PARIS

FROM THE EARLIEST PERIOD TO THE PRESENT DAY

VOLUME I

THE SEINE AT BOUGIVAL
PHOTOGRAVURE, AFTER THE PAINTING BY JULIUS L. STEWART

IL FLOTTE SANS ÊTRE SUBMERGÉ

PARIS

FROM THE EARLIEST PERIOD TO THE PRESENT DAY

VOLUME I

PHILADELPHIA
GEORGE BARRIE & SON, PUBLISHERS

COPYRIGHT, 1899, BY GEORGE BARRIE & SON

CONTENTS

VOLUME I
[INTRODUCTION]
[CHAPTER I]
GALLO-ROMAN AND PRE-MEDIÆVAL PERIODS
[CHAPTER II]
THE COURT AND THE UPPER CLASSES
[CHAPTER III]
THE BOURGEOIS AND THE LOWER CLASSES

INTRODUCTION

INTRODUCTION

Well, the heights and depths which we are called upon to contemplate are not unendurable, but they are certainly in many respects unexcelled. "France," says one of her most eloquent and dignified historians, "has justly been termed the soldier of God;" "Other continents have monkeys," says a learned German philosopher; "Europe has the French." Any community or locality which offers, or is considered by intelligent observers to offer, such a range as this, is certainly worthy of high renown and deep research, and it is not too much to say that Paris justifies her fame. Within her walls the human mind has displayed its loftiest development, and the human passions their most insane excesses; her art and her literature have erected beacon-lights for all the ages to come, and have but too frequently fallen into the depths of more than swinish filth; her science of government has ranged from the Code Napoléon to the statutes of Belial himself; her civilization has attained an elegance of refinement unknown to the Greeks, and her cigars and lucifer-matches are a disgrace to Christendom!

Happily, as in several other human institutions, there is more of good than of bad. The so-called "seamy side" of cities is not like that of flour-bags,—equal in extent and importance to the fair outer surface that meets the eye. Much as has been published of the depravity of Paris, it is not that, but the splendid activity of her material and intellectual civilization, the serious confronting of the heavy problems of humanity, the intelligent accumulation of the treasures of the mind and the hand, legislation, literature, art, science, that impress the intelligent visitor. Moreover, it is the annals of unhappy nations only that are said to be interesting, and it is impossible that a quick human interest should not attach to the contemplation of this capital which has attacked so many problems, maintained so many struggles, and endured such crushing reverses. In the light of her most troubled history the import becomes clear of the galley on her shield, and her motto: "Floats, but sinks not." But few capitals have been more frequently, apparently, on the point of being submerged. Even as these lines are being written, it is agitated by the protracted and cumulating effects of a military and social agitation which, in the language of the President of the Cabinet of Ministers, "is deplorable, which paralyzes all commerce and creates a situation intolerable to all."

Therefore, let us hasten to contemplate this great and most admirable Babylon before Cyrus comes.

Paris, Rue Boissonade.

INTRODUCTION

GALLO-ROMAN AND PRE-MEDIÆVAL
PERIODS

GALLO-ROMAN AND
PRE-MEDIÆVAL

Lutetia, of which the modern French make Lutèce, is supposed to have been derived from the Celtic louk-teih, which signified the place of morasses; and the name of the Parisii from the Celtic par, a species of boat, and gwys, in composition ys, man, whence parys, boatmen,—these islanders being supposed to have been skilful navigators. But they are said to have called themselves Loutouchezi,—that is to say, a residence in the midst of the waters. Other etymologists cast doubts upon all these deductions, and the matter is not very important. The early Parisians were one of the smallest of the Gaulish tribes, and preferred the islands to the mainland as a safer place of residence; they were surrounded by the Carnutes, Senones, and other, stronger people whose names have not been perpetuated. Of their ten islands and sand-banks, which were preserved until late in the Middle Ages, there are now only two remaining, the Ile Saint-Louis and Ile de la Cité. The ancient town, like the modern one, lay in the centre of a "tertiary" basin, about sixty-five mètres, or two hundred and ten feet, above the level of the sea, broken here and there by low hills. The modern historian, Duruy, quotes Strabo as finding a proof of divine providence in the fortunate configuration of the soil of Gaul; and that writer testifies that the whole country was inhabited, even in the marshes and woods. "The cause of this is, however, rather a dense population than the industry of the inhabitants. For the women there are both very prolific and excellent nurses, while the men devote themselves rather to war than to husbandry."

The antiquity of the inhabitants of Gaul is now pushed back by the learned far beyond the days of Cæsar. M. A. Thieullen, in two communications addressed to the Société d'anthropologie at Paris (January and February, 1898), maintained that the chipped flint arrow-heads found at Chelles and Saint-Acheul, which have been considered as the earliest works of prehistoric man, are, in reality, in common with the polished stone hatchets of the Neolithic age, the products of an industry in a high state of development, the result of successive essays by numberless generations. In this theory he is supported by other scientists, among them the English geologist, Prestwich; and in this insistence upon the artistic quality of the chipped and polished flints and the prodigious number of rudimentary utensils which have preceded and accompanied them is found another argument in favor of the great antiquity of man and his existence in the tertiary period. The soil of Paris has furnished many of these superior flints, and the comparative state of civilization to which the locality early attained is further testified to by the discovery, in the early months of this year, 1898, by an enterprising proprietor on the edge of the forest of Fontainebleau, of the site of a prehistoric pottery on his grounds. This locality, opposite the village of Ecuelle, was already noted for the menhir, or prehistoric upright stone, standing on the right bank of the canal. The ancient potteries seem to have occupied a space about five hundred mètres in length and two hundred in width; at the depth of sixty-five or seventy centimètres below the surface there is found "a black sand, burned, beaten down, trodden, which gives forth a resonant sound when attacked by the pick-axe; this arises from the fact that it has been, through a long series of centuries, tormented by the incessant passage of men and the innumerable fires of the furnaces." From the specimens of pottery extracted from this sand, it is concluded that this manufactory had been maintained from the Neolithic age down to the Gallo-Roman period. In the little village of La Mouthe, in the department of the Dordogne, farther south, have been discovered within the last few years, in a cavern, very curious and not unskilful outline drawings on the rock, sometimes touched up with color, of now extinct animals,—the extreme age of these works of art being demonstrated by the fact that they are in many cases partially covered with stalactites. The learned scientists who have uncovered and photographed these incised drawings conclude, from their appearance and from the fragments of animals' bones found in the cavern, that they are the work of men of the Neolithic age and the Palæolithic, which preceded it. In short, there is every reason to believe, on the strength of all the testimony which modern science has wrested from the unwilling records of the past, that the earliest inhabitants of the islands of the Seine were contemporary with the mammoth, the cave-bear, the auroch, and the rhinoceros with cleft nostrils.

FRAGMENT OF ROMAN AQUEDUCT, STILL IN EXISTENCE, ON THE PROPERTY OF
M. RASPAIL, AT ARCUEIL.

It is not to be supposed, however, that these very ancient texts are read without the necessary stumbling over obscure passages and much upsetting of cherished historical truth. The finest presentations of ancient records that we find in grave historians are now set aside by learned archæologists in communications to the Académie des Sciences à Paris or the Académie des Inscriptions et Belles-Lettres. Even the original number of islands in the Seine and Cæsar's statements concerning the Gauls and their manners and customs are now disputed. When it comes to the origin of things and of peoples, the erudition is profound. M. G. de Mortillet proposes for the epoch quaternaire or pléistocène four successive divisions,—in their order of antiquity, the Chelléen, the Moustérien, the Solutréen, and the Magdalénien; M. Perrier du Carne thinks that the traces of the Solutré and of the Madeleine show them to have been derived from two races long contemporary on the same soil, of which the former were autochthonous and the latter, immigrants, who came in with the reindeer and followed him when he retreated northward. M. Piette objects to the word Magdalénien, and proposes to replace it by glyptique, for, during this period, man learned to carve bones with flint instruments; after the Solutré he places the epoch Eburnéenne, and after that, the Tarandienne, characterized by instruments in reindeer's horns. After the quaternary period, Professor Alexandre Bertrand, of the École du Louvre, places the Mégalithiques, whom he thinks belonged to the great ethnological family of the Touranians which preceded the Aryans in Europe, and who erected the great stone monuments, dolmens, menhirs, cromlechs, etc., formerly called druidical, found in various parts of Europe. Several of these monuments mégalithiques have been discovered in Paris and its environs,—a street of the Faubourg du Temple owes its name of Pierre-Levée (raised stone) to the fact that at its opening, in 1782, an enormous ancient rock was found artificially supported on two others, the funerary tumulus, or mound, which formerly covered it having disappeared.

As it is impossible to attribute any longer these prehistoric monuments to the "Celts," or to "their priests, the Druids," so do others of our historical illusions vanish. M. Duruy, in his learned Histoire de France, states that at the dawn of history the country known as Gaul was "divided between three or four hundred tribes (peuplades) belonging to the three great families,—the Celts, the Iberians, and the Belgians." M. Guizot says that "in the south were Iberians or Aquitanians, Phœnicians and Greeks; in the north and northwest, Kymrians or Belgians; everywhere else, Gauls or Celts, the most numerous settlers, who had the honor of giving their name to the country." M. Salomon Reinach, in his detailed description of the monuments in the Museum of Saint-Germain-en-Laye, under the general title of Antiquités nationales, declines to recognize the race celtique; in accord with the science of anthropology he distinguishes various Gaulish types and is aware that they nowhere present themselves in a pure state. Professor Bertrand "superposes" upon his Mégalithiques, whose distinguishing trait in Europe is their use of polished stone, another race, numerically inferior and much less ancient; these are the "tribus celtiques or celtisées of the Aryan race." When they arrived in Gaul, they were already familiar with the use of metals, especially bronze, beginning to be acquainted with iron; they were pastoral and agricultural, and burned their dead. About the sixth century B.C. appeared a third group, the tribus galatiques, Helvetians, Kymrians, Belgians; they were wandering bands of warriors, who used iron implements only and buried their dead. "From the superposition, rather than from the fusion, of these divers elements has resulted that which is called la nation gauloise or celtique."

Naturally, the religions of these varied nations were as diversified as their origins. The Druids, according to Professor Bertrand, so far from forming the priesthood of a practically homogeneous race, can be said to have had no influence upon the religion of the people, who were alien to them and who remained faithful to their own worship of the spirits or powers in nature and to their superstitious practices. "Druidism was, then, neither a dogma, nor a religion, nor a particular theogony, but a social institution with an organization analogous to that of the great abbeys of Ireland in the fifth and sixth centuries, or to the Lamaism of Thibet. The Druids lived in communism, like the Lamas." Moreover, M. Bertrand refuses the Druids all their fine old qualities,—human sacrifices; worship of stones; solstitial ceremonies, such as the Yule-log and fires on the eve of Saint John; the herbs of Saint John; the worship of fountains; the worship of trees, and medical prescriptions. Even more, what Guizot calls their "noblest characteristic, a general and strong, but vague and incoherent, belief in the immortality of the soul," was less a particular doctrine of their own than a sentiment innate in the race; "they had only to develop ideas the germ of which had not been imported by them." Nevertheless, so well organized was their communal order that they were, before the Roman epoch, the only central, definite power capable of consecutiveness in its conceptions and of unity in its views, and their influence over a gross and ignorant people was proportionally great.

To the chamanisme, or belief in the spirits that pervade nature, and in the power of man over them by magic arts, of the original Touranians, the Celtic tribes brought the worship of natural forces,—the sun, fire, torrents, tempests, mountains, etc.; but neither they nor the Druids had any human figures or symbols in their pantheon. The invasions galatiques or kimrobelge, on the contrary, brought in from the Orient a cult already strongly anthropomorphous, and with these symbols, traditions, and divinities those of the Greeks and Romans became mingled to a greater or lesser degree that it is impossible to determine, because, as it appears, all that we really know of the Gaulish religion before the Roman conquest is reduced to a few lines in Polybius, in which can be found the name of Perkunas, the Perkun of the Slavs. Cæsar identifies the gods of the Gauls with the Roman ones, Mercury, Apollo, Mars, Jupiter, and Minerva; and M. André Lefèvre, in the Revue mensuelle de l'École d'anthropologie, asks, without being able to answer: "How is it possible that such men as Cæsar and Tacitus were able to confound with Mercury the supreme gods of the Gauls and the Germans; but, still more, how is it that the Gaul should have adopted with enthusiasm the Latin name and forgotten the Gaulish name of his supreme god?" M. Reinach is considered to have proved beyond a doubt that the god with the mallet, the Dispater of the Gallo-Roman period, was a sort of copy, in Gaulish attire, of the Egyptian Serapis; and the inscriptions of the imperial epoch testify to the diffusion of the worship of the divinities of Alexandria from Arles and Nîmes, in the extreme south, to Besançon, almost on the borders of Switzerland, and Soissons, northeast of Paris. Nevertheless, those archæologists who have thought they found traces of the art of Egypt and Babylon in that of the original cave-dwellers are now considered to have been deceiving themselves; and M. Reinach has modified the opinions he held a few years ago on the early religious art of Gaul. "In short, what we know of Gaulish mythology amounts to nothing, or practically nothing."

Various rude images and fragments of altars found under the modern pavements of Paris at different dates and localities—among others, under the choir of Notre-Dame in 1710—have revealed the names, if not the characters, of some of the ancient divinities of the soil, Esus, Jovis, Volcanus, Tarvos trigaramos, Cernunnos.

But if the scientists grope doubtingly in these twilights of history, the romancers relate boldly. One of them, M. Henri Lavedan, has been calling up the Parisienne of the Lacustrine age, "gran' maman archi-centennaire" of her of the present day. This is how she was. "Large, thick, and short, with a vigorous figure, shaking out coarse and matted hair, the feet bare, the arms bare, the breast half bare and unrestrained under her species of primitive corset. The body is that of a handsome and robust decent human animal, a tanned skin, somewhat hairy. The feet are large and powerful, like the hands, with cutting nails, square and hard. The visage, high in color, with features that are simple and elementary, is lit up by eyes grey or blue, eyes limpid and tranquil, which regard without vivacity, without appearing and disappearing lights, without surprise, the eyes of an animal under the yoke and resigned to it, eyes only too well acquainted with the eternal landscape which they have been reflecting ever since they were first opened. The step is slow, sure, heavy, and majestic. Under her petticoat of sombre color may be divined two great legs, the legs, almost, of a man, two legs of labor and of endurance. She sings naturally, this woman, when she is alone, vague songs, sort of fugues of savages, very simple, which seem to have neither beginning nor end, but in the company of others she is almost taciturn, replying by gestures, by signs, accomplishing her task with a passive regularity. She scarcely knows the lighter shades of sentiments and expressions. She laughs or she weeps. No smiling. When she laughs, it is with a large display of the solid white teeth of a carnivorous animal; when she weeps, it is with the deep sobs of a beaten child. She is strong and patient like the ox, she runs like the horse, she resists cold, heat, and fatigue; her sleep is profound and without dreams. She is more mother than wife, in the animal sense of the word; she is capable of courage, of rude goodness and of devotion, but all of these naturally and by instinct. Her life may be hard and long, she may retain until a very advanced age the plenitude of her vigor, and die splitting wood or turning the mill.

"Should the wife cease to please her husband, he sells her again; should she commit a fault, he strips her (the garments will serve for the new spouse); then he takes her by the hair and smothers her in the marsh. Nevertheless, however miserable may be her condition of a domestic animal, this creature has passions. Tacitus informs us that adultery was not unknown to the purchased wife. The male children belonged to the father, and always remained with him; as to the aged, the old relatives, useless and cumbering, they were put 'in a place apart,' a sort of hollow in the neighborhood of the hole for the hogs or the enclosure for the cattle, and there was thrown to them the remnants of the meals. The family sentiment, the voice of kindred blood, did not, as yet, make itself heard very distinctly."

THE BATHS OF THE EMPEROR JULIAN, CORNER BOULEVARDS ST. MICHEL AND ST. GERMAIN. Restoration.

This information may be supplemented by various extracts from the ancient historians, who give us the usual picture of early man in the barbarous stage, bellicose, blood-thirsty, brutal, having the one virtue of courage. Cæsar says that when a man of importance died, his wives were tortured and put to death by fire if suspected of being instrumental in his taking off; but a short time before his conquests it was the custom to burn with the defunct his slaves and his favorite clients. It was also said that the women were not constrained in their choice of husbands, and that the latter were obliged to furnish an equivalent for the dowry brought by the wife. Human sacrifices were offered on certain great occasions, and it was thought possible that one of the upper stones of the great sepulchre discovered at Meudon in 1845, indicated one of the sites dedicated to these offerings.

Of the many attempts that have been made to restore the primitive man in his environments, one of the most learned and interesting is that shown by M. Cormon, the painter, in his series of large decorations for the plafond and walls of some ethnological museum, exhibited in the Salon of 1898. But an artist is an impossible archæologist; the more of an artist he is, the more will he be unwilling to represent the merely bestial, as the scientist finds it; and though the original inhabitant of the valley of the Seine and other favored spots may have circulated in some such early landscape, and have garbed himself and tattooed himself somewhat as the painter here paints him, it is probable that there was far less of the picturesque and presentable about him, of grace of attitude and whiteness of skin in his women-folk, than in any artist's presentation on a self-respecting canvas.

The habitations of the early Parisian were equally unlike those familiar to the Cook's tourist. On the pedestal of an antique statue of Melpomene of heroic size in the Louvre is a relief representing the head of a supposed Gaul defending his house against a Roman soldier, and this sculpture, confirmed by others on the column of Antoninus at Rome of those of the German barbarians, gives this dwelling as a species of circular, upright hut, covered with a conical-shaped roof constructed of branches and reeds, or thatch, or perhaps of a half-spherical piece of wood.

In the soil of the tertiary, or quaternary, basin in which Paris lies are found traces of marine plants, oyster-shells, skeletons of fish, etc., which indicate that it has risen from the bottom of the sea. As every one knows, the Seine, flowing in a general direction from east to west, curves toward the north to traverse the heart of the city, the former Palais de l'Industrie, but just demolished, having occupied nearly the centre of the upward curve of this bow. On the south, the river receives the waters of the Bièvre, a feeble stream which flows through a narrow valley, and, farther eastward, those of the river Marne. Under the Roman domination and that of the first Merovingian kings, that part of the city lying immediately south of the river seems to have become the most populous and important almost as soon as the narrow limits of the original islands became too confining. The pride of the Faubourg Saint-Germain may date itself back for some fifteen centuries. A central, principal street traversed the city from south to north, entering it in the general direction of the Rue Saint-Jacques, passing on the east side of the imperial palace whose ruins may still be seen in the Musée des Thermes, at the corner of the Boulevard Saint-Germain and Boulevard Saint-Michel. Under the Rue Saint-Jacques remains of the ancient pavement have been found at a great depth, and a fragment of it is preserved in the Musée de Cluny. The Roman street crossed the small arm of the Seine on a wooden bridge, near where is now the Petit-Pont, traversed the Ile de la Cité, at the western end of what is to-day the Place du Parvis-Notre-Dame, and crossed the larger branch of the river near the site of the present Pont Notre-Dame. On the northern shore, it followed for some distance nearly the course of the present Rue Saint-Denis, and then forked,—one branch continuing in a general northerly direction toward Senlis, and the other turning off to the northwest, in the direction of the Bourse, toward Clichy, Saint-Ouen, Saint-Denis, and, finally, Rouen by the valley of the Montmorency.

Of the stately buildings erected by the Roman officers sent to govern the city on the Seine and the province of which it was the capital, the only remains now above ground are those preserved in the Musée des Thermes, in somewhat curious juxtaposition with the late fifteenth-century Hôtel de Cluny. These ruins represent the great Roman baths of the palace, the frigidarium, the piscine, the tepidarium, and, somewhat deeper, the hypocaustum, or furnace for heating. By their size and importance, these ancient walls testify to the dignity of the imperial palace which rose on this site, and, surrounded by its gardens, extended along the southern bank of the Seine. Of the date of the erection of this Palatium Thermarum seu Thermæ Parisiaci nothing definite is known; it is generally ascribed to Constantius, surnamed Chlorus, "the pale," father of Constantine the Great, who died in 306 A.D. It is considered certain that it was occupied by Julian, and by Valentinian I, and Valens; after the expulsion of the Romans by the Franks, it served as a residence for the kings of the first and second race, and was still an important edifice in 1180 when Philippe-Auguste presented it to his chamberlain, Henri. About 1340 it passed into the possession of the Abbé of Cluny, Pierre de Chaslus.

These very antique walls are preserved by the national authorities in a manner that might be considered as more satisfactory to the lovers of the picturesque than to the archæologists. They are exposed to all the disintegrating influences of the sun and rain, much blackened by the Parisian climate, which darkens everything exposed to it, and largely overgrown with creeping vines. They are constructed of squared stones interspersed with layers of brick, with rectangular and arched niches, filled-up arches at the base of which may be seen still the remnants of the prows of ships, and in the niches are still the remains of the earthenware pipes that conveyed the water to the baths. The student of architecture is interested to observe here that the Roman bricks were much longer than ours, and only about an inch and a half thick. Their original, cheerful red still shows occasionally through the Parisian blackness. He will, however, probably be somewhat disturbed by the fine indifference of the authorities to styles and chronologies. In the place of the missing wall of the piscine is set the arched porch of the cloister of the Benedictines of Argenteuil; inside the enclosures are tumulary stones, with inscriptions in Hebrew, found on the site of the publishing house of Hachette. In the pleasant green garden in front of these ruins, and in which the bare-legged Parisian children play at soldiers or at digging gravel in the paths, are more incongruous mediæval bits of architecture and sculpture,—placid Madonnas and Annunciations, much defaced by time; gargoyles from the church of Saint-Germain-l'Auxerrois, in what may be called the size of life, agonizing and tormented by queer little beasts like weasels under their throats or bellies, and, guarding the gateway at the angle of the boulevards, three great, deformed figures of the animals of the Evangelists, the Lion, the Eagle, and the Ox, from the tower of Saint-Jacques-la-Boucherie, where they have been replaced by copies.

For a number of centuries these ruins were forgotten, and were even concealed until 1810 under hanging-gardens constructed above them. In 1819 it was proposed to establish in the Thermes a museum for the Gaulish and Roman antiquities discovered in the soil of Paris; but this project was not carried out until 1836, when, through the action of the Prefect of the Seine and the Conseil Municipal, the remains of the Roman palace became the property of the city. Seven years later, the State having acquired the Hôtel de Cluny and the collection Sommerard, the city offered the Palais des Thermes to the national government, and the two museums were united in one national one. The project of M. E. du Sommerard, of clearing away all the surrounding modern buildings, opening the new streets and planting the garden, was finally put in the way of being realized in 1856.

The site of this palace, the ruins of which are among the most important in France, was on the lower slopes of Mount Lucotitius, afterward the mount of Sainte-Geneviève, overlooking both the city and the Roman road to Genabum (Orléans). Its dependent buildings and enclosures seem to have extended as far south as the Rue Soufflot, in front of the Panthéon, ruins of foundation-walls having been located at various periods in this quarter. Its magnificent baths were probably preserved during the earlier Christian centuries, when the civilization of the Romans had not entirely disappeared, until the siege of Paris by the Normans in the ninth century. On this (southern) side of the river have also been discovered the ruins of an amphitheatre, traces of a quarter or barracks for soldiers, another establishment of baths, the aqueduct of Arcueil, a great cemetery on the southern slopes of Mount Lucotitius, secondary roads, and a port on the smaller arm of the Seine. In the Luxembourg garden have been unearthed at various periods numerous fragments of painted walls; seven hundred large Roman medals in bronze and two hundred in silver, all enclosed in a species of chest of tiles, and covered with a silver plate, and supposed to have been the treasury of a rich Gallo-Roman country-house; a statuette of Mercury; a bust of Cybele; pits to preserve grain, etc.

Another of these important palaces or suburban villas was seated on the northern slopes of the Butte Montmartre, which rises some hundred mètres above the level of the Seine, on the other side of the river,—a site which gave it an admirable extended view over the city and the surrounding plains. The most important ruins which have been discovered north of the river are the remnants of the aqueduct to convey water from Passy, large basins on the site of the Palais-Royal, various highways branching off to the north and east and extensive cemeteries near these roads, and numerous Roman medals and coins in various localities,—sufficient to demonstrate the existence of an extensive and important population. Montmartre is supposed to have derived its name from having been the site of a temple of Mars (Mons Martis); or from having been the scene of the martyrdom of Saint Denis, the first bishop of Paris, and his companions, A.D. 270 (Mons Martyrum).

Buried under the modern pavement of the Ile de la Cité, the Gaulish Oppidum, are many vestiges of the Roman occupation. In 1847 numerous remains of the construction of houses during this period and of what was considered to be a church dedicated to the Virgin were discovered under the open place in front of Notre-Dame; of these, careful drawings were made, engraved, and published in the Statistique monumentale de Paris and the structures then covered up again; in the following year, excavations made in the course of enlarging the Palais de Justice brought to light in the court of the Sainte-Chapelle and under the houses to the south of it remains of walls of the ancient Roman palace. The old historians of Paris, indeed, relying upon the testimony of Ammianus Marcellinus, state that one of the two Roman palaces was situated in the western end of the island which formed the ancient Lutetia. In 1844 the laying out of a new street between the Palais de Justice and the Hôtel-Dieu revealed two portions of edifices the use of which was unknown, but which, by the thickness of their walls and the nature of their construction, were supposed to have formed some part of the public structures. It has been considered that these various vestiges of important buildings situated in the centre of Lutetia indicate that they surrounded an open market-place or commercial exchange.

