The main feature of these façades is the superposition of columns. All three orders are used in Saint Gervais, the simplest, Doric, at the bottom, the Ionic above, and the most florid, the Corinthian at the top. The others employ but two orders, always with the more elaborate above.
Decoration was of the heavy style called baroque which developed later into the slightly more acceptable rococo, so called from its use of rocks, shells, and foliage combined with conventional scrolls. Louis’ addition to the Louvre, however, of a part of the eastern courtyard, reproduced the renaissance decorations of the constructions of Francis I and Henry II to which they were attached.
Far to the east of the city Louis’ physician started a botanical garden which developed into the present huge Jardin des Plantes with its connecting collections of animals. One of the sights of the garden is a spreading cedar tree which the famous eighteenth century botanist, Jussieu, is said to have brought from the Andes, a tiny plant, slipped under the band of his hat.
An important addition to the Paris of Louis XIII’s time was the construction of what is now called the Île Saint Louis to the east of the Cité. This island was made by uniting two small islands, one of which had belonged to the bishop and the other to the canons of the cathedral. With bustling Paris only the cast of a stone away on each bank these two islets were devoted to such rural uses as the pasturage of cows and the whitening of linen. One of them, however, in Charles V’s time, had been the scene of a strange combat between a man and a dog, the property of his enemy whom he was accused of murdering from the fact that the dog attacked him whenever they met. Lists were enclosed on the then barren island and the king and a great crowd of men from court and town stood about to see the outcome of the “ordeal.” The man was allowed a stick; the dog had a barrel open at both ends into which he might retreat and from which he could plunge forth. When he was loosed he rushed about his enemy, evading his blows, threatening him now on one side and now on another until he was worn out, and then flew at his throat and threw him down so that he was forced to make confession of his crime thus proven by the “wager of battle.”
Henry IV built a chapel which became in the eighteenth century the present church of Saint Louis-in-the-Island, whose delicately pierced spire shows glints of sky through its openings. The first union with the main land was by a
PALACE OF THE LUXEMBOURG.
