PARIS AND ITS STORY

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P A R I S
AND ITS STORY

BY
T. O K E Y

ILLUSTRATED BY
KATHERINE KIMBALL
& O. F. M. WARD
1904
LONDON: J. M. DENT & CO.
NEW YORK: THE MACMILLAN CO.

“I will not here omit, that I never rail so much against France as to be out of humour with Paris; that city has ever had my heart from my infancy; and it has fallen out to me, as of excellent things, that the more of other fine cities I have seen since, the more the beauty of this gains upon my affections. I love it for its own sake, and more for its own native being than the addition of foreign pomp; I love it tenderly even with all its warts and blemishes. I am not a Frenchman but by this great city great in people, great in the felicity or her situation, but above all great and incomparable in variety and diversity of commodities; the glory of France and one of the most noble ornaments of the world.”

Montaigne.

“Quand Dieu eslut nonante et dix royaumes
Tot le meillor torna en douce France.”
Couronnement Loys.

PREFACE

THE History of Paris, says Michelet, is the history of the French monarchy. The aim of the writer in the following pages has been to narrate the story of the capital city of France on the lines thus indicated, dwelling, however, in the earlier chapters rather more on its legendary aspect than perhaps an austere historical conscience would approve. But it is precisely a familiarity with these romantic stories, which at least are true in impression if not in fact, that the sojourner in Paris will find most useful, translated as they are in sculpture and in painting on the decoration of her architecture both modern and ancient, and implicit in the nomenclature of her ways. Within the limits of time and space allotted for the work no more than an imperfect outline of a vast subject has been possible. The writer has essayed to compose a story of, not a guide to, Paris. Those who desire the latter may be referred to the excellent manuals of Murray, Bædeker and of Grant Allen—the last named being an admirable companion for the artistically-minded traveller. In controversial matter, such, for instance, as the position of the ancient Grand Pont, the writer has adopted the opinions of the most recent authorities.

The story of Paris presents a marked contrast with that of an Italian city-state whose rise, culmination and fall may be roundly traced. Paris is yet in the stage of lusty growth. Time after time, like a young giantess, she has burst her cincture of walls, cast off her outworn garments and renewed her armour and vesture. Hers are no grass-grown squares and deserted streets; no ruined splendours telling of pride abased and glory departed; no sad memories of waning cities once the mistresses of sea and land; none of the tears evoked by a great historic tragedy; none of the solemn pathos of decay and death. Paris has more than once tasted the bitterness of humiliation; Norseman, and Briton, Russian and German have bruised her fair body; the dire distress of civic strife has exhausted her strength, but she has always emerged from her trials with marvellous recuperation, more flourishing than before.

Since 1871, when the city, crushed under a two-fold calamity of foreign invasion and of internecine war, seemed doomed to bleed away to feeble insignificance, her prosperity has so increased that house rent has doubled and population risen from 1,825,274 in 1870 to 2,714,068 in 1901. The growth of Paris from the settlement of an obscure Gallic tribe to the most populous, the most cultured, the most artistic, the most delightful and seductive of continental cities has been prodigious, yet withal she has maintained her essential unity, her corporate sense and peculiar individuality. Paris, unlike London, has never expatiated to the effacement of her distinctive features and the loss of civic consciousness. The city has still a definite outline and circumference, and over her gates to-day one may read, Entrée de Paris. The Parisian is, and always has been, conscious of his citizenship, proud of his city, careful of her beauty, jealous of her reputation. The essentials of Parisian life remain unchanged since mediæval times. Busy multitudes of alert, eager burgesses crowd her streets; ten thousand students stream from the provinces, from Europe, and even from the uttermost parts of the earth, to eat of the bread of knowledge at her University. The old collegiate life is gone, but the arts and sciences are freely taught as of old to all comers; and a lowly peasant lad may carry in his satchel a prime minister’s portfolio or the insignia of a president of the republic, even as his mediæval prototype bore a bishop’s mitre or a cardinal’s hat. The boisterous exuberance of youthful spirits still vents itself in rowdy student life to the scandal of bourgeois placidity, and the poignant self-revelation and gnawing self-reproach of a François Villon find their analogue in the pathetic verse of a Paul Verlaine. Beneath the fair and ordered surface of the normal life of Paris still sleep the fiery passions which, from the days of the Maillotins to those of the Commune, have throughout the crisis of her history ensanguined her streets with the blood of citizens.[1] Let us remember, however, when contrasting the modern history of Paris with that of London, that the questions which have stirred her citizens have been not party but dynastic ones, often complicated and embittered by social and religious principles ploughing deep in the human soul, for which men have cared enough to suffer, and to inflict, death.

Those writers who are pleased to trace the permanency of racial traits through the life of a people dwell with satisfaction on passages in ancient authors who describe the Gauls as quick to champion the cause of the oppressed, prone to war, elated by victory, impatient of defeat, easily amenable to the arts of peace, responsive to intellectual culture; terrible, indefatigable orators but bad listeners, so intolerant of their speakers that at tribal gatherings an official charged to maintain silence would march, sword in hand, towards an interrupter, and after a third warning cut off a portion of his dress. If the concurrent testimony of writers, ancient, mediæval and modern, be of any worth, Gallic vanity is beyond dispute. Dante, expressing the prevailing belief of his age, exclaims, “Now, was there ever people so vain as the Sienese! Certes not the French by far.”[2] Of their imperturbable gaiety and the avidity for new things we have ample testimony, and the course of this story will demonstrate that France, and more especially Paris, has ever been, from the establishment of Christianity to the birth of the modern world at the Revolution, the parent or the fosterer of ideas, the creator of arts, the soldier of the ideal. She has always evinced a wondrous preventive apprehension of coming changes. The earliest of the western people beyond Rome to adopt Christianity, she had established a monastery near Tours a century and a half before St. Benedict, the founder of Western monasticism, had organised his first community at Subiaco. In the Middle Ages Paris became the intellectual light of the Christian world. From the time of the centralisation of the monarchy at Paris she absorbed in large measure the vital forces of the nation, and all that was greatest in art, science and literature was drawn within her walls until, in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, she became the centre of learning, taste and culture in Europe.[3] During the first Empire and the Restoration, after the tempest was stilled and the great heritage of the Revolution taken possession of, an amazing outburst of scientific, artistic and literary activity made Paris the Ville Lumière of Europe.

Paris is still the city in Europe where the things of the mind and of taste have most place, where the wheels of life run most smoothly and pleasantly, where the graces and refinements and amenities of social existence, l’art des plaisirs fins, are most highly developed and most widely diffused. There is something in the crisp, luminous air of Paris that quickens the intelligence and stimulates the senses. Even the scent of the wood fires as one emerges from the railway station exhilarates the spirit. The poet Heine used to declare that the traveller could estimate his proximity to Paris by noting the increasing intelligence of the people, and that the very bayonets of the soldiers were more intelligent than those elsewhere. Life, even in its more sensuous and material phases, is less gross and coarse,[4] its pleasures more refined than in London. It is impossible to conceive the pit of a London theatre stirred to fury by a misplaced adjective in a poetical drama, or to imagine anything comparable to the attitude of a Parisian audience at the cheap holiday performances at the Français or the Odéon, where the severe classic tragedies of Racine, of Corneille, of Victor Hugo, or the well-worn comedies of Molière or of Beaumarchais are played with small lure of stage upholstery, and listened to with close attention by a popular audience responsive to the exquisite rhythm and grace of phrasing, the delicate and restrained tragic pathos, and the subtle comedy of their great dramatists. To witness a première at the Français is an intellectual feast. The brilliant house; the pit and stalls filled with black-coated critics; the quick apprehension of the points and happy phrases; the universal and excited discussion between the acts; the atmosphere of keen and alert intelligence pervading the whole assembly; the quaint survival of the time-honoured “overture”—three knocks on the boards—dating back to Roman times when the Prologus of the comedy stepped forth and craved the attention of the audience by three taps of his wand; the chief actor’s approach to the front of the stage after the play is ended to announce to Mesdames and Messieurs what in these days they have known for weeks before from the press, that “the piece we have had the honour of playing” is by such a one—all combine to make an indelible impression on the mind of the foreign spectator.

The Parisian is the most orderly and well-behaved of citizens. The custom of the queue is a spontaneous expression of his love of fairness and order. Even the applause in theatres is organised. A spectacle such as that witnessed at the funeral of Victor Hugo in 1885, the most solemn and impressive of modern times, is inconceivable in London. The whole population (except the Faubourg St. Germain and the clergy) from the poorest labourer to the heads of the State issued forth to file past the coffin of their darling poet, lifted up under the Arc de Triomphe, and by their multitudinous presence honoured his remains borne on a poor bare hearse to their last resting-place in the Panthéon. Amid this vast crowd, mainly composed of labourers, mechanics and the petite bourgeoisie, assembled to do homage to the memory of the poet of democracy, scarcely an agent was seen; the people were their own police, and not a rough gesture, not a trace of disorder marred the sublime scene. The Parisian democracy is the most enlightened and the most advanced in Europe, and it is to Paris that the dearest hopes and deepest sympathies of generous spirits will ever go forth in

“The struggle, and the daring rage divine for liberty,
Of aspirations toward the far ideal, enthusiast dreams of brotherhood.”

It now remains for the writer to acknowledge his indebtedness to the following among other authorities, which are here enumerated to obviate the necessity for the use of repeated footnotes, and to indicate to readers who may desire to pursue the study of the history of Paris in more detail, some works among the enormous mass of literature on the subject that will repay perusal.

For the general history of France the monumental Histoire de France now in course of publication, edited by E. Lavisse; Michelet’s Histoire de France, Récits de l’Histoire de France, and Procès des Templiers; Victor Duruy, Histoire de France; Histoire de France racontée par les Contemporains, edited by B. Zeller; Carl Faulmann, Illustrirte Geschichte der Buchdruckerkunst; the Chronicles of Gregory of Tours, Richer, Abbo, Joinville, Villani, Froissart, Antonio Morosini; De Comines; Géographie Historique, by A. Guerard; Froude’s essay on the Templars; Jeanne d’Arc, Maid of Orleans, by T. Douglas Murray; Paris sous Philip le Bel, edited by H. Geraud.

For the later Monarchy, the Revolutionary and Napoleonic periods, the Histories of Carlyle, Mignet, Michelet and Louis Blanc; the Origines de la France Contemporaine, by Taine; the Cambridge Modern History, Vol. VIII.; the Memoirs of the Duc de St. Simon, of Madame Campan, Madame Vigée-Lebrun, of Camille Desmoulins, Madame Roland, Paul Louis Courier; the Journal de Perlet; Histoire de la Societé Française pendant la Revolution, by J. de Goncourt; Goethe’s Die Campagne in Frankreich, 1792; Légendes et Archives de la Bastille, by F. Funck Brentano; Life of Napoleon I., by J. Holland Rose; L’Europe et la Revolution Française by Albert Sorel; Contemporary American Opinion of the French Revolution, by C. D. Hazen. For the particular history of Paris, the exhaustive and comprehensive Histoire de la Ville de Paris, by the learned Benedictine priests, Michel Félibien and Guy Alexis Lobineau; the so-called Journal d’un Bourgeois de Paris, edited by L. Lalanne; Paris Pendant la Domination Anglaise, by A. Longnon; the more modern Paris à Travers les Ages, by M. F. Hoffbauer, E. Fournier and others; the Topographie Historique du Vieux Paris, by A. Berty and H. Legrand. Howell’s Familiar Letters, Coryat’s Crudities, and Evelyn’s Diary, contain useful matter. For the chapters on Historical Paris, E. Fournier’s Promenade Historique dans Paris, Chronique des Rues de Paris, Enigmes des Rues des Paris; the Marquis de Rochegude’s Guide Pratique à Travers le Vieux Paris, and the excellent Nouvel Itinéraire Guide Artistique et Archéologique de Paris, by C. Normand, now appearing in fascicules published by the Société des Amis des Monuments Parisiens, have been largely drawn upon and supplemented by affectionate memories of an acquaintance with the city dating back for more than thirty years, and by notes of pilgrimages, under the guidance of a member of the Positivist Society of Paris, made in 1891 through revolutionary Paris and Versailles.

For personal help and information the writer desires to express his obligations to Monsieur Lafenestre, Director of the Louvre: Monsieur L. Bénédite, Director of the Luxembourg; Monsieur G. Redon, architect of the Louvre and the Tuileries; Professor A. Legros; and for help in proof-reading to Mr James Britten.

CONTENTS

LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS

The majority of the photographs of sculpture have been taken by Messrs. Haweis & Coles, while most of the other photographs are reproduced by permission of Messrs. Giraudon.

LINE ILLUSTRATIONS BY KATHARINE KIMBALL

The majority of the three-colour, half-tone and line blocks used in this book have been made by the Graphic Photo-Engraving Co., London.

LIST OF MAPS

PARIS AND ITS STORY

CHAPTER I
GALLO-ROMAN PARIS

THE mediæval scribe in the fulness of a divinely-revealed cosmogony is wont to begin his story at the creation of the world or at the confusion of tongues, to trace the building of Troy by the descendants of Japheth, and the foundation of his own native city by one of the Trojan princes made a fugitive in Europe by proud Ilion’s fall. Such, he was very sure, was the origin of Padua, founded by Antenor and by Priam, son of King Priam, whose grandson, yet another Priam, by his great valour and wisdom became the monarch of a mighty people, called from their fair hair, Galli or Gallici. And of the strong city built on the little island in the Seine who could have been its founder but the ravisher of fair Helen—Sir Paris himself? The naïve etymology of the time was evidence enough.

But the modern writer, as he compares the geographical position of the capitals of Europe, is tempted to exclaim, Cherchez le marchand! for he perceives that their unknown founders were dominated by two considerations—facilities for commerce and protection from enemies: and before the era of the Roman roadmakers, commerce meant facilities for water carriage. As the early settlers in Britain sailed up the Thames, they must have observed, where the river’s bed begins somewhat to narrow, a hill rising from the continuous expanse of marshes from its mouth, easily defended on the east and west by those fortified posts which, in subsequent times, became the Tower of London and Barnard’s Castle. If we scan a map of France, we shall see that the group of islands on and around which Paris now stands, lies in the fruitful basin of the Seine, known as the Isle de France, near the convergence of three rivers; for on the east the Marne and the Oise, and on the south the Yonne, discharge their waters into the main stream on its way to the sea. In ancient times the great line of Phœnician, Greek and Roman commerce followed northwards the valleys of the Rhone and of the Saone, whose upper waters are divided from those of the Yonne only by the plateau of Dijon and the calcareous slopes of Burgundy. The Parisii were thus admirably placed for tapping the profitable commerce of north-west Europe, and by the waters of the Eure, lower down the Seine, were able to touch the fertile valley of the Loire. The northern rivers of Gaul were all navigable by the small boats of the early traders, and, in contrast with the impetuous sweep of the Rhone and the Loire in the south and west, flowed with slow and measured stream:[5] they were rarely flooded, and owing to the normally mild winters, still more rarely blocked by ice. Moreover, the Parisian settlement stood near the rich corn-land of La Beauce, and to the north-east, over the open plain of La Valois, lay the way to Flanders. It was one of the river stations on the line of the Phœnician traders in tin, that most precious and rare of ancient metals, between Marseilles and Britain, and in the early Middle Ages became, with Lyons and Beaucaire, one of the chief fairs of that historic trade route which the main lines of railway traffic still follow to-day. The island now known as the Cité, which the founders of Paris chose for their stronghold, was the largest of the group which lay involved in the many windings of the Seine, and was embraced by a natural moat of deep waters. To north and south lay hills, marshes and forests, and all combined to give it a position equally adapted for defence and for commerce.

