On Whitsunday, 1313, Philip the Fair here knighted his three sons, with all the ceremonies of ancient chivalry. The king of England, our unfortunate Edward II, and his abominable queen Isabella, who were invited, crossed the sea on purpose, and were present at this entertainment, together with a great number of English barons. It lasted eight days, and is spoken of, by historians, as a most sumptuous banquet.
This magnificent hall, as well as great part of the palace, being reduced to ashes in 1618, it was rebuilt, in its present state, under the direction of that skilful architect, JACQUES DE BROSSES. It is both spacious and majestic, and is the only hall of the kind in France: the arches and arcades which support it are of hewn stone.
Another fire, which happened in 1776, consumed all the part extending from the gallery of prisoners to the Sainte Chapelle, founded by St. Lewis, and where, before the revolution, were shewn a number of costly relics. The ravages occasioned by this fire, were repaired in 1787, and the space in front laid open by the erection of uniform buildings in the form of a crescent. To two gloomy gothic gates has been substituted an iron railing, of one hundred and twenty feet in extent, through which is seen a spacious court formed by two wings of new edifices, and a majestic façade that affords an entrance to the interior of the palace.
In this court Madame La Motte, who, in 1786, made so conspicuous a figure in the noted affair of the diamond necklace, was publicly whipped. I was in Paris at the time, though not present at the execution of the sentence.
In the railing, are three gates, the centre one of which is charged with garlands and other gilt ornaments. At the two ends are pavilions decorated with four Doric pillars. Towards the Pont St. Michel is a continuation of the building ornamented with a bas-relief, at present denominated Le serment civique.
At the top of a flight of steps, is an avant-corps, with four Doric columns, a balustrade above the entablature, four statues standing on a level with the base of the pillars, and behind, a square dome.
These steps lead you to the Mercière gallery, having on the one side, the Sainte Chapelle, and on the other, the great hall, called the Salle des Procureurs. In this extensive hall are shops, for the sale of eatables and pamphlets, which, since the suppression of the Parliament, seem to have little custom, as well as those of the milliners, &c. in the other galleries.
In what was formerly called the grande chambre, where the Parliament of Paris used to sit, the ill-fated Lewis XVI, in 1788, held the famous bed of justice, in which D'ESPRESMENIL, one of the members of that body, struck the first blow at royalty; a blow that was revenged by a lettre de cachet, which exiled him to the Ile de St. Marguerite, famous for being the place of confinement of the great personage who was always compelled to wear an iron mask. The courage of this counsellor, who was a noble and deputy of the noblesse, may be considered as the primum mobile of the revolution. Under the despotism of the court, he braved all its vengeance; but, in the sequel, he afforded a singular proof of the instability of the human mind. After haying stirred up all the parliaments against the royal authority, he again became the humble servant of the crown.
After the revolution, the Palais de Justice became the seat of the Revolutionary Tribunal, where the satellites of Robespierre, not content with sending to the scaffold sixty victims at a time, complained of the insufficiency of their means for bringing to trial all the enemies of liberty. Dumas, at one time president of this sanguinary tribunal, proposed to his colleagues to join to the hall, where the tribunal sat, part of the great hall of the palace, in order to assemble there five or six hundred victims at a time; and on its being observed to him that such a sight might in the end disgust the people; "Well," said he, "there's but one method of accomplishing our object, without any obstacle, that is to erect a guillotine in the court-yard of every prison, and cause the prisoners to be executed there during the night." Had not Robespierre's downfall involved that of all his blood-thirsty dependents, there seems no doubt that this plan would have been carried into speedy execution.
Nothing can paint the vicissitude of human events in colours more striking than the transitions of this critical period. Dumas who made this proposal, and had partially satisfied his merciless disposition by signing, a few hours before, the death-warrant of sixty victims, was the very next day brought before the same tribunal, composed of his accomplices, or rather his creatures, and by them condemned to die. Thus did experience confirm the general observation, that the multiplicity and enormity of punishments announces an approaching revolution. The torrents of blood which tyrants shed, are, in the end, swelled by their own.