The Story of Paris Part 11

[Footnote 126: In 1586 six poor wretches convicted of plotting the a.s.sa.s.sination of Queen Elizabeth were dragged to Tyburn, "hanged but for a moment, taken down while the susceptibility of agony was unimpaired and cut in pieces afterwards with due precautions for the protraction of the pain."--Froude's _History_.]

The first Bourbon king has left his impress on the architecture of Paris. "Soon as he was master of Paris," says a contemporary, "one saw naught but masons at work." Small progress had been made during the reign of Henry II.'s three sons with their father's plans for the rebuilding of the Louvre. The work had been continued along the river front after Lescot's death in 1578 by Baptiste du Cerceau, and Catherine de' Medici had erected a gallery on the south, known as the Pet.i.te Galerie--a ground-floor building with a terrace on top, intended for a meeting-place and promenade but not for residence. She had also begun in 1564 the palace of the Tuileries, which, like the Louvre, was designed to be a quadrangular building and of which the west wing alone was ever constructed, but abandoned it on being warned by her astrologer, Ruggieri, that she should die under the ruins of a house near St Germain.[127] Henry, soon after he had entered Paris, elaborated a vast scheme for finis.h.i.+ng the Tuileries, demolis.h.i.+ng the churches of St. Thomas and St. Nicholas, quadrupling the size of the old Louvre, and joining the two palaces by continuing the Grande Galerie, already begun by Catherine, to the west, to afford a means of escape in the event of an attack on the Louvre. Towards the east the hotels d'Alencon, de Bourbon and the church of St. Germain l'Auxerrois were to be demolished, and a great open s.p.a.ce was to be levelled between the new east front of the Louvre and the Pont Neuf. At Henry's accession Catherine's architects, Philibert de l'Orme and Jean Bullant, had completed the superb domed central pavilion of the Tuileries, with its two contiguous galleries, and begun the end pavilions, the former using the Ionic order as a delicate flattery of Catherine, "since among the ancients that order was employed in temples dedicated to a G.o.ddess." The gardens, with the famous maze and Palissy's beautiful grotto or fountain, had been completed in 1476, and for some years were a favourite promenade for Catherine and her court. Henry's plans were so far carried out that on New Year's day, 1606, he could lead the Dauphin along the Grande Galerie to the Pavilion de Flore at the extreme west of the river front, and enter the south wing of the Tuileries which had been extended to meet it.

The Pavilion de Flore thus became the angle of junction between the two palaces. An upper floor was imposed on the Pet.i.te Galerie, and adorned with paintings representing the kings of France. Unhappily the fire of 1661 destroyed all the portraits save that of Marie de' Medici by Porbus, and all the subsequent decorations by Poussin. Henry intended the ground floor of the Grande Galerie for the accommodation of his best craftsmen--painters, sculptors, goldsmiths, tapestry weavers, smiths, and others. The quadrangle, however, remained as the last Valois had left it--half Renaissance, half Gothic--and the north-east and south-east towers of the original chateau were still standing to be drawn by Sylvestre towards the middle of the seventeenth century.

[Footnote 127: The new palace was situated in the parish of St.

Germain l'Auxerrois, the parish church of the Louvre.]

The unfinished Hotel de Ville was taken in hand after more than half-a-century and practically completed.[128] The larger, north portion of the Pont Neuf was built, the two islets west of the Cite were incorporated with the island to form the Place Dauphine and the ground that now divides the two sections of the bridge--a new street, the Rue Dauphine, being cut through the garden of the Augustins and the ruins of the college of St. Denis. The Place Royale (now des Vosges) was designed and partly built--that charming relic of seventeenth and eighteenth century fas.h.i.+onable Paris, where Moliere's _Precieuses_ lived.

[Footnote 128: The north tower was left only partially constructed, and was finished by Louis XIII.]

Henry also partly rebuilt the Hotel Dieu, created new streets, and widened others.[129] New fountains and quays were built; the Porte du Temple was reopened, and the Porte des Tournelles constructed.