The Parisii were a small tribe of Gauls who were content to place themselves under the protection of the more powerful Senones. Their island city was the home of a prosperous community of shipmen and merchants, but it is not until the Conquest of Gaul by the Romans that Lutetia, for such was its Gallic name, enters the great pageant of written history. It was—

“Armèd Cæsar falcon-eyed,”[6]

who saw its great military importance, built a permanent camp there and made it a central entrepôt for food and munitions of war. And when in 52 B.C. the general rising of the tribes under Vercingetorix threatened to scour the Romans out of Gaul and to destroy the whole fabric of Cæsar’s ambition, he sent his favourite lieutenant, Labienus, to seize Lutetia where the Northern army of the Gauls was centred. Labienus crossed the Seine at Melun, fixed his camp on a spot near the position of the church of St. Germain l’Auxerrois, and began the first of the historic sieges for which Paris is so famous. But the Gaulish commander burnt the bridges, fired the city and took up his position on the slopes of the hill of Lutetius (St. Genevieve) in the south, and aimed at crushing his enemy between his own forces and an army advancing from the north. Labienus having learnt that Cæsar was in a tight place, owing to a check at Clermont and the defection of the Eduans, by a masterly piece of engineering recrossed the Seine by night at the Point du Jour, and when the Gauls awoke in the morning they beheld the Roman legions in battle array on the plain of Grenelle beneath. They made a desperate attempt to drive them against the river, but they lost their leader and were almost annihilated by the superior arms and strategy of the Romans. Labienus was able to join his master at Sens, and the irrevocable subjugation of the Gauls soon followed. With the tolerant and enlightened conquerors came the Roman peace, Roman law, Roman roads, the Roman schoolmaster; and a more humane religion abolished the Druidical sacrifices. Lutetia was rebuilt and became a prosperous and, next to Lyons, the most important of Gallo-Roman cities. It lay equidistant from Germany and Britain and at the issue of valleys which led to the upper and lower Rhine. The quarries of Mount Lutetius produced an admirable building stone, kind to work and hardening well under exposure to the air. Its white colour may have won for Paris the name of Leucotia, or the White City, by which it is sometimes called by ancient writers. Cæsar had done his work well, for so completely were the Gauls Romanised, that by the fifth or sixth century their very language had disappeared.[7]

But towards the end of the third century three lowly wayfarers were journeying from Rome along the great southern road to Paris, charged by the Pope with a mission fraught with greater issues to Gaul than the Cæsars and all their legions. Let us recall somewhat of the appearance of the city which Dionysius, Rusticus and Eleutherius saw as they neared its suburbs and came down what is now known as the Rue St. Jacques. After passing the arches of the aqueduct, two of which exist to this day, that crossed the valley of Arcueil and brought the waters of Rungis,[8] Paray and Montjean to the baths of the imperial palace, they would discern on the hill of Lutetius to their right the Roman camp, garrison and cemetery. Lower down on its eastern slopes they would catch a glimpse of a great amphitheatre, capable of accommodating 10,000 spectators, part of which was laid bare in 1869 by some excavations made for the Campagnie des Omnibus between the Rues Monge and Linné. Unhappily, the public subscription initiated by the Académie des Inscriptions to purchase the property proved inadequate, and the Company retained possession of the land. In 1883, however, other excavations were undertaken in the Rue de Navarre, which resulted in the discovery of the old aqueduct that drained the amphitheatre, and some other remains, which have been preserved and made into a public park.

On their left, where now stands the Lycée St. Louis, would be the theatre of Lutetia, and further on the imposing and magnificent palace of the Cæsars, with its gardens sloping down to the Seine. The turbulent little stream of the Bièvre flowed by the foot of Mons Lutetius on the east, entering the main river opposite the eastern limit of the civitas of Lutetia, gleaming white before them and girdled by Aurelian’s wall[9] and the waters of the Seine. A narrow eel-shaped island, subsequently known as the Isle de Galilée,[10] lay between the Isle of the Cité and the southern bank; two islands, the Isles de Notre Dame and des Vaches, divided by a narrow channel to the east, and two small islets, the Isles des Juifs and de Bussy, to the west. Another islet, the Isle de Louviers, lay near the northern bank beyond the two eastern islands. Crossing a wooden bridge, where now stands the Petit Pont, they would enter the forum (Place du Parvis Notre Dame) under a triumphal arch. Here would be the very foyer of the city; a little way to the left the governor’s palace and the basilica, or hall of justice;[11] to the right the temple of Jupiter. As they crossed the island they would find it linked to the northern bank by another wooden bridge, replaced by the present Pont Notre Dame.[12] In the distance to the north stood Mons Martis (Montmartre) crowned with the temples of Mars and Mercury, four of whose columns are preserved in the church of St. Pierre; and to the west the aqueduct from Passy bringing its waters to the mineral baths located on the site of the present Palais Royal. A road, now the Rue St. Martin, led to the north; to the east lay the marshy land which is still known as the quarter of the Marais.

Denis and his companions preached and taught the new faith unceasingly and met martyrs’ deaths. By the mediæval hagiographers St. Denis is invariably confused with Dionysius, the Areopagite, said to have been converted by St. Paul and sent on his mission to France by Pope Clement. In the Golden Legend he is famed to have converted much people to the faith, and “did do make many churches,” and at length was brought before the judge who “did do smite off the heads of the three fellows by the temple of Mercury. And anon the body of St. Denis raised himself up and bare his head between his arms, as the angels led him two leagues from the place which is said the hill of the martyrs unto the place where he now resteth by his election and the purveyance of God, when was heard so great and sweet a melody of angels that many that heard it believed in our Lord.” In an interesting picture, No. 995 in Room X. of the Louvre, said to have been painted for Jean sans Peur, Duke of Burgundy, by Malouel, and finished at his death in 1415 by Bellechose, St. Denis in bishop’s robes is seen kneeling before the block; the headsman raises his axe; one of the saint’s companions has already met his fate, the other awaits it resignedly. To the left, St. Denis in prison is receiving the Sacred Host from the hands of Christ.

The work that Denis and his companions began was more fully achieved in the fourth century by the rude Pannonion soldier, St. Martin, who also evangelised at Paris. He is the best-known of Gallic saints, and the story of his conversion one of the most popular in Christendom. When stationed at Amiens he was on duty one bitter cold day at the city gate, and espied a poor naked beggar asking alms. Soldiers in garrison are notoriously impecunious, and Martin had nothing to give; but drawing his sword he cleaved his mantle in twain, and bestowed half upon the shivering wretch at his feet. That very night the Lord Jesus appeared to him in a dream surrounded by angels, having on His shoulders the half of the cloak which Martin had given to the beggar. Turning to the angels, Jesus said: “Know ye who hath thus arrayed Me? My servant Martin, though yet unbaptised, hath done this.” After this vision Martin received baptism and remained steadfast in the faith. At length, desiring to devote himself wholly to Christ, he begged permission to leave the army. The Emperor Julian, who deemed the Christian faith fit only to form souls of slaves, reproached him for his cowardice, for he was yet in the prime of life, being forty years of age. “Put me,” exclaimed Martin, “naked and without defence in the forefront of the battle, and armed with the Cross alone I will not fear to face the enemy.” Early on the following morning the barbarians submitted to the emperor without striking a blow, and thus was victory vouchsafed to Martin’s faith and courage, and he was permitted to leave the army. The illiterate and dauntless soldier became the fiery apostle of the faith, a vigorous iconoclast, throwing down the images of the false gods, breaking their altars in pieces and burning their temples. Of the Roman gods, Mercury, he said, was most difficult to ban, but Jove was merely stupid[13] and brutish, and gave him least trouble. Martin was a democratic saint, of ardent charity and austere devotion. Later in life he founded the monastery of Marmoutier, which grew to be one of the richest in France. His rule was severe; when his monks murmured at the hard fare he bade them remember that cooked herbs and barley bread was the food of the hermits of Africa. “That may be,” answered they, “but we cannot live like the angels.”

On the 16th of March 1711, some workmen, digging a tomb for the archbishop of Paris in the choir of Notre Dame, came upon the walls, six feet below the pavement, of the original Christian basilica over which the modern cathedral is built. In the fabric of these walls the early builders had incorporated the remains of the still earlier temple of Jupiter, which had been destroyed to give place to the Christian church, and among the débris were found the fragments of an altar raised to Jove in the reign of Tiberius Cæsar by the Nautæ, a guild of Parisian merchant-shippers, an altar on whose foyer still remained some of the very burnt wood and incense used in the last pagan sacrifice. The mutilated stones, with their rude Gallo-Roman reliefs and inscriptions, may be seen in the Frigidarium of the Thermæ, the old Roman baths by the Hôtel de Cluny, and are among the most interesting of historical documents in Paris. The Corporation of Nautæ who dedicated this altar to Jove, were the origin of the Commune or Civil Council of Paris, and in later time gave way to the provost[14] of the merchants and the sheriffs of that city. Their device was the Nef, or ship, which is and has been throughout the ages the arms of Paris, and which to this day may be seen carved on the vaultings of the Roman baths.

In the great palace of which these baths formed but a part was enacted that scene so vividly described in the pages of Gibbon, when Julian, after his victories over the Alemanni and the Franks, was acclaimed Augustus by the rebellious troops of Constantius. On a plain outside Paris Julian had admonished the sullen legions, angry at being detached from their victorious and darling commander for service on the Persian frontier, and had urged them to obedience. But at midnight the young Cæsar was awakened by a clamorous and armed multitude besieging the palace, and at early dawn its doors were forced; the reluctant Julian was seized and carried in triumph through the streets to be enthroned and saluted as emperor. He was lifted on a shield, and for diadem, crowned with a military collar. In after life the emperor-philosopher looked back with tender regret to the three winters he spent in Paris before his elevation to the imperial responsibilities and anxieties. He writes of the busy days and meditative nights he passed in his dear Lutetia, with its two wooden bridges, its pure and pleasant waters, its excellent wine. He dwells on the mildness of its climate, where the fig-tree, protected by straw in the winter, grew and fruited. One rigorous season, however, the emperor well remembered[15] when the Seine was blocked by huge masses of ice. Julian, who prided himself on his endurance, at first declined the use of those charcoal fires which to this day are a common and deadly method of supplying heat in Paris. But his rooms were damp and his servants were allowed to introduce them into his sleeping apartment. The Cæsar was almost asphyxiated by the fumes, and his physicians to restore him administered an emetic. Julian in his time was beloved of the Lutetians, for he was a just and tolerant prince whose yoke was easy. He had purged the soil of Gaul from the barbarian invaders, given Lutetia peace and security, and made of it an important, imperial city. His statue, found near Paris, still recalls his memory in the hall of the great baths of the Lutetia he loved so well.

The so-called apostasy of this lover of Plato and worshipper of the Sun, who never went to the wars or travelled without dragging a library of Greek authors after him, was a philosophic reaction against the harsh measures,[16] the bloody and treacherous natures of the Christian emperors, and the fierceness of the Arian controversy. The movement was but a back-wash in the stream of history, and is of small importance. Julian’s successors, Valentinian and Gratian, reversed his policy but shared his love for the fair city on the Seine, and spent some winters there. Lutetia had now become a rich and cultured Gallo-Roman city.

CHAPTER II
THE BARBARIAN INVASIONS—ST. GENEVIEVE—THE CONVERSION OF CLOVIS—THE MEROVINGIAN DYNASTY

IN the Prologue to Faust the Lord of Heaven justifies the existence of the restless, goading spirit of evil by the fact that man’s activity is all too prone to flag,—

“Er liebt sich bald die unbedingte Ruh.”[17]

As with men so with empires: riches and inaction are hard to bear. It was not so much a corruption of public morals as a growing slackness and apathy in public life and an intellectual sloth that hastened the fall of the Roman Empire. Owing to the gradual exhaustion of the supply of slaves its economic basis was crumbling away. The ruling class was content to administer rather than to govern and unwilling or incompetent to grapple with the new order of things.[18] For centuries the Gauls had been untrained in arms and habituated to look to the imperial legions for defence against the half-savage races of men, giants in stature and strength, surging like an angry sea against their boundaries. Towards the end of the fourth century Vandals and Burgundians, Suevi and Alemanni, Goth and Hun, treading on each other’s heels, burst through the Rhine frontier, destroyed the Roman garrisons and forts, and inundated Gaul. Two of these races stayed to form kingdoms: the Burgundians in the fertile plains of the Rhine; the Visigoths in Aquitaine and North Spain, whose aid the Romans were fain to seek to roll back the hordes of Attila’s Huns at Chalons-sur-Marne. This was the last achievement of Roman arms in Gaul, and even that victory was largely due to the courage of the Goths. In the fifth century the confederation of Frankish tribes who had conquered and settled in Belgium saw successive waves of invasion pass by, and determined to have their part in the spoils of Gaul. They soon overran Flanders and the north, and at length under Clovis captured Paris and conquered nearly the whole of Gaul.

The end of the fifth century is the beginning of the evil times of Gallic story. That fair land of France, “one of Nature’s choicest masterpieces, one of Ceres’ chiefest barns for corn, one of Bacchus’ prime wine cellars and of Neptune’s best salt-pits,” became the prey of the barbarian. The whole fabric of civilisation seem doomed to destruction. Gaul had become the richest and most populous of Roman provinces; its learning and literature were noised in Rome; its schools drew students from the mother city herself. But at the end of the sixth century Gregory of Tours deplores the fact that in his time there were neither books, nor readers, nor scholar who could compose in verse or prose, and that only the speech of the rustic was understood. He playfully scolds himself for muddling prepositions and confusing genders and cases, but his duty as a Christian priest is to instruct, not to charm, and so he tells the story of his times in such rustic Latin as he knows. He draws for us a vivid picture of Clovis, the founder of the French monarchy, his savage valour, his astuteness, his regal passion.

After the victory over Syagrius, the shadowy king of the Romans, at Soissons, Clovis was met by St. Rémi, who prayed that a vase of great price and wondrous beauty among the spoil might be returned to him. “Follow us,” said the king, “to Soissons, where the booty will be shared.” Before the division took place Clovis begged that the vase might be accorded to him. His warriors answered: “All, glorious king, is thine.” But before the king could grasp the vase, one, jealous and angry, threw his francisque[19] at it, exclaiming: “Thou shalt have no more than falls to thy lot.” The broken vase was however apportioned to the king, who restored it to the bishop. But Clovis hid the wound in his heart. At the annual review in the Champ de Mars near Paris, the king strode along the line inspecting the weapons of his warriors. He stopped in front of the uncourtly soldier, took his axe from him, complained of its foul state, and flung it angrily on the ground. As the man stooped to pick it up Clovis, with his own axe, cleft his skull in twain, exclaiming: “Thus didst thou to the vase at Soissons.” “Even so,” says Gregory quaintly, “did he inspire all with great fear.”

At this point of our story we meet the first of those noble women, heroic and wise, for whom French history is pre-eminent. In the first half of the fifth century St. Germain of Auxerre and St. Lew of Troyes, chosen by the prelates of France “for to go and quench an heresy that was in Great Britain, now called England, came to Nanterre for to be lodged and harboured and the people came against them for to have their benison. Among the people, St. Germain, by the enseignements of the Holy Ghost, espied out the little maid St. Genevieve, and made her come to him, and kissed her head and demanded her name, and whose daughter she was, and the people about her said that her name was Genevieve, and her father Severe, and her mother Geronce, which came unto him, and the holy man said: Is this child yours? They answered: Yea. Blessed be ye, said the holy man, when God hath given to you so noble lineage, know ye for certain that the day of her nativity the angels sang and hallowed great mystery in heaven with great joy and gladness.”

When on the morn she was brought to him again, he saw in her a sign celestial, commended her to God, and prayed that she would remember him in her orisons, and on his return to Paris, finding her in the city, he commended her to its people. Tidings came that “Attila, the felon knight of Hungary, had enterprised to destroy and waste the parts of France,” and the burgesses of Paris for great dread they had, sent their goods into cities more sure. Genevieve caused the good women of the town “to wake in fastings and orisons, and bade the merchants not to remove their goods for the city should have none harm.” At first the people hardened their hearts and reviled her, but at St. Germain’s prayers they believed in her, and our Lord “for her love did so much that the tyrants approached not Paris, thanks and glory to God and honour to the virgin.” At the siege of Paris by Childeric and his Franks, when the people were wasted by sickness and famine, “the holy virgin, that pity constrained, went by the Seine to Arcy and Troyes for to go fetch by ship some victuals. She stilled by her prayers a furious tempest and brought the ships back laden with wheat.” When the city was at length captured, King Childeric, although a paynim, saved at her intercession the lives of his prisoners, and one day, to escape her importunate pleadings for the lives of some criminals, fled out of the gates of Paris and shut them behind him.

The saint lived to build a church over the tomb of St. Denis and to see Clovis become a Christian. She died in 509, and was buried on the hill of Lutetius, which ever since has borne her name.

“Her hope,” says the Golden Legend, from which we have chiefly drawn her story, “was nothing in worldly things, but in heavenly, for she believed in the holy scriptures that saith: Whoso giveth to the poor liveth for availe. The reward which they receive that give to poor people, the Holy Ghost had showed to her long tofore, and therefore she ceased not to weep, to adore and to do works of pity, for she knew well that she was none other in this world but a pilgrim passing.”

The faithful built a little wooden oratory over her tomb, which Clovis and his wife Clotilde replaced by a great basilica and monastery which became their burial-place. All that now recalls the church, whose length the king measured by the distance he could hurl his axe, is the so-called Tower of Clovis, a thirteenth-century structure in the Rue Clovis. The golden shrine of the saint,[20] which reached thirty feet above the high altar, was confiscated by the Revolutionists to pay their armies, and what remains of her relics is now treasured in the neighbouring church of St. Etienne du Mont.

The conversion of Clovis is the capital fact of early French history. His queen Clotilde, niece of the Burgundian king, had long[21] importuned him to declare himself a Christian. He had consented to the baptism of their firstborn, but the infant’s death within a week seemed an admonition from his own jealous gods. A second son, however, recovered from grievous sickness at his wife’s prayers and this, aided perhaps by a shrewd insight into the trend of events, induced him to lend a more willing ear to the teachers of the new Faith. In 496 the Franks were at death grapple with their German foes at Tolbiac. Clovis, when the fight went against him, invoked the God of the Christians and prayed to be delivered from his enemies. His cry was heard and the advent of the new Lord of Battles was winged with victory.

