Читать книгу Paris from the Earliest Period to the Present Day - William Walton - Страница 11

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."

LOUIS XVI ON THE LEADS OF THE TEMPLE. After an engraving of the period.

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.

LOUIS XVI, WITH HIS FAMILY, IN THE LOGOGRAPHIC BOX AT THE ASSEMBLY, WITNESSING HIS DEPOSITION; AUGUST 11, 1792. From a drawing by Georges Cain.

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.

FEMME-DE-LA-COUR AND FOUNDLING; EIGHTEENTH CENTURY. From a water-color by Maurice Leloir.

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.'"

NAPOLEON AND MARIE LOUISE ENTERING THE GARDEN OF THE TUILERIES ON THE DAY OF THEIR MARRIAGE, APRIL 2, 1810.

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."

GRAND SALON OF THE TUILERIES, 1810. After Percier and Fontaine.

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."

BONAPARTE AND THE GRENADIER. One of the first acts of the new king, Charles VIII, was to hang Olivier le Dain, valet de chambre, barber, counsellor, and, finally, ambassador of his father. His property was confiscated and given to the Duc d'Orléans. This act afforded a lively satisfaction to the Parisians and to the nation at large. Another favorite of the late monarch, Jean de Doyat, was somewhat more fortunate, though he was arrested, publicly whipped in the streets, pilloried at the Halles, where his tongue was pierced with a hot iron and one ear cut off, then sent down to Auvergne, his native province, flogged again, robbed of the other ear, and all his goods confiscated. Later, however, the king quashed the judgment and restored him his property, if not his severed members.

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.

THE POMPEIIAN HOUSE, AVE. MONTAIGNE. BUILT IN 1866, FOR PRINCE NAPOLEON. DEMOLISHED IN 1892.

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:

"Lever à cinq, dîner à neuf, Souper à cinq, coucher à neuf. Fait vivre d'ans nonante-neuf."

(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.

COSTUME FOR YOUNG GIRL. PERIOD, 1821. From a sketch by F. Courboin. This reign witnessed one of those unjust condemnations of the royal treasurer which had become so common in French history. Jacques de Beaune, Seigneur de Semblançay, had succeeded his father in this important post; Louis XII and François I alike had found every reason to repose the utmost confidence in their financial officer, but the latter monarch, and his mother, set no bounds to their lavish expenditure. In 1521, Lautrec, François's general in Italy, drew on the royal treasury for four hundred thousand écus to pay his Swiss mercenaries. Semblançay was about to send him the money, when he was summoned, according to the generally received story, by Louise de Savoie, to hand it over to her, which he did. Owing to the defection of his unpaid Swiss, Lautrec was defeated at the Bicoque and lost the Milanaise; when bitterly reproached by the king for his ill-success, the facts in the case came out. The queen-mother admitted having received the money and applied it to her own use, but she declared that it was a portion of her private funds which she had previously deposited with the treasurer-general. Semblançay was accordingly brought to trial, but, though he demonstrated that the king was in his debt to the amount of three hundred thousand livres, he was condemned for peculation and hung on the gibbet at Montfaucon, notwithstanding his blameless life and his seventy-two years. "I have, indeed, deserved death," he said, "for having served men more faithfully than God." Clément Marot, the court poet, wrote an epigram on the juge d'enfer who had condemned this worthy servant of the king, and a popular tumult was averted with difficulty; two years later, the clerks whom the queen-mother had employed to steal her receipts from the treasurer's coffers confessed, he was declared innocent, and his confiscated property restored to his grandson.

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—

"Adieu, plaisant pays de France, O ma patrie, La plus chèrie," etc.,

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.