There is a story, probably untrue, that Charles, almost crazy with excitement took his stand at a window of the Louvre and shot down all the Huguenots he saw, shrieking “Kill! Kill!” For twenty-four hours the slaughter continued in Paris, ruffians and unprincipled men seizing the opportunity to kill for plunder and to rid themselves of their enemies. Paris streets literally ran blood and Paris buildings so echoed the cries of the dying that the king heard them in his own delirium of death.
When Queen Wilhelmina visited Paris in June, 1912, she placed a wreath at the foot of the statue of her ancestor, Admiral Coligny, which stands at the outside end of the church called the Oratory, now Protestant, not far from the spot of his assassination.
Charles IX’s name is not connected with buildings or improvements in Paris, so overshadowed was he by his mother. He rebuilt the Arsenal at the eastern end of the city, and he furthered the sale and demolition of the great establishment of the Hôtel Saint Paul, whose breaking up had been begun by Francis I.
Catherine had left the Hôtel des Tournelles after the death there of her husband, Henry II. At the Louvre she found herself sadly crowded, for she had been obliged to give up her royal apartments to the young queen when Charles married, and, counting her daughters and daughter-in-law there were four queens with their retinues to be housed in the old palace. Near the church of Saint Eustache the dowager-queen selected a location to her fancy for the building of a new palace, but the ground was occupied by a refuge of Filles Pénitentes. With the entire lack of consideration for others peculiar to the powerful, Catherine had this establishment razed and its inmates removed to an abbey on the rue Saint Denis. The religious of the abbey, in their turn, were sent to the top of the Mont Sainte Geneviève, where they took possession of the old hospital of Saint Jacques-du-Haut-Pas, whose name still clings to the parish and the church. The construction for which all this moving gave place was a charming palace known as the Hôtel de Soissons of which nothing is left but a graceful pillar from whose top it is said that Catherine indulged in the harmless amusement of star-gazing. The palace was pulled down in 1749 to give place to the Corn Exchange, and that, in 1887, to allow the erection of the Bourse de Commerce.
Column at the Hôtel de Soissons.
More ambitious was a southwestern addition to the Louvre, a wing going to meet the river, and another at right angles following the stream westward. This extension parallel with the Seine was begun with the idea of continuing it to meet the palace of the Tuileries (see plan of Louvre, Chapter XXII) which the queen had begun on the site of some ancient tile-yards to the west of the Louvre. Only the central façade was finished in Catherine’s day, a pavilion containing a superb staircase and crowned by a dome, connected by two open galleries with what was planned to be the buildings surrounding the quadrangle. The workmanship was exquisitely delicate. Its beauty was enhanced by a lovely formal garden laid out by that Jack-of-all-Trades, Bernard Palissy, best known as “the Potter.”
Of private buildings two of the most beautiful still remain. Both are in the Marais, which had become fashionable at this time on account of its proximity both to the Tournelles and the Louvre. One of them is the Hôtel Carnavalet which now houses the Historical Museum of Paris, the most interesting special collection in the city to students of olden times. This building was begun in 1544 in Francis I’s reign, by the then president of the Parliament of Paris, who employed the best architects of the day, Lescot and Bullant, aided by Goujon, the sculptor, whose symbolic figures give its name to the “Court of the