In 1618 the Grande Salle of the Palais de Justice, the finest of its kind in Europe, decorated by Fra Giocondo, was gutted by fire, and its rich stained glass, its double vaultings resplendent with blue and gold, its long line of the statues of the kings of France from Pharamond to Henry IV., were utterly destroyed. Debrosse, who built the new Salle in 1622, left a noble and harmonious Renaissance chamber, which, again restored after the fire of 1776, endured until its destruction by fire during the Commune. The old palace was clung to by a population of hucksters, whose shops and booths huddled round the building. The Grande Salle, far different from the present bare Salle des Pas Perdus, was itself a busy mart, booksellers especially predominating, most of whom had stations there, much as we see them to-day, round the Odéon theatre. Every pillar had its bookseller’s shop. Verard’s address was—“At the image of St. John the Evangelist, before Notre Dame de Paris, and at the first pillar in the Grande Salle of the Palais de Justice, before the Chapelle where they sing the mass for Messieurs of the Parlement.” Gilles Couteau’s address was—“The Two Archers in the Rue de la Juiverie and at the third pillar at the Palais.” In the Galerie Mercière (now the Galerie Marchande) at the top of the stairway ascending from the Cour du Mai, lines of shops displayed fans, gloves, slippers and other dainty articles of feminine artillery. The further Galeries were also invaded by the traders, who were not finally evicted until 1842. Much rebuilding and restoration were again needed after the great fire of 1776, and the old flight of steps of the Cour du Mai, at the foot of which criminals were branded and books condemned by the Parlement were burnt, was replaced by the present fine stairway.
The Grande Chambre (now the Tribunal de Première Instance) entered from the Grande Salle, was renamed the Salle d’Egalité by the Revolutionists, and used for the sittings of the Revolutionary Tribunal. As the dread work increased, a second court was opened in the Salle St. Louis, renamed the Salle de Liberté! Here Danton was tried, whose puissant voice penetrated to the opposite side of the Seine.
It was through Debrosse’s restored Grande Salle that the Girondins trooped after condemnation to the new prisoners’ chapel, built after the fire, and passed the night there, hymning the Revolution and discoursing of the Fatherland before they issued by the nine steps, unchanged to-day, on the right in the Cour du Mai, to the fatal tumbrils awaiting them.
The pseudo-classic church of St. Sulpice, begun in 1665 and not completed until 1777, is a monument of the degraded taste of this unhappy time. At least three architects, Gamart, Levau and the Italian Servandoni, are responsible for this monstrous pile, whose towers have been aptly compared by Victor Hugo to two big clarionets. The building has, however, a certain puissante laideur, as Michelet said of Danton, and is imposing from its very mass, but it is dull and heavy and devoid of all charm and imagination. Nothing exemplifies more strikingly the mutation of taste that has taken place since the eighteenth century than the fact that this church is the only one mentioned by Gibbon in the portion of his autobiography which refers to his first visit to Paris, where it is distinguished as “one of the noblest structures in Paris.”
CHAPTER XVII
LOUIS XVI.—THE GREAT REVOLUTION—FALL OF THE MONARCHY
CROWNED vice was now succeeded by crowned folly. The grandson of Louis XV., a well-meaning but weak and foolish youth, and his thoughtless, pleasure-loving queen, were confronted by state problems that would have taxed the genius of a Richelieu in the maturity of his powers. Injustice, misery, oppression, discontent, were clamant and almost universal; taxes had doubled since the death of Louis XIV.; there were 30,000 beggars in Paris alone. The penal code was of inhuman ferocity; law was complicated, ruinous and partial and national credit so low that loans could be obtained only against material pledges and at interest five times as great as that paid by England. Wealthy bishops and abbots[152] and clergy, noblesse and royal officials were wholly exempt from the main incidents of taxation; for personal and land taxes, tithes and forced labour, were exacted from the common people alone. No liberty of worship, nor of thought: Protestants were condemned to the galleys by hundreds; booksellers met the same fate. Authors and books were arbitrarily sent by lettres de cachet to the Bastille. Yet in spite of all repression a generation of daring, witty, emancipated thinkers in Paris were elaborating a weapon of scientific, rationalistic and liberal doctrine that cut at the very roots of the old régime. And while France was in travail of the palingenesis of the modern world, the futile king was trifling with his locks and keys and colouring maps, the queen playing at shepherdesses at Trianon or performing before courtiers, officers and equerries the rôles of Rosina in the Barbier de Seville and of Colette in the Devin du Village, the latter composed by the democratic philosopher, whose Contrat Social was to prove the Gospel of the Revolution.[153] Jean Jacques Rousseau, the solitary self-centred Swiss engraver and musician, has described for us in words that will bear translation how an ineffaceable impression of the sufferings of the people was burnt into his memory, and the germs of an unquenchable hatred of their oppressors were sown in his breast. Journeying on foot between Paris and Lyons he was one day diverted from his path by the beauty of the landscape, and wandered about, seeking in vain to discover his way. “At length,” he writes, “weary and dying of thirst and hunger I entered a peasant’s house, not a very attractive one, but the only one I could see. I imagined that here as in Switzerland every inhabitant of easy means would be able to offer hospitality. I entered and begged that I might have dinner by paying for it. The peasant handed me some skim milk and coarse barley bread, saying that was all he had. The milk seemed delicious and I ate the bread, straw and all, but it was not very satisfying to one exhausted by fatigue. The man scrutinised me and judged by my appetite the truth of the story I had told. Suddenly, after saying that he perceived I was a good, honest youth and not there to spy upon him he opened a trap door, descended and returned speedily with some good wheaten bread, a ham appetising but rather high, and a bottle of wine which rejoiced my heart more than all the rest. He added a good thick omelette and I enjoyed a dinner such as those alone who travel on foot can know. When it came to paying, his anxiety and fears again seized him; he would have none of my money and pushed it aside, exceedingly troubled, nor could I imagine what he was afraid of. At last he uttered with a shudder the terrible words ‘commis, rats de cave’ (“assessors, cellar rats”). He made me understand that he hid the wine because of the aides,[154] and the bread because of the tailles[155] and that he would be a ruined man if it were supposed that he was not dying of hunger. That man, although fairly well-off, dared not eat the bread earned by the sweat of his brow, and could only escape ruin by pretending to be as miserable as those he saw around him. I issued forth from that house indignant as well as affected, deploring the lot of that fair land where nature had lavished all her gifts only to become the spoil of barbarous tax-farmers (publicans).” The elder Mirabeau has told how he saw a bailiff cut off the hand of a peasant woman who had clung to her kitchen utensils when distraint was made on her poor possessions for dues exacted by the tax-farmer. It is related in Madame Campan’s Memoirs that Louis XV., hunting one day in the forest of Senard, about fifteen miles south of Paris, met a man on horseback carrying a coffin. “Whither are you carrying that coffin?” asked the king. “To the village of ——.” “Is it for a man or a woman?” “For a man.” “What did he die of?” “Hunger,” bluntly returned the villager. The king spurred his horse and said no more.