FOOTNOTES:
[1] "Faudra recommencer" ("We must begin again"), said, to the present writer in 1871, a Communist refugee bearing a great scar on his face from a wound received fighting at the barricades.
[2] Inf. XXIX. 121-123. A French commentator consoles himself by reflecting that the author of the Divina Commedia is far more vituperative when dealing with certain Italian peoples, whom he designates as hogs, curs, wolves and foxes.
[3] Cobbett, comparing the relative intellectual culture of the British Isles and of France between the years 1600 and 1787, found that of the writers on the arts and sciences who were distinguished by a place in the Universal, Historical, Critical and Bibliographical Dictionary, one hundred and thirty belonged to England, Scotland and Ireland, and six hundred and seventy-six to France.
[4] "Nous cuisinons même l'amour."—Taine.
[5] The Seine takes five hours to flow through the seven miles of modern Paris.
[6] "Cesare armato con gli occhi grifani."—Inferno, iv. 123.
[7] Of some 10,000 ancient inscriptions found in Gaul, only twenty are in Celtic, and less than thirty words of Celtic origin now remain in the French language.
[8] The water supply of Paris is even now partly derived from these sources, and flows along the old repaired Roman aqueduct.
[9] Part of this amphitheatre was laid bare in 1869 by some excavations made for the Compagnie des Omnibus between the Rues Monge and Linné. Unhappily, the public subscription initiated by the Académie des Inscriptions to purchase the property proved inadequate, and the Company retained possession of the land. In 1883, however, other excavations were undertaken in the Rue de Navarre, which resulted in the discovery of other remains of the amphitheatre which have been preserved and made into a public park.
[10] In 1848 some remains were found of the old halls of this building, and of its columns, worn by the ropes of the boatmen who used to moor their craft to them. In 1866 fragments of the triumphal arch were found in digging the foundations of the new Hôtel Dieu.
[11] In 860 a new bridge was built east of the Grand Pont by Charles the Bold and defended by a tower at its head. The money-changers were established on the bridge by Louis VI., and it became known subsequently as the Pont au Change.
[12] "Jovem brutum atque hebetem."
[13] On the former may still be read: TIB ... CAESARE AVG. IOVI. OPTVM ... MAXSVMO. ARAM. NAVTAE. PARISIACI PVBLICE. POSIERVNT.
[14] Not to be confounded with the Royal Provost, a king's officer, who in 1160 replaced the Capetian viscounts. The office was abolished in 1792.
[15] French authorities believe the scene to have been enacted in the old palace of the Cité.
[16] The present writer recalls a similar glacial epoch in Paris during the early eighties, when the Seine was frozen over at Christmas time.
[17] By the law of 350 A.D. it was a capital offence to sacrifice to or honour the old gods. The persecuted had already become persecutors. Boissier, La Fin du Paganisme.
[18] "He soon hugs himself in ease at any price."
[19] To protect home producers against the competition of the Gallic wine and olive growers, Roman statesmen could conceive nothing better than the stupid expedient of prohibiting the culture of the vine and olive in Gaul.
[20] The favourite arm of the Franks, a short battle-axe, used as a missile or at close quarters.
[21] Again we quote from the Golden Legend.
[22] Her figure was a favourite subject for the sculptors of Christian churches. She usually bears a taper in her hand and a devil is seen peering over her shoulder. This symbolises the miraculous relighting of the taper after the devil had extinguished it. The taper was long preserved at Notre Dame.
[23] If we may believe Gregory of Tours, her arguments were vituperative rather than convincing. "Your Jupiter," said she, "is omnium stuprorum spurcissimus perpetrator."
[24] Merovée, second of the kings of the Salic Franks, was fabled to be the issue of Clodio's wife and a sea monster.
[25] Among the wives of Clothaire was the gentle Radegonde, who turned with horror from the bloody scenes of the palace to live in works of charity with the poor and suffering, and in holy communion with priests and bishops. She was at length consecrated a deaconess by St. Médard, donned the habit of a nun, and founded a convent at Poitiers, where the poet Fortunatus had himself ordained a priest that he might be near her. Radegonde's memory is dear to us in England, for it was a small company of her nuns who settled on the Green Croft by the river bank below Cambridge, and founded a priory whose noble church and monastic buildings were subsequently incorporated in Jesus College when the nunnery was suppressed by Bishop Alcock in 1496.
[27] The works of art traditionally ascribed to St. Eloy are many. He is reported to have made a golden throne set with stones (or rather two thrones, for he used his material so honestly and economically). He was made master of the mint, and thirteen pieces of money are known which bear his name. He decorated the tombs of St. Martin and St. Denis, and constructed reliquaries for St. Germain, Notre Dame, and other churches.
