Seven Ages of Paris

by Alistair Horne

  On the Right Bank, the Hôtel de Ville was an unfinished palace in the French Renaissance style, but it served as the meeting place for the elected officials of the bourgeois of Paris—and for receiving members of the royal family and visiting dignitaries. The registers and the seals of Paris, and its official weights and measures, were kept there. Outside, the Place de Grève, with its sombre associations of numerous public executions, was at a much lower level than the present square (the Place de l’Hôtel de Ville) and was frequently flooded by the Seine. People living on the square profitably rented out their windows on days of public execution. Apart from the area immediately bordering on the quays, Paris eastwards from the Hôtel de Ville was mainly aristocratic. The Marais, despite its insalubrious odours, remained the most fashionable quartier. Its residents generally ended in the nearby Cemetery of the Innocents. Like the Place de Grève, the chapels, charnel houses with their frescoes of the Dance of Death, aroused the morbid curiosity of visitors. The worm-laden earth of the Innocents was said to be remarkable; it could manger son cadavre en neuf jours. When graves had to be dug again in the same spot, the bones were pulled out of the earth and stored in piles along the walls. Two or three common graves stood open at the same time, to receive the humbler citizens, or victims of plague.

  On the western fringe of the Right Bank stood the Louvre. Following demolition of the donjon under François I, access to it was gained from the east side. This postern entrance had been built by Charles V as part of the flamboyant residence into which he had transformed the old fortress of Philippe Auguste. After crossing the drawbridge over the moat and passing under the east wing, one entered a courtyard crowded with people, carriages and horses. The gothic walls of the “old” Louvre on the north and east sides of the courtyard contrasted sharply with those facing the Seine and the west, built by François I and Henri II in the Renaissance style. Here was a balanced façade of classical columns, windows and statues.

  On the Left Bank, beyond Saint-Etienne-du-Mont, a belt of colleges and elegant houses built by judicial families formed a half-circle from the Convent of the Cordeliers on the west, which stood just inside the walls from Saint-Germain-des-Prés, to the commercial and bourgeois section of the Place Maubert. A medley of colleges and private houses stretched eastward from the Rue Saint-Jacques to the Place Maubert—described as the most bourgeois part of Paris. The families living there still behaved, talked and dressed like wealthy merchants rather than adopting the orotund courtly language characteristic of social climbers in the grander families. Meanwhile, the Place Maubert witnessed executions and occasional burnings of heretics in the sixteenth century to rival its grisly competitor across the river.

  Beyond the city walls, in the city’s faubourgs, monasteries had sprung up to gird Paris with a belt of cloisters, refectories, churches and gardens. The Abbey of Saint-Germain-des-Prés, the richest and largest of these, occupied what were to become the most fashionable parts of Paris in the eighteenth century. Founded in about 543, it had grown up under the double aegis of the Benedictine order and royal favour. The abbots were high-ranking feudal lords, usually of royal blood. The Faubourg Saint-Germain, extending from the land where the Luxembourg Palace now stands west to the Seine, to that of the Eiffel Tower, lay completely under the jurisdiction of the abbey court. The monastery contained one of the largest prisons in Paris, and was the scene of many public hangings. Standing almost alone beyond the walls in 1600, Saint-Germain still possessed all the characteristics of a medieval stronghold. Surrounded by a wide ditch, high crenellated walls, towers, drawbridges and gates, the abbey remained physically and judicially independent of Paris. Its three towers dominated the entire Left Bank. Here each year a fair was held near the monastery beginning a fortnight after Easter and lasting for three weeks. The main pavilion was nearly sixty metres wide. Its stone walls and high roof sheltered the principal alleys of stalls, named Normandy, Paris, Picardy, Chaudronnière, Mercière and Lingerie. The fair was a very fashionable and also a “very wild place to go.” There Parisians showed off their new clothes, while young noblemen would gallop through on horseback, knocking over carts and displays, and picking up girls along the way. It was a favourite haunt for pickpockets and merchants selling trash. Prostitutes gathered there to prey on provincials and Parisians alike.

