The Story of Paris

by Thomas Okey

The victories of the Duke of Marlborough and of Prince Eugene spread consternation at Versailles. When, in 1704, the news of Blenheim oozed out, the king's grief was piteous to see. Scarce a noble family but had one of its members killed, wounded, or a prisoner. Two years later came the defeat of Ramillies, to be followed in three months by the disaster at Turin. The balls and masquerades and play at Marly went merrily on; but at news of the defeat of Oudenarde and the fall of Lille, even the reckless courtiers were subdued, and for a month gambling and even conversation ceased. At the sound of an approaching horseman they ran hither and thither, with fear painted on their cheeks. Wildest schemes for raising money were tried; taxes were levied on baptisms and marriages; sums raised for the relief of the poor and the maintenance of highways were expropriated, and the wretched peasants were forced to repair the roads without payment, some dying of starvation at their work. King and courtiers, with ill-grace, sent their plate to the mint and a plan for the recapture of Lille was mooted, in which Louis was to take part, but, for lack of money, the king's ladies were not to accompany him to the seat of war as they had hitherto done.[145] The expedition was to remain a secret; but the infatuated Louis could withhold nothing from Madame de Maintenon, who never rested until she had foiled the whole scheme and disgraced Chamillart, for having concealed the preparations from her.

Versailles had now grown so accustomed to defeats that Malplaquet was hailed as half a victory; but, in 1710, so desperate was the condition of the treasury, that a financial and social débâcle was imminent. The Dauphin, on leaving the opera at Paris, had been assailed by crowds of women shouting, "Bread! bread!" and only escaped by throwing them money and promises. To appease the people, the poor were set to level the boulevard near St. Denis, and were paid in doles of bread—bad bread. Even this failed them one morning, and a woman who made some disturbance was dragged to the pillory by the archers of the watch. An angry mob released her, and proceeded to raid the bakers' shops. The ugly situation was saved only by the firmness and sagacity of the popular Marshal Boufflers. Another turn of the financial screw was now meditated, and, as the taxes had already "drawn all the blood from his subjects, and squeezed out their very marrow," the conscience of the lord of France was troubled. His Jesuit confessor, Le Tellier, promised to consult the Sorbonne, whose learned doctors decided that, since all the wealth of his subjects rightly belonged to the king, he only took what was his own.

Towards the end of the seventeenth century, the quarrel between Jansenists and Jesuits concerning subtle doctrinal differences had grown acute through the publication of Pascal's immortal Lettres Provinciales, and by Quesnel's Réflexions Morales which the Jesuits had succeeded in subjecting to papal condemnation. In 1709, Le Tellier induced his royal penitent to decree the destruction of one of the two Jansenist establishments, and Port Royal des Champs, between Versailles and Chevreuse, rendered famous by the piety and learning of Arnault, Pascal and Nicolle, was doomed. On the night of 28th October 1709, the convent was surrounded by Gardes Françaises and Suisses, and on the following morning the chief of the police, with a posse of archers of the watch entered, produced a lettre de cachet, and gave the nuns a quarter of an hour to prepare for deportation. The whole of the sisters were then brutally expelled, "comme on enlève les créatures prostituées d'un lieu infâme," says St. Simon, and scattered among other religious houses in all directions. The friends of the buried were bidden to exhume their dead, and all unclaimed bodies were flung into a neighbouring cemetery, where dogs fought for them as for carrion. The church was profaned, all the conventual buildings were razed and sold in lots, not one stone being left on another; the very ground was ploughed up and sown, "not, it is true with salt," adds St. Simon, and that was the only favour shown.

Two years after the scene at Port Royal, amid the heartless gaiety of the court, the Angel of Death was busy in Louis' household. On 14th April 1711, the old king's only lawful son, the Grand Dauphin, expired; on 12th February 1712, the second Dauphiness, the sweet and gentle Adelaide of Savoy, Louis' darling, died of a malignant fever; six days later the Duke of Burgundy, her husband, was struck down; on 8th March, the Duke of Brittany, their eldest child, followed them. Three Dauphins had gone to the vaults of St. Denis in less than a year; mother, father, son, had died in twenty-four days—a sweep of Death's scythe, enough to touch even the hearts of courtiers. In a few days the king gave orders for the usual play to begin at Marly, and the dice rattled while the bodies of the Dauphin and Dauphiness lay yet unburied.

In May 1714, the Duke of Berri, son of the Grand Dauphin, died, and the sole direct heir to the throne was now the king's great-grandson, the Duke of Anjou, a sickly child of five years. On September 1715, the Grand Monarque made a calm and an edifying end to his long reign of seventy-two years, declaring that he owed no man restitution, and trusted in God's mercy for what he owed to the realm. He called the young child, who was soon to be Louis XV., to his bedside, and apparently without any sense of irony, exhorted him to remember his God, to cherish peace, to avoid extravagance, and study the welfare of his people. After receiving the last sacraments he repeated the prayers for the dying in a firm voice and, calling on God's aid, passed peacefully away. None but his official attendants, his priest and physicians, saw the end: two days before, Madame de Maintenon had retired to St. Cyr.