But the discovery of one of the most important and interesting vestiges of the Gallo-Roman city was reserved for the latter part of the year 1869, when, in laying out the Rue Monge, on the eastern slopes of Mont Sainte-Geneviève, there was revealed the ancient amphitheatre, with which no Roman city of importance could dispense. Although these important vestiges lay only some twelve mètres below the surface, and though at least two passages in mediæval chronicles were known which alluded to the locality, this contribution to the history of the city was delayed to this late date. Alexandre Neckham, a professor in Paris, writing in 1180, mentions, in the course of four verses, the vast ruins of a Roman amphitheatre, dedicated to Venus, which was situated near the Abbey of Saint-Victor. Adrien de Valois cites a cartulary, or registry of a monastery, dated in 1310, in which mention is made of three sections of vineyards situated in the district known as les Areinnes. A date for the construction of this amphitheatre was conjectured by M. Adrien de Longpérier, from the bringing together of three of the broken stones of the edifice—selected from the sixteen bearing inscriptions now in the Musée Carnavelet and from twelve others bearing similar inscriptions and evidently from the same source, but which were found in 1847 in the Parvis-Notre-Dame, having been taken in later days to construct the wall of fortification of the city. By placing three of these fragments in order, M. de Longpérier was enabled to decipher the names of two of the Gaulish emperors who lived in the second half of the third century of our era, from which he concluded that it was a portion of the imperial inscription, and that the construction of the amphitheatre accordingly dated from this period. The pride of the Parisians, however, took offence at this interpretation, and it was considered as highly improbable that the Romans "should have delayed for more than two centuries and a half to construct, for the use of the population of a city as important as Lutèce had become, a monument similar to those the ruins of which have been enumerated in more than fifty Gallo-Roman cities,—a figure which shows how much the diversions of the amphitheatre and the theatre were relished by the Gauls." M. Gourdon de Genouillac, in his history of Paris, decides that the structure dates from the second century.

It may be observed that, in the third century, Roman Gaul became a practically independent State,—from A.D. 258 to 273, from Posthumus to Tetricus, its connections with Italy ceased, and it maintained its own emperors and its own legions. This was in sympathy with the rising spirit of nationalities, awakened throughout the empire by Septimus Severus, but in this ephemeral empire of the Gauls the old Celtic influence had but little part. "If there took place," said M. Camille Jullian before the Académie des Inscriptions in 1896, "as we would willingly believe, a Celtic renaissance at the opening of the third century, it was entirely superficial, and doubtless slightly factitious; it resembled that reaction in the life, the language, the traditions of the provinces which the French Romanticism brought about in 1815. Like that, it in no way changed the ideas of the nation, it had no influence upon the political and social destinies of Gaul." With regard to the fondness of the ancient Gauls for histrionic and spectacular performances, we may quote M. Reinach again: "The qualities and the defects of the present inhabitants of France may all be found again among the Gaulish contemporaries of Cato and Cæsar. The warlike humor, the facility of elocution, the curiosity—often turbulent, have remained, throughout the centuries, the portion, more or less enviable, of the inhabitants of Gaul."

An important publication in folio by Firmin-Didot, Paris à travers les Ages, gives the following description of the amphitheatre of Lutetia. "But few constructions are visible around the arena, elliptic in shape and measuring fifty-four mètres on its long axis and forty-seven on the short one. This was the space reserved for the combats of animals, for the hunts and other spectacles. A podium, or enclosing wall, surrounded this arena in its entire circuit, and the thickness of this wall was such that it resisted the thrust of the sides of the Mount Lucotitius, on the eastern slopes of which the edifice was constructed. The places arranged for the spectators of the games, around the arena, were evidently placed, on the west, on the slope of Mount Lucotitius, where have been found walls converging toward the centre of the structure to support the tiers of seats running in the contrary direction. The benches may have been supported by constructions which have now disappeared; the various fragments of architecture discovered in the excavations must have formed part of the decoration of the edifice, as well as the stones that were employed in the military wall of fortification of Lutetia during the later period of decline."

The discovery of these ruins caused much excitement among the savants of Paris at the time. The Société de Numismatique visited the excavations in a body, several archæological and antiquarian associations united in drawing up a paper, which was presented to the Emperor, advocating the preservation of this "antique theatre of the popular festivals of the Gauls, the arena in which had perished for liberty of conscience the ancestors of the French nation, the field in which sleep the martyrs of Lutèce." A petition was likewise addressed to the Chamber of Deputies; Napoleon III visited the locality in person; but the Municipal Council hesitated before the expenditure of 300,000 francs for this purpose, and the ground was actually purchased by the Compagnie Générale des Omnibus.

This interesting excavation, but little known even to the Parisians, has now been transformed into a public garden, in the quarter between the Panthéon and the Jardin des Plantes, and is well worth visiting. The ancient Mont Lucotitius still heaves itself under the modern Parisian pavement, and the grades frequently become so steep that they have to be abandoned, and terraces and retaining-walls substituted. Although much less than a half of the oval of the original arena has been uncovered, the explorations have reduced the houses on the Rue Monge to but little more than tall façades. From under their rear walls emerge the amphitheatre and some of the curving rows of seats in stone, the latter much restored. In the walls of the arena are two rectangular, barred entrances, and one lower, arched one, from which we may imagine the gladiators or the wild beasts emerging. The floor of the arena is left in a roughly gravelled condition; at present, nothing more formidable is to be encountered there than three very little French boys making mud-pies in the puddle formed by last night's rain. A fourth, still smaller, is at some distance, absorbed in some dry engineering of his own at the foot of the old wall. Seated in the steep little green park which rises above the terraced seats, crowned with trees and shrubberies, and vocal with a prodigious twittering of birds, are three or four idle, bare-headed young women in "shirt-waists," one with a lover, and an old gentleman with a red ribbon reading his morning newspaper. The traveller can place himself on one of the benches in this pleasant little greenery, look down on the infantile engineers below, and make appropriate reflections.

A still more important architectural feature of the ancient city was the great aqueduct which supplied the baths of the palace on the river, its fountains and those of the populous quarter around it. The waters of three or four small streams to the south of the capital were united and conveyed in a channel, lined with cement, 19,100 mètres in length, which traversed the slopes of the hills on the eastern side of the Bièvre, and remains of which have been found at various points. To cross the valley and the stream, an aqueduct was constructed on arches at the locality which took the name of Arcueil, and where some of the masonry is still preserved in modern construction, "this aqueduct being some four hundred mètres long and fifty (?) high." It is computed that a supply of twenty-four cubic mètres of water was furnished every twenty-four hours. Remains of other and smaller aqueducts have been discovered at various points in the city. At Passy, surrounding the present Trocadéro, there were springs of mineral waters, which were conveyed to the city by terra-cotta pipes, passing along the banks of the Seine. In 1781, in the gardens of the Palais-Royal, were discovered the remains of great basins which are supposed to have been the piscines of the hygienic baths. Remains of Roman aqueducts have been found at various other localities in France, at Nîmes, at Lyons, at Metz, etc., and that over the Gard is still standing in part.

Among the bridges constructed by the Gauls, Cæsar mentions that of Melun on the Seine; one on the Allier, near Vichy; that of Genabum (Orléans), and that of Lutetia, over the larger arm of the Seine, on the site of the present Pont Notre-Dame. Of that over the Allier and of the Parisian one, some of the ancient piles have been found in the bed of the rivers.

Remains of the ancient wall of fortification of the capital have also been brought to light, at various localities and at different dates. The excavations in the Parvis-Notre-Dame in 1847 discovered a section of the Roman wall twenty-six mètres in length, as well as the substructure of the porch and the front portion of the nave of the original basilica, constructed by Childebert and dedicated to the Virgin. These latter foundations, some thirty-two mètres in front of the present cathedral, demonstrate by their position, and by the probable width of the primitive edifice in proportion to its length, that they were constructed to the west and inside of the enclosing wall of the city, a portion of which had been found under the choir of the cathedral. The basilica constructed by the son of Clovis probably rose on the site of the altars consecrated to the Roman or Gaulish gods, Jupiter, Vulcan, Esus, and others, and which, before the construction of the city wall, were visible from all sides. The enclosing wall, on the contrary, fenced in the basilica, since it was necessary to protect this part of the city, as well as all others. The somewhat unimposing aspect of Notre-Dame, which was founded in 1163, may be ascribed in part to the raising of the level of all the surrounding soil, for, as the histories tell us, so late as 1748, it was reached only by ascending a flight of thirteen steps, whereas now it is on the ordinary street-level.

This wall of defence was not commenced till about 406, when the barbarians began to invade Gaul, and was apparently constructed in great haste, if we may judge by the manner in which materials were borrowed from surrounding buildings of all kinds. It is described as being something over three and a half mètres in thickness at its base, which was constructed in rough stone, frequently of small size, and sloping to a height of two mètres. On this was erected a wall of dressed stones, each successive layer set back, like a step, so that at the top it was only some two mètres in width. It might be thought that this manner of building offered considerable facilities to an escalading enemy.

On the largest stone of those discovered in 1711 under the choir of Notre-Dame was deciphered an inscription which recorded the erection of this altar to Jupiter, "very great, very beneficent," in the reign of Tiberius Cæsar, by the corporation of nautæ, or mariners, apparently the most powerful in the city, and the prows of the ships at the foot of the arches in the ancient palace of Thermes are supposed to have been connected with the same guild, though this architectural ornament is by no means uncommon in ancient art. It is from these Nautæ Parisiaci that the modern city derives its arms,—a vessel with distended sails. (If any doubting tourist inquire concerning the maritime commerce of Paris, he will be proudly referred to the barges which may be seen at all the quais, and, even more, to the little steamers from London which contrive to get under the bridges.) In some of the modern records this ancient corporation is given great importance—with many sans doutes and il paraîts—in the history of the city, both before and during the sway of the Romans. Cæsar found it "fully organized," though it was founded on the Roman corporation of the Nautæ Tyberis, navigators of the Tiber, composed of senators, magistrates, and knights, which transported grain and other merchandise from the port of Ostia to the capital; and it was the original of the later maison de la marchandise de l'eau, de l'hôtel de Ville et du conseil municipal of Paris. The activity of the Lutetian shippers and navigators covered the territory bathed by the Seine, the Marne, and the Oise, all of them quite navigable. The ruins of the Gallo-Roman buildings discovered in the Cité in 1844, at the opening of the Rue de Constantine, were the remains of a market or forum for the sale of provisions; and the corporation had, near the port, an office or bureau for the regulation of this river commerce. Opposite the port, on the northern side of the Seine, they controlled also another point of landing, at the Grève, where, later, was established the prévôté de l'eau, which developed into the Parisian municipality. The port on the Cité, on the larger arm of the Seine, received in the Middle Ages the name of Saint Landri, this bishop having had an oratory, and perhaps his residence, in the neighborhood. Under the Later Empire, in the reign of Posthumus, the northern suburb having increased in size and importance, a market was placed at the Champeaux, on the site of the present Halles Centrales, and the port of the Grève became, as it has remained ever since, a point of landing for merchandise coming from the upper Seine. The port on the southern side of the river, near the great road from Genabum, was established on the site of the mediæval Quai de la Tournelle, the great tower which replaced that of the southern wall of fortification of the city built by Philippe-Auguste. This quai still serves at the present day as a landing-place for the barges.

In the reigns of Louis the Fat and Louis VII, the successors of the Nautæ Parisiaci were known as mercatores aquæ parisiaci, and they were the origin of the municipal body charged with the policing of the river navigation and commerce. Later in the Middle Ages, this small species of Hanseatic League had a commercial station at Marsons-sur-Seine, and its maritime jurisdiction extended as far as the city of Mantes, situated on the western limits of the territory of the Parisii. The sources of the Seine, near the farm of the Vergerots in the commune of Saint-Germain-la-Feuille, were held in great veneration in Gallo-Roman times, and a temple, the remains of which have been found, was erected in their honor. In 1867 the Municipal Council of Paris set up a monument "to the sources of the river which has given its name to the department of the Seine, and to which Paris owes its ancient prosperity."

The overrunning of Gaul by the barbarians, the latest historians tell us, did not present the imposing spectacle of a great invasion in which armed hosts of valiant and robust warriors trod down the effeminate and corrupted civilization of the Romans, pillaged and ravaged the seats of refinement and luxury in city and country, slew and carried into captivity without respect for age or sex.

Long before the invasions of the fifth century the Germans had been established in the empire, both as colonists and as soldiers. The legions composed of Germans are said to have been even more amenable to discipline than the Roman ones. The first who established themselves in Gaul were the Visigoths and the Burgundians; the former, flying before the Huns, appeared as suppliants on the frontiers of the empire in the closing years of the fourth century. Ataulf (Ataulphus), the successor of the imperial puppet Attalus, set up by the conquering Alaric, came into Gaul early in the fifth century, became the ally of the Emperor Honorius, married his sister Placida, and marched to the conquest of Spain. The Visigoths, being thus installed in Gaul, admitted the Burgondes (Burgundii) in a neighborly manner; we are even told that they considered themselves as honored by the friendship of the Romans, and pretended that they had a common origin. Their kings proclaimed themselves lieutenants of the emperors, and fed their vanity by the Roman titles with which they invested themselves. The historian Orosius says the Burgundii were a quiet people, with gentle manners, respecting the civil authorities, and living in friendly relations with the Gauls. Both Visigoths and Burgundii promptly abandoned their national religions and traditions and adopted Christianity, but they followed the Aryan sect,—"unfortunately," says Duruy. Some modern French historians, on the contrary, attribute the greatness of France to this circumstance. The Gallo-Romans were orthodox.

When the Huns, driving the Germans before them or passing over their bodies, appeared on the frontiers of Gaul in the year 451, they were met by an army commanded by a Roman, Aëtius, but composed of Romans, Burgundii, Visigoths, Franks, and Saxons, which defeated them at the famous battle of the champs catalauniques, over the locality of which the historians are still disputing. When the Franks appeared, at the end of the fifth century, the army of Clovis contained a large number of Romans, and from the time of the sons of Clotaire, the entire population, without distinction of race, was called upon to do military duty. It is even said that it was only the Gallo-Roman chiefs of the armies who acquired military renown. Notwithstanding all this, there are still historians of the present day who speak of "the catastrophe of 406 breaking abruptly the bond which attached the barbarians to the Empire of the West." Some of these latter are disposed to see in Clovis, after his conversion, the founder of modern political society, a creator of a nationality, a maker of civilization,—titles which are freely denied him by others. His success was owing, it is said, not to his victories, but to his conversion. He was baptized by the Bishop of Reims, Remi, on Christmas Day, 496. "From that date, he had the alliance of the bishops throughout all Gaul against the Visigoths and the Burgondes, and his reign was assured."

This conversion, it is said, had been earnestly desired by his wife Clotilde, a niece of Gondebaud, King of the Burgondes, who had stipulated with her royal spouse that her first-born should be "consecrated to Christ by baptism." It also contributed greatly to his final establishment in Paris, a capital which he had long coveted and from which his predatory attacks had been constantly turned aside by the efforts of a virgin, Sainte-Geneviève, whom the Parisians still honor as their patron saint. The central position of this city, between the Rhine and the Loire, enabled him to keep a watchful eye upon Brittany, Aquitaine, the Burgondes, and the Frankish tribes of Belgium.

At his death, his kingdom was divided among his four sons, Paris, with Poitiers, Périgueux, Saintes, and Bordeaux, falling to the lot of Childebert. From the confused records of these barbaric times the names of two women issue, and have remained permanently engraven upon the tablets of history,—one of them as that of a personification of Christian and feminine virtues rare at any age and doubly so in these dark ages, and the other that of a monstrous queen whose crimes have made her immortal. Radegonde was a daughter of Bertaire, King of Thuringe, killed by his brother Hermanfried at the instigation of the wife of the latter; the murderer invited Thierry, King of Metz, and Clotaire, King of Soissons, sons of Clovis, to invade the kingdom, and in the partition of the booty, Radegonde fell to the share of Clotaire. Charmed by her original beauty, the king had her educated with unusual care, and, later, married her, but the queen sought only to forget her earthly dignities in ministering to the poor, in pious meditation, and in long conversations upon the Scriptures with some learned prelate. "She is a nun," said Clotaire, "and not a queen;" and he ended by killing her last surviving brother. Whereupon she fled to Noyon and implored Saint Médard at the altar to give her the protection of the Church; Clotaire threatened and protested, but finally permitted her to found a church and a convent at Poitiers, in which she immured herself till her death, in 587,—thirty-seven years. "During this long seclusion she constantly mingled with good works and with the austerity of religious exercises the culture of letters; constantly also did she guard her cherished traditions of the domestic hearth, and we find her living again in the awkward verses of the greatest poet of that time, Fortunatus, who had himself ordained priest that he might never be constrained to leave her."

At the death of Clotaire, the monarchy was again divided into four kingdoms, those of Paris, Soissons, Metz, and Burgundy,—soon reduced to three by the death of Charibert, King of Paris. The Burgondes were under the sway of Gontran, the Austrasien and Eastern Franks under Sigebert, and the mingled population of Franks and Gallo-Romans which were called Neustriens, or the Westerners, under Chilpéric. Aquitaine was divided between the three, and Paris was already of so much importance that none of them was willing to yield her to the others, and it was agreed that no one should enter the city without the consent of the other two. The royal authority was weaker in Austrasie, now Belgium and Lorraine, the petty chiefs stronger, and the manners and customs more Germanic and barbaric; in Neustrie, now Ile-de-France, Normandy, etc., there were more ancient cities, mere remnants of the Roman civilization and vestiges of imperial administration. To the political rivalry to which this disparity gave rise was added the personal animosity of the two queens, Frédégonde and Brunehaut.

While Sigebert was fighting the Avars, barbarians from Asia, on the eastern frontier, his two brothers amused themselves by pillaging his western provinces. Chilpéric had taken, for a most unwilling bride, a younger sister of Brunehaut, Galswinthe, daughter of a king of the Visigoths, notwithstanding the fierce jealousy of his mistress, or his first wife, Frédégonde; her empire was, however, soon regained, and Galswinthe was strangled in her sleep. Brunehaut incited her husband, Sigebert, to a war of vengeance; Paris was taken, and Chilpéric only saved from ruin by his wife, who despatched two assassins against the King of the Neustriens. The rights of inheritance of her son, Clotaire, were impaired by the existence of two sons of Chilpéric by a former marriage. One of them, Mérovée, imprudently married the widowed Brunehaut, and his step-mother sent him to rejoin Sigebert. The Bishop of Rouen, Prétextat, who had already narrowly escaped with his life, in Paris, from the terrible queen, had blessed this marriage; he was killed on the steps of the altar while celebrating mass. Clovis, the brother of Mérovée, followed; then one of his sisters, and Audovère, the mother. The king left Paris for Chelles one afternoon, for the chase; he had previously entered his wife's apartment while she was occupied with her toilette and struck her playfully on the shoulder with a light wand,—the queen mistook him for another, and answered, without turning round: "Tout beau! Landry," and other words of great familiarity. Then she perceived her error, and the king went out without a word; as he dismounted, on his return, some one slipped a knife into his heart, "and no one thought it worth while to run after the murderer."

Charibert, the short-lived king of Paris, had in his royal palace a serf named Leudaste, who, when a fellow-servant, Markowefe, attracted the monarch's favor and was made queen, contrived to ingratiate himself with her to such an extent that he was made grand equerry and, later, Comte de Tours. In his administration he proved himself capable of every outrage; but the death of Charibert compelled him to seek refuge with Chilpéric, and he endeavored to win Frédégonde's favor as he had Markowefe's. When Tours fell into the hands of Chilpéric, in 574, Leudaste was re-established in his office and resumed his old practices; two years later, upon a petition addressed to the king by the bishop, Saint Grégoire de Tours, he was dismissed. Thereupon he hatched a plot against the bishop and against the queen who had not interposed to save him; he declared to the king that the former had conspired to deliver Tours to the King of Austrasie, and that the queen had done him an even greater wrong, and he offered to produce witnesses. But his case fell to the ground; the king, threatened with excommunication by the clergy for bringing false charges against the revered prelate, threw all the responsibility upon Leudaste, and that individual, diligently sought for, had prudently disappeared.

He was accordingly solemnly excommunicated and declared anathema "from the crown of his head to the sole of his feet." After some two years passed in pillage and debauchery at the head of an organized band of brigands in the domains of Gontran, he obtained permission to return to Tours, and had the audacity to come and seek his pardon at the court of Neustrie. Chilpéric tolerated his presence, but advised him to avoid the queen. As the sovereigns were one day attending mass in the basilica of Paris, Leudaste entered boldly, traversed the crowd, and knelt at the feet of Frédégonde, imploring her forgiveness. The king had him expelled from the church, but, instead of taking warning, he lingered in the shops around the market-place in the Cité, selecting jewels and rich stuffs with which to propitiate the queen; when she issued from the church and saw him, she despatched her guards to arrest him; one of them was wounded, and another gave him a sword-cut over the head; as he fled across the Petit-Pont, he fell and broke his leg. The manner and quality of a torture that should be appropriate for him were carefully discussed by the royal pair; he was tended by eminent physicians that he might be duly strengthened for it; but when Frédégonde learned that gangrene had appeared in his wounds, she had him dragged from his bed, stretched on the pavement with his neck on a great iron bar, and his head crushed by another heavy bar in the hands of the executioner.

After the murder of Chilpéric, the people began to murmur, and the gentle King Gontran, according to Saint Grégoire of Tours, "in order to put an end to the evil custom of killing kings, went one day to a church where all the people were assembled for the mass, commanded silence through a deacon, and said: 'I conjure you, men and women who are here present, keep for me an assured fidelity, and do not kill me as you have lately killed my brothers. Allow me to live at least two or three years, that I may educate my young nephews, for fear that, after my death, it should happen that you should perish with these children, since there will remain of all my family no man strong enough to defend you.'"

Nevertheless, he had the courage to raise doubts as to the legitimacy of Frédégonde's son, Clotaire, and to postpone his baptism till she produced three bishops and three hundred other witnesses in his favor. Brunehaut's son, Childebert, was threatening the queen with an armed force; he and Gontran agreed to be each the other's heir in case they died without children, and on Gontran's death Childebert endeavored to take possession of Clotaire's domains also. Frédégonde had him poisoned: the dreary series of civil war and family murders began again; Clotaire II became in the end sole king of the Franks, and his mother died in her bed, "full of years." Her rival, Brunehaut, less fortunate, betrayed by her own followers, was, by Clotaire's orders, tied naked to the tail of a wild horse and dragged to death.

Such were the manners and customs of the Mérovingians.

There are various accounts of the two patron saints of France and Paris. It is to Grégoire de Tours that we owe our first knowledge of Saint Denis, who, according to his statement, came to preach Christianity in Lutetia in the year 245, with the friar Rustique and the deacon Eleuthère. Dionysius, bishop of the Parisians, he says, full of zeal for the name of Christ, suffered many persecutions, and finally martyrdom. Other historians assign to Saint Martin, rather than to Saint Denis, the glory of having converted the Gauls to Christianity; some place his mission even before the year 100, and the Abbé Hilduin confounds him with Saint Denis the Areopagite. But, according to Grégoire, Denis, Rustique, and Eleuthère were beheaded in the year 272, by order of the préfet Percennius, on a mountain situated near Paris, which accordingly took the name of the Mont des Martyrs (Montmartre). The préfet had given orders to have the bodies thrown into the Seine, but a Roman lady, named Catulla, although not a Christian herself, caused them to be sought for in the night and piously buried in a locality known as Catolocus. Grain was sown over the graves, and when the fury of persecution was passed, they were disinterred and deposited in a tomb.

According to the popular legend (to which the municipal and national authority has given a sort of official sanction by M. Bonnat's very vigorous and realistic presentation on the walls of the Panthéon), after having had his head struck off, the saint arose on his feet, picked it up and walked away, carrying the severed organ in his hands, to the great surprise of the spectators. In this manner he traversed the space of a league, till he came to the spot where his church now stands, the angels meanwhile chanting around him Gloria tibi Domine, and others repeating three times the Alleluia. It was this unusual promenade that gave rise to the well-known proverb that it is only the first step that costs.

In 286 the weight of the Roman yoke and the persecutions of the Christians had become so cruel that there was a rebellion, headed by Salvianus Amandus and Lucius Pomponius Ælianus, who put themselves at the head of the slaves and the colons of Paris and Meaux, were elevated on bucklers, and proclaimed emperors near the site of the present Hôtel de la Ville. To them were speedily joined the bagaudes (insurgents) of the surrounding country, and it required a very serious effort on the part of the Roman troops, under the command of Maximien Hercule, associated with Diocletian in the government of the empire, to restore order.

Sainte-Geneviève, the patron saint of the Parisians, also perpetuated with her legend on the walls of the Panthéon, originally her church but now dedicated to the Grands Hommes of the nation, was born at Nanterre, near Paris, in 422, and guarded in the fields the flocks of her parents, Sévère and Gérontia. She is said to have known Saint Germain d'Auxerre, and to have promised him to devote herself to the service of God; her reputation for sanctity, confirmed by several miracles accomplished, was such that when the city was thrown into a panic by the approach of Attila and his terrible Huns (begotten, it was asserted, in the deserts of Scythia by the union of sorceresses and infernal spirits) her voice was listened to as that of one qualified from on high. Nevertheless, there were certain obstinate ones who doubted her assurances of safety; there was even question of stoning her for false counsel; but she, mounting a little eminence, assured her fellow-citizens that, though Attila was indeed advancing, he would not attack their city; this she stated in the name of God. That was convincing, and, indeed, the dreaded conqueror turned his march toward Orléans, and was preparing to pillage it when he was vanquished by Aëtius and Théodoric.

A second time she came to the rescue of the capital when it was suddenly attacked, in 476, by Childéric at the head of his Franks. His first efforts were directed toward cutting off all supplies by the river, and in this he was so successful that the Parisians speedily found themselves reduced to a diet of fish and roots, with no bread at all. Geneviève was touched by their sufferings, she embarked on a little flotilla of fishermen's boats, and succeeded in escaping through the enemy's lines in the most marvellous manner. Her return was anxiously awaited; for nine days there was no news of her, and the famine grew more cruel; finally, the lookouts on the towers perceived something in the distance on the bosom of the river; it approached; it was she, with eleven vessels filled with provisions of all kinds, of which she herself superintended the distribution. Each one of the nine days had been marked by some miracle, in the pursuance of her object. Monsieur Puvis de Chavannes has recently devoted a large mural painting to this pious legend. Nevertheless, Childéric took the city, in which he dwelt but very little.

