Royal Palaces and Parks of France

by M. F. Mansfield

This work of aggrandizement of the quadrangle was carried out by the architect Lemercier on the basis of a project adopted in 1642, and, to a great extent, completed before the arrival of Anne d'Autriche, twenty years later.

This queenly personage had ideas of her own as to what sort of a residence she would have in Paris, and beyond her personal needs little was done for the moment towards actually linking up the various loose ends, each more or less complete in itself, which now composed the Paris palace of the French monarchs.

Her son, the king in person if not in power, was not likely to be endowed with instincts which would put him in the rank of the traditional castle or palace builders of his race; it was literature, music and painting which more particularly flourished during his reign, and so the Austrian contented herself at first with merely putting the former apartments of Catherine de Médici into condition for her personal use and building a Salle-de-Spectacle, and—happy thought—a Salle-des-Bains.

Louis XIV, as he found time, after the war of the Fronde, actually did bethink himself of completing, in a way, the work of his elders, and charged the architect Levau to finish off the north wing, which was done in 1660. A year later the Galerie Henri IV was practically destroyed by fire and rebuilt by Levau, who gave the commission for its interior decoration to Lebrun.

Soon the south wing was completed, leaving only the gap for the eastern façade which was intended to be the chief entrance to the mass of buildings, which still bore the comprehensive name of "The Louvre."

For the accomplishment of this façade, the demolition of certain dwellings of the nobility which had clustered around the royal fabric was necessary, and the Hotels du Petit Bourbon, de Villequier, de Chaumont, La Force, De Créquy, de Longueville, and de Choisy fell before the picks of the house-breakers. Levau commenced work on the façade at once, and made rapid progress until 1664, when an abrupt order came for him to stop all work. Political conspiracy, graft, if you like, was at work, and Colbert, little favourable towards Levau, made a proposition to the king to open a competition for the design and execution of the façade. Willingly enough, his mind doubtless more occupied with other things, Louis XIV agreed, and a general call was sent out to all French architects to enter the lists. Confusion reigned, and Levau was about to be recalled when Colbert spied an unrolled parchment in the corner and pounced upon it eagerly as the means of saving him from the dubious efforts of the former incumbent.

It was the "non-professional" plan submitted by a doctor in medicine, one Charles Perrault. Jealous competitors made all sorts of criticisms and objections, the chief contention being that if by any chance an architectural design by a "pill-roller" proved pleasing to the eye it was bound to be impracticable from an economic or constructive point of view, or both. This is often enough true, and it proved to be so in this case, for in spite of a certain amount of advice from an expert Italian builder, who had come to Paris to help the good doctor with his difficult task (for he actually received a commission for the work and completed it in 1674), the façade did not fit the rest of the fabric with which it was intended to join up, and to-day it may be observed by the curious as being several feet out of line with the structure which faces on the Rue de Rivoli.

Louis XIV practically had no regard for the Louvre and its architectural traditions; his palatial garden-city idea, worked out at Versailles, shows what an innovator he was. He allowed the Louvre to be filled up with all sorts of riffraff, who were often given a lodging there in place of a money payment for some service rendered. The Louvre thus became a sort of genteel poor-house, while king and court spent their time in the more ample country-house behind the Meudon hills.

By 1750 the Louvre had become little more than an immense ruin, humbled and desecrated; a veritable orphan. The Marquis de Marigny, Surintendant des Batiments Royaux, obtained the authorization to chase out the parasites and clean up the Augean stable and put things in order as best pleased his esthetic fancy, but only with the early years of the nineteenth century did the Louvre become a real palace again and worthy of its traditions.

From 1803 to 1813 the architects Fontaine and Percier were constantly engaged in the work of repairs and additions, and built (for Napoleon I) the gallery which extends from what is now the Place Jeanne d'Arc to the Pavillon de Rohan, along the Rue de Rivoli. This detached portion (bound only to the Tuileries) was finally joined to the seventeenth century work of Lemercier under Louis Napoleon in 1852. This gallery, the work of "moderns," is no mean example of palace-building, either. It was the work of Visconti and Lefuel, and with the adoption of this plan was finally accomplished the interpolation of that range of pavilions which gives the architecture of the Louvre one of its principal distinctions. Named after the principal ministers of former administrations—Donon, Mollien, Daru, Richelieu, Colbert, Turgot, etc., these pavilions break up what would otherwise be monotonous, elongated façades.