We are able to give the impression which the Paris of Henri Quatre made on an English traveller, a friend of Ben Johnson and author of Coryat’s Crudities, hastily gobbled up in five months’ Travell. The first objects that met Coryat’s eye are characteristic. As he travelled along the St. Denis road he passed “seven[124] faire pillars of freestone at equal distances, each with an image of St. Denis and his two companions, and a little this side of Paris was the fairest gallows I ever saw, built on Montfaucon, which consisted of fourteene fair pillars of freestone.” He notes “the fourteene gates of Paris, the goodly buildings, mostly of fair, white stone and”—a detail always unpleasantly impressed on travellers—“the evil-smelling streets, which are the dirtiest and the most stinking I ever saw in any city in my life. Lutetia! well dothe it brooke being so called from the Latin word lutum, which signifieth dirt.” Coryat was impressed by the bridges—“the goodly bridge of white freestone nearly finished (the Pont Neuf); a famous bridge that far exceedeth this, having one of the fairest streets in Paris called our Ladies street; the bridge of Exchange where the goldsmiths live; St. Michael’s bridge, and the bridge of Birds.” He admires the “Via Jacobea, full of bookesellers’ faire shoppes, most plentifully furnished with bookes, and the fair building, very spacious and broad, where the Judges sit in the Palais de Justice, the roofs sumptuously gilt and embossed, with an exceeding multitude of great, long bosses hanging downward.” Coryat next visited the fine quadrangle of the Louvre, whose outside was exquisitely wrought with festoons, and decked with many stately pillars and images. From Queen Mary’s bedroom he went to a room[125] “which excelleth not only all that are now in the world but also all that were since the creation thereof, even a gallery, a perfect description whereof would require a large volume, with a roofe of most glittering and admirable beauty. Yea, so unspeakably fair is it that a man can hardly comprehend it in his mind that hath not seen it with his bodily eyes.” The Tuileries gardens were the finest he ever beheld for length of delectable walks.
Next day Coryat saw the one thing above all he desired to see, “that most rare ornament of learning Isaac Casaubon,” who told him to observe “a certain profane, superstitious ceremony of the papists—a bedde carried after a very ethnicall manner, or rather a canopy in the form of a bedde, under which the Bishop of the city, with certain priests, carry the Sacrament. The procession of Corpus Christi,” he adds, “though the papists esteemed it very holy, was methinks very pitiful. The streets were sumptuously adorned with paintings and rich cloth of arras, the costliest they could provide, the shews of Our Lady street being so hyperbolical in pomp that it exceedeth all the rest by many degrees. Upon public tables in the streets they exposed rich plate as ever I saw in my life, exceeding costly goblets and what not tending to pomp; and on the middest of the tables stood a golden crucifix and divers other gorgeous images. Following the clergy, in capes exceeding rich, came many couples of little singing choristers, which, pretty innocent punies, were so egregiously deformed that moved great pity in any relenting spectator, being so clean shaved round about their heads that a man could perceive no more than the very rootes of their hair.”
At the royal suburb Coryat saw “St. Denis, his head enclosed in a wonderful, rich helmet, beset with exceeding abundant pretious stones,” but the skull itself he “beheld not plainly, only the forepart through a pretty, crystall glass, and by light of a wax candle.”
CHAPTER XIV
PARIS UNDER RICHELIEU AND MAZARIN
LOUIS XIII. was nine years of age when he came to the throne in 1610. For a time the regent, Marie de’ Medici, was content to suffer the great Sully to hold office, but soon favouritism and the greed of princes, to the ill-hap of France, drove him in the prime of life from Paris into the retirement of his château of Villebon, and a feeble and venal Florentine, Concini, took his place. The Prince of Condé, now a Catholic, the Duke of Mayenne, and a pack of nobles who professed solicitude for the wrongs of the pauvre peuple, fell upon the royal treasury like hounds on their quarry. The court, to meet their demands, neglected to pay the poor annuitants of the Hôtel de Ville, and this was the only result to the pauvre peuple. In 1614, so critical was the financial situation, that the States-General were called to meet in the Salle Bourbon,[126] but to little purpose. Recriminations were bandied between the noblesse and the Tiers Etat. The insolence of the former was intolerable. One member of the Tiers was thrashed by a noble and could obtain no redress. The clergy refused to bear any of the public burdens. The orator of the Tiers, speaking on his knees according to usage, warned the court that despair might make the people conscious that a soldier was none other than a peasant bearing arms, and that when the vine-dresser took up the arquebus he might one day cease to be the anvil and become the hammer. But there was no thought for the common weal; each order wrangled for its own privileges, and their meeting-place was closed on the pretext that the hall was wanted for a royal ballet. No protest was raised, and the States-General never met again until the fateful meeting at Versailles, in 1789, when a similar pretext was tried, with very different consequences. Among the clergy, however, sat a young priest of twenty-nine years of age, chosen for their orator, Armand Duplessis de Richelieu, who made rapid strides to fame.