Pagan though he was, he partook of the general veneration for the saintly virgin, and could refuse nothing to her earnest entreaties. It was during his reign that she conceived the idea of building a church to Saint Denis on the site of his tomb; by her prayers and entreaties she succeeded in inducing the clergy and the people of Paris to raise the necessary funds, and she commissioned a priest by the name of Genès to construct the edifice. Clovis, son and successor of Childéric, had no less consideration for her, but the basilica which he erected, in connection with his wife Clotilde, and in consequence of his vow made during the war with the Visigoths, was originally dedicated to Saint Peter and Saint Paul, and did not take the name of Sainte-Geneviève until later. It was completed after his death by Clotilde, who caused to be interred in it the bodies of her spouse and the saint.

The famous châsse (shrine or casket) of Sainte-Geneviève, preserved in the abbey bearing her name which was completed in the reign of Philippe-Auguste, and enriched by successive gifts of various sovereigns, was constantly appealed to during many centuries, taken down, solemnly carried in procession through the streets escorted by barefooted clergy, whenever any of the innumerable evils from the hand of God or man afflicted her good city of Paris.

THE COURT
AND THE UPPER CLASSES

FROM THE OPENING OF THE MIDDLE AGES
TO THE PRESENT DAY

THE COURT AND THE
UPPER CLASSES

This curiously-garnished statue is that representing the city of Strasbourg, which is no longer a French city; and of all the others, which illustrate nothing particularly mortifying or mournful in the national history, no proclamation whatever is made. In the centre of the handsome court-yard of the new and imposing Hôtel de Ville, the statue selected as the central jewel of this écrin, as it were, is Mercié's Gloria Victis, the vanquished here being, again, France. (It should be stated, however, that if any work of contemporary sculpture is worthy of honor and of proud municipal recognition, it is this admirable bronze.)

Many of the great public places in the city of Paris, moreover, commemorate, more or less openly, what might be called the great stains on the history of the nation. The Place de la Concorde is that of the Guillotine, and the Luxor obelisk is the monument of the more than twenty-eight hundred victims beheaded by that axe. The Place de l'Hôtel de Ville was formerly the Place de Grève, famous in all hangmen's annals,—burnings alive, tearings asunder by horses, breakings on the wheel, decapitations, hangings,—from Catherine de Médicis' Huguenot chiefs and the unlucky Comte de Montgomery; Lally-Tollendal, Governor of the Indies; Foulon, contrôleur-général of the finances and his son-in-law, hanged to the street lanterns by the mob, down to the famous regicides and the obscure and ignoble multitude of criminals of all ages. The Place de la Bastile commemorates the fortress-jail of that name,—one of the worst of all jails and one to be discreetly forgotten; the column of July, in the centre of this place, was erected in memory of the victims of the Revolution of 1830. The statue of Henri IV on the Pont-Neuf marks the spot where the Grand Master of the Templars and one of his officers were burned at the stake; on the carrefour of the Observatory, that of Marshal Ney, the locality where that brave soldier was shot by order of the Chamber of Peers; from the little bell-tower at the side of the church of Saint-Germain-l'Auxerrois, back of the Louvre, the signal was sounded for the Saint Bartholomew. The Châtelet and the Conciergerie were famous prisons; the ruins of the palace on the Quai d'Orsay have been but just removed, to make room for the new depot of the Orléans railway, after having stood since 1871 a most eloquent monument of the excesses of the Commune. It was even proposed to leave the shattered walls of the Tuileries as a permanent record of the follies of an unbridled democracy!

This expansiveness, this frank parading of unseemly things, is supplemented by other public demonstrations of the passion of the hour. For some years after the fall of the Commune the national emotions found solace in stencilling in big letters on every possible wall or fronton or pediment, public or private,—Liberté. Egalité. Fraternité. The harassed citizen of the new republic looked up, or down, or sideways, at this official assurance of the sentiments breathed by all, high or low, and found comfort. Only, the wits of the agitated capital—who perceive some, but by no means all, of the opportunities which their fellow-citizens afford them—took occasion to read this text with the punctuation-mark—(.) point—after each noble word. Point is also the strongest of negations, so that the official declaration of faith was reduced to nullity,—"Liberty, none; Equality, none: Fraternity, not the slightest!"

All this seems to constitute a curious national trait, and in literature, in the daily journals, the observing traveller is again impressed with this unbosoming, which the Parisian himself would probably brand as naïveté if he could perceive it. It flourishes perfectly side by side with his vanity; in fact, it probably has its origin in his vanity. "The Causes of Our Defeat in 1870," under various titles, have furnished and are still furnishing matter for interminable publication. In municipal affairs, the unshakable conviction that Paris is, simply, the only capital in the world does not in the least interfere with frank admissions concerning its limitations, which the least public-spirited villager in other climes would neither believe nor admit. Here, the journalist, the romancer, the historian, find in the most simple human demonstration, if it take place in the capital, something peculiarly and most admirably Parisien. Balzac, e.g., in the Double Famille, if we remember aright, brings two of his characters together late at night in a dusky street; the younger man thinks he recognizes the elder, but is not certain; he therefore approaches him doubtfully "as a Parisian does when he is undecided." This endless and childish delight in everything appertaining to his town, and the accompanying frank indifference to everything, pretty much, outside of it, is, in fact, so well known abroad that it has even brought down upon the Parisian's unconscious head the epithet that he would consider the uttermost of insults—"provincial!" He provincial! he who has invented those two withering words, "the provinces" and "bourgeois."

Nevertheless, this capital of all possible civilizations does not hesitate to admit that it must by all means do all in its power to attract the wealthy tourist of other nations, on whom its prosperity is so largely dependent, especially since it has no longer the attractions of a royal or imperial court to offer. No presentation of the city of Paris at the present day would be complete without documents giving the opinions of its own cultured and intelligent classes on its general characteristics and its most urgent needs. With regard to this question of dependence upon strangers, endless quotations might be cited, and two or three may well be printed here as more valuable contributions to this contemporary history than any speculations by mere foreigners. The Revue Encyclopédique, published weekly by the great house of Larousse, has a column which it devotes to ideas of general interest, underscored, and in this column appeared, in the issue of January 23, 1897, the following communication: "For some time past the Avenue de L'Opéra, at Paris, has been lighted by electricity by means of incandescent lamps placed along the central axis of this great thoroughfare. This very handsome illumination serves only to accentuate more strongly the monotonous melancholy of the double row of commercial establishments the fronts of which are invariably closed at eight o'clock in the evening.... And sorrowful reflections are awakened of the brilliant evenings of thirty years ago, the movement of foreigners along the boulevards, the crowd of promenaders constantly changing before the dazzling show-windows of the end of the Second Empire. Why is not some effort made to revive this brilliant past by creating attractions capable of arousing the curiosity of the Parisians and, above all, of the foreigners? Could not some arrangement be made among all the shop-keepers of the grand boulevards and of the principal adjacent streets (Rue de la Paix, Rue Royale, Avenue de l'Opéra, etc.), that one evening a week be devoted to the exceptional adornment of their establishments?" And the writer goes on to suggest, with Parisian ingenuity, that a jury of artists might even be constituted to decide which display was the most brilliant and the most worthy, and to award suitable recompense. "By this means it is probable that the street and the boulevard would resume their former animation, to the great profit of the trade in articles of luxury, so profoundly affected by the desertion of the foreigners."

In the year of grace, 1898, the Parisian world was greatly agitated by the fact that the Grand Prix de Paris was run at Longchamps on the 5th of June, and that, consequently, the Parisian season was brought to an ending most unreasonably early. These complaints were so insistent that they found voice in the Municipal Council and were brought before the Prefect of the Seine. It was contended that the treaty between the city and the Société d'encouragement of improvement of the equine breed, its lessee at Longchamps, had been violated, inasmuch as the great event had taken place before the middle of June. But the Société d'encouragement proved conclusively, by the terms of its lease from the city, that the date and the regulations of the race were left to its own judgment, and that, in point of fact, it had always taken place before the 15th of June. "But that which it is above all important to observe is, that the date of the Grand Prix is determined, not according to the whim of the Société d'encouragement, but indeed by that of the English Derby, which regulates also that of the French Derby. It is necessary, in fact, that the same horses should take part in the three trials. The English, having set the date of their Derby this year on the 26th of May, the French Derby, which precedes it, had to be run on the 22d of May, and the Grand Prix de Paris, which occurs regularly ten days after the English Derby, could only be run on Sunday, the 5th of June. It is impossible, moreover, in any way to postpone this date, for the reason that the horses cannot be maintained in racing condition for any longer period of time."

Notwithstanding this conclusive reasoning, Le Temps, one of the most eminent and dignified journals of the capital, devoted a long article in its largest type, two days afterward, to the duty of the Conseil municipal in the matter. "This date is not, in fact, a matter of indifference to the interests of the city. It is, or it is considered to be, the moment selected for a general exodus of foreigners and even of Parisians in comfortable circumstances toward the seaside and other rural resorts. The shop-keepers therefore consider that they have cause for complaint if this moment arrive too early. The municipal councillors who have constituted themselves the spokesmen of their griefs have demanded and obtained a vote on a resolution having for its object the designation of the third Sunday in June, at the earliest, as the date of this equine solemnity.

"Whether this date may or may not be adopted, it seems to us that the interest which it awakens is entitled to unqualified commendation. The Municipal Council in no way goes outside of its proper sphere; on the contrary, it is well within it, when it concerns itself with the general interests of the city of Paris, when it seeks for means of retaining in it and attracting to it the largest possible number of foreigners and of very wealthy individuals whose presence and whose habits have for result the circulation of a great deal of money and the constant vivifying of the Parisian industries, which are, for the greater part, the industries of luxury. The Municipal Council understands perfectly that this question of the sojourn of strangers amongst us is in the highest degree an economical question which concerns the labor and the wages of the Parisian workmen, as it does also the general prosperity of the finances of the city. Therefore, far from criticising it for deliberating upon this question and others of a similar nature, we should rather regret that it has not turned its attention upon them with more constancy and consecutiveness.

"It is not, in fact, a simple matter of detail like that which has occupied the Municipal Council, which can ameliorate or even guarantee the situation of Paris in so far as it is a rendezvous or a residence for foreigners. These will not continue to come here and to remain here unless their sojourn is made agreeable and peaceful for them. This is something which should be considered, and it is a question which is closely connected with the general functions of our ædiles. It is not to be imagined that with a few indirect measures this foreign colony, so essentially susceptible and flitting by nature, can be constrained to remain among us and expend its money against its own will. These are not birds that can be put in a cage, and, above all, retained there. Even those whose passion for the races is well developed will easily find a method of being present at the Grand Prix without domiciling themselves among us. They will only pass through; we shall see them no more. The essential point is, therefore, to watch with the utmost care, every day, that Paris shall never lose in their eyes its prestige and its attractions. From this will ensue, if we wish to deduce from it, practical regulations for the administration of the great city."

And the editor goes on to regret that the municipal authorities, so far from occupying themselves exclusively with these details of public hygiene, street lighting, facility of transport, etc., should so frequently expend themselves upon "violent discussions of politique pure." "Is it not true that in what concerns the general progress of urban life, whether it be the question of transportation, or that of gas, or that of electricity, we are behind, and very greatly behind, the condition which has been attained in London, in New York, in Berlin, and even in Geneva and in some of our cities of the provinces?" These reflections appeared to be especially opportune on the evening of the election which was to replace in the Municipal Council those members who were about to leave it for the Chamber of Deputies. "The electors who are interested in the aspect under which the city will present itself to foreigners in 1900, at the moment of the Exposition Universelle, will not allow to escape this opportunity of manifesting their sentiments upon this subject.... All those who labor to augment its prosperity accomplish much more—be it known—for the amelioration of the condition of the work-people than the dreamers of national confiscations and of obligatory collectivism, and their efforts, if they are in the majority, will be otherwise efficacious in retaining the foreigners than by the moving forward some fifteen days of the date of the Grand Prix. Although it is not to be despised, a season of fifteen days' duration is, taking it altogether, but a slight gain. The foreigners flock hither the whole year round, and it is the whole year round that it is necessary to make them find it safe and agreeable to visit here, visits to which they are inclined and from which the entire city derives such great benefits."

This exposition may be considered as an authentic, contemporary document, and, as has been premised, these opinions are coeval and coterminous with an admirable civic self-satisfaction. It is perhaps scarcely necessary to stipulate that in these general observations it is the frame of mind and the mode of speech of what are known everywhere as the upper classes, the more intelligent and refined, which are taken into account,—the Parisian workman, day-laborer, and semi-criminal, though they figure very largely in the results of the general elections (worse luck!), do not necessarily appear in the discussion of these questions of high importance. It may be remembered that, at the period of this much-discussed Grand Prix, there was much contradictory testimony as to the existence of a general feeling of hostility toward America and the Americans among the French because of the Spanish war. Many depositions were made on both sides, but there was a general consensus of opinion among the heads of the larger Parisian commercial and manufacturing establishments as to that of their work-people. "Their political views and manner of looking at things have no other horizon than that of the newspaper they are in the habit of reading," said one chief of an important house, "they take no notice of the effect which such crises may have upon their work." "We believe them to be absolutely indifferent," said another; "I can assure you that the workmen take not the slightest interest in this question, and they probably would not understand it if it were put to them," testified a third. "As to the working-class," said a merchant in the Rue de Rivoli, "they occupy themselves with their own affairs, and nothing beyond. Apart from the social question, all they want is to earn as much money as possible, and do the least work possible for it." One of these sons of toil corroborated these statements very frankly. "I can assure you," said he, "that neither my comrades nor myself side with one or the other. I assure you that it matters nothing to us. We have something better to do than to gossip about the war."

Much the same conditions have obtained in the formation and development of this superior intellectual and aristocratic Parisian society as in that of other civilized nations. We are all more or less familiar with the general demonstrations by which the historians demonstrate the development of the wealthy classes, by the aid and support of which alone the letters and the arts arise and flourish. In the earliest stages of society, the struggle for life absorbs all possible energy; a little comfort and security, and consequent leisure, bring in the arts. The half-starved hunting-dog follows the game steadily, stealthily, without a superfluous sign or motion; after the chase, and the subsequent feast and the subsequent luxurious slumber, he awakes to indulge in unpractical gambols and barkings around his master,—it is the dance; Art is invented! The three superior social classes, the king, the clergy, and the nobles, which were definitely established in France at the outbreak of the Revolution, were the legitimate development of the feudal system, and had, apparently, legitimately conquered their position. They had been the protectors of the people even before the Carlovingian epoch, and when the people finally arose and overturned them, it was only because they had completely forgotten their high mission through a long course of years.

To Stendhal's observation, that, in the tenth century, a man considered himself lucky if he were not killed, and had a good leathern jacket for winter, Taine adds, and a woman, if she were not violated by a whole band of ruffians. In those truly Dark Ages the peasant accepted quite willingly the hardest feudal obligations as a harbor of refuge from the ills that menaced him on every side. The sixth and seventh centuries of our era are considered to have been among the worst that the world has seen; it was declared that it was not with water, but with His tears, that God moistened the earth out of which He made man. After the fall of the Romans, it was the Church alone that saved human society from "a Mongol anarchy;" in the last years of the Empire, the cities, illy defended by their natural protectors, gave to their bishops, with the title of defensor civitatis, the principal municipal authority. The Church alone retained any influence over the conquering barbarian; before the shaven monk or the mitred abbot, the wolfish and ignorant chief, long-haired, filthy, and half-clad in furs, hesitated, listened to his words in the council, stooped before his altars,—"like Saint Lupicin before the Burgonde king Chilpéric, Saint Karileff before the king Childebert." In his moments of repose, after the chase, or the battle, or the feast, the menaces of the prelate began to stir in his guilty soul,—aided, perhaps, by the reproaches or the advice of his wife or his concubine; he hesitated to violate the sanctuary lest he should fall dead with a broken neck on the threshold; if he had been carried away by his passions, and committed murder or robbery, he repented and made reparation, sometimes a hundred-fold. The cloister offered a refuge to those who fled aghast from the world and sought meditation and solitude; the abbey was not only an asylum, but a haunt of learning and practical industry, a seat of instruction for the farmer, the workman, the student. "Thus the most evil centuries of the Middle Ages," says Duruy, "were acquainted with virtues of which the finest ages of paganism were ignorant; and thus, thanks to a few souls of the elect, animated by the pure spirit of Christianity, humanity was arrested on the edge of the abyss in which it seemed about to precipitate itself."

Nevertheless, this historian admits that Christianity, which had not modified the manners of Roman society, was itself an element in the dissolution of the Empire, and that the Church itself acquired some of the rudeness of the barbarians with which it came into such intimate contact. "Germans and Franks aspired to the honor of the episcopate, and carried into the basilicas customs and manners which were strange there. The great intellectual movement which had formerly animated religious society slackened, then ceased; the shadows descended upon the Church itself."

After Charlemagne's short-lived empire, the universal dissolution set in again. Against the bands of brigands, four or five hundred strong each, that traversed the country, any defender was welcome, and a second upholder of society arose,—the stout warrior, skilled in arms, who gathered retainers around him, secured a hold or a castle, and offered protection in return for service rendered. His title or his lineage mattered but little in the tenth century, his defence was much too welcome for any carping about his arms or his ancestry,—he was an ancestor himself. The original source of many noble houses is more than doubtful,—Tertulle, the founder of the Plantagenets; Rollo, Duke of Normandy; the ancestors of Robert le Fort; the Capétiens were said to have been descended from a butcher of Paris. "'In these times,'" says Taine, quoting the Spanish chronicle, "'the kings, counts, nobles, and all the knights, in order to be ready at any moment, kept their horses in the hall in which they slept with their wives.' The viscount in the tower which defends the entrance to the valley, or the passage of the ford, the marquis thrown as a forlorn hope on the devastated frontier, sleeps on his arms, like the American lieutenant in a blockhouse in the far West, among the Sioux. His house is only a camp and a refuge; some straw and a pile of leaves are thrown on the pavement of the great hall; it is there that he sleeps with his horsemen, unbuckling a spur when he has a chance for repose; the loopholes scarcely allow the day-light to enter,—it is important, above all, that the arrows do not. All inclinations, all sentiments, are subordinated to the service; there are posts on the European frontier where the boy of fourteen is called upon to march, and where the widow, up to sixty years of age, is compelled to marry again. Men in the ranks, to fill up the vacancies, men at the posts, to mount guard,—this is the cry that issues at this moment from all human institutions, like the call of a voice of bronze." Thanks to these stout defenders, some form of society is again made possible.

A later historian, M. Flach, in his Origines de l'ancienne France, finds the germ from which sprang the whole feudal system in this patronage, the system of defence of the serf and vassal by the landed proprietor. In the great disorganization of the Roman Empire, a portion of the public authority passed into the hands of individuals; when the Frankish kings invaded Gaul, they found there a system of patronage similar to their own. These great proprietors were maintained under the first Merovingian kings, who kept them in due subjection; but as this regulation gradually weakened under the growing power of the land-owner, the private individual found himself ground between these two millstones. A private patron then became his only defence, and thus was hastened the strictly feudal system. With regard to the royal function, which crowned this feudal system, the historian cites two quotations in support of his thesis: "Under Louis d'Outre-mer, the legate of the Pope, Marin, defined the royal authority,—he called it patronage [patrocinium]. Forty years later the decisive argument of the Archbishop of Reims, Adalbéron, in sustaining the claims of Hugues Capet to the throne, was: 'You will have in him a father. No one, up to the present time, has invoked in vain his patronage [patrocinium].'"

Quite apart from these valid, historical reasons, the British "love of a lord" is by no means confined to Great Britain. The Parisians, also, have a certain fondness for titles and distinctions of all sorts. For the English aristocracy they profess a genuine admiration, as affording the best example of the success of a certain élite in affecting the social conscience. They quote approvingly John Bright when he admits that his folk—trades-people and commoners—are quite willing to have their public affairs managed by a superior class, specially trained, enjoying an independent and commanding social station. Their titles and their pride of ancestry give them robes and plumes, and a troop follows its officers more readily when they are gorgeously uniformed. Only, it is required that this privilege shall not be abused; no favor to mediocrities, no nepotism. Victor Hugo was more proud of his title of vicomte Hugo than of his greatest work, and Balzac's obstinacy in clinging to his particle of de has lately been shown to have been completely unfounded. To Sainte-Beuve, who infuriated him by constantly speaking of him as M. Honoré Balzac, he wrote: "My name is on my register of birth, as M. Fitz-James's is on his." So it is, but without any de. In 1836, at the period of the legal process to which one of his works, Le Lys dans la vallée, gave rise, he wrote: "If my name is that of an old Gaulish family, it is not my fault; but my name, De Balzac, is my name patronymic, an advantage which is not enjoyed by many aristocratic families who called themselves Odet before they called themselves Châtillon, Riquet before Caraman, Duplessis before Richelieu, and which are none the less great families.... If my name resounds well in some ears, if it is envied by some who are not content with their own, I cannot therefore renounce it.... My father ... found in the Trésor des Chartres the concession of land made in the fifth century by the De Balzacs to establish a monastery in the environs of the little town of Balzac (department of La Charente), a copy of which, he told me, was, by their action, enregistered by the Parliament of Paris." It appears that there are existing no Merovingian records of any kind dating earlier than the seventh century; and a keeper of archives, M. Ch. Portal, in the department of Tarn, in which the death of the great novelist's father, "Bernard-François Balzac, born at Nougaïris," is recorded, having looked the matter up, discovered that his ancestors were simple country-people, laborers, who had never dreamed of a de before their name, which, in fact, was really Balssa or Balsa!

The French have no word in their language which exactly translates "snob," so they adopt with enthusiasm the English syllable (mispronouncing it fearfully); and this curious weakness in so great a writer and so keen a student of humanity would be even more remarkable if it were not so very common among other civilized people. M. Jules Lemaître, a couple of years ago, read before the five Academies of the Institute a careful study of this particular social class; there were said to be a crowd of amateur playwrights besieging the managers with plays with this title, and the pretentious claimer of things that are not his in the great world, "the great nephew of Mascarille in the Précieuses ridicules," was honored with more analysis, comment, and reconstruction than he was probably entitled to.

In addition to the three great classes that have ruled over France, and which, with the commons or serfs, have been known to almost every European nation, a third class, the tiers état, still in process of formation elsewhere on the Continent, but which arose in Paris and other great cities in the thirteenth century, is claimed by the historians of this nation as peculiarly French.

Previous to Pepin and Charlemagne, Paris was generally recognized as the capital, though the wandering and barbaric Frankish kings much preferred as places of residence their great country-houses or villas, when they were neither hunting nor fighting. The court of Charlemagne, in the later years of his reign, was held at Aix-la-Chapelle, his favorite abode. In 775 he was present at the dedication of the new church of Saint-Denis, and the Parisians are said to have made a fête of the occasion. Louis le Débonnaire, his son, more monk than king, also neglected the city, excepting in the matter of founding churches and increasing the privileges of the clergy. But under the last of the Carlovingian emperors, Charles le Gros, the capital redeemed its right to that title by its gallant defence against the Northmen, or Normans, and its valiant count, Eudes, having brought the sluggish emperor to the heights of Montmartre only to see him conclude an unworthy peace with the invaders, founded himself the first national dynasty when his fat suzerain was deposed in the following year. "One of the greatest figures of the Carlovingian decadence," says M. Faure, in a recent monograph, "he continued the monarchy of Charlemagne without changing anything in the institutions, and he gave a precise form to a power that before him was still undecided, that of duke of the Franks."

The royal authority waxed and waned, the turbulent nobles exhausted themselves in war, in struggles amongst themselves and against the king, but the wealth and power of the Church steadily increased. Occasionally only, when its interference was too flagrantly unjust, its authority was defied. The first Capétiens, like the first Carlovingians, whether from motives of self-interest or sincere faith, were its faithful allies. Hugues Capet liked better to wear his cope as Abbot of Saint-Martin de Tours than his crown, and he restored to the Church several abbeys which he possessed. His son, Robert the Pious, was almost a saint, and the princes of this dynasty, on the whole, merited the title which Rome gave them, of "eldest sons of the Church." Their piety was not altogether without reward: the bishops of the Ile-de-France and the abbots, chiefs of the abbeys founded by royal grace, brought more than once not only earthly weapons but a spiritual one, that of excommunication, to the defence of the sovereign.

Robert's first care, after his accession to the throne in 996, was to rebuild the church of Saint-Germain l'Auxerrois and the monastery of Saint-Germain-des-Près, which had been destroyed by the Northmen. He also erected in his palace a chapel dedicated to Saint Nicolas, which, in 1154, entirely restored, became the Sainte-Chapelle. He washed the feet of the poor, he fed, it is said, sometimes a thousand of them a day; nothing was too sacred for them, neither the silver ornaments of his lance nor the gold fringe of his robe. He was constant in his attendance on the church services, he composed hymns, himself, which were long retained. Nevertheless, having espoused his cousin Berthe, he found himself excommunicated by the Pope, Gregory V. Among the earliest works of the painter Jean-Paul Laurens, long in the Luxembourg, is a graphic presentation of this unhappy couple, clinging to each other in the poor, bare splendor of the very early mediæval throne-room, the overturned great tapers of the excommunication service on the floor before them, the smoke rising like anathema, and the last of the implacable ministers of the Church departing through the open doorway. Every one deserted them, as though plague-stricken; only two poor domestics remained to serve them, and they purified by fire every vessel from which the unhappy monarch had taken food or drink. But Berthe was enceinte, and the king loved her, and so clung to her and would not obey. One morning as he went to pray, according to his custom, at the door of the church of Saint-Barthélemy, into which he was forbidden to enter, Abbon, Abbé de Fleury, followed by two women of the palace, carrying a great silver-gilt plate covered with a linen cloth, approached him, and announced that Berthe had been delivered. Then he uncovered the plate:

"See!" he exclaimed, "the effects of your disobedience to the decrees of the Church, and the seal of anathema on the fruit of your guilty love!"

And Robert recoiled in horror before a little monster with the head and neck of a duck! (Canard, it may be noted, in French, signifies both a duck and a highly improbable story.)

So the poor queen was repudiated, and Robert married Constance, daughter of the Comte de Toulouse, who made his life a burden to him. He hid himself from her to say his prayers, and feared her so much that he did not hesitate to deny his charities and good deeds to her,—though he had such a horror of falsehood, that he had made a casket of crystal, mounted with gold, but in which he was careful not to put any holy relic, so that those who took their oaths on it before him might not perjure themselves.