[28] The term Cité (civitas) was given to the old Roman part of many French towns.
[29] The Carlovingians had been careful to abolish the office of mayor of the palace.
[30] St. Pierre was subsequently enriched by the possession of the body of St. Maur, brought thither in the Norman troubles by fugitive monks from Anjou, and the monastery is better known to history under the name of St. Maur des Fossés. The entrails of our own Henry V. were buried there. Rabelais, before its secularisation, was one of its canons, and Catherine de' Medicis once possessed a château on its site. Monastery and château no longer exist.
[31] The villa of those days was a vast domain, part dwelling, part farm, part game preserve.
[32] The remains of the great Viking's castle are still shown at Aalesund, in Norway.
[33] When Alan Barbetorte, after the recovery of Nantes, went to give thanks to God in the cathedral, he was compelled to cut his way, sword in hand, through thorns and briers.
[34] It must be admitted, however, that the poet's uncouth diction is anything but Virgilian.
[35] The tablet has now (1911) disappeared. See p. [313.]
[36] Abbo's favourite epithet. They were without a head, for they knew not Christ, the Head of Mankind.
[37] In the Middle Ages and down to 1761 Montfaucon had a sinister reputation. There stood the gallows of Paris, a great stone gibbet with its three rows of chains, near the old Barrière du Combat, where the present Rue de la Grange aux Belles abuts on the Boulevard de la Villette.
[38] William the Conqueror was also known as William the Builder.
[39] The surname Capet is said to have originated in the capet or hood of the abbot's mantle which Hugh wore as lay Abbot of St. Martin's, having laid aside the crown after his coronation.
[40] A dramatic representation of the delivery of the papal bull, painted by Jean Paul Laurens, hangs in the museum of the Luxembourg.
[41] The possession of an oven was a lucrative monopoly in mediæval times. The writer has visited a village in South Italy where this curious privilege is still possessed by the parish priest, who levies a small indemnity of a few loaves, made specially of larger size, for each use of the oven.
[42] He was said to be "kind even to Jews."
[43] The indignant scribe is most precise: they walked abroad artatis clunibus et protensis natibus.
[44] The reformers always discover the nunneries to be so much more corrupt than the monasteries, but it is a little suspicious that in every case the former are expropriated to the latter. The abbot of St. Maur evidently had some qualms concerning the expropriation of St. Eloy, and wished to restore it to the bishop.
[46] A modern reproduction may be seen in the church of St. Denis, but the exact shape is doubtful, no less than three different forms being known to antiquarians.
[47] The abbey was suppressed at the time of the Revolution and the site is now occupied by the Halle aux Vins.
[48] In the ardour of the fight the king found himself surrounded by the enemy's footmen, was unhorsed, and while they were vainly seeking for a vulnerable spot in his armour some French knights had time to rescue him.
[49] Jeanne de Burgogne, queen of Philip le Long, lived at the Hôtel de Nesle, and is said to have seduced scholars by night into the tower, had them tied in sacks and flung into the Seine. If we may believe Villon, this was the queen —
"Qui commanda que Buridan
Fust jetté en ung sac en Seine."
Legend adds that the schoolman, made famous by his thesis, that if an ass were placed equidistant between two bundles of hay of equal attraction he would die of hunger before he could resolve to eat either, was saved by his disciples, who placed a barge, loaded with straw, below the tower to break his fall.
[50] It should be remembered that heresy was the solvent antisocial force of the age and was regarded with the same feelings of abhorrence as anarchist doctrines and propaganda are regarded by modern statesmen.
[51] She was wont to say to her son—"I would rather see thee die than commit a mortal sin."
[52] By a subtle irony, part of the money was derived from the tribute of the Jews of Paris.
[53] On account of the cord they wore round their habit.
[54] St. Louis loved the Franciscans, and in the Fioretti a beautiful story is told how the king, in the guise of a pilgrim, visiting Brother Giles at Perugia, knelt with the good friar in an embrace of fervent affection for a great space of time in silence. They parted without speaking a word, marvellously comforted.
[55] The innocence of Marie Antoinette in this scandalous affair has been clearly established. See L'affaire du Collier, by M. Funck Brentano. Paris, 1903.
[56] It was buried in the church of Monreale at Palermo.
[57] Joinville was a brave and tender knight; he tells us that before starting to join the crusaders at Marseilles he called all his friends and household before him, and declared that if he had wronged any one of them reparation should be made. After a severe penance he was assoiled, and as he set forth, durst not turn back his eyes lest his heart should be melted at leaving his fair château of Joinville and his two children whom he loved so dearly.
[58] The relics were transferred to a new church of St. Stephen (St. Étienne du Mont), built by the abbot of St. Genevieve as a parish church for his servants and tenants.
