During the tranquil intervals that ensued on this rude awakening from dreams of an Italian Empire, and the third and fourth wars with the emperor, the king was able to give effect to a project that had long been dear to him. “Come,” says Michelet, “in the still, dark night, climb the Rue St. Jacques, in the early winter’s morning. See you yon lights? Men, even old men, mingled with children, are hurrying, a folio under one arm, in the other an iron candlestick. Do they turn to the right? No, the old Sorbonne is yet sleeping snug in her warm sheets. The crowd is going to the Greek schools. Athens is at Paris. That man with the fine beard in majestic ermine is a descendant of emperors—Jean Lascaris; that other doctor is Alexander, who teaches Hebrew.”
The schools they were pressing to were those of the Royal College of France. Already in 1517 Erasmus had been offered a salary of a thousand francs a year, with promise of further increment, to undertake the direction of the college, but declined to leave his patron the emperor. The prime movers in the great scheme were the king’s confessor, Guillaume Parvi, and the famous Grecian, Guillaume Budé, who in 1530 was himself induced to undertake the task which Erasmus had declined. Twelve professors were appointed in Greek, Hebrew, mathematics, philosophy, rhetoric and medicine, each of the twelve with a salary of two hundred gold crowns (about £80), and the dignity of royal councillors. The king’s vast scheme of a great college and magnificent chapel, with a revenue of 50,000 crowns for the maintenance (nourriture) of six hundred scholars, where the most famous doctors in Christendom should offer gratuitous teaching in all the sciences and learned languages, was never executed. Too much treasure had been wasted in Italy, and it was not till the reign of Louis XIII. that it was partially carried out. The first stone was laid in 1610, but the college as we now see it was not completed till 1770; before the construction the professors taught in the colleges of Treguier and Cambray. Chairs were founded for Arabic by Henry III., for surgery, anatomy and botany by Henry IV., and for Syrian by Louis XIV. Little is changed to-day; the placards, so familiar to students in Paris, announcing the lectures, are indited in French instead of in Latin as of old; the lectures are still free to all, and the most famous scholars of the day teach there, but in French and not in Latin.[103]
How dramatic are the contrasts of history! While the new learning was organising itself amid the pomp of royal patronage, while the young Calvin was sitting at the feet of its professors and the Lutheran heresy germinating at Paris, Ignatius Loyola, an obscure Spanish soldier and gentleman of thirty-seven years of age, was sitting—a strange mature figure—among the boisterous young students at the College of St. Barbara, patiently preparing himself for dedication to the service of the menaced Church of Rome; and in 1534, on the festival of the Assumption of the Blessed Virgin, a little group of six companions met around the fervent student, in the crypt of the old church at Montmartre, and decided to found on the holy hill of St. Denis’ martyrdom the first house of the Society of Jesus.
In 1528, says the writer of the so-called Journal d’un Bourgeois de Paris, the king began to pull down the great tower of the Louvre, in order to transform the château into a logis de plaisance, “yet was it great pity for the castle was very fair and high and strong, and a most proper prison to hold great men.”
The tall, massive keep, which darkened the royal apartments in the south wing, was the tower here meant, and after some four months’ work, and an expenditure of 2500 livres, the grim pile, with its centuries of history, was cleared away. Small progress, however, had been made with the restoration of the old château up to the year 1539, when the heavy cost of preparing the west wing for the reception of the Emperor Charles V., induced Francis to consider a plan which involved the replacement of the whole fabric by a palace in the new Renaissance style. In 1546 Pierre Lescot was appointed architect without salary, but given the office of almoner to the king, and made lay abbot of Clermont. Pierre Lescot was an admirable artist, who has left us some of the finest examples of early French Renaissance architecture in Paris. But Francis lived only to see the great scheme begun, most of Lescot’s work being done under Henry II.
From the same anonymous writer we learn something of Parisian life in the reign of Francis I. One day a certain Monsieur Cruche, a popular poet and playwright, was performing moralities and novelties on a platform in the Place Maubert, and among them a farce, “funny enough to make half a score men die of laughter, in which the said Cruche, holding a lantern, feigned to perceive the doings of a hen and a salamander.”[104] The amours of the king with the daughter of a councillor of the Parlement, named Lecoq, were only too plainly satirised. But it is ill jesting with kings. A few nights later, Monsieur Cruche was visited by eight disguised courtiers, who treated him to a supper in a tavern at the sign of the Castle in the Rue de la Juiverie, and induced him to play the farce before them. When the unhappy player came to the first scene, he was set upon by the king’s friends, stripped and beaten almost to death with thongs. They were about to put him in a sack and throw him into the Seine, when poor Cruche, crying piteously, discovered his priestly tonsure, and thus escaped.
