715-741) stayed the advance of the Saracens in the fiercely fought battle at Tours where he earned not only his nickname but the gratitude of the Christian world, threatened by the Mohammedan invasion. Charles’s son, Pépin le Bref (752-768), thought that the time had come when the achievements of the Mayors of the Palace should receive recognition—when the king in fact should be the king in name. He appealed to Pope Zachary to sanction his taking the title. The pope was glad of the support of the Franks, and approved. Childéric III became the last of the Merovingian line when he was shorn of the long locks which symbolized his regal strength, and Pépin, anointed king in his stead, became the first of those monarchs who have been called Carolingians or Carlovingians from the name of his son, Charlemagne (Carolus Magnus, Charles the Great.)

Pépin was anointed first at Soissons by the Bishop of Mayence who used in the ceremony the flask from which Saint Rémi had anointed Clovis. Later the new king was anointed again, this time at Saint Denis, by Zachary’s successor, Stephen III, who was the first pope to visit Paris. The Frankish nobles paid for the honor to their city by being forced by the Holy Father to swear allegiance to Pépin and his sons.

There was much in Paris to interest the pope. The Cité was rich in churches and religious establishments. The cathedral now was a church dedicated to Notre Dame, built by Childebert in gratitude for a recovery from illness. It stood beside the one-time cathedral dedicated to Saint Étienne; smaller churches honored Saint Gervais, Saint Nicholas and Saint Michel. Eloy, the jovial goldsmith saint, was the protector of a convent raised to his name. Saint Landry, a bishop of Paris in the seventh century, had founded a hospital on the very spot where Saint Louis and his mother, Blanche of Castile, were to build the Hôtel Dieu in the thirteenth century, and but the width of the present square from the new Hôtel Dieu, built since the Third Republic came into being. Together with religion and good works justice held sway on the island. In the Roman palace judges interpreted the laws gathered and summarized by Dagobert. In a building near by whose site is covered by the enlarged palace was housed the first organ known in Europe, a gift to Pépin. So mysterious seemed its working that a woman is said to have fallen dead when she heard it.

On the Cité dwelt the merchants, too, for the right bank of the river had not yet become the business section of Paris, although the Grève always was busy with the loading and unloading of boats. The shops in the Cité held stocks of rich stuffs and of gold and silver vessels and ornaments, chiefly of home manufacture, for the trade that had grown up in Gallo-Roman days was rapidly dying out in the unsympathetic atmosphere of constant strife.

Back from the river on the right bank were monasteries in whose great size the papal visitor must have delighted as he did in the establishment dedicated to the patron saint of Paris on the hill now called by her name, the Mont Sainte Geneviève, and in the abbey of Saint Germain-des-Prés, rich in lands and serfs and so gorgeous with Spanish booty that its church was called Saint Germain-le-Doré—The Gilded.

Charlemagne (768-814), son of Pépin le Bref, saw a splendid vision of a united Gaul, but his plan was not suited to a period when the German belief in the might of the strong-armed individual was laying the foundations of the feudal system. He himself was German and established his capital not at Paris, but nearer the German boundary, where he felt more at home. He visited Paris, however, lending the splendor of his presence to the services of dedication which marked the completion of the church of Saint Denis. Under the emperor’s direction his adviser, Alcuin of York, established in Paris the first of those schools which have made the city through the centuries one of the chief educational centers of the world. Charlemagne himself never learned to write, it is said, but his intelligence appreciated the value of learning and he first offered to the students of Europe the hospitality which Paris has given them with the utmost generosity ever since. To-day foreign students are admitted to the University of France on exactly the same terms as native students.

An equestrian statue of the Emperor, his horse led by Roland and Oliver, stands before the cathedral of Notre Dame.

Not only was Charlemagne’s kingdom divided after his death, but his strength as well seemed to have shared the shattering. His descendants were men of small force. Louis le Débonnaire, (814-840) succeeded the great king. Louis’ three sons, Lothair, Louis, and Charles the Bald divided the vast possessions into three parts.

The oath by which Louis pledged himself to support Charles against Lothair has an especial interest for scholars because it is the oldest known example of the Romance tongue which succeeded the Low Latin of the Gallo-Romans. The oath was given at Strasburg, the armies of Louis and Charles witnessing, in March, 842.

The weakness of Charlemagne’s successors helped the growth in power of the individual nobles. The feudal system developed without check. Families made themselves great by their fighting strength. Dukes and counts held sway without hindrance in their own dominions. Much as this added to their importance it was a disadvantage to them when there was need for concerted action against an enemy. Once Charlemagne saw the piratical crafts of the Northmen enter one of his harbors and he prophesied that they would bring misfortune to his people when he was no longer living to guard them. His prophecy came true, and when the sea robbers penetrated into the country by way of the big northern rivers and attacked the cities on the Seine and the Loire, sacking the churches and carrying away the riches of the monasteries, there was no concerted action among the nobles, and destruction and loss went on little hindered by the inadequate efforts of this or that feudal lord. Paris itself was pillaged more than once, and the abbeys of Saint Denis and Saint Germain-des-Prés paid unwilling tribute to the boldness of the invaders.

Charlemagne’s grandsons were not of the mettle to deal sharply with the Northmen. Charles the Bald preferred diplomacy to fighting. His nephew, Charles the Fat, once more united the great king’s possessions, but he was no warrior and when the terrible foes appeared in the Seine he was not ashamed to buy them off. Again and again they came, each time ravaging more fiercely, each time approaching nearer and nearer to Paris which they now threatened to destroy. It was in 885 that Rollo or Rolf, called the Ganger or Walker, because he was so huge that no horse could carry him, led a persistent band before whom the Parisians abandoned their suburbs and withdrew behind the walls of the Cité. They fortified the bridges leading to the northern and southern banks, and under their protection sustained a siege of a year and a half. Abbo, one of the monks of the monastery of Saint Germain-des-Prés, has told us about it in a narrative poem of some 1,200 lines. It all sounds as if the days of Cæsar had come again. The Northmen used machines for hurling weapons and fireballs into the city, and floated fireboats down the river to destroy the bridges. The Parisians retaliated from the wall and the towers. The leaders were Eudes, count of Paris and of the district around the city, and Gozlin, bishop of Paris, both of whom fought manfully, and also took intelligent care to foster the courage of their people. Not a day passed without fighting, and although success usually rested with the practised Northmen the Parisians did not become discouraged or demoralized. The most dramatic episode of the siege came at a time when the swollen Seine swept away the Petit Pont leading to the southern bank, and cut off from their friends the defenders of the Petit Châtelet on the mainland. The garrison numbered but a dozen men and they fought with superb courage until every one of them was killed.

Abbo’s story tells of sorties to secure food, of negotiations that fell through, of a journey made by Eudes to seek help from the Emperor and of the suspicion of treachery that his long absence cast upon him until he banished it by cutting his way through his foes into the town again. His return heartened the besieged, but the besiegers were not disheartened. Hot weather lowered the Seine and an attacking party found footing outside the walls of the island and built a fire against one of the gates. Then in truth the very saints were called on to give aid. Holy Sainte Geneviève’s body had been in some way brought into the Cité from its resting place on the southern hill, and now it was carried about the town that she had succored three centuries before. The trusting declared that they saw Saint Germain in spirit-guise upon the wall encouraging the defenders.

At last Charles appeared upon the hill of Montmartre, but while the plucky fighters in the beleaguered city were preparing to go forth to meet him they learned that once again he had bought off the invading army.

The fat king was deposed and died soon after and again the regal possessions were divided. Paris and its surroundings, the Île de France, fell (887) to Eudes, the candidate of a party of independent nobles who admired his fine work in the defense of the city.

The end of the siege did not mean the end of the new king’s troubles with Rollo. That sturdy opponent never ceased his fighting though his invasions became in time not ravages but reasonably ordered campaigns, since he did not destroy what he gained, and sometimes even repaired the damage he had done. Fortune was impartial. Now Rollo defeated Eudes, now Eudes defeated Rollo. The king’s most famous success was at Montfaucon, then northeast of Paris, but now within the fortifications. For five hundred years before the Revolution there stood on this spot a gibbet three stories high on which one hundred and twenty criminals could be hung at once. The man who built it was one of its victims.

Loyalty to the royal family led to the restoration of the Carlovingian line after the death of Eudes. Charles, called the Simple, a youth of nineteen, was set upon the throne and found himself faced at once by the problem of crushing or checking the perpetual invasion. When no solution had been found after thirteen years the king attempted conciliation. He offered Rollo his daughter in marriage and a considerable piece of territory provided that the rover should acknowledge himself Charles’s vassal and should become a Christian. Rollo considered this proposition for a period of three months and then consented to parley with the king over details. They went with their followers to a town not far from Paris where they ranged themselves on opposite sides of a stream and communicated by messenger. Rollo seems to have made no difficulty on the subject of his bride or of his religion, but he was fastidious as to the land he should receive. No one knew better than he the character and condition of northern France, and he rejected one proposed section after another on the plea of its being too swampy or too close to the sea or—brazenly enough—too seriously hurt by the harrying of the Northmen! When at last he deigned to accept what came to be called Normandy a further difficulty arose because he refused to acknowledge his vassalship by kneeling before the king and kissing his foot. He had never bent the knee to any one, he said, and he never would. He was willing to do it vicariously, however, and he directed one of his followers to offer the feudal salute. But his proxy had been trained in the same school. Stooping suddenly he seized Charles’s foot and raised it to his lips, oversetting the king and provoking bursts of laughter from the Northmen and of indignation from the Franks.

Charles found it prudent to swallow his rage and he was rewarded by gaining an admirable colony. The Northmen or Normans became excellent settlers and their coming invigorated a people whose feeble monarchs had represented only too well their own characteristics. It was largely through this vigorous northern influence that, when a break occurred in the Carlovingian line, Hugh Capet, duke of France and count of Paris, a descendant of Eudes’ brother Robert, was elevated (987) by the barons to the throne which his descendants in the direct line occupied for some three hundred years. The family never has died out. Louis XVI in prison was called “Citizen Capet;” the duke of Orleans, pretender to the non-existent French throne, is a twentieth century representative.

The tenth century found Paris reduced to practically its size when Cæsar sent Labienus to attack it. The Northmen had destroyed the faubourgs on the once flourishing left bank, and it was only by degrees that the abbeys of Sainte Geneviève and of Saint Germain-des-Prés replaced their buildings to meet the needs of the population slowly growing around them once more.

The northern bank was even more forlorn, with but a chapel or two to lighten its waste places, and an insignificant blockhouse, perhaps built by the Northmen, where to-day the Louvre stands magnificent.

