The court often came to town both to give and receive entertainment, and public festivities were not infrequent, for the people had a sort of tolerant affection for the king and queen whose gentleness and helplessness were not without their appeal. When the dauphin was born, eight years after the accession, the City of Paris gave a dinner at the Hôtel de Ville in honor of the event. The royal table was laid with seventy-eight covers and at it the king and his two brothers were the only men, the remaining seventy-five being the queen, the princesses and the ladies of the court. As seems frequently to have happened at these large dinners at the City Hall not everything went smoothly. This time the trouble arose from the commands of etiquette. The hosts bent their whole energies upon serving the king promptly. When he had finished his dinner the guests at the other tables had had nothing but butter and radishes, yet in spite of their hunger they were forced to rise and leave when the king rose. As the preparations for the feast are reported to have been lavishly extravagant it is to be hoped that “the left-overs” were given to the poor who were pitiably hungry most of the time in those days.
The public works of Louis’ reign were not many. The unrest of the people was too evident, the supply of money too small for much to be accomplished. To the clearing of the bridges which has been mentioned above was added an effort to bring light and air into at least one crowded spot on the left bank by tearing down the ancient Petit Châtelet. A new wall protected several of the outlying suburbs, and was not pulled down until 1860. At each of its gates was a pavilion, several of which are still standing, which served as an office for the collectors of the octroi, a tax levied even now upon all food brought into the city. As anything to do with taxes was obnoxious to the people this construction has been described as
“Le mur murant Paris rend Paris murmurant.”
which may be inadequately translated, “The wall walling Paris makes Paris wail.”
The over-florid architecture of Louis XV’s reign showed signs of betterment under the younger Louis through the influence of the Greek. The best and, indeed almost the only remaining examples are the church of Saint Louis d’Antin which Louis built as a chapel for a Capuchin convent, and the Odéon, a theater. This building has a dignified façade, but around the remaining three sides runs an arcade filled with open-air book shops whose widely varied stock is more picturesque than appropriately placed. Its actors are the students graduated in the second rank from the government school of acting. Those of the first grade make up the company of the Comédie Française whose playhouse stands in columned ugliness to-day attached to the corner of the Palais Royal.
The drama always has been fostered in Paris, but up to Molière’s time no especial provision was made for the presentation of the play from which the people derived so much pleasure. In early times the performance took place in the street. In the fifteenth century the clerks attached to the court held in the palace of the Cité performed farces in the great hall of the palace, using Louis IX’s huge marble table as a stage. In the sixteenth century a troupe remodeled for its use a part of the Hôtel of Burgundy of which a fragment is left in the Tower of John the Fearless. In the seventeenth century a disused tennis court in the Marais housed a company of players. Molière and his actors occupied the hall of a half-ruined residence opposite the eastern end of the Louvre until it was torn down, when they moved to the Palais Royal.
Street fairs were enormously popular. They
THE ODÉON.