Public festivities were held with incredible magnificence. When the English envoys entered Paris in 1518, there was the finest triumph ever seen. The king, the royal princes, five cardinals and a train of lords and dukes and counts, with a gorgeous military pageant, met them and conducted them to Notre Dame, whose interior was almost hidden under decorations of tapestry and of cloth of silver and of gold. A pavilion of cloth of gold, embroidered with the royal salamander, moult riche et fort triomphante, supported by four columns of solid silver, was erected, and was so large that some of the masonry between the choir and the high altar had to be removed to give it place. The banquet by night at the Bastille was the most solemn and sumptuous ever seen; the whole courtyard was draped and the edifice lighted by ten thousand torches; words fail to describe the triumph of the meats and table decorations. The feast ended at midnight and was followed by dances of moriscos attired in cloth of silver and of gold, by jousts and princely gifts. The extravagance of Francis was prodigious; a Venetian ambassador estimated the annual ordinary expenses of the court at 1,500,000[105] crowns; another describes the people as “eaten to the bone by taxes.” Cellini declares that the king on his travels was accompanied by a train of 12,000 horse.
After the defeat at Pavia, the king became excessively pious. By trumpet cry at the crossways, games—quoits, tennis, contre-boulle—were prohibited on Sundays; children were forbidden to sing along the streets, going to and from school. Blasphemers[106] were to be severely punished. In 1527 a notary was burned alive in the Place de Grève for a great blasphemy of our Lord and His holy Mother. In June of the next year some Lutherans struck down and mutilated an image of the Virgin and Child at a street corner near St. Gervais; the king was so grieved and angry that he wept violently, and offered a reward of one hundred gold crowns, but the offenders could not be found. Daily processions came from the churches to the spot, and all the religious orders, clothed in their habits, followed, “singing with such great fervour and reverence, that it was fair to see.” The rector and doctors, masters and bachelors, scholars of the university, and children with lighted tapers, went there in great reverence. On Corpus Christi day the street was draped and a fair canopy stretched over the statue. The king himself walked in procession, bearing a white taper, his head uncovered in moult gran révérence; hautboys, clarions and trumpets played melodiously. Cardinals, prelates, great seigneurs and nobles, each with his taper of white wax, followed, with the royal archers of the guard in their train. On the morrow a procession from all the parishes of Paris, with banners, relics and crucifixes, accompanied by the king and nobles, brought a new and fair image of silver, two feet in height, which the king had caused to be made. Francis himself ascended a ladder and placed it where the other image had stood, then kissed it and descended with tears in his eyes. Thrice he kneeled and prayed, the bishop of Lisieux, his almoner, reciting fair orisons and lauds to the honour of the glorious Virgin and her image. Again the trumpets, clarions and hautboys played the Ave Regina cælorum, and the king, the cardinal of Louvain, and all the nobles presented their tapers to the Virgin. Next day the Parlement, the provost and sheriffs, came and put an iron trellis round the silver image for fear of robbers.[107]
Never were judicial and ecclesiastical punishments so cruel and recurrent as during the period of the Renaissance. It is a common error to suppose that judicial cruelty reached its culmination in the Middle Ages. Punishments are described with appalling iteration in the pages we are following. The Place de Grève was the scene of mutilations, tortures, hangings and quarterings of criminals and traitors, the king and his court sometimes looking on. Coiners of false money were boiled alive at the pig-market; robbers and assassins were broken on the wheel and left to linger in slow agony (tant qu’ils pourraient languir). The Lutherans were treated like vermin, and to harbour them, to possess or print or translate one of their books, meant a fiery death. In 1525 a young Lutheran student was put in a tumbril and brought before the churches of Notre Dame and St. Genevieve, crying mercy from God and Mary and St. Genevieve; he was then taken to the Place Maubert, where, after his tongue had been pierced, he was strangled and burnt. A gendarme of the Duke of Albany was burnt at the pig-market for having sown Lutheran errors in Scotland; before his execution his servant was whipped and mutilated before him at the cart-tail, but was pardoned on recantation.
On Corpus Christi day, 1532, a great procession was formed, the king and provost walking bare-headed to witness the burning of six Lutherans—a scene often repeated. The Fountain of the Innocents, the Halles, the Temple, the end of the Pont St. Michel, the Place Maubert, and the Rue St. Honoré were indifferently chosen for these ghastly scenes. Almost daily the fires burnt. A woman was roasted to death for eating flesh on Fridays. In 1535, so savage were the persecutions, that Pope Paul III., with that gentleness which almost invariably has characterised Rome in dealing with heresy, wrote to Francis protesting against the horrible and execrable punishments inflicted on the Lutherans, and warned him that although he acted from good motives, yet he must remember that God the Creator, when in this world, used mercy rather than rigorous justice, and that it was a cruel death to burn a man alive; he therefore prayed and required the king to appease the fury and rigour of his justice and adopt a policy of mercy and pardon. This noble protest was effective, and some clemency was afterwards shown. But in 1547 the fanatical king, a mass of physical and moral corruption, soured and gloomy, went to his end amid the barbarities wreaked on the unhappy Vaudois Protestants. The cries of three thousand of his butchered subjects and the smoke from the ruins of twenty-five towns and hamlets were the incense of his spirit’s flight.