Packed into the Cité were the houses and the public buildings of such population as the wars had left. A street led across the island from north to south, connecting the two bridges; another from east to west between the cathedral and the palace. Around the open square made by their crossing clustered the shops and markets. Wooden dwellings filled every alley and even crouched against the huge encircling wall. Nobles in armor, their servitors in leather, ecclesiastics with mail beneath their robes, merchants in more peaceful guise, peasants in walking trim—all these carried on the every-day life of this city which is seemingly immortal since fire and sword and flood have laid it low repeatedly but only for such brief time as it takes for it to grow again.

CHAPTER IV
PARIS OF THE EARLY CAPETIANS

NEVER in all its many troubled days has France been more in need of a wise head and a steady hand than it was when in 987 the lords gave to Hugh Capet the name of King of France. He was already Count of Paris and Duke of France, that is, of the Île de France, the district around Paris. When he was chosen king the title meant only that a few powerful nobles promised him their fidelity. Back of this insignificant fact, however, loomed the idea of kingship remembered from the Roman days of centralized power. Combined with this idea was the governing principle of the new feudalism which emphasized the duty of every man to be loyal to his superior with obedience and support, to his inferior with protection. Thus the title of king meant much or little in proportion as the holders of great possessions lived up to their oaths of allegiance. The weakness of the royal person was the foundation weakness of the feudal system which

France at Time of Hugh Capet.

(At the dates indicated the provinces came under the French crown)

nominally linked the whole of society in an inter-dependent chain, but really fostered the strength of the individual.

Under such conditions it was only the man of unusual force who could maintain himself at a pitch of power greater than that of subordinates who were his equals in all but name. Hugh Capet proved himself such a man, fighting, cajoling, buying his way through a reign of constant disturbance, but strong enough at its end to leave his crown to his son without opposition from the nobles.

A medieval tradition had it that Hugh was the son of a butcher of Paris. A fourteenth century chanson called “Hugh the Butcher” encouraged the bourgeois to believe in the possibility of a like elevation. Dante refers to the story in the “Divine Comedy.” He hears a shade on the Fifth Ledge of Purgatory say: “I was the root of the evil plant which so overshadows all the Christian land that good fruit is rarely plucked therefrom.... Yonder I was called Hugh Capet: of me are born the Philips and the Lewises by whom of late times France is ruled. I was the son of a butcher of Paris. When the ancient kings had all died out, save one who had assumed the gray garb, I found me with the bridle of the government of the realm fast in my hands.”

Here follows a recital of wicked deeds done by Hugh’s descendants by reason of avarice, in the midst of which is the apostrophe, “O Avarice, what more canst thou do with us since thou hast so drawn thy race unto thyself that it cares not for its own flesh?”

There is no reason to suppose that the tradition concerning Hugh’s birth rested on fact. His descent from Robert the Strong was direct and he himself was the worthy head of a family that had given to the throne of France one titled and two untitled kings.

The son who followed Hugh was Robert the Pious (996-1031) and he and his successors for a hundred and fifty years labored perseveringly toward that centralization of power in the monarch which came to definite realization in the reign of Philip Augustus (1180-1223), and to establishment under the single-hearted rule of Louis IX, the Saint (1226-1270).

Within three centuries after the accession of the new dynasty Paris attained to the position which she has held ever since—as the head of the nation, leading by virtue of her thought and will, and as the heart of the people, beating with impulses of generosity and love and passion. With Hugh Capet himself her stability began, for he was the first king to make the city his permanent home. The palace at the western end of the Cité had been strengthened by Eudes who made of it a square fortress with towers. Here Hugh lived when he was not in the field suppressing the uprisings of the nobles who had elected him. That they were of a spirit so independent as to need a constant curb is to be guessed from a conversation reported to have occurred between Hugh and Adelbert, one of the great lords. “Have a care,” warned Hugh. “Who made you count?” “Who made you king?” instantly retorted the lord. Perhaps it was a wish not to seem to glory over his subjects that impelled Hugh never to wear his crown after the occasion of his coronation. By having his son Robert crowned at the same time he helped secure the stability of his line.

To the west of the palace Hugh planted a garden, and he also added stables, whose care was entrusted to a comte de l’étable, or constable, the title given later and until 1627 to the commander-in-chief of the French army. On the river side of the palace the king rebuilt the Gallo-Roman prison on the spot where now stands the Conciergerie. The keeper of this prison was a noble to whom was given the title of count of the candles, comte des cierges or concierge, the name bestowed to-day on a janitor. His pay in the olden days consisted of two fowls a day and the ashes from the king’s fireplace.

To the east of the palace on the spot where the Tribunal of Commerce now rises, there stood in Hugh’s day a Merovingian chapel dedicated to Saint Bartholomew. Legend has it that it was of ancient origin and had been sacred to pagan gods. To secure their overthrow, Saint Denis, it is said, went there to preach, and there it was that he was seized by his enemies. King Hugh enlarged the church and dedicated it not only to Saint Bartholomew but to Saint Magloire as well.

It was during the time of Robert the Pious that society, grown degenerate under the generally base or incompetent kings of the Merovingian and Carlovingian dynasties, reached its lowest ebb of hopelessness and inaction. Modern historians deny that fear of the end of the world when the year 1000 should open had anything to do with the lethargy of this period. Whether they are right or wrong, it cannot be disputed that after the year had begun there was a stirring such as had not been known for two or three generations. Only the church seems to have emerged triumphant in material things, for it now held rich possessions whose deeds of gift, beginning “Because of the approaching end of the world,” seem to hint at an attempt of former owners to be on the safe side in the event of the possible coming of the Day of Judgment. Whatever the cause, the givers, stripped stark, had to busy themselves to restore their affairs, and some new constructive impulse built noble buildings and inspired a brutalized society with ideals which devoted force to uplifting ends—the protection of the weak and the defense of the church.

Robert did not inherit his father’s energy or administrative ability. He was a handsome man, fond of appearing in public wearing his crown and flowing robes. He was something of a scholar, and so good a musician that he led the choir at Saint Denis and composed hymns which were accepted by the Church. The poor were his especial care and so traded on his good nature that they even snipped the gold tassels and fringe from his garments when he went abroad. At an open table many hundred dined daily at his expense. He was truly pious as his name declared, and, in the manner of the age, he sought to express his religious interest by the building of churches and monasteries. Paris in especial profited by his desire to win eternal favor, for he built or restored churches to the mystic number of seven and twice that number of religious establishments.

King Robert’s domestic life verged on tragedy. He married a distant cousin whom he loved devotedly, but the marriage was not approved by the pope, and when the king and queen refused to separate he excommunicated them. To be excommunicated meant not only that the offender was cut off from the sacraments of the Church, but that he was forbidden all intercourse with his fellow men. Every one fled at sight of the accursed and the few servants left to the royal pair cleansed with fire every plate and cup that they used.

Robert and Bertha finally bowed to the papal decree. Robert then married Constance, daughter of the Count of Toulouse, who proved a sufficient punishment for any and all his sins of omission and commission. In her train came troubadours and southern knights who brought to Robert’s rebuilt and enlarged Paris palace fashions of dress that were regarded as unseemly, manners that were all too frivolous, and characters unworthy of dependence. The novelty caught the fancy of the Parisians, who, according to an old chronicler, “before long reflected only too faithfully the depravity and infamy of their models.”

Constance kept a sharp eye on her husband’s charitable disbursements, and she brought up her sons so badly that Robert’s last years were embittered by their brawlings and rebellions. The king died bitterly lamented by his subjects, who knew enough of the character of his successor to feel strong apprehension concerning their fate at his hands.

The eleventh century, filled by the reigns of Robert, his son, Henry I (1031-1060) and his grandson Philip I (1060-1108), was made terrible by famines and wonderful by the opening of the great adventure of the Crusades. The famine brought to thousands a lingering death beside which the sudden departure attending the end of the world would have been peaceful translation. The Crusades, begun (1096) in exaltation but in a pitiful ignorance of ways and means, ended a hundred and seventy-five years later in selfishness and an accession of knowledge. The ignorance cost a waste of human life horrible to think of; the knowledge moved western Europe to expression in all forms of art, and brought about a feeling of unity which, in France, produced a nation bound by common interests. Beyond any calculation was the impetus given to commerce and to the intellectual life. The ordering of society, the institution of chivalry, the awakening to the vividness of mental activity and of beauty—these three influences touched life under the early Capetians until it grew and ripened into the simple, beauty-loving, God-fearing temper of the thirteenth century, the soul of the Middle Ages.

Henry I (1031-1060), no weakling but not a man of administrative ability, followed his father’s example as a builder. One of his benefactions was the Priory of Saint Martin-des-Champs which was begun in the last year of his reign on the site of a former establishment which had been destroyed by the Normans. It lay well out of the city on the old Roman road leading to the north and was a huge place, a fortified village in itself and quite independent of Paris. A wall of considerable size furnished with round towers surrounded an enclosure in which were a church, a refectory, a cloister, a chapter-house, an archive tower, a field for the pasturing of cattle, gardens for the raising of vegetables, and a cemetery for the burial of the dead. The wall has gone to-day except for one of the round towers which was preserved and rebuilt through the intercession of Victor Hugo when the straightening of a street called for its destruction. The field and gardens and the cemetery are now hidden beneath houses and pavements, but the church, whose erection lasted from the eleventh to the thirteenth century, and the refectory, finished in the thirteenth century, have been preserved as parts of the Conservatoire des Arts et Métiers, established by the Convention in 1794 as a technical school and museum of machines and scientific instruments. The church, secularized, serves as an exhibition hall for machinery, an incongruous and somewhat shocking combination. The refectory is put to the more suitable use of housing the technical library. Both are exquisite examples, and the church is the oldest existing instance in the city, of that Gothic architecture which sprang into being in the twelfth century as if to symbolize with its stretching height and its soaring spires, its delicate workmanship and its brilliancy of light and coloring, the aspiration toward the high and the beautiful which filled men’s desires after they came in contact with the appealing mysticism and the dazzling loveliness of the East.

Like his father Henry had trouble with his wives—there were three of them—and the marital affairs of his son, Philip I (1060-1108), were even more involved. Becoming violently infatuated with Bertrade, the fourth wife of the Count of Anjou, Philip sent away his wife, Bertha, and arranged with Bertrade during a church service that she should submit to being kidnapped. No bishop would marry them and it was only after long search that a priest was found sufficiently timid or sufficiently avaricious to yield his conscience to the royal demand. Excommunication followed promptly, and for twelve years the coming of Philip and Bertrade to a city silenced the church bells, which rang out joyfully again as they left. So bad was the effect upon his people of their king’s obstinate wrong-doing that the pope at last consented to an examination of the royal offender. All the bishops of France met in Paris on the first day of December, 1104. The Bishop of Orleans and the Bishop of Paris waited upon Philip and asked whether he were prepared to change his manner of life. He said that he was and accordingly appeared before the ecclesiastical body barefooted and seemingly penitent. Kneeling he promised atonement and swore to put aside Bertrade. Bertrade took a similar oath. Neither of them kept it, but so willing was everybody to feign blindness after this form of expiation that two years later the monks of Saint Nicholas at Angers received them both cordially, and Bertrade’s discarded husband dined at the same table with his successor and slept in the same room with him.