The demolition of what remained of mediæval Paris proceeded apace during Louis XIV.'s lifetime, and, at his death, the architectural features of its streets were substantially those of the older Paris of to-day. Colbert had taken up the costly legacy of the unfinished Louvre before the petrified banalities of Versailles and Marly had engulfed their millions, and, in 1660, the Hôtel de Bourbon was given over to the housebreakers to make room for the new east wing of the palace. So vigorously did they set to work that when Molière, whose company performed there three days a week in alternation with the Italian opera, came for the usual rehearsal, he found the theatre half demolished. He applied to the king, who granted him the temporary use of Richelieu's theatre in the Palais Royal, and his first performance there was given on 20th January 1661.

Levau was employed to carry on Lemercier's work on the Louvre, and had succeeded in completing the north wing and the river front in harmony with Lescot's design, when in 1664 Colbert stayed further progress and ordered him to prepare a model in wood of his proposed east wing. Levau was stupefied, for he had elaborated with infinite study a design for this portion of the palace, which he regarded as of supreme importance, and which he hoped would crown his work. He had already laid the foundations and erected the scaffolding when the order came. Levau made his model, and a number of architects were invited to criticise it: they did, and unanimously condemned it. Competitive designs were then exhibited with the model and submitted to Colbert, who took advantage of Poussin's residence at Rome to send them to the great Italian architects for their judgment. The Italians delivered a sweeping and general condemnation, and Poussin advised that Bernini should be employed to design a really noble edifice. Louis was delighted by the suggestion, and the loan of the architect of the great Colonnade of St. Peter's was entreated of the pope by the king's own hand in a letter dated 11th April 1665.

Bernini, in spite of his sixty-eight years, came to Paris, accompanied by his son, where he was treated like a prince, and drew up a scheme of classic grandeur. Levau's work on the east front was destroyed, and in October 1665, Bernini's foundations were begun. The majestic new design, however, ignored the exigencies of existing work and of internal convenience, and gave opportunities for criticisms and intrigue, which Colbert and the French architects,[146] forgetting for the moment all domestic rivalry, were not slow to make the most of. The offended Italian, three days after the ceremony of laying the foundation stone by the king on the 17th October 1665, left to winter in Rome, promising to return with his wife in the following February. He carried with him a munificent gift of 3000 gold louis and a pension of 12,000 livres for himself and of 1,200 for his son. The pension was paid regularly up to 1674, but the great Bernini was never seen in Paris again.

Among the designs originally submitted to Colbert, and approved by him and Lebrun, was one which had not been sent to Rome. It was the work of an amateur, Claude Perrault, a physician, whose brother, Charles Perrault, was chief clerk in the Office of Works. This was brought forth early in 1667, and a commission, consisting of Levau, Lebrun, Claude Perrault and others, appointed to report on its practicability. Levau promptly produced his own discarded designs, and both were submitted to the king for a final decision on 13th May. Louis was fascinated by the stately classicism of Perrault's design, and this was adopted. "Architecture must be in a bad state," said his rivals, "since it is put in the hands of a physician." Colbert seems, however, to have distrusted Claude's technical powers and on his brother Charles' advice a council of specialists, consisting of Levau, Lebrun, and Claude was appointed under the presidency of Colbert. Charles was made secretary and many were the quarrels between the rival architects over practical details. Perrault's new wing was found to be seventy-two feet too long, but the sovereign fiat had gone forth, the new east façade was raised and the whole of Levau's river front was masked by a new façade, rendered necessary by the excessive length of Perrault's design. The whole south wing[147] is in consequence much wider than any of the others which enclose the great quadrangle. Poor Levau's end was hastened by vexation and grief. Even to this day the north-east wing of Perrault's façade projects unsymmetrically beyond the line of the north front. The work has been much criticised and much praised. It evoked Fergusson's ecstatic admiration, was extolled by Reynolds and eulogised by another critic as one of the finest pieces of architecture in any age. Strangely enough, neither of these ever saw, nor has anyone yet seen, more than a partial and stunted realisation of Perrault's design, for, as the accompanying reproduction of a drawing by Blondel demonstrates, the famous east front of the Louvre is like a giant buried up to the knees, and the present first-floor windows were an afterthought, their places having been designed as niches to hold statues. The exactitude of Blondel's elevations was finally proved in 1903 by the admirable insight of the present architect of the Louvre, Monsieur G. Redon, who was led to undertake the excavations which brought to light a section of Perrault's decorated basement, by noticing that the windows of the ground floor evidently implied a lower order beneath. This basement, seven and a half metres in depth, now buried, was in Perrault's scheme designed to be exposed by a fosse of some fifteen to twenty metres in width, and the whole elevation and symmetry of the wing would have immensely gained by the carrying out of his plans.