In manners, dress and literature this reign was increasingly formal following upon the example of Louis who was formal because he honestly believed himself godlike and insisted on formality as appropriate. His was a grand manner and his an incomparable selfishness. His belief in the divine right of kings stretched until “right” meant the right to do whatever he chose however unkind or immoral. Beneath the gorgeousness of the court was a life of hypocrisy, self-seeking, and crime almost beyond belief.
The godlike sovereign certainly had a more than human appetite. It is related that at one dinner he ate:
Four plates of different kinds of soup
A whole pheasant
A partridge
A large plate of salad
Two large slices of ham
A bowl of mutton with gravy and garlic
A plate of pastry
Fruit
Several hard-boiled eggs.
In theatrical parlance, he was “playing to capacity.”
Upon Mazarin’s death the king, then twenty-three years old and ignorant of independent action, had made known his intention of conducting affairs himself. For the rest of his life he worked hard every day at the affairs of the state, comforted when things went wrong with the refreshing thought that the fault was not his because he had acted with God-given intelligence. The early part of his career was marked by such advance in the condition of the finances, the laws, education, the army, and industrial achievement that, provided he blinded himself to the fact that in Colbert, Vauban and Louvois he had exceptionally efficient administrators, he might well think himself a paragon of intelligence. Great generals won his battles; great writers praised his power; great artists and architects built grandly in his honor. It is not strange that he thought himself what others called him, the “Grand Monarque” and the “Roi Soleil.”
Centralization was the basic policy of Louis’s career. In Paris it took the form of substituting a law court under royal control for the local courts in different parts of the city, and in making the municipal offices purchasable from the king. Municipal improvements made the city pleasanter to live in. An effort was made—not very successfully from the modern point of view—to keep the streets clean, and at night a lantern was hung midway between cross streets and burned until midnight. As the number of lights installed was but 6,500 and Paris at that time covered some four square miles of territory it may be seen that the illumination was not dazzling. It was enough, however, to be of assistance to Louis’ new police force, and to make visible in the evening as well as the morning the two gates—of Saint Denis and Saint Martin—erected by the admiring Parisians to do honor to his early victories. The fire department became a lay institution at this time for, rather curiously, fire fighting had previously been the work of a religious house. The population is estimated at between eight and nine hundred thousand.
Two new squares of this century were the Place des Victoires, in front of Notre Dame des Victoires, and the Place Vendôme, north of the rue Saint Honoré. By a city regulation no change is permitted to-day of the façades of the buildings on these two open places.
At the extreme eastern end of modern Paris the Place de la Nation is the former Place du Trône, which received its name when in 1660 Louis sat upon a temporary throne beyond the city wall to receive congratulations upon having secured the Peace of the Pyrenees.
The poet Scarron, husband of Françoise d’Aubigné who, after his death, became the governess of the king’s children by Madame de Montespan, and who later was married secretly to Louis, has left a description of Paris in the “Great Century.” The translation is by Walter Besant.
Houses in labyrinthine maze;
The streets with mud bespattered all;
Palace and prison, churches, quays,
Here stately shop, there shabby stall.
Passengers black, red, gray and white,
The pursed-up prude, the light coquette;
Murder and Treason dark as night;
With clerks, their hands with ink-stains wet;
A gold-laced coat without a sou,
And trembling at a bailiff’s sight;
A braggart shivering with fear;
Pages and lackeys, thieves of night!
And ’mid the tumult, noise and stink of it,
There’s Paris—pray, what do you think of it?