Philip never was a friend of the church though he did not in later life carry into effect depredations such as he planned when young, a real theft, in fact, which, through a miraculous intervention, never came to pass. Feeling a twinge of royal poverty—which does not mean that he was really very poor—he went with one of his officers to Saint Germain-des-Prés to take possession of some part of its riches. As they approached the treasury the king’s companion was stricken blind, a circumstance that put the thieving monarch to flight in terror. Yet the check was not lasting for he and his courtiers so corrupted some of the nunneries and monasteries of Paris that the Bishop of Paris was obliged to disperse the establishments. One of the largest, a convent, was on the Cité on the site of the present Prefecture of Police.

Having all this trouble with the pope and the church on his hands it is not to be wondered at that Philip was not stirred by Peter the Hermit’s preaching of the First Crusade. Indeed, no great ruler went on this first expedition, though the enlistment of many strong lords and their feudal following, and the unwise rush of whole families—women and children as well as men and youths—lost many lives to France in this most French of all the crusades.

Though not of a temper to sympathize personally with a love of learning Philip had intelligence enough and kingly pride enough to see the advantage to Paris of a concentration of schools in his capital. He never interfered with the teaching of the religious houses, and during his reign and immediately after at least four schools had obtained a more than local reputation. As the church of Saint Denis sheltered the tombs of the kings it was fitting that the abbey should instruct the sons of the nobles; the cathedral of Notre Dame stood in the heart of the Cité, and there the sons of the merchants were trained, one of their teachers being William of Champeaux whose eloquence knew no equal until it was matched and surpassed by one of his pupils, a young man from Brittany, Abélard. Abélard learned what many others have learned before and since, that it is both tactless and unprofitable to outshine your so-called “betters.” He was sent away from Paris. It was not long before he was summoned back by general acclaim, and joined the lecturers of the third great school of the time, the favorite of the foreign students, that of the abbey of Sainte Geneviève. His popularity there so displeased William of Champeaux that he severed his connection with the school of Notre Dame and founded the school and abbey of Saint Victor, on the south bank, east of the island. This abbey was suppressed during the Revolution and Napoleon built on its site the Halle aux Vins where the city’s supply of wine is stored in bond.

Of these four schools the one to which Abélard attached himself acquired a drawing reputation throughout all Europe, and scholars from England and Germany and Italy sought him eagerly, often enjoying the privilege of sitting under him at the expense of a long journey on foot and of a life of privation when Paris was reached. Abélard’s thesis was “Do not believe what you cannot understand”—the time-honored cry of the independent thinker. The conservatives bided their time; there was no use contending with a man in whom youth, beauty, learning and eloquence flowered in a magical persuasiveness.

Unfortunately for Abélard’s career he was invited by Fulbert, a canon of the cathedral, to enter his household as tutor of his niece, Héloise. It was a rash experiment. In a narrow street of the Cité, twisting about in the space north of the cathedral, the section where the canons and canonesses used to live, there is still shown the site of the garden where tutor and pupil, soon grown lovers, met in secret and plighted a troth that was to bring upon them both suffering and shame—for Abélard the end of his rise in the church, for Héloise, the cloister. They were married and lived for a time where now stands number nine on the Quai aux Fleurs, looking across the Seine to the right bank. Fulbert separated them, but even the conservatives were shocked at the hideous revenge which sent Abélard away from Paris only to be reunited with Héloise after her death in a convent twenty years after the death of her lover. To-day their tomb in Père Lachaise is the most visited of all the resting places of the illustrious in this famous cemetery.

Louis VI (1108-1137), called “the Wideawake” and “the Fat,” was a monarch who did much and planned more. Tall, handsome, energetic, serious, he was the author of policies which in later days developed important results. His accession found his kingdom surrounded by nobles who were nominally his subjects but really enemies of uncommon vigor awaiting the first chance to take their liege lord by surprise. He needed something more than his present resources to cope with the situation, and he met it by making for his son an advantageous marriage which won him the adherence of Poitou and Guienne, and by permitting in his adversaries’ domains, but not in his own, the establishment of communes—self-governing towns which paid for their privileges by supporting him against the nobles who ordinarily would have received their feudal obedience. Both these steps proved of substantial value to the crown, the first adding a large piece of territory to the royal possessions in the next reign, and the other developing a new social class, the bourgeoisie or town dwelling class, whose democratic spirit grew so rapidly that Louis IX in the next century had to check its advance if he would have his own unchecked. It has never been long subdued, however; it smoldered until it burst into the flame of the Revolution; it persists to-day as the genius of the Third Republic.

Paris never was a commune, but, in compensation for remaining under the rulership of the king and his provost (who lived in the Grand Châtelet built to defend the northern end of the bridge from the Cité as the Petit Châtelet held the southern bank) it received certain unusual privileges. Among them was the monopoly of water transportation between Paris and Mantes granted by Louis VI to the Corporation of Water Merchants. This corporation was the most powerful of the merchants’ guilds in whose hands rested the municipal administration.

Louis’ methods, and those of his schoolmate and adviser, Suger, abbot of Saint Denis, encouraged the growth of the city, for in this reign it began once more to increase briskly on both banks of the river. As in the earlier centuries, the pleasant country on the left bank proved more attractive than did the rough land on the right. The south side permitted streets to wander as widely as they willed, but on the north the newcomers were pushed into a crowded section along the river. Marsh and forest behind separated this compact district from Saint Martin-des-Champs. Even at this early stage the northern settlement, grouped around the Grève where the shipping was concentrated, was becoming the business part of Paris. At a discreet distance outside were the markets on exactly the spot where the Halles Centrales stand to-day, and just within the settlement Louis built for the benefit of the market men and women the church of Saint Jacques-la-Boucherie, now entirely destroyed except for a sixteenth century tower which stands in ornate dignity in a leafy square around which nineteenth century steam trams and twentieth century automobiles hoot and whirl.

To Louis VI is attributed the building of the second city wall, piecing out its predecessor so as to protect the suburbs on the right bank. He was interested, too, in religious establishments. He added to the number of the clergy of the chapel of Saint Nicholas near the palace, making part of their emolument six hogsheads of wine apiece from his own vineyards. He repaired Notre Dame, already five centuries old. He was a patron of Saint Denis, where he had been educated and where he adopted as the royal banner the oriflamme of the saint. He dedicated a church of the Cité to Sainte Geneviève in gratitude for her staying an epidemic of fever. He had the heads of cattle carved over the door of the church with which he honored Saint Peter—Saint Pierre-aux-Boeufs—for the especial benefit of the butchers of the city.

On top of Montmartre, standing demurely to-day beside the glittering basilica of the Sacred Heart, is the little church of Saint Pierre-de-Montmartre built by Louis as the chapel of a Benedictine abbey. Its restoration has been completed within the last decade, and its cold, undecorated severity compels a realization of monastic cheerlessness and of how acceptable must have been the reaction to the colorful warmth and grace of the Gothic. Though their church was not beautiful the Benedictines had no reason to be uncomfortable, for Louis granted to them a whole village and sundry estates, and in addition such eminently secular property as a monopoly of the baking privileges of certain ovens, a slaughter-house, the confiscated house of an Italian money-changer, and the exclusive right to fish in certain parts of the Seine.

Up to this point the buildings mentioned have but little to show to modern eyes beyond their ancient character and perhaps their form. A Roman bath, a Merovingian tower on the Church of Saint Germain-des-Prés, a rebuilt tower of Saint Martin’s Priory, two aged columns in Saint Pierre-de-Montmartre—these are but fragments of the old constructions. From this period on, however, it will become more and more usual to find large portions of early buildings. One such is the church of Saint Julien-le-Pauvre. Its date is a little later than that of the abbey church of Saint Pierre-de-Montmartre. It is Gothic at its simplest, yet its pointed windows and arches are prophetic of the beauty to come.

The story of Saint Julien, to whom the church is dedicated, is one of tragic interest. A youth of noble family, he gave himself earnestly to all the pursuits of his time and of his class, his one fault being his love of the cruelties of the chase. One day a dying stag whose doe and fawn he had killed prophesied that he would slay his own father and mother. The prophecy came to pass and Julien, in horror at the misfortune that had befallen him, left home and wife and wealth and wandered in poverty through the world seeking whom he might help. At last he established himself on a river bank in a hut where he sheltered travelers through the night, and in the morning ferried them across the stream. There he lived a life of expiation till death took him.

It was in the sixth century that a pilgrim’s hostel was built in Saint Julien’s honor on the south side of the Seine. There Saint Gregory of Tours lodged in 580, and there the Normans came in 886 and destroyed it. In the twelfth century it was rebuilt as a part of the Abbey of Longpont. Since then the unpretentious building has had a varied history. At one time it served as the general assembly hall of the University; again it became the chapel of the hospital, the Hôtel Dieu. During the Revolution it served as a storehouse for fodder. At some time the nave was destroyed, leaving in the present courtyard a well which once was beneath the roof of the church. The existing edifice, which is merely the choir of the twelfth century building, is used for the Greek service.

Thanks to his father’s prudent arrangements Louis VII, called “the Young” and “the Pious” (1137-1180), inherited a far larger and stronger territory than had Louis VI. He was by no means his father’s equal in intelligence or energy and his reign was unmarked by events notable either for Paris or for France. His happiest days were those that he spent in the cloisters of Notre Dame, he said. His father was happiest in the field.

A few years after Louis’ accession he became involved in a quarrel with the pope over a candidate for a bishopric. When the Count of Champagne sided with the Holy Father Louis invaded his domains. During the siege of the town of Vitry no fewer than thirteen hundred people who had taken refuge in a church were burned to death with the destruction of the building. Remorse for this disaster for which he was responsible made him lend a willing ear to the exhortations of Saint Bernard, an opponent of Abélard’s heresies who was now preaching the Second Crusade, and when Pope Eugenius came in person to France he gave the French king the pilgrim’s equipment and the oriflamme of Saint Denis in the Saint’s own church. The crusade ended in bitter disaster, and Louis died before the Third Crusade was under way, but his interest in the Holy Wars led to his patronage of the order of Knights Templar, which had been founded to protect pilgrims to the Holy Sepulcher. At the time when Pope Eugenius went to Paris there was a mighty gathering there of Templars, and probably it was then that King Louis granted them the land not far from the Priory of Saint Martin on which they built a huge establishment, part fortification, part religious house, whose surroundings they made fair by draining the marshes and converting waste land into fruitful fields.

