When at last Louis took to his bed, his physician, Jacques Cottier, told him that most surely his hour was come. Confession made, he gave much political counsel and some orders to be observed by le Roi, as he now called his son, and spoke, says De Comines, "as dryly as if he had never been ill. And after so many fears and suspicions Our Lord wrought a miracle and took him from this miserable world in great health of mind and understanding. Having received all the sacraments and suffering no pain and always speaking to within a paternoster of his death, he gave orders for his sepulture. May the Lord have his soul and receive him in the realm of Paradise!"

It was in Louis' reign that the art of printing was introduced into Paris. As early as 1458 the master of the mint had been sent to Mainz to learn something of the new art, but without success. In 1463, Fust and his partner, Schöffer, had brought some printed books to Paris, but the books were confiscated and the partners were driven out of the city, owing to the jealousy of the powerful corporation of the scribes and booksellers, who enjoyed a monopoly from the Sorbonne of the sale of books in Paris; and in 1474 Louis paid an indemnity of 2500 crowns to Schöffer for the confiscation of his books and for the trouble he had taken to introduce printed books into his capital. In 1470, at the invitation of two doctors of the Sorbonne, Guillaume Fichet and Jean de la Puin, Ulmer Gering of Constance and two other Swiss printers set up a press near Fichet's rooms in the Sorbonne. In 1473 a press was at work at the sign of the Soleil d'Or (Golden Sun), in the Rue St. Jacques, under the management of two Germans, Peter Kayser, Master of Arts, and John Stohl, assisted by Ulmer Gering. In 1483 the last-named removed to the Rue de la Sorbonne, where the doctors granted to him and his new partner, Berthold Rumbolt of Strassburg, a lease for the term of their lives. They retained their sign of the Soleil d'Or, which long endured as a guarantee of fine printing. The earliest works had been printed in beautiful Roman type, but unable to resist the favourite Gothic introduced from Germany, Gering was led to adopt it towards the year 1480, and the Roman was soon superseded. From 1480 to 1500 we meet with many French printers' names: Antoine Vérard, Du Pré, Cailleau, Martineau, Pigouchet—clearly proving that the art had then been successfully transplanted.

The re-introduction of Roman characters about 1500 was due to the famous house of the Estiennes, whose admirable editions of the Latin and Greek classics are the delight of bibliophiles. Robert Estienne was wont to hang proof sheets of his Greek and Latin classics outside his shop, offering a reward to any passer-by who pointed out a misprint or corrupt reading. Their famous house was the meeting-place of scholars and patrons of literature. Francis I. and his sister Margaret of Angoulême, authoress of the Heptameron, were seen there, and legend says that the king was once kept waiting by the scholar-printer while he finished correcting a proof. All the Estienne household, even the children, conversed in Latin, and the very servants are said to have grown used to it. In 1563 Francis I. remitted 30,000 livres of taxes to the printers of Paris, as an act of grace to the professors of an art that seemed rather divine than human. But in spite of royal favour printing was a poor career. The second Henry Estienne, who composed a Greek-Latin lexicon, died in poverty at a hospital in Lyons; the last of the family, the third Robert Estienne, met a similar miserable end at the Hôtel Dieu in Paris. So great was the reaction in the university against the violence of the Lutherans and the daring of the printers, that in 1534 all the presses were ordered to be closed. In 1537 no book was allowed to be printed without permission of the Sorbonne, and in 1556 an order was made, it is said at the instance of Diane de Poitiers, that a copy in vellum of every book printed by royal privilege should be deposited at the royal library. After Gering's death the forty presses then working in Paris were reduced to twenty-four, in order that every printer might have sufficient work to live by and not be tempted by poverty to print prohibited books or execute cheap and inferior printing.

CHAPTER XI

Francis I.—The Renaissance at Paris

The advent of the printing-press and the opening of a Greek lectureship by Gregory Tyhernas and Hermonymus of Sparta at the Sorbonne warns us that we are at the end of an epoch. With the accession of Charles VIII. and the beginning of the Italian wars a new era is inaugurated. Gothic architecture had reached its final development and structural perfection, in the flowing lines of the flamboyant style;[99] painting and sculpture, both in subject and expression, assume a new aspect. The diffusion of ancient literature and the discovery of a new world, open wider horizons to men's minds, and human thought and human activity are directed towards other, and not always nobler, ideals. Mediævalism passes away and Paris begins to clothe herself in a new vesture of stone.

The Paris of the fifteenth century was a triple city of overhanging timbered houses, "thick as ears of corn in a wheatfield," of narrow, crooked streets,[100] unsavoury enough, yet purified by the vast open spaces and gardens of the monasteries, from which emerged the innumerable spires and towers of her churches and palaces and colleges. In the centre was the legal and ecclesiastical Cité, with its magnificent Palais de Justice; its cathedral and a score of fair churches enclosed in the island, which resembled a great ship moored to the banks of the Seine by five bridges all crowded with houses. One of the most curious characteristics of Old Paris was the absence of any view of the river, for a man might traverse its streets and bridges without catching a glimpse of the Seine.

The portal of the Petit Châtelet at the end of the Petit Pont opened on the university and learned district on the south bank of the Seine, with its fifty colleges and many churches clustering about the slopes of the mount of St. Genevieve, which was crowned by the great Augustine abbey and church founded by Clovis. Near by, stood the two great religious houses and churches of the Dominicans and Franciscans, the Carthusian monastery and its scores of little gardens, the lesser monastic buildings and, outside the walls, the vast Benedictine abbatial buildings and suburb of St. Germain des Prés, with its stately church of three spires, its fortified walls, its pillory and its permanent lists, where judicial duels were fought. On the north bank lay the busy, crowded industrial and commercial district known as the Ville, with its forty-four churches, the hôtels of the rich merchants and bankers, the fortified palaces of the nobles, all enclosed by the high walls and square towers of Charles the Fifth's fortifications, and defended at east and west by the Bastille of St. Antoine and the Louvre. To the east stood the agglomeration of buildings known as Hôtel St. Paul, a royal city within a city, with its manifold princely dwellings and fair gardens and pleasaunces sloping down to the Seine; hard by to the north was the Duke of Bedford's Hôtel des Tournelles, with its memories of the English domination. At the west, against the old Louvre, were among others, the hôtels of the Constable of Bourbon and the Duke of Alençon out in the fields beyond, the smoking kilns of the Tuileries (tile factories).

Tower of St. Jacques.
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