[59] The early glass-workers were particularly fond of their beautiful red. "Wine of the colour of the windows of the Sainte Chapelle," was a popular locution of the time.
[60] The researches of Professor Strzygowski of Gratz, and other authorities in the field of Byzantine and Eastern archæology, tend to prove the dominant importance of the Christian East in the development of early ecclesiastical architecture and the subordinate influence of Roman models.
[61] Brunetto Latini, in the thirteenth century contrasted the high towers and grim stone walls of the fortress-palaces of the Italian nobles with the large, spacious and painted houses of the French, their rooms adorned pour avoir joie et delit and surrounded with orchards and gardens.
[62] Par. XVI. 51.
[63] Another delusion of moderns is that there was an absence of personal cleanliness in those ages. In the census of the inhabitants of Paris, who in 1292 were subject to the Taille, there are inscribed the names of no less than twenty-six proprietors of public hot baths, a larger proportion to population than exists to-day, and Dr. Gasquet has described in his English Monastic Life the admirable provisions for personal cleanliness made in mediæval monasteries.
[64] Hence the name of clerc applied to any student, even if a layman.
[65] "Love is quickly caught in gentle heart."—Inf. V. 100.
[66] Afterwards bishop of London.
[67] The two churches still existed in the eighteenth century and stood on the site of the southern Cours Visconti and Lefuel of the present Louvre.
[68] The actual originator was, however, the queen's physician, Robert de Douai, who left a sum of money which formed the nucleus of the foundation.
[69] The Montaigu scholars were called capetes from their peculiar cape fermée, or cloak, such as Masters of Arts used to wear. The Bibliothèque Ste. Geneviève occupies the site of the college.
[70] There were two Prés, the Petit Pré roughly represented by the area now enclosed by the Rues de Seine, Jacob and Bonaparte; and the Grand Pré which extended nearly to the Champ de Mars. A narrow stream, the Petite Seine, divided them.
[71] Par. X. 136. "Who lecturing in Straw St. deduced truths that brought him hatred."
[72] Benvenuto was certainly in France and possibly in Paris during the fourteenth century. At any rate he would be familiar with Parisian students, many of whom were Italians.
[73] The contemporary chronicler, Villani, says of one of these scoundrels that he "was named Nosso Dei, one of our Florentines, a man filled with every vice."
[74] The indictment covers seven quarto pages. The charges may be briefly classified as blasphemy, heresy, spitting and trampling on the crucifix, obscene and secret rites, and unnatural crimes.
[75] An approved method of extracting confessions. As late as 1584 at the examination of a papal emissary, the titular archbishop of Cashel, before the Lords Justices, Archbishop Loftus and Sir H. Wallop at Dublin, the easy method failing to do any good "we made commission," writes Loftus to Walsingham, "to put him to torture such as your honour advised us, which was to toast his feet against the fire with hot boots. Yielding to the agony he confessed," etc.—Froude's History, x. p. 619.
[76] There is a significant entry on page 273 of the published trial: in ista pagina nihil est scriptum. The empty page tells of the moment when the papal commissioners, having heard that the fifty-four had been burned, suspended the sitting.
[77] Nihil sibi appropriare intendebat.
[78] Or the isle of the Jews, which, with its sister islet of Bussy, were subsequently joined to the island of the Cité, and now form the Place Dauphine and the land that divides the Pont Neuf. Philip watched the fires from his palace garden.
[79] It is to be hoped that some English scholar will do for these most important records, the earliest report of any great criminal trial which we possess, what Mr. T. Douglas Murray has done for the Trial and Rehabilitation of Joan of Arc.
[80] In the seventeenth century the councillors had increased to one hundred and twenty and the courts to seven.
[81] The term "Parlement" was originally applied to the transaction of the common business of a monastic establishment after the conclusion of the daily chapter.
[82] The royal war-cry, "Montjoie St. Denis," was uttered when the king took the Oriflamme from the altar at St. Denis.
[83] During John the Good's reign, the province of Dauphiny had been added to the French crown, and the king's eldest son took the title of Dauphin.
[84] So called from the familiar appellation "Jacques Bonhomme," applied half in contempt, half in jest, by the seigneurs to the peasants who served them in the wars.
[85] Howell mentions the locution in a letter dated 1654.
[86] Charles taxed and borrowed heavily. Even the members of his household were importuned for loans, however small. His cook lent him frs. 67.50.
[87] This priceless collection of books, which at length filled three rooms, was appropriated for a nominal sum by the Duke of Bedford during the English occupation in Paris and sent to England. A few, barely fifty, have survived, of which the greater number have been acquired by the Bibliothèque Nationale.
[88] Each gate of the new wall was defended by a kind of fortress called a Bastide or Bastille.