There was a stirring scene that Christmas at Rheims, when Clovis with his two sisters and three thousand of his warriors marched through the streets, all hung with cloth of many colours, into the cathedral which was glittering with innumerable candles and perfumed with incense of divine odour. Clovis was the first to be baptised. “Bend thy neck, gentle Sicamber,” cried St. Rémi. “Adore what thou didst burn: burn what thou didst adore.” When the bishop was reading the Gospel story of the Passion, the king, thrilled with indignation, cried out: “Ah! had I been there with my Franks I would have avenged the Christ.”

The conversion of Clovis was a triumph for the Church: in her struggle with the Arian heresy in Gaul, she was now able to enforce the arguments of the pen by the edge of the sword. The enemies of Clovis were the enemies of the Church, and as the representative of the Eastern emperor, she arrayed him, after the defeat of the Arian Goths in the South, in purple and hailed him Consul and Augustus at Tours. Her scribes are tender to his memory, for his Christianity was marked by few signs of grace. He remained the same savage monarch as before, and did not scruple to affirm his dynasty and extend his empire by treachery and by the assassination of his kinsmen. To the Franks, Jesus was but a new and more puissant tribal deity. “Long live the Christ who loves the Franks,” writes the author of the prologue to the Salic law; and Clothaire I., when the pangs of death seized him in his villa at Compiègne, cried out, “Who is this God of Heaven that thus allows the greatest kings of the earth to perish?” Nor was their ideal of kingship any loftier. Their kingdom was not a trust, but a possession to be divided among their heirs, and the jealousy and strife excited by the repeated partition among sons, make the history of the Merovingian[22] dynasty a tale of cruelty and treachery whose every page is stained with blood.

In the ninth century a story was current among the people of France which admirably symbolises the fate of the dynasty. One night as Childeric, father of Clovis, lay by the side of Basine, his wife, she awoke him and said, “Arise, O king, look in the courtyard of thy dwelling and tell thy servant what thou shalt see.” Childeric arose and saw beasts pass by that seemed like unto lions, unicorns and leopards. He returned to his wife and told her what he had seen. And Basine said to him: “Master, go once again and tell thy servant what thou shalt see.” Childeric went forth anew and saw beasts passing by like unto bears and wolves. Having related this to his wife she bade him go forth yet a third time. He now saw dogs and other baser animals rending each other to pieces. Then said Basine to Childeric: “What thou hast seen with thine eyes shall verily come to pass. A son shall be born to us who will be a lion for courage: the sons of our sons shall be like unto leopards and unicorns: they in their turn shall bring forth children like unto bears and wolves for their voracity. The last of those whom thou sawest shall come for the end and destruction of the kingdom.”

Clovis, in 508, made Paris the official capital of his realm, and at his death in 511 divided his possessions between his four sons—Thierry, Clodomir, Childebert, and Clothaire. Clodomir after a short reign met his death in battle, leaving his children to the guardianship of their grandmother, Clotilde. One day messengers came to her in the palace of the Thermæ from Childebert and Clothaire praying that their nephews might be entrusted to them. Believing they were to be trained in kingly offices that they might succeed their father in due time, Clotilde granted their prayer and two of the children were sent to them in the palace of the Cité. Soon came another messenger, bearing a pair of shears and a naked sword, and Clotilde was bidden to determine the fate of her wards and to choose for them between the cloister and the edge of the sword. An angry exclamation escaped her: “If they are not to be raised to the throne, I would rather see them dead than shorn.” The messenger waited to hear no more and hastened back to the two kings. Clothaire then seized the elder of the children and stabbed him under the armpit. The younger, at the sight of his brother’s blood, flung himself at Childebert’s feet, burst into tears, and cried: “Help me, dear father, let me not die even as my brother.” Childebert’s heart was softened and he begged for the child’s life. Clothaire’s only answer was a volley of insults and a threat of death if he protected the victim. Childebert then disintwined the child’s tender arms clasping his knees—he was but six years of age—and pushed him to his brother, who drove a dagger into his breast. The tutors and servants of the children were then butchered, and Clothaire rode calmly to his palace, to become at his brother’s death, in 558, sole king of the Franks. The third child, Clodoald, owing to the devotion of faithful servants escaped, and was hidden for some time in Provence. Later in life he returned to Paris and built a monastery at a place still known by his name (St. Cloud) about two leagues from the city.

Clothaire himself had narrowly escaped assassination when allied with Thierry during the wars with the Thuringians. Thierry invited his brother one day to a conference, having previously hidden some armed men behind the hangings in his tent. But the drapery was too short, and Clothaire as he entered caught sight of the assassins’ feet peeping through. He retained his arms and his escort. Thierry invented some fable to explain the interview, embraced his brother and bestowed on him a heavy silver plate.

The fruits of kingship were bitter to Clothaire. Ere two years were past his rebellious and adulterous son, Chramm, escaped to Brittany and raised an army against him. Chramm and his allies were defeated, himself, his wife and children captured. Clothaire spared none. Chramm was strangled with a handkerchief, and his wife and children were cast into a peasant’s hut which was set on fire and all perished in the flames. Next year the king took cold while hunting near Compiègne, fell sick of a fever and died.

Four out of seven sons had survived him, and again the kingdom was divided. Charibert, king of Paris, soon died, and yet again a partition was made among the three survivors. To Siegbert fell Austrasia or Eastern France as far as the Rhine: to Chilperic, Neustria or Western France to the borders of Brittany and the Loire: Gontram’s lot was Burgundy. Once more the consuming flames of passion and greed burst forth, this time fanned by the fierce breath of feminine rivalry. Siegbert had married Brunehaut, daughter of the Visigoth king of Spain: Chilperic had espoused her sister, Galowinthe, after repudiating his first wife, Adowere. When the new queen of Neustria came to her throne she found herself the rival of Fredegonde, a common servant, with whom Chilperic had been living. He soon tired of his new wife, a gentle and pliant creature; Fredegonde regained her supremacy and one morning Galowinthe was found strangled in bed. The news came to the court of Austrasia and Brunehaut goaded King Siegbert to avenge her sister’s death. Meanwhile Chilperic had married Fredegonde, who quickly compassed the murder of her only rival, the repudiated queen, Adowere. At the intervention of Gontram war was, for a time, averted, and Chilperic, by the judgment of the whole people, made to compensate Brunehaut by the restoration of her sister’s dowry. But Chilperic soon drew the sword and civil war again devastated the land. By foreign aid Siegbert captured and spoiled Paris and compelled a peace. Scarcely, however, had the victor dismissed his German allies, when Chilperic fell upon him again. Siegbert now determined to make an end. He entered Paris, and the Neustrians having accepted him as king, he prepared to crush his enemy at Tournay. As he set forth, St. Germain, bishop of Paris, seized his horse’s bridle and warned him that the grave he was digging for his brother would swallow him too. It was of no avail. He marched to Vitry and was proclaimed king of Neustria. After the proclamation two messengers desired to see him. As he stood between them listening to their suit he was stabbed on either side by two long poisoned knives: the assassins had been sent by Fredegonde. Chilperic now hastened to Paris and seized the royal treasure. Brunehaut’s son, Childebert II., a child of five, was, however, stolen away from the palace in a basket by one of Siegbert’s faithful servants and proclaimed king by the warriors.

But Fredegonde’s tale of blood was not yet complete. She soon learned that Merovée, one of Chilperic’s two sons by Adowere, had married Brunehaut. Merovée followed the rest of her victims, and Clovis, the second son, together with a sister of Adowere, next glutted her vengeance. “One day, after leaving the Synod of Paris,” writes St. Gregory, “I had bidden King Chilperic adieu and had withdrawn conversing with the bishop of Albi. As we crossed the courtyard of the palace[23] he said: ‘Seest thou not what I perceive above this roof?’ I answered, ‘I see only a second building which the king has had built.’ He asked again, ‘Seest thou naught else?’ I weened he spoke in jest and did but answer—‘If thou seest aught else, prithee show it unto me.’ Then uttering a deep sigh, he said: ‘I see the sword of God’s wrath suspended over this house.’” Shortly after this conversation Chilperic having returned from the chase to his royal villa of Chelles, was leaning on the shoulder of one of his companions to descend from his horse, when Landeric, servant of Fredegonde, stabbed him to death.

Thirty years were yet to pass before the curtain falls on the acts of the rival queens, their sons and grandsons, but the heart revolts at the details of the wars and lusts of these savage potentates. Gregory begins the fifth book of his Annals by expressing the weariness that falls upon him when he recalls the manifold civil wars of the Franks.

Let us make an end of this part of our story. By her son, Clothaire II., Fredegonde continued to dominate Neustria: Brunehaut ruled over Austrasia and Burgundy through her sons Theodobert II. and Thierry II. Battle and murder had destroyed Brunehaut’s children and her children’s children until none were left to rule over the realms but herself and the four sons of Thierry II. The nobles, furious at the further tyranny of a cruel and imperious woman, plotted her ruin, and in 613, when Brunehaut, sure of victory, marched with two armies against Clothaire II., she was betrayed to him, her implacable enemy. He reproached her with the death of ten kings, and set her on a camel for three days to be mocked and insulted by the army. The old and fallen queen was then tied to the tail of a horse: the creature was lashed into fury and soon all that remained of the proud queen was a shapeless mass of carrion. The traditional place where Brunehaut met her death is still shown at the corner of the Rue St. Honoré and the Rue de l’Arbre Sec. Thierry’s four sons had already been put to death.

In 597 her rival Fredegonde, at the height of her prosperity, had died peacefully in bed, full of years, and was buried in the church of St. Vincent (St. Germain des Prés) by the side of Chilperic, her husband, and Clothaire II. became sole monarch of the three kingdoms.

Amid all this ruin and desolation, when the four angels of the Euphrates seem to have been loosed on Gaul, one force was silently at work knitting up the ravelled ends of the rent fabric of civilisation and tending a lamp which burned with the promise of ideals nobler far than those which fed the ancient faith and polity. The Christian bishops were everywhere filling the empty curule chairs in the cities and provinces of Gaul. At the end of the sixth century society lived in the Church and by the Church, and the sees of the archbishops and bishops corresponded to the Roman administrative divisions. All that was best in the old Gallo-Roman aristocracy was drawn into her bosom, for she was the one power making for unity and good government. From one end of the land to the other the bishops visited and corresponded with each other. They alone had communion of ideas, common sentiments and common interests. St. Gregory, bishop of Tours, was the son of a senator; St. Germain of Auxerre was a man of noble lineage, who had already exercised high public functions before he was made a bishop. St. Germain of Autun was ever on the move, now in Brittany, now at Paris, now at Arles, to crush heresy, to threaten a barbarian potentate, or to sear the conscience and, if need were, ban the person of a guilty Christian king. The bishop of Trèves, seeing the horses of some royal Frankish envoys grazing in the wheat-fields of the peasants, threatened to excommunicate them if they spoiled the substance of the poor, and himself drove the horses away.

By the end of the sixth century two hundred and thirty-eight monastic institutions had been founded in Gaul, and from the sixth to the eighth century, eighty-three churches were built. The monasteries were so many nurseries of the industry, knowledge and learning which had not perished in the barbarian invasions; so many cities of refuge from violence and rapine, where the few who thirsted after righteousness and burned with charity might find shelter and protection. “Every letter traced on paper,” said an old abbot, “is a blow to the devil.” The ecclesiastical and monastic schools took the place of the destroyed Roman day-schools, and whatever modicum of learning the Frankish courts could boast of, was due to the monks and nuns of their time; for some at least of these potentates when not absorbed in the gratification of their lusts, their vengeance, greed, or ambition, were possessed by nobler instincts.

Brunehaut, nurtured in the more cultured atmosphere of the Visigoth court of Spain, protected commerce and kept the Roman roads[24] in repair, founded monasteries and corresponded with Gregory the Great, who commended to her care the safety of his missionaries passing through her dominions to convert the Angles across the straits.

Chilperic, whom Gregory of Tours brands as the Herod and Nero of his time, plumed himself on his piety, was concerned at the blasphemies of the Jews, and forced on them conversion or exile at the sword’s point. He composed Latin hymns, and discussed the nature of the Trinity with Gregory and the bishop of Albi. He sought to reform the alphabet by the addition of new letters which corresponded to the guttural sounds in the Frankish tongue, and ordered that the old alphabet should be erased from the children’s books with pumice stone in all the cities of his kingdom, and the reformed alphabet substituted for it.

Among the wives of Clothaire I. was the gentle Radegonde, who turned with horror from the bloody scenes of the palace to live in works of charity with the poor and suffering, and in holy communion with priests and bishops. She was at length consecrated a deaconess by St. Medard, donned the habit of a nun, and founded a convent at Poitiers, where the poet Fortunatus had himself ordained a priest that he might be near her. Radegonde’s memory is dear to us in England, for it was a small company of her nuns who settled on the Green Croft by the river bank below Cambridge, and founded a priory whose noble church and monastic buildings were subsequently incorporated in Jesus College when the nunnery was suppressed by Bishop Alcock in 1496.

To St. Germain of Autun, made bishop in 555, Paris owes one of her earliest ecclesiastical foundations. His influence over Childebert, king of Paris, was great. He obtained an order that those who refused to destroy pagan idols in their possession were to answer to the king, and when Childebert and his warriors, seized by an irresistible fighting impulse, marched into Spain, and were bought off the siege and sack of Saragossa by the present of the tunic of St. Vincent, he induced the king to found the abbey and church of St. Vincent (St. Germain des Prés), to receive the relic. In Childebert’s reign was begun on the site of the present Cathedral of Notre Dame a splendid basilica, so magnificently decorated that it was compared to Solomon’s Temple for the beauty and the delicacy of its art. During this great outburst of zeal and devotion another monastery was established and dedicated to St. Vincent, which subsequently became associated with the name of the earlier St. Germain of Auxerre (l’Auxerrois).

A curious episode is found in Gregory’s Chronicle, which is characteristic of the times, and proves that a monastery and church of St. Julien le Pauvre were already in existence. An impostor, claiming to have the relics of St. Vincent and St. Felix, came to Paris, but refused to deposit them with the bishop for verification. He was arrested and searched, and the so-called relics were found to consist of mole’s teeth, the bones of mice, some bear’s claws and other rubbish. They were flung into the Seine and the impostor was put in prison. Gregory, who was lodging in the monastery of St. Julien le Pauvre, went into the church shortly after midnight to say matins, and found the creature, who had escaped from the bishop’s prison, dead drunk on the pavement. He had him dragged away into a corner, but so intolerable was the stench that the pavement was purified with water and sweet smelling herbs. When the bishops, who were at Paris for a synod, met at dinner the next day, the impostor was identified as a fugitive slave of the bishop of Tarbes.

At the end of the sixth century we bid adieu to St. Gregory of Tours, gentlest of annalists. Courageous and independent before kings, he had a pitying heart for the poor and suffering, and bewails the loss of many sweet little babes of Christ, during the plague of 580, whom he had warmed at his breast, carried in his arms, and fed tenderly with his hands.

Clothaire II. was a pious king in his way, interested in letters, a munificent patron of the Church, but overfond of the chase and inheriting the savage instincts of his race in dealing with enemies. After quelling a Saxon revolt he is said to have killed all the warriors whose stature exceeded the length of his sword. Dagobert the Great, his son, who succeeded him in 628, was the most enlightened and mightiest of the Merovingian kings. He and his favourite minister, St. Eloy, goldsmith and bishop (founder of the convent which long bore his name), are enshrined in the hearts of the people in many a song and ballad:—St. Eloy, with his good humour, his happy countenance, his eloquence, gentleness, modesty, wit, and wide charity; Dagobert, the Solomon of the Franks, the terror of the oppressor, the darling of the poor. The great king was fond of Paris and established himself there when not scouring his kingdom to administer justice or to crush his enemies. He was the second founder of the monastery of St. Denis, which he rebuilt and endowed, and to which he gave much importance by the establishment there of a great fair, which soon drew merchants from all parts of Europe. He was a patron of the arts and employed St. Eloy to make reliquaries[25] for the churches in Paris of such richness and beauty that they were admired of the whole of France.

Chaos and misery followed the brilliant reign of Dagobert. In half a century his race had faded into the feeble rois fainéants, degenerate by precocious debauchery, some of whom were fathers at fourteen or fifteen years of age and in their graves before they were thirty.[26]

In an age when human passions are untamed, the one unpardonable vice in a king is weakness, and soon the incapable, impotent and irresolute Merovingians were thrust aside by a more puissant race.

CHAPTER III
THE CARLOVINGIANS—THE GREAT SIEGE OF PARIS BY THE NORMANS—THE GERMS OF FEUDALISM

AT the head of the establishment of every Merovingian chief was his mayor, or major domus, who administered his domains and acted as deputy when his master was non-resident or away at the wars. A similar official of the king’s household, the mayor of the palace, likewise presided over the royal council and tribunal in the absence or during the minority of the king.