  HENRI REBUILDS

  With characteristic energy, Henri began deluging Paris with orders for repair and reconstruction. To mend the accrued dilapidations alone looked likely to take years. Every summer there was still a shortage of food, particularly bread, and a threat of la peste. Conditions were to grow worse between the summer of 1596 and the summer of 1605 before they got better. Even with the free labour of the religious orders, welfare costs went well beyond what the prosperous bourgeois were willing to pay. Yet Henri did not wait for the collapse of the Pont au Meunier, or even a second wooden bridge, before setting to work to build a new and dazzling Paris. “As soon as he was master of Paris, one saw nothing but stonemasons at work,” recorded Le Mercure Galant in the year of his death. The new King was one of those born builders. Ambassadors who had known Paris in the days of the League expressed astonishment.

  Building was a true passion for Henri. In some ways he was a kind of Haussmann before his time. His ambition was to clear away the cluttered medieval quartiers, the breeding-places of pestilence, crime and revolt, and replace them with an orderly classical elegance that his predecessors had imported from Italy—and to do so on a grand scale without precedent. In his reign of sixteen years, he did more for Paris than any other ruler, before or since. In 1600, he became the first to institute planning regulations for Paris, issuing an order requiring house-owners to obtain official confirmation of the building line before undertaking any construction or repairs. The building of timber houses was now banned, including those with a timber frame. A new style, an elegant combination of brick and stone which can be seen in the present-day Place des Vosges, became the vogue.

  Within a year of his arrival, sweeping aside all obstacles and objections, Henri was at work extending the Louvre with a magnificent gallery, 500 metres in length, along the Seine, the Galerie de Bord de l’Eau and the Pavillon de Flore to link up with the Tuileries Palace laid down by Catherine de Médicis back in 1566. On its ground floor he set up his own school of fine and applied arts. Three years later, he was ordering completion of the Pont Neuf, a project dating back to his predecessor Henri III in 1578. This wonderfully elegant bridge that still spans the Seine across the western tip of the Ile was to be Paris’s first stone structure, unencumbered by houses, and robust enough to withstand the excesses of the unruly river. By 1601, Henri had finally achieved peace with his principal enemies abroad, and the far-sighted and liberal-minded Edict of Nantes in 1598 had brought about peace between the religious factions at home. On 11 March 1601, he was telling his administrators: “now that the country is at peace, regard must be paid to the embellishment of the kingdom, and in particular to finishing the projects begun by his predecessors, namely the Pont Neuf and the [water-supply] fountains.”

  But Parisians were reluctant to pay for the bridge, and infuriated the King by suggesting that the country at large be taxed for it. At one point he threatened to drop the whole project; but eventually the Pont Neuf was funded by a new tax levied on every barrel of wine brought into the city. Work on it resumed that summer. A short while later, Henri came down to inspect the work and, seeing an uncompleted arch, he took a running jump and leaped across the gap over the Seine—to the delight of the workmen and passers-by.

  In 1607, Henri followed up the opening of the newly completed bridge with a visionary scheme to develop the land between it and the old Palais. He handed it over in a grant to de Harlay, First President of the Parlement, on condition that the Place Dauphine—named after his infant son—would be built. Houses of red brick with festoons of stonework (the style was borrowed from provincial architecture, and then copied again in the ensuing years in the many charming
Louis XIII châteaux of the Ile de France), all of a pattern, were to form a large symmetrical triangle, open at the top by the Pont and framing a vista of the Palais as its base, in the first unified piazza to be constructed in Paris. The scheme was not actually completed until five years after Henri’s death, with the erection of the ebullient equestrian statue—the “Vert Galant”*—that still dominates one of the most favoured sites in all Paris, and with the addition of the enchanting small garden that forms the tip of the Ile de la Cité, like the prow of a ship. But Henri’s Place Dauphine swiftly became a major commercial success, with the houses taken by diplomats and provincials pursuing lawsuits in the courts, and the arcades below filled with shops, workshops and restaurants.

  Under Henri the Pont Neuf was soon pulsing with vitality, something like the Boulevard Saint-Germain in its heyday, where you could purchase a parasol, a chicken—or a tart. With music being played all along the bridge, the hubbub must have been immense, and incessant. Echoing the gay and bawdy tone set by the Vert Galant himself, in its love of life it must have been a microcosm of a city at last released from anxiety, fear and deprivation.