The king does not seem to have been the cause of much civic improvement of Paris in spite of his long reign. He built an oratory to Notre Dame-de-l’Étoile near the palace. If we may judge by his usual oath—“By the Holy Innocents of Bethlehem”—it must have been he who gave the name to the cemetery of the Holy Innocents and its chapel, though probably they were established before his day. The burying ground was near the Halles, and it was laid out when that section was far beyond the crowded part of the town. By the time of the accession of Philip Augustus (1180), however, the population had pushed northwards from the busy river bank, the marsh had been made habitable, and the quickly increasing cemetery stood on the outskirts of the town, not in the country, and needed the wall which Philip gave it.

The Pont au Change, the bridge leading from the right bank to the island near the palace—perhaps the very line which the Grand Pont drew across the river at the time of the siege by the Normans—received its name at this time. There were houses built upon it from end to end, and Louis allowed the money-changers to do business upon it along one side and permitted the goldsmiths to establish themselves on the other. For four centuries this was the fashionable promenade of Paris until Henry IV finished the Pont Neuf whose open expanse across the western tip of the Cité gave more space for display. When a new king made his formal entry into Paris it was customary for a huge flock of birds to be let loose from the Pont au Change that they might carry the glad news abroad.

Eleanor of Aquitaine who had brought Louis and France so handsome a dowry proved a wife whose conduct her husband could not countenance, though he loved her with a stern fondness. Their marriage was annulled. Within a few months Eleanor married Henry Plantagenet who became Henry II of England and she gave her new husband possessions in France which, added to those which he already had as lord of Normandy, Brittany, Anjou and Maine, made him richer in French lands than the king to whom he owed allegiance. Then began the friction between the two countries which it has required centuries to still. Louis was twice married after his separation from Eleanor. His last wife was Alix or Adelaide of Champagne, whose marriage, consecration and coronation on a November day in 1160 were the ceremonies of the last brilliant scene enacted within the walls of the ancient Merovingian church of Notre Dame, soon to be replaced by the building which ennobles the Cité to-day.

After Louis’ death there came to the throne a king for whom the bird-sellers of the Pont au Change might properly have sent forth double the usual number of feathered messengers of gladness, for Philip the Great was to make France understand for the first time the spirit of nationality, and under him Paris was to develop into the brain that ordered the members.

CHAPTER V
PARIS OF PHILIP AUGUSTUS

IN Philip Augustus (1180-1223) was reincarnated Charlemagne’s wide-seeing spirit, and now it appeared at a time when it was possible to turn vision into fact. Charlemagne saw the value of a united nation under a centralized power but conditions were not ripe for the fulfillment of his vision. Philip Augustus was alert in taking advantage of the beginning made by Louis VI toward establishing the supremacy of the king and in availing himself of certain feudal rights which previous monarchs had not been strong enough to enforce. He insisted that his vassals, great lords all of them, should submit themselves to his court; that they should take him as arbiter of their disputes; that they should ask his confirmation, as suzerain, of any privileges that they granted to their vassals; and that they should make no changes in their fiefs which should lessen their value to him. As suzerain the king was heir to fiefs which fell vacant for any reason, and he acted as guardian for the many minor children orphaned in the constant quarrels in which the nobles engaged.

A strong grasp of all these hitherto unurged rights gave Philip a power that enabled him to repress the disorders of the country, and sounded the note for the downfall of feudal home rule which could not live harmoniously with power centralized in the monarch.

Philip’s procedure divided his kingdom into bailiwicks, each containing several provostships. Four times a year each bailli appeared before the assizes in Paris and reported on the condition of the land under his care. Thrice a year he came to town bringing the revenues of his bailiwick, and the king saw to it that the money was not turned over to any body of lords, always hungry for more without Oliver’s excuse, and accustomed to pocket any sums that strayed in their way. By the king’s decree the financial report was made to a board consisting of a clerk and of six burgesses. The burgesses were always Philip’s good friends. He made it for their interest to be faithful to him, and with their aid he played the barons against the church, the church against the barons, and both against the bands of robbers that infested the kingdom. He banished the Jews and confiscated their property, this for the same spiritual benefit which he thought would profit the country by his burning of heretics. Incidentally, the contents of the Hebrews’ coffers hidden in the ghetto on the Cité did not come amiss for the filling of the king’s own strong boxes in the palace not far away.

In the palace Philip’s father and grandfather had died, there he himself was born, and there he married his second wife, Ingeborg of Denmark, to whom he took so violent a dislike that he separated from her the next day. The unlucky young woman appealed to the pope and the consequent embroilment of Philip with the church on account of his subsequent marriage with Agnes of Meran laid the whole kingdom under interdict. No services were held in the churches even for marriages or burials and the unhappiness caused the people was so great that at last Philip put away Agnes and recalled Ingeborg. Because he loved Agnes tenderly he hated Ingeborg all the more and her life of seeming favor was in reality one of wretchedness.

When Philip came to the throne all the western part of what is now France belonged to the king of England, Henry II. The Île de France was cut off from the sea, and the frequent hostile actions of a vassal whose possessions were greater than his own kept the young monarch constantly involved in petty wars with a man so much older than he and so much more skillful a tactician that he gained nothing and even came near losing a part of what he had. Into the mind of the lad of fifteen these troubles instilled a hatred of England and a determination to be free of this perpetual annoyance and to obtain a hold upon land that seemed unnaturally owned by a lord who was his vassal and yet lived over seas.

The years intervening between the growth of Philip’s determination and his chance to put it into effect were filled with work which developed the young king’s naturally strong character and intelligence. After Henry’s death one of his troublesome sons succeeded him—Richard, who has come down in history as “the Lion-hearted.” Richard was handsome and brave, a man to stir the imagination and admiration of a fighting age, but he was too impetuous and too active to apply himself to the study of government. When the call came for the Third Crusade Richard found in it an outlet for his energy for which he would not have to make excuse to his deserted kingdom. He and Philip and Frederick of Germany all went to the East, and there the French and English kings came to know each other, Philip envying Richard’s dash and audacity and envied in turn for the statesmanlike qualities which he was developing.

When it became evident that his presence would be of no help to a crusade doomed to failure Philip insisted on withdrawing to France where he knew that his coming would be of advantage; Richard stayed on with no thought for his kingdom, hoping for further adventure. Philip put himself in touch with conditions in and around the Île de France, took advantage of all disturbances in his vassal’s provinces which would give him even a slender foothold, and was ready to meet any act of Richard’s successor, John, whatever it might be.

The opportunity came soon after John’s accession, for he could be depended upon to open some loophole through his disposition toward devious ways rather than straightforward. As lord of the western provinces of France he was Philip’s vassal; as Duke of Brittany his boy nephew, Arthur, was his vassal. When war broke out between France and England and John went across the Channel to pursue it, he found that his nephew, incited by Philip, without doubt, was laying claim to other provinces than Brittany. The easiest way out of the difficulty was to murder Arthur, which John is said to have done either with his own hand or by the dirks of ruffians in his presence. After Philip had stormed a fortress that had been looked upon as the chief defender of Rouen the frightened Englishman fled home, and then Philip devised a plan of making Arthur’s death work to his advantage. As John’s suzerain he summoned him to Paris to answer for his nephew’s death before the king’s court. John refused to appear unless he were promised a safe-conduct not only to the city but home again. Philip refused to promise protection for the return trip unless the court should declare John not guilty of the charge against him. Philip hardly could have expected that John would thrust his head into the noose, but it suited his purpose quite as well that he should not. What he wanted was his land and that he could take now with perfect justice when the court declared John guilty of murder and of treason in disobeying the orders of his overlord. The estates in France which John had inherited from his father, those in the north, were confiscated to the French crown. It was all much easier than fighting.

While diplomacy gained for Philip these northern possessions and the power that went with them, he gained a like addition in the south by a system of letting alone. Simon de Montfort, a noble of Normandy, entered upon a crusade against the people of Albi, in Toulouse, a town and district heretical enough to attract the attention of the persecutor and rich enough to draw the gaze of the avaricious soldier of fortune. The destruction that ensued laid waste a fair country and wiped out the greater part of its population. A few years later the province fell in to the crown in default of direct heirs to the ruling family of Toulouse, and thus the south of France was added to the northern and western possessions which were accumulating under Philip’s control.

Poor-spirited as was John, now called “Lackland,” he could not see himself deprived of his own land and his rival growing rich in other provinces without making some opposition. He entered into a coalition with the German emperor and with the Count of Flanders, who was one of Philip’s important vassals. Philip defeated the combined armies in the battle of Bouvines (1214) and thereby made himself the most powerful monarch in Europe. The success of the citizen soldiery established the reputation of the burgesses as strong and intelligent fighters and thereby struck terror to the hearts of nobles who were nursing plans of rebellion like those of the captured Count of Flanders. Yet nobles were one with burgesses in rejoicing over John’s final dismissal from any governing part in northern France and over the defeat of the intruding Germans. Never before in all her history had there been so universal a feeling of what it meant to be a Frenchman and to serve a country whose unity was symbolized by a king personally strong, strongly supported, in very truth the head controlling the members.

It is an interesting fact that the same period that established the supremacy of the king of France was marked in England by the check to the royal domination administered to John Lackland when the barons wrested from him the Magna Charta. Historians of other countries are apt to speak of the French as volatile, capricious, delighting in revolutions, of which the troubled fourscore years from 1789 to 1871 are examples. It might be well to remember that the English, who pride themselves on being neither volatile nor capricious, were less patient than the men across the Channel. They, too, made their stand against aristocratic privilege, and they did it five hundred years before the long-suffering French; they, too, cut off their monarch’s head, and Charles went to the block a hundred and fifty years before Louis mounted the guillotine. Action and reaction are equal, prolonged repression must result in corresponding expression. The evils of five centuries are quickly cured if less than one century is devoted to the healing.

After the battle of Bouvines the victorious army marched to Paris in a triumph which was participated in by every village along the way. Every parish church held a service of thanksgiving, every crossroads was packed with shouting peasants doing homage to the king, admiring the nobles, and, above all, wonderstruck at the new military force whose possible value they could see, even if it was not yet entirely clear how great would be the weight of the “mailed fist” of the bourgeois.

At the very time when the power of the king was becoming dominant, however, democracy showed itself even with impudence in the fabliaux, the popular tales which betrayed the jealous spirit of the populace toward the nobles and the clergy. These verses, marked by the esprit gaulois were characteristic of the period of the early middle ages as were also the chansons de geste which stirred the crusaders by their recital of the valorous deeds of accredited heroes. “Renard the Fox,” a long epic of three centuries’ growth, burlesques every aspect of the social life of the middle ages, and its delicious fooling paints a more vivid and more intimate picture than does the pen of any chronicler. These lighter forms were not representative of all the thought of the period, for Abélard’s thesis, ancient and ever new, that we should not believe what we do not understand, and Saint Bernard’s refutation of such a lack of faith were the most prominent instances of a mental activity that found lodgment in schools and expression in pulpit controversy and rostrum argument. Now, too, the professions and the arts no longer were confined to the monasteries, but laymen became teachers and writers and artists and craftsmen.