[89] Aubriot is said to have been the first prisoner incarcerated in the dungeon of his own Bastille.
[90] The scene is quaintly illustrated in an illuminated copy of Froissart in the British Museum.
[91] They melted down the reliquaries in the Paris churches.
[92] In 1417 Charles, returning from a visit to the queen at the castle of Vincennes, met the Chevalier Bois-Burdon going thither. He ordered his arrest, and under torture a confession reflecting on the queen's honour was extorted. Bois-Burdon was delivered to the provost at the Châtelet, and one night, sans declarer la cause au people, sewn in a sack and dropped into the Seine. The queen was banished to Tours, and her jewels and treasures confiscated. Furious with the king and the Armagnac faction, she made common cause with the Duke of Burgundy.
[93] The statue was mutilated at the expulsion of the English in 1446 and was destroyed in the fire of 1618.
[94] An equestrian statue in bronze stands at the south end of the Rue des Pyramides, a few hundred yards from the spot where the Maid fell before the Porte St Honoré.
[95] In 1421 and 1422 the people of Paris had seen Henry V. and his French consort sitting in state at the Louvre, surrounded by a brilliant throng of princes, prelates and barons. Hungry crowds watched the sumptuous banquet and then went away fasting, for nothing was offered them. "It was not so in the former times under our kings," they murmured, "then was open table kept, and servants distributed the meats and wine even of the king himself."
[96] The fifteenth-century goldsmiths of Paris: Loris, the Hersants, and Jehan Gallant, were famed throughout Europe.
[97] At the conclusion of the Hucksters' Peace at Amiens.
[98] The reader will hardly need to be reminded that this amazing folly forms one of the principal episodes in Scott's Quentin Durward.
[99] Flamboyant windows were a natural, technical development of Gothic. The aim of the later builders was to facilitate the draining away of the water which the old mullioned windows used to retain.
[100] The drainage of an old city was offensive to the smell rather than essentially insanitary. "Mediæval sewers," says Dr. Charles Creighton in his History of Epidemics in Britain, pp. 323-4, "were banked-up water-courses ... freely open to the greatest of all purifying agents, the oxygen of the air."
[101] The good king's portrait by an Italian sculptor may be seen in the Louvre, Room VII., and on his monument in St. Denis he kneels beside his beloved and chère Bretonne, Anne of Brittany whose loss he wept for eight days and nights.
[102] "He was well named after St. Francis, because of the holes in his hands," said a Sorbonne doctor.
[103] The authorship of this famous building is much canvassed by authorities. M.E. Mareuse, secretary of the Committee of Inscriptions, affirms that Domenico must be considered the unique architecte of our old Municipal Palace: other writers claim with equal confidence Pierre Chambiges as the architect. Charles Normand after an exhaustive examination of documents, declares that the Italian master's design was followed in the south court, but that after his death in 1549 the design was ordered to be revised and the great façade was erected in a style wholly different from the original plan. This eminent authority inclines to the belief that the new design was due to Du Cerceau. Certain it is that French masters were associated with Domenico, for we know that on the 19th June 1534, a rescript came from the city fathers to the masters Pierre Chambiges, Jacques Arasse, Jehan Aesselin, Loys Caquelin and Dominique de Cortona, reminding them that it would be more seemly to push the works forward and keep an eye on the workmen instead of going away to dine together.
[104] "Ah! me, how thou art changed! See, thou art neither two nor one."
[105] The Petit Nesle comprised the south-west gate and tower: the Grand Nesle, the Hôtel de Nesle within the wall. See p. [68]
[106] Students in Paris in the days of King Francis had cause to remember gratefully that monarch's solicitude, for a maximum of charges was fixed, and an order made that every hotel-keeper should affix his prices outside the door, that extortion might be avoided. Among other maxima, the price of a pair of sheets, to "sleep not more than five persons," was to be five deniers (a penny).
[107] The salamander was figured on the royal arms of Francis.
[108] For the first offence a fine; for the second, the lips to be cloven; for the third, the tongue pierced; for the fourth, death.
[109] The image was stolen in 1545 and replaced by one of wood. This was struck down in 1551, and the bishop of Paris substituted for it one of marble.
[110] "The moral brutality of the Renaissance is clearly shown in its punishments. In this matter it reached with perfection its prototype, the times of the cruel Roman Emperors.... Never has 'justice' been more barbarous; not even in the darkest Middle Ages has torture been more refined, more devilish, than in the days of Humanism.... Truly it is no accident that immediately after, indeed, even before, the end of the Renaissance, everywhere in Western Europe the fires began to glow wherein thousands of unhappy wretches expired in torments for the sake of their faith; men's minds were only too well prepared for such horrors." Gustav Körting (Anfänge der Renaissancelitteratur, pp. 161, 162.)