His son Henri I, who succeeded him, married a daughter of the Grand Duke of Russia, in order that he might be certain of not taking a wife within the degrees of consanguinity prohibited by the Church. This princess, Anne, claimed to descend through her mother, daughter of the Emperor Romanus II, from Philip of Macedon.

The queen Constance brought with her from the Midi some of those troubadours whose romantic airs and graceful verses were so appreciated in the little courts of the south of France and, later, in the gloomy castles of the nobles of the north. Great was the prevalence of ennui in these fortresses, in which there was but little sunshine and a great dearth of all other refining and civilizing influences. It was impossible to be engaged in warfare or the chase all the time, and the wandering pilgrim, with his tales from afar, or, still more, the wandering minstrel, trouvère, as he was called in the north of France, was a welcome relief to the deadly monotony of the days of peace. "Seated at the hearth of the seigneur, he sang, during long evenings, the tragic adventures of the Dame de Fayel and of the Sire de Coucy, or the marvellous exploits of the Knights of the Round Table, of Renaud, and of Roland, of Charlemagne and his Twelve Peers; unless, indeed, his audience, in a livelier mood, demanded of him some sarcastic fabliau, or the fine tricks played upon Master Isengrin by his shrewd gossip, Master Renard."

But these Aquitains in the train of Queen Constance, when they first appeared in the court of the good Robert, were singularly offensive to the Parisians by their elegance, their luxurious habits, and their light manners. "As soon as Constance appeared at the court," says Raoul Glaber, "you could have seen France inundated by a species of folk the most vain and the most frivolous of all possible men. Their fashion of living, their garments, their armor, the harness of their horses, were all equally fantastic. Their hair descended scarcely as low as the middle of the head [the northern French still retained the long flowing locks in the German fashion]: true theatricals, in whom the shaved chin, the small-clothes, the ridiculous boots, ending in a curved beak, and the whole outward appearance badly arranged, betrayed the disorder of their minds. Men without faith, without law, without shame, whose contagious example will corrupt the French nation, formerly so decent, and precipitate it into all kinds of debauchery and wickedness."

Notwithstanding Robert's piety, his reign was signalized by a cruel persecution of the Jews, in revenge for the destruction of the church of the Holy Sepulchre at Jerusalem by the Fatimite caliph of Egypt, and by the first execution of heretics in France. Throughout the whole of the Middle Ages, the Jews, forbidden to hold any landed property, were constantly persecuted, plundered, and outraged, banished only to be called back again at the price of further exactions. The first thirteen heretics were burned at Orléans in 1022; one of them had been the confessor of Queen Constance, and as he passed her on his way to the stake, she put out one of his eyes with a long rod she held in her hand. Nevertheless, the historian Duruy considers that this certain mental movement, these deviations of the human intelligence from the beaten track, demonstrated that the period in which all thought seemed dead had passed, and that the first Renaissance began in this (eleventh) century.

A more recent writer distinguishes this century also by "that revolution in feudal France," the development of the commune. The great social fact was the disappearance of the three classes, serfs, semi-freemen, and free men (libres), which had existed since the ninth century, and their unity under subjection to the seigneur. This domination of the seigneur, at first justified by the protection afforded, lost its authority when it began to consult only its self-interest, and, toward the close of the century, stirred up revolts which led to the establishment of all kinds of popular associations, guilds, confraternities, charities, communities, etc.

The only church erected in Paris during the thirty years' reign of Henri I was that of Sainte-Marine, founded about 1036, and whose patron, according to the story, was a young virgin named Marine, who conceived a strong desire to be a monk. So she disguised herself as a man, and became Brother Marin in a convent. One of her duties was to go to the city for provisions, with an ox-cart, and on her journeys she frequently passed the night in the house of the Seigneur de Pandoche, whose daughter was found to be with child. To screen her lover, a soldier, she laid the blame on Brother Marin, and he was accordingly driven from his monastery. However, he took the child, which was sent him, nourished it, and the monks, touched by his meekness, finally received him back in their fold. Not till his death was his secret discovered, when he was interred with great religious pomp and canonized under his true name. Consequently, in the church of Sainte-Marine were celebrated all the forced marriages of couples found living together without the sanction of law, the public authorities compelling them to appear before the curé of Sainte-Marine, who wedded them with a ring of straw, slipped on the bride's finger.

Henri's son, Philippe I, contrived, like his grandfather, to get himself excommunicated because of his marriage, but for the space of ten years he seems to have concerned himself but little about the wrath of the Church. He had repudiated his wife, Berthe, and taken Bertrade, whom he had carried off from her husband, Foulque, Comte d'Angers. Finally, wearied of her, he presented himself as a penitent, barefooted, before the council of 1104, Bertrade doing the same; they protested their horror of their past conduct, their resolve to sin no more, and were accordingly absolved. It was this monarch who, by his unseemly jest concerning William the Conqueror, of whom he was both jealous and afraid, nearly brought down upon the Parisians again another Norman. "When is that fat man going to be delivered?" inquired Philippe, with the delicate humor of the Middle Ages. To which the Conqueror replied that he was coming to Paris for his "churching," with ten thousand lances instead of tapers. And, as was his fashion, he started to keep his word: his advance guard was burning villages up to the gates of Paris, when, according to the story, his horse stepped on some hot cinders at Mantes and in his sudden recoil so injured the monarch that he died soon after at Rouen.

The great national assemblies which Charlemagne had so often consulted, and even those convocations of the great lords and bishops which had been so frequent in the tenth century, fell into disuse under the Capétiens, in consequence of the rise of the feudal power and the decline of the royal authority. The king, by his constant donations to his leudes or great vassals, had, in course of time, very nearly stripped himself of domains, and these bénéfices were retained by the lords and made hereditary in their own families. It was the same with the public charges and the titles of dukes, counts, etc., which carried with them an authority delegated by the prince, and which ended by passing entirely out of his hands. Charlemagne had been able to check the greed and ambition of the feudal lords, but his feebler successors were unable to do so. Even the right of coining money was claimed by the great seigneurs, and in this century there were no less than a hundred and fifty in France who exercised this privilege. Most of them refused to receive any coinage but their own, and the confusion and difficulty in conducting trade may be imagined. The nobles, solicitous to increase their power, founded new towns and took them under their protection, granting certain privileges to the inhabitants, even that of holding land, and under the cover of these privileges, as under those of the communes, the tiers état, or third estate, was gradually formed. Similar grants were made to some of the ancient cities, including Paris and Orléans, which seemed to have received all their franchises from the Middle Ages and from the kings, excepting, in Paris, the corporation of the Nantes, already referred to, whose privileges were confirmed by Louis VII.

This monarch, father of Philippe-Auguste, fixed the number of peers of France, the great seigneurs who held directly from the crown, at twelve,—six laic and six ecclesiastical. The first were the dukes of Burgundy, Normandy, and Guyenne, the counts of Champagne, Flanders, and Toulouse, and, to counterbalance these puissant lords, six ecclesiastics, all the more attached to the king that they were without landed property and consequently without much temporal power, the Archbishop of Reims and the bishops of Laon, Noyon, Châlons, Beauvais, and Langres. The Court of Peers was, however, not regularly organized before the beginning of the thirteenth century. Notwithstanding the weakness of the royal authority, it still retained elements of strength and superiority which time eventually developed. The king was nominal head of the whole feudal society, he was the chief suzerain, and all the great lords were his vassals and owed him homage. He was the supreme justice of the nation, and the vassals all were bound to appear before the "Court of the King." This court was not only a great council, but also a court of justice; the great vassals had the right to demand a trial by their equals, or peers, and in this case the court became the Court of Peers. The fief, held from the suzerain, could not be diminished or impaired in any way—just as the modern tenant has no right to damage his landlord's property; at the death of the vassal, the suzerain inherited, and in case he left infant children, the suzerain was the guardian.

Two incidents recorded by the chroniclers of the reign of that very capable monarch, Louis VI, called le Gros, or the Fat, will serve to illustrate the manners and customs of the times from two points of view. A short time before the marriage of the king with Adélaïde de Savoie, he had, in the exercise of his royal authority, demolished part of a house, the property of the Canon Duranci, in the Rue des Marmousets, because it projected too far out into the street and obstructed the circulation. But the chapter of Notre-Dame protested in the name of its privileges and of its immunities; the king admitted his error, and agreed to pay an indemnity of a denier of gold; the chapter insisted that this should be done on the day of his marriage, before he could be permitted to receive the nuptial benediction, and the crowned culprit was obliged to consent that a formal record of the affair should be placed on the registers of the chapter. It was recognized that he had no right to demolish any house, except for the purpose of erecting a church on the site: this, although the narrowness and crookedness of the streets, as well as their foul and miasmatic condition owing to the lack of all paving and sewerage, were the constant sources of epidemics.

On the 13th of October, 1131, the king was riding with his son on the hillock of Saint-Gervais (to-day the site of the Mairie of the IVth Arrondissement, on the Rue de Rivoli, a little beyond the Hôtel de Ville), when a wandering pig ran between the legs of the young man's horse, causing him to bolt and throw his rider, who was so badly injured that he died in a few hours. This led to the promulgation of a royal ordinance forbidding the proprietors of swine in the city to allow them to run at large, under penalty of confiscation for the benefit of the executioner of Paris. This regulation was several times renewed,—in 1261 under Saint Louis, in 1331 under Philippe VI, and in 1369 under Charles V, and extended to the faubourgs of Paris and the surrounding districts. The decree of 1331 gave the sergeants of the city authority to kill all those which they found wandering at liberty, to keep the head for themselves provided they transported the body to the Hôtel-Dieu. The pigs of the abbey of Saint-Antoine alone were exempted from this regulation, and, that they might be recognized, they bore a bell marked with a cross.

Louis le Gros, already occupied with measures to repress the growing power of the great nobles, commenced the fortifications of Paris, which were not completed until during the reign of his son, with a view of guarding his capital against any sudden attack. It is recorded that he adopted the habit of the great Caliph of the Arabian Nights, of traversing the streets at night in disguise and mingling familiarly with the people,—but with the design of drawing from them their complaints against their feudal lords and their knowledge of their machinations. They were not without their grievances against the king himself, and it was not till the reign of his son that was abolished the right of the royal officers, when the king came to Paris, to enter the houses of the bourgeoisie and carry off for their own use the bedding and the downy pillows they found therein.

During the long reign of Philippe-Auguste, which even the modern historians call "glorious," the power of the nobles was seriously impaired. The Cour du Roi retained the organization it had received, but its importance increased with that of the royal authority, and the most powerful vassal of the king of France saw himself dispossessed of his fiefs by its decree. The feudal power was attacked in one of its most cherished rights, that of private warfare, by a royal ordinance compelling the observance of a truce of forty days after any injury, so that no one might be assailed without warning. Any seigneur might be at once vassal and suzerain, but when Philippe acquired the fief of the Amiénois, for which he was to render homage to the Bishop of Amiens, he refused, saying that the king of France should be the vassal of no man. "To the feudal contract, between man and man, symbolized by the homage and the investiture, the thirteenth century saw succeed the democratic contract between a man and a group, between seigneurs and subjects, carrying an engagement written and public. Then began the conquest of liberty,—liberty of the person, of the family, and of the property; liberty administrative and political; economic liberty.... Of the total sum of partial contracts intervening between the king and the provinces, cities and corporations, has been formed the great national contract tacitly concluded between him and the people." (M. Imbart de la Tour.)

Notwithstanding war, famine, and pestilence, Paris had outgrown the fortifications of Louis le Gros, and, before he departed for the Crusade, Philippe-Auguste ordered the bourgeois of the city to construct a new wall, solidly built of stone, with towers and gates. This was commenced in 1190; the faubourgs were surrounded with a wall of more than two mètres in thickness, faced with masonry, flanked by five hundred towers and pierced with fifteen gates. Its course can be traced on any good map of modern Paris, and the size of the mediæval city thus compared with that of the present one. On the right bank of the river it began with a tower that was called "the tower which makes the corner," and which stood near the northern end of the present Pont des Saints-Pères. Thence it passed to the Porte-Saint-Honoré, near the present Oratoire and the statue of Coligny on the Rue de Rivoli, which was defended by two towers, struck northerly to the site of the present square formed by the intersection of the Rues Jean-Jacques-Rousseau and Coquillière, just north of the Bourse, where was a gate called Bahaigne. Here it turned eastward, cut off the commencements of the Rues Montmartre and Montorgueil, traversed also the Rue Française, and, following the direction of the little Rue Mauconseil, arrived at the Rue Saint-Denis, where was another gate called Porte-Saint-Denis, or Porte aux Peintres. Continuing in this direction, it traversed the Boulevard Sébastopol and the Rue Saint-Martin, enclosing the Rue aux Ours, followed the Rues Grenier-Saint-Lazare and Michel-le-Comte, traversed the Rue du Temple, and came to a tower erected nearly on the site of the Mont-de-Piété of to-day, between the Rues des Francs-Bourgeois and des Blancs-Manteaux, opposite to the Palais des Archives. Remains of this tower were discovered in 1878, in demolishing some old houses to make way for the enlargement of the Mont-de-Piété; it served to enclose a circular staircase. The wall continued to follow the Rue Francs-Bourgeois to another gate, the Porte Barbette, at the intersection of the Rue Vieille-du-Temple with the Rue des Rosiers; then, beginning to trend south, it followed nearly the Rue Malher to the Place Birague, not far from where the Rue de Rivoli becomes the Rue Saint-Antoine. Here was another gate, the Porte Baudet or Baudoyer. Thence the line of fortification, crossing the locality of the present church Saint-Paul-Saint-Louis, descended to the river in the direction of the Rue des Barres, and ended on the quai, at the Porte Barbel-sur-l'Yeau. Vestiges of this tower were also found in 1878.

On the south side of the river the wall was not commenced till 1208, when that on the northern side was completely terminated. Instead of making a close junction with that on the other shore, it took its start somewhat to the eastward of the "corner tower," at the famous Tour de Nesle, on the locality now occupied by the right wing of the Bibliothèque Mazarine and the Hôtel des Monnaies. It crossed the Rue Dauphine and halted on the Rue Saint-André-des-Arts at the Porte Buci; crossed the Boulevard Saint-Germain, where was another gate, the Porte des Cordeliers, afterward Porte Saint-Germain; descended the Rue Monsieur-le-Prince to the Boulevard Saint-Michel, where was the Porte de Fert or d'Enfer, which became the Porte Saint-Michel under Charles VI. From this gateway the wall continued southeasterly to that of Notre-Dame-des-Champs, between the Rue Soufflot and the Rue des Fossés-Saint-Jacques, just south of it, enclosed the Place du Panthéon, crossed the Rue Descartes at the Porte Bordet or Bordel, crossed the Rue Clovis, and traversed the locality at present occupied by the buildings of the École Polytechnique. Continuing in a northerly direction, it reached the Porte Saint-Victor near the present junction of the Rue Saint-Victor and the Rue des Écoles, and finally arrived at the Quai de la Tournelle by following a direction parallel to that of the Rue des Fossés-Saint-Bernard.

It was to Philippe-Auguste also that the city of Paris was indebted for its first paved streets. In 1185, five years before the wall of fortification was begun, he was in one of the great halls of his palace in the Cité, and approached a window whence he was in the habit of watching the traffic on the Seine. Some heavy wagons or carts were being drawn through the streets at the time, says the historian Rigord, and such an insupportable odor was stirred up from the mud and filth that the king was obliged to leave the window, and was even pursued by it into his palace. From this occurrence came his resolve to carry out a work from which all his predecessors had shrunk because of the great expense involved, and which, indeed, discouraged the bourgeois and the prevost of the city when the royal commands were laid upon them. Instead of carrying it out for all the streets and by-ways of the capital, they appear to have contented themselves with paving the environs of the palace, and the two streets which traversed the Cité from north to south and from east to west, and which were called the croisée de Paris. This paving was effected by means of square stones fifteen centimètres long and fifteen to eighteen thick. The bourgeoisie found the expense so heavy that under Louis XIII half of the streets of Paris were still unpaved.

In 1204, the king charged the prévôté of Paris to pay to the prior and the monks of Saint-Denis de la Chartre thirty sous parisis for the privilege of building on their land, and he commenced the construction of the Louvre. The site had long been occupied by a sort of suburban house of entertainment, and the king resolved to erect a strong château, commanding the Seine. This château was square, the thick walls pierced with small windows and loopholes arranged without order, surrounded by wide and deep ditches, and completed by a great tower rising in the middle. Over the pointed roof floated the royal banner, and within were confined the State prisoners, and the royal treasures, crown-jewels, and Trésor des Chartres. In 1200, this indefatigable monarch conceived the idea of uniting all the different schools established in Paris under one head, but the corporation of the Université was not constituted until twelve years later.

The life and reign of Louis VIII, son of Philippe-Auguste and father of Saint-Louis, have recently been made the subject of special research by M. Petit-Dutaillis, whose history may serve to give his short reign of three years a greater importance in the eyes of subsequent students than it has received. He surrounded himself with the same political advisers that had served his father, and was inspired by the same political and administrative principles: the death of King John and the birth of the infant Henry III caused his expedition to England, while still Dauphin, to fail, and in his attempt to unite the crowns of Hugues Capet and of William the Conqueror he had against him the influence of the Pope. His energetic and persevering obstinacy won for him the surname of "the Lion;" and, moreover, he was haunted "by those visions of sanctity and of power to which the clerical and classical education gave birth, the sole general ideas which enlightened and enlarged the darkened and narrow brains of the men of the Middle Ages." The French historians are of the opinion that it was to his father's victory of Bouvines that England was indebted for her Magna Charta.

His entry into Paris after his coronation at Reims is described enthusiastically by the chroniclers of the times. "The whole city turned out before him; the poets chanted odes in his praise, the musicians filled the air with the sound of the vielle [hurdy-gurdy!], of fifes, of tambours, of the psalterion and of the harp." Another admires the richness of the garments: "It is a pleasure to see the embroideries of gold and the coats of jewelled silk sparkle on all the public places, in the streets, in the squares. Old age, the flower of life, petulant youth, all stoop under the weight of the purple. The servitors and the domestics abandon themselves to the joy of being covered with adornments, and forget their condition of servitude on seeing the splendid stuffs which they display on their persons. Those who had not garments worthy of figuring in such a festival procured them by borrowing."

On the occasion of another procession which took place during this reign, and in which, as in so many other mediæval demonstrations, the devout participants walked barefoot, the religious zeal of these latter was so great that they appeared, most of them, in their shirts, and very many quite naked. This did not prevent the three queens, Isemberge, widow of Philippe-Auguste; Blanche, wife of Louis VIII, and Bérengère, Queen of Jerusalem, from watching the procession with great interest. This chronicler, Guillaume Guiart, records another instance of the manners and customs of the period, in which Queen Blanche again appears. It was the custom, at mass, when the officiating priest pronounced the words: "The peace of the Lord be with you!" for each worshipper to turn to his neighbor on the left and give him the kiss of peace. On one occasion, the queen, having received this chaste salutation, bestowed it in her turn upon a girl of the town who was kneeling next her, but whose dress was that of a respectable married woman. Greatly offended, she procured from her royal husband an edict that, in future, these coureuses d'aiguillettes should be forbidden to appear in robes with trains, in falling collars and gilded girdles. Saint-Louis, Queen Blanche's son, for all his sanctity, appears to have been the first king of France to introduce a royal falconer into his court.

Concerning this monarch, "in whose grand figure," says M. Henri Martin, "is summed up all that there is of pure and elevated in the Catholicism of the Middle Ages," we have, fortunately, abundant information in the chronicles of the Sire de Joinville, his secretary and intimate friend, who, with Villehardouin, is one of the first in date and in merit of these national historians. The piety of the king—like that of most other truly sincere mortals—had about it something simple and ingenuous which Joinville records with equal frankness. When they first embarked on their voyage to the Crusade, the clerks and the seigneurs were fearfully seasick and much repented themselves; when they had somewhat recovered, the king would draw them into serious conversation. On one day, says Joinville:

"'Sénéchal,' said the king, 'what is it that is God?' 'Sire, it is so sovereign and so good a thing that nothing could be better.' 'Truly, that is very well replied, for this response is written in this little book which I hold in my hand. Another question I will put to you, that is to say: 'Which would you prefer, to be leprous and ugly, or to have committed a mortal sin?' And I," says Joinville, "who never wished to lie to him, I replied to him that I would rather have committed thirty mortal sins than to be a leper. When the brothers had all departed from where we were, he called me back alone and made me sit at his feet, and said to me: 'How have you dared to say that which you said to me?' And I reply to him that I would say so again. And then he says to me: 'Ha, fou musart, musart, you are deceived there, for you know that there is no leprosy so ugly as that of being in mortal sin. And I pray you, for the love of God in the first place, and for the love of me, that you retain this in your heart.'"

The king's piety did not prevent him from showing an unyielding front to the turbulent nobles and duly strengthening the royal authority at their expense. By enforcing the regulations of Philippe-Auguste, he well-nigh put a stop to the private wars and the judicial duel; he decided that the royal coinage alone should circulate in the kingdom; at his death, "Royalty already appeared as the unique centre of jurisdiction and of power, and the tiers état amassed every day more science and more riches—which always ends by giving also more influence." The French language, disengaging itself from its Latin idioms, had become the language of legislation; it was that of the Assises, or laws of the kingdom of Jerusalem. The poetry of the troubadours had perished in the atrocious crusade against the Albigeois, but, "north of the Loire, the trouvères were still composing the chansons de geste, veritable epic poems which were translated or imitated by Italy, England, and Germany. So that we are quite justified in saying that, from the twelfth century, the intellectual domination of Europe appertained incontestably to France."

The formation of the collection of manuscripts known as the Trésor des Chartes is due to Saint-Louis. These archives he gathered together and placed in the Sainte-Chapelle,—founded to receive the true Crown of Thorns which he had received from Baldwin II, Emperor of Constantinople. He restored and protected the great hospital of the Hôtel-Dieu; and when his chaplain, Robert de Sorbon, in 1253, being at that time canon of Paris, conceived the design of erecting a building devoted to the instruction, by a certain number of secular ecclesiastics, doctors in theology, of poor students, who, at that period, were frequently obliged to live in the utmost poverty in order to pursue their studies, the king purchased for the purpose a building situated in the Rue Coupe-Gueule before the Palais des Thermes. The canonization of the monarch was celebrated with great pomp in the spring of 1297, under Philippe IV; all the nobles of the kingdom, clerical and laic, were invited to the capital, the body was placed in a silver casket and carried in a procession from Saint-Denis to Paris, where it was transferred to the church of Saint-Denis. Some time afterward, one of the ribs was placed in Notre-Dame and a part of the head in the Sainte-Chapelle.

It was under very different circumstances that these earthly remains were first carried from Paris to Saint-Denis. The king had died in his second Crusade, under the walls of Tunis; his son and successor, Philippe III, re-entered Paris in 1271, bringing with him five coffins,—that of his father, of his brother, of his brother-in-law, of his wife, and of his son. He insisted upon carrying, unaided, upon his shoulders, the body of his father from Paris to Saint-Denis, and at the localities upon the road where he was obliged to stop and rest, crosses of stone were erected, and remained for several centuries. Fortunately, this was the last of the Crusades.

This filial piety did not save the young king from much tribulation. Soon after his second marriage, with the princess Marie de Brabant (during the rejoicings attending which the Parisians consumed an inordinate quantity of wine, it is said, because the cabaretiers, in revenge for the renewal of an old tax the year before, had put more water than ever in their casks), his eldest son, the child of his first wife, died. The king's chamberlain, the surgeon Pierre de Labrosse, accused the young queen of having poisoned the prince. The queen protested her innocence; the nobles of her train asserted, on the contrary, that Labrosse was probably the murderer, as he was jealous of the confidence which the king bestowed upon her, and which the chamberlain had previously enjoyed. The king was unable to believe either of them guilty; the medical science of the day was quite unequal to the task of determining whether there had been any poisoning; the queen demanded that Labrosse be put to the torture, and, to decide this doubtful question, appeal was had to the judicial duel. The duke, Jean de Brabant, arrived to maintain his sister's innocence in the lists; if he were vanquished, she would be burned at the stake. While the unhappy king was sending messengers to a celebrated béguine, a species of nun, in Brabant, who was reported to have the gift of revelation, and receiving only obscure replies, a certain man suddenly fell ill in a convent in Melun, after having confided to a monk a sealed letter to be sent to the king. The king received it, read it, showed it to his council, which declared that the seal and the writing were undoubtedly those of Labrosse. Whereupon the chamberlain was arrested, accused of high treason, correspondence with the enemies of France, peculation, everything except the real offence, and finally hung upon the celebrated gibbet of Montfaucon,—the first mention of it in history, though it had been long in existence.

It was in the first year of the reign of this monarch that the first Parisian was ennobled,—Raoul, "called the Goldsmith," the king's silversmith. Philippe afterward extended this privilege to several other worthy bourgeois who had distinguished themselves in the arts. Restricted as the space enclosed within the wall of Philippe-Auguste had been, it still contained many cultivated fields and other unbuilt-upon tracts of land; the numerous religious edifices and university establishments erected since that reign had occupied these waste spaces, and the population had even over-flowed in several directions and congregated around the abbeys that had been constructed outside the walls. When Philippe IV, the Bel, succeeded his father in 1285, four principal streets were paved,—those leading to Saint-Denis and to the Portes Baudet, Saint-Honoré, and Notre-Dame. The bourgeois successfully resisted the demands of the prévôt of Paris that they should pave more.

Under Philippe IV, the conditions regulating the acquisition of the rights of bourgeoisie were definitely determined. Any free colon—i.e., stranger, sojourner—could go before the prévôt of the city with two witnesses, engage himself to contribute to the finances of the city, and to build or to purchase within the space of a year a house of the value of, at least, sixty sous parisis; on these conditions he was recognized as a bourgeois of Paris, and, in consequence, was obliged to reside within its limits from the day of Toussaint to that of Saint-Jean, in the summer, or at least to leave his wife there, or his valet, if he were a bachelor. The population of Paris was thus composed of the clergy, of the nobility,—of which the king was the chief,—of the bourgeois or proprietors roturiers, of the colons,—free or still vilains,—and of a few serfs of the soil whom their owners had obstinately refused to emancipate.