The opportunities of meeting in Paris like-minded people from all over Europe for a long time had drawn students to Paris, and schools were endowed for men of different nationalities. Philip united them under the jurisdiction of the University. From very early days the region on the south bank, just across from the eastern end of the Cité and extending up Mont Sainte Geneviève has been given over to students. In the church of Saint Julien-le-Pauvre they met with their instructors. Across the alley on which the church faces still stands the house of the governor of the Petit Châtelet before whom the young men appeared to adjust their differences. Behind the church runs the rue du Fouarre on which many colleges were situated, among them the Schools of France, Normandy, Germany and Picardy. In 1202 this thoroughfare was called rue des Escoliers, but when, by way of responding to Pope Urban V’s appeal for self-denial, the students in the classes sat on bundles of straw bought in the near-by hay market, the street changed its name to “Straw Street,” to commemorate their good intentions. Near by, to-day, is a modern street called “Dante,” after the Italian poet, who was not behind his contemporaries in studying in Paris. Émile Loubet, the former president of the French Republic, lives at number 5 on this street.

Le Louvre au Tems de Philippe Auguste

THE LOUVRE IN THE TIME OF PHILIP AUGUSTUS.

From an old print owned by the City of Paris.

FRAGMENT OF THE WALL OF PHILIP AUGUSTUS AS IT LOOKS TO-DAY.

Not far away is the rue des Anglais, which was laid out before Philip Augustus’s reign and took its name from the English students who frequented it. A little farther west, creeping in the dark between tilted houses, is the street, called since the fourteenth century, “of the Parchment Workers,” and in the thirteenth century rue des Escrivains. Two of the tiny dwellings, numbers 6 and 7, belonged in the thirteenth century to the English cathedral of Norwich, which used them as dormitories for the scholars which it supported at the French seat of learning.

These houses are built around a microscopic courtyard, a plan persistent in France through many hundred years. It is a plan seen to-day in many modern dwellings, in the Banque de France, a seventeenth century building, in the eastern end of the Louvre and in its pavement record of the earliest quadrangular Louvre. It is a plan making for light and air and it often permits the planting of a small garden within. The idea sprang from the necessity of a fortification’s preserving a stolid and impenetrable exterior while the life of its tenants, carried on within the shelter of its walls, had something of pleasant environment.

So closely does Paris cling to her ancient traditions that even in the twentieth century the schools and their students are removed but a few yards from their medieval location. The students of to-day, too, have their own traditions of dress and behavior which mark them as inhabitants of the “Latin Quarter” even if they are kodaked at Versailles on a holiday afternoon. They assume for themselves now privileges which Philip Augustus encouraged them to take by making them free from the regulations which the other citizens obeyed and subject only to the ecclesiastical tribunal. This difference of attitude caused many riots in the thirteenth century and they break out afresh in the twentieth with a frequency which helps to occupy any idle moments of the city police.

So great were the attractions of Paris offered not only to students but to merchants that the population of the city grew to one hundred and twenty thousand under Philip’s rule. The populous section on the south or left bank of the river was matched by another on the north, chiefly inhabited by merchants and artisans, and both of them were larger than the original Cité on the island. The Cité was the administrative and ecclesiastical center, for the king’s palace was not his only residence but also a palace of justice, and crowded into the limits set by the Seine were so many churches that one of them served a parish of only twenty houses.

The northward growth of the city encroached upon the Halles as it had upon the cemetery of the Innocents, and Philip recognized the necessity of enclosing and roofing the markets. Such utilities as public ovens, too, which had been a monopoly of some of the religious houses, he opened to the citizens at large. He also instituted a water supply, which, though far from ample, since it allowed only two quarts a day for each inhabitant, was an earnest of good intentions.

The original tower of the Louvre seemed to Philip a good nucleus for an enlarged fortification which should be at the same time a palace to which he might withdraw from the palace in the crowded Cité. Around the old donjon he built a rectangular fortress, its short end lying along the river, its entrance defended by another huge tower whose work of protection was reinforced by smaller towers, by a surrounding wall, and by a moat. Down beneath the treasures of to-day’s Louvre and out under the courtyard still run passages of this old building. They twist and turn within walls of rough masonry and inflame the imagination with thoughts of adventurous possibilities, of plots and prisoners and escapes, until they land the wanderer of a sudden in the coal bin of the hopelessly up-to-date furnace that heats the Hall of the Caryatides.

Across the river on the south bank stood another huge tower, best known by its later name, the Tour de Nesle. It was from this tower, that, in the fourteenth century, Jeanne of Burgundy, widow of Philip the Long, is reputed to have had the people who displeased her dropped into the river. Villon’s “Ballad of Old-Time Ladies” says:

“And where, I pray you, is the Queen,
Who willed that Buridan should steer
Sewed in a sack’s mouth, down the Seine?”

Buridan was a professor in the University, and the author of the famous assertion that if an ass were placed between two equally attractive bundles of hay he would starve to death before he could determine which one to eat first. The tale goes that Buridan’s friends, fearing the outcome of his visit to the tower, were waiting in a boat and rescued him. Dumas’ play, “La Tour de Nesle” is based on the legends surrounding this old fortification, now existent only in a tablet placed on the eastern wing of the Institute to mark its site.

A chain across the stream from the Louvre to the Tour de Nesle regulated navigation, for it could only be taken down for the passage of boats by permission of the provost.

Starting south from the Tour de Nesle ran

TOUR DE NESLE IN 1661.

the wall whose erection Philip commanded when he first went off to the wars, that his fair city might be well protected in his absence. It was higher and heavier than its predecessors, with a battlemented top to hide soldiers in action and frequent towers which served the triple purpose of sheltering extra men, of storing weapons and of affording points of observation somewhat above the wall itself. A dozen gates opened each upon a drawbridge whose lifting compelled the invader to cross a ditch in some way before he attempted to storm an entrance.

Leaving the Tour de Nesle the wall swept around Mont Sainte Geneviève and back to the river at a point about opposite the center of the present Île Saint Louis, east of the Cité. On the right bank it ran north and west, keeping below the Priory of Saint Martin which lay outside of it. Its course is traced on the pavement of the eastern courtyard of the present Louvre, part of one of the towers is extant in a government pawnshop in the Marais, a considerable section is to be seen in the enclosure beside Saint Julien-le-Pauvre, and its course is marked elsewhere by an occasional fragment, by some street named Fossé, or by a tablet placed by the Commission of Old Paris, which is doing excellent antiquarian work in the preservation and marking of historic buildings and localities.

The Paris of Philip Augustus was but a thirtieth part as large as the Paris of to-day, but it had three hundred streets. Narrow, dark and dirty alleys they were, the best of them, and even in this early century the devastating epidemics of a later day were not unknown. A contemporary historian says: “One day the king was in his castle of the Louvre and was walking back and forth, pondering the affairs of the kingdom, when there passed a heavy wagon whose wheels stirred up the street and caused an insupportable odor to rise from it. When he smelled this stench Philip experienced a profound nausea. At once he summoned the provost and the burgesses of the city and he gave them orders to pave the streets with large stones and strong, which was done.”

“Which was done in part” would have been nearer the truth, for, although one public-spirited citizen gave a large sum, most of the contributions were of the nature of samples from the shopkeepers’ stocks, and the actual amount of paving accomplished was very little for many centuries to come. As late as the sixteenth century Montaigne was deploring the evil odors of the city he loved so well, and Arthur Young, at the end of the eighteenth, compared the cleanliness of Paris most unfavorably with that of London. In Philip’s reign ladies seldom went afoot, so thick was the mud, composed of indescribable filth, and knights had good need of armor in times of peace to protect them from buckets of water, poured casually into the streets from abutting houses with only a cry of “Gare l’eau” as a warning.

Nevertheless, in days of festival these same narrow streets might be gorgeous to behold. When Philip Augustus returned from the battle of Bouvines the whole city came out to meet him. Chanting priests, singing girls, shouting urchins ushered him into a town decorated to do him honor. From windows and balconies hung rich tapestries and carpets; banners waved, and the sunlight flashed on glittering spearpoints by day as bonfires made breastplates glitter at night.

It would be hard to find in all history so complete an instance of a nation’s spiritual and mental growth expressing itself in outer form rapidly and in transcendent beauty as is exhibited in the evolution of Gothic architecture in France in the twelfth century. It originated in the Île de France and within the span of this hundred years Paris was rebuilt, bursting into the elegance and grace of the new style from the heaviness of the old as a butterfly casts aside its constraining cocoon.

The nave of Saint Germain-des-Prés, is an example of the heavy-pillared, round-arched building of the Romanesque era. The desire to give visible form to the universal feeling of uplift brought to birth the ogive or pointed arch which gave its name to “ogival” or Gothic architecture best shown, of course, in churches. Higher and higher the arches pointed skyward; lancet windows above helped to light the deep “vessel” or nave (from the Latin navis, ship) and the roof crowned all at a dizzying height.

Satisfying as this was from the point of view of beauty and of symbolism, it gave rise to serious practical questions. How were such lofty walls to be made strong enough to support the outward push of the roof? The thirteenth century had come about before the problem was solved entirely. By that time outer buttresses had been evolved strong enough for their work yet so delicate that they were called “flying,” spread as they were like the wings of a bird.

Decoration became more beautiful, also. Romanesque pillar capitals had been adorned with conventional vegetation and strange beasts whose originals never were on land or sea. The sculptors of the ogival period took Nature as their teacher and France as their schoolroom and carved the leaves and flowers and fruits that grew about them, the oak and willow and rose-bush and clover and grape. Pinnacles gave an effect of lightness to exteriors and their edges were

CHOIR AND NAVE OF NOTRE DAME, LOOKING WEST. NAVE OF SAINT GERMAIN DES PRÉS.

decorated with crochets (furled leaves) and tipped with fleurons or bunches of budding leaves.

High heavenward sprang spires from the western end of the churches, this western façade forming an imposing entrance to the nave through whose length the choir and altar at the eastern end, beyond the transepts, looked mysteriously far away. From the roof at the junction of the nave and the transepts a slender spire called a flèche (arrow) shot upward with exquisite grace.

The introduction of ogival architecture had a sudden and revolutionary effect upon the art of painting. Before the twelfth century mural decorations and the illumination of manuscripts had been the only instances in France. When the broad expanses of wall above the semicircular Romanesque arches vanished with the coming of the pointed arch there was no place left except the windows for the depiction of the lives of the saints, of scenes from Old Testament history and from the life of Christ. Glass then became the artist’s medium.

The most illustrious examples of the new style to be found in modern Paris are the cathedral of Notre Dame, the refectory of Saint Martin-des-Champs, and the Sainte Chapelle built by Saint Louis in the thirteenth century.