In 622, when Dagobert became king of Austrasia, one Pepin of Landen, known as Pepin le Vieux, was made mayor of the palace and, associated with St. Arnoulf, bishop of Metz, was appointed ward of the young king. A marriage between Pepin’s daughter and the son of St. Arnoulf resulted in the birth of Pepin of Heristal, who in the anarchy that followed on Dagobert’s death succeeded in crushing Ebroin,[27] the king-maker, mayor of the palace of Neustria. Pepin then seized the royal treasury, installed Thierry III. as king of the Franks and himself as mayor of the palace. Pepin’s successor, for the office of mayor had now become hereditary, was Charles Martel, his son by Alfaide, a fair and noble concubine. He it was, who by his valour and address saved Western Europe from the Mussulman at Tours, and made glorious his name in Christendom. At his death, when crossing the Alps to defend the Pope against the Arian Lombards, the leadership of the Franks passed to his sons Carloman and Pepin the Short, of whom the latter, on his brother’s retirement to the cloister at the famous Italian Benedictine monastery at Monte Cassino, held undivided sway.

Charles Martel, although buried with the Frankish kings at St. Denis, was content with the title of Duke of the Franks, and hesitated to proclaim himself king. He, like the other mayors of the palace, ruled through feeble and pensioned puppets when they did not contemptuously leave the throne vacant. In 751 Pepin sent two prelates to sound Pope Zacchary, who, being hard pressed by the Lombards, lent a willing ear to their suit, agreed that he who was king in fact should be made so in name, and authorised Pepin to assume the title of king. Chilperic III., like a discarded toy, was relegated to a monastery at St. Omer, and Pepin the Short anointed at Soissons by St. Boniface, bishop of Mayence, from that sacred “ampul full of chrism” which an angel of Paradise had brought to St. Rémi wherewith to anoint Clovis at Rheims. In the year 754 Stephen III., the first pope who had honoured Paris by his presence, came to ask the reward of his predecessor’s favour and was lodged at St. Denis. There he anointed Pepin anew, with his sons Charles and Carloman, and compelled the Frankish chieftains, under pain of excommunication, to swear allegiance to them and their descendants.

The city of Lutetia had much changed since the messengers of Pope Fabianus entered five centuries before. On that southern hill where formerly stood the Roman camp and cemetery were now the great basilica and abbey of St. Genevieve. The amphitheatre and probably much of the palace of the Cæsars were in ruins, all stripped of their marbles to adorn the new Christian churches. Extensive abbatial buildings and a church resplendent with marble and gold, on the west, were dedicated to St. Vincent, and were henceforth to be known as St. Germain of the Meadows (des Prés), for the saint’s body had been translated from the chapel of St. Symphorien in the vestibule to the high altar of the abbey church a few weeks before the pope’s arrival at St. Denis. The Cité[28] was still held within the decayed Roman walls, and a wooden bridge, the Petit Pont, crossed the south arm of the Seine. On the site of the old pagan temple to Jupiter by the market-place stood a new and magnificent basilica to Our Lady. The devotion of the Nautæ had been transferred from Apollo to St. Nicholas, patron of shipmen, and Mercury had given place to St. Michael, and to each of those saints oratories were erected. Other churches and oratories adorned the island, dedicated to St. Stephen, St. Gervais, and St. Denis of the Prison (de la chartre), built where the saint was imprisoned by the north wall and where, abandoned by his followers, he was visited by his divine Lord, who Himself administered the sacred Host. A nunnery dedicated to St. Eloy, where three hundred pious nuns diffused the odour of Jesus Christ through the whole city, occupied a large site opposite the west front of Notre Dame. Near by stood a hospital, founded and endowed a century before by St. Landry, bishop of Paris, for the sick poor, which soon became known as the Hostel of God (Hôtel Dieu). The old Roman palace and basilica had been transformed into the official residence and tribunal of justice of the Frankish kings. On the south bank stood the church and monastery of St. Julien le Pauvre. A new Frankish city was growing on the north bank, bounded on the west by the abbey of St. Vincent le Rond, later known as St. Germain l’Auxerrois, and on the east by the abbey of St. Lawrence. Houses clustered around the four great monasteries, and suburbs were in course of formation. The Cité was still largely inhabited by opulent merchants of Gallo-Roman descent, who were seen riding along the streets in richly-decorated chariots drawn by oxen.

King Pepin, after proving himself a valiant champion of orthodoxy by defeating the Arian Lombards, and bestowing Ravenna on the pope in perpetual sovereignty, died at Paris in 768. The kingdom of France was then shared by his sons, Charles and Carloman, and on the latter’s death in 771 Charles, surnamed the Great, began his tremendous career during which the interest of the French Monarchy shifts from Paris to Aix-la-Chapelle. Charlemagne during his long reign of nearly half a century was too preoccupied with his noble but ineffectual purpose of cementing by blood and iron the warring races of Europe into a united populus Christianus, and establishing, under the dual lordship of emperor and pope, a city of God on earth, to give much attention to Paris. He did, however, spend a few Christmases there, and was present at the dedication of the new church of St. Denis, completed in 775 under Abbot Fulrad. It was a typical Frankish prince whom the Parisians saw enthroned at St. Denis. He had the abundant fair hair, shaven chin and long moustache we see in the traditional pictures of Clovis. Above middle height, with bright piercing eyes and short neck, he impressed all by the majesty of his bearing in spite of a rather shrill and feeble voice and a certain asymmetrical rotundity below the belt. Abbot Fulrad was a sturdy prince and for long disputed the possession of some lands at Plessis with the bishop of Paris. The decision of the case is characteristic of the times. Two champions were deputed to act for the litigants, and met before the Count of Paris[29] in the king’s chapel of St. Nicholas in the Palace of the Cité, and a solemn judgment by the Cross was held. While the royal chaplain recited psalms and prayers, the two champions stood forth and held their arms outstretched in the form of a cross. In this trial of endurance the bishop’s deputy was the first to succumb. His fainting arms drooped and the abbot won his cause.

Paris grew but slowly under the Frankish kings. They lived ill at ease within city walls. Children of the fields and the forest, whose delight was in the chase or in war, they were glad to escape from Paris to their villas at Chelles or Compiègne.

But the civil power of the Church grew apace. In the early sixth century one-third of the land of France was held and administered by the monasteries. The abbots of St. Germain des Prés held possession of nearly 90,000 acres of land, mostly arable, in various provinces of France. Their annual revenue amounted to about £24,000 of our money: they ruled over more than 10,000 serfs. From a list of the lands held in the ninth century by the abbey of St. Pierre des Fossés,[30] founded by Clovis II. about eight miles from Paris, and published in the Trésor des pièces rares ou inédites, we are able to form some idea of the vast extent of monastic possessions in the city. The names of the various properties whose boundaries touch those of the abbey lands are given. Private owners are mentioned only four times, whereas to ecclesiastical and monastic domains there are no less than ninety references.

These monastic settlements were veritable garden cities, where most of our modern fruits, flowers and vegetables were cultivated; where flocks and herds were bred and all kinds of poultry, including pheasants and peacocks, reared. Guilds of craftsmen worked and flourished; markets were held generally on saints’ days, and pilgrimages were fostered. Charlemagne was an honest coiner and a protector of foreign traders; he was tolerant of the Jews, the only capitalists of the time, and under him Paris became the “market of the peoples,” and Venetian and Syrian merchants sought her shores.

In Gallo-Roman days few were the churches outside the cities, but in the great emperor’s time every villa[31] is said to have had its chapel or oratory served by a priest. Charlemagne was a zealous patron of such learning as the epoch afforded, and sought out scholars in every land. English, Irish, Scotch, Italian, Goth and Bavarian—all were welcomed. The English scholar Alcuin, master of the Cloister School at York, became his chief adviser and tutor. He would have every child in his empire to know at least his paternoster. Every abbot on election was required to endow the monastery with some books. The choice of authors was not a wide one: the Old and New Testaments; the writings of the Fathers, especially St. Augustine, the emperor’s favourite author; Josephus; the works of Bede; some Latin authors, chiefly Virgil; some scraps of Plato translated into Latin—a somewhat exiguous and austere library, but one which reared a noble and valiant line of scholars and statesmen to rule the minds and bridle the savage lusts of the coming generations of men. Under Irish and Anglo-Saxon influences the cramped, minute script of the Merovingian scribes grew in beauty and lucidity: gold and silver and colour illuminated the pages of their books. The golden age of the Roman peace seemed dawning again in a new Imperium Christianorum.

Towards the end of his reign the old emperor was dining with his court in a seaport town in the south of France, when news came that some strange, black, piratical craft had dared to attack the harbour. They were soon scattered, but the emperor was seen to rise from the table and go to a window, where he stood gazing fixedly at the retreating pirates. Tears trickled down his cheeks and none dared to approach him. At length he turned and said: “Know ye, my faithful servants, wherefore I weep thus bitterly? I fear not these wretched pirates, but I am afflicted that they should dare to approach these shores, and sorely do grieve when I foresee what evil they will work on my sons and on my people.” His courtiers deemed they were Breton or Saracen pirates, but the emperor knew better. They were the terrible Northmen, soon to prove a bloodier scourge to Gaul than Hun or Goth or Saracen; and to meet them Charlemagne left an empire distracted by civil war and a nerveless, feeble prince, Louis the Pious, Louis the Forgiving, fitter for the hermit’s cell than for the throne and sword of an emperor.

In 841 the black boats of the sea-rovers for the first time entered the Seine, and burnt Rouen and Fontenelle. In 845 a fleet of one hundred and twenty vessels swept up its higher waters and on Easter Eve captured, plundered and burnt Paris, sacked its monasteries and churches and butchered their monks and priests. The futile Emperor Charles the Bald bought them off at St. Denis with seven thousand livres of silver, and they went back to their Scandinavian homes gorged with plunder—only to return year by year, increased in numbers and ferocity. Words cannot picture the terror of the citizens and monks when the dread squadrons, with the monstrous dragons carved on their prows, their great sails and three-fold serried ranks of men-of-prey, were sighted. Everyone left his home and sought refuge in flight. The monks hurried off with the bodies of the saints, the relics and treasures of the sanctuary, to hide them in far-away cities. In 852 Charles the Bald’s soldiers refused to fight, and for two hundred and eighty-seven days the pirates ravaged the valley of the Seine at their will. Never within memory or tradition were such things known. Rouen, Bayeux, Beauvais, Paris, Meaux, Melun, Chartres, Evreux, were devastated. The islands of the Seine were whitened by the bones of the victims. Similar horrors were wrought along the other rivers of France. Whole districts reverted to paganism. In 858 a body of the freebooters settled on the island of Oissel, below Rouen, and issued forth en excursion to spoil and slay and burn at their pleasure. They made of the once rich city of Paris a cinder heap; the cathedrals of St. Germain des Prés and of St. Denis alone escaped at the cost of immense bribes. Charles ordered two fortresses to be built for the defence of the approaches to the bridges, and continued his feeble policy of paying blackmail.

In 866 Robert the Strong, Count of Paris, had won the title of the Maccabeus of France, by daring to stand against the fury of the Northmen and to defeat them; but having in the heat of battle with the terrible Hastings taken off his cuirass, he was killed. In 876 began a second period of raids of even greater ferocity under the Norwegian Rollo the Gangr[32] (the walker), a colossus so huge that no horse could be found to bear him. In 884 the whole Christian people seemed doomed to perish. Flourishing cities and monasteries became heaps of smoking ruins; along the roads lay the bodies of priests and laymen, noble and peasant, freeman and serf, women and children and babes at the breast to be devoured of wolves and vultures. The very sanctuaries[33] were become the dens of wild beasts, the haunt of serpents and creeping things. Packs of wolves, three hundred strong, harried Aquitaine.

In 885 a great league of pirates—Danes, Normans, Saxons, Britons and renegade French—on their way to ravage the rich cities of Burgundy drew up before Paris; and their leader, Siegfroy, demanded passage to the higher waters. For Paris had now been put in a state of defence, the Roman walls repaired, the bridges fortified and protected by towers on the north and south banks. Bishop Gozlin, in whom great learning was wedded to incomparable fortitude, defied the pirates, warning them that the citizens were determined to resist and to hold Paris for a bulwark to the other cities of France.

Paris, forsaken by her kings and emperors for more than a century, scarred and bled by three sieges, was now to become a beacon of hope to the wretched land of France. Of the fourth and most terrible of the Norman sieges of Paris, we have fuller record. A certain monk of St. Germain des Prés, Abbo by name, had endured the siege and was one day sitting in his cell reading his Virgil. Desiring to exercise his Latin, and give an example to other cities, he determined to sing of a great siege with happier issue than that of Troy.[34] Abbo saw the black hulls and horrid prows of the pirates’ boats as they turned the arm of the Seine below Paris, seven hundred strong vessels, and many more of lighter build. For two leagues and a half the very waters of the Seine were covered with them, and men asked into what mysterious caves the river had retreated. On November 26th, the attack began at the unfinished tower on the north bank. Three leaders stand eminent among the defenders of the city. Bishop Gozlin, the great warrior priest; his nephew, Abbot Ebles of St. Denis; and Count Eudes (Hugh) of Paris, son of Robert the Strong. The air is darkened with javelins and arrows. The abbot with one shaft spits seven of the besiegers, and mockingly bids their fellows take them to the kitchen to be cooked. Bishop Gozlin is wounded by a javelin early in the attack. On the morrow, reinforced by fresh troops, the assault is renewed, stones are hurled, arrows whistle: the air is filled with groans and cries. The defenders pour down boiling oil and melted wax and pitch. The hair of some of the Normans takes fire: they burn and the Parisians shout—“Jump into the Seine to cool yourselves.” One well-aimed millstone, says Abbo, sends the souls of six to hell. The baffled Northmen retire, entrench a camp at St. Germain l’Auxerrois, and prepare rams and other siege artillery.

Abbo now pauses to bewail the state of France: no lord to rule her, everywhere devastation wrought by fire and sword, God’s people paralysed at the advancing phalanx of death, Paris alone tranquil, erect and steadfast in the midst of all their thunderbolts, polis ut regina micans omnes super urbes, like a queenly city resplendent above all towns. The second attack begins with redoubled fury. After battering the walls of the north tower, monstrous machines on sixteen wheels are advanced and the besiegers strive to fill the fosse. Trees, shrubs, slaughtered cattle, wounded horses, the very captives slain before the eyes of the besieged, are cast in to fill the void. Bishop Gozlin brings down a Norman chieftain by a well-aimed arrow: his body, too, is flung into the fosse. The enemy cover the plain with their swords and the river with their bucklers. Fireships are loosed against the bridge. In the city women fly to the sanctuaries: they roll their hair in the dust, beat their breasts and rend their faces. They call on St. Germain: “Blessed St. Germain, succour thy servants.” The fighters on the walls take up the cry. Bishop Gozlin invokes the Virgin, Mother of the Redeemer, Star of the Sea, bright above all other stars, to save them from the cruel Danes.

On February 6th, 886, a sudden flood sweeps away the Petit Pont, and its tower, with twelve defenders, is isolated. With shouts of triumph the Northmen cross the river and surround it. The twelve refuse to yield, and fire is brought. The warriors (a touching detail) fearing lest their falcons be stifled, cut them loose. There is but one vessel wherewith to quench the flames and that soon drops from their hands. The little band rush forth, place themselves against the ruins of the bridge, and prepare to sell their lives dearly—terrible against terrible foes. The walls of the city are lined with their kinsmen and friends impotent to help. The enemies of God, doomed one day to dine at Pluto’s cauldron, press upon them. They fight till Phœbus sinks to the depths of the sea, so great is the courage of despair. They are promised their lives if they will yield, are disarmed, then treacherously slain, and their souls fly to heaven. But one, Hervé, of noble bearing and of great beauty, deemed a prince, is spared for ransom. With thunderous voice he refuses to bargain his life for gold, falls unarmed on his foes and is cut to pieces. “These things,” writes Monk Abbo, “I saw with mine eyes.” He gives the names of the heroic twelve who went to receive the palm of martyrdom. They were exemplars to France and helped to save her by their desperate courage and noble self-sacrifice. Their names are inscribed on a tablet on the wing of the Hôtel Dieu in the Place au Petit Pont: Ermenfroi, Hervé, Herland, Ouacre, Hervi, Arnaud, Seuil, Jobert, Hardre, Guy, Aimard, Gossouin.