One of the strongest grievances which this population had against the king was his repeated debasements of the royal coinage, and on one of these occasions their discontent was so menacing that, notwithstanding he had hastily caused some specie of legal weight and value to be struck, he left his own palace and sought refuge with the Templars. The establishment of this order had greatly increased since they had first found an asylum in Paris under Louis VI; the ancient gate of the tower of the Temple was demolished as late as 1810. Within their walls was asylum for all, as in the churches, and the king was none too prompt, for the angry multitude was soon at the gates. Before these frowning walls, they hesitated, but a few of the more hardy pushed past the guard at the portal and penetrated as far as the kitchens. "What do you want here?" inquired the mâitre-queux, the chief cook. "To know what is going on here," replied the boldest of the invaders. "Why, the dinner of our dear lord, the king." "Where is this dinner?" "Here it is." And he presented an appetizing dish to his interlocutor, who passed it on to his comrades, saying: "Here, all of you, it is the King of France who gives the feast." By this time the alarm had been given, and the intruders would have paid dearly for their enterprise had not Philippe ordered that they be allowed to depart unmolested. However, though they went away very proud of having eaten the king's dinner, a few days later the bodies of twenty-eight of their number were seen hanging in a row along the ramparts of the town. It was rumored that the Templars had not been altogether ignorant of the gathering of this popular tumult, and that if the entrance to their fortress had been so easily forced it was not altogether without their knowledge; their ruin is said by some historians to have been determined in the king's mind from this date. On Friday, the 13th (!) of October, 1307, the Parisian population were very much surprised to learn that the grand-master of the order and all the knights had been arrested, their entire property confiscated, and the Temple occupied by the king and his court. In this nefarious enterprise Philippe had taken care to secure the co-operation of the Pope, Clement V; the wildest charges, of idolatry, magic practices, cruelty and outrage, were brought against the order; fifty-six of the knights were burned alive at a slow fire at Vincennes, and, finally, in 1313, the grand-master and another dignitary, on the little Ile aux Vaches, to-day the platform of the Pont-Neuf, in the presence of the king and all his court. A popular legend asserts that as the figure of the grand-master, Jacques de Molay, disappeared finally in the smoke and flame of his pyre, he was heard, in a solemn voice, to summon his executioners to meet him before the bar of God, the Pope within forty days and the king within the year. Certain it is that both these potentates died within the appointed time.

The provincial synod which had condemned the fifty-six Templars had been presided over by one of Philippe's confidants, the Archbishop of Sens, brother of the king's minister of finances, Enguerrand de Marigny. It was this latter who set the melancholy example of being hanged by his royal master's successor, which was followed by other finance ministers in two succeeding reigns. His innocence, however, was formally recognized by the king, Louis X, before the end of his short reign of eighteen months, a sum of ten thousand livres was granted to his children, "in consideration of the great misfortune which has befallen them," and his principal accuser, the Comte de Valois, stricken with paralysis ten years later, made amends by a general distribution of alms to the poor of Paris, with the request that they would "pray to God for Monseigneur Enguerrand and for Monseigneur Charles de Valois." Much the same fate awaited Gérard de la Guette, minister of Philippe V, le Long, who reigned for six years after Louis X,—only, as he had expired under the torture, this minister was hanged after death, and his innocence duly acknowledged in course of time. Pierre Remy, successor of Gérard de la Guette and treasurer of Charles le Bel, who succeeded Philippe le Long, was arrested by Charles's successor, Philippe de Valois, even before he had been crowned, and hanged on the gibbet of Montfaucon, like his predecessors. He was at first intended for the little gibbet of Montigny, reserved for the vulgar, but on his way there—whether moved by sudden remorse, or by ambition for higher honors—he accused himself of a multitude of new crimes, among others, of high treason against the king and against the State. He was accordingly transferred to Montfaucon, where he had the distinction of being hanged above all others. This was in 1328.

"The amount of his property which was confiscated," says the historian Félibien, "was estimated at twelve hundred thousand livres, which was the produce, as well as the proof, of his pillaging; but this example and that of several others of a similar kind did not serve to render any more moderate those who have since had charge of the finances,—as witness Macé de Manches, treasurer-changer of the king's treasury, executed, like Pierre Remy, in 1331; Réné de Siran, director of the mint, treated in the same fashion in 1333, and some others."

Louis X, Philippe V, and Charles IV, the three sons of Philippe le Bel who reigned in succession after him, and who ended the elder branch of the Capétiens, were even more unfortunate in their wives than in their treasurers. These three Burgundian princesses, Marguerite, Jeanne, and Blanche, were of an exceedingly dissolute character; the eldest and the youngest resided in the abbey of Maubuisson and had for lovers two Norman gentlemen, Philippe and Gaultier d'Aulnay. The king, Philippe le Bel, being informed, caused the two Normans to be arrested, in 1314; they confessed under torture, and were condemned to be flayed alive, mutilated, decapitated, and hung up by the arm-pits. The two princesses, after having had their heads shaved, were conducted to the Château-Guillard, where they were most ingeniously persecuted. When the husband of Marguerite ascended the throne, in 1315, as Louis le Hutin, or the Quarreller, he disposed of his unworthy spouse by smothering her between two mattresses, or, according to the local legend, strangling her with her own long hair.

Neither Brantôme nor Villon gives the name of the sanguinary princess who is said to have inhabited the Tour de Nesle, attracted handsome young men passing by, and in the morning had them strangled and thrown into the Seine, but romance or popular report has ascribed these doings to Marguerite de Bourgogne, though it is certain that she never lived in the Tour de Nesle. Other romances have designated Jeanne, wife of Philippe le Long, as the princess celebrated for her amours with Buridan, rector of the University in 1347; but this story is equally unfounded, as she died in the Hôtel de Nesle in 1329, leaving behind her a great reputation for gallantry, royal widow though she was. The Hôtel de Nesle occupied nearly the site of the present Mint, adjoining the Institute.

When the question of deciding upon a successor for Louis X arose, the famous Loi Salique, by which at least one modern historian, M. Duruy, thinks France has profited but little, was revived. Louis le Hutin left but one child, a daughter; a posthumous son, Jean, lived but a week. "Should his sister take the crown? A text of Scripture reads: 'The lilies spin not, and yet Solomon, in all his glory, was not arrayed like one of these.' This evidently signifies that the kingdom of the lilies shall not fall under the sway of a distaff. In the fourteenth century this was a reason. There were others: it was not to be desired that a foreigner should acquire France by a marriage; and the States-General, applying to the Crown the rule of succession formerly established for the Salic domains, excluded the daughter of Louis X from the throne. Thus the right of inheritance recognized for daughters for the fiefs was denied for the Crown."

Philippe le Long, also, had only daughters, and their uncle, Charles IV, accordingly succeeded, only to see the same fate befall his children. On his death-bed he said to his barons: "If the queen give birth to a son, he will be your king; if a daughter, the crown will belong to Philippe de Valois, whom I declare your regent." Another branch of the Capétiens, the Valois, thus assumed the sceptre. But this interpretation, thus three times renewed in twelve years, was contested abroad. Philippe VI of Valois was a cousin of Charles IV, nephew of Philippe le Bel and grandson of Philippe III. Edward III, King of England, was a grandson of Philippe IV by his mother Isabella, and he protested against this decision and asserted his right to the throne of France, mildly in 1328, on the accession of Philippe VI, and strongly eight years later. Thus came about the Hundred Years' War, and, incidentally, the residence in Paris, as if in his capital, of an English king.

Unfortunately, the French nobility were divided in these evil days coming upon the capital and the nation. In 1329, the Comtesse de Mahaut, who held the comté d'Artois, died in Paris, poisoned. Robert d'Artois, a prince of the blood, one of the royaux de France, claimed the succession, but the king awarded it to the queen Jeanne, widow of Philippe le Long; a month later, as she was about to take possession of the comté, she also died suddenly, poisoned by one of the officers of her table, in the hippocras, or medicated wine, which he handed her. Whereupon Robert produced documents, duly signed and sealed by his grandfather, Robert I, in which he was designated as the successor to his title to the comté; these letters were recognized as forgeries, and Robert was banished from the kingdom forever by the Court of Peers, and his property confiscated. The false witnesses whom he had suborned were arrested,—a demoiselle, Jeanne de Divion; his clerk, Perrot de Sanis; his fille de chambre, Jeannette des Chaînes, and Pierre Tesson, notary. All this made a tremendous sensation in Paris; a Jacobin, called as one of the witnesses, refused to reveal the secrets of the confessional; he was threatened with the rack by the Bishop of Paris; the doctors in theology assembled and decided that he must testify, in the interests of justice, which he did, and was accordingly confined in prison for the rest of his days. The demoiselle La Divion was burned alive on the Place of the Marché-aux-Pourceaux, in the presence of the prévôt of Paris and a great multitude of people; the same fate finally befell Jeannette de Chaînes, after having concealed herself in various localities, in 1334, on the same place; eight other false witnesses were condemned to the pillory and other punishments, the notary to perpetual imprisonment, and others to make amende honorable.

This ceremony, so usual in the Middle Ages, consisted in the culprit walking in his shirt, bareheaded and barefoot, conducted by the public executioner, a rope around his neck, a candle of yellow wax in his hand, a placard explaining his crime on his chest, another on his back, to some public place, usually the Parvis-Notre-Dame, and there, in an audible voice, avowing his crime and professing repentance. No rank of society, not even the monarch himself, was exempt from this punishment, which frequently was only the prelude to execution. The chief criminal, in this case, took refuge in Brabant, and there, to revenge himself, envoulta the king's son.

This was the familiar process in witchcraft by which an image of the person attacked being made in wax, baptized, and the voult duly performed, with a mass said and religious consecration, it is then melted before a fire, or in the sun, or pierced with a needle. This was discovered. Robert, afraid of prosecution for sorcery, thought himself too near France and escaped to England, where he urged Edward III to war against his native country.

Notwithstanding the national troubles, the court and the Parisians seemed disposed to give themselves up to pleasure. The marriage of the king's second son, Philippe, with Blanche, daughter of Charles le Bel, was celebrated with great pomp, and with a tournament at which assisted the most illustrious knights of France and many from abroad. Among these was the Duc de Normandie, against whom the king pitted the Seigneur de Saint-Venant, and the duke was overthrown, horse and man. The Comte d'Eu, Constable of France, received a lance-thrust in the chest, from which he died that night. These casualties were only too common in these celebrations, which were constantly discouraged by the popes, and even forbidden by some of the kings of France. At the close of these particular exercises, Olivier de Clisson, the Baron d'Avangour, Geoffroi and Georges de Malestroit, and other Breton chevaliers were arrested and conducted to the prisons of the Châtelet on charges of high treason and of conspiring with the king of England.

The historian Mézeray declares that in the capital the sumptuousness of apparel, the lascivious dances, the multiplication of entertainments, were common both to the court and the citizens. Nothing was to be seen but jongleurs, farceurs, and other actors and buffoons, extravagance, debauchery, and constant change. "All the misfortunes of the nation did not serve to correct them; the spectacles, the games, and the tourneys constantly succeeded each other. The French danced, as it were, on the bodies of their relatives. They seemed to rejoice at the conflagration of their châteaux and their houses, and at the death of their friends. Whilst some of them were having their throats cut in the country, the others were feasting in the cities. The sound of the violins was not interrupted by that of the trumpets, and there could be heard at the same time the voices of those singing in the balls, and the pitiful cries of those who perished in the flames or under the edge of the sword."

Another chronicler, Robert Gaguin, writing in the fifteenth century, dilates on the constant changes in the Parisian fashions in 1346. "In those times, the garments differed very much from each other. When you saw the manner in which the French clothed themselves, you would have taken them for mountebanks. Sometimes the vestments which they adopted were too large, sometimes they were too narrow; at one period they were too long, at another, too short. Always eager for novelties, they could not retain for ten years the same style of apparel."

Jean II succeeded his father Philippe in 1350, and has preserved his surname of le Bon, or the Good, though his reign was one of the most disastrous in history. One of his very first acts was to cause the arrest, in the Hôtel de Nesle, of Raoul, Comte d'Eu, Constable of France, whom he accused of high treason, and, without any form of law, had him beheaded at night in the presence of the Duc de Bourbon, the Comte d'Armagnac, the Comte de Montfort, and several other high personages of the court. All his property was confiscated, his comté was given to the king's cousin, Jean d'Artois, and the king kept the rest. In the following year he founded an order of knighthood, in imitation of that of the Garter, established by Edward III in England, and which, in its turn, served as a model for that of the Toison d'Or, the Golden Fleece, instituted in 1439 by the Duke of Burgundy. King Jean gave to his order the name of Notre-Dame de la Noble maison, but it was more generally known as that of l'Étoile, the Star. According to Froissart, it was "a company after the manner of the Round Table, which should be constituted of three hundred of the most worthy chevaliers." They took an oath never to flee in battle more than four arpents,—about four hundred perches,—and there to die or to yield themselves prisoners; the king gave them for a residence the royal lodging of Saint-Ouen, near Paris. "True chivalry was departing, since the kings endeavored to create an official chivalry."

Ten days after the battle of Poitiers, in which the king and his youngest son, Philippe le Hardi, were taken prisoners, the Dauphin Charles, Duc de Normandie, returned to Paris, took the title of lieutenant of the King of France, and convoked the estates, which assembled in October. The bourgeoisie, irritated at the ineptitude of the royal power, assumed the authority under the prévôt of the merchants, Etienne Marcel, and the civil war followed. On the side of the dauphin were the nobility and all those attached to the court; on that of the prévôt, the bourgeoisie, the shop-keepers, artisans, and common people. The latter extended the fortifications, especially those on the northern side of the city, so as to include all the buildings erected outside the walls of Philippe-Auguste. The dauphin, with a force of seven thousand lances, occupied alternately Meaux, Melun, Saint-Maur, the bridge of Charenton, and shut off all the supplies coming from the upper Seine and the Marne. The attempt of Marcel to deliver the city to Charles le Mauvais, King of Navarre, was discovered, the prévôt was killed at the city gate, and the dauphin entered Paris triumphantly two days later.

In 1364, he succeeded to the throne, under the title of Charles V, and by his wise administration, his prudent conduct of the war, and the judicious management of the finances, secured for himself the surname of "the Sage." He rendered the parliament permanent, instead of occasional, and he gave it for its sittings in the Cité the ancient palace of Saint-Louis, which became the Palais de Justice. A royal ordinance, which remained in force till the Revolution, fixed the majority of the kings of France at thirteen years of age, and provided that the regent should not be the guardian of the young prince; another, dated in 1370, authorized the bourgeois of Paris to wear the spurs of gold and other ornaments of the order of knighthood, and a third, of 1377, awarded titles of nobility to the prévôts and échevins, or aldermen, of the city. In 1369, the authority of the prévôt of Paris was officially confirmed in regard to all offences and misdemeanors committed within the city by any person whatsoever.

Among the many important buildings which this king erected or commenced was the Bastile, founded in 1370, to replace the old Porte Saint-Antoine, and consisting at first of two towers, united by a fortified gate; the Louvre, repaired and enlarged; the fortifications of the city; the Hôtel Saint-Pol, the gardens of which descended to the Seine; the chapelle of Vincennes, and several châteaux in the environs of the city. Nevertheless, and in spite of the encouragement given by Charles V to letters, the capital and the nation shared in the general decadence of the century, in morals, in intellect, and even in physical force. It has been estimated that while the average duration of human life was thirty years during the Roman Empire, it had now diminished to seventeen. The readers of Voltaire will remember that in The Man with the Forty Écus his "geometer" gives it as twenty-two or twenty-three years for Paris, and contrives to reduce this brief span to practically two or three years of active, enjoyable life,—ten years off the twenty-three for the period of youthful immaturity, ten more for the decline of old age, sleep, sickness, work, worry, etc.!

Duruy cites two instances of feminine peers of France. In 1378, the Duchesse d'Orléans writes to excuse herself from coming to take her seat as a peer in the Parliament of Paris; the Duchesse d'Artois, Mahaut, had been present at the coronation of Philippe V, and had supported, with the other peers, the crown on the head of the king.

The need of funds was so pressing at the very outset of the following reign that the young king, Charles VI, under the tutelage of his uncles, the dukes of Anjou, Burgundy, and Berry, entered into serious negotiations with the bourgeoisie of the city of Paris with a view of persuading them to accept a new tax on commodities. The people were obstinate in their refusal; a statute forbade the imposition of any new duties without previous public proclamation, and, in the actual condition of affairs, this proclamation was likely to lead to a popular outbreak. On the last day of April, 1382, however, a public crier presented himself on horseback at the Halles, where these proclamations were usually made, sounded his trumpet, and when he saw the people assembled around him, lifted his voice and announced that the king's silverware had been stolen and that a liberal reward would be paid for the discovery of the thieves. Then, profiting by the general surprise and commotion, he proceeded: "I have still another proclamation to make to you; to-morrow the new tax on produce will begin to be levied." After which he put spurs to his horse, and disappeared at full speed!

Early the next morning the tax-collectors accordingly presented themselves at the Halles; one of them claimed the percentage on a little cresson which an old woman had just sold, the old woman raised an outcry, the unhappy collector was beaten and thrown in the gutter, another was dragged from the very altar of the church of Saint-Jacques-l'Hôpital and killed, and the mob rushed to the Hôtel de Ville, where it was known that Charles V had caused to be deposited the maillets or mallets of lead which he had had made in anticipation of an attack by the English, and armed themselves with these weapons,—whence their name of Maillotins. But the new tax was withdrawn, and the popular fury speedily subsided.

When the young king attained his majority, in 1388, the former councillors of his father, the petty nobles, or marmousets, as the great seigneurs contemptuously called them, resumed the direction of affairs, but, with all their prudence and ability, were quite unable to restrain the prodigal wastefulness of the prince. The entry of the queen, Isabeau de Bavière, whom he had married three years before, was made the occasion of extravagant processions, pomps, diversions, and mystery-plays in Paris, as was the marriage of his brother, the Duc d'Orléans, with the beautiful Valentine Visconti, and the conferring of the order of knighthood on the children of the Duc d'Anjou. When, finally, worn out with dissipation, with the license of unlimited power from the age of twelve, the king went mad, his uncles resumed the regency and the marmouset ministry prudently sought safety in flight. The Duc de Bourgogne, Philippe le Hardi, died in 1404; his son, Jean sans Peur, wished to succeed to his father's authority in the State, but found himself opposed at every turn by the Duc d'Orléans; the old Duc de Berry interposed and effected a formal reconciliation; three days later the Duc d'Orléans was assassinated in the Rue Vieille-du-Temple by the bravos of Jean sans Peur, who did not fear to do murder on a prince of the blood.

In the civil war which followed, the Parisians profited at first by the concessions which were made to them in order to secure their support,—open opposition to all new taxes, restoration of their old free constitution, the right to elect their prévôt and other officers, to organize their bourgeois militia under officers elected by themselves, even that of holding fiefs like the nobles, with the accompanying privileges, provided they were well born, and of Paris. The nobility, on the contrary, were even less disposed to pardon him for thus seeking the aid of the populace than for having compromised the seignorial inviolability by laying violent hands on a brother of the king. The Comte d'Armagnac, father-in-law of one of the sons of the Duc d'Orléans, placed himself at the head of the opposing party; both parties made advances to the English to secure their aid on different occasions, but it was the Armagnacs who fought Henry V at Azincourt and sustained that disastrous defeat; the Duc de Bourgogne secured possession of the queen and proclaimed her regent; negotiating first with one and then with another, he finally ended by being assassinated in his turn by Tanneguy Duchâtel, prévôt of Paris, and other servants of the dauphin, on the bridge of Montereau, at the confluence of the Yonne and the Seine.

"That which neither Crécy nor Poitiers nor Azincourt had accomplished, the assassination on the bridge of Montereau did,—it gave the crown of France to a king of England." In the following year, 1420, the treaty of Troyes, concluded between Henry V, the Queen Isabeau, and the new Duc de Bourgogne, Philippe le Bon, recognized the King of England as regent and heir to the throne of France, he having married Isabeau's daughter, Catherine of France. "All the provisions of this treaty were read publicly, in a general assembly held by the Parliament on the 29th of April. The governor of Paris, the chancellor, the prévôt, the presidents, counsellors, échevins, merchants, and bourgeois, all were unanimous in accepting this treaty." On the 30th of May it was formally ratified in another general assembly, and on the 1st of December the bourgeois turned out in great state and with much pomp to receive the two kings, who entered, walking side by side, Charles VI on the right. "The streets were richly decorated and tapestried from the Porte Saint-Denis to Notre-Dame, 'and all the people cried Noël! to show their joy.'" The English king, with his two brothers, the dukes of Clarence and of Bedford, were lodged at the Louvre; the poor French king, at the Hôtel Saint-Pol, and the Duc de Bourgogne, in his Hôtel d'Artois.

The madness of Charles VI was intermittent, but apparently hopeless; it had been greatly aggravated by all the tragic circumstances of his reign, including the terrible bal des ardents, in which he had been saved from being burned to death, with several other maskers disguised as satyrs, by the coolness and courage of the Duchesse de Berry. The queen, Isabeau, was openly dissolute; on one occasion, the king, returning from visiting her at Vincennes, encountered her lover, the chevalier Louis de Bois-Bourdon, had him arrested on the spot, put to the question, sewed up in a sack, and thrown in the river. Probably with a view to her own security, she had placed in the king's bed-chamber "a fair young Burgundian," Odette de Champdivers, and it was this demoiselle who, in his periods of frenzy, was alone able to soothe and persuade him. It is related that they played cards together in his saner moments, this amusement having recently been brought into fashion again. Even the powers of magic were tried in vain to effect his cure.

Nevertheless, few monarchs seem to have been so sincerely mourned. "All the people who were in the streets and at the windows wept and cried as if each one had seen the death of the one he loved the best. 'Ah! très cher prince, never shall we have another so good! Never shall we see thee again! Cursed be Death! We shall have no longer anything but war, since thou hast left us. Thou goest to repose, we remain in tribulations and sorrow.'"

Queen Isabeau, in addition to disinheriting her son in favor of her daughter, was held responsible by her contemporaries for setting the fashion in wasteful and absurd extravagance in dress. The ladies wore the houppelande, the cotte hardie, tight around the girdle, and looped up their sleeves excessivement to show this cotte hardie; they also had openings in the surcoat to show the girdle. These openings the preachers called "windows of hell." "They made their stomachs prominent, and seemed, all of them, enceinte: this mode they clung to for forty years." "The more the misery increased, the more the luxury augmented; at the Hôtel de Bohême, inhabited by Louis d'Orléans, there were chambers hung with cloth of gold à roses, embroidered with velours vermeil, of satin vermeil embroidered with arbalists, of cloth of gold embroidered with mills.... And, during this time, the grass grew in the streets, say the historians of the period, the wolves entered the city at night by the river; the imagination of the people, exalted, saw already in Paris a new Babylon, the ruins of which would presently become the repair of the beasts of prey."

When the remains of what might well seem to be the last of the kings of France were interred at Saint-Denis, a herald-at-arms recommended the soul of the defunct to the prayers of the assembled multitude; then he cried: "Vive Henri de Lancastre, Roi de France et d'Angleterre!" At this cry, all the officers present reversed their maces, rods, and swords, to signify that they considered themselves as no longer exercising their offices. The English king was not crowned in Paris till nine years later (1431), but his representative, the Duke of Bedford, left his residence in the Hôtel de la Rivière, Rue de Paradis, and Rue du Chaume (to-day the Rues des Francs-Bourgeois and des Archives), to establish himself in the Palais de la Cité. On the 8th of September, 1429, Jeanne d'Arc, having brought about the crowning of the sluggish Charles VII at Reims in the preceding July, presented herself at the head of a French corps under the orders of the Duc d'Alençon before the northern walls of Paris, and herself directed the assault on the Porte Saint-Honoré. She surmounted the first entrenchment, constructed in front of the pig market there established on the Butte des Moulins,—afterward suppressed to make way for the opening of the Avenue de l'Opéra,—drove in the English, sounded the depth of the moat with the staff of her banner, and fell wounded with an arbalist shaft through her thigh, in front of what is now the entrance to the Théâtre-Français. The chronicles of the time differ as to whether the French chiefs failed to support her through jealousy, or fought with acharnement to save her from falling into the hands of the besieged. The attempt was abandoned, and the Maid was carried to Saint-Denis to have her wound dressed.

In Paris, opinions were very much divided, and even those who favored the French king felt that they were too much compromised to open their gates to him without some stipulations. Two years later, Jeanne having been duly burned at Rouen, and the consecration of Charles VII, at Reims, "to which he had been conducted by an agent of the demon, being in itself and of its own nature null and void," the English monarch entered his city of Paris to receive an orthodox and irreprehensible coronation. As he rode by the Hôtel Saint-Pol, he perceived the Queen Isabeau on the balcony; he doffed his hat to her and she returned his salute, then burst into tears. On the 17th of December, he was anointed and crowned in Notre-Dame by Cardinal Winchester—which gave great offence to the Bishop of Paris—and surrounded entirely by English lords; there was no liberation of prisoners, no largess to the people, no removal of taxes. "A bourgeois who marries off his daughter would have done the thing better," said the Parisians. However, he manifested some desire to secure their good-will by confirming a number of their minor privileges, their right to acquire titles of nobility, etc.

The discontent grew among the citizens; no coronation of a king of France could be as sacred as that celebrated according to the ancient ceremonial at Reims; the English garrison felt constrained to take such strong measures of precaution as to forbid any one to leave the city without passports, or to mount upon the ramparts under penalty of being hanged. It was not till the 29th of May, 1436, that six citizens, whose names history has preserved, contrived to open the Porte Saint-Jacques, in the quarter of the Halles, to their countrymen outside; the Constable of France, Arthur de Bretagne, Comte de Richemont, with the Comte de Dunois and some two thousand horsemen, were waiting for them; the first twenty men introduced through a little postern gate opened the great doors and let down the drawbridge, all the cavalry trooped in without meeting the least resistance. "Then the Maréchal de l'Isle-Adam mounted upon the wall, unfurled the banner of France, and cried 'Ville gagnée!' [City taken!]."

