CHAPTER XIV

Paris under Richelieu and Mazarin

Before Coryat left Paris he rode a sorry jade to Fontainebleau which, "though I did excarnificate his sides," would not stir until a gentleman of the court drew his rapier and ran him to the "buttock." At the palace he saw the "Dolphin whose face was full and fat-cheeked, his hair black, his look vigorous and courageous." The Dolphin that Coryat saw came to the throne, at nine years of age, in 1610, as Louis XIII. For a time the regent, Marie de' Medici, was content to suffer the great Sully to hold office, but soon favouritism and the greed of princes, to the ill-hap of France, drove him in the prime of life from Paris into the retirement of his château of Villebon, and a feeble and venal Florentine, Concini, who came to Paris in the time of Marie, took his place. The Prince of Condé, now a Catholic, the Duke of Mayenne, and a pack of nobles fell upon the royal treasury like hounds on their quarry. In 1614, so critical was the financial situation, that the States-General were called to meet in the Salle Bourbon,[132] but to little purpose. Recriminations were bandied between the noblesse and the Tiers État. The insolence of the former was intolerable. One member of the Tiers was thrashed by a noble and could obtain no redress. The clergy refused to bear any of the public burdens. The orator of the Tiers, speaking on his knees according to usage, warned the court that despair might make the people conscious that a soldier was none other than a peasant bearing arms, and that when the vine-dresser took up the arquebus he might one day cease to be the anvil and become the hammer. But there was no thought for the common weal; each order wrangled for its own privileges, and their meeting-place was closed on the pretext that the hall was wanted for a royal ballet. No protest was raised, and the States-General never met again until the fateful meeting at Versailles, in 1789, when a similar pretext was tried, with very different consequences. Among the clergy, however, sat a young priest of twenty-nine years of age, chosen for their orator, Armand Duplessis de Richelieu, who made rapid strides to fame.

In 1616 the nobles were once more in arms, and Condé was again bought off. The helpless court was in pitiful straits and the country drifting to civil war, when Richelieu, who, meanwhile, had been made a royal councillor and minister for foreign affairs, took the Condé business in hand. He had the prince arrested in the Louvre itself and flung into the Bastille; the noble blackmailers were declared guilty of treason, and three armies marched against them. The triumph of the court seemed assured, when Louis XIII., now sixteen years of age, suddenly freed himself from tutelage, and with the help of the favourite companion of his pastimes, Albert de Luynes, son of a soldier of fortune, determined to rid himself of Concini. The all-powerful Florentine, on 24th April 1617, was crossing the bridge that spanned the eastern fosse of the Louvre, when the captain of the royal Guards, who was accompanied by a score of gentlemen, touched him on the shoulder and told him he was the king's prisoner. "I, a prisoner!" exclaimed Concini, moving his hand towards his sword. Before he could utter another word he fell dead, riddled with pistol shots; Louis appeared at a window, and all the Louvre resounded with cries of "Vive le roi!" Concini's wife, to whom he owed his ascendency over the queen-mother, was accused of sorcery, beheaded and burnt on the Place de Grève; Marie was packed off to Blois and Richelieu exiled to his bishopric of Luçon. De Luynes, enriched by the confiscated wealth of the Concini, now became supreme at Paris only to demonstrate a pitiful incapacity. The nobles had risen and were rallying round Marie; the Protestants were defying the state; but Luynes was impotent, and soon went to a dishonoured grave, leaving chaos behind him.