A temporary relief is afforded by the arrival of Henry of Saxony, sent with supplies by the emperor. Count Eudes sallies forth to meet him, and in his ardent courage outstrips his men, is surrounded and almost slain. The little city is revictualled. Henry returns whence he came, and again the Parisians are left to themselves. On the sixth of April Bishop Gozlin, their shield, their two-edged axe, whose shaft and bow were terrible, passes to the Lord. On May 12th, Eudes steals away to implore further help from the emperor, and as soon as he sees the imperialists on the march returns and cuts his way into Paris, to share the terrors of the siege. Henry the Saxon again appears, but is ambushed and slain and his army melts away. Yet again Paris is abandoned by her emperor and seeks help of heaven. For the waters are low, the besiegers are able to get footing on the island, they set fire to the gates and attack the walls. The body of St. Genevieve is borne about the city, and at night the ghostly figure of St. Germain is seen by the sentinels to pass along the ramparts, sprinkling them with holy water and promising salvation. Charles the Fat, the Lord’s anointed, at length appears with a multitude of a hundred tongues and encamps on Montmartre. While the Parisians are preparing to second him in crushing their foes, they learn that the cowardly emperor has bought them off with a bribe and permission to winter in Burgundy, and for the first time they ravage that opulent province. Next year, as Gozlin’s successor, Bishop Antheric, was sitting at table with Abbot Ebles, a fearful messenger brought news that the acephali[35] were again in sight. Forgetting the repast, the two churchmen seized their weapons, called the city to arms, hastened to the ramparts, and the abbot slew their pilot with a well-aimed shaft. The Normans are terrified, and at length a treaty is made with their leaders, who promised not to ravage the Marne and some even entered Paris. But the ill-disciplined hordes were hard to hold in and bands of brigands, as soon as the ramparts were passed, began to plunder and slew a score of Christian men. The Parisians in their indignation sought out and—Evax! Hurrah!—found five hundred Normans in the city and slew them. But the bishop protected those that took refuge in his palace, instead of killing them as he ought to have done—potius concidere debens. For a time Paris had respite. Cowardly Charles the Fat was deposed, and in 887 Count Eudes was acclaimed king of France after his return from Aquitaine, whose duke he had brought to subjection. He counselled a gathering of all the peoples near Paris to make common cause against the Normans. Abbo saw the proud Franks march in with heads erect, the skilful and polished Aquitaines, the Burgundians too prone to flight. But nothing came of it.

At the extreme north-east of Paris the Rue du Crimée leads to a group of once barren hills, part of which is now made into the Park of the Buttes Chaumont. Here, by the Mount of the Falcon (Montfaucon[36]) in 892 King Eudes fell upon an army of Northmen, who had come against Paris, and utterly routed them. Antheric, the noble pastor, with his virgin-like face, led three hundred footmen into the fight and slew six hundred of the acephali. But Abbo’s muse now fails him. Eudes, noble Eudes, is no more worthy of his office, and Christ’s sheep are perishing. Where is the ancient prowess of France? Three vices are working her destruction: pride, the sinful charms of Venus (fœda venustas veneris) and love of sumptuous garments. Her people are arrayed in purple vesture, and wear cloaks of gold; their loins are cinctured with girdles rich with precious stones. Monk Abbo wearies not of singing, but the deeds of noble Eudes are wanting. All the poet craves is another victory to rejoice Heaven; another defeat of the black host of the enemy.

But the noble Eudes was now a king with rebellious vassals. Paris was never captured again, but the acephali were devouring the land. The grim spectres of Famine and Plague made a charnel-house of whole regions of France, while Eudes was fighting the Count of Flanders, a rival king, and the ineffectual emperor, Charles the Simple. He it was who after Eudes’ death, by the treaty of St. Claire-sur-Epte in 902, surrendered to the barbarians the fair province, subsequently to be known as Normandy. The new prayer in the Litany, “From the fury of the Northmen, good Lord deliver us,” was heard. The dread name of Rollo now vanishes from history to live again in song, and under the title of Robert, assumed from his god-father, he reappears to win a dukedom and a king’s daughter. The Normans are broken in to Christianity, law and order; their land becomes one of the most civilized regions of France; the fiercest of church levellers are known as the greatest of church builders in Christendom. They gave their name to a style of Christian architecture in Europe and a line of kings to England,[37] Naples and Sicily.

The new empire of Charlemagne had endured less than three generations; from its wreck were formed the seven kingdoms of France, Navarre, the two Burgundies, Lorraine, Italy and Germany. The people of France never forgot the lesson of the dark century of the invasions. A subtle change had been operating. The empire had decomposed into kingdoms; the kingdoms were segregating into lordships. Men in their need were attracted to the few strong and dominant lords whose courage and resource afforded them a rallying point and shelter against disintegrating forces: the poor and defenceless huddled for protection to the seigneurs of strongholds which had withstood the floods of barbarians that were devastating the land. The seeds of feudalism were sown in the long winter of the Norman terror.

CHAPTER IV
THE RISE OF THE CAPETIAN KINGS AND THE GROWTH OF PARIS

FROM 936 to the coronation of Hugh Capet at Noyon in 987, the Carlovingians exercised a slowly decaying power. The real rulers of France were Hugh the Tall and Hugh Capet,[38] grandson and great-grandson of Robert the Strong. Lay abbots of St. Martin of Tours, St. Denis, and St. Germain, Counts of Paris and Dukes of France, they pursued the policy of the mayors of the palace in Merovingian times, accepting the nominal kingship of the degenerate Carlovingians—Louis from overseas, Lothaire, and Louis the Lazy—until the time was ripe to pick up the fallen sceptre. They founded a new line of kings of France which stretches onward through history for a thousand years until the guillotine of the Revolution cut it in twain. It is Hugh Capet whom Dante, following a legend of his time, calls the son of a butcher of Paris, and whom he hears among the weeping souls cleaving to the dust and purging their avarice in the fifth cornice of Purgatory.

Their patrimony was a small one—the provinces of the Isle de France, La Brie, La Beauce, Beauvais and Valois; but their sway extended over the land of the Langue d’oil, with its strenuous northern life, le doux royaume de la France, the sweet realm of France, cradle of the great French Monarchy and home of art, learning and chivalry. The globe of the earth, symbol of universal empire, gives way to the hand of justice as the emblem of kingship. They were, it is true, little more than seigneurs over other seigneurs, some of whom were almost as powerful as they; but that little, the drop of holy chrism by which they were consecrated of the Church, contained within it a potency of future grandeur. They were the Lord’s anointed, supported by the Lord’s Vicar on earth: to disobey them was to disobey God. Tribal sovereignty had now given way to territorial sovereignty. Feudal lords and abbots were supreme within their own domains. The people, long forsaken by their emperors, had in their turn forsaken them. In order “not to be at the mercy of all the great ones they surrendered themselves to one of the great ones” and in exchange for protection gave troth and service. Cities, churches and monasteries now assumed a new aspect. Paris had demonstrated the value of a walled city, for the dread Rollo himself had three times assaulted it in vain. During the latter part of the Norman terror, from all parts of North France, monks and nuns and priests had brought their holy relics within its walls as to a city of refuge. Gone were the lines of villas from Gallo-Roman times extending freely into the country. Fortifications were everywhere raised around the dwelling-places of men. The ample spaces within cities were soon to give place to crowded houses and narrow streets. The might of the archbishops, bishops and abbots increased: they sat in the councils of kings and dominated the administration of justice; the moral, social and political life of the country centred around them. Armed with the sword and the cross they held almost absolute sway over their little republics; coined money, levied taxes, disposed of small armies and went to the chase in almost regal state. The land bristled with castles and fortified towns and abbeys, and was parcelled out into territories of varying extent, from great duchies equal to a dozen modern departments, to the small domain just enough to maintain a single knight.

The advent of the year 1000 was regarded with universal terror in Christendom. A fear, based on a supposed apocalyptic prophecy that the end of the world was at hand, paralysed all political and social life. Churches were too small to contain the immense throngs of fearful penitents: legacies and donations from conscience-stricken worshippers poured wealth into their treasuries. But once the awe-inspiring night of the vernal equinox that began the year 1000 had passed, and the bright March sun rose again on the fair earth, unconsumed by the wrath of God, the old world “seemed to thrill with new life; the earth cast off her out-worn garments and clothed herself in a rich and white vesture of new churches.” Everywhere in Europe, and especially in France, men strove in emulation to build the finest temples to God. The wooden roofs of the Merovingian and Carlovingian basilicas had ill withstood the ravage of war and fire. Stone took the place of wood, the heavy thrust of the roof led to increased mural strength, walls were buttressed, columns thickened. Massive towers of defence, at first round, then polygonal, then square, flanked the west fronts, veritable keeps, where the sacred vessels and relics might be preserved and defended in case of attack. Soon spaces are clamant for decoration, the stone soars into the beauty of Gothic vaulting and tracery, “the solid and lofty shafts ascend and press onward in agile files, and in the sacred gloom are like unto an army of giants that meditate war with invisible powers.”[39]

The Capets are more intimately associated with the growth of Paris than any of the earlier dynasties, and at no period in French history is the ecclesiastical expansion more marked. Under the long reign of Hugh’s son, King Robert the Pious, no less than fourteen monasteries and seven churches were built or rebuilt in or around the city. A new and magnificent palace and hall of Justice, with its royal chapel dedicated to St. Nicholas, rose on the site of the old Roman basilica and palace in the Cité. The king was no less charitable than pious. Troops of the poor and afflicted followed him when he went abroad, and he fed a thousand daily at his table. But notwithstanding his munificent piety, he was early made to feel the power of the Church. His union with Queen Bertha, a cousin of the fourth degree, whom he had married a year before his accession, was condemned by the pope as incestuous, and he was summoned to repudiate her. Robert, who loved his wife dearly, resisted the papal authority, and excommunication and interdict followed.[40] Everyone fled from him; only the servants are said to have remained, who purged with fire all the vessels which were contaminated by the guilty couple’s touch. The misery of his people at length subdued the king’s spirit, and he cast off his faithful and beloved queen.

The beautiful and imperious Constance of Aquitaine, her successor, proved a penitential infliction second only in severity to the anathemas of the Church. Troops of vain and frivolous troubadours from her southern home, in all kinds of foreign and fantastic costumes, invaded the court and shocked the austere piety of the king. He perceived the corrupting influence on the simple manners of the Franks of their licentious songs, lascivious music and dissolute lives, but was powerless to dismiss them. The tyrannous temper of his new consort became the torment of his life. He was forced even to conceal his acts of charity. One day, on returning from prayers, he perceived that his lance by the queen’s orders had been adorned with richly chased silver. He looked around his palace and was not long in finding a poor, tattered wretch whom he ordered to search for a tool, and the pair locked themselves in a room. The silver was soon stripped from the lance and the king hastily thrust it into the beggar’s wallet and bade him escape before the queen discovered the loss. The poor whom he admitted to his table, despite the angry protests of the queen, at times ill repaid his charity. On one occasion a tassel of gold was cut from his robe, and on the thief being discovered the king simply remarked: “Well, perhaps he has greater need of it than I, may God bless its service to him.” The very fringe was sometimes stripped from his cloak as he walked abroad, but he never could be induced to punish any of these poor spoilers of his person. There is, however, an obverse to this ardent piety and noble enthusiasm:—the merciless persecution and spoliation of the Jews and the first executions of heretics[41] recorded in France.

In 1022 two priests, one of whom had been the queen’s confessor, and eleven laymen were condemned to be burnt at the stake at Orleans for heresy. The king spent nine hours wrestling with them in prayer and argument, but in vain. As the unhappy wretches were being led to execution, Constance leaned forward, savagely struck at her old confessor and gouged out one of his eyes. She was applauded for her zeal.

The economic condition of the people was far from satisfactory. Famine and pestilence claimed their victims with appalling frequency, and between 970 and 1040, forty-eight famines and plagues are known to historians; that of 1033 is recounted by the chronicler, Raoul Glaber, with details so ghastly that the heart sickens and the hand faints at their transcription. Slavery existed everywhere: it was regarded as an integral part of the divine order of things. The Church aimed at alleviating the lot of the slave, not at abolishing slavery. At a division of serfs, held in common between the priors of two abbeys in 1087, the children were shared, male and female, without any reference to their parents. Archbishops fulminated against serfs who tried to escape from their lords, quoting the words of the apostle: “Serfs be subject in all things to your masters.” A serf was valued at so much money, like a horse or an ox. The serfs of the Church at Paris were sent to the law courts to give evidence for their bishop or prior, or to do battle for them in the event of a judicial duel. The freemen in the eleventh century began to rebel against fighting with a despised serf, and refused the duel, whereupon early in the next century the king and his court decided that the serfs might lawfully testify and fight against freemen, and whoso refused the trial by battle should lose his suit and suffer excommunication. The prelates exchanged serfs, used them as substitutes in times of war, allowed them to marry outside their church or abbey only by special permission and on condition that all children were equally divided between the two proprietors. If a female serf married a freeman he and their children became serfs. Serfs were only permitted to make a will by consent of their master; every favour was paid for and liberty bought at a great price. Whole bourgades were often in a state of serfdom. Merchants even and artizans in towns owed part of their produce to the seigneur. In the eleventh century burgesses as well as serfs and Jews were given to churches, exchanged, sold or left in wills by their seigneurs. The story of mediæval France is the story of the efforts of serf and burgess to win their economic freedom[42] and of her kings to tame the insolence of disobedient vassals and to make their shadowy kingship a real thing. And the story of mediæval France is closed only by the great Revolution.

The declining years of King Robert were embittered by the impiety of rebellious sons, who were reduced to submission only at the price of a protracted and bloody campaign in Burgundy. The broken-hearted father did not long survive his victory. He died in his palace at Melun in 1031, and the benisons and lamentations of the poor and lowly winged his spirit to its rest. If we may believe some writers, pious King Robert’s memory is enshrined in the hymnology of the Church, which he enriched with some beautiful compositions: he was often seen to enter St. Denis in regal habit to lead the choir at matins, and would sometimes challenge the monks to a singing contest; once, it is said, when importuned by his queen to immortalise her name in song, he began, “O Constantia Martyrum!” The delighted Constance heard no further and was satisfied.

Scarcely had the grave closed over the dead king at St. Denis when Constance plotted with some of the nobles to place Robert, her youngest and favourite son, on the throne in place of Henry, the rightful heir, who fled to Normandy to implore the aid of Duke Robert. The cultivation of the arts of peace had not enfeebled the fighting powers of the Normans. Robert fell upon the queen’s supporters with reckless[43] bravery and crushed them in three decisive battles. Henry gained his crown but at the cost of a big slice of territory which advanced the Norman boundary to within twenty leagues of Paris. The queen survived her humiliation but a short time, and her death at Melun in 1032 and Henry’s generosity to his enemies gave peace to the kingdom.

In 1053, towards the end of Henry’s almost unchronicled reign, an alarming rumour came to Paris. The priests of St. Ermeran at Ratisbon claimed to have possession of the body of St. Denis, which they alleged had been stolen from the abbey in 892 by one Gisalbert. The loss of a province would not have evoked livelier emotion, and Henry at once took measures to convince France and Christendom that the true body was still at St. Denis. Before an immense concourse of bishops, abbots, princes and people, presided over by the king, his brother and the archbishops of Rheims and of Canterbury, the remains of St. Denis and his two companions were solemnly drawn out of the silver coffers in which they had been placed, by Dagobert, together with a nail from the cross and part of the crown of thorns, all locked with two keys in a kind of cupboard richly adorned with gold and precious stones, and preserved in a vault under the high altar. After having been borne in procession they were exposed on the high altar for fifteen days and then restored to their resting-place. The stiff-necked priests of Ratisbon, fortified with a papal bull of 1052, still maintained their claim to the possession of the body, but no diminution was experienced in the devotion either of the French peoples or of strangers of all nations to the relics at St. Denis.

The chief architectural event of Henry’s reign at Paris was the rebuilding on a more magnificent scale of the Merovingian church and abbey of St. Martin in the Fields (des Champs), whose blackened walls and desolate lands were eloquent of the Norman terror. The buildings stood outside Paris about a mile beyond the Cité on the great Roman road to the north, where St. Martin on his way to Paris healed a leper. The foundation, which soon grew to be one of the wealthiest in France, included a hostel for poor pilgrims endowed by Philip I. with a mill on the Grand Pont, to which the monks added the revenue from an oven.[44]

In the eighteenth century, when the monastery was secularised, the abbot was patron of twenty-nine priories, three vicarates and thirty-five parishes, five of which were in Paris. Some of the old building has been incorporated in the existing Conservatoire des Arts et Métiers. The Gothic priory chapel, with its fine twelfth-century choir, is used as a machinery-room, and the refectory, one of the most precious and beautiful creations attributed to Pierre de Montereau, is now a library.

Philip I. brought to the indolent habit inherited from his father a depraved and vicious nature. After a regency of eight years he became king at the age of fifteen, and lived to defile his youth and dishonour his manhood by debauchery and adultery, simony and brigandage. Early in his career he followed the evil counsels of his provost Etienne, and purposed the spoliation of the treasury of St. Germain des Prés to pay for his dissolute pleasures. “As the sacrilegious pair,” says the chronicler, “drew near the relics, Etienne was smitten with blindness and the terrified Philip fled.” Simony filled his gaping purse; bishoprics and other preferments were openly sold to the highest bidder, and one day when an abbot complained that he had been kept waiting while a rich competitor for a bishopric had been admitted, the king answered: “Wait a while until I have made my money of him; I will then accuse him of simony, and you shall have the reversion.”