Captain Willoughby, who commanded the English, finding the whole populace rising against him, was compelled to take refuge in the Bastile with some thousand or twelve hundred men, and soon after capitulated and left the city by the Porte Saint-Antoine, pursued by the hootings of the people. Charles VII made his triumphal entry in the following November, and was received with abundant demonstrations of welcome. It was, however, a city devastated by pestilence and famine and with troops of wolves in all the suburbs. Bands of brigands, largely made up of unpaid soldiers, and called, from their outrages, escorcheurs, traversed the country and the environs and were more feared even than the wolves. The universal demoralization caused by the war had removed all bounds to the cruelty of the nobles, and the chronicles of the time are replete with murder, open and secret. "The Duc de Bretagne caused the death of his brother; the Duc de Gueldre, that of his father; the Sire de Giac, that of his wife; the Comtesse de Foix, that of her sister; the King of Aragon, that of his son."

"Above this feudal aristocracy was placed another aristocracy, that of the princes, which royalty had elevated with its own hands, in constituting vast appanages for the royaux de France, the title given to the sons, the brothers, the relatives of the king. Hence those powerful houses of Bourgogne, of Orléans, of Anjou, of Bourbon, which joined to the spirit of independence of the ancient feudality the pride and the pretensions of a royal origin, and which said by one of its members: 'I esteem so much the kingdom of France, that, in the place of one king, I should like to see six.'"

Valuing only that which was acquired by the sword, or professing to do so, this feudal aristocracy affected to look down with disdain upon the great merchants and bankers,—whose large fortunes, indeed, were not always acquired with the strictest probity,—and they viewed with indifference the king's infamous robbery of his minister, Jacques Cœur, which, with his abandonment of Jeanne d'Arc, constitute the blackest stains upon his character. The gens de petit estat, the councillors of humble origin, with which the king surrounded himself, and who served him so well, were also a source of offence to these proud nobles. M. G. du Fresne de Beaucourt, in his exhaustive history of this monarch, in six octavo volumes, dwells at length on the constantly increasing influence in the grand council, during the period of national reorganization in the latter part of the reign, of these humble councillors. "And it was, above all, the people of France themselves," says M. Funck-Brentano, "who, in the midst of all the secular struggles, acquired, little by little, the sentiment of its unity, of the common solidarity of the public welfare. The day on which they were found grouped, admirable in their energy and devotion, around the royal throne which, for them, was the concentrating point of these sentiments, the cause of the foreign enemy was lost."

Son though he was "of an imbecile father and a debauched mother," Charles VII did not lack for intelligence, and in his diplomacy, directed during the first part of his reign against a foreign enemy and, in the latter part, against a domestic one, the Burgundians, he gave proof of the highest qualities. He had a taste for letters, and was—"unique, doubtless, in this among the kings of France"—a good Latin scholar. His mistresses, of whom Agnès Sorel was only the first, were imposed upon his wife, Marie d'Anjou, and upon his court with unusual effrontery. The queen was even obliged to distribute gifts to the "filles joyeuses who followed the court in its peregrinations." This moral depravation, naturally, extended downward to the whole court. M. Brentano, who is one of the few French historians who venture to lay disrespectful hands on the grand Roi-soleil, says: "Charles VII was the original source of the crapulous debauchery of the last Valois; he traced the way for the crimes of Louis XIV, and the turpitudes of Louis XV." This, although the higher clergy of the reigns both of Charles and of Louis Quatorze did not fail in their duty, and did denounce openly from the pulpit the sins of these all-powerful monarchs.

On his re-entry into Paris, Charles did not take up his residence in the Hôtel Saint-Pol, the sorrowful lodging of his father, but in the Tournelles, which he made a "delightful sojourn," and where his successors installed themselves until François II, who established his dwelling in the Louvre. In the time of Louis XI, however, the Tournelles partook of the sordid and melancholy character of its master. "The king lived there alone and stingily," says the historian Michelet. "He had had the odd taste to retain some servitors whom he had brought from Brabant; he lived there as if in exile.... As soon as he was king, he assumed the pilgrim's habit, the cape of coarse gray cloth, with the gaiters of a travelling costume, and he took them off only at his death.... If he came out of the Tournelles, it was in the evening, like an owl, in his melancholy gray cape. His gossip, companion, and friend (he had a friend) was a certain Bische, whom he had formerly set as a spy on his father, Charles VII, and whom afterward he kept near the Comte de Charolais, to induce him to betray his father, the Duc de Bourgogne."

The king had, indeed been one of the worst of sons,—at the period of his accession to the throne he was almost in open rebellion against his father, and had sought refuge at the court of Burgundy. The great nobles consequently looked with complacency upon his coming into power, and were very far from foreseeing that through him their privileges and authority throughout the kingdom were to be finally ruined. During his reign, the capital prospered,—"the king made of it his refuge, his citadel and his arsenal for all his enterprises against the feudality." In one respect, he followed his father's example and even bettered it,—his counsellors were chosen by preference among the tiers état, and frequently even among men of base extraction. When occasion required, he did not disdain any of the arts of the demagogue: on entering Paris after the indecisive battle of Montlhéry, with the Burgundians, almost under the walls of the capital, he took supper with the principal ladies of the city in the house of Charles de Melun, and so moved them with the recital of the dangers he had undergone that all the dames bourgeoises wept. He was in the habit of visiting familiarly the principal bourgeois, seating himself at their table or inviting them to his own, and interesting himself in their private affairs. By this means, he endeavored to ascertain their opinions concerning his political measures, and the amount of obedience which they were likely to render to them. In 1471, "he honored the city by starting the fire with his own hand in the Place de Grève, the evening of Saint John the Baptist." On a mast, twenty-five mètres in height and surrounded by combustibles of all kinds, was hung a great basket containing a dozen black cats and a fox, symbols of the devil. "The more the grilled cats cried, the more the people laughed."

For all his craftiness, "he had not reigned four years when all the world was against him," says Duruy. "The people forced to provide, by paying a great many imposts, for the necessities of the government which they did not as yet comprehend, the bourgeoisie wounded in its particular interests, which it did not know how to sacrifice to the general interests, the clergy menaced in its property, the lesser nobility in its rights and in its dearest habits, the higher aristocracy in its pretensions to sovereignty,—all these classes, so widely diverse, so often hostile one to another, found themselves for the moment quite in accord upon one point,—the necessity of limiting the royal authority." The Ligue du Bien public was formed by the great nobles through compassion for the miseries of the kingdom "under the discord and piteous government of Louis XI." Thus threatened by the aristocracy, it was a question of the utmost importance for the king to retain his capital; he wrote to the Parisians in the most cajoling phrases before Montlhéry, and after, hastened to arm the bourgeois and accepted, as an aid and support, a council of six bourgeois, six members of the Parliament, and six clerks of the University.

The festivals and processions in the streets of Paris were not so numerous in this reign as in many of the preceding ones, but some of them have remained memorable. On his entry into the city on the occasion of his accession to the throne, August 30, 1461, he was richly dressed in white satin, and rode between the old Duc de Bourgogne and the Comte de Charolais. Over the Porte Saint-Denis was the representation of a ship, "emblem of the arms of Paris (which are, gules, a ship équipé, argent, on a sea of the same; au chef cousu d'argent, sown with fleurs-de-lis d'or). From this ship descended two little angels, who placed a crown upon the head of the king. The fountain of Ponceau ran wine; and at this fountain three beautiful maids, quite nude, represented sirens; 'and this was a very pleasant thing,' adds the chronicler, Jean de Troyes; 'they discoursed little motets and bergerettes.'" Other demonstrations, in the fashion of the time, were given at other points of the route; all the streets through which the king passed were hung with rich tapestries, and when he arrived at the Pont-au-Change, the bird merchants of Paris launched in the air "more than two hundred dozen birds of all kinds."

A very good painter, M. Tattegrain, in one of his recent envois to the annual Salon, has represented with great detail and much historical accuracy the incident of the three pretty sirens, quite nude. According to his story, they were only bared to the waist, and the king, very gallantly, checked the procession and rode out from under his canopy to hear their motets and bergerettes.

On the 15th of May, 1468, there was a fine tilting at the Hôtel des Tournelles between the gentlemen of Paris and those of Normandy; "they were valiant champions, superbly apparelled in hacquetons embossed with gold." Of the four Norman chevaliers who came expressly for this occasion, three were wounded, so that "all the honor of the jousts remained with those of Paris." On the 19th of November, the conclusion of the treaty of Péronne, between the king and the Duc de Bourgogne, was announced by trumpets in all the public squares of the city, and popular rejoicings ordered; as also for the birth of the dauphin, afterward Charles VIII, June 30, 1470, and the victory of Henry of Lancaster, King of England, over his competitor, Edward. These two events, the king directed, should be celebrated by a cessation of work of all kind for three days, and public prayers. Not long afterward, the queen of Henri VI arrived in Paris with her son, the Prince of Wales, and was received, by order of the king, with all the honors due her rank.

Amidst all these splendors it was Louis XI himself who frequently presented the reverse side of the medal. The registers of the Chambre des Comptes mention, about the time of the English queen's visit, a disbursement of twenty sols for the insertion of a pair of new sleeves in an old pourpoint of the king's wearing. He was considered to have gotten much the worse of the treaty of Péronne with Charles the Bold, and he had a mistress named Perrette, so that the Parisians trained their parrots, magpies, and other speaking birds to ask Perrette to give them a drink, among other ribald phrases. Consequently, the king issued a royal commission "to a young man of Paris named Henry Perdriel, in the said city of Paris" to take and seize "all magpies, jays, and chevrettes being in cages or otherwise, and being private property, in order to bring them all before the king, and have written down and registered the place where he had taken the aforesaid birds and also all that they knew how to say, as: larron; paillard; fils de p—— ; va hors, va; Perrette, donne-moi à boire, and several other words which the said birds know very well how to say and which have been taught them." In this same year, 1468, he caused to be confiscated in Paris and brought to him at Amboise all the deer, does, and cranes which the rich bourgeois were in the habit of keeping in their gardens. "This dispensed with the necessity of his buying them," adds the historian.

A Bohemian periodical, the Nation Czech, has recently published a condensation of the very curious journal kept by a certain Seigneur Léon de Rozmital, brother of the queen Joan, wife of Georges Podiébrad, King of Bohemia, during his travels in France in the year 1465. At Meung-sur-Loire he met Louis XI, who received him with much honor, though he appears to have quite declined to listen to the seigneur's proposals of a treaty of alliance between the two nations; he accompanied the king to Kand (perhaps the château of Candes, Indre-et-Loire), where he was presented to the queen and all her train. Her Majesty received him cordially, "and every one kissed him on the mouth. It was the king who had ordered it, and who wished it so. Afterward, the queen gave her hand to every chevalier and was very gracious with all." Louis invited his guest to come to visit him in Paris, but the latter fails to record his doing so.

In the year 1470, it may be mentioned, Ulric Gering, Michel Friburger, and Martin Krantz set up the first printing-press, in the college of the Sorbonne, and printed a book: Epistolæ Gasparini Pargamensis (Letters of Gasparin de Bergamo). Other works appeared, the first of which was a Bible, offered to Louis XI in this same year.

The universal demoralization of manners resulting from the long wars against the English and between the Burgundians and Armagnacs, the English occupation of the city, the presence in the capital of a multitude of drunken and debauched soldiers, did not serve to check the extravagance and license among the wealthier bourgeois against which the clergy thundered in vain. One of the boldest of these preachers was a Cordelier named Olivier Maillard, who appealed to the multitude by the freedom of his language and his images too frequently borrowed from the vernacular, and who—although he bore the title of prédicateur du roi—did not hesitate to denounce the monarch himself. He accordingly received an intimation that if these attacks did not cease very promptly, he would be tied up in a sack and thrown in the river. "The king is master," replied Maillard, "but go and say to him that I would go quicker to paradise by water than he with his post-horses." A species of crusade was organized by the mendicant friars against the extravagance of the costumes and the indecency of the manners; the evil had assumed such proportions that to be modestly and decently dressed was to be, in the language of the people as well as in that of the preachers, "clothed without sin." "To the ferocity, to the barbarity of feudal times had succeeded the vices of a semi-civilization, whilst waiting till manners and customs should refine themselves under the action of the Renaissance."

By his marriage with Anne de Bretagne, December 13, 1491, this monarch united the last of the great fiefs of France to the crown, and disappointed several powerful foreign suitors, English, German, and Spanish. On the 9th of the following February the royal couple entered the capital in state, and the stately and haughty carriage of the Breton princess was greatly admired by the populace. The bourgeois and merchants of various conditions who rode, two by two, to meet her had all "magnificent costumes, robes of satin cramoisi, of damask gris cendre, or of scarlet cloth on a violet ground. They had had made a dais the canopy of which was of cloth of gold, embossed, sown with lilies and roses. They carried it alternately from the Porte Saint-Denis as far as Notre-Dame."

When the king set off on his ill-advised expedition to conquer the kingdoms of Naples and Sicily, he was very short of funds and wished to borrow a hundred thousand écus from the Parisians, but met with a flat refusal. Consequently, when a deputation of the notables of the city took the liberty of remonstrating with him concerning this Italian war, he received them very badly and requested them to keep their advice for themselves, as he had no need of it. But, after having conquered the Milanais and lost it very soon afterward, he applied again to his city of Paris for a vessel of war; Jean de Ganay, president of the Parliament, presented to the prévôt of the merchants and to the échevins at the Hôtel de Ville the letter which the king had written on this subject. In order to deliberate on it weightily, they assembled all the councillors, and a resolution was adopted that the Messieurs of the Parliament and of the Chambre des Comptes and the Bishop of Paris meet in a general assembly at the Hôtel de Ville. But the progress of political events having rendered this vessel unnecessary, nothing came of all these deliberations.

Louis XII, on his accession to the throne in 1498, resolved to cross the Alps in his turn, and on his solemn entry into Paris after his coronation an elaborate machine was contrived to delicately flatter his pretensions to Genoa and Milan, and appear in the royal procession. This consisted of an apparatus mounted on wheels, in the form of a terrace, on which was seen a porcupine, moving all his quills at once, and a young virgin, habited in Genoese fashion and throned on a seat of cloth-of-gold cramoisi. But unluckily the machine would not function, and after remaining immovable in one place, finally disappeared "in great mortification." The Parisians seem never to have lost their fondness for processions and displays, and were always ready to welcome a new king with the firm belief that all their griefs would speedily be remedied under the new régime. As there was a possibility of the widowed queen, Anne de Bretagne, carrying her rich dower, now returned to her, out of the kingdom, Louis XII secured a divorce from his wife Jeanne, third child of Louis XI, and so very plain in countenance that her royal father could not endure the sight of her. Thus it happened that la Bretonne made her second solemn entrance into Paris as a newly-wed queen of France, in 1504; and at her death, ten years later, the king "during a whole week did nothing but weep."

Her obsequies, at Saint-Denis and Notre-Dame, gave rise to a scandalous discussion over the possession of all the objects which had figured in them. The abbot and the monks of Saint-Denis demanded the restitution of the dais, of the effigy and of the garments of the queen, of the cloth of gold, of the velvet which had served to decorate the chapel, and of all the offerings made by the assistants. The nuns of La Saussaye-lez-Villejuif wished that there should be given them all the linen of the late queen, body linen and table linen, the ornaments of gold and of silver, and all the mules, palfreys, horses of state and others which had drawn the chariots, with all the harness and the collars. The grand equerry of the queen, Louis de Hangest, pretended, for his part, that the horses, the canopy, and the cloth of gold all pertained to him in virtue of his office, and, whilst awaiting the decision, he insisted that the horses, chariots, and harness should at least be turned over to him provisionally in order that he might conduct the ladies and the pages of the late queen. But it was feared that he would keep them under any conditions. The king-at-arms and the heralds wanted all the mouldings and all the stuffs of velvet and of silk which were on the walls of the chapelle ardente; and the chaplains of the cardinal, the sum of all the offerings made both at Notre-Dame and at Saint-Denis. The Parliament devoted a week to endeavoring to bring the disputants into accord, and in the meanwhile ordered an appraisement of all the horses, carriages, etc., which were confided to the grand equerry, and all the linen, ornaments, dais, etc., were sequestered and placed in the hands of Jean du Val, receiver of pledges, and of Ragerin Le Lieur, merchant bourgeois.

In addition to his grief over his wife's death, the king found himself very much embarrassed in his finances till his good city of Paris came to his relief with a donation of twenty thousand livres. He had even sold his vessels of gold and silver, for the sum of two hundred thousand livres. Being thus relieved, with the inconstancy of men, he began to think of another wife, and in September, 1514, the magistrates of the city went out in state to meet the ambassadors of England who had arrived to negotiate a match with the Princess Mary, daughter of their sovereign. For this fickleness (which, however, was partially dictated by political considerations) Louis XII was destined to pay dearly; he was fifty-three years of age and his bride was eighteen; to please her, he changed all his habits of life, and even the hours of his repasts. He had been in the habit of "dining" at eight o'clock, and he now dined at noon; he had been accustomed to go to bed at six o'clock in the evening, and now it was often midnight when he retired. So that he died at the Palais des Tournelles on the first of the following January, 1515, and the death-criers, sounding their bells, paraded the streets, calling aloud: "The good king Louis, father of the people, is dead!"

It was the States-General of the nation, speaking through the representative of Paris, which had given him this fine name, Père du peuple, and which, by his care for their interests, his economy in the general administration, his suppression of abuses, he had well deserved. "The third part of the kingdom," says a contemporary, "was opened to cultivation in twelve years, and for one important merchant that had been known in Paris, in Lyons, or in Rouen, there could be found fifty under Louis XII, who made it more easy to go to Rome, to Naples, or to London than formerly to Lyons or Geneva." In this intelligent administration, he was greatly aided by the cardinal, Georges d'Amboises, who "for twenty-seven years remained less his minister than his friend," and who shared with him the well-earned approval of the people. "Laissez faire à Georges" (Let George alone and he'll do it) marked the general appreciation.

That curious custom of the Middle Ages, which testifies so strongly to the impotence and unjustness of the laws and the universal prevalence of sudden outbreaks of passion and crime, the right of asylum, was greatly modified in Paris by Louis XII. In the porches of the churches, or, if they had none, within the space of thirty feet of their walls on all sides, and in the cemeteries adjoining them, the hunted criminal was safe. The king suppressed this privilege for the churches and convents of Saint-Jacques-la-Boucherie, Saint-Merri, Notre-Dame, l'Hôtel-Dieu, the Abbaye Saint-Antoine, the Carmelites of the Place Maubert, and the Grands-Augustins. François I extended this reform still further; his ordinance of 1539 abolished all places of immunity for debts or other civil matters, and decreed that any person could be apprehended anywhere, provided that, if his place of refuge should be justified, he should be returned to it. This, however, never was done. In 1789, there were in Paris a few privileged localities remaining,—the royal residences, the hôtels of the ambassadors, and the hôtel of the grand prior of Malta, the Temple. By an article of the Code de procédure civile, it was forbidden to arrest debtors in the buildings consecrated to worship and during the religious exercises; and under the Second Empire a debtor could not be arrested in the garden of the Tuileries. With the abolishment of imprisonment for debt, these regulations repealed themselves.

In an almost equally important matter, that of the hours of the three meals of the day, a great change also took place during this reign. The courtiers did not generally follow the king in his transferral of le dîner from eight o'clock in the morning (according to the custom established at the beginning of the reign) to noon, but the people seem to have adopted the new hour. The wars in Italy brought to the French table for the first time the pâtes of that country, vermicelli, macaroni, semoule, the lassagnes and others. For women in childbed and for consumptives were reserved the bouillons or "restaurants,"—these were composed of meat, of animals or of chickens, cut up very fine and distilled in an alembic with peeled barley, dried roses, cinnamon, coriander, and Damascus raisins. One of the most succulent of these bouillons was called restaurant divin.

Under François I, the dinner-hour was established at nine o'clock in the morning, and the supper-hour at five in the evening. It is true that the hour of rising was also most unreasonably early according to modern ideas. There was a popular rhyme:

(To rise at five, to dine at nine, to sup at five, to go to bed at nine, will make you live to ninety-nine.)

The national menu was further increased by contributions from Italy and from domestic producers, pâtes, cheeses, and some new fruits, apricots and plums; the latter, still a great favorite with the French, was called la reine Claude after the daughter of Louis XII. With the good living came an increase in drunkenness among all, lower classes, bourgeois, courtiers, and soldiers,—the latter, indeed, to such an extent that the king felt constrained to issue edicts threatening this growing vice with the severest penalties: for the first offence, imprisonment; for the second, flogging in private; for the third, flogging in public; and the hardened offender ran a great risk of losing his ears and being banished from the kingdom.

With the reign of François I began the ancien régime,—"that is to say, a government in which the subjects have no guarantee against oppression, even the most iniquitous, and the prince, no obstacle to his will, even the most capricious." In 1527, the president of the Parliament of Paris declared openly that the king was above the law, though he added that his sovereign will should be regulated by equity and reason. The nobility, reduced to a state merely of revenues and titles, were no longer the great feudal powers of the Dark Ages, "and at the sumptuous court which François opened to them they learned to ruin themselves and to obey." In the middle of this century, there was only one great feudal house remaining, that of Bourbon-Navarre, the head of which, Antoine, was quite without influence. Below were the grand seigneurs, the Montmorencys, the Guises, the La Trémouilles, the Châtillons, and others, but deprived of all the rights of the powerful feudal vassals of the king of former times; the clergy had been reduced to a condition of dependence upon the king by the concordat of 1516, which made him the unique dispenser of benefices; the tiers état—which included "the men of letters, who are called men of the long robe; the merchants, the artisans, the people, and the peasants"—had long been accustomed to obedience. "There had formerly been only manants (rustics, clowns), seigneurs, and fiefs; there is now a people, a king, and a France."

"If the accession of François I was a great occasion for the men," says M. de Lescure, "it was still more so for the ladies. In fact, it might be said that they ascended the throne with the new king. Admitted for the first time to the banquets, to the tourneys of the Hôtel des Tournelles, this hardy innovation gave the measure of their new destinies and of the credit reserved by the most gallant of monarchs for the fairest half of the human species." Unfortunately, the king was not inclined to make any distinctions among these new ornaments to his court, and while his predecessors had made strenuous efforts to reduce the license of manners, we find him issuing such edicts as this:

"François, by the grace of God, King of France, to our friend and loyal treasurer of our exchequer, Maître Jehan Duval, salutation and dilection. We desire, and we command you, that from the deniers of our aforesaid exchequer you pay, give, and deliver ready-money to Cécile de Viefville, dame des filles de joie, attending our court, the sum of forty-five livres tournois, making the value of twenty écus of gold sol at forty-five sols apiece, of which we have made and do make by these presents donation, as much for her as for the other women and girls of her vocation, to divide among themselves as they may advise, and this for their right for the month of May passed...."

The court of the French kings itself is dated by their historians from this reign. Before François I, it did not exist. "Grave councillors only surrounded Louis XII, and the chaste Anne de Bretagne authorized around her only rare and tranquil pleasures. François I wished to be followed always by a troop so numerous that there were counted around the royal residence rarely less than six thousand and sometimes as many as eighteen thousand horses." By the brilliancy of its fêtes, this court attracted to itself the châtelaines, up to this time forgotten in the depths of their feudal castles. "At the beginning," says Mézeray, "this had an excellent effect, this amiable sex having introduced into the court politeness and courtesy, and imparting lively impulses of generosity to those whose souls were more nobly constituted. But the manners and customs became speedily corrupted; the offices, the benefices, were distributed according to the whims of the women, and they were the cause of the adoption of very pernicious maxims by the government."

The revival of the arts brought about by the Renaissance, and which François I had the intelligence to appreciate and encourage, and the somewhat greater sense of security in the body politic, combined to give to this court, and to the wealthy citizens of the capital, such extravagant luxury of dress and ornament that even this pleasure-loving monarch felt constrained to promulgate sumptuary laws on various occasions, an example which was followed by his son and successor, Henry II. The edict of 1538 proscribed chains of gold of too great weight for financiers and men of affairs, and it was intimated to them that it would be better not "to make their daughters too handsome and too rich when they married them." In 1543, the tissues of gold and silver were forbidden for men, with the exception of the relatives of the monarch, and this edict was renewed, four years later, by Henri II, greatly amended and amplified and extended to all, high and low, excepting the ladies in the queen's suite and the king's sister. In 1549, it was renewed, with still greater detail concerning the costumes of the two sexes.

The abuse of masks was of long standing, Charles VI having been addicted to their use, and in 1514, under Louis XII, the Parlement directed that all these false visages in the city, wherever found, should be collected and burned, and that, by order of the king, no more should be worn. During the captivity of François I in Madrid, the members of the Parlement set the example of reducing their style of living, limiting the number of their horses, etc.; and so great was the suspicion and distrust at this time, that a special edict was directed against the mysterious strangers who were seen in the streets of the city, all with long beards and carrying heavy sticks. The use of the latter was strictly forbidden, and the wearing of the former, "which seemed to conceal some pernicious designs against the peace of the State." Among the minor social revolutions which this monarch effected, in consequence of a wound received on his head, was that in the manner of wearing the hair and beard, which had prevailed since the time of Louis VII; François I reversed the ancient custom, and cut his hair short, but not his beard.

Paris, which had celebrated his accession with even more than the usual ceremonial, jousts, and tourneys, was greatly alarmed at the threat of the Connétable de Bourbon to march upon it with the allied forces of the King of England and of Charles V. The king, to reassure them, sent them the Sire de Brion, who declared to them that their monarch "had so much consideration for the city of Paris that he would sacrifice himself rather than allow it to be taken, that he was willing to expose his life in order to defend it, to live and to die with the Parisians, and that, if he could not come to it in person, he would send to it his wife, his children, and his mother, and all that he had and possessed, persuaded as he was that when he had lost the rest of the kingdom, he would readily recover all his losses if he could preserve Paris; that he had the intention to bring to it ten thousand Swiss, that he was aware of the attachment which the Parlement and the city bore to his person, that he thanked them for it, and exhorted them to continue a fidelity which was so useful to him."

