Paris and Its Story

by Thomas Okey

The degradation of the monarchy during the reign is reflected in the condition of the royal palace in the capital. Henry IV.’s great scheme, which Louis XIII. had inherited and furthered, included a colossal equestrian statue, which was to stand on a rocky pedestal in the centre of a new Place, before the east front of the Louvre, but the regency revoked the scheme, and for thirty years nothing was done. It had even been proposed under the ministry of Cardinal Fleury to pull the whole structure down and sell the site. The neglect of the palace during these years is almost incredible. Perrault’s fine façade was hidden by the half-demolished walls of the Hôtels de Longueville, de Villequier, and de Bourbon. The east wing itself was unroofed on the quadrangle side and covered with rotting boarding. Perrault’s columns on the outer façade were unchannelled, the capitals unfinished, the portal unsculptured, and the post-office stabled its horses along the whole of the wing from the middle entrance to the north angle. The royal apartments of Anne of Austria in the Petite Galerie were used as stables; so, too, were the halls where now is housed the collection of Renaissance sculpture. The Infanta’s garden was a yard where grooms exercised their horses: a colony of poor artists and court attendants were lodged in the upper floors, and over most of the great halls entresols were constructed to increase this kind of accommodation. The building was described as a huge caravanserai, where each one lodged and worked as he chose, and over which might have been placed the legend, “Ici on loge à pied et à cheval.” Worse still, an army of squatters, ne’er-do-weels, bankrupts and defaulting debtors took refuge in the wooden sheds left by the contractors, or built others—a miserable gangrene of hovels—against the east façade. Perrault’s base had been concealed by rubbish and apparently forgotten. Stove-pipes issued from the broken windows of the upper floors, the beautiful stone-work was blackened by smoke, cracked by frost and soiled by rusting iron clamps; the quadrangle was a chaos of uncut stone, rubbish and filth, in the centre of which, where the king’s statue was designed to stand, the royal architect had built himself a large house; a mass of mean houses encumbered the Carrousel, and the almost ruined church of St. Nicholas was a haunt of beggars. Such a grievous eyesore was the building that the provost in 1751 offered, in the name of the citizens, to repair and complete the palace if a part were assigned to them as an Hôtel de Ville. In 1754 Madame de Pompadour’s brother had been appointed Commissioner of Works, and Louis was persuaded to authorise the repair and completion of the Louvre. Gabriel being made architect set about his work by clearing out the squatters and the accumulated rubbish in the quadrangle, and evicting the occupants of the stables. The ruins of the Hôtels de Longueville, de Villequier, and de Bourbon were demolished, grass plots laid before Perrault’s east front, which was restored and for the first time made visible. The west front, giving on the quadrangle, was then repaired and the third order nearly completed, when funds were exhausted and it was left unroofed. An epigram, put into the mouth of the king of Denmark, who visited Paris in 1768, tersely describes the condition of the palace at this time:—

“J’ai vu le Louvre et son enceinte immense,
Vaste palais qui depuis deux cent ans,
Toujours s’achève et toujours se commence.
Deux ouvriers, manœuvres fainéants,
Hâtent très lentement ces riches bâtiments
Et sont payés quand on y pense.[150]”

During Louis XVI.’s reign little or nothing was done. Soufflot was making feeble efforts to complete Perrault’s north front when the Revolution came to arrest his work. So lost to reverence and devoid of artistic sentiment were the official architects of this period, that a sacrilege worse than any wrought by revolutionists was perpetrated at the instance of the canons of Notre Dame. Louis XIV. had begun the vandalism by demolishing the beautiful old Gothic high altar and replacing it by a huge, ponderous anachronism in marble, on whose foundation stone, laid in 1699, was placed an inscription to the effect that Louis the Great, son of Louis the Just, having subdued heresy, established the true religion in his realm and ended wars gloriously by land and sea, built the altar to fulfil the vow of his father, and dedicated it to the God of Arms and Master of Peace and Victory under the invocation of the Holy Virgin, patroness and protector of his States. Many of the fine old Gothic tombs of marble and bronze in the church, the monuments of six centuries, were destroyed. But to the reign of Louis the Well-Beloved was reserved the crowning infamy: in 1741 the glorious old stained-glass windows, rivalling those of Chartres in richness, were destroyed by Levreil and replaced by grisaille with yellow fleur-de-lys ornamentation. Happily the replacing of the rose windows was deemed too expensive, and they escaped destruction. The famous colossal statue of St. Christopher, the equestrian monument of Philip le Bel, and a popular statue of the Virgin, were broken down by these clerical iconoclasts. In 1771 the canons instructed Soufflot to throw down the pillar of the central porch, with its beautiful statue of Christ, to make room for their processions to enter. The priceless sculpture of the tympanum was cut through to make a loftier and wider entrance, and the whole symmetry of the west front was grievously destroyed.[151] This hideous architectural deformity remained until a son of the Revolution, Viollet-le-Duc, restored the portal to its original form. After the havoc wrought at Notre Dame, Soufflot’s energies were diverted to the holy mount of St. Genevieve. Louis XV. had attributed his recovery at Metz to the intercession of the saint, and in 1754, when the abbot complained to the king of the almost ruined condition of the abbey church, he found a sympathetic listener. Soufflot and the chapter, who shared the prevalent contempt of Gothic, decided to abandon the venerable old pile, with its millennial associations of the patron saint of Paris, and to build a grand domed classic temple on the abbey lands to the west. Funds for the sacred work were raised by levying a tax on public lotteries. The old church, with the exception of the tower, was finally demolished in 1802, when the rude stone coffin which had held the body of St. Genevieve until it was burnt by revolutionary fanatics, was transferred to St. Etienne du Mont.