Regal irresponsibility led in 1092 to a greater crime. Most popular of the twelfth-century stories sung by the trouvères of North France was that of Tortulf, the Breton outlaw, the Robin Hood of his day, who won by his prowess against the Normans the lordship of rich lands by the Loire, and with his son, Ingelar, founded the famous house of Anjou. In 1092 Foulques de Réchin, lord of Anjou—whose handsome grandson Geoffrey, surnamed Plantagenet from the sprig of broom (genêt) he wore in his helmet, was to father a race of English kings—had to wife Bertrarde, fairest of the ladies of France, whose two predecessors had been cast off like vile courtesans. Philip, when on a visit to the count at Tours became inflamed with passion at beholding her, and she was easily induced to elope with him under the promise that she should share his throne. His queen, Bertha, mother of his two children, was pitilessly driven from his bed and imprisoned at Montreuil, and two of his venal bishops were found to bestow the blessings of the Church on the new union. But the thunder of Rome came swift and terrible. Philip laid aside his crown and sceptre, grovelled before the pontiff, and implored forgiveness, but continued to live with his mistress. Next year a new pope excommunicated the guilty pair and laid their kingdom under the ban. The same Council, however, of Clermont, which fulminated against Philip, stirred Christendom to the first crusade, and in the magnificent enthusiasm of the moment Philip was permitted to live outwardly submissive but secretly rebellious. He crowned Bertrarde at Troyes, and lived on his vicious life, while Bertha was dying of a broken heart in her prison at Montreuil. Monkish legends tell of the excommunicated king languishing, a scrofulous wretch, in a deserted court; but there is little doubt that the impious monarch died, tardily repentant, at his palace at Melun, after a reign of nearly half a century. It was a reign void of honour or profit to France. He left his son Louis VI. (the Lusty) a heritage of shame, a kingdom reduced to little more than a baronage over a few comtés, whose cities of Paris, Etampes, Orleans and Sens were isolated from royal jurisdiction by insolent and rebellious vassals, one of whom, the Seigneur de Puisset, had inflicted a disgraceful defeat on Philip in 1081. Many of the great seigneurs were but freebooters, living by plunder. The violence and lawlessness of these and other smaller scoundrels, who levied blackmail on merchants and travellers, made commerce almost impossible. Corruption, too, had invaded many of the monasteries and fouled the thrones of bishops, and a dual effort was made by king and Church to remedy the evils of the times. The hierarchy strove to centralise power at Rome that the Church might be purged of wolves in sheep’s clothing: the Capetian monarchs to increase their might at Paris in order to subdue insolent and powerful vassals to law and obedience.

In 1097 the Duke of Burgundy learned that Archbishop Anselm of Canterbury was about to pass through his territory with a rich escort on his way to Rome. The usual ambush was laid and the party were held up. As the duke hastened to spoil his victims, crying out—“Where is the archbishop?” he turned and saw Anselm, impassive on his horse, gazing sternly at him. In a moment the savage and lawless duke was transformed to a pallid, stammering wretch with downcast eyes, begging permission to kiss the old man’s hand and to offer him a noble escort to safeguard him through his territory. It was the moral influence of prelates such as this and monks such as St. Bernard that enabled the hierarchy to enforce the celibacy of the clergy, to cleanse the bishoprics and abbeys, to wrest the privilege of conferring benefices from lay potentates and feudal seigneurs who bartered them for money, and to make and unmake kings.

The end of the eleventh and the beginning of the twelfth centuries saw the culmination of the power of the reformed orders. All over France, religious houses—the Grande Chartreuse, Fontevrault, Cîteaux, Clairvaux—sprang up as if by enchantment. Men and women of all stations and classes flocked to them, a veritable host of the Lord, “adorning the deserts with their holy perfection and solitudes by their purity and righteousness.” “How fair a thing it is,” exclaims St. Bernard, “to live in perfect unity! One weeps for his sins; another sings praises to the Lord. One teaches the sciences; another prays. One leads the active; another the contemplative, life. One burns with charity; another is prone in humility. Nought is here but the house of God and the very gate of heaven.”

St. Bernard was the terror of mothers and of wives. His austerity, his loving-kindness,[45] his impetuous will and masterful activity, his absolute faith and remorseless logic, his lyric and passionate eloquence, carried all before him. St. Bernard was the dictator of Christendom; he it was who with pitying gesture as of a kind father, his eyes suffused with tender joy, received Dante from the hands of Beatrice in the highest of celestial spheres, and after singing the beautiful hymn to the Virgin, led him to the heaven of heavens, to the very ecstasy and culmination of beatitude in the contemplation and comprehension of the triune God Himself. But religious no less than seculars are subdued by what they work in. Already in the tenth century Richer complained that the monks of his time were beginning to wear rich ornaments and flowing sleeves, and with their tight-fitting garments[46] looked like harlots rather than monks.

In the polluting atmosphere of Philip’s reign matters grew worse. St. Bernard denounced the royal abbey of St. Denis as “a house of Satan, a den of thieves.” “The walls of the churches of Christ were resplendent with colour but His poor were naked and left to perish; their stones were gilded with the money of the needy and wretched to charm the eyes of the rich.” “Bishops dressed like women; the successors of St. Peter rode about on white mules, loaded with gold and precious stones, apparelled in fine silk, surrounded with soldiers and followed by a brilliant train. They were rather the successors of Constantine.”

In 1095 the task of cleansing the Abbey of St. Maur des Fossés seemed so hopeless, that the abbot resigned in despair rather than imperil his soul, and a more resolute reformer was sought. In 1107 the bishop of Paris was commanded by Rome to proceed to the abbey of St. Eloy and extirpate the evils there flourishing. The nuns, it was reported, had so declined in grace, owing to the proximity of the court and intercourse with the world, that they had lost all sense of shame and lived in open sin, breaking the bonds of common decency. The scandal was so great that the bishop determined to cut them off from the house of the Lord. The abbey was reduced to a priory and given over to the abbot of the now reformed monastery of St. Maur, and its vast lands were parcelled out into several parishes.[47] The rights of the canons of Notre Dame were to be maintained; on St. Eloy’s day the abbot of St. Maur was to furnish them with six pigs, two and a half measures of wine and three of fine wheat, and on St. Paul’s day with eight sheep, the same quantity of wine, six crowns and one obole. The present Rue de la Cité and the Boulevard du Palais give approximately the east and west boundaries of the suppressed abbey, part of whose site is now occupied by the Prefecture de Police.

But the way of the reformer is a hard one. At the Council of Paris, 1074, the abbot of Pontoise was severely ill-treated for supporting, against the majority of the Council, the pope’s decrees excluding married clerics from the churches. The reform of the canons of Notre Dame led to exciting scenes. Bishop Stephen of Senlis was sent in 1128 to introduce the new discipline, but the archdeacons and canons, supported by royal favour, resisted, and Bishop Stephen was stripped of his revenues and hastened back to his metropolitan, the archbishop of Sens. The archbishop laid Paris under interdict and the influence of St. Bernard himself was needed to compose the quarrel.

On Sunday, August 20, 1133, when returning from a visitation to the abbey of Chelles, the abbot and prior of St. Victor were ambushed and the prior was stabbed. Some years later, in the reign of Louis VII., Pope Eugene III. came to seek refuge in Paris from the troubles excited at Rome by the revolution of Arnold of Brescia. When celebrating mass before the king at the abbey church of St. Genevieve the canons had stretched a rich, silken carpet before the altar on which the pontiff’s knees might rest. When the pope retired to the sacristy to disrobe, his officers claimed the carpet, according to usage; the canons and their servants resisted, and there was a bout of fisticuffs and sticks. The king intervened, and anointed majesty himself was struck. A scuffle ensued, during which the carpet was torn to shreds in a tug-of-war between the claimants. Here was urgent need for reform. The pope decided to introduce the new discipline and appointed a fresh set of canons. The dispossessed canons met them with insults and violence, drowned their voices by howling and other indignities, and only ceased on being threatened with the loss of their eyes and other secular penalties.

Louis the Lusty was the pioneer of the great French Monarchy. He had none of Philip’s indolence, and was ever on the move, hewing his way, sword in hand, through his domains, subduing the violence, and burning and razing the castles of his insolent and disobedient vassals. The famous Suger, abbot of St. Denis, was his wise and firm counsellor, and led the Church to make common cause with him and lend her diocesan militia. It was a poor bald curé who, when all else despaired, led the assault on the keep of the castle of Le Puisset; he seized on a plank of wood, assailed the palisade, calling on the hesitating royal troops to follow him; they were shamed by his bravery and the castle was won.

The social revolution known as the enfranchisement of the commons and the growth of towns begins in the reign of Louis VI. The king would have the peasant to till, the monk to pray, and the pilgrim and merchant to travel in peace. He was an itinerant regal justiciary, destroying the nests of brigands, purging the land with fire and sword from tyranny and oppression. Wise in council, of magnificent courage in battle, he was the first of the Capetians to associate the cause of the people with that of the monarchy. They loved him as a valiant soldier-king, destroyer and tamer of feudal tyrants, the protector of the Church, the vindicator of the oppressed. He lifted the sceptre of France from the mire and made of it a symbol of firm and just government.

It is in Louis VI.’s reign that we have first mention of the Oriflamme (golden flame) of St. Denis, which took the place of St. Martin’s cloak as the royal standard of France. The Emperor Henry V. with a formidable army was menacing France. Louis rallied all his friends to withstand him and went to St. Denis to pray for victory. The abbot took from the altar the standard—famed to have been sent by heaven, and formerly carried by the first liege man of the abbey, the Count de Vexin, when the monastery was in danger of attack—and handed it to the king. The sacred banner was fashioned of silk in the form of a gonfalon, of the colours of fire and gold, and was suspended at the head of a gilded lance.

There was a solemn ceremony, the Remise des corps saints, at the royal abbey when the king returned with his court to give thanks and to restore the banner to the altar. He carried the relics of the holy martyrs on his shoulders in procession, then replaced them whence they were taken and made oblations. A yet more superb spectacle was given to the Parisians when Pope Innocent II., a refugee from the violence of the anti-papal party at Rome, came to celebrate the Easter mass at St. Denis. The pope and his cardinals were mounted on fair steeds, barons and seigneurs on foot led the pope’s white horse by the bridle. As he passed, the Jews presented him with a scroll of the law wrapped in a veil—“May it please God to remove the veil from your hearts,” answered the pope. The solemn mass ended, pope and cardinals repaired to the cloisters where tables were spread with the Easter feast. They first partook of the Paschal lamb, reclining on the carpet in the fashion of the ancients, then, rising, took their places at table. After the repast a magnificent procession went its way to Paris, to be met by the whole city with King Louis and Prince Philip at their head.

The manner of the young prince’s tragic death gives an insight into the state of a mediæval town. He was riding one day for amusement in the streets of Paris, attended by one esquire, when a pig ran between his horse’s feet; the lad was thrown and died before the last sacraments could be administered. He was only fourteen years of age, and all France wept for him.

The strenuous reign of Louis was marked by a great expansion of Paris, which became more than ever the ordinary dwelling-place of the king and the seat of his government. The market, now known as Les Halles, was established at a place called Champeaux, belonging to St. Denis of the Prison. William of Champeaux founded the great abbey of St. Victor,[48] famed for its sanctity and learning, where Abelard taught and St. Thomas of Canterbury and St. Bernard lodged. At the urgent prayer of his wife Adelaide, the king built a nunnery at Montmartre, and lavishly endowed it with lands, ovens, the house of Guerri, a Lombard money-changer, some shops and a slaughter-house in Paris, and a small bourg, still known as Bourg-la-Reine, about five miles south of the city. Certain rights of fishing at Paris, to which Louis VII. added five thousand herrings yearly from the port of Boulogne, were also granted. The churches of Ste. Geneviève la Petite, founded to commemorate the miraculous staying of the plague of the burning sickness (les ardents); of St. Jacques de la Boucherie; and of St. Pierre aux Bœufs, so named from the heads of oxen carved on the portal, were also built.

CHAPTER V
PARIS UNDER PHILIP AUGUSTUS AND ST. LOUIS

DURING the twenty-eight years of the reign of Louis VII. no heir to the crown was born. At length, on the 22nd of August, 1165, Adelaide of Champagne, his third wife, lay in child-bed and excited crowds thronged the palace. The king, “afeared of the number of his daughters and knowing how ardently his people desired a child of the nobler sex,” was beside himself with joy when the desire of his heart was held up to him. The chamber was closed, but curious eyes had espied the longed-for heir through an aperture of the door and in a moment the good news was spread abroad. There was a sound of clarions and of bells and the city as by enchantment shone with an aureole of light. An English student roused by the uproar and the glare of what seemed like a great conflagration leapt to the window and beheld two old women hurrying by with lighted tapers. He asked the cause. They answered “God has given us this night a royal heir, by whose hand your king shall suffer shame and ill-hap.” This was the birth of Philip le Dieu donné—Philip sent of Heaven—better known as Philip Augustus. Under him and Louis IX. mediæval Paris, faithfully reflecting the fortunes of the French Monarchy, attained its highest development.

When Philip Augustus took up the sceptre at fifteen years of age, the little realm of the Isle de France was throttled by a ring of great and practically independent feudatories, and in extent was no larger than half-a-dozen of the eighty-seven departments into which France is now divided. In thirty years Philip had burst through to the sea, subdued the Duke of Burgundy and the great counts, wrested the sovereignty of Normandy, Brittany and Maine from the English Crown, won Poitou and Aquitaine, crushed the emperor and his vassals in the memorable battle of Bouvines, and become one of the greatest of European monarchs. The English king was humiliated by the invasion of his territory by Prince Louis, afterwards Louis VIII., who overran nearly the whole of the east of England, captured Rochester and Winchester, and received the barons’ homage at London.

The victory of Bouvines evoked that ideal of moral and material and national unity which the later kings of France were to realise. The progress of Philip towards Paris was one long triumph. Peasants and mechanics dropped their tools to gaze on the dread iron Count of Flanders, captive and wounded. The king, who had owed his life to the excellence of his armour,[49] was received in Paris with a frenzy of joy. The whole city came forth to meet him, flowers were strewn in his path, the streets were hung with tapestry, Te Deums sung in all the churches, and for seven days and nights the popular enthusiasm expressed itself in dance, in song and joyous revel. It was the first national event in France. The Count of Flanders was imprisoned in the new fortress of the Louvre, where he lay for thirteen years, with ample leisure to meditate on the fate of rebellious feudatories. “Never after was war waged on King Philip, but he lived in peace.”

Two vast undertakings make the name of Philip Augustus memorable in Paris—the beginning of the paving of the city and the building of its girdle of walls and towers.

One day as Philip stood at the window of his palace, where he was wont to amuse himself by watching the Seine flow by, some carts rattled along the muddy road beneath the window and stirred so foul and overpowering an odour that the king almost fell sick. Next day the provost and the sheriffs and chief citizens were sent for and ordered to set about paving the city with stone. The work was not however completed until the reign of Charles V., a century and a half later. It was done well and lasted till the sixteenth century, when it was replaced by the miserable cobbles, known as the pavement of the League. Whether the city grew much sweeter is doubtful; certainly Paris in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries was as evil-smelling as ever. Montaigne, in the second half of the sixteenth century, complains that the acrid smell of the mud of Paris weakened the affection he bore to that fair city, and Howell writes in 1620, “the city is always dirty, and by perpetual motion the mud is beaten into a thick, black and unctuous oil that sticks so that no art can wash it off, and besides the indelible stain it leaves, gives so strong a scent that it may be smelt many miles off, if the wind be in one’s face as one comes from the fresh air of the country.”

The great fortified wall of Philip Augustus began at the north-west water-tower, which stood just above the present Pont des Arts, and passed through the quadrangle of the Louvre where a line on the paving marks its course to the Porte St. Honoré, near the Oratoire. It continued northwards by the Rue du Jour to the Porte Montmartre, whose site is marked by a tablet on No. 30 Rue Montmartre. Turning eastward by the Painters’ Gate (135 Rue St. Denis) and the Porte St. Martin, near the Rue Grenier St. Lazare, the fortification described a curve in a south-easterly direction by the Rue des Francs Bourgeois, where traces of the wall have been found in the Cour de l’Horloge of the Mont de Piété, and of a tower at No. 57. The line of the wall continued in the same direction by the Lycée Charlemagne, No. 131 Rue St. Antoine, where stood another gate, to the north-east water-tower, known as the Tour Barbeau, which stood near No. 32 Quai des Célestins. The opposite or southern division began at the south-east water-tower, La Tournelle, and the Gate of St. Bernard on the present Quai de la Tournelle, and went southward by the Rues des Fossés, St. Bernard and Cardinal Lemoine, to the Porte St. Victor, near No. 2 Rue des Ecoles. The wall then turned westward by the Rue Clovis, where at No. 7 one of the largest and best-preserved remains may be seen. It enclosed the abbey of St. Geneviève, and the Pantheon stands on the site of the Porte Papale. The south-western angle was turned near the end of the Rue Soufflot and the beginning of the Rue Monsieur le Prince. In a northerly direction it then followed the line of the latter street, crossing the Boulevard St. Germain, and continued by the Rue de l’Ancienne Comédie. In the Cour de Rouen, No. 61 Rue St. André des Arts, an important remnant may be seen with the base of a tower. We may now trace the march of the wall and towers by the Rues Mazarin and Guénégaud, where at No. 29 other fragments exist, to the south-west water-tower, the notorious Tour de Nesle[50] whose site is occupied by the Hôtel des Monnaies. The passage of the Seine was blocked by chains, which were drawn at night from tower to tower and fixed on boats and piles. The wall was twenty years building and was completed in 1211. It was eight feet thick, pierced by twenty-four gates and fortified by about five hundred towers. Much of the land it enclosed was not built upon; the marais (marshes) on the north bank were drained and cultivated and became market and fruit gardens.