All these fine words gave great pleasure to the citizens, and they were thrown into corresponding consternation when the news was received, on the 7th of March, 1525, that he had been taken prisoner at Pavia. His mother, Louise de Savoie, subordinated the evil traits of her character to constitute herself an intelligent regent; and on the 14th of April, 1527, the king made a triumphal re-entry into his capital after his release. Some doubts seem to have been entertained as to the genuineness of the welcome, for, it is recorded, the prévôt of the merchants, the échevins, and the school-masters were ordered to station, at a dozen points on the route of the procession, groups of eighty or a hundred children, who were to cry enthusiastically: "Vive le roi!" The quibbling by which François endeavored to justify his refusal to carry out the provisions of the treaty of Madrid, for which he had left his two sons as hostages, deceived no one; Charles V very justly proclaimed him a traitor and perjured, to which the king had no better answer than that the emperor "lied in his throat," and that he would meet him in the lists in single combat whenever he liked.

The ransom of the two young princes cost one million two hundred thousand écus, a sum which both the king and his capital found it very difficult to raise. After the treaty of Cambrai, in 1529, François endeavored to strengthen his position by foreign alliances, without any regard for his standing as eldest son of the Church and persecutor of Protestants. He made terms with Henry VIII of England, who had just broken with the Holy See; and he acquired the friendship of the Pope by demanding for his son, afterward Henri II, the hand of Catherine de Médicis, niece of the pontiff. He renewed the ancient friendship with the Scotch by giving his eldest daughter, afterward Marie de Lorraine, to their king for wife. He even concluded a commercial treaty, and one of alliance, offensive and defensive, with the Sultan Soliman, who promised to aid, with all his power, his good friend, "the Padishah of France."

The first of the followers of Luther to be executed in Paris was burned alive on the Place de Grève in March, 1525, and from this beginning the persecution went on, by direction of the king, and even during his absence, with a cruelty only tempered by the occasional necessity of conciliating the Protestant allies of the nation. The Sorbonne ordered that all the writings of Luther should be publicly burned on the Place du Parvis Notre-Dame; and the king decreed that all persons having in their possession any of the aforesaid heretical books should deliver them up, under penalty of banishment and confiscation of all their property. For the dreary spectacle of a nation and a city divided into hostile factions, struggling through barbarism and crime to a political unity and a more beneficent civilization, we have now, just when these goals seemed to be on the point of being attained, the spectacle of the same city and nation rent by religious faction, and relapsing into an even crueller barbarism under all the specious glitter of the civilization of the Renaissance.

It seemed at first, however, as though the doctrines of the Reform might find as stable a footing in France as they did in Germany. Among the lettered and cultivated classes their conquests were rapid; even in the court, the king's mother, Louise de Savoie, was not apparently disposed to oppose them; his sister, Marguerite, Queen of Navarre, and his dear friend the Duchesse d'Étampes, were more or less openly inclined in their favor; Clément Marot, the court poet, translated the Psalms of David into French, which the Reformers sang at the Pré-aux-Clercs. Two scholars greatly esteemed by François I, Lefebvre d'Étaples, who had begun six years before Luther, and Louis de Berquin, considered by his contemporaries as "the wisest of the nobility," publicly supported the Reform doctrines. But the king, fearing in them an organized movement against all authority, sacred or secular, soon withdrew his support; Berquin was burned at the stake in the Place de Grève, and the Sorbonne even ventured to pursue, with open prosecution and denunciation, and with hidden satire in a comedy represented at the Collége de Navarre, the king's sister for having caused her brother to adopt a book of prayers translated into French and for having caused to be printed a work of her own in verse: Le Miroir de l'Ame pécheresse. The Parlement formally forbade the scholars of the Université to translate any of the sacred books in Hebrew or Greek into French, as being a work of heresy. In 1546, Etienne Dolet, the printer, was hanged and then burned, for impiety and atheism, on the Place Maubert where his statue now stands. There was even invented, for the benefit of the heretics, a refinement of cruelty on the ordinary horrors of the stake,—a pulley over the victim's head to which he was suspended by chains, so that he could alternately be raised out of the flames and lowered into them again. This was called l'estrapade.

Charles V, who more than once threatened Paris with his victorious arms,—in 1544 he was at Château-Thierry, twenty-four leagues from the capital, and the affrighted citizens had begun to transport themselves and their worldly goods to Orléans,—visited the city in peace, on the 1st of January, 1540, on his way to Flanders to subdue the revolted burghers of Ghent. François was strongly tempted to break his royal promises, as he had done once before, and retain so valuable a prisoner, but confined himself to hints as to what he might do, and displayed on the part of his court and his capital an ostentation of luxury almost equal to that of the Field of the Cloth of Gold twenty years before, when he had met Henry VIII of England—"that spot of blood and grease on the pages of history." The capital, indeed, was much embellished and made more healthful under François I; the municipality were enjoined to pave and to clean the streets, and the king caused to be drawn up minute regulations concerning the administration of the city, the fountains, markets, slaughter-houses, gutters, etc. Nevertheless, the pest prevailed throughout the whole of his reign.

This gay monarch, who aspired to excel in all the accomplishments of a chevalier, wrote verses in his lighter moments, but the celebrated "Souvent femme varie; bien fol est qui s'y fie," said to have been written with the diamond of his finger-ring on a window in the Château d'Amboise, has been resolved into the very commonplace phrase: "Toute femme varie," which Brantôme saw written by the royal hand on the window-casing. In like manner, the pretty verses ascribed to Mary Queen of Scots, on leaving France,—

were really written by a journalist named Meunier de Querlon. What the young queen did say, as she saw the French coast sink below the horizon, was: "Adieu, chère France! je ne vous verrai jamais plus!"

The son of François I, who succeeded him, had all his father's defects and none of his good qualities; his short reign is made memorable chiefly by his mistress, Diane de Poitiers, and the unusual manner of his death. The former, whom he made Duchesse de Valentinois, and who exercised in the court an authority quite denied to the queen, maintained over her royal lover,—she had been the mistress of his father,—notwithstanding her forty-eight years of age, an ascendency, by her beauty and her intelligence, which her contemporaries ascribed to an enchanted ring. She was nearly sixty years of age, and the king was in his forty-first year when he wore her colors, the black and white of widows, in the fatal tourney which he had commanded to celebrate the wedding of his eldest daughter, Elisabeth de France, to Philippe II, King of Spain, already twice widowed. The lists were set up across the Rue Saint-Antoine, from the Palais des Tournelles almost to the Bastile, with great amphitheatres of seats on each side for the spectators. The king, who excelled in bodily exercises, had distinguished himself during the first two days; on the third, the jousting was completed, when he happened to see two lances still unbroken, and commanded the captain of his guards, Gabriel, Comte de Montgomery, to take one of them and tilt with him "for the love of the ladies." Montgomery protested, but the king insisted, and as they came together the former did not lower his arm quickly enough, and the broken shaft of his lance, glancing up from the king's breast-plate, lifted his visor and inflicted a mortal wound over the right eye. Eleven days afterward, he died, and Montgomery paid with his life for his inadvertence.

Henry "was not yet dead when Catherine de Médicis sent to Diane de Poitiers an order to restore the crown-jewels, and to retire to one of her châteaux. 'What!' she exclaimed, 'is the king dead?' 'No, madame, but he soon will be.' 'So long as he has a finger living,' she replied, 'I wish that my enemies should know that I do not fear them, and that I will not obey them whilst he is alive. My courage is still invincible. But when he is dead, I no longer wish to live after him.'

"She did live, however, but she made haste to leave Paris, and withdrew to her Château d'Anet."

The king's death occurred in the midst of his plans to resume the persecution of the heretics, plans which he had so much at heart that he had not hesitated to conclude the unfortunate treaty of Cateau-Cambrésis, in the same year, in order to be at liberty to engage in this crusade against his own subjects. "Sire," said his generals, Guise and Brissac, as the treaty was signed, "you are giving away in one day what could not be taken from you in thirty years of reverses." But Henri "was more religious than the Pope," for, the sovereign pontiff having sent the Parisians a bull by which he granted them permission to eat butter, cheese, and eggs during the approaching Lent, the king was scandalized at this license; the Garde des Sceaux directed the Lieutenant Criminel to publish, by the public criers, a decree forbidding the printing and circulating of this bull, and the document was even publicly burned by order of the king and the Parlement.

Among the ceremonials of public rejoicing attending the wedding of Henri with Catherine de Médicis was the illuminating, by the royal hand, of the fire on the eve of Sainte-Jean, on the Place de Grève, in which the lamentable cries of the cats confined in a basket, and thus consumed, filled the populace with the wildest delight. Their appetite for cruelty was soon to be much more fully gratified, for arrangements were made, after high mass at Notre-Dame and the State banquet in the episcopal palace, to burn as many Protestants at the stake at once, at several places, as was possible. Among these unfortunates was a journeyman tailor, who had been summoned before the king, and reproached by him for listening to heretical doctrines; when Diane de Poitiers, who had been instrumental in causing his arrest, also began to harangue him, the tailor suddenly broke silence: "Madame," said he, "content yourself with having infested France, and do not bring your ordure to mingle with things as sacred as the truth of God." He was consequently given one of the posts of honor among the victims, his stake being erected in the Rue Saint-Antoine, nearest the window of the Hôtel de la Roche-Pot, from which the king watched the executions, and it is related that, notwithstanding his atrocious sufferings, he fixed upon the monarch, from amidst the flames, so steadfast and terrible a look that Henri withdrew from the window, declaring that he would never be present at another auto-da-fé. This did not signify, however, that he would order no more.

Both François and Henri had formed, and partially carried out, various enlightened measures for the embellishment of the capital and its environs, the rebuilding of the Louvre, the completion of Fontainebleau, the improvement of the navigation of the Seine, etc. Henri ordered the demolition of the old royal residence, the Palais des Tournelles, and its pestiferous moats were filled up. He is represented as being inordinately fond of processions, and every event, of good or bad omen, was made a pretence for one of these public displays. Catherine de Médicis had brought with her from Tuscany a taste for luxury, letters, and the arts; Philibert Delorme, whom the French consider the second of their great architects, and who, under her orders, began, in 1564, the construction of the Tuileries, testifies to "the exceeding pleasure which she took in architecture, designing and sketching out the plans and profiles of the edifices she intended to erect."

Under the reign of Henri II began the rise in importance, and the frequent appearance in the national councils, of the great families afterward so prominent in the wars of the League. The Connétable de Montmorency, the Maréchal de Saint-André, and the Guises, younger branch of the ducal house of Lorraine, who at this period claimed to be only the heirs of the house of Anjou, but who, later, asserted themselves to be descendants of Charlemagne, monopolized the royal favors and the royal authority. The eldest of Henri's sons, François II, during his brief reign of seventeen months, confided the military administration of his kingdom to François, Duc de Guise, who had retaken Calais from the English, and defended Metz against Charles V, and the "civil affairs" to his brother Charles, cardinal, and possessor of no less than a dozen benefices in the Church. The house of Bourbon, which might have disputed this ascendency with them, was temporarily in disgrace because of the treason of the Connétable, under François I, and the Duc de Montmorency had lost the important battle of Saint-Quentin against the Imperialists, in 1557, and was advanced in years. To these malcontents was added the Prince de Condé, and the higher nobility were all indignant at seeing the domination of France in the hands of foreigners,—the queen-mother, Italian; the young wife of François II, Scotch, and the Guises, Lorrainers. To add to their ill-humor, these foreigners, as foreigners, claimed the precedence in matters of etiquette, and the right to walk in procession immediately after the princes of the blood, before the chiefs of the most illustrious houses of France.

Catherine de Médicis had preserved, amidst the intrigues and debauchery of the court, but one wholesome moral sentiment,—a passionate love for her children. The long course of mortifications which she had had to endure at the hands of Diane de Poitiers "had effaced in her all distinctions between good and evil." To preserve the royal power in the hands of her sons, three of whom succeeded to the throne in somewhat rapid succession, she considered all means legitimate. For a brief space of time she saw herself excluded from her ascendency over the king by the young queen, Marie Stuart, daughter of James V of Scotland and Marie de Lorraine, whom Henri II had married to his son to assure the alliance of Scotland against England. The discontent against the Guises led to the "conspiracy of Amboise," in 1560, easily suppressed and punished with the utmost severity; the young king wept at the incessant executions, but the pretty young queen, as seems to be proven by her "Letters," secretly approved. The queen-mother, more intelligent, gave the keeping of the seals to the Chancellor Michel de l'Hôpital, who opposed the proposition of the Guises to set up the Inquisition in France, and convoked the nobles at Fontainebleau to organize the opposition. The civil wars were inaugurated.

François II died on December 5, 1560; Mary of Scots went back to her native land, weeping bitterly, and the queen-mother assumed the regency, as her second son, Charles IX, was then only ten years and six months of age. He was not without good parts, he had an inclination for les belles lettres, fostered in him by his preceptor, Amyot, who had translated Plutarch, and one of his favorites was the poet, Pierre de Ronsard. The mutual outrages and exasperations, the changing fortunes of the incessant wars between Catholics and Huguenots, gradually led up to the calamity of the Saint-Bartholomew; in 1567, five years before, the young king was nearly captured by the chiefs of the Reformed religion, escaping with difficulty to his capital and to his palace of the Louvre. To cement the peace of Saint-Germain, signed in 1570, and which granted such favorable terms to the Protestants that the Catholic party protested fiercely, a marriage was arranged between the son of Jeanne d'Albret, Queen of Navarre, Henri de Béarn, and the king's sister, Marguerite, the Reine Margot of the chroniclers. The Queen of Navarre and her son, followed by the Admiral Coligny and a host of the leaders among the Huguenots, came to Paris; the protestations of friendship with which they were received by the king inflamed still more the passions of the partisans of the Guises, and the sudden death of Jeanne d'Albret, attributed to poison, but probably caused by a pulmonary affection, only served to increase the universal apprehension and suspicion.

The marriage was postponed, but celebrated a week later, on the 17th of August, 1572, with great pomp; the bridegroom took up his lodgings in the Louvre, but, five days later, Coligny, returning to his little hôtel in the Rue des Fossés-Saint-Germain-l'Auxerrois, was fired at by an assassin named Maurevert in the pay of the Guises, receiving one ball in the left arm and losing the index finger of his right hand by another. The excessive grief and concern manifested by the king seems to have disarmed his suspicions; but Catherine, aided by the leaders of the Catholic party, was incessantly urging her son to seize the opportunity thus within his grasp, and, by exterminating all the enemies of the true religion, at once avert from France the horrors of a fourth civil war. "The king resisted; his mother quoted to him the Italian proverb that mildness is often cruelty, and cruelty mildness; then she threatened to leave the court with her other son, the Duc d'Anjou, so as not to witness the ruin of her house, so as to no longer have before her eyes such cowardice and imbecility. She had well calculated the effect of this last taunt upon a violent spirit. Charles, until then motionless and sombre, suddenly exclaimed, that, if it were found advisable to kill the admiral, he wished that all the Huguenots in France might be killed, 'so that not one should be left to reproach him.'" It was agreed to exempt from the massacre the King of Navarre, the new brother-in-law of Charles, and the young Prince de Condé, but on the condition that both of them returned to the Catholic religion.

All the necessary measures had been taken by the Guises and by the municipality of the city; the signal was to be given from the Palais de Justice, by the first stroke of the tocsin after midnight, on the morning of Sunday, the 24th of August, the day of Saint-Barthélemy, and the Catholics were to be designated by white handkerchiefs on their arms and white crosses in their hats. But the killing began under the walls of the Louvre before the appointed hour, and Catherine sent hastily to the neighboring church of Saint-Germain-l'Auxerrois with orders to give the signal. The Duc de Guise had reserved for himself the honor of superintending the murder of Coligny, then helpless from his wounds, and he immediately hastened to the Hôtel de Ponthieu, where the admiral was lodged, burst in the doors, had the old man murdered and flung out of the window and his head struck off.

There are various authorities, among them D'Aubigné, for the story that the king fired with a long arquebus from one of the windows of the Louvre upon the fleeing Huguenots. "He took great pleasure," says Brantôme, "in seeing from his windows more than four thousand corpses, killed or drowned, floating down the river." The same chronicler relates that when, on the 27th, in company with his mother and a number of seigneurs, he visited the gibbet of Montfaucon to inspect the corpse of the admiral, there hanging in chains, he did not, like all the others, stop his nose, but said: "I do not as you all do, for the smell of an enemy is always pleasant." He had, perhaps, borrowed the phrase from Aulus Vitellius, visiting the battle-field of Bedriac.

"Women who were enceinte were ripped open, that the little Huguenots might be snatched from their wombs, to be thrown, to be devoured, to pigs and dogs. In those houses in which none were left alive but children, these infants were piled into large baskets, and then thrown from the bridges into the river. There might be seen frightful little boys, ten years of age, strangling the babies in the cradles, or dragging them through the streets by a cord around their necks."

The number of slain in the city of Paris was variously estimated at from two thousand to ten. The murders did not cease entirely until the 17th of September, and, with the exception of some districts, in which the officials refused to carry out their orders, extended throughout France. The victims were by no means all Huguenots; the opportunities offered to private vengeance were too great, and rivals, debtors, thieves, and a horde of criminals covered their crimes with the cloak of religion. Two years later, the king died, at the age of twenty-four, tormented in his last moments by remorse, and cared for only by his old Huguenot nurse.

Even in this horrible business, there were not wanting reassuring touches of human nature. The fine story which Dumas père tells with so much spirit in his Reine Margot, of the wounded gentleman, pursued by the assassins, seeking refuge in the very bed-chamber of this queen, and saved by her, is quite true, if we may believe the recital of the queen herself (Historic Memoirs: Margaret of Valois). His name was Monsieur de Nançay, and she was obliged to change her chemise, as he had bloodied it in clinging to her! In the conspiracy to prevent the return of the King of Poland, afterward Henri III, to France in the eventuality of the death of Charles, of which conspiracy the youngest royal brother, the Duc d'Alençon, was the head, there were two gentlemen, Joseph de Boniface, Sieur de la Mole, who was Queen Marguerite's lover, and the Comte de Coconas, an Italian, who was loved by the Duchesse de Nevers. The story of the trial and execution of these two, and even the ghastly incident of the preservation of the severed head of the lover, are also founded on facts.

The massacre of Saint-Bartholomew has found apologists, even at this late day,—an historical work issued by the house of Firmin-Didot, in 1898, purporting to give an impartial résumé of the acts of the League during the reigns of Henri III and Henri IV, declares that the people took part in this tragedy because "their zeal had been misled," and they believed that they were going, not to massacre, but to battle "against enemies who menaced their faith and their liberty." The League, according to this champion of the Church, M. V. de Chalambert, "was at once legitimate in its principles, energetic and sagacious in its acts, in its faith;" ... "if the family of Lorraine had the signal honor of personifying, during a space of nearly fifty years, the Catholic cause in France, it owed this honor to the faith, to the sincere zeal, and to the great qualities of its princes, not to the schemes of ambition." A more important work, the History of the Princes of Condé, by the Duc d'Aumale, in seven volumes, is much more impartial, though the distinguished author's sympathies are naturally enlisted in this subject. He quotes with just appreciation the answer of the young Prince of Condé, Henri de Bourbon, to Charles IX after the massacre, when the king summoned him before him and curtly gave him his choice: "Messe, mort, ou Bastille?" (the mass, death, or the Bastile.) "God will not permit, my king and my seigneur, that I should select the first. As for the other two, they are at your discretion, which may God temper with His Providence."

"The intellectual life of the people," says the author of the Mémoires du peuple français, "had gained, rather than lost, amid the terrible emotions of public affairs. In the interiors of the houses, everything demonstrated that literature, the arts, the sciences, commerce, and industry were far from having succumbed during the long crises of the preceding reigns." It was during the reign of Charles IX that the beginning of the year was fixed at the first of January, by an edict issued in 1564. It had previously been considered as commencing at Easter.

Henri de Navarre and the young Duc d'Alençon were retained as prisoners in the Louvre, where they amused themselves by flying quails in their rooms and making love to the ladies. The young prince escaped first, on the evening of the 15th of September, 1575, but the king did not succeed in evading the vigilance of his keepers till the following February, when he took advantage of a hunt in the forest of Senlis, to ride to rejoin Monsieur, his young brother-in-law, and the Prince de Condé, thus abjuring the vows of the Church, which he had taken under compulsion. The Paix de Monsieur which followed, signed on the 17th of April, 1576, granted the followers of Luther and Calvin the free exercise of their religion everywhere, "as much as they would have acquired by gaining two battles against the court of France." To the zealous Catholics this peace seemed like a betrayal of their cause, and the Sainte Ligue, for the maintenance of the privileges of the Church and the king, was organized throughout the country under the auspices of Henri de Guise, who placed himself at the head of the movement.

Henri III, who had fled from his throne of Poland to take that of France as soon as he heard of the death of his brother, had not even the few good qualities of the latter. Depraved, prodigal, effeminate, capable only of the most puerile occupations, he excited the indignation of the Parisians by his dissolute manners, by his travesty of feminine apparel, his fine collars, his necklaces of pearls, his pourpoint opened to show his throat. D'Aubigné declared that he could not decide whether he saw "a woman-king or a man-queen." In his solemn entry into his capital he scandalized the grave citizens by his appearance, "having around him a great quantity of parakeets, monkeys, and little dogs." His courtiers and favorites naturally followed his example, and shared the popular disfavor; in 1576, the Parisians began to designate them as mignons du roi. Their worthy master, whenever it arrived to one of them to be killed in duel or ambuscade, contented himself with giving him a fine tomb and a marble statue in the church of Saint-Paul, hence called "the seraglio of the mignons," so that, says De Thou, "the usual threat against one of these favorites was: 'I will have him carved in marble like the others.'"

To thwart the schemes of the Guises, who had begun to plot for the succession to the throne, the king placed himself at the head of the League, and created his Order of the Saint-Esprit in hopes of winning partisans in both camps. His brother, now Duc d'Anjou, died in 1584, after an unsuccessful expedition into the Low Countries; the Duc de Guise concluded the treaty of Joinville with Philippe II of Spain, in the same year, in which the high contracting parties agreed to extirpate sects and heresies; to exclude from the throne of France heretic princes, or those who promised public impunity to heretics, and to assure the succession of the Valois to Charles, Cardinal de Bourbon. The cardinal was put forward as a stalking-horse, to be discarded at the right moment. And yet after the eighth civil war, that "of the three Henrys," the duke had the courage, or the assurance, to come to demand an audience of the king at Blois, and was poniarded by the Quarante-Cinq, the royal body-guard, in the antechamber. The next day, his brother, the cardinal, was killed with halberds, and the two bodies were burned that there might be no relics.

Catherine de Médicis, if we may believe the historians, had an undoubted talent for epigrams. When it was announced to her erroneously, as it afterward proved, that the battle of Dreux, in 1562, had been won by the Huguenots, she remarked, placidly: "Well, we shall have to pray God in French." When her son hastened to inform her after this notable assassination: "I have become, again, King of France, madame, having had killed the King of Paris," she replied: "It is not enough to cut out, my son; you must sew up." Henri did not know how to sew up; the League was far from being killed, the city of Paris, filled with fury and resentment at this murder, publicly disowned him and closed its gates against him. In one of the many nocturnal processions in its streets, a hundred thousand persons, it is said, carrying lighted torches, extinguished them all at once at a signal, crying, with one voice: "God extinguish thus the race of Valois!" He was obliged to seek an alliance with the Béarnais; the two kings laid siege to the capital, and a fanatical Dominican monk, Jacques Clément, having gained access to the tent of Henri III by forged letters, buried a knife in his bowels. He died in the night, having previously made his attendants swear to recognize the King of Navarre as King of France. His mother had died six months before, "despair in her soul."

Of Henri IV, "manly and humane by natural gifts, as well as by worldly experience," there are innumerable anecdotes related to illustrate his somewhat contradictory character. He is even found apologizing for Catherine de Médicis. One day, in 1600, the Président de Groulard was recalling to the king the memory of the many ills that she had brought upon France. "But," said the Béarnais, "I should like to ask you, what could a poor woman do who had, by the death of her husband, been left with five small children on her hands and two families who were endeavoring to wrest the crown from them, ours and that of the Guises? Was she not obliged to make use of strange personages to outwit both of them, and yet to preserve, as she did, her children, who reigned successively, thanks to the discreet conduct of so sagacious a woman? I wonder that she did not do even worse!" His perpetual pecuniary difficulties, so common to kings of France, developed in him other qualities. L'Estoile relates that his fine horses were returned to him in Paris because there were no funds with which to provide for them. The king turned to M. d'O, the Governor of Paris, and asked him how this came to be. "Sire," replied the latter, "there is no money." "My condition," said the king, "is, indeed, deplorable! I shall presently be obliged to go naked and on foot." Then, turning to a valet de chambre, he asked him how many shirts he possessed. "A dozen, sire; some of them are torn." "And handkerchiefs, have I not eight?" "At present, there are only five." "One night, when D'Aubigné and La Force were sleeping near the King of Navarre, the former complained bitterly to the second of their master's stinginess. La Force, overwhelmed with fatigue, was not listening. 'Do you not hear what I am saying?' asked D'Aubigné. La Force, rousing himself, demanded the subject of his discourse. 'Eh! he is telling thee,' said the king, who had heard it all, 'that I am a skinflint [un ladre vert], and the most ungrateful mortal on the face of the earth.' 'He did not manifest any resentment toward me,' adds D'Aubigné; 'but neither did he give me a quarter of an écu the more.'"

His second marriage, with Marie de Médicis, a niece of the Pope, was no more happy than royal marriages usually were. The pontiff had granted him a divorce from Marguerite de Valois, whose conduct was thought to be too frivolous even for those times; and the royal nuptials were solemnized at Florence in October, 1600, and greatly fêted in Paris the following January. "A dull woman, who brought him neither heart nor beauty nor wit, but the largest dot that could then be found (six hundred thousand écus of gold, equivalent to eighteen or twenty millions of francs to-day)." "His mistresses—less by their beauty than by gaiety and good humor—held an influence over him which probably she herself might have acquired, could she have curbed her violent temper. But not only did she rave and rage, and assail him with angry words, it was even necessary to restrain her from the too free use of her hands. And her blows were far from being light ones, for, as Henri once jestingly said, she was 'terribly robust.'" His conjugal inconstancy was, indeed, flagrant. La belle Gabrielle, Madame de Liancourt, afterward made Marquise de Mousseaux, the most celebrated of his mistresses, was declared by him to be the only woman he ever really loved, and, say the chronicles, "he used to caress her greatly and kiss her before everybody," but she had plenty of successors. One of them, the Marquise de Verneuil, was obliged to be present in the queen's train on the day of her coronation, as was, also, the divorced Marguerite de France; and on the very morning of his assassination, the king, now grizzled and bent, went to pay a visit to a newer beauty to whom he was paying court, Mlle. Angélique Paulet, daughter of the secretary of State who originated the celebrated financial measure named, after him, la paulette.