Richelieu's star was now in the ascendant. The king drew near to his mother, and both turned to the one man who seemed able to knit together the distracted state. A cardinal's hat was obtained for him from Rome, and the illustrious churchman ruled in Paris for eighteen years. Everything went down before his commanding genius, his iron will and his indefatigable industry. "I reflect long," said he, "before making a decision, but once my mind is made up, I go straight to the goal. I mow down all before me, and cover all with my scarlet robe." The Huguenots, backed by the English, aimed at founding an independent republic: Richelieu captured La Rochelle[133] and wiped them out as a political party. The great nobles sought to divide power with the crown: he demolished their fortresses, made them bow their necks to the royal yoke or chopped off their heads. They defied the king's edict against duelling: the Count of Bouteville, the most notorious duellist of his time, and the Count of Les Chapelles were sent to the scaffold for having defiantly fought duels in the Place Royale in open noonday, at which the Marquis of Buffy was killed. The execution made a profound impression, for the Count was a Montmorency, and the Condés, the Orleans, the Montmorencys and all the most powerful nobles brought pressure to bear on the king and swore that the sentence should never be carried out. But Richelieu was firm as a tower. "It is an infamous thing," he told Louis, "to punish the weak alone; they cast no baleful shade: we must keep discipline by striking down the mighty." Richelieu crushed the Parlement and revolutionised the provincial administrations. He maintained seven armies in the field, and two navies on the seas at one and the same time. He added four provinces to France—Alsace, Lorraine, Artois and Rousillon, humiliated Austria and exalted his country to the proud position of dominant factor in European politics. He foiled plot after plot and crushed rebellion. The queen-mother, Gaston Duke of Orleans her second son and heir to the throne, the Marquis of Cinq-Mars the king's own favourite—each tried a fall with the great minister, but was thrown and punished with pitiless severity. Marie herself was driven to exile—almost poverty—at Brussels, and died a miserable death at Cologne. The despicable Gaston, who twice betrayed his friends to save his own skin, was watched, and when the queen, Anne of Austria, gave birth to a son after twenty years of marriage, he was deprived of his dignities and possessions and interned at Blois. The Marquis of Cinq-Mars, and the last Duke of Montmorency, son and grandson of two High Constables of France, felt the stroke of the headsman's axe.

In 1642, when the mighty cardinal had attained the highest pinnacle of success and fame, a mortal disease declared itself. His physicians talked the usual platitudes of hope, but he would have none of them, and sent for the curé of St. Eustache. "Do you pardon your enemies?" the priest asked. "I have none, save those of the state," replied the dying cardinal, and, pointing to the Host, exclaimed, "There is my judge." Louis heard of his death without emotion, and simply remarked—"Well, a great politician has gone." In six months his royal master was gone too.

The Medici Fountain, Luxembourg Gardens.
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Paris, under Marie de' Medici and Richelieu, saw many and important changes. In 1612 a new Jacobin monastery was founded in the Rue St. Honoré for the reformed Dominicans, destined later to be the theatre of Robespierre's triumphs and to house the great Jacobin revolutionary club.[134] In the same year the queen-regent bought a château and garden from the Duke of Piney-Luxembourg, and commissioned her architect, Solomon Debrosse, to build a new palace in the style of the Pitti at Florence. The work was begun in 1615, and resulted in the picturesque but somewhat Gallicised Italian palace which, after descending to Gaston of Orleans and his daughter the Grande Mademoiselle, ends a chequered career as palace, revolutionary prison, house of peers, and socialist meeting-place by becoming the respectable and dull Senate-house of the third Republic. The beautiful Renaissance gardens have suffered but few changes; adorned with Debrosse's picturesque fountain, they form one of the most charming parks in Paris. The same architect was employed to restore the old Roman aqueduct of Arcueil and finished his work in 1624. In 1614 the equestrian statue in bronze of Henry IV., designed by Giovanni da Bologna, and presented to Marie by Cosimo II. of Tuscany, reached Paris after many vicissitudes and was set up on the Pont Neuf by Pierre de Fouqueville, who carved for it a beautiful pedestal of marble, whereon were inscribed the most signal events and victories of Henry's reign. This priceless statue was melted down for cannon during the Revolution, and for years its site was occupied by a café. In 1818, during the Restoration, another statue of Henry IV., by Lemot, cast from the melted figure of Napoleon I. on the top of the Vendôme column, was erected where it now stands. The founder, who was an imperialist, is said to have avenged the emperor by placing pamphlets attacking the Restoration in the horse's belly.

In the seventeenth century the Pont Neuf was one of the busiest centres of Parisian life. Streams of coaches and multitudes of foot-passengers passed by. Booths of all kinds displayed their wares; quacks, mountebanks, ballad-singers and puppet-shows, drew crowds of listeners. Evelyn describes the footway as being three to four feet higher than the road; and at the foot of the bridge, says the traveller, is a water-house, "whereon, at a great height is the story of our Saviour and the Woman of Samaria pouring water out of a bucket. Above is a very rare dyall of several motions with a chime. The water is conveyed by huge wheels, pumps and other engines, from the river beneath." This was the famous Château d'Eau, or La Samaritaine, erected in 1608 and rebuilt in 1712 to pump water from the Seine and distribute it to the Louvre and the Tuileries palaces. The timepiece was an industrieuse horloge, which told the hours, days, and months. The present baths of La Samaritaine mark its site and retain its name.