CHURCH OF SAINT GERMAIN-L’AUXERROIS IN 1835.
See [page 193.] 		TOUR DE SAINT JACQUES DE LA BOUCHERIE.
See [page 207.]

CHAPTER XII
PARIS OF THE RENAISSANCE

CHARLES VIII died without direct heirs and the crown fell to Louis XII, a grandson of that duke of Orleans who had played so sorry a part in the reign of Charles VI, the mad king, and who had been assassinated by the ruffians of John the Fearless. This change threw the reigning line into the hands of what is known as the Valois-Orleans family. Of that branch of the Capets the most brilliant monarch was Francis I, Louis XII’s successor, a son of his cousin, the count of Angoulême.

Three score years had passed after the fall of Constantinople when Francis I came to the throne, young, alert, intelligent, progressive. He was fond of literature and the arts, and the revival of ancient letters and the importation of Italian paintings and architecture roused him to vivid interest; he was ambitious and the discovery of America spurred him to claim a share for France; the aspirations of Emperor Charles V, urged him to dispute a rivalry which threatened his own career and the integrity of his kingdom.

Louis XII had been called the “Father of his People” because of the care with which he had nursed back to economic health the depleted forces of France which Louis XI had begun to restore. It is even told of him that he returned part of a tax after it had paid the demand for which it had been levied. Such a proceeding was unknown before, and it is small wonder that his subjects adored him. Francis reaped the benefit of his predecessor’s social and financial intelligence.

Of united national feeling there was more at the beginning of Francis’s reign than there ever had been, and power was more concentrated in the king than it ever had been. Feudalism with its picturesque and brutal individualism had been outgrown. With the disappearance of the need for fortified dwellings the rural strongholds of the nobility were modified into pleasant châteaux, while their masters, not obliged to stay at home to be ready to fight quarrelsome neighbors, were free to join the king in Paris or at Fontainebleau. Thus there was formed for the first time a court consisting of more than the retinue necessary for the conduct of the royal household. For the first time, too, the nobles brought the women of their families to court, with the result that dress and festivities became more brilliant than ever before, and language developed a precision which marks this period as the beginning of the use of Modern French.

Francis himself wrote not badly and his encouragement of writers won him the title of “Father of French Letters.” Here is his tribute to the intelligent favorite of Charles VII.

EPITAPH ON AGNES SOREL[3]

Here lies entombed the fairest of the fair:
To her rare beauty greater praise be given,
Than holy maids in cloistered cells may share,
Or hermits that in deserts live for heaven!
For by her charms recovered France arose,
Shook off her chains and triumphed o’er her foes.