Читать книгу The Story of Paris - Thomas Okey - Страница 12

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Paris under Philip Augustus and St. Louis

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

When Philip Augustus took up the sceptre at fifteen years of age, the little realm of the Isle de France was throttled by a ring of great and practically independent feudatories, and in extent was no larger than half-a-dozen of the eighty-seven departments into which France is now divided. The English king held the mouths of all the great rivers and all the great cities, Rouen, Tours, Bordeaux. In thirty years Philip had burst through to the sea, subdued the Duke of Burgundy and the great counts, wrested the sovereignty of Normandy, Brittany and Maine from the English Crown, won Poitou and Aquitaine, crushed the emperor and his vassals in the memorable battle of Bouvines, and become one of the greatest of European monarchs. The king, who had owed his life to the excellence of his armour,[48] was received in Paris with a frenzy of joy. The whole city came forth to meet him, flowers were strewn in his path, the streets were hung with tapestry, Te Deums sung in all the churches, and for seven days and nights the popular enthusiasm expressed itself in dance, in song and joyous revel. It was the first national event in France. The Count of Flanders was imprisoned in the new fortress of the Louvre, where he lay for thirteen years, with ample leisure to meditate on the fate of rebellious feudatories. "Never after," say the chroniclers, "was war waged on King Philip, but he lived in peace."

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