[111] A document recently discovered at Modena however, proves that Goujon, after the massacre of Vassy, fled to Italy with other Protestants and died in obscurity at Bologna.
[112] One thousand two hundred are said to have suffered death during the month of vengeance.
[113] Henry of Guise had succeeded to the dukedom after his father's assassination.
[114] Suspicions of poison were entertained by the Huguenots. Jeanne, in a letter to the Marquis de Beauvais, complained that holes were made in her rooms and wardrobes that she might be spied upon.
[115] Félibien and Lobineau, 1725.
[116] Catherine was accustomed to treat of important state matters requiring absolute secrecy in her new garden. The pourparlers between her and Lord Buckhurst, relative to the proposed marriage of Queen Elizabeth and the Duke of Anjou, took place under the trees in the Tuileries garden.
[117] "That to show pity was to be cruel to them: to be cruel to them was to show pity."
[118] The municipality gave presents of money to the archers who had taken part in the massacre, to the watermen who prevented the Huguenots from crossing the Seine, and to grave-diggers for having buried in eight days about 1,100 bodies.
[119] Now known as the Galerie d'Apollon.
[120] Ugonottorum strages. Inscription on the obverse of the medal.
[121] Examples of magnificent costumes of the order may be seen in the Cluny Museum.
[122] The Duke of Guise was so called from his face being scarred by a wound received at the battle of Dolmans.
[123] The king had premonitions of a violent end. One day, after keeping Easter at Negeon with great devotion, he suddenly returned to the Louvre and ordered all the lions, bears, bulls, and other wild animals kept in the Hôtel des Lions, reconstructed in 1570 for Charles IX., for baiting by dogs, to be shot. He had dreamt that he was set upon and eaten by wild beasts.
[124] So called derisively, because he was born and brought up in the poor province of Béarn, in the Pyrenees.
[125] Her majesty, we learn from the Mémoires of L'Estoile, was of a rich figure, stout, fine eyes and complexion. She used no paint, powder or other vilanie.
[126] In 1586 six poor wretches convicted of plotting the assassination of Queen Elizabeth were dragged to Tyburn, "hanged but for a moment, taken down while the susceptibility of agony was unimpaired and cut in pieces afterwards with due precautions for the protraction of the pain."—Froude's History.
[127] The new palace was situated in the parish of St. Germain l'Auxerrois, the parish church of the Louvre.
[128] The north tower was left only partially constructed, and was finished by Louis XIII.
[129] By a curious coincidence the widening of the Rue de la Ferronnerie had been ordered just before the king was assassinated.
[130] They marked the seven resting-places of the saint as he journeyed to St. Denis after his martyrdom.
[131] The Grande Galerie.
[132] In the Hôtel de Bourbon, east of the old Louvre, sometimes known as the Petit Bourbon. It was demolished to give place to the new east façade of the Louvre.
[133] The Church of Notre Dame des Victoires commemorates the victory.
[134] The Marché St. Honoré now occupies its site.
[135] In 1793 the tomb was desecrated, and the head removed from the body, but in 1863, as an inscription tells, the head was recovered by the historian Duruy, and after seventy years reunited to the trunk.
[136] A letter from Paris to Lyons was taxed at two sous.
[137] The Rue Poulletier marks the line of the old channel between the islands.
[138] So named from the wooden seat, or couche de bois, covered with rich stuff embroidered with fleur-de-lys, on which the king sat when he attended a meeting of the Parlement.
[139] One of the schemes of Francis I. to raise money had been to offer the benches to the highest bidders, and under the law of 1604 the office of councillor became a hereditary property on payment to the court of one-sixtieth of its value. Moreover, the Parlement was but a local body, one among several others in the provinces.
[140] The added indignity of the whip is an invention of Voltaire.
[141] Louis used, however, to stilt his low stature by means of thick pads in his boots.
[142] Taine, basing his calculation on a MS. bound with the monogram of Mansard, estimated the cost of Versailles in modern equivalent at about 750,000,000 francs (£30,000,000 sterling.)
[143] The writer, whose youth was passed among the descendants of the Huguenot silk-weavers of Spitalfields, has indelible memories of their sterling character and admirable industry.
[144] Marshal Luxembourg was dubbed the Tapissier de Notre Dame (the upholsterer of Notre Dame), from the number of captured flags he sent to the cathedral.
[145] In a previous campaign the king had taken his queen and two mistresses with him in one coach. The peasants used to amuse themselves by coming to see the "three queens."
[146] Bernini, according to Charles Perrault, was short in stature, good-humoured, and seasoned his conversation with parables, good stories and bons mots; never tiring of talking of his own country, of Michel Angelo and of himself. For a full history of these intrigues, see Ch. Normand's Paris.
