North and east and west of the municipal centre, the Maison aux Piliers, on the Place de Grève, was a maze of streets filled with the various crafts of Paris. The tower of the great church of St. Jacques de la Boucherie, as yet unfinished, emerged from the butchers' and skinners' shops and slaughter-houses, which at the Rue des Lombards met the clothiers and furriers; the cutlers and the basket-makers were busy in streets now swept away to give place to the Avenue Victoria. Painters, glass-workers and colour merchants, grocers and druggists, made bright and fragrant the Rue de la Verrerie, weavers' shuttles rattled in the Rue de la Tixanderie (now swallowed up in the Rue de Rivoli); curriers and tanners plied their evil-smelling crafts in the Rue (now Quai) de la Mégisserie, and bakers crowded along the Rue St. Honoré. The Rue des Juifs sheltered the ancestral traffic of the children of Abraham. At the foot of the Pont au Change, on which were the shops of the goldsmiths and money-lenders stood the grim thirteenth-century fortress of the Châtelet, the municipal guard-house and prison; to the north in the Rue de Heaumarie (Armourers) lay the Four aux Dames or prison of the abbesses of Montmartre; further on westward stood the episcopal prison, or Four de l'Evêque. North-west of the Châtelet was the Hôtel du Chevalier du Guet or watch-house and round about it a congeries of narrow, crooked lanes, haunts of ill-fame, where robbers lurked and vice festered. A little to the north were the noisy market-place of the Halles and the cemetery of the Innocents with its piles of skulls, and its vaulted arcade painted (1424) with the Dance of Death. Further north stood the immense abbey of St. Martin in the Fields, with its cloister and gardens and, a little to the west, the grisly crenelated and turreted fortress of the Knights-Templars, huge in extent and one of the most solid edifices in the whole kingdom. This is the Paris conjured from the past with such magic art by Victor Hugo in "Notre Dame," and gradually to be swept away in the next centuries by the Renaissance, pseudo-classic and Napoleonic builders and destroyers, until to-day scarcely a wrack is left behind.

With the Italian campaigns of Charles VIII., notre petit roi, as Brantôme calls him, and of the early Valois-Orleans kings, France enters the arena of European politics, wrestles with the mighty Emperor Charles V. and embarks on a career of transalpine conquest. But in Italy, conquering France was herself conquered by the charm of Italian art, Italian climate and Italian landscape. When Charles VIII. returned to Paris from his expedition to Naples he brought with him a collection of pictures, tapestry, and sculptures in marble and porphyry, that weighed thirty-five tons; by him and his successors Italian builders, Domenico da Cortona and Fra Giocondo, were employed. The latter supervised the rebuilding of the Petit Pont and after the destruction of the last wooden Pont Notre Dame in 1499—when the whole structure, with its houses and shops, fell with a fearful crash into the river—he was made head of the Commission of Parisian artists who replaced it by a noble stone bridge, completed in 1507. This, too, was lined with tall gabled houses of stone, and adorned with the arms of Paris and statues of Notre Dame and St. Denis. On its restoration in 1659 the façades of the houses were decorated with medallions of the kings of France held by caryatides bearing baskets of fruit and flowers on their heads. These houses were the first in Paris to be numbered, odd numbers on one side, even on the other, and were the first to be demolished when, on the eve of the Revolution, Louis XVI. ordered the bridges to be cleared.

The French Renaissance is indissolubly associated with Francis I., who in 1515 inherited a France welded into a compact, absolute monarchy, and inhabited by a prosperous and loyal people; for the twelfth Louis had been a good and wise ruler, who to the amazement of his people returned to them the balance of a tax levied to meet the cost of the Genoese Expedition, which had been over estimated, saying, "It will be more fruitful in their hands than in mine." Commerce had so expanded that it was said that for every merchant seen in Paris in former times there were, in his reign, fifty. Scarce a house was built along an important street that was not a merchant's shop or for the practice of some art. Louis introduced the cultivation of maize and the mulberry into France, and so rigid was his justice that poultry ran about the open fields without risk of pillage from his soldiers. It was the accrued wealth of his reign, and the love inspired by "Louis, father of his people,"[101] that supported the magnificence, the luxury and the extravagance of Francis I. The architectural creations of the new style were first seen in Touraine, in the royal palaces of Blois and Chambord, and other princely and noble châteaux along the luscious and sunny valleys of the Loire. Italian architecture was late in making itself felt in Paris, where the native art made stubborn resistance.

Pont Notre Dame.
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The story of the state entry of Francis I. into Paris after the death of Louis XII., as told by Galtimara, Margaret of Austria's envoy, who witnessed the scene from a window, is characteristic. After the solemn procession which was belle et gorgiaise he saw the king, clothed in a glittering suit of armour and mounted on a barbed charger, accoutred in white and cloth of silver, prick his steed, making it prance and rear, faisant rage, that he might display his horsemanship, his fine figure and dazzling costume before the queen and her ladies. It was all bien gorrière à voir. "Born between two adoring women," says Michelet, "Francis was all his life a spoilt child." Money flowed through his hands like water[102] to gratify his ambition, his passions and his pleasures. Doubtless his interviews with Da Vinci at Amboise, where he spent much of his time in the early years of his reign, fired that enthusiasm for art, especially for painting, which never wholly left him; for the veteran artist, although old and paralysed in the right hand, was otherwise in possession of all his incomparable faculties.

Chapel, Hôtel de Cluny.
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The question as to the existence of an indigenous school of painting before the Italian artistic invasion is still a subject of acrimonious discussion among critics; there is none, however, as to its existence in the plastic arts. The old French tradition died hard, and not before it had stamped upon Italian Renaissance architecture the impress of its native genius and adapted it to the requirements of French life and climate. The Hôtel de Cluny, finished in 1490, still remains to exemplify the beauty of the native French domestic architecture modified by the new style. The old Hôtel de Ville,[103] designed by Dom. da Cortona and submitted to Francis in 1532, was dominated by the French style, and not until nearly a century after the first Italian Expedition were the last Gothic builders superseded. The fine Gothic church of St. Merri was begun as late as 1520 and not finished till 1612, and the transitional churches of St. Étienne and St. Eustache remind one, by the mingling of Gothic and Renaissance features, of the famous metamorphosis of Agnel and Cianfa in Dante's Inferno, and one is tempted to exclaim, Ome, come ti muti! Vedi, che già non sei nè duo nè uno![104]