THE ARCHBISHOP’S PALACE.
Beyond the bridge, the old Hôtel Dieu.
RICHELIEU’S PALAIS CARDINAL, LATER CALLED PALAIS ROYAL.
Marie de Medicis as a parade ground for the satins and velvets, the flowing cloaks and plumed hats of her courtiers. A similar sight was to be seen in the gardens of the left bank palace which Marie, disgusted with the gloom of the Louvre which she could not believe was really the palace when she first came to Paris, had rebuilt on the site of an old residence of the dukes of Luxembourg. To-day, with that combination of thrift and love of beauty which characterizes the Frenchman, the Senate occupies one part and the President of the Senate lives in another section. The national museum of contemporary art is housed in a modern building adjoining. The garden is still carefully ordered, the only renaissance garden in Paris, and is a fitting adjunct to the beautiful and varied Italian edifice which looks down upon it. The grounds are dotted with statues of eminent men and women, most of them portraits. To the east of the palace is an elaborate Florentine fountain and basin called the Fountain of the Medicis.
It was in Louis’ reign that Paris became the seat of an archbishop who used as his episcopal residence the bishop’s palace on the south side of Notre Dame. Of a half-dozen religious houses founded or enlarged at this time the best known is the Val-de-Grâce, made prominent by its gift from Louis’ wife, Anne of Austria, of a handsome church, a thank-offering for the birth of a son after a childless wedded life of twenty-three years. This son ruled as Louis XIV, the “Grand Monarque.” The church of the Val-de-Grâce was dome-crowned in the fashion set by the left bank monastery of the Carmelites and followed in the construction of the near-by palace of the Luxembourg, of the chapel of the Sorbonne in which is Richelieu’s tomb, of the Church of Saint Paul-Saint Louis, in whose graveyard Rabelais was buried, and, in the next reign, of the College Mazarin (the Institute) and of the Dome of the Invalides beneath which Napoleon sleeps. The popularity of the dome continued far into the next century, for Sainte Geneviève’s church, now called the Pantheon, is topped in the same majestic style.
Now was the beginning, too, of the so-called “Jesuit” style, seen to-day in not undignified form in the façades of Saint Paul-Saint Louis near the Place de la Bastille, Saint Thomas Aquinas, the left bank church of fashionable weddings, Saint Roch on the rue Saint Honoré, from which the crowds watched the daily passing of the tumbrils during the Revolution, Saint Gervais, east of the Hôtel de Ville, which cherishes a crucifix from the ancient abbey of Sainte Geneviève, and the Oratory also on the rue Saint Honoré, now a Protestant church and serving as a background for a fine group of statuary representing Admiral Coligny between Fatherland and Religion.