Unhappily, some of the old wooden bridges remained, and on Sunday, 22nd December 1596, the Pont aux Meuniers (Miller's Bridge), just below the Pont au Change, suddenly collapsed, with all its shops and houses, and sixty persons perished. They were not much regretted, for most of them had enriched themselves by the plunder of Huguenots, and during the troubles of the League. The bridge was rebuilt of wood, at the cost of the captain of the corps of archers, and as the houses were painted each with the figure of a bird, the new bridge was known as the Pont aux Oiseaux (Bridge of Birds). It spanned the river from the end of the Rue St. Denis and the arch of the Grand Chatelet to the Tour de l'Horloge of the Palais de Justice. In 1621, however, it and the Pont au Change were consumed by fire in a few hours and, in 1639, the two wooden bridges were replaced by a bridge of stone, the Pont au Change, which stood until rebuilt in 1858.

[Footnote 129: By a curious coincidence the widening of the Rue de la Ferronnerie had been ordered just before the king was a.s.sa.s.sinated.]

[Ill.u.s.tration: OLD HOUSES NEAR PONT ST. MICHEL, SHOWING SPIRE OF THE STE. CHAPELLE.]

We are able to give the impression which the Paris of Henri Quatre made on an English traveller, a friend of Ben Jonson and author of _Coryat's Crudities, hastily gobbled up in five months' Travell_. The first objects that met Coryat's eye are characteristic. As he travelled along the St. Denis road he pa.s.sed "seven[130] faire pillars of freestone at equal distances, each with an image of St.

Denis and his two companions, and a little this side of Paris was the fairest gallows I ever saw, built on Montfaucon, which consisted of fourteene fair pillars of freestone." He notes "the fourteene gates of Paris, the goodly buildings, mostly of fair, white stone and"--a detail always unpleasantly impressed on travellers--"the evil-smelling streets, which are the dirtiest and the most stinking I ever saw in any city in my life. Lutetia! well dothe it brooke being so called from the Latin word _lutum_, which signifieth dirt." Coryat was impressed by the bridges--"the goodly bridge of white freestone nearly finished (the Pont Neuf); a famous bridge that far exceedeth this, having one of the fairest streets in Paris called our Ladies street; the bridge of Exchange where the goldsmiths live; St. Michael's bridge, and the bridge of Birds." He admires the "Via Jacobea, full of booke-sellers' faire shoppes, most plentifully furnished with bookes, and the fair building, very s.p.a.cious and broad, where the Judges sit in the Palais de Justice, the roofs sumptuously gilt and embossed, with an exceeding mult.i.tude of great, long bosses hanging downward."

Coryat next visited the fine quadrangle of the Louvre, whose outside was exquisitely wrought with festoons, and decked with many stately pillars and images. From Queen Mary's bedroom he went to a room[131]

"which excelleth not only all that are now in the world but also all that were since the creation thereof, even a gallery, a perfect description whereof would require a large volume, with a roofe of most glittering and admirable beauty. Yea, so unspeakably fair is it that a man can hardly comprehend it in his mind that hath not seen it with his bodily eyes." The Tuileries gardens were the finest he ever beheld for length of delectable walks.

[Footnote 130: They marked the seven resting-places of the saint as he journeyed to St. Denis after his martyrdom.]

[Footnote 131: The Grande Galerie.]

Next day Coryat saw the one thing above all he desired to see, "that most rare ornament of learning Isaac Casaubon," who told him to observe "a certain profane, superst.i.tious ceremony of the papists--a bedde carried after a very ethnicall manner, or rather a canopy in the form of a bedde, under which the Bishop of the city, with certain priests, carry the Sacrament. The procession of Corpus Christi," he adds, "though the papists esteemed it very holy, was methinks very pitiful. The streets were sumptuously adorned with paintings and rich cloth of arras, the costliest they could provide, the shews of Our Lady street being so hyperbolical in pomp that it exceedeth all the rest by many degrees. Upon public tables in the streets they exposed rich plate as ever I saw in my life, exceeding costly goblets and what not tending to pomp; and on the middest of the tables stood a golden crucifix and divers other gorgeous images. Following the clergy, in capes exceeding rich, came many couples of little singing choristers, which, pretty innocent punies, were so egregiously deformed that moved great pity in any relenting spectator, being so clean shaved round about their heads that a man could perceive no more than the very rootes of their hair."

