The incident of the flight of the royal family and Mazarin to St. Germain is one of the historic and dramatic incidents which Dumas used as one of the events in which D’Artagnan participated.
The court never returned to make use of the Palais Royal as a royal residence, and it became the refuge of Henriette de France, Queen of England and widow of Charles I. Thirty years later Louis XIV., who had fled from its walls when a child, gave it to his nephew Philippe d’Orleans, Duc de Chartres.
It was during the Régence that the famous fêtes of the Palais Royal were organized,—they even extended to what the unsympathetic have called orgies,—but it is certain that no town residences of kings were ever as celebrated for their splendid functions as was the Palais Royal in the seventeenth century.
In 1763 a fire brought about certain reconstructions at the expense of the city of Paris. In 1781, it became again the prey of fire; and Philippe-Égalité, who was then Duc de Chartres, constructed the three vast galleries which surround the Palais of to-day.
The boutiques of the galleries were let to merchants of all manner of foibles, and it became the most lively quarter of Paris.
The public adopted the galleries as fashionable promenades, which became, for the time, “un bazar européen et un rendez-vous d’affaires et de galanterie.”
It was in 1783 that the Duc d’Orleans constructed “une salle de spectacle,” which to-day is the Théâtre du Palais Royal, and in the middle of the garden a cirque which ultimately came to be transformed into a restaurant.
The purely theatrical event of the history of the Palais Royal came on the 13th of July, 1789, when at midday—as the coup of a petit canon rang out—a young unknown avocat, Camille Desmoulins, mounted a chair and addressed the throng of promenaders in a thrilling and vibrant voice:
“Citoyens, j’arrive de Versailles!—Necker is fled and the Baron Breteuil is in his place. Breteuil is one of those who have demanded the head of Mirabeau ... there remains but one resource, and that ‘to arms’ and to wear the cockade that we may be known. Quelle couleur voulez-vous?”
With almost a common accord the tricolour was adopted—and the next day the Bastille fell.