[147] Levau's south façade was not completely hidden by Perrault's screen, for the roofs of the end and central pavilions emerged from behind it until they were destroyed by Gabriel in 1755.
[148] Jules Hardouin, the younger Mansard, was a nephew and pupil of François Mansard, and assumed his uncle's name. The latter was the inventor of the Mansard roof.
[149] The sixth part of a sou.
[150] Twelve alone were added to the St. Honoré quarter by levelling the Hill of St. Roch and clearing away accumulated rubbish.
[151] It extended as far as the entrance to the quadrangle opposite the Pont des Arts. Blondel's drawings show a double line of trees, north and south, enclosing a Renaissance garden of elaborate design: a charming bosquet, or wood, filled the eastern extremity.
[152] "By order of the king, God is forbidden to work miracles in this place."
[153] In 1753 between 20th January and 20th February two hundred persons died of want (misère) in the Faubourg St. Antoine.
[154] Some conception of the insanitary condition of the court may be formed by the fact that fifty persons were struck down there by this loathsome disease during the king's illness.
[155] "I have seen the Louvre and its huge enclosure, a vast palace which for two hundred years is always being finished and always begun. Two workmen, lazy hodmen, speed very slowly those rich buildings, and are paid when they are thought of."
[156] The aspect of the west front with Soufflot's "improvements" is well seen in Les Principaux Monuments Gothiques de l'Europe, published in Brussels, 1843.
[157] Taine estimates the revenues of thirty-three abbots in terms of modern values at from 140,000 to 480,000 francs (£5,600 to £19,200). Twenty-seven abbesses enjoyed revenues nearly as large.
[158] The score of Rousseau's opera is still preserved in the Bibliothèque Nationale.
[159] The Excise duty.
[160] Personal and land-taxes paid by the humbler classes alone.
[161] It is difficult, however, to read the sober and irrefutable picture of their miserable condition, given in the famous Books II. and V. of Taine's Ancien Régime, without deep emotion.
[162] See also Bodley's France, where the author favours the view that Robespierre was not a democrat with a thirst for blood, but rather a man of government, destroyed as a reactionary by surviving Revolutionists who saw their end coming.
[163] After the Thermidorian reaction in 1795, ninety-seven Jacobins were massacred by the royalists at Lyons on 5th May; thirty at Aix on 11th May. Similar horrors were enacted at Avignon, Arles, and Marseilles, and at other places in the south.
[164] A whole library has been written concerning the identity of this famous prisoner. There is little doubt that the mask was of velvet and not of iron, and that the mysterious captive who died on 19th November 1703 in the Bastille, was Count Mattioli of Bologna, who was secretly arrested for having betrayed the confidence of Louis XIV.
[165] Only five francs were allowed for a bourgeois; a man of letters was granted ten; a Marshal of France obtained the maximum.
[166] When Sir S. Romilly called on Franklin in 1783, the latter expressed his amazement that the French Government had permitted the publication of the American Constitution, which produced a great impression in Paris. The music of Ça ira, taken from a dance tune, Le Carillon National, very popular in the guinguettes of Paris, has been published in the Révolution Française for 16th December 1898.
[167] It was composed by one of the émigrés, M. de Limon, approved by the Emperor of Austria and the King of Prussia, and signed, against his better judgment, by the Duke of Brunswick.
[168] The numbers have been variously estimated from 100 to 5000 killed on the popular side.
[169] The Académie d'Équitation was an expensive and exclusive establishment where the young nobles and gentlemen of fortune were taught fencing, riding and dancing. It was long and narrow, 240 feet by 60, and only the most powerful voices could be heard in the Assembly. The Rue de Rivoli between the Rues d'Alger and de Castiglione cuts through the site.
[170] "Sew we, spin we, sew we well, behold the coats we have made for the winter that is coming. Soldiers of the Fatherland, ye shall want for nothing."
[171] The term implied rather an excess than a defect of nether garment and was applied in scorn by the fashionable wearers of culottes to the plebeian wearers of trousers.
[172] Inferno, XV. 76-78.—"In whom lives again the seed of those Romans who remained there when the nest (Florence) of so much wickedness was made."
[173] Mlle Curchod, for whom Gibbon "sighed as a lover but renounced as a son."
[174] The meaning of this much misunderstood phrase was simply that the citizens were ready to sacrifice their lives in defence of the revolutionary principles.
[175] The services seem to have been not very dissimilar to a modern Ethical Society meeting. The notorious Festival of the 20th Brumaire was a Fête of Liberty not of Reason, the mistake being due to a careless transcription in the procès-verbal of the Convention. A living representative of Liberty was chosen as less likely to tend to idolatry than an image of stone. See La Révolution Française, 14th April 1899, La Déesse de la Liberté.