At the royal suburb Coryat saw "St. Denis, his head enclosed in a wonderful, rich helmet, beset with exceeding abundant pretious stones," but the skull itself he "beheld not plainly, only the forepart through a pretty, crystall gla.s.s, and by light of a wax candle."

CHAPTER XIV

_Paris under Richelieu and Mazarin_

Before Coryat left Paris he rode a sorry jade to Fontainebleau which, "though I did excarnificate his sides," would not stir until a gentleman of the court drew his rapier and ran him to the "b.u.t.tock."

At the palace he saw the "Dolphin whose face was full and fat-cheeked, his hair black, his look vigorous and courageous." The Dolphin that Coryat saw came to the throne, at nine years of age, in 1610, as Louis XIII. For a time the regent, Marie de' Medici, was content to suffer the great Sully to hold office, but soon favouritism and the greed of princes, to the ill-hap of France, drove him in the prime of life from Paris into the retirement of his chateau of Villebon, and a feeble and venal Florentine, Concini, who came to Paris in the time of Marie, took his place. The Prince of Conde, now a Catholic, the Duke of Mayenne, and a pack of n.o.bles fell upon the royal treasury like hounds on their quarry. In 1614, so critical was the financial situation, that the States-General were called to meet in the Salle Bourbon,[132]

but to little purpose. Recriminations were bandied between the n.o.blesse and the Tiers etat. The insolence of the former was intolerable. One member of the Tiers was thrashed by a n.o.ble and could obtain no redress. The clergy refused to bear any of the public burdens. The orator of the Tiers, speaking on his knees according to usage, warned the court that despair might make the people conscious that a soldier was none other than a peasant bearing arms, and that when the vine-dresser took up the arquebus he might one day cease to be the anvil and become the hammer. But there was no thought for the common weal; each order wrangled for its own privileges, and their meeting-place was closed on the pretext that the hall was wanted for a royal ballet. No protest was raised, and the States-General never met again until the fateful meeting at Versailles, in 1789, when a similar pretext was tried, with very different consequences. Among the clergy, however, sat a young priest of twenty-nine years of age, chosen for their orator, Armand Duplessis de Richelieu, who made rapid strides to fame.

[Footnote 132: In the Hotel de Bourbon, east of the old Louvre, sometimes known as the Pet.i.t Bourbon. It was demolished to give place to the new east facade of the Louvre.]

In 1616 the n.o.bles were once more in arms, and Conde was again bought off. The helpless court was in pitiful straits and the country drifting to civil war, when Richelieu, who, meanwhile, had been made a royal councillor and minister for foreign affairs, took the Conde business in hand. He had the prince arrested in the Louvre itself and flung into the Bastille; the n.o.ble blackmailers were declared guilty of treason, and three armies marched against them. The triumph of the court seemed a.s.sured, when Louis XIII., now sixteen years of age, suddenly freed himself from tutelage, and with the help of the favourite companion of his pastimes, Albert de Luynes, son of a soldier of fortune, determined to rid himself of Concini. The all-powerful Florentine, on 24th April 1617, was crossing the bridge that spanned the eastern fosse of the Louvre, when the captain of the royal Guards, who was accompanied by a score of gentlemen, touched him on the shoulder and told him he was the king's prisoner. "I, a prisoner!" exclaimed Concini, moving his hand towards his sword.

Before he could utter another word he fell dead, riddled with pistol shots; Louis appeared at a window, and all the Louvre resounded with cries of "_Vive le roi!_" Concini's wife, to whom he owed his ascendency over the queen-mother, was accused of sorcery, beheaded and burnt on the Place de Greve; Marie was packed off to Blois and Richelieu exiled to his bishopric of Lucon. De Luynes, enriched by the confiscated wealth of the Concini, now became supreme at Paris only to demonstrate a pitiful incapacity. The n.o.bles had risen and were rallying round Marie; the Protestants were defying the state; but Luynes was impotent, and soon went to a dishonoured grave, leaving chaos behind him.