  Henri was delighted by his first creations. In 1607 he launched an even grander scheme for the Marais, on the site of the razed Hôtel des Tournelles, scene of the tragic joust that had killed Henri II. It was to be known as Place Royale—finally Place des Vosges. Though not finished until two years after Henri’s death, it remains perhaps the most lasting tribute to his reign, with its symmetrical perfection the true gem in his crown as an architect of Paris. Over the centuries it fell into terrible decay, but survived to be superbly resurrected during the 1960s, and remains one of the most magical squares in all Europe. Its construction confirmed the Marais, until the age of Louis XIV, as the fashionable residential area of Paris.

  Grander still than the Place Royale was Henri’s plan of 1609 to build—also in the Marais—a vast semi-circular piazza to be called the Place de France, and designed truly to put Paris on the map as an impressive modern capital, outdoing Rome’s Piazza del Popolo in splendour. It was to be sited at the city limits to the north-east, and from it would radiate eight important, and ramrod-straight, thoroughfares each bearing the name of a French province. Thus visitors entering through its gate would be instantly impressed by the union of Paris with the provinces under Henri’s flag of reconciliation. Alas for Paris, Henri’s death the following year aborted the Place de France; all that remains of the concept is the dead-straight and classically handsome Rue de Turenne in the Marais.

  Henri’s original intent for his Place Royale was, rather than the quartier chic into which it evolved, to create a low-rent development which would “house the workers whom we would attract here in the greatest possible numbers, and … serve as a promenade for those citizens of the town who were most crowded in their houses.” One should note, however, given the hurricane that was to sweep Paris at the end of the next century, that neither Henri’s town-planning nor that of his successors actually did much to alleviate the miserable housing conditions of the Parisian poor.

  On top of all these vast building schemes, Henri had to find time—and money—to house his ex-Queen, the demanding Margot, and her successor, not to mention the regiments of mistresses and their royal bastards whom he continued to collect. Henri’s marriage to La Reine Margot had been extraordinarily mouvementé and modern—certainly by sixteenth-century standards. Margot, meticulous in her personal habits and sensitive to untoward odours, had swiftly become disenchanted by Henri’s slovenliness and goatlike attributes, and soon both had embarked on a string of affairs. Yet, throughout, and even after divorce, they remained curiously devoted to each other, with Margot once saving Henri’s life by organizing his flight from Paris in 1576. By the time of his coronation, however, the marriage had all but broken down, and Henri was living as man and wife with Gabrielle d’Estrées. Of noble birth, as well as great beauty and high intelligence, Gabrielle represented probably the most serious attachment in the philandering life of the Vert Galant.

  In 1599 Henri had decided to ask Pope Clement VIII for an annulment of his marriage to Margot to enable him to marry Gabrielle. This would have made their illegitimate son, the Duc de Vendôme, heir to the throne—not a step likely to be pleasing to the powerful Médicis. Preparations for the wedding were already under way that spring. Henri had placed a conspicuously large diamond ring on her finger, provoking Gabrielle to remark publicly and hubristically, “Only God or the King’s death can put an end to my good luck!” In the event, it was her own death which intervened.

  One evening in April, while Henri was at Fontainebleau, Gabrielle was awaiting his return in one of their favourite trysting places, a little palace in the Marais in the romantically named Rue de la Cerisaie, or Street of the Cherry Orchard (which still exists). It belonged to a rather sinister figure named Sebastiano Zametti, alias Zamet, an Italian banker who also served as a kind of court jester to the King—and probably procureur. A gambling companion of the King, he was owed vast sums of money by Henri as well as by many of the French nobility. Zamet was even said to have been a lover of Gabrielle. Famous for his table, that night he treated her to one of his celebrated dinners. Almost immediately Gabrielle suffered acute convulsions of the nervous system, gave birth to a still-born son, and, aged only twenty-six, died in terrible pain before Henri could reach her side the following day. It was widely believed that Zamet had slipped her one of the notorious Médici poisons.

