In 1539, Francis I., having given permission to the Emperor Charles V. to traverse France, entertained the idea of receiving him at the Louvre, which underwent, on that account, a general restoration, according to the style of the renaissance; but as soon as the emperor departed, Francis, perceiving that the new works were merely of a temporary character, resolved to build a new palace on the same site as the former one, and confided its erection to Pierre Lescot. The building, begun in 1541, was continued till the death of Henry II. It is the finest portion of the Louvre; the south-west angle. When Catherine de Médicis came into power, she dismissed Lescot, engaged an Italian architect, and caused that wing to be built which advances toward the river.
In 1564, tired of the Louvre, Catherine bought a piece of ground called the Salbonière, covered with pottery-works, the Tuileries Saint Honoré, and commenced the palace which received its name from the fabrics which had occupied its site. For six years, the new edifice steadily progressed; but Catherine, having learned from her astrologer, Ruggieri, that it was her fate to die under the ruins of a house near St. Germain, suddenly gave up the works of the Tuileries, because it was in the parish of St. Germain l'Auxerrois, and built the Hôtel de Soissons, on the site of the present corn-market.
The famous Pont-Neuf was begun in 1578, Henry III. laying the first stone.
The Place Royale was completed in 1612. Here Cardinal Richelieu soon afterward built a palace, which he called the Palais Cardinal, but which, in a spirit of regal munificence, he presented to his king, Louis XIII. Thenceforth it became the Palais Royal. Numerous hotels of the noblesse sprang up in the same quarter, and with them first appeared there the warehouses for bijouterie and other fancy goods, for which the Palais Royal is at present so celebrated. A writer of that time severely blames the merchants of these shops for permitting their wives to flirt with customers—"all to induce them to buy a fashionable collar, a child's purse, a drachm or two of perfume for the perruques or a boy's wooden sword." Speaking of perruques, we must not omit to mention that they reached their full development at the time of Louis Quatorze. Their most celebrated maker was a M. Binet, from whom they sometimes were called binettes. They weighed several pounds, sometimes cost a thousand crowns, and rose five or six inches above the brow. The word binette still exists in the language of the Paris gamin, designating a person with a droll countenance.
The last insurrection at Paris before the revolution was that called the Fronde, (sling.) This revolt received its name in a singular manner. In the moat of the town, near Saint Roch, the little boys of the quarter used to fight with slings. When the constable appeared, they all took to their heels. In the disputes of the parliament, a young counsellor, Bauchaumont, observed the modesty and docility of the members in the presence of the king, and their turbulence in his absence. "They are quiet just now," said he, "but, when he is gone, they will sling (on frondera) with a will." The word remained. The Fronde soon gained the whole town, which eagerly took the side of the insurgents, as the first cause of the troubles was a new tax on houses built outside the walls. Afterward, when the rebellion was quelled, the Parisians paid dearly for their share in it. Their privileges were abolished, a royal garrison took the place of their civic guards, and magistrates dependent on the crown, that of the municipal authorities.
Deprived of its independence, it became the sole glory of Paris to be the stage on which the splendors of the court of Louis XIV. were revealed. In 1662, that king gave an idea of what his reign would cost by the famous fète du carrousel, which has left its name to the vast place between the Louvre and the Tuileries. It cost 1,200,000 francs. Gold and silver were employed in so great profusion on the trappings of the horses, that the material of which they were made could not be distinguished from the embroidery with which it was covered. The king and the princes shone with the prodigious quantity of diamonds with which their arms and the harness of their horses were covered. About the same time the Tuileries and the Louvre were completed, and a garden was designed for the former by Le Nôtre. The former garden of the Tuileries, like other ancient French gardens, comprised a strange medley; among other objects, it contained a pretty little abode, beside the quay, and mysteriously concealed by a thick grove, which Louis XIII. had given to his valet-de-chambre, Renard, who had furnished it with rare and costly articles, and had made it a secret rendezvous for young seigneurs, and the scene of luxurious petits soupers.
It was in 1669 that Soliman Aga, the Turkish ambassador at the French court, introduced the use of coffee into Paris. The first café was opened at the foire St. Germain, which was then one of the most frequented and fashionable places of resort in the town, and the suppression of which, toward the end of the eighteenth century, went far to destroy the industry and commerce of the left bank of the river, to the profit of the right. An Armenian named Pascal afterward established a café, which was much in vogue, called the Manouri, upon the Quai de l'Ecole; and, in 1689, a Sicilian, Procopio, opened the Café Procope in the present Rue de l'Ancienne Comédie, which was for long the favorite place of reunion for the savans and beaux-esprits of the period.
But the café reminds us that we are leaving Paris in old times for the Paris of the present, and that we are close upon that blood-written page, the revolution, which divides the chronicles of the former from those of the latter. These notes must not be brought to a conclusion without the acknowledgment that from M. Malte-Brun's laborious compilation, La France Illustrée, they derive whatever archaeological interest they possess.