Nevertheless, it is related that on the day of her coronation, in 1610, when Marie de Médicis passed up the nave of the cathedral of Saint-Denis, flushed with pride and triumph, and wearing regally the royal mantle and jewels, Henri, who was present only as a spectator, turned to Sully, his minister and friend, and said, with animation: "Ventre-saint-gris! Qu'elle est belle!" It may be remarked that the king's favorite oath was said to have been invented for him by the churchmen, that he might not be guilty of blasphemy,—neither Saint-Gris nor his stomach being known to the calendar.

After having paid his visit to Mademoiselle Paulet, the king ordered his carriage, to go and see how the preparations for the 16th of May—the day of the public entrance into the capital of the newly-crowned Queen of France—were progressing. It is said that he had a superstitious presentiment concerning carriages, and but very seldom used them; there were not wanting other warnings, one from the astrologers, and his heart was unusually heavy. He had already escaped nineteen attempts at assassination. The coaches of those days had no glass windows, and were clumsy boxes, mounted on four immense wheels, and either set without springs or suspended on broad leathern bands. The king, who was accompanied by the ducs d'Épernon and de Montbazon and five other gentlemen, ordered the leathern curtains at the sides to be rolled up; at the corner of the Rue Saint-Honoré and the narrow Rue de la Ferronnerie there was a temporary blockade caused by two wagons, one laden with wine and the other with hay,—Ravaillac took advantage of the halt to mount with one foot on one of the spokes of the hind wheel on the side where the king was sitting and stabbed him three times, though the second stroke was instantly mortal.

The consternation was general and overwhelming, and with reason. "There might be seen men, as if struck by lightning, suddenly fall unconscious in the middle of the streets; several persons died very suddenly."

Henri III was the first King of France who made use of a carriage, but horses and mules long remained the favorite means of transportation for those who did not go afoot. Sober personages, magistrates and burghers, rode mules, and the ladies were loath to give up their hackneys for the new machines. Sauval, in his Antiquités de Paris, relates that he had been informed by a certain ancient dame—Madame Pilon—that there were no coaches in Paris until after the time of the League, some sixteen years before the death of Henri IV, and that the first person to appear in one was a relative of her own, the daughter of a wealthy apothecary of the Rue Saint-Antoine. Glass windows for them were not used till the reign of Louis XIV, who sent a coach so furnished as a gift to Charles II of England. The usage of tobacco began to be general under Henri IV, and soon became so excessive that the strongest measures were taken against those addicted to this habit. The beard of this monarch was also considered an offensive innovation by his Catholic subjects, and is even said to be responsible for more than one of the fanatical attempts on his life. His Huguenot subjects, however, "drew a hope from his continuance to wear it that their renegade chief might yet be of the number of the predestined."

"A hundred virtues of a valet, and not one virtue of a master," said Tallemant des Réaux of Henri's son, Louis XIII, as he grew to manhood. In two very recent publications on this historical period, M. Berthold Zeller, drawing his details from the contemporary reports of the Florentine and Venetian ambassadors at the court of France, presents a striking picture of the feebleness and ineptitude of the young king, even after the date of the official ending of his minority, October 2, 1614, and of the subtlety, quite Italian, with which the queen-mother played her part amid the intrigues of her followers and her adversaries. M. Louis Batiffol, in an article in the Revue de Paris, December, 1896, comments on a collection of manuscripts which he has found in the Bibliothèque Nationale, communications furnished by Louis XIII to the Gazette, published by Renaudot, on various military transactions. The communications were all edited, and not printed from these originals, because, although he was very fond of writing for the new art of printing, the king was "absolutely destitute of orthography, and was ignorant of the simplest rules of grammar. He wrote stiffly and with great care, in letters thin and long, more than a centimètre in length, he re-read, erased, and corrected in pencil the most awkward phrases, but his style remained at the end that of a child." Before being sent to the printer, these royal communications were corrected by one of his secretaries, M. Lucas, and afterward went through the hands of Richelieu. Nevertheless, M. Batiffol finds that these articles give "a very favorable impression of a king who presents so unimportant a figure in history and yet who did not lack for real qualities,"—an impression of impassibility, of self-control under all circumstances, and of a very serious application to the details of the affairs that came before him. "He was a soldier devoted to his profession, a true soldier, who loved the whistling of bullets, and would remain all night on horseback under a beating rain if he expected an attack from the enemy."

He was also a superior market-gardener, and prided himself on having the earliest and finest spring vegetables, superintending all the details of their cultivation himself. None of these early crops, however, appeared on his own table, but were furnished, at fancy prices, to such luxurious consumers as the wealthy Pierre de Puget, Seigneur de Montauron, Conseiller du roi. One day, in 1628, being, as usual, at a loss for occupation, and having successfully concocted a fricandeau for dinner, he amused himself by shaving all his courtiers, leaving them only a little tuft on the chin. This, naturally, set the fashion for beards for some time.

It also became the custom for gentlemen to perfume themselves, to disguise the odor of the pipe, which was now coming into general use. In October, 1645, the King of Poland sent a magnificent embassy, with an escort of four hundred cavaliers, to Paris to demand in marriage the hand of Marie-Louise de Gonzague, daughter of Charles I, Duke of Mantua, and Catherine de Lorraine; a formal entry into the city was arranged, and the Parisians were much impressed with the grand costumes of the Polish nobility,—"their stuffs were embossed with gold and silver, and precious stones glittered from every portion of their adornment, whilst the French nobility, which came out to meet them, displayed only plumes and ribbons." Nevertheless, it appeared that the French nobles had shaved themselves and washed their hands, which the Poles had forgotten to do. This mediæval lack of cleanliness continued down to the time of Louis XIV; Marguerite de Navarre, in a pretty, amorous dialogue of her composition, makes the fair lady admit that she had not washed her hands for a week.

In 1612, the queen-mother, Marie de Médicis, then regent, arranged a double Spanish marriage for two of her children: the Princess Elisabeth, a child of twelve, was sent to Spain to wed the Prince of the Asturias, afterward Philip IV, and Louis brought back to Paris "a fine tall girl, a Spanish blonde, wanting yet two or three summers for the full development of her beauty," Anne d'Autriche. Though he was as faithful to his marriage vows as Saint-Louis, it is said, he seems to have always maintained for his wife a profound contempt, and, when the little Louis XIV was born, refused to take the infant in his arms, or to kiss it, which wounded the mother more than all his previous neglect. His treatment of his own mother in her later days was even more reprehensible; she was banished, and left in indigence and humiliation till her death, at Cologne, July 3, 1642. Her sole piece of jewelry, a cross surrounded with diamonds, and containing a piece of the true cross, she bequeathed to her daughter Henrietta, wife of Charles I of England. It was through Marie de Médicis, whom he afterward opposed so consistently, that the Bishop of Luçon, afterward Cardinal Richelieu, first was called to court, and during the king's minority and tutelage the government was administered by "the three robes," the queen-mother, the Bishop of Luçon, and the wife of the Italian favorite Concini, the Maréchal d'Ancre, killed on the drawbridge of the Louvre when he became too overbearing and obnoxious.

"The distinguishing characteristic of the Siècle de Louis XIV," says M. Maxime Petit, in his review of the important work by Émile Bourgeois, Le Grand Siècle, "that which Voltaire selected as the most important, is not the history of the negotiations and the battles, but that of the manners and customs, the ideas, the beliefs, the letters, and the arts.... Never, perhaps, more than in the time of Louis XIV was there a more complete harmony between the ideas and the life. The political forces are thoroughly disciplined, and the principle of authority, which Richelieu had developed to its fullest extent, reigns uncontested. Polite society—the only one to be considered—believes itself to be in possession of absolute rules, and, in the court as in the city, the heart abdicates in favor of reason." "When one speaks of the seventeenth century in France," says M. Louis Farges, "it appears, to those who are neither historians nor professional scholars, as one of those rare epochs in which all the forces of the nation concentrate and develop in a serene and majestic unity. France seems, then, to be at the summit of her political power, of her intellectual and artistic development, of her religious and philosophical unity. Taken altogether, and in a very general manner, this is a very just idea; ... it must be admitted that at no other epoch has the genius of France manifested itself in the divers branches of human activity in a manner so complete, so abundant, and so united." "France was really," says M. Duruy, "at the head of modern civilization, and, by the recognized superiority of her genius and of her taste, she caused to be accepted by the whole of Europe the pacific empire of her artists and of her writers."

Apparently, at least, the visible instrument that accomplished this great result was the dogma of absolute power, the monarchical régime; the king was the earthly image of God, divine, inviolable: loyalisme was a veritable religion, it had its symbols, its mysteries, and its rites. "If the king were not afraid of the devil," said Saint-Simon, "he would cause himself to be worshipped." This faith and this worship were already manifested "in their incomparable splendor by the ceremonies attending the opening of the États Généraux in 1614, dominated, not, as in 1789, by the august and abstract idea of the nation, but by the pale and melancholy figure of a boy of thirteen." For the tremendous and elaborate pomp of his court, the ceremonial ostentation which hedged around his own redoubtable figure, the tedious and suffocating etiquette which attended all approach to his person, Louis XIV himself had very definite reasons, which he expressed with an appreciable logic in his Mémoires. "Those who deem that these are only matters of ceremony deceive themselves greatly. The people over whom we reign, not being able to penetrate to the depths of things, form their judgments usually on that which they see on the surface, and most frequently measure their respect and their obedience by precedence and rank. As it is important to the public to be governed by one only, it is also of importance to it that he who fills this function should be elevated in such a manner above the others that there should be no person who can be either confounded or compared with him, and it is not possible, without injury to the whole body of the State, to deprive its chief of the slightest marks of superiority which distinguish him from all the other members."

Hence, three conditions were imposed absolutely upon all those who sought in any way to find favor with the head of the State,—to ask and to obtain a residence at Versailles; to follow the court everywhere, even when sick, even when dying, and to approve of everything. Of the universal abasement of spirit which this régime brought about, the memoirs of the time are full. La Bruyère said: "Whoever considers how the happiness of the courtier lies wholly in the face of the prince, that he makes it the one occupation of his life to look on it, and to be seen by it, may, in some degree, comprehend how, in looking on the face of God, consists all the glory and happiness of the saint." The Duc de Richelieu wrote: "I pray the king on my knees that he will permit me to come sometimes to pay my court to him, for I had rather die than be two months without seeing him." A court-preacher, preaching one day before the king on the familiar topic, dwelt upon it: "We shall all die, all, all!" A sudden and involuntary movement of the monarch reminded him that he had touched upon a theme displeasing to royalty. In his dismay and confusion he hastened to qualify his assertion: "Yes, sire, almost all." Louis XIV, it is said, looked forward to continuing his rôle of Grand Monarque, even in the next world.

"Violating all laws, civil and religious," says Duruy, "the king placed on a level with the princes of the blood the princes legitimized. He forced the court to respect the one as equal to the other; and the public morality received a blow from which it was very slow to recover." These lessons were not lost, and the annals of the nobility are full of scandalous examples. The ducs d'Orléans and Vendôme were addicted to infamous debauchery; the Duc d'Antin was caught, flagrante delicto, in theft; drunkenness and gambling were prevalent at court, the Grand Prieur de Vendôme boasted that he had not gone to bed sober one night in forty years. Pascal, discussing the privileges of the nobles and the kings, said to them boldly: "You are kings only of concupiscence." This great court, the most brilliant in Europe, "sweated hypocrisy," said Saint-Simon. It may be remarked, that, in addition to the very frequent disfigurement by small-pox, from which even the king was not entirely free, there was a remarkable prevalence of deformity among the families of the aristocracy. "There was scarcely one of which some member, male or female, had not a curved spine, a distorted limb, or other malformation; owing, most likely, to the common practice of closely swathing the limbs of infants, and of confiding young children to the charge of careless and ignorant nurses, for the first three or four years of their lives."

Two of the mysteries of this reign which have long furnished themes for discussion have lately been solved by the ingenuity of modern research. The "Man in the Iron Mask," guarded in the Bastile "for forty-two years," treated with the utmost consideration and buried under a false name, it now appears was confined there only five years, from September, 1698, to his death in November, 1703, shared his cell at different periods with other prisoners, a police spy and a lackey, and was buried without any attempt at mystery! The original register of his death, reproduced before its destruction among other archives of the city of Paris in 1871, gives his name as Marchioly, though it had been read Marchialy by all the commentators (the tail of the o being really a trifle too high for an a), and it is now considered settled that this signified Mattioli, in the uncertain orthography of the times, Count Hercule-Antoine Mattioli, secretary of the Duke of Mantua, whom Louis XIV had caused to be arrested on Italian soil, in defiance of international law, for having betrayed the secrets of the negotiations relative to the acquisition of Casal.

The sudden and tragic death of Madame, Henriette d'Angleterre, wife of the king's brother, Monsieur, le Duc d'Orléans, made famous by Bossuet's funeral oration, long ascribed to poison, has been elucidated by Littré in what has been designated as the finest example known of "a retrospective medical demonstration." She had just returned from England, bearing with her the treaty of Dover, signed by her brother, Charles II, in which that monarch agreed to abandon the alliance with Holland, and died suddenly in great agony after taking her usual glass of chicory-water in the evening. The autopsy, which was performed by the most celebrated surgeons of France, aided by two or three English physicians, revealed a small perforation in the walls of the stomach, which the doctors, knowing no other way of accounting for, agreed must have been made accidentally by the point of their scissors. Littré demonstrates that this accident was very improbable, and that the perforation was evidently caused by an ulcer of the stomach,—a disease unknown to the medical science of the time.

His testament, as he had foreseen, was set aside, much as his father's had been. Philippe d'Orléans summoned the Parlement, which granted him full power as regent, with freedom to compose the council as he liked, and the government of the royal household was taken from the Duc du Maine after a most unseemly altercation. All the solemn and pompous traditions of the court were likewise abandoned. "What does it matter to the State," said the regent, "whether it is I or my lackey who rides in a carriage." He took for his minister and councillor the Abbé Dubois, "a little, thin man, like a weasel," said Saint-Simon, "in whom all the vices, perfidiousness, avarice, debauchery, ambition, and base flattery, struggled for the mastery." The general demoralization caused by the collapse of the great financial schemes of John Law was only a feature in the general abandonment of all restraint in the pursuit of pleasure. In the midst of this luxury of effrontery, there suddenly appeared the imposing and barbaric figure of Peter the Great of Russia, who visited Paris in the spring of 1717, and dismayed the court and the Parisians by the simplicity and directness of his character, his disregard for their voluptuous frivolity, and his appreciation of the things only that make for greatness in a State. He did not hesitate to prophesy, from what he saw and learned, the approaching decadence and ruin of the French monarchy and the French people.

At the age of thirteen, in February, 1723, Louis XV was declared to have attained his majority and assumed the reins of government, nominally at least, for the regent had taken care to give him Dubois for prime minister. Both these illustrious personages, however, died in the course of the year, and were succeeded by the Duc de Bourbon, "ugly and one-eyed, low, mediocre, hypocritical, a man of little led by a woman of nothing, Madame de Prie," and who renewed the persecution of the Protestants and the Jansenists. The young king contented himself with "showing at the council table his handsome and impassible countenance, which nothing ever animated. When not thus engaged, when he was neither gambling nor hunting, he occupied himself with tapestry-making, turning snuff-boxes in wood, or reading either the secret correspondence with his ambassadors, which he maintained unknown to his ministers, or the scandalous recitals which the lieutenant of police sent him regularly every day." In the latter part of his reign, these habits were succeeded by even more ignoble ones, drunkenness and nameless vices.

To maintain his own power, the Duc de Bourbon sent back to Spain the Infanta, who had been brought to Paris, at the age of four, to fit her for her future position as Queen of France, and married the king to Marie Leczinska, daughter of the dethroned King of Poland, then living at Wissembourg on the charity of the French government. One day, this Stanislas Leczinski entered the chamber in which his wife and daughter were sitting, and said to them in great excitement: "Let us get down on our knees and thank God!" "Are you recalled to the throne of Poland?" asked his daughter. "Much better; you are Queen of France." She was seven years older than the king, very poor, without beauty, but gentle and pious. The insult offered to the court of Spain was but one of the many blunders and failures of the foreign diplomacy, while the extravagance and debauchery at home kept pace with the growing disorder in the national finances. The sum total of the funds disbursed during "the nineteen years of the reign of Madame de Pompadour, drawn up by her orders, exceeds thirty-six millions of livres, equivalent to more than sixty millions at the present day." In 1780, under Louis XVI, the amount of pensions paid by the government reached the sum of twenty-eight millions, and soon after rose to thirty-two. "I doubt," said Necker, in his Compte rendu, "if all the sovereigns of Europe pay in pensions the half of this sum." At the same time, the officers of the household of Louis XV were frequently unpaid, and it was more than once necessary, as it had been in the reign of his illustrious predecessor, to appeal to bourgeois and nobles to bring their silverware to the treasury to be melted down, that the national administration might not be utterly bankrupt. "Never," said the Comte de Maistres, during the Terror, "did a great crime have so many accomplices: there are doubtless some innocent sufferers among the victims, but they are very much fewer than is generally supposed."

The marriage of the dauphin, afterward Louis XVI, with the Austrian archduchess, Marie-Antoinette, in May, 1770, was attended with a frightful catastrophe during the celebration of the event, on the evening of the 30th, on the Place Louis XV, now Place de la Concorde,—hundreds of persons being crushed to death, trampled under foot, killed with swords, or with the fireworks which burst in their midst. It was an ill omen for the future. The accession to the throne of this youthful pair, in 1774, was hailed with pleasing anticipations by the nation, wearied with the excesses of the late reign. "What joy," said Michelet, "to see seated at last on the purified throne of Louis XV this virtuous, this excellent young king and this charming queen! Who would not have hoped for everything? A grand movement of art adorned this coronation, illuminated the scene. And the queen was the centre of all. One woman only seemed to exist." The graceful, youthful figure of Marie-Antoinette, dauphine, has recently been made the subject of special research by M. Pierre de Molhac, and the intimate relations between court intrigues and the gravest measures of foreign diplomacy are exemplified in the pressure put upon her by her mother, Marie-Thérèse, to treat with more consideration the king's mistress, Madame du Barry, who, the dauphine wrote to her mother, "is the silliest and most impertinent creature imaginable." The consent of Louis XV to the partition of Poland was purchased by the promise of his daughter-in-law to assume the same attitude toward Madame du Barry that her mother had formerly condescended to with respect to Madame du Pompadour. "Louis XV was touched in the most sensitive part of his heart by the tact of his old friend; his silence concerning Poland was paid for in advance."

Amid the general extravagance and corruption of the upper classes of society some attempts were made to preserve the traditions of the famous Hôtel de Rambouillet, le berceau de la société polie, where talent, learning, and wit were the qualities that secured distinction, and not pride of birth. Under Louis XIV, this salon was renewed in the fine hôtel of the Marquise de Lambert, in the Ile Saint-Louis,—in modern times restored by Prince Czartoriski,—and in the "Saturdays" of Mademoiselle de Scudéry, one of the greatest literary celebrities that had frequented the receptions of the Marquise de Rambouillet. The Saturdays were a great success, and the example thus set of "having a day" was generally followed; the literary coteries of the précieuses—later satirized by Molière—became numerous, and Mademoiselle de Scudéry's receptions were maintained till 1695. Under Louis XVI, in 1780, appeared no less than three social organizations having widely different aims,—the Société Philanthropique, the Société Apollonienne, which soon changed its title to that of the Musée, and the more practical Société des Mercredis, which existed for the purpose of encouraging good cooking. But the most distinguished of these reunions, frequented by the higher classes of society, was the Société Dramatique de Madame de Montesson, the mistress of the Duc d'Orléans, who had ended by marrying her with his left hand. In her hôtel in the Rue Chaussée d'Antin, this lady had mounted a theatre, on which she appeared with the prince, and which, from 1770 to 1780, quite maintained the lead in the social diversions of the capital.

With the approach of the Revolution, about the commencement of the year 1785, there was a new movement, in the direction of the organization of a great number of "clubs," a word then new to the Parisian ears, but which was received with great favor. There was already in existence a Club Politique, which the government tolerated on the express condition that no discussions of politics or religion were to be permitted,—a condition which was quite disregarded. The Duc d'Orléans, who was very proud of being a member of the Club Anglais, founded the Club de Boston or des Américains; then there was the Club des Arcades, the Club des Étrangers, the Club de la Société Olympique, the Club des Artistes, and several others. The important part played in the bloody drama of the Revolution by the various political clubs, is matter of history. The earliest of these associations, of course, bore a general resemblance to the social institutions which the Parisians now know as Cercles; and it may be remarked that one of the most celebrated of the many recent pessimistic publications of the day, the Grandeur et Décadence des Français, by M. Gaston Routier, finds one of the many signs of the social demoralization of his countrymen in the number and importance of the cercles in the cities, and especially in the high play that so many of them favor.

To the extravagances and pretended miracles of the sect of the convulsionnaires and those wrought on the tomb of the deacon Paris in the cemetery Saint-Médard in 1730 and 1731, succeeded the extraordinary alleged cures of the German doctor Mesmer, who came to Paris in 1778 with his theory of "animal magnetism,"—theory treated with more respect by many of the savants of the present day than by those of the eighteenth century. The invention of the brothers Montgolfier, practically tested in 1783, awakened an extraordinary interest both in the scientific world and among the populace; and it is related that the American, Benjamin Franklin, being asked what he thought of these new aërial machines, replied: "It is the coming child."

The times were ripe for change: Mademoiselle de Romans, walking in the Tuileries gardens with a little son whom she had born to Louis XV, and pressed by the crowd, exclaimed: "Eh! messieurs and mesdames, do not crush so, and let your king's child breathe!" The Comte d'Artois, who was devoted to the game of tennis, being one day in an ill humor, ordered the court to be cleared of all the spectators, using epithets which were habitual with him: "Drive them all out," he said, "tous ces b . . . et ces j . . . f . . . !" No one was left but one officer. "Well, did you not hear what I said?" demanded his Royal Highness. "Yes, monseigneur, but as I am neither a b . . . , nor a j . . . f . . . , I remained." "The respect for la noblesse was singularly diminished, and the whole audience, even the nobles themselves, applauded at the theatre, in 1784, the bold epigrams of the 'Figaro' of Beaumarchais: 'Because you are a great seigneur, you think yourself a great genius! You have given yourself the trouble to be born; that is all you have done!'"

On the 19th of June, 1789, the Assemblée Nationale, in a session which Marat qualified as "glorious," decreed "that hereditary nobility is forever abolished in France; that, consequently, the titles of marquis, chevalier, écuyer, comte, vicomte, messire, prince, baron, vidame, noble, duc, and all other similar titles cannot be borne by any person whatsoever, nor given to any one; that no citizen shall bear other than his true family name; that no one shall cause his domestics to wear a livery nor have any coats-of-arms, and that incense shall be burned in the temples only in honor of the Divinity." The Assemblée Legislative held its first sitting on the 1st of October, 1792; on the 4th, the deputation of sixty members sent to announce to the king that the body was ready to begin its deliberations hesitated as to what phrases to employ, and finally decided upon Votre Majesté. When the deputation returned to give an account of its mission, much dissatisfaction was expressed: "Let there be no more use of this title of 'Majesty,'" exclaimed one member.

"Let us repudiate the title of 'Sire,'" said another.

"There is no longer any majesty here but that of the law and the people," cried Couthon.

It was accordingly decreed that the deputies should seat themselves and cover themselves before the king, that there should be provided but two similar arm-chairs, one for the king and one for the president, and, finally, that the king should receive no other title but that of Roi des Français. Louis XVI complained bitterly of this indignity, but it was one of the least he was called upon to endure.

When the royal family were brought into Paris from Versailles by the armed mob, they arrived at the Tuileries at half-past ten in the morning of the 6th of October, 1789. No attempt had been made to prepare for their use this long uninhabited palace, and the little dauphin said to his mother: "Mamma, everything here is very ugly." "My son," she replied, "Louis XIV lived here, and found himself comfortable; we should not be more difficult to please than he was." On the 20th of June, 1791, they made an unsuccessful attempt to escape by flight, in disguise, from the constantly increasing perils that menaced them, but were recognized at Varennes and brought back in captivity. Nevertheless, the king was restored to his executive functions on the 14th of the following September, and it was not until after the attack on the Tuileries, on the 10th of August, 1792, brought about largely by the intrigues of the émigré nobles who had fled over the frontier and by the manifesto of the Duke of Brunswick, the general in command of the Prussian army, announcing that he was coming, in the name of the allied kings, to restore to Louis XVI his authority, that that hapless monarch finally lost it. While his faithful Swiss guards were being massacred in the hopeless defence of his palace, he was sitting, surrounded by his family, in the loge called that of the logographe, where he had taken refuge with the Assemblée, watching through the open grille, or iron railing, the tumultuous deliberations of that body while it enacted that the chief of the executive power was temporarily suspended from the exercise of his functions. Two days later, they were all conducted to the Temple as prisoners, where the king was lodged on one floor of the grand tower, while the queen, Madame Elisabeth, his sister, the young dauphin and his sister, occupied that above him.

On the 26th of October, the Journal de Paris announced that the ladies had taken possession of their new apartment on the third floor, which consisted "of four rooms very well furnished, two of which had chimneys and the other two, stoves. The son of Capet sleeps in his father's chamber. On a clock in the chamber of Louis there was the inscription: 'Le Pautre, clockmaker to the king.' The name of the king has been effaced and that of the Republic substituted." The "ci-devant royal family" were allowed to promenade in the garden, and the king sometimes walked on the leads of the tower, all the openings of which had been carefully closed so that he could not see below, nor be seen. During five months this captivity was maintained under a constant and frequently outrageous surveillance.