  Henri was inconsolable—for a while. But his sophisticated minister Baron de Rosny, though a lifelong Protestant, urged him to consider for dynastic purposes another Médicis, Marie. Habitually amenable to Rosny’s persuasion, Henri agreed. His country, impoverished by war, his building projects, his gambling and his amours, badly needed Florentine money. Marie arrived in Lyons, and to her intense rage Henri insisted on bedding her in advance of the marriage ceremony on 17 December 1600. Described unkindly as “the fat banker,” the twenty-eight-year-old Marie was certainly no beauty—but the following year she produced an heir for Henri, the future Louis XIII, and then settled down to an annual pregnancy. She also added, conspicuously, to the great buildings of Paris, most notably in the shape of the superlative Luxembourg Palace, built in her widowhood and in the style of her native Florence.

  All Henri’s women had to be housed, or else financed to build their own sumptuous quarters. Above all, there was Margot, still entitled to call herself queen (part of the annulment deal with Henri). With typical generosity, the Vert Galant allowed her back to Paris after eighteen years’ exile in Provence and gave her a stretch of land along the Seine on the Left Bank, with an unrivalled view over her childhood home in the Louvre. Here she built a magnificent mansion just behind the present Académie Française.

  While work was in progress, she lodged in the handsome Hôtel de Sens in the Marais, one of Paris’s last medieval buildings that still survive today. There ensued a grim tragedy, suggesting that though in her fifties Margot was by no means sexually extinct. Among her pages she had two young lovers—the Comte de Vermond, aged eighteen, and Dal de Saint-Julien, aged twenty. In a fit of jealousy Vermond shot his rival. Saint-Julien was the current favourite, and the murder drove Margot insane with rage; she had Vermond executed as she watched from a window. Depleted, d’un seul coup, of two young lovers, Margot quit the Hôtel de Sens for ever for the Left Bank. But her gardens, on which she lavished almost as much passion as she had upon her lovers, and which became the pride and joy of the quartier, soon aroused the jealousy of her successor, Queen Marie, gazing at them from the Right Bank. To trump Margot, she laid out the superb Cours de la Reine, the tree-lined quai 1,600 metres in length, reaching to the present-day Place de l’Alma. Her son, Louis XIII, later had to sell the property—to pay off Margot’s debts.

  * “Vert Galant,” or “Gay Blade,” was the abiding Parisian nickname for Henri.

  SULLY

  Indebtedness was a constant problem for Henri throughout
his reign. Fortunately he had the admirable Sully to help him. But before Sully could bring order to France’s derelict finances, Henri had had to put an end to strife, within and without the kingdom—something only he, with the immense moral stature he had now achieved, could do. As a first step, he succeeded, in 1595, in persuading Pope Clement VIII to lift the deadly ban of excommunication which had been placed upon him during the Siege of Paris. At a stroke the main weapon of the Catholic extremists of the Paris League was removed. In the spring of 1598, Henri signed both the Peace of Vervins, which ended the debilitating war with Spain, and the Edict of Nantes, which granted France, internally at least, an armistice in the Wars of Religion, which had paralysed her over the past half-century. The Edict, which granted France’s one million Protestants freedom of worship, rights to all state offices and other concessions, was by the standards of the time a visionary act of reconciliation and liberalism, and an important marker in the march of humanism.

  To be considered truly great, a leader of men needs to be able to attract the best of talents to his side. If it was true of Napoleon, it was certainly true of Henri IV in his choice of Maximilien de Béthune, Baron de Rosny and—later—Duc de Sully to run his affairs. One of the most remarkable administrators ever produced by France, Sully had followed Henri’s flag since the age of sixteen. He was also a dedicated Protestant, so it was not until the settlements of 1598 that Henri was able to bring him forward, aged thirty-eight, as his grand voyer, or chief of the municipal inspectors of Paris—in effect, his finance minister. That rare combination, a soldier-financier, Sully was a man capable of extreme ruthlessness—and was strangely popular with, and acceptable to, Catholics and Protestants alike; they trusted him. He rose each morning at four, and worked till ten at night, and by 1608 he had stabilized the nation’s finances, massively reducing debt and accumulating a reserve of cash in hand.