Richelieu's star was now in the ascendant. The king drew near to his mother, and both turned to the one man who seemed able to knit together the distracted state. A cardinal's hat was obtained for him from Rome, and the ill.u.s.trious churchman ruled in Paris for eighteen years. Everything went down before his commanding genius, his iron will and his indefatigable industry. "I reflect long," said he, "before making a decision, but once my mind is made up, I go straight to the goal. I mow down all before me, and cover all with my scarlet robe." The Huguenots, backed by the English, aimed at founding an independent republic: Richelieu captured La Roch.e.l.le[133] and wiped them out as a political party. The great n.o.bles sought to divide power with the crown: he demolished their fortresses, made them bow their necks to the royal yoke or chopped off their heads. They defied the king's edict against duelling: the Count of Bouteville, the most notorious duellist of his time, and the Count of Les Chapelles were sent to the scaffold for having defiantly fought duels in the Place Royale in open noonday, at which the Marquis of Buffy was killed. The execution made a profound impression, for the Count was a Montmorency, and the Condes, the Orleans, the Montmorencys and all the most powerful n.o.bles brought pressure to bear on the king and swore that the sentence should never be carried out. But Richelieu was firm as a tower. "It is an infamous thing," he told Louis, "to punish the weak alone; they cast no baleful shade: we must keep discipline by striking down the mighty." Richelieu crushed the Parlement and revolutionised the provincial administrations. He maintained seven armies in the field, and two navies on the seas at one and the same time. He added four provinces to France--Alsace, Lorraine, Artois and Rousillon, humiliated Austria and exalted his country to the proud position of dominant factor in European politics. He foiled plot after plot and crushed rebellion. The queen-mother, Gaston Duke of Orleans her second son and heir to the throne, the Marquis of Cinq-Mars the king's own favourite--each tried a fall with the great minister, but was thrown and punished with pitiless severity. Marie herself was driven to exile--almost poverty--at Brussels, and died a miserable death at Cologne. The despicable Gaston, who twice betrayed his friends to save his own skin, was watched, and when the queen, Anne of Austria, gave birth to a son after twenty years of marriage, he was deprived of his dignities and possessions and interned at Blois. The Marquis of Cinq-Mars, and the last Duke of Montmorency, son and grandson of two High Constables of France, felt the stroke of the headsman's axe.

[Footnote 133: The Church of Notre Dame des Victoires commemorates the victory.]

In 1642, when the mighty cardinal had attained the highest pinnacle of success and fame, a mortal disease declared itself. His physicians talked the usual plat.i.tudes of hope, but he would have none of them, and sent for the _cure_ of St. Eustache. "Do you pardon your enemies?"

the priest asked. "I have none, save those of the state," replied the dying cardinal, and, pointing to the Host, exclaimed, "There is my judge." Louis heard of his death without emotion, and simply remarked--"Well, a great politician has gone." In six months his royal master was gone too.

Paris, under Marie de' Medici and Richelieu, saw many and important changes. In 1612 a new Jacobin monastery was founded in the Rue St.

Honore for the reformed Dominicans, destined later to be the theatre of Robespierre's triumphs and to house the great Jacobin revolutionary club.[134] In the same year the queen-regent bought a chateau and garden from the Duke of Piney-Luxembourg, and commissioned her architect, Solomon Debrosse, to build a new palace in the style of the Pitti at Florence. The work was begun in 1615, and resulted in the picturesque but somewhat Gallicised Italian palace which, after descending to Gaston of Orleans and his daughter the Grande Mademoiselle, ends a chequered career as palace, revolutionary prison, house of peers, and socialist meeting-place by becoming the respectable and dull Senate-house of the third Republic. The beautiful Renaissance gardens have suffered but few changes; adorned with Debrosse's picturesque fountain, they form one of the most charming parks in Paris. The same architect was employed to restore the old Roman aqueduct of Arcueil and finished his work in 1624. In 1614 the equestrian statue in bronze of Henry IV., designed by Giovanni da Bologna, and presented to Marie by Cosimo II. of Tuscany, reached Paris after many vicissitudes and was set up on the Pont Neuf by Pierre de Fouqueville, who carved for it a beautiful pedestal of marble, whereon were inscribed the most signal events and victories of Henry's reign. This priceless statue was melted down for cannon during the Revolution, and for years its site was occupied by a _cafe_. In 1818, during the Restoration, another statue of Henry IV., by Lemot, cast from the melted figure of Napoleon I. on the top of the Vendome column, was erected where it now stands. The founder, who was an imperialist, is said to have avenged the emperor by placing pamphlets attacking the Restoration in the horse's belly.