The moated château of the Louvre, another of Philip’s great buildings, stood outside the wall and commanded the valley route to Paris. It was at once a fortress, a palace and a prison. Parts of two wings of the structure are incorporated in the present palace of the Louvre, and the site of the remaining wings, the massive keep and the towers are marked out on the pavement of the quadrangle.

Many are the stories of the great king’s wisdom. One day, entering the chapter-house of Notre Dame during the election of a bishop, Philip seized a crozier and passing along the assembled canons thrust it into the hands of one of lean and poor aspect, saying: “Here, take this, that you may wax fat like your brethren.” His jester once claimed to be of his family through their common father Adam, and complained that the heritage had been badly divided. “Well,” said the king, “come to me to-morrow and I will restore what is due to thee.” Next day, in the presence of his court, he handed the jester a farthing, saying: “Here is thy just portion. When I shall have shared my wealth with each of thy brothers, barely a farthing will remain to me.”

One of the royal bailiffs coveted the land of a poor knight, who refused to sell. The knight at length died, and the widow proving equally stubborn, the bailiff went to the market-place, hired two porters whom he dressed decently, and repaired with them by night to the cemetery where the dead chevalier lay buried. His body was drawn from the tomb and held upright while the bailiff abjured it to agree before the two witnesses to a sale of the land. “Silence gives consent,” said the bailiff, and placed a coin in the corpse’s hand. The tomb was closed and the land seized on the morrow, despite the widow’s protests. On the case being brought before the judgment-seat of Philip in the palace of the Cité, the two porters bore witness to the sale. The king, suspecting the truth, led one of the witnesses aside and bade him recite a paternoster. While the man was murmuring the prayer the king was heard of all the court loudly saying: “Yes, that is so: you speak truly.” The recital over, the king assured him of pardon, and returning to the second witness, admonished him also not to lie, for his friend had revealed all as truly as if he had said a paternoster. The second witness confessed. The bailiff, praying for mercy, fell prostrate before the king, who condemned the guilty man to banishment for life, and ordered the whole of his possessions to be escheated to the poor widow.

Of the impression that the Paris of Philip Augustus made on a provincial visitor, we are able, fortunately, to give some account. “I am at Paris,” writes Guy of Bazoches, about the end of the twelfth century, “in this royal city, where the abundance of nature’s gifts not only retains those that dwell there but invites and attracts those who are afar off. Even as the moon surpasses the stars in brightness, so does this city, the seat of royalty, exalt her proud head above all other cities. She is placed in the bosom of a delicious valley, in the centre of a crown of hills, which Ceres and Bacchus enrich with their gifts. The Seine, that proud river which comes from the east, flows there through wide banks and with its two arms surrounds an island which is the head, the heart, and the marrow of the whole city. Two suburbs extend to right and left, even the lesser of which would rouse the envy of many another city. These suburbs communicate with the island by two stone bridges; the Grand Pont towards the north in the direction of the English sea, and the Petit Pont which looks towards the Loire. The former bridge, broad, rich, commercial, is the centre of a fervid activity, and innumerable boats surround it laden with merchandise and riches. The Petit Pont belongs to the dialecticians, who pace up and down disputing. In the island adjacent to the king’s palace, which dominates the whole town, the palace of philosophy is seen where study reigns alone as sovereign, a citadel of light and immortality.”

After Louis VIII.’s brief reign of three years, there rises to the throne of France one of the gentlest and noblest of the sons of men, a prince indeed, who, amid all the temptations of absolute power maintained a spotless life, and at death laid down an earthly crown to assume a fairer and an imperishable diadem among the saints in heaven. All that was best in mediævalism—its desire for peace and order and justice; its fervent piety, its passion to effect unity among Christ’s people and to wrest the Holy Land from the pollution of the infidel; its enthusiasm for learning and for the things of the mind; its love of beauty—all are personified in the life of St. Louis.

The young prince was eleven years of age when his father died. During his minority he was nurtured in learning and piety[51] by his mother, Blanche of Castile, whose devotion to her son, and firm and wise regency were a fitting prelude to the reign of a saintly king. Even after he attained his majority, Louis always sought his mother’s counsel and was ever respectful and submissive to her will. When the news of her death reached him in the Holy Land, he went to his oratory, fell on his knees before the altar, submissive to the will of God, and cried out with tears in his eyes, that he had loved the queen, “his most dear lady and mother, beyond all mortal creatures.”

The king’s conception of his office was summed up in two words—Gouverner bien. “Fair son,” said he one day to Prince Louis, his heir, “I pray thee win the affection of thy people. Verily, I would rather that a Scotchman came from Scotland and ruled the kingdom well and loyally than that thou shouldst govern it ill.” Joinville tells with charming simplicity how the king after hearing mass in the chapel at Vincennes was wont to walk in the woods for refreshment and then, sitting at the foot of an old oak tree, would listen to the plaints of his poorer people without let of usher or other official and administer justice to them. At other times, clothed in a tunic of camlet, a surcoat of wool (tiretaine) without sleeves, a mantle of black taffety, and a hat with a peacock’s plume, he would walk with his Council in the garden of his palace in the Cité, and on the people crowding round him, would call for a carpet to be spread on the ground, on which he would sit, surrounded with his councillors, and judge the poor diligently.

So rigidly just was the good king that he would not lie even to the Saracens. On his return from the crusade, being pressed by his Council to leave a stranded ship, he called the mariners to him and asked them if they would abandon the vessel if it were charged with merchandise. All replied that they would risk their lives rather than forsake the ship. “Then,” said the king, “why am I asked to abandon it?” “Sire,” they answered, “your royal person and your queen and children cannot be valued in money nor weighed in the balance against our lives.” “Well,” said the king, “I have heard your counsel and that of my lords: now hear mine. If I leave this ship there will remain on board five hundred men, each of whom loves his life as dearly as I do mine, and who, perchance, will never see their fatherland again. Therefore will I rather put my person and my wife and children in God’s hands than do hurt to so much people.”

In 1238 the king was profoundly shocked by the news that the crown of thorns was a forfeited pledge at Venice for an unpaid loan advanced by some Venetian merchants to the Emperor Baldwin of Constantinople. Louis paid the debt,[52] redeemed the pledge, and secured the relic for Paris. The king met his envoys at Sens, and barefooted, himself carried the sacred treasure enclosed in three caskets, one of wood, one of silver and one of gold, to Paris. The procession took eight days to reach the city, and so great were the multitudes who thronged to see it, that a large platform was raised in a field outside the walls, from which several prelates exposed it in turn to the veneration of the people. Thence it was taken to the cathedral of Notre Dame, the king dressed in a simple tunic, and barefoot still carrying the relic. From the cathedral it was transferred to the royal chapel of St. Nicholas within the precincts of the palace. A year later the Emperor Baldwin was constrained to part with other relics, including a piece of the true cross, the blade of the lance and the sponge of the Passion. To enshrine them and the crown of thorns the chapel of St. Nicholas was demolished and the beautiful Sainte-Chapelle built in its place. The upper chapel was dedicated to the relics; the lower to the Blessed Virgin. On solemn festivals the king would himself expose the relics to the people. Louis was zealous in his devotion and for a time attended matins in the new chapel at midnight, until, suffering much headache in consequence, he was persuaded to have the office celebrated in the early morning before prime. His piety, however, was by no means austere: he had all the French gaiety of heart, dearly loved a good story, and was excellent company at table, where he loved to sit conversing with Robert de Sorbon, his chaplain. “It is a bad thing,” he said one day to Joinville, “to take another man’s goods, because rendre (to restore) is so difficult, that even to pronounce the word makes the tongue sore by reason of the r’s in it.”

At another time they were talking of the duties of a layman towards Jews and Infidels. “Let me tell you a story,” said St. Louis. “The monks of Cluny once arranged a great conference between some learned clerks and Jews. When the conference opened, an old knight who for love of Christ was given bread and shelter at the monastery, approached the abbot and begged leave to say the first word. The abbot, after some protest against the irregularity, was persuaded to grant permission, and the knight, leaning on his stick, requested that the greatest scholar and rabbi among the Jews might be brought before him. ‘Master,’ said the knight, ‘do you believe that the Blessed Virgin Mary gave birth to Jesus and held Him at her breast, and that she is the Virgin Mother of God?’ The Jew answered that he believed it not at all. ‘Then,’ said the knight, ‘fool that thou art to have entered God’s house and His church, and thou shalt pay for it.’ Thereupon he lifted his stick, smote the rabbi under the ear and felled him to the ground. The terrified Jews fled, carrying their master with them, and so,” said St. Louis, “ended the conference. And I tell you, let none but a great clerk dispute: the business of a layman when he hears the Christian religion defamed is to defend it with his sharp sword and thrust his weapon into the miscreant’s body as far as it will go.”

Louis, however, did not apply the moral in practice. Although severe in exacting tribute from the Jews, he spent much money in converting them and held many of their orphan children at the font. To others he gave pensions, which became a heavy financial burden to himself and his successors. He was stern with blasphemers, whose lips he caused to be branded with a hot iron. “I have heard him say,” writes Joinville, “with his own mouth, that he would he were marked with a red-hot iron himself if thereby he could banish all oaths and blasphemy from his kingdom. Full twenty-two years have I been in his company, and never have I heard him swear or blaspheme God or His holy Mother or any Saint, howsoever angry he may have been: and when he would affirm anything, he would say, ‘Verily it is so, or verily it is not so.’ Before going to bed he would call his children around him and recite the fair deeds and sayings of ancient princes and kings, praying that they would remember them for good ensample; for unjust and wicked princes lost their kingdoms through pride and avarice and rapine.” The good king essayed to deal with some social evils at court, but in vain:[53] he could only give the example of a pure and chaste life. When he was in the east he heard of a Saracen lord of Egypt who caused all the best books of philosophy to be transcribed for the use of young men, and he determined to do the like for the youth of Paris. Scribes were sent to copy the Scriptures and the writings of the Fathers, preserved in various abbeys in France. He had a convenient and safe place built at the treasury of the Sainte-Chapelle, where he housed the books. Scholars had free access to them, and he himself was wont in his leisure time to shut himself up there for study, reading rather the Holy Fathers than the writings of the best doctors of his own time.

Louis was a steadfast friend to the religious orders. On his return from the Holy Land he brought with him six monks from Mount Carmel and established them on the north bank of the Seine, near the present Quai des Celestins; they were subsequently transferred to the University quarter, on a site now occupied by the Marché aux Carmes. The prior of the Grande Chartreuse was also prayed to spare a few brothers to found a house in Paris; four were sent, and the king endowed them with his Château de Vauvert, including extensive lands and vineyards. The château was reputed to be haunted by evil spirits, and the street leading thither as late as the last century was known as the Rue d’Enfer. Louis began a great church for them, and the eight cells, each with its three rooms and garden, were increased to thirty before the end of his reign; in later times the order became one of the richest in Paris and occupied a vast expanse of land to the south of the Luxembourg. The fine series of paintings illustrating the life of St. Bruno, by Le Sueur, now in the Louvre, was executed for the smaller cloister of the monastery. The Grands Augustins were established on the south bank of the Seine, near the present Pont Neuf, and the Serfs de la Vierge, known later as the Blancs Manteaux, from their white cloaks, in the Marais. They were subsequently amalgamated with the Guillelmites, or the Hermits of St. William, and at no. 14 of the street of that name some remains of their monastery may yet be seen. The church of the Blancs Manteaux, rebuilt in the seventeenth century, also exists in the street of that name.

In 1217 the first of the Preaching Friars were seen at Paris. On the 12th of September seven friars, among whom were Laurence the Englishman and a brother of St. Dominic, established themselves in a house near the parvis of Notre Dame. In 1218 the University gave them a home near St. Genevieve, opposite the church of St. Etienne des Grez (St. Stephen of the Greeks), and in the following year, when St. Dominic came to Paris, the brothers had increased to thirty. The saint himself drew up the plans of their monastery in the Rue St. Jacques, and always cherished a particular affection for the Paris house. Their church was opened in 1220, and being dedicated to St. Jacques, the Dominicans were known as Jacobins all over France. St. Louis endowed them with a school; they soon became one of the most powerful and opulent of the religious orders, and their church, a burial-place for kings and princes. The Friars Minor soon followed. St. Francis himself, in his deep affection for France, had determined to go to Paris and found a house of his order, but being dissuaded by his friend, Cardinal Ugolin, sent in 1216 a few of his disciples. These early friars, true poverelli di Dio, would accept no endowment of house or money, and supporting themselves by their hands, carried their splendid devotion among the poor, the outcast, and the lepers of Paris. In 1230 the Cordeliers, as they were called,[54] accepted the loan of a house near the walls in the south-western part of the city. St. Louis built them a church, and left them at his death part of his library and a large sum of money.[55] They too became rich and powerful and their church one of the largest and most magnificent in Paris. St. Bonaventure and Duns Scotus taught at their school of theology. Their monastery in the sixteenth century was the finest and most spacious in Paris, with cells for a hundred friars and a vast refectory, which still exists. The king also founded the hospital for 300 blind beggars, known as the Quinze-Vingts (15 × 20) now in the Rue de Charenton, and left them an annual rente of thirty livres parisis, that every inmate might have a mess of good pottage at his meals. Until Cardinal de Rohan, of diamond-necklace fame, effected the sale of the buildings in 1779 to a syndicate of speculators, an act of jobbery which brought his eminence a handsome commission, the hospital was situated between the Palais Royal and the Louvre. Originally it was a night shelter, whither the poor blind might repair after their long quest in the streets of Paris. The king subsequently gave them a dress on which Philip le Bel ordered a fleur-de-lys to be embroidered, that they might be known as the “king’s poor folk.” They were privileged to place collecting-boxes and to beg inside the churches. Since, however, the differences in the relative opulence of churches was great, the right to beg in certain of the richer ones was put up to auction every year, and those who promised to pay the highest premium to the funds of the hospital were adjudicated the privilege of begging there. This curious arrangement was in full vigour until the latter half of the eighteenth century, when the foundation was removed. Twelve blind brothers and twelve seeing brothers—husbands of blind women who were lodged there on condition that they served as leaders through the streets—had a share in the management of the institution. Luxury seems to have sometimes invaded the hostel, for in 1579 a royal decree forbade the sale of wine to the brethren and denounced the blasphemy with which their conversation was often tainted. In 1631 they were forbidden to use stuffs other than serge or cloth for their garments, or to use velvet for ornament.

The establishment of the abbey of St. Antoine, of the Friars of the Holy Cross and of the Sisters of St. Bega or Béguines, were also due to the king’s piety, and the whole city was surrounded with religious houses. “Even as a scribe,” says an old writer, “who hath written his book illuminates it with gold and silver, so did the king illumine his kingdom with the great quantity of the houses of God that he built.”

Louis was, however, firm in his resistance to ecclesiastical arbitrariness. The prelates complained to him on one occasion that Christianity was going to the dogs, because no one feared their excommunications, and prayed that he would order his sergeants to lend the secular arm to enforce their authority. “Yes,” answered the king, “if you will give me the particulars of each case that I may judge if your sentence be just.” They objected that that appertained to the ecclesiastical courts, but Louis was inflexible, and they remained unsatisfied.

Many were the king’s benefactions to the great hospital of Paris, the Hôtel Dieu. Rules, dating from 1217, for the treatment of the sick poor were elaborated in his reign with admirable forethought. The sick, after confession and communion, were to be put to bed and treated as if they were the masters of the house. They were to be daily served with food before the nursing friars and sisters, and all that they desired was to be freely given if it could be obtained and were not prejudicial to their recovery. If the sickness were dangerous the patient was to be set apart and to be tended with especial solicitude. The sick were never to be left unguarded and even to be kept seven days after they were healed, lest they should suffer a relapse. The friars and sisters were to eat twice a day: the sick whenever they had need. A nurse who struck a patient was excommunicated. In later times, lax management and the decline of piety which came with the religious and political changes of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries made reform urgent, and in 1505 the Parliament appointed a committee of eight bourgeois clercs to control the receipts. The buildings were much increased in 1636, but were never large enough, and in 1655 the priory of St. Julien was united to the hospital. “As many as 6000 patients,” says Félibien, writing in 1725, “have been counted there at one time, five or six in one bed.” No limitations of age or sex or station or religion or country were set. Everybody was received, and in Félibien’s time the upkeep amounted to 500,000 livres per annum. The old Hôtel Dieu was situated to the south of Notre Dame, and stood there until rebuilt on its present site in 1878.