The cornerstone of Notre Dame was laid by Pope Alexander III in the reign of Louis VII (1163.) The new cathedral covered the spot where the Nautae had erected their altar to Jupiter, replaced the many times repaired Merovingian cathedral of Notre Dame, and attached itself to the ancient church of Saint Étienne, the original cathedral of Paris which stood where Notre Dame’s sacristy now rises. This old edifice was not taken down until the new was sufficiently advanced for the altar to be consecrated, so that service beneath the cathedral roof never was interrupted even for a day. The relics were removed to a new Saint Étienne’s, built on Mont Sainte Geneviève.

Construction went on briskly through Louis’ reign and the four decades of Philip Augustus’s and the three years of his successor’s, Louis VIII, and work ended on the superb edifice in the twentieth year of the rule of Saint Louis. It was a “quick job”—eighty-four years—as building went in those days. The great mass never has been completed, for the spires of the original plan have not been added. It has had its days of decay and of restoration, the last attempt having returned its elaborate west façade as closely as possible to its appearance in Philip Augustus’s day when it was finished.

Inside and out it is magnificently harmonious,

NAVE OF SAINT GERMAIN DES PRÉS.

CATHEDRAL OF NOTRE DAME.

a worthy setting for the scenes it has witnessed—scenes splendid, startling, tragic. Here Saint Louis brought the Crown of Thorns and here his funeral took place. Here Philip the Fair rode in on horseback after the battle of Mons-en-Puelle and here he convened the first States General—the first Assembly wherein the burgesses were represented. Henry VI of England was crowned here, so was Marie Stuart, and here it was that Napoleon set the imperial crown upon his own head and then crowned Josephine. Here Henry IV, turned Catholic for the purpose of gaining possession of Paris, heard his first mass, and here, during the Revolution, a ballet dancer posed in the choir as the Goddess of Reason, “in place of the former Holy Sacrament.”

Officially, the cathedral is the hub of France, for measurements along the national highways are all made from the foot of its towers. Deep in the hearts of the French people, too, is love for this splendid fane. They love it as a summary of Gothic beauty, as a storehouse of history, and, above all, as the moral fortress of the city, sheltering as it does “Notre Dame de Paris,” the guardian of the city for five hundred years.

CHAPTER VI
PARIS OF SAINT LOUIS

THE son of Philip Augustus, Louis VIII, whose accession was celebrated in Paris with high festivity, reigned for three dismal, unprofitable years. His wife, Blanche of Castile, reared to a manhood of conscientious rectitude their son, Louis IX, whose virtues were recognized by canonization less than thirty years after his death.

It has happened, oddly enough, that although women are forbidden by the fourteenth century construction of the Salic Law to sit on the throne of France as sovereigns, no country has been more frequently ruled by women. Sometimes the queen-mother has acted as regent during the minority of her son, sometimes the queen has steered the ship of state while her husband was out of the country on war intent. Isabella of Hainault, Philip Augustus’s first wife, was regent when her lord went to the third crusade in 1189; Blanche of Castile governed her son’s kingdom for ten years (1226-1236); Anne de Beaujeu, daughter of Louis XI, guided the realm of her brother, Charles VIII, from 1483-1490; Louise de Savoie ruled (1515) until her son, Francis I came of age, and was again entrusted with the power when he went upon one of his many military expeditions; Catherine de Medicis, the mother of three kings—Francis II, Charles IX and Henry III—began her career as a ruler when her husband, Henry II, was warring with Germany (1552), continued it unofficially during the short reign of Francis II, was legal regent (1560) during the minority of Charles IX, and enjoyed a long continuance of influence because of his and his brother Henry III’s weakness of character which she herself had fostered; Marie de Medicis (1610) played havoc with Henry IV’s reorganized France during the long minority of her son, Louis XIII; Maria Theresa controlled the kingdom of Louis XIV while the “Sun King” was carrying war into Holland; Marie Louise was declared regent when Napoleon left France (1812-1814) to meet the allied forces of Austria, England, Prussia, Russia, and Sweden; and Eugénie took her husband’s place when Napoleon III fought against Austria (1859) and again (1870) when he left his country, never to return to it, during the ill-advised contest with Prussia.

Blanche of Castile was a person of extraordinary political intelligence, tact and administrative ability. The years of her son’s minority were made turbulent by unruly vassals who thought to take advantage of the inexperience of a woman, yet the queen-regent proved herself able to cope with every situation that arose. She endeared herself and the young king to the burgesses by appealing to them for support against the lords, and the lords realized the worth of the citizens’ friendship. On one occasion, when the bourgeois of Paris set forth to meet and protect their young master who was surrounded by foes at some distance from the city, the nobles, hearing the news, gave up their iniquitous intentions and went to their homes. Indeed, it was their lack of coöperation among themselves that enabled Louis all through his reign to strengthen the royal power at the expense of that of his subjects.

In her treatment of these troublesome lords Blanche was not always obliged to use such stern measures as force of arms. Her armory was full of woman’s weapons, for she was handsome and gracious, and her manner and charm often brought about conclusions which she might not have reached by argument. In spite of the constant uprisings and conspiracies with which she had to contend the kingdom as a whole did not degenerate, and Philip Augustus’s strong foundation was not undermined. More and more power became centralized in the throne, Louis pursuing from a single-hearted belief that such a concentration was best for his people, the policy which his grandfather undertook for ambition’s sake.

Had Louis followed his personal inclinations he would have entered the religious life. It has been suggested that Blanche encouraged this spirit in him, not because it would have been possible for him to have given up his throne, but because, if his interests were involved elsewhere he would not interfere with his mother’s rule of his kingdom. Blanche’s failing was jealousy. Jealous even of her own child, she continued to force her influence upon Louis after he was of age. Jealousy moved her to interfere between him and his wife, Margaret of Provence, so that they had to meet by stealth. She even took him from his wife’s bedside when she was thought to be dying. Naturally such an attitude did not endear her to her daughter-in-law, and Margaret, envious perhaps, in her turn became ambitious for power which she was not competent to wield. Who shall say that Louis had an easy life between an ambitious mother to whom his dignity did not permit him to give way, and a wife, finely courageous, but without talents of the larger sort! Only the fact that he loved both women tenderly could have given him the wisdom to steer his course straight.

The English king, Henry III, became involved in a quarrel between Louis and one of his vassals, and invaded France. Louis took the oriflamme from Saint Denis and went against his foes, gaining victory after victory but using his gain with a moderation and kindness very different from the custom of the time. After the first hurt to his pride had worn away Henry was of a mind to be glad to accept Louis’ offer to give back to him such of his holdings in France as had been captured in the recent war, provided that Henry renounced others for all time, and admitted himself the vassal of France for those he still retained.

The ceremony of swearing the oath to Louis took place in the square (now the Place Dauphine) at the western end of the palace. Amid a great gathering of nobles and priests both French and English, Henry, dressed with no sign of his royal state, not even wearing sword, spurs, cape or head covering, knelt before Louis, laid his hands in his, and made oath, “Sir, I become your liegeman with mouth and hands, and I swear and promise you faith and loyalty, and to guard your right according to my power, and to do fair justice at your summons or the summons of your bailiff, to the best of my wit.”

Wise as he was in the rearing of his children, just to his people so that even the quarrelsome lords brought their troubles to his Paris court, generous to the poor and merciful to the afflicted, Louis was cruelly harsh to those whom he considered at fault on the score of religion. Heretics, so-called, he punished with severity; blasphemers he caused to be branded on the mouth, saying that he himself would consent to be branded with a hot iron if by that means all profane oaths might be removed from his realm. “I was full twenty-two years in his company,” says de Joinville, “and never heard him swear by God nor His Mother nor His Saints. When he wished to affirm anything he would say ‘Truly that was so,’ or ‘Truly, that is so.’”

On one occasion when he had commanded the branding of a Paris burgher the decree was harshly criticised by the people. When these same folk a little later were praising the king for some good works that he had done for the city he said that he expected more favor from God for the curses that his branding order had brought down upon his head than for the honor that he received for these good works.

Queen Blanche was given to benevolence and during her regency set her son an example which he willingly followed throughout his life. It was she who excited his interest in continuing the rebuilding of the Hôtel Dieu, the hospital which had stood in one guise or another for some half dozen centuries on the south side of the Cité between the cathedral and the river. A later annex was built on the left bank of the Seine adjoining Saint Julien-le-Pauvre, and this section was not demolished until 1908, although the buildings on the Cité were torn down and the present Hôtel Dieu on the north of the cathedral was built some forty years ago.

Louis’ philanthropic leanings included an establishment for the blind, three hundred (“Quinze-Vingts,” “Fifteen-Twenties”) being sheltered in a hospice which stood near the present Palais Royal, but is now established in the eastern part of the town. His interest in learning moved him to encourage his chaplain, Robert de Sorbon, in the enlargement of the school named after him, the Sorbonne, which Robert had undertaken at first for poor students, but which, under royal patronage, became a renowned theological school. It has always been independent in attitude, now opposed to the Reformation, now to the Jesuits, now to the Jansenists. To-day it is the University of Paris, the building on the Mont Sainte Geneviève being given over to the faculties of arts and sciences. Here come students from all over the world to listen to the foremost lecturers of France in a huge edifice which about a quarter of a century ago replaced one built by Richelieu. With the generosity which France has always shown in educational matters all the lectures are free.

The palace on the Cité remained under Louis the heart of the bustling city of 130,000 people. Here he came after his wedding, and the room that he occupied was used by many succeeding monarchs on the night after their first entry into Paris. The king’s library, built as a part of the palace, was filled with the work of several thousand copyists. Louis threw the building open to young students as well as to old scholars, and loved nothing better than to walk about among the young men and explain their tasks to them. In the palace garden the king used to sit and administer justice. De Joinville says:

“Sometimes have I seen him, in summer, go to do justice among his people in the garden of Paris, clothed in a tunic of camlet, a surcoat of tartan without sleeves, and a mantle of black taffeta about his neck, his hair well combed, no cap, and a hat of white peacock’s feathers upon his head. And he would cause a carpet to be laid down, so that we might sit round him, and all the people who had any cause to bring before him stood around. And then would he have their causes settled, as I have told you afore he was wont to do in the wood of Vincennes.”

Other parts of the palace were built by Saint Louis, notably the vaulted guard hall in the lower part of the north side. The ancient round towers belong to the Conciergerie where, during the Revolution, Marie Antoinette and many others as brave and as innocent went from imprisonment to death by the guillotine. Queen Blanche gave her name to an existing room in one of the towers.

In early days the towers must have been an impressive feature of the building. Their foundations are sunk below the surface of the river, and where the king’s hall opened on the street at the water level these massive constructions, now half buried by the quay, rose, tall and menacing on the island’s shore.

The Tour de l’Horloge, the square tower at the corner, replaces an early Merovingian tower on the same spot. The oldest public clock in France still tells the hour from its sculptured canopy, and its bell gave the left bank signal for the massacre of Saint Bartholomew.

