In 1551 Robert Étienne, seriously menaced, was forced to seek refuge at Geneva, leaving at Paris his wife and children, who might have starved had not Henri II., on the prayer of Charles Étienne, Robert’s brother, restored to them the goods of the proscribed printer. This same monarch gave a further proof of his goodwill in exempting printers, by an edict of the 23rd of September, 1553, from the taxes to which books were then liable.
In 1556 Henri decreed that a copy, printed on vellum, of every book whose publication was authorised, should be contributed to the Royal Library; and that every such copy should be magnificently bound. It is supposed to have been to Diana of Poitiers, a great bibliophile, that this decree was due.
Charles IX. showed no little favour to printing. By letters patent, dated March, 1560, he confirmed and continued to the printers all those favours, rights, privileges, liberties, exemptions, and so forth, which had been ceded by his royal predecessors. One printer, however, Martin Lhomme by name, derived small benefit from these letters patent, for in the same year, on a decree of the Parliament, he was hanged.
This printer, a native of Rouen, living at Paris in the Rue du Mûrier, was accused of having sold a book entitled “The Royal Tiger,” which was a satire directed against the Guises. He was condemned, according to the Parliamentary decree, “to be hanged and strangled on a scaffold erected in the Place Maubert, a suitable and convenient spot.” The goods of the prisoner were to be confiscated to the king, and the objectionable book was to be burned in the printer’s presence previously to his execution.
Not long afterwards, in September, 1563, an ordinance appeared which proclaimed that all printers, binders, and sellers of libellous placards and other publications should be punished, for the first offence with the whip, for the second with death. A further ordinance, issued the same month, forbade printers to put any unauthorised volume in type “under pain of being hanged and strangled.”
In spite of all these fetters the art of printing lived on and even prospered. Henri Étienne, having returned into possession of the paternal establishment, published in 1572 the four first volumes, in folio, of the Thesaurus linguæ Græcæ, a work which his father had planned, and which it took Henri eleven years to execute. This monument of literary learning was published under the auspices of several sovereigns, with Charles IX. amongst them.
In July, 1575, the Dean of the Faculty of Medicine complained, in the general assembly, that the books of Ambroise Paré, first surgeon to the king, were being printed, although they contained a doctrine pernicious to the public welfare and to good morals. The dean, therefore, prayed the University to lay a petition before Parliament to the effect that the writings of this author might be examined by medical professors. Attempts were at the same time made to subject the printers of these works to a fine.
The sixteenth century had been a time of[{180}] conflict for the art of printing, just as it had been for the Reformation. The subsidence of the civil wars benefited both. Hardly established on the throne, Henri IV., by letters patent, dated 20th February, 1595, confirmed to the printers their privileges, and liberated them from the taxes which, the year before, had been newly imposed upon them. At the moment of his accession he had exempted them from the duties payable for the confirmation of their ancient rights.
THE GARDEN, SCHOOL OF FINE ARTS.