[Footnote 134: The Marche St. Honore now occupies its site.]

[Ill.u.s.tration: THE MEDICI FOUNTAIN, LUXEMBOURG GARDENS.]

In the seventeenth century the Pont Neuf was one of the busiest centres of Parisian life. Streams of coaches and mult.i.tudes of foot-pa.s.sengers pa.s.sed by. Booths of all kinds displayed their wares; quacks, mountebanks, ballad-singers and puppet-shows, drew crowds of listeners. Evelyn describes the footway as being three to four feet higher than the road; and at the foot of the bridge, says the traveller, is a water-house, "whereon, at a great height is the story of our Saviour and the Woman of Samaria pouring water out of a bucket.

Above is a very rare dyall of several motions with a chime. The water is conveyed by huge wheels, pumps and other engines, from the river beneath." This was the famous Chateau d'Eau, or La Samaritaine, erected in 1608 and rebuilt in 1712 to pump water from the Seine and distribute it to the Louvre and the Tuileries palaces. The timepiece was an _industrieuse horloge_, which told the hours, days, and months.

The present baths of La Samaritaine mark its site and retain its name.

[Ill.u.s.tration: PONT NEUF.]

In 1624, Henry the Fourth's great scheme for enlarging and completing the Louvre was committed by Richelieu to his architect, Jacques Lemercier, and the first stone of the Pavilion de l'Horloge was laid on 28th June by Louis. Lemercier was great enough and modest enough to adopt his predecessor's design and having erected the pavilion, continued Lescot's west wing northwards, turned the north-west angle and carried the north wing to about a fourth of its designed extent.

The Pavilion de l'Horloge thus became the central feature of the west wing, which was exactly doubled in extent. The south-east and north-east towers of the eastern wing of the old Gothic Louvre, however, remained intact, and even as late as 1650 Sylvestre's drawing shows us the south-east tower still standing and the east wing only partly demolished. Lemercier also designed a grand new palace for the cardinal, north of the Rue St. Honore, including in the plans two theatres: a small one to hold about six hundred spectators, and a larger one, which subsequently became the opera-house, capacious enough to seat three thousand. Magnificent galleries, painted by Philippe de Champaigne and other artists, represented the chief events in the cardinal's reign, and were hung with the portraits of the great men of France, each with a Latin distich in letters of gold. The courts were adorned with carvings of s.h.i.+ps' prows and anchors, symbolising the cardinal's function as Grand Master of Navigation; s.p.a.cious gardens, with an avenue of chestnut trees, which cost 300,000 francs to train, added to its splendours.

In this palace the great minister, busy with a yet vaster scheme for building an immense Place Ducale to the north, pa.s.sed away leaving its stately magnificence to the king, whose widow, Anne of Austria, inhabited it during the regency with her sons, Louis XIV. and Philip, Duke of Orleans, the founder of the Bourbon-Orleans family. The famous architect, Francois Mansard, was employed by her to extend the Palais Royal as it was then called, which in 1652 was occupied by Henrietta Maria, Charles I.'s widow, whose court ill repaid the hospitality of France by acts of Vandalism. In 1661, on the marriage of Henrietta Anne, her daughter, to the Duke of Orleans it was a.s.signed to the Orleans princes, a portion being reserved for Louis XIV. where he lodged his mistress Mme. de la Valliere. The palace subsequently became infamous as the scene of almost incredible orgies during the regency. In 1730 Philip II.'s austere and pious son, Prince Louis, after having made an _auto-da-fe_ of forty pictures of the nude from the Orleans collection, permitted the destruction of Richelieu's superb avenue of trees. The buildings were further extended by Philip Egalite, who erected shops along the sides of the gardens, which as _cafes_ and gambling-saloons became a haunt of fas.h.i.+onable vice and dissipation in the late eighteenth century. The gardens of the royal palaces had always been open to well-dressed citizens, but notices forbade entrance to beggars, servants, and all ill-clad persons under pain of imprisonment, the carcan, and other graver penalties. Egalite, however, to win popularity, opened his gardens without restriction, and they soon became the forum of the revolutionary agitation. Here Camille Desmoulins declaimed his impa.s.sioned orations and called Paris to arms. The gambling-h.e.l.ls, of which there were over three hundred, survived the Revolution, and Blucher and many an officer of the allied armies lost immense sums there. The Palais Royal became subsequently the residence of Louis Philippe, and now serves as the meeting-place of the Conseil d'etat.