Unable to leave his royal duties for the monastery, as he would have liked, Louis showed his leaning by the fostering of many religious houses. Paris was filled with brethren of the various orders, later to become a doubtful blessing, but now sincere, useful, typical of the trusting nature of the thirteenth century. Louis sat at their feet in spirit as he did literally before the great, lecturers of the University. To the Louvre he added a chapel.

It was to be expected that the Crusades would find an ardent response in the king. He went twice to the East, the first time to suffer a long captivity, and the last time to lose his life.

It was through the crusades that Louis became the owner of the Crown of Thorns whose possession gave him the highest pleasure that his life knew. Because of it Paris was enriched by one of its most beautiful buildings. The Emperor Baldwin, it appears, had borrowed a large sum of money from some merchants of Venice, giving as security the sacred relic. When he failed to redeem his pledge the merchants sought to recoup themselves. Louis regarded as a direct gift from Heaven this opportunity to secure for himself and his kingdom a relic so holy. The price asked was about $270,000, an enormous sum for that time. The money was raised, however, a part of it by forced contributions from the Jews, who had begun to drift back to France because their usefulness made it expedient to disregard Philip Augustus’s edict of banishment. Messengers carefully selected for their probity and piety, brought the Crown from Italy into France. It was encased in a coffer of gold which was set into another of silver and that in turn into a box of wood.

The king, dressed as a penitent and barefooted, met the messengers at the town of Sens, about sixty miles from Paris. There he took the casket into his own hands and walked with it all the way to the city. So eager were the crowds to see the procession that it could move but at the slowest pace. The multitude thickened as the city folk came out from the walls to join in reverencing the treasure. In order that every one might rest his eyes upon it Louis caused a lofty stand to be erected in an open spot and there the foremost of the clergy of France took turns in elevating the Crown for the crowds to see.

At Vincennes, east of Paris, the monks from the Abbey of Saint Denis joined the escort. When the advance was renewed Louis again bore the sacred casket which he carried to a spot of safety in the cathedral of Notre Dame which was at that time just about approaching completion.

From the cathedral Louis removed the relic to the chapel of Saint Nicholas, attached to the palace, so that it might be under his close supervision, and then, in an ecstasy of reverence he planned for its shelter a building which should be “in no wise like the houses of men,” the Sainte Chapelle. Only royal chapels received the title “Sainte.” This exquisitely beautiful structure is indeed royal, as it is truly a chapel, small and without transepts. The lower part contains the crypt with ogival vaulting which the builder, Pierre de Montereau, the architect of

THE SAINTE CHAPELLE, ERECTED BY LOUIS IX. INTERIOR OF THE SAINTE CHAPELLE.

the refectory of Saint Martin-des-Champs, learned, perhaps, from the Saracens. This part of the church was used for the religious services of the servants of the palace. It has been restored recently with the vivid red and blue and gold of its original decoration. Above is the main body of the chapel, with no entrance except that into the palace whence it was Louis’s habit to come twice or thrice during each night to prostrate himself before the altar. The chapel’s solid walls reach not far above a man’s head, and above them is a glittering mass of gorgeous glass, some of it the original. At the eastern end a gilded framework supports the platform to which the king ascended by a tiny staircase on the left side to show the sacred relic to the devout. Behind him the lower part of the western window was of plain glass that the people gathered in the courtyard might have the same privilege as those inside. The gold and jeweled covering of the relic was seized during the Revolution. The Crown, cased in glass, is now in the sacristy of Notre Dame.

The chapel’s glass tells the story of the coming of the relic to France and has portraits of the king and of Queen Blanche. In the outside carving as well as in the inside decoration Louis’s fleur-de-lis and his mother’s towers of Castile are repeated. The R of the rex stands supported by angels. A wealth of loving ornament enriches the western façade.

At one side a tiny window cut slanting in the thickness of the wall is the only opening from the chapel into a private room built on to the outside by Louis XI who feared assassination if he should attend mass openly.

The flèche now rising from the roof dates from 1853 and is the fourth of its kind. The second was burned, and the third destroyed in the Revolution. It is wonderful that the whole building did not meet a similar fate, for it was used as a storehouse for flour and received no gentle treatment. To-day, although still a consecrated edifice, but one service is held in it during the year. That is called the “Red Mass” and to it go the judiciaries, clad in their scarlet robes, when the courts open in the autumn, to celebrate the “Mass of the Holy Ghost.”

Louis’ conscientiousness as a sovereign extended even to the business details of the city of Paris, now so grown that its traffic required four bridges to knit the island with the right and left banks. The king established the Parliament of Paris, not a parliament in the English sense of the word, but a court of justice. A body of watchmen policed the streets. The guilds and corporations had a carefully developed organization. Municipal administration was placed under the care of the Provost of the Merchants and a body of councillors. The king was represented by the Provost of Paris. This office had so fallen into disrepute that it was with difficulty that Louis could secure any one to undertake the responsibility. How he reformed the office so that the holder became so eager to serve his fellow-citizens that he slept, all dressed, in the Châtelet, that he might be ready to do his duty at any hour, DeJoinville describes.

“The provostship of Paris was at that time sold to the citizens of Paris, or indeed to any one; and those who bought the office upheld their children and nephews in wrongdoing; and the young folk relied in their misdoings on those who occupied the provostship. For which reason the mean people were greatly downtrodden.

“And because of the great injustice that was done, and the great robberies perpetuated in the provostship, the mean people did not dare to sojourn in the king’s land, but went and sojourned in other provostships and other lordships. And the king’s land was so deserted that when the provost held his court, no more than ten or twelve people came thereto.

“With all this there were so many malefactors and thieves in Paris and the country adjoining that all the land was full of them. The king, who was very diligent to enquire how the mean people were governed and protected, soon knew the truth of this matter. So he forbade that the office of provost in Paris should be sold; and he gave great and good wages to those who henceforth should hold the said office. And he abolished all the evil customs harmful to the people; and he caused enquiry to be made throughout the kingdom to find men who would execute good and strict justice, and not spare the rich any more than the poor.

“Then was brought to his notice Stephen Boileau, who so maintained and upheld the office of provost that no malefactor, nor thief, nor murderer dared to remain in Paris, seeing that if he did, he was soon hung or exterminated; neither parentage, nor lineage, nor gold, nor silver could save him. So the king’s land began to amend, and people resorted thither for the good justice that prevailed.”

CHAPTER VII
PARIS OF PHILIP THE FAIR

WITH the ending of Saint Louis’ life (in 1270) such stability and beauty as he had achieved for his kingdom seemed to pass away. The fifteen years’ reign of his son, Philip III, was lacking in eventfulness. He was with his father on the Crusade that cost Louis his life, and he came back to Paris, the “king of the five coffins,” bringing with him for burial at Saint Denis not only his father’s body but that of his uncle, his brother-in-law, his wife, and his son. Louis’ body lay in state in Notre Dame.

Philip inherited his father’s gentleness of spirit, but none of his intelligence or administrative ability. His physical courage won for him the nickname of “the Bold,” but it was through a train of circumstances with which he seems to have had little to do and not through war that the throne became enriched by the acquisition of some valuable territories in the south.

Probably, also, he did not realize that when he raised to the nobility a certain silversmith whose work he admired he struck a blow at the hereditary pride of the lords, and showed a new power which threatened the integrity of their class. Naturally, too, it encouraged the democracy.

A comparatively trivial happening of this reign shows the increasing boldness of the democratic spirit. The king took as his favorite a man who had been his father’s barber, and who probably possessed the traditional conversational charm attaching to his occupation. When Philip made him wealthy with lands, houses and gold the nobles of the court could not restrain their jealousy, and accusations charging him with the medieval equivalent of graft and even with baser crimes were soon so persistent and apparently so well-proven that even his royal master either was convinced or thought it wise to seem to believe. At any rate the man was hanged in company with Paris thieves of the meaner sort. To the commonalty of Paris who were not in a position to hear the whispers and accusations of the court this seemed an unmerited punishment, and they did not hesitate to express vivid opinions concerning the victim of what they supposed to be aristocratic greed.

When an aristocrat engaged in petty graft his reproof was not so swiftly administered. Enguerrand de Marigny, under whose direction the palace was enlarged by Philip the Bold’s son, Philip the Fair, was accused of charging rental for the booths along the Galérie des Merciers which connected the Great Hall with the Sainte Chapelle and whose stalls were supposed to be given rent free to tradespeople whose goods might be of interest to the folk who had daily tasks at the palace. Nothing came of the accusation, however, unless it may be thought to have been punished in common with other financial misdeeds of which Marigny was accused by Philip the Fair’s successor, Quarrelsome Louis—le Hutin—, and for which he was hanged on the Montfaucon gallows which he had built when he was Philip’s “Coadjutor and Inspector.”

Guilty or not, de Marigny was set a poor example by his master, for Philip the Fair (1285-1314) was so consumed by avarice that he spared neither friends, vassals, burgesses nor ecclesiastics if by taxing them or dragging them into warfare he might add to his treasures. His greed led him into the pettiness of debasing the coinage, and inspired him to defy the pope himself, though he claimed sovereignty over all the monarchs of Europe. He was a masterful ruler—Philip—but one who worked for his own interests and not for those of his people.

Probably, however, his subjects were entirely in sympathy with Philip’s evident desire upon his accession to know where he stood with England. If he wanted to bring about an immediate quarrel his wish was balked, for when he summoned Edward I to appear before him to take the oath of allegiance “for the lands I hold of you” the English king came to Paris without a whimper and offered public acknowledgment to his suzerain. Philip made a trifling quarrel between some French and English sailors an excuse for war, and the Flemish, who were also Philip’s vassals, were soon involved. Flanders manufactured woolen cloths which went all over Europe. Raw wool was imported from England. For commercial reasons it behooved the Flemish to stay at peace with England and to regard England’s enemies as their enemies. Philip was willing enough to be considered in that light since it gave him a chance to invade a country whose industries with their resultant wealth fairly made his palms tingle.

Certainly “Hands off” was not his motto. By underhand means he contrived to get some of Edward’s French possessions away from him and he forced the Parliament of Paris to approve his action. Naturally such behavior drove Philip’s opponents together. Philip suspected some new coalition and ordered the Count of Flanders to come to Paris. Guy obeyed unwillingly, and he was confirmed in his belief that it was a mistaken step when Philip, upon hearing that Guy and Edward were arranging a marriage between Edward’s son Edward and Philippa, Guy’s daughter, flew into a rage and straightway cast the count and his two sons into the tower of the Louvre. There they stayed for several months, gaining their freedom only at the expense of poor Philippa, who, as hostage, replaced them within the grim walls on the river bank.

For the next few years there was constant trouble in the north. The imprisonment of an entirely innocent girl gave zest to the Flemish rage over Philip’s arrogant demands. Guy betrothed another of his daughters (he had eight daughters and nine sons) to the English crown prince and sent an embassy to announce the new arrangement to Philip and to tell him that he considered himself freed from his allegiance.

