Perhaps the most dramatic incident in connection with the Louvre mentioned by Dumas, was that of the massacre of St. Bartholomew’s night, “that bloody deed which culminated from the great struggle which devastated France in the latter part of the sixteenth century.”
Dumas throws in his lot with such historians as Ranke and Soldain, who prefer to think that the massacre which took place on the fête-day of St. Bartholomew was not the result of a long premeditated plot, but was rather the fruit of a momentary fanatical terror aroused by the unsuccessful attempt on the life of Coligny.
This aspect is apart from the question. The principal fact with which the novelist and ourselves are concerned is that the event took place much as stated: that it was from the Louvre that the plot—if plot it were—emanated, and that the sounding bell of St. Germain l’Auxerrois did, on that fateful night, indicate to those present in the Louvre the fact that the bloody massacre had begun.
The fabric itself—the work of many hands, at the instigation of so many minds—is an enduring monument to the fame of those who projected it, or who were memorialized thereby: Philippe-Auguste, Marie de Medici, François I., Charles IX., Henri IV., Louis XIV., Napoleon I.,—who did but little, it is true,—and Napoleon III.—who did much, and did it badly.
Besides history, bloody deeds, and intrigue, there is also much of sentiment to be gathered from an observation of its walls; as witness the sculptures and decorations of Goujon and Lescot, the interlaced monogram G. H., of Henri and Gabrielle d’Estrées, and the superimposed crescents of the fair Diane de Poitiers. But such romances as these are best read in the pages of Dumas.
“To the French the Louvre is more than a palace; it is a sanctuary,” said an enthusiastic Frenchman. As such it is a shrine to be worshipped by itself, though it is pardonable to wish to know to-day just where and when the historic events of its career took place.
One can trace the outline, in white marble, of the ancient Château du Louvre, in the easterly courtyard of the present establishment; can admire the justly celebrated eastern colonnade, though so defective was the architect in his original plans that it overlaps the side walls of the connecting buildings some dozen or more feet; can follow clearly all the various erections of monarchs and eras, and finally contemplate the tiny columns set about in the garden of the Tuileries, which mark all that is left of that ambitious edifice.
The best description of the Tuileries by Dumas comes into the scene in “The Count of Monte Cristo,” when Villefort,—who shares with Danglars and Fernand the distinction of being the villain of the piece,—after travelling with all speed from Marseilles to Paris, “penetrates the two or three apartments which precede it, and enters the small cabinet of the Tuileries with the arched window, so well known as having been the favourite cabinet of Napoleon and Louis XVIII., as also that of Louis-Philippe.
“There, in this closet, seated before a walnut-tree table he had brought with him from Hartwell, and to which, from one of those fancies not uncommon to great people, he was particularly attached, the king, Louis XVIII., was carelessly listening to a man of fifty or fifty-two years of age, with gray hair, aristocratic bearing, and exceedingly gentlemanly attire, whilst he was making a note in a volume of Horace, Gryphius’s edition, which was much indebted to the sagacious observations of the philosophical monarch.”
Of course, an author of to-day would have expressed it somewhat differently, but at the time in which Dumas wrote, the little cabinet did exist, and up to the time of the destruction of the palace, at the Commune, was doubtless as much of a showplace in its way as is the window of the Louvre from which Charles IX. was supposed to have fired upon the fleeing Huguenots—with this difference: that the cabinet had a real identity, while the window in question has been more recently ascertained as not having been built at the time of the event.