[176] "The collapse of the Empire is tremendous. I have no pity for the melodramatic villain who ends as he began, in causeless and wanton blood." Lord Coleridge, Life, ii., p. 172.
[177] "We could rouse no enthusiasm," said the head of a State Department to the writer at the time of the Fashoda incident, "even for a war for the recovery of Alsace and Lorraine, much less against England."
[178] Open 11-4 or 5. Closed Mondays and Chief Festivals.
[179] Open daily, except Sundays, 11-4.
[180] This portal suffered much from the vandalism of Soufflot and his clerical employers of the eighteenth century (p. [252]): all that remains of the original carvings in the tympanum is a portion of the figure of Christ and the angels. The Revolutionary Chaumette, when it was proposed to destroy the Gothic simulacra of superstition, protected the carvings on the west portals on the plea that they related to astronomy, to philosophy and the arts. The astronomer Dupuis was added to the Commission and the reliefs were saved.
[181] Now (1911) demolished.
[182] Notes exist of payments in 1502, 1505 to Pierre Gringoire, histrion et facteur for the mysteries—well and honestly performed—at the entries of Madame la reine, before the portail of the Châtelet.
[183] Permission to visit on Thursdays, 9-5, to be obtained by written application to the Prefect of Police, Rue de Lutèce.
[184] The annexe, the inscription and the Rue du Petit Pont—all have disappeared (1911).
[185] Purgatorio, XI. 81.
[186] Now demolished (1911).
[187] Open Sundays, 10-4.
[188] Open 11-4 or 5, closed Mondays and Chief Festivals.
[189] May be visited Thursdays and Sundays, 11-4. Apply Concierge, 7 Rue des Écoles.
[190] Open 10-4 or 5, closed Mondays and Festivals.
[191] Now suppressed and the building taken over by the State (1911).
[192] The Collège de France may be seen further along the Rue des Écoles at the corner of the Rue St. Jacques.
[193] The Louvre is open from 9-5 in summer, from 10-4 in winter. On Sundays it is open from 10-4. It is closed on Mondays and holidays and on Thursdays till 1 o'clock.
[194] The architectural framework is believed to represent the portal of Hades.
[195] We are credibly informed that this priceless statue was first offered to the English Government for 4,000 francs and refused! The French Government bought it for 6,000 francs.
[196] Unfortunately the numeration of the sculpture in the Louvre is in a most chaotic state. Some of the objects are unnumbered; others retain their old numbers, yet others have both old and new numbers.
[197] There was originally a fosse between it and the garden which Marie de' Medici bridged by a wooden structure, known as the Pont d'Amour, to facilitate interviews with her favourite Concini.
[198] It may not be inopportune to summarise here, Bienkowski's criterion for dating Roman busts, which is as follows: Augustan and Julio-Claudian epoch, head only rendered; Flavian, shoulders rendered but juncture of arms not indicated; the sculptors of Trajan's time included the juncture of the arms, and of Hadrian's and the Antonines, part of the upper arm. Later, the bust developed to a half-length figure. It is necessary of course to exclude decapitated busts subsequently restored or fitted with heads of another epoch.
[199] Now (1911) entered from the E. portal (Antiquités Égyptiennes).
[200] The canons decided that these were unworthy of the enlightened taste of the eighteenth century and had them cleared away. The relief of the Evangelists was discovered in 1850 embedded in the wall of a house in the Rue St. Hyacinthe.
[201] Copiez, copiez toujours et surtout copiez juste was his favourite maxim.
[202] The best criticism passed on this facile artist was uttered by Flaxman: "That man's hand is too great for his head."
[203] For further details, we may refer the reader to Vernon Lee's essay: "Botticelli at the Villa Lemmi," Juvenilia I.
[204] "It cannot be proved that a single picture attributed to Cimabue was painted by him." Editorial Note to new edition of Crowe and Cavalcaselle, I., p. 181.
[205] Crowe and Cavalcaselle, however, assign the work to Pesellino, who is represented in this room by two small pictures, 1414 and 1415, on the wall.
[206] Mr. H. Cook has, however, given reasons for post-dating Titian's birth from 1477 to 1489-90, in spite of the master's twice repeated assertion of his great age in letters to Charles V. See Nineteenth Century Magazine, 1902, p. 156.
[207] It is, however, accepted by Eugène Müntz as a genuine Raphael, executed at Florence about 1507.
[208] From an age when the personality of the painter was of less importance than the subjects he painted, few names of German artists have come down to us.
