A palace—something more elaborate than a mere habitation—stood on the same site in the twelfth century, a work which, under the energies of Philippe Auguste, in 1204 began to grow to still more splendid proportions, though infinitesimal one may well conclude as compared with the mass which all Paris knows to-day under the inclusive appellation of "The Louvre."
The Paris of Philippe Auguste was already a city of a hundred and twenty thousand inhabitants, with mean houses on every side and little pretense at even primitive comforts or conveniences. This far-seeing monarch laid hand first on the great citadel tower of the fortified lower, added to its flanking walls and built a circling rampart around the capital itself. It is recounted that the rumbling carts, sinking deep in mud and plowing through foot-deep dust beneath the palace windows, annoyed the monarch so much that he instituted what must have been the first city paving work on record, and commanded that all the chief thoroughfares passing near the Louvre should be paved with cobbles. This was real municipal improvement. He was a Solon among his kind for, since that day, it has been a sine qua non that for the well-keeping of city streets they must be paved, and, though cobblestones have since gone out of fashion, it was this monarch who first showed us how to do it.
The Louvre of Philippe Auguste was the most imposing edifice of the Paris of its time. To no little extent was this imposing outline due to its great central tower, the maitresse, which was surrounded by twenty-three dames d'honneur, without counting numberless tourelles. This hydra-towered giant palace was the real guardian of the Paris of mediævalism, as its successor is indeed the real centre of the Paris of to-day.
The city was but an immense mass of low-lying gable-roofed houses, whose crowning apex was the sky-line of the Louvre, with that of Tournelles only less prominent to the north, and that of La Cité hard by on the island where the Palais de Justice and Notre Dame now stand.
Before the hand of Francis fell upon the Louvre it was but an isolated stronghold—a combined castle, prison and palace, gloomy, foreboding and surrounded by moats and ramparts almost impassable. Philippe Auguste built well and made of it an admirable and imposing castle and a place of defence, and a defence it was, and not much more.
For its time it was of great proportions and of an ideal situation from a strategic point of view; far more so than the isolated Palais de la Cité in the middle of the Seine.
Four gates led out from the inner courtyard of the Old Louvre: one to the Seine; one to the south, facing Saint Germain l'Auxerrois; another towards the site of the later Tuileries; and the other to about where the Rue Marengo cuts the Rue de Rivoli of to-day.
With the endorsement given it by Philippe Auguste the Louvre now became the official residence of the kings of the Capetian race, whereas previously they had dwelt but intermittently at Paris, chiefly in the Palais de la Cité.
The monarch, as if to test the efficiency of his new residence as a stronghold, made a dungeon tower, his greatest constructive achievement until he built the castle of Gisors, and in the tower imprisoned the Comte de Flandre, whom he had taken prisoner at Bouvines. Louis IX (Saint Louis), in his turn, built a spacious annex to Philippe Auguste's Louvre, to which he attached his name.