HOUSE OF FRANCIS I ON THE COURS-LA-REINE.
beneath it. Farther on the procession stopped for the imperial guest to witness an allegorical play depicting the friendship of France and Germany. Over the Notre Dame Bridge, covered with ivy, Charles went to the cathedral and then to the palace of the Cité, where he supped. During his visit of a week he stayed at the Louvre, and was so brilliantly entertained that upon his departure he exclaimed, “Other cities are merely cities; Paris is a world in itself.”
The chief churches built in Francis’s reign were Saint Étienne-du-Mont (on the site of an earlier edifice) in which Sainte Geneviève’s ashes now rest, Saint Eustache, the church of the market people at the Halles, and the flamboyant tower of Saint Jacques-de-la-Boucherie. This tower is the last expression of the Gothic, while Saint Étienne and Saint Eustache show the Transition combination of Gothic and Renaissance.
Étienne Marcel’s Maison aux Piliers had been but a second-hand affair. By 1530 a new City Hall was imperative. Its corner stone was laid amid feasting on the open square with bread and wine for all comers and cries of “Long live the king and the city fathers!” This enthusiastic beginning did not foretell quick work, however, for eighty years elapsed before the building was done. Its style was the same that it is to-day except in the development of details.
Cellier’s Drawing of the Hôtel de Ville in 1583.
It was the old Maison aux Piliers that had seen the dinner given to Queen Claude by the city fathers on the occasion of her entrance into Paris after Francis’s accession. Louis XII’s third queen, Mary, an English princess, was the first royal lady whom the city fathers had ventured to invite to partake of their hospitality. The occasion had not been entirely successful, for so great a throng pressed in to the city hall to observe the unusual guests that the waiters “hardly had room to bring the food upon the tables.” The arrangements for Queen Claude’s entertainment included precautions against such an invasion. When the great day came the provost of the Merchants and the lesser officials, clothed flamingly in red velvet and scarlet satin and followed by representatives of the guilds of drapers, grocers, goldsmiths, dyers, and so on, went to a suburb to meet their lady and act as her escort, and her majesty was graciously appreciative of all their attentions.
While the Renaissance, humanism and the discovery of the New World were exciting men to new interests they also did their part in promoting independence of thought. With ability to read the Bible in the original came questioning of previous interpretations. There grew up both within and without the Church a desire to reform it, and with Calvin and Luther there came into expression not only a protest against the present state of affairs but a formulation of a new belief. Rabelais and Montaigne in their vastly different ways worked toward the same end. The movement proved to be one of those appeals which spread like a flame when the air touches it. Rich and poor, noble and simple responded to the plea, and Francis found himself the ruler of people ready to fly at each other’s throats and clamoring for him to let loose the dogs of persecution.