On Sunday, August 20, 1133, when returning from a visitation to the abbey of Chelles, the abbot and prior of St. Victor[45] at Paris were ambushed and the prior was stabbed. Some years later, in the reign of Louis VII., Pope Eugene III. came to seek refuge in Paris from the troubles excited at Rome by the revolution of Arnold of Brescia, and celebrated mass before the king at the abbey church of St. Genevieve. The canons had stretched a rich, silken carpet before the altar on which the pontiff's knees might rest, and when he retired to the sacristy to disrobe, his officers claimed the carpet, according to usage. The canons and their servants resisted, there was a bout of fisticuffs and sticks, the king intervened, anointed majesty himself was struck, and during the scuffle which ensued the carpet was torn to shreds in a tug-of-war between the claimants. Here was urgent need for reform. The pope decided to introduce the new discipline and appointed a fresh set of canons. The dispossessed canons met them with insults and violence, drowned their voices by howling and other indignities, and only ceased on being threatened with the loss of their eyes and other secular penalties.
Louis VI., the noble damoiseau as he is called by the Chronicle of St. Denis, enthroned in 1108, was the pioneer of the great French Monarchy, ever on the move, hewing his way, sword in hand, through his domains, subduing the violence, and burning and razing the castles of his insolent and disobedient vassals. The famous Suger, abbot of St. Denis, was his wise and firm counsellor, who led the Church to make common cause with him and lend her diocesan militia. The king would have the peasant to till, the monk to pray, and the pilgrim and merchant to travel in peace. He was an itinerant regal justiciary, destroying the nests of brigands, purging the land with fire and sword from tyranny and oppression. Wise in council, of magnificent courage in battle, he was the first of the Capetians to associate the cause of the people with that of the monarchy. They loved him as a valiant soldier-king, destroyer and tamer of feudal tyrants, the protector of the Church, the vindicator of the oppressed. He lifted the sceptre of France from the mire and made of it a symbol of firm and just government.
It is in Louis' reign that we have first mention of the Oriflamme (golden flame) of St. Denis, which took the place of St. Martin's cloak as the royal standard of France. The Emperor Henry V. with a formidable army was menacing the land. Louis rallied all his friends to withstand him and went to St. Denis to pray for victory. Pope Eugene and Abbot Suger received Louis, who fell prostrate before the relics. Suger then took from the altar the standard—famed to have been sent by heaven, and formerly carried by the first liege man of the abbey, the Count de Vexin, when the monastery was in danger of attack—and handed it to the king: the pope gave him a pilgrim's wallet. The sacred banner was fashioned of silk in the form of a gonfalon, of the colours of fire and gold, and was suspended at the head of a gilded lance.[46]
The strenuous reign of Louis was marked by a great expansion of Paris, which became more than ever the ordinary dwelling-place of the king and the seat of his government. The market which from Roman times had been held at the bifurcation of the northern road near the fields (Champeaux), belonging to St. Denis of the Prison, was extended. William of Champeaux founded the great abbey of St. Victor,[47] famed for its sanctity and learning, where Abelard taught and St. Thomas of Canterbury, whose hair shirt was long preserved there, and St. Bernard lodged. At the urgent prayer of his wife Adelaide, the king built a nunnery at Montmartre, and lavishly endowed it with lands, ovens, the house of Guerri, a Lombard money-changer, some shops and a slaughter-house in Paris, and a small bourg, still known as Bourg la Reine, about five miles south of the city. Certain rights of fishing at Paris, to which Louis VII. added five thousand herrings yearly from the port of Boulogne, were also granted. The churches of Ste. Geneviève la Petite, founded to commemorate the miraculous staying of the plague of the burning sickness (les ardents); of St. Jacques de la Boucherie; and of St. Pierre aux Bœufs, so named from the heads of oxen carved on the portal, were also built.
CHAPTER V
Paris under Philip Augustus and St. Louis
During twenty-eight years of the reign of Louis VII. no heir to the crown was born. At length, on the 22nd of August, 1165, Adelaide of Champagne, his third wife, lay in child-bed and excited crowds thronged the palace in the Cité. The king, "afeared of the number of his daughters and knowing how ardently his people desired a child of the nobler sex," was beside himself with joy when the desire of his heart was held up to him; curious eyes espied the longed-for heir through an aperture of the door and in a moment the good news was spread abroad. There was a sound of clarions and of bells and the city as by enchantment shone with an aureole of light. An English student roused by the uproar and the glare of what seemed like a great conflagration leapt to the window and beheld two old women hurrying by with lighted tapers. He asked the cause. They answered: "God has given us this night a royal heir, by whose hand your king shall suffer shame and ill-hap." This was the birth of Philip le Dieu-donné—Philip sent of Heaven—better known as Philip Augustus. Under him and Louis IX. mediæval Paris, faithfully reflecting the fortunes of the French Monarchy, attained its highest development.
When Philip Augustus took up the sceptre at fifteen years of age, the little realm of the Isle de France was throttled by a ring of great and practically independent feudatories, and in extent was no larger than half-a-dozen of the eighty-seven departments into which France is now divided. The English king held the mouths of all the great rivers and all the great cities, Rouen, Tours, Bordeaux. In thirty years Philip had burst through to the sea, subdued the Duke of Burgundy and the great counts, wrested the sovereignty of Normandy, Brittany and Maine from the English Crown, won Poitou and Aquitaine, crushed the emperor and his vassals in the memorable battle of Bouvines, and become one of the greatest of European monarchs. The king, who had owed his life to the excellence of his armour,[48] was received in Paris with a frenzy of joy. The whole city came forth to meet him, flowers were strewn in his path, the streets were hung with tapestry, Te Deums sung in all the churches, and for seven days and nights the popular enthusiasm expressed itself in dance, in song and joyous revel. It was the first national event in France. The Count of Flanders was imprisoned in the new fortress of the Louvre, where he lay for thirteen years, with ample leisure to meditate on the fate of rebellious feudatories. "Never after," say the chroniclers, "was war waged on King Philip, but he lived in peace."
Two vast undertakings make the name of Philip Augustus memorable in Paris—the beginning of the paving of the city and the building of its girdle of walls and towers. One day as the king stood at the window of his palace, where he was wont to distract himself from the cares of state by watching the Seine flow by, some carts rattled along the muddy road beneath the window and stirred so foul and overpowering an odour that the king almost fell sick. Next day the provost and the sheriffs and chief citizens were summoned before him and ordered to set about paving the city with stone. The work was not however completed until the reign of Charles V., a century and a half later. It was done well and lasted till the sixteenth century, when it was replaced by the miserable cobbles, known as the pavement of the League. Whether the city grew much sweeter is doubtful; certainly Paris in the sixteenth, seventeenth and eighteenth centuries was as evil-smelling as ever. Montaigne, in the second half of the sixteenth century, complains that the acrid smell of the mud of Paris weakened the affection he bore to that fair city, and Howell writes in 1620, "the city is always dirty, and by perpetual motion the mud is beaten into a thick, black and unctuous oil that sticks so that no art can wash it off, and besides the indelible stain it leaves, gives so strong a scent that it may be smelt many miles off, if the wind be in one's face as one comes from the fresh air of the country." Horace Walpole in the eighteenth century, called Paris "the beastliest town in the universe."