In the resulting war Philip was victorious. Guy and his immediate followers went to Paris and gave themselves up to the king before the steps of the palace while the queen looked on sneeringly from a window. It was not Philip’s nature to be magnanimous and he hurried his enemy off to prison. With the queen he soon after paid a visit to his new possessions where Jeanne was filled with jealousy of the rich apparel of the women of Bruges. “There are only queens in Bruges,” she cried. “I thought that only I had a right to royal state.”

The governors whom Philip put over Flanders suffered from their master’s disease, greed of gold, and so outrageous was their behavior that Flanders revolted. In the battle of Courtrai the French suffered a defeat that made terrible inroads on the ranks of the nobility. This loss was of benefit to the personal power and the pocketbook of the king, however, through his inheritance of estates and his privileges as guardian of children orphaned by the battle.

Philip was in a fury over the check to his arms at Courtrai. He took Guy of Flanders out of the Louvre and sent him to arrange a peace. The Flemish were elated by success and would not listen to him, and the now aged count, who had been promised his liberty if he succeeded, returned again to his prison and to the death that was soon to give him a long-delayed tranquillity.

The war went on with varying fortune. Philip’s chief advantage was at the battle of Mons-en-Puelle. When he returned to Paris crowds gathered before the cathedral to see their monarch ride in full equipment into Notre Dame, bringing his horse to a stand before the statue of Notre Dame de Paris to whom he had vowed his armor if he might be given the victory. During the Revolution the equestrian statue which had worn this same suit of mail for four centuries and a half was broken up in the destruction that was meted out to all representations of royalty.

The struggle with Flanders lasted even beyond Philip’s reign. On the whole the results—direct and indirect—of the contest were in Philip’s favor. In England he was able to exert a more or less open influence through his daughter, Isabelle, to whom the often-betrothed English prince (who came to the throne as Edward II) was at last united. Probably the bridegroom’s pride in having married the handsomest woman of her country was somewhat neutralized by developments of her character which won for her the nickname of “the she-wolf of France.”

Meanwhile Philip became involved in a quarrel with the pope that lasted for many years and set its mark for all time on the relations and possible relations between France and Rome. In the course of one of his attempts to replenish his treasury Philip insisted that imposts should be levied on the clergy. They had previously been free, and they turned to the pope to support their refusal. This action precipitated an immediate quarrel which was patched up but broke out again under pressure of the king’s behavior. What with his wars and what with his natural acquisitiveness Philip was always needing and always obtaining money in ways deserving of sternest censure. Beside debasing the coinage, he had used infamous methods with the Jews, he had sold patents of nobility to men considered unsuitable to enjoy the honor of belonging to the aristocracy, and he had given their freedom to all serfs who were able to pay for it.

The king rebuked Philip in a bull. Philip personally superintended its burning by the Paris hangman. When the pope sent another the king summarized it for the popular understanding into “Boniface the Pope to Philip the Fair, greeting. Know, O Supreme Prince, that thou art subject to us in all things.” This document Philip caused to be read aloud in many public places together with what purported to be his answer; “Philip to Boniface, little or no greeting. Be it known to thy Supreme Idiocy that we are subject to no man in political matters. Those who think otherwise we count to be fools and madmen.”

This was all very dashing but Philip was shrewd enough to see that it was necessary when contending with a power that proclaimed itself accountable only to God to have the support of his people. He summoned to meet in Notre Dame (April 10, 1302) the first National Assembly. It was called the States General because it was made up of representatives of the three upper classes or estates—the clergy, the nobility and the burgesses of the free cities. It may well have been a satisfied body that gathered under the Gothic arches of the great church. Its members did not realize that their powers were only advisory and that they would be expected to advise the king to do what he wanted to. All that they were yet to learn. For the moment they felt that this meeting was a concession from a king who had curbed the power of the nobles, who was trying to prevent the clergy from even entering the hall where was sitting the Parliament of Paris, increasingly made up of lawyers, and who made it clear that he tolerated the burgesses only because they were occasionally useful.

To the burgesses this was in truth a proud moment, for it was their first admission to any body of the kind on even terms with the other two estates. They were to find out that, because the voting always was done by classes, they were to be outnumbered two to one on almost every question with a unanimity that betrayed the fear that their presence excited in the lords and clergy.

It was not until the fifteenth century that deputies from the peasantry sat with the Third Estate. In the five centuries between the calling of the first States General and the Revolution the Assembly was summoned only thirteen times. When Louis XVI ordered an election in the futile hope that something might be suggested that would help France in her trouble it had been one hundred and seventy-five years since a sitting had been held.

The first States General found itself in something of a predicament. It was clear that it was expected to endorse Philip’s attitude toward the pope, yet such a course would place the clergy at variance with the head of the church. Of course they yielded. Boniface was a long way off; Philip was near at hand, and the dungeons of the Grand Châtelet and of the Louvre were always able to hold a few more prisoners. The pope was notified that the affairs of France were the concern of France and not of an outsider. The pope replied with excommunication. Philip retaliated with charges for which, he said, the pontiff should be tried. Boniface, justly enraged, threatened to depose Philip and make the German emperor king of France. Philip once more laid his case before his subjects, this time in the palace garden. Hot and heavy raged the quarrel after this. It resulted in the popes becoming for seventy years no more than dependents upon the will of the French crown, and practically its prisoners at Avignon on French soil.

Having negotiated the election of a pope of French birth, Philip used him as a tool for the accomplishment of his mercenary and cruel plans against the Order of Knights Templar. This order, at once religious and military, had been founded to protect pilgrims to the Holy Sepulcher. Its duties over with the ending of the Crusades, idleness may, perhaps, have done its proverbial work. No one believes, however, that Philip’s charges of corruption in both religious practices and in manner of living were other than shamefully exaggerated excuses for seizing rich possessions which he had coveted ever since the time when, during a Paris riot caused by an unjust tax, he had taken refuge in the Temple to the north of the city. There he had seen the gathered treasures, and the fact that he owed his life to the Templars did not deter him from devising elaborate plans to rob them.

Early in the morning of October 13, 1307, all the Templars in France were seized in their beds and thrown into ecclesiastical prisons. There were one hundred and forty arrests in Paris. The knights listened, astounded, to what purported to be a confession by the Grand Master, Jacques de Molay, of the truth of the abominable charges brought against the Order. They were promised liberty if they confirmed the confession. To the lasting credit of the Order only a few bought their freedom by perjury. The rest were “put to the question” with a wealth of hideous ingenuity which has seldom been approached in the grisly history of the torture chamber. In Paris alone thirty-six died as a result of their rending on the rack, and the others said anything that would put an end to suffering worse than death.

The methods employed by Philip became known to the pope, and although he had sworn to do the king’s behest in regard to some unknown deed, and this proved to be the deed, yet he had the courage to send a commission to Paris to search into the truth of the rumors that had reached him. It sat in the Abbey of Sainte Geneviève. Under shelter of the commission’s protection scores of witnesses from all over France told what they had endured, and denied their extorted confessions. Jacques de Molay himself was tortured physically and tormented mentally, but he persisted in a denial. His courage gave strength to over two hundred other knights who came before the commission to show the wounds by which they had been forced into saying what was not true.

But Philip was not to be balked of his prey. The archbishop of Sens, who was also metropolitan of Paris held a special court in the Hôtel de Sens. This palace was replaced almost two centuries later by the Hôtel de Sens now to be

seen on the rue du Figuier-Saint-Paul, a house well worth a visit from lovers of line and proportion as well as from antiquarians. To his court the archbishop summoned half a hundred of the knights who had denied their confessions, and the tribunal promptly convicted them of heresy and condemned them to be burned. The pope’s commissioners had no control over a local court and could not save the poor wretches. On a day in May, 1308, they were taken out of the city on the northeast and there suffered their cruel punishment, every one of them protesting to the assembled crowd the innocence of the Order. Six others were burned on the Grève.

Five years later the pope ordered the dispersal of the Order and Philip was at last able to take possession of their treasure—to repay himself for the heavy expenses of the trial!

While the Grand Master lived, however, even though he was in prison for life, the king did not feel secure in his ill-gotten gain. A year after the general dispersal the Parisians thronged one day into the Parvis de Notre Dame—the raised open space before the cathedral—where a representative of the pope, the archbishop of Sens and other church dignitaries sat enthroned. There Jacques de Molay and three other officers of the late Order were confronted with their false or extorted confessions. If it was done to harry them into some betrayal of feeling which could be taken advantage of for their destruction it was successful. De Molay protested against this untruth being again attributed to him. The crowd, eager for excitement, pressed closer to hear the ringing words of the old soldiers. Then, in the dusk of evening, noble and burgess and cleric pushed to the western end of the Cité where they could look across to some small islands, to-day walled and made a part of the land on which the Pont Neuf rests between the two arms of the Seine. On one of these islets the fagots were piled. A witness says; “The Grand Master, seeing the fire, stripped himself briskly; I tell just as I saw; he bared himself to his shirt, light-heartedly and with a good grace, without a whit of trembling, though he was dragged and shaken mightily. They took hold of him to tie him to the stake, and they were binding his hands with a cord, but he said to them, ‘Sirs, suffer me to fold my hands a while and make my prayer to God, for verily it is time. I am presently to die, but wrongfully, God wot. Wherefore woe will come ere long, to those who condemn us without a cause. God will avenge our death.’”

While the flames leaped scarlet against the river and the sky the Grand Master summoned pope and king to appear with him before the bar of the Almighty. They who heard must have shuddered, and shuddered yet again when in fact Pope Clement died within forty days and Philip the Fair within the year.

In Paris the huge establishment of the Temple with its many buildings, its considerable fields and gardens and its walls, had been independent of the city, and over its inhabitants the Grand Master had power of life and death. When Philip took possession of its treasure he turned over the enclosure to the Knights of Saint John who held it as his subjects. In the course of time the quiet precincts of the Temple became a haven for impoverished nobles, for unlicensed doctors and for small manufacturers “independent” of the guilds, for all these found sanctuary here. Later the growth of the city smothered the grounds with streets and houses and did away with most of the buildings. In 1792 when Louis XVI was imprisoned in the large tower and the other members of the royal family in the smaller tower the few buildings that were left were torn down so that they might not serve as hiding places for any rescue party. Napoleon had the donjon demolished in 1811, and everything that was left of the once superb commandery melted into the Square du Temple under the beautifying process instituted by Napoleon III. Until a very few years ago one of the sights of Paris for seers in search of the unusual was the Temple Market edging the square, where old clothes, old curtains, old upholstery—every sort of second hand “dry goods”—offered a chance for the securing of occasional wonderful bargains provided the purchaser was either fluent in his own behalf or indifferent to what was said to him.