In the early seventeenth century nine lovers of literature a.s.sociated themselves for the purpose of holding a friendly symposium, where they discoursed of books, and read and criticised each other's compositions; the meetings were followed by a modest repast and a peripatetic discussion. The masterful cardinal, who would rule the French language as well as the state, called the nine together, and in 1635 organised them into an Academie Francaise, whose function should be to perfect and watch over the purity of the French tongue. The Parlement granted letters-patent, limited the number of academicians to forty, and required them to take cognisance of French authors and the French language alone. The original nine, however, were far from gratified, and always regretted the "golden age" of early days.

Richelieu established the Jardin des Plantes for the use of medical students, where demonstrations in botany were given; he rebuilt the college and church of the Sorbonne where his monument,[135] by Girardon from Lebrun's designs, may still be seen. He cheapened the postal service,[136] established the Royal Press at the Louvre which in twenty years published seventy Greek, Latin, Italian and French cla.s.sics. He issued the first political weekly gazette in France, was a liberal patron of men of letters and of artists, and saw the birth and fostered the growth of the great period of French literary and artistic supremacy.

[Footnote 135: In 1793 the tomb was desecrated, and the head removed from the body, but in 1863, as an inscription tells, the head was recovered by the historian Duruy, and after seventy years reunited to the trunk.]

[Footnote 136: A letter from Paris to Lyons was taxed at two sous.]

Another of Henry the Fourth's plans for the aggrandis.e.m.e.nt of Paris was carried out by the indefatigable minister. As early as 867 the bishops of Paris had been confirmed by royal charter, in their possession of the two islands east of the Cite, the Isle Notre Dame and Isle aux Vaches. From time immemorial these had been used as timber-yards, and in 1616 the chapter of the cathedral was induced to treat with Christophe Marie, contractor for the bridges of France, and others, who agreed to fill in the channel[137] which separated the islands; to cover them with broad streets of houses and quays, and to build certain bridges; but expressly contracted never to fill up the arm of the Seine between the Isle Notre Dame, and the Cite. The first stone of the new bridge which was to connect the islands with the north bank was laid by Louis XIII. in 1614 and named Pont Marie, after the contractor. In 1664 a church, dedicated to St. Louis, was begun on the site of an earlier chapel by Levau, but not completed until 1726 by Donat.

[Footnote 137: The Rue Poulletier marks the line of the old channel between the islands.]

The new quarter soon attracted the attention of rich financiers, civic officers, merchants and lawyers, some of whose hotels were designed by Levau, and decorated by Lebrun and Lesueur. Madame Pompadour's brother lived there; the Duke of Lauzan, husband of the Grande Mademoiselle, lived in his hotel on the Quai d'Anjou (No. 17); Voltaire lived with Madame du Chatelet in the Hotel Lambert (No. 1 Quai d'Anjou). To the _precieuses_ of Moliere's time the Isle St. Louis (for so it was called) became the Isle de Delos, around whose quays the gallants and ladies of the period were wont to promenade at nightfall. _The Isle_, as it is now familiarly known, is one of the most peaceful quarters of Paris, and has a strangely provincial aspect to the traveller who paces its quiet streets.

In 1622 Paris was raised from its subjection to the Metropolitan of Sens, and became for the first time the seat of an archbishopric; the diocese was made to correspond to the old territories of the Parisii.