The king was ever solicitous for the earthly weal of his subjects and made an unpopular peace with England against the advice of his Council. “Sirs,” he protested, “the land I give to the king of England I give without being held to do so, that I may awaken love between his children and mine who are cousins germain.”

Louis sought diligently over all the land for the grand sage homme who would prove an honest and fearless judge, punishing the wicked without regard to rank or riches;[56] and what he exacted of his officers he practised himself. He punished his own brother, the Count of Artois, for having forced a sale of land on an unwilling man, and ordered him to make restitution. He inflicted a tremendous fine on the Sire de Coucy, one of the most powerful of his barons, for having hanged three young fellows for poaching. The whole of the baronage appealed against the sentence, but the king was inexorable. As Joinville was on his way to join ship at Marseilles for the crusade in Palestine, he passed a ruined château:—it had been razed to the ground as a warning to tyrannous seigneurs, who robbed and spoiled merchants and pilgrims. Louis forbade the judicial duel in civil cases; he instituted the Royal Watch to police the streets of Paris; he registered and confirmed the charters of the hundred crafts of Paris and gave many privileges to the great trade guilds.

In 1720 the king put on a second time the crusader’s badge, “the dear remembrance of his dying Lord,” and met his death in the ill-fated expedition to Tunis. Louis was so feeble when he left that Joinville carried him from the Hôtel of the Count of Auxerre to the Franciscan monastery (the Cordeliers), where the old friends and fellow-warriors in the Holy Land parted for ever. When stricken with the plague the dying king was laid on a couch strewn with ashes. He called his son, the Count of Alençon, to him and gave wise and touching counsel, and, after holy communion, he recited the seven penitential psalms, invoked “Monseigneurs St. James and St. Denis and Madame St. Genevieve,” crossed his hands on his heart, gazed towards heaven and rendered his soul to his Creator. Piteuse chouse est et digne de pleurer le trépassement de ce saint prince, says Joinville, to whom the story was told by the king’s son—“A piteous thing it is and worthy of tears the passing away of this holy prince.”

The bones of the dead king, from which the flesh[57] had been removed by boiling, were sent for burial to St. Denis, which he had chosen for the place of his sepulture. The Sieur de Joinville,[58] his friend and companion, from whose priceless memoirs we have chiefly drawn, ends his story thus:—“I make known to all readers of this little book that the things which I say I have seen and heard of the king are true and steadfastly shall they believe them. And the other things of which I testify but by hearsay, take them in a good sense if it please you, praying God that by the prayers of Monseigneur St. Louis it may please Him to give us those things that He knoweth to be necessary as well for our bodies as for our souls. Amen.”

King Louis was tall of stature, with a spare and graceful figure; his face was of angelic sweetness, with eyes as of a dove, and crowned with abundant fair hair. As he grew older he became somewhat bald and held himself slightly bent. “Never,” says Joinville, when describing a charge led by the king, which turned the tide of battle, “saw I so fair an armed man. He seemed to sit head and shoulders above all his knights. His helmet of gold was most fair to see, and a sword of Allemain was in his hand. Four times I saw him put his body in danger of death to save hurt to his people.”

CHAPTER VI
ART AND LEARNING AT PARIS

TWO epoch-making developments—the creation of Gothic architecture and the rise of the university—synchronise with the period covered by the reigns of Philip Augustus and St. Louis, and may now fitly be considered.

The memory of the Norman terror had long passed from men’s minds. The Isle de France had been purged of robber lords, and with peace and security, wealth and population had increased. The existing churches were becoming too small for the faithful and new and fairer temples replaced the old: the massive square towers, the heavy walls and thick pillars of the Norman builders blossomed into grace and light and beauty. Already in the beginning of the twelfth century the church of St. Denis was in urgent need of extension. On festival days so great were the crowds pressing to view the relics that many people had been trodden under foot, and Abbot Suger determined to build a larger and nobler church. St. Denis is an edifice of profound interest to the traveller. In the west façade (1140) we may see the round Norman arch side by side with the pointed Gothic, and the choir completed in 1144 was the earliest example of a Gothic apse. But Suger’s structure was nearly destroyed by fire in 1219, and the upper part of the choir, the nave and transepts, were rebuilt in 1231 in the pure Gothic of the time. Great was the enthusiasm of the people as the new temple rose. Noble and burgess, freeman and serf, harnessed themselves like beasts of burden to the ropes and drew the stone from the quarry. All would lend their aid in raising the new house of God and of His holy martyrs, and the burial-place of their kings. In 1161 Maurice de Sully, a peasant’s son, who had risen to become bishop of Paris, determined to erect a great minster in the place of Childebert’s basilica, which was no longer adequate to the demands of the time. The old church of St. Stephen[59] and many houses were demolished together with the cathedral, and a new street, called Notre Dame, was made. Sully devoted the greater part of his life and private resources to the work. The king, the pope, seigneurs, guilds of merchants and private persons, vied with each other in making gifts. Two years were spent in digging the foundations, and in 1163 Pope Alexander III. is said to have laid the first stone. In 1182, the choir being finished, the papal legate consecrated the high altar. At Sully’s death, in 1196, the walls of the nave were erect and partly roofed. The transepts and nave were completed in 1235.

In 1218 an ingenious and sacrilegious thief, climbing to the roof to haul up the silver candlesticks from the altar by a noose in a rope, set fire to the altar cloth, and the choir was seriously injured. Sully’s work had been Romanesque in style, and choir and apse were now rebuilt in the new style, to harmonise with the remainder of the church. The builders have preserved some of the best of the Romanesque twelfth-century work in the portal of St. Anne’s, under the south tower, and the magnificent iron hinges of old St. Stephen’s were used for its doors. The chapels round the apse and the twenty-eight figures of the royal benefactors from Childebert I. to Philip Augustus, on the west front, were not completed until the end of the thirteenth century. The choir of St. Germain des Prés and the exquisite little church of St. Julien le Pauvre were built at the end of the twelfth century, and the beautiful refectory of St. Martin des Champs was created about 1220. But the culmination of Gothic art is reached in the wondrous sanctuary that St. Louis built for the crown of thorns, “the most precious piece of Gothic,” says Ruskin, “in Northern Europe.” Michelet saw a whole world of religion and poetry—tears of piety, mystic ecstasy, the mysteries of divine love—expressed in the marvellous little church, in the fragile and precious paintings of its windows.[60] The narrow cell with an aperture looking on the reliquary, which St. Louis used as an oratory, is still shown. The work was completed in three years, and has been so admirably restored by Viollet-le-Duc that the visitor may gaze to-day on this pure and peerless gem almost as St. Louis left it, for the gorgeous interior faithfully reproduces the mediæval colour and gold. During the Revolution it was used as an granary and then as a club. It narrowly escaped destruction, and men now living can remember seeing the old notices on the porch of the lower chapel—Propriété nationale à vendre. Only once a year, when the “red mass” is said at the opening of the Law Courts in November, is the church used; and all that remains of the relics has long been transferred to the treasury of Notre Dame. The old Quinze-Vingts, the Chartreux, the Cordeliers, St. Croix de la Bretonnerie, St. Catherine, the Blancs Manteaux, the Mathurins and other masterpieces of the Gothic builders have all disappeared.

Gothic architecture was eminently a product of the Isle de France. The thirteenth century rivals the finest period of Greek art for purity, simplicity, nobility and accurate science of construction. Imagination was chastened by knowledge, but not systematised into rigid rules. Each master solved his problem in his own way, and the result was a charm and a variety, a fertility of invention, never surpassed in the history of art. Early French sculpture is a direct descendant of Greek art, which made its way into France by the Phœnician trade route. French artists achieved a perfection in the representation of the human form which anticipated by a generation the work of the Pisani in Italy, for the statues on the west front of Chartres Cathedral (1150-1160) are carved with a naturalness and grace which the Italian masters never surpassed, and the marvellously mature and beautiful thirteenth-century silver-gilt figure of a king, in high relief, found in 1902 immured in an old house at Bourges and exhibited in 1904 among the Primitifs Français at the Louvre, was wrought more than a century before the birth of Donatello. Some fragments of the old sculptures that adorned St. Denis and other twelfth- and thirteenth-century churches may still be found in the museums of Paris. The influence of the French architects, as Emile Bertaux has demonstrated in the first volume of his Art dans l’Italie Meridionale, extended far beyond the limits of France, and is clearly traceable in the fine hunting-palace, erected for Frederic II. in the thirteenth century, at Castello del Monte, near Andria, in Apulia. But the names of those who created these wonderful productions no man knoweth; the great masterpieces of the thirteenth century are anonymous. Jean de Chelles, one of the masons of Notre Dame, has left his name on the south portal and the date, Feb. 12, 1257, on which it was begun, “in honour of the holy Mother of Christ,” but nothing is known of him. The Sainte-Chapelle is commonly attributed to Pierre de Montereau, but the attribution is a mere guess.

Nor did the love of beauty during this marvellous age express itself solely in architecture. If we were asked to specify one trait which more than any other characterises the “dark ages” and differentiates them from modern times, we should be tempted to say, love of brightness and colour. Within and without, the temples of God were resplendent with silver and gold, with purple and crimson and blue; the saintly figures and solemn legends on their porches, the capitals, the columns, the groins of the vaultings were lustrous with colour and gold. Each window was a complex of jewelled splendour: the pillars and walls were painted or draped with lovely tapestries and gorgeous banners: the shrines and altars glittered with precious stones—jasper and sardius and chalcedony, sapphire and emerald, chrysolite and beryl, topaz and amethyst and pearl. The Church illuminated her sacred books with exquisite painting, bound them with precious fabrics, and clasped them with silver and gold; the robes of her priests and ministrants were rich with embroideries. So insensible, so atrophied to colour have the eyes of moderns grown amid their drab surroundings, that the aspect of a building wherein skilful hands have in some small degree essayed to realise the splendour of the past dazes the beholder; a sense of pain rather than of delight possesses him and he averts his gaze.

Nor were the churches of those early times anything more than an exquisite expression of what men were surrounded by in their daily lives and avocations. The houses[61] and oratories of noble and burgess were rich with ivories exquisitely carved, with sculptures and paintings, tapestry and enamels: the very utensils of common domestic use were beautiful. Men did not prate of art: they wrought in love and simplicity. The very word art, as denoting a product of human activity different from the ordinary daily tasks of men, was unknown. If painting was an art, even so was carpentry. A mason was an artist: so was a shoemaker. Astronomy and grammar were arts: so was spinning. Apothecaries and lawyers were artists: so was a tailor. Dante uses the word artista as denoting a workman or craftsman, and when he wishes to emphasise the degeneracy of the citizens of his time as compared with those of the old Florentine race, he does so by saying that in those days their blood ran pure even nell’ ultimo artista (in the commonest workman). Let us be careful how we speak of these ages as “dark”; at least there were “retrievements out of the night.” Already before the tenth century the basilica of St. Germain des Prés was known as St. Germain le doré (the golden), from its glowing refulgence, and St. Bernard declaimed against the resplendent colour and gold in the churches of his time. Never since the age of Pericles has so great an effusion of beauty descended on the earth as during the wondrous thirteenth century in the Isle de France and especially in Paris.[62]

We pass from the enthusiasm of art to that of learning. From earliest times, schools, free to the poor, had been attached to every great abbey and cathedral in France. At the end of the eleventh century four were eminent at Paris: the schools of St. Denis, where the young princes and nobles were educated; of the Parvis Notre Dame, for the training of young clercs,[63] the famous Scola Parisiaca, referred to by Abelard; of St. Genevieve; and of St. Victor, founded by William of Champeaux. The fame of this teacher drew multitudes of young men from the provinces to Paris, among whom there came, about 1100, Peter Abelard, scion of a noble family of Nantes. By his wit, erudition and dialectical subtlety he soon eclipsed his master’s fame and was appointed to a chair of philosophy in the school of Notre Dame. William of Champeaux, jealous of his young rival, compassed his dismissal, and after teaching for a while at Melun, Abelard returned to Paris and opened a school on Mont St. Genevieve, whither crowds of students followed him. So great was the fame of this brilliant lecturer and daring thinker that his school was filled with eager listeners from all countries of Europe, even from Rome herself.

Abelard was proud and ambitious, and the highest prizes of an ecclesiastical and scholastic career seemed within his grasp. But Fulbert, canon of Notre Dame, had a niece, accomplished and passing fair, Héloïse by name, who was an enthusiastic admirer of the great teacher. It was proposed that Abelard should enter the canon’s house as her tutor, and Fulbert’s avarice made the proposition an acceptable one. Abelard, like Arnault Daniel, was a good craftsman in his mother tongue, a facile master of versi d’amore, which he would sing with a voice wondrously sweet and supple. Now Abelard was thirty-eight years of age: Héloïse seventeen. Amor al cor gentil ratio s’apprende,[64] and Minerva was not the only goddess who presided over their meetings. For a time Fulbert was blind, but scandal cleared his eyes and Abelard was expelled from the house. Héloïse followed and took refuge with her lover’s sister in Brittany, where a child, Astrolabe, was born. Peacemakers soon intervened and a secret marriage was arranged, which took place early one morning at Paris, Fulbert being present. But the lovers continued to meet; scandal was again busy and Fulbert published the marriage. Héloïse, that the master’s advancement in the Church might not be marred, gave the lie to her uncle and fled to the nuns of Argenteuil. Fulbert now plotted a dastardly revenge. By his orders Abelard was surprised in his bed, and the mutilation which, according to Eusebius, Origen performed on himself, was violently inflicted on the great teacher. All ecclesiastical preferment was thus rendered canonically impossible: Abelard became the talk of Paris, and in bitter humiliation retired to the abbey of St. Denis. Before he made his vows, however, he required of Héloïse that she should take the veil. The heart-broken creature reproached him for his disloyalty, and repeating the lines which Lucan puts into the mouth of Cornelia weeping for Pompey’s death, burst into tears and consented to take the veil.

A savage punishment was inflicted by the ecclesiastical courts on Fulbert’s ruffians, who were made to suffer the lex talionis and the loss of their eyes: the canon’s property was confiscated. The great master, although forbidden to open a school at St. Denis, was importuned by crowds of young men not to let his talents waste, and soon a country house near by was filled with so great a company of scholars that food could not be found for them. But enemies were vigilant and relentless, and he had shocked the timid by doubting the truth of the legend that Dionysius the Areopagite had come to France.

In 1124 certain of Abelard’s writings on the Trinity were condemned, and he took refuge at Nogent-sur-Seine, near Troyes, under the patronage of the Count of Champagne. He retired to a hermitage of thatch and reeds, the famous Paraclete, but even there students flocked to him, and young nobles were glad to live on coarse bread and lie on straw, that they might taste of wisdom, the bread of the angels. Again his enemies set upon him. He surrendered the Paraclete to Héloïse and a small sisterhood, and accepted the abbotship of St. Gildes in his own Brittany. A decade passed, and again he was seen in Paris. His enemies now determined to silence him. St. Bernard, the dictator of Christendom, denounced his writings. Abelard appealed for a hearing, and the two champions met in St. Stephen’s church at Sens before the king, the hierarchy and a brilliant and expectant audience. Abelard, the ever-victorious knight-errant of disputation, stood forth, eager for the fray, but St. Bernard simply rose and read out seventeen propositions from his opponent’s works, which he declared to be heretical. Abelard in disgust left the lists, and was condemned unheard to perpetual silence. The pope, to whom he appealed, confirmed the sentence, and the weary soldier of the mind, old and heart-broken, retired to Cluny. He gave up the struggle, was reconciled to his opponents, and died absolved by the pope near Chalons in 1142. His ashes were sent to Héloïse, and twenty years later she was laid beside him at the Paraclete. A well-known path, worn by generations of unhappy lovers, leads to a monument in Père-la-Chaise Cemetery at Paris which marks the last resting-place of Abelard and Héloïse, whose remains were transferred there in 1817.

It is commonly believed that Abelard’s school on Mont St. Genevieve was the origin of the Latin Quarter in Paris, but the migration to the south had probably begun before Abelard came, and was rather due to the overcrowding of the episcopal schools. Teachers and scholars began to swarm to the new quarter over the bridge where quiet, purer air and better accommodation were found. Ordinances of Bishop Gilbert, 1116, and Stephen, 1124, transcribed by Félibien, make this clear. So disturbed were the canons by the numbers of students in the cloister, that externes were to be no longer admitted, nor other schools allowed on the north side where the canons lodged. The growing importance of the new schools, which tended to the advantage of the abbey of St. Genevieve, soon alarmed the bishops, and the theologians were ordered to lecture only between the two bridges (the Petit and Grand Ponts.) But it was Abelard’s brilliant career that attracted like a lodestar the youth of Europe to Paris, and made that city the “oven where the intellectual bread of the world was baked.” Providence, it was said, had given Empire to Germany, Priestcraft to Italy, Learning to France. What a constellation of great names glows in the spiritual firmament of Paris: William of Champeaux, Peter Lombard, Maurice de Sully, Pierre de Chartreux, Abelard, Gilbert[65] l’Universel, John of Salisbury, Adrian IV., St. Thomas of Canterbury. Small wonder that the youth of the twelfth century sought the springs of learning at Paris!