[209] The picture subsequently found its way to the apartments of Louis XVI., and followed him from Versailles to Paris. The vacillation of this ill-fated monarch towards his advisers, says Michelet, was much influenced by a fixed idea that Charles I. lost his head for having made war on his people, and that James II. lost his crown for having abandoned them.
[210] See, however, [206] p. 357.
[211] French Painting in the Sixteenth Century, by L. Dimier. 1904.
[212] A more rational classification into schools would perhaps, as Dimier has hinted, follow the lines of racial division—French and Teutonic. For many of the Flemish artists were French in race, as, for instance, Roger Van der Weyden, who was known to Italians as Rogerus Gallicus, and called himself Roger de la Pasture.
[213] The late fifteenth-century artist, provisionally known as the Master of Moulins and also as the Painter of the Bourbons, is the author of the famous Triptych of the Cathedral of Moulins. Some critics believe him to be identical with Jehan Perréal (Jehan de Paris).
[214] Entretiens sur les Vies et sur les Ouvrages des plus Excellens Peintres Anciens et Modernes. André Félibien. Paris, 1666-1688.
[215] The Goldsmiths' Guild of Paris was accustomed, from 1630-1701, to present to Notre Dame an ex-voto picture every May-day, painted by the most renowned artist of the time.
[216] The reader may be referred to Hazlitt's essay, On a Landscape of Nicholas Poussin, as an antidote to Ruskin's wayward criticism.
[217] La Gloire du Dome du Val de Grâce. The subject of the picture is La Gloire des Bienheureux, and contains 200 figures.
[218] Coresus, a priest of Bacchus at Calydon, whose love was scorned by the nymph Callirrhoe, called forth a pestilence on the land. The Calydonians, ordered by the oracle to sacrifice the nymph, led her to the altar. Coresus, forgetting his resentment, sacrificed himself instead of her, who, conscious of ingratitude, killed herself at a fountain.
[219] Whistler, while disliking his art, was wont to wish he had been his pupil.
[220] Pictures by living artists are excluded from the Louvre.
[221] The student of history will not need to be reminded that the famous retreat of the Ten Thousand, so dramatically described by Xenophon, was occasioned by the death in battle of their ally Cyrus, in his ill-omened attempt to dispossess his brother, Artaxerxes, of the crown of Persia.
[222] Open, 2-4, by ticket obtained at the Secretary's office.
[223] Open, 10-4, daily, except Chief Festivals.
[224] The masons of Paris were wont to stand on the Place waiting to be hired, and sometimes contrived to exact higher wages. Hence the origin of the term faire grève (to go out on strike).
[225] Charles Normand, founder of the Société des Amis des Monuments, appeals for information concerning the fate of the old inscription commemorating the laying of the foundation stone of the former Hôtel de Ville in 1533. It is said to have been appropriated (se serait emparé) by an Englishman in 1874.
[226] All demolished (1911).
[227] Under process of demolition (1911).
[228] Open Sundays, 12-3.
[229] Open Thursdays at 2 o'clock by a permit from the Director.
[230] Open daily (except Monday) 10-4 or 5 (1 fr.). Thursdays and Sundays free. Closed till 12.30 Tuesdays.
[231] At the north end of the Rue des Archives is the site, now a square and a market, of the grisly old fortress of the Knights Templars, whose walls and towers and round church were still standing a century ago. The enclosure was a famous place of refuge for insolvent debtors and political offenders, and sheltered Rousseau in 1765 when a lettre de cachet was issued for his arrest. In the gloomy keep, which was not destroyed until 1811, were imprisoned the royal family of France after the abandonment of the Tuileries on 10th August 1792. The old market of the Temple, the centre of the petites industries of Paris, has been recently demolished. West of this is the huge Museum of the Arts and Crafts (Conservatoire des Arts et Métiers), on the site of the abbatial buildings and lands of St. Martin of the Fields, still preserving in its structure the beautiful thirteenth-century church and refectory of the Abbey.
[232] Removed to give place to the name of a firm of wholesale chemists (1911).
[233] Recently augmented.
[234] According to Sir Thomas Browne, bodies soon consumed there. "Tis all one to lie in St. Innocents' churchyard as in the sands of Egypt, ready to be anything in the ecstasy of being ever, and as content with six feet as the moles of Adrianus."
"Tabesne cadavera solvat
An rogas haud refert."—Lucan.
[235] Open Tuesdays and Fridays, 10 to 4.
[236] A description of this and of other public balls of the Second Empire will be found in Taine's Notes sur Paris, which has been translated into English.
[237] We cannot too strongly impress on the traveller the desirability of visiting the admirable Musée de Sculpture Comparée at the Trocadero where casts of the most important sculpture and architecture in France, including many of the monuments, here and elsewhere in Paris, may be conveniently studied.