Among the many evils attendant on a monarchy, which Samuel recited to the children of Israel, that of the possibility of a regency might well have found place. Louis XIV. was less than five years of age when his father died, and once again the great n.o.bles turned the difficulties of the situation to their own profit. By a curious anomaly, while women were excluded from succession to the throne of France, the queen-mother was invariably preferred to all other claimants for the Regency, and Anne of Austria became regent in accordance with old custom. She retained in office Cardinal Mazarin, Richelieu's faithful disciple, chosen by him to continue the traditions of his policy. The new cardinal-minister, scion of an old Sicilian family, was a typical Italian; he had none of his predecessor's virile energy and directness of purpose, but ruled by his subtle wit and cool, calculating patience. "Time and I," was his device. He was an excellent judge of men, and profoundly distrusted "the unlucky," always satisfying himself that a man was "lucky,"

before he employed him. Conscious of his foreign origin, Mazarin hesitated to take strong measures, and advised a policy of conciliation with the disaffected n.o.bles. Anne filled their pockets, and for a time the whole language of the court is said to have consisted of the five little words "_La reine est si bonne_." But the ambitious courtiers soon aimed at higher game, and a plot was discovered to a.s.sa.s.sinate the foreign cardinal; the Duke of Beaufort, chief conspirator, a son of the Duke of Vendome, and grandson of Henry IV., by Gabrielle d'Estrees, was imprisoned in the keep at Vincennes, and his a.s.sociates interned at their chateaux.

The finances which Richelieu had left in so flouris.h.i.+ng a condition were soon exhausted by the lavish benevolence of the court, and were unhappily in the hands of Emery (a clever but cynical official, who had formerly been a fraudulent bankrupt), whose rigorous exactions and indifference to public feeling aroused the indignation of the whole nation. In 1646, 23,800 defaulters lay rotting in the jails, and an attempt to enforce an odious tax on all merchandise entering Paris led to an explosion of popular wrath. The Parlement, by the re-a.s.sertion of its claims to refuse the registration of an obnoxious decree of the crown, made itself the champion of public justice; the four sovereign courts met in the hall of St. Louis, and refused to register the tax.

Anne was furious and made the boy-king hold a "bed[138] of justice"

to enforce the registration of the decree. But the Parlement stood firm, declared itself the guardian of the public and private weal, claiming even to reform abuses and to discuss and vote on schemes of taxation. So critical was the situation that the court was forced to bend, and to postpone the humiliation of the Parlement to a more convenient season. The glorious issue of the campaigns of Conde against the Houses of Spain and Austria seemed to offer the desired opportunity. On 26th August 1648, while a Te Deum was being sung at Notre Dame for the victory of Lens, and a grand trophy of seventy-three captured flags was displayed to the people, three of the most stubborn members of the Parlement were arrested. One escaped, but while the venerable Councillor Broussel was being hustled into a carriage, a cry was raised, which stirred the whole of Paris to insurrection. In the excitement a street porter was shot by a captain of the Guards, the Marquis of Meilleraye, and the next morning the court, aroused by cries of "Liberty and Broussel," found the streets of Paris barricaded and the citizens in arms. De Retz, the suffragan archbishop of Paris, came in his robes to entreat Anne to appease the people, but was snubbed for his pains. "It is a revolt," she cried, "to imagine a revolt possible; these are silly tales of those who desire it: the king will enforce order." De Retz, angry and insulted, left to join the insurrection and to become its leader. The venerable president of the Parlement, Mole, and the whole body of members next repaired to the Palais Royal with no better success: Anne's only answer was a gibe. As they returned crestfallen from the Palais Royal they were driven back by the infuriated people, who threatened them with death, and clamoured for Broussel's release or Mazarin as a hostage. Nearly all the councillors fled, but the president, with exalted courage, faced them and, answering gravely, as if in his judgment-seat, said, "If you kill me, all my needs will be six feet of earth": he strode on with calm self-possession, amid a shower of missiles and threats, to the hall of St. Louis. The echo of Cromwell's triumph in England, however, seemed to have reached the Palais Royal, and the queen-regent was at length induced to treat. The demands of the people were granted and Broussel was liberated, amid scenes of tumultuous joy.

[Footnote 138: So named from the wooden seat, or _couche de bois_, covered with rich stuff embroidered with _fleur-de-lys_, on which the king sat when he attended a meeting of the Parlement.]

In February of the next year the regency made an effort to rea.s.sert its authority. The queen and the royal princes left Paris for the palace of St. Germain and gathered an army under Conde: the Parlement taxed themselves heavily, tried their hands at organising a citizen militia, and allied themselves with the popular Duke of Beaufort, now at liberty, and leader of a troop of brilliant but giddy young n.o.bles.