Paris, under Marie de’ Medici and Richelieu, saw many and important changes. In 1612 a new Jacobin monastery was founded in the Rue St. Honoré for the reformed Dominicans, destined to be later the theatre of Robespierre’s triumphs and to house the great Jacobin revolutionary club.[128] In the same year the queen-regent bought a château and garden from the Duke of Piney-Luxembourg, and commissioned her architect, Solomon Debrosse, to build a new palace in the style of the Pitti at Florence. The work was begun in 1615, and resulted in the picturesque but somewhat Gallicised Italian palace which, after descending to Gaston of Orleans and his daughter the Grande Mademoiselle, ends a chequered career as palace, prison, house of peers, socialist-meeting place by becoming the respectable and dull Senate-house of the third Republic. The beautiful Renaissance gardens have suffered but few changes; adorned with Debrosse’s picturesque fountain, they form one of the most charming parks in Paris. The same architect was employed to restore the old Roman aqueduct of Arceuil and finished his work in 1624. In 1614 the equestrian statue in bronze of Henry IV., designed by Giovanni da Bologna, and presented to Marie by Cosimo II. of Tuscany, reached Paris after many vicissitudes and was set up on the Pont Neuf by Pierre de Fouqueville, who carved for it a beautiful pedestal of marble, whereon were inscribed the most signal events and victories of Henry’s reign. This priceless statue was melted down for cannon during the Revolution, and for years its site was occupied by a café. In 1818, during the Restoration, another statue of Henry IV., by Lemot, cast from the melted figure of Napoleon I. on the top of the Vendôme column, was erected where it now stands. The founder, who was an imperialist, is said to have avenged the emperor by placing pamphlets attacking the Restoration in the horse’s belly.
In the seventeenth century the Pont Neuf was one of the busiest centres of Parisian life. Streams of coaches and multitudes of foot-passengers passed by. Booths of all kinds displayed their wares; quacks, mountebanks, ballad-singers and puppet-shows, drew crowds of listeners. Evelyn describes the footway as being three to four feet higher than the road; and at the foot of the bridge, says the traveller, is a water-house, “whereon, at a great height, is the story of our Saviour and the Woman of Samaria pouring water out of a bucket. Above is a very rare dyall of several motions with a chime. The water is conveyed by huge wheels, pumps and other engines, from the river beneath.” This was the famous Château d’Eau, or La Samaritaine, erected in 1608 to pump water from the Seine and distribute it to the Louvre and the Tuileries palaces. The timepiece was an industrieuse horloge, which told the hours, days, and months.
In 1624 Henry the Fourth’s great scheme for enlarging and completing the Louvre was committed by Richelieu to his architect, Jacques Lemercier, and the first stone of the Pavilion de l’Horloge was laid on 28th June by the king. Lemercier was great enough and modest enough to adopt his predecessor’s design, and having erected the pavilion, continued Lescot’s west wing northwards, turned the north-west angle and carried the north wing to about a fourth of its designed extent. The Pavilion de l’Horloge thus became the central feature of the west wing, which was exactly doubled in extent. The south-east and north-east towers of the eastern wing of the old Gothic Louvre, however, remained intact, and even as late as 1650 Sylvestre’s drawing shows us the south-east tower still standing and the east wing only partly demolished. Lemercier also designed a grand new palace for the cardinal north of the Rue St. Honoré, which was completed in 1636. Richelieu’s passion for the drama led him to include two theatres as part of his scheme: a small one to hold about six hundred spectators, and a larger one, which subsequently became the opera-house, capacious enough to seat three thousand. Magnificent galleries, painted by Philippe de Champaigne and other artists, represented the chief events in the cardinal’s reign, and were hung with the portraits of the great men of France. The courts were adorned with carvings of ships’ prows and anchors, symbolising the cardinal’s function as Grand Master of Navigation; spacious gardens, with an avenue of chestnut trees, which cost 300,000 francs to train, added to its splendours.
In this palace the great minister—busy with a yet vaster scheme for building an immense Place Ducale, north of the palace—passed away leaving its stately magnificence to the king, whose widow, Anne of Austria, inhabited it during the regency with her sons, Louis XIV. and Philip Duke of Orleans, the founder of the Bourbon-Orleans family. The famous architect, François Mansard, was employed by her to extend the Palais Royal as it was then called, which subsequently became infamous as the scene of the orgies of Philip’s son during his regency. The buildings were further extended by Philip Egalité, who destroyed the superb plantation of chestnut trees and erected shops along the sides of the gardens, which as cafés and gambling-saloons became a haunt of fashionable vice and dissipation in the late eighteenth century. The gardens of the royal palaces had always been open to well-dressed citizens, but notices forbade entrance to beggars, servants, and all ill-clad persons under pain of imprisonment, the carcan, and other graver penalties. Egalité, however, to win popularity, opened his gardens without restriction, and they soon became the forum of the revolutionary agitation. Here Camille Desmoulins declaimed his impassioned orations and called Paris to arms. The gambling-hells, of which there were over three hundred, survived the Revolution, and Blucher and many an officer of the allied armies lost immense sums there. The Palais Royal became subsequently the residence of the Orleans family, and now serves as the meeting-place of the Conseil d’Etat.
In the early seventeenth century nine lovers of literature associated themselves for the purpose of holding a friendly symposium, where they discoursed of books, and read and criticised each other’s compositions; the meetings were followed by a modest repast and a peripatetic discussion. The masterful cardinal, who would rule the French language as well as the state, called the nine together, and in 1635 organised them into an Académie Française, whose function should be to perfect and watch over the purity of the French tongue. The Parlement granted letters-patent, limited the number of academicians to forty, and required them to take cognisance of French authors and the French language alone. The original nine, however, were far from gratified, and always regretted the “golden age” of early days. Richelieu established the Jardin des Plantes for the use of medical students, where demonstrations in botany were given; he rebuilt the college and church of the Sorbonne where his monument,[129] a masterpiece of sculpture by Girardon from Lebrun’s designs, may still be seen. He cheapened the postal service,[130] established the Royal Press at the Louvre which in twenty years published seventy Greek, Latin, Italian and French classics. He issued the first political weekly gazette in France, was a liberal patron of men of letters and of artists, and saw the birth and fostered the growth of the great period of French literary and artistic supremacy.