Twenty Centuries of Paris

by Mabell S. C. Smith

Oh, how our hearts were beating, when at the dawn of day,
We saw the army of the League drawn out in long array,
With all its priest-led citizens and all its rebel peers
And Appenzell’s stout infantry, and Egmont’s Flemish spears.
There rode the brood of false Lorraine, the curses of our land;
And dark Mayenne was in the midst, a truncheon in his hand;
And as we looked on them, we thought of Seine’s empurpled flood,
And good Coligny’s hoary hair all dabbled with his blood;
And we cried unto the living God, who rules the fate of War,
To fight for his own holy name and Henry of Navarre.

Then the “burghers of Saint Genevieve” were indeed forced to “Keep watch and ward” for Henry marched upon Paris without which he could not call his crown his own. At his approach the people from the suburbs crowded into the city till it held some 200,000. Henry had no trouble in taking the chief of the outer settlements and in controlling the town’s food supply. The resulting famine drove the Parisians to straits such as they had not known since the days of Sainte Geneviève and were not to know again until the Franco-Prussian War. The usual meat soon gave out and when all the horses and all the mules were eaten, any stray dog or cat was pursued by the populace and when caught, cooked and devoured in the open street. From dead men’s bones was made a sort of pasty bread, and mothers knew the taste of the flesh of their own children whose strength had not availed against the greater force of hunger.

Touched by the suffering of the city which he regarded as his own, Henry offered to let the besieged leave the town, but so earnest was the League, so inspiring the preaching of the priests that not more than 3000 took advantage of the opportunity.

The League was not at peace with itself, however. Mayenne disposed by death of the Leaguers whose importance threatened his power and there was stirring that feeling in favor of Henry which found voice a little later in the “Satire Ménippée,” the essays which rallied Catholics to the support of their monarch. The papers were written by a canon of the Sainte Chapelle and half a dozen friends in the form of a burlesque report of a meeting of the States General. The following selection gives an idea of the spirit of unrest that was troubling Paris and of the lack of approval of Henry III’s assassination felt by the moderate party.

“O Paris who are no longer Paris but a den of ferocious beasts, a citadel of Spaniards, Walloons and Neapolitans, an asylum and safe retreat for robbers, murderers and assassins, will you never be cognizant of your dignity and remember who you have been and what you are; will you never heal yourself of this frenzy which has engendered for you in place of one lawful and gracious King fifty saucy kinglets and fifty tyrants? You are in chains, under a Spanish Inquisition a thousand times more intolerable and harder to endure by spirits born free and unconstrained as the French are than the cruelest deaths which the Spaniards could devise. You did not tolerate a slight increase of taxes and of offices and a few new edicts which did not concern you at all, yet you endure that they pillage houses, that they ransom you with blood, that they imprison your senators, that they drive out and banish your good citizens and counselors: that they hang and massacre your principal magistrates; you see it and endure it but you approve it and praise it and you would not dare or know how to do otherwise. You have given little support to your King, good-tempered, easy, friendly, who behaved like a fellow-citizen of your town which he had enriched and embellished with handsome buildings, fortified with strong and haughty ramparts, honored with privileges and favorable exemptions. What say I? Given little support? Far worse: you have driven him from his city, his house, his very bed! Driven him? you have pursued him. Pursued him? You assassinated him, canonized the assassin and made joyful over his death. And now you see how much this death profited you.”

Henry of Navarre became king of Paris as well as of the rest of France though it required a considerable concession to achieve that position. Still it was not the first time that he had made a mental somersault, so when he found that Paris was stubborn in spite of more than three years and a half of hunger, sickness and death, and that his enemies outside of the city were strong enough to inflict upon him a defeat of some moment, he yielded to the urging of his counselors, admitted with a shrug “So fair a city is well worth a mass” and declared his willingness to turn Catholic. After suitably prolonged disputations with theologians he declared himself convinced of the error of his belief, and on a Sunday in July, 1593, he appeared at Saint Denis where an imposing body of prelates was arrayed before the great door, and professed his new faith. Then he was allowed to enter the building and to repeat his profession before the altar.

Paris was not sorry to have an excuse for submitting and in the following March when Henry’s troops entered the city in the grayness of dawn one day toward the end of the month there was no opposition. On his way to Notre Dame to hear mass, Henry, resplendent in velvet, gold-embroidered, mounted on a handsome gray charger and constantly doffing his white-plumed helmet, was greeted with cries of “Long live the king” and “Hail to peace.” When the Provost of the Merchants and some of the principal citizens the day after his entry brought him a gift of sweetmeats, the king, though not fully dressed, for his subjects’ ardor had brought them at an unduly early hour, accepted the offering graciously, saying, “Yesterday I received your hearts; to-day I receive your comfits no less willingly.”

A Spanish troop had been called in by the League to assist them in holding the city against Henry. He allowed them to leave unmolested, contenting himself with watching them from a window as they passed through the Porte Saint Denis, and calling to them with cheerful insolence, “Gentlemen, my regards to your master—and never come back here!”

In the calm that succeeded the nation began a career of prosperity which it had not known for two generations. With cheerful severity Henry caused a gallows to be erected near the Porte Saint Antoine “Whereon to hang any person of either religion who should be found so bold as to attempt anything against the public peace.” He was determined that every peasant in the kingdom should have a chicken in the pot for his Sunday dinner, and he used intelligent methods of bringing about that result. Not only was he a man of practical good sense himself, but he was able to recognize that quality in others, and he chose men of prudence and intelligence as his advisers, chief of them the Duke of Sully. He encouraged agriculture, introduced new industries, permitted religious toleration through the Edict of Nantes, made himself the friend alike of peasant and of noble. France throve as she had not had a chance to do for many a decade—and the power of the crown became stronger than ever.

Henry’s early life had taught him to be active, and he lost no time in winning Paris to his friendship in various ways. He did not treat it like an enemy but as a returned prodigal, and the citizens lost none of their old privileges while they gained the civic improvements about which their new monarch busied himself promptly. He began the rebuilding of the city with the high roofed structures of brick and stone combined which showed that the classic outlines of the Renaissance were on the wane and which prefaced the Italian forms of the next reign.