Old and New Paris: Its History, Its People, and Its Places, v. 1

The Prince of Béarn now became the chief of the Protestant party, and as such, directed their forces at the Battle of Jarnac, with Coligny as second in command. The result of this engagement was a temporary peace, by which certain privileges were granted to the Protestants: not to be enjoyed, but simply to inspire a false confidence. It was not so easy to deceive Admiral Coligny, who, observing that the Guises had lost nothing of the influence they exercised over the king and queen, resolved to remain still upon his guard. At last, however, Catherine de Medicis succeeded in enticing him to the Court, and with him the Queen of Navarre, the Prince of Béarn, and the foremost chiefs of the Protestant party. Catherine spoke in a confiding tone to the old admiral about the war she pretended to contemplate against Flanders, and the king said to him, with a familiar slap on the shoulder: “I have you now, and don’t intend to let you go.” Flattered by these attentions, he felt secure, though many of his friends still doubted the sincerity of the king and queen. Their suspicions were confirmed by the sudden death of the Queen of Navarre, which was attributed to poison. Vainly, however, did they attempt to awaken the brave old admiral to his danger. He had, by express permission of the king, made a journey to Châtillon, and many of the Protestant chiefs warned and entreated him on no account to return to the Court. One of them, Langoiran by name, asked the admiral’s permission to quit his service. “Why?” said Coligny, in astonishment. “Because,” replied Langoiran, “they are loading us with caresses, and I would rather fly like a dog than die like a dupe.” Nothing, however, could disturb the confidence of the admiral, who returned to Paris only to throw himself into the arms of his assassins.

The young King of Navarre, the future Henry IV., was about to be married to the sister of the King of France, and the ceremony was to be made the occasion of all kinds of entertainments and festivities. The enemies of the Protestants were meanwhile preparing their massacre; and in the first place the death of Coligny was resolved upon.

When Richard III., in Shakespeare’s play, says to one of his pages, “Know’st thou a murderer?” the ingenuous youth replies —

“I know a ruined gentlemanWhose humble means match not his haughty tastes.”

A gentleman of this sort (and it was precisely from such material during the Renaissance that murderers were formed) presented himself in La Brie, the favourite country of witchery and bedevilment. He was called Maurevel, and surnamed, for no obvious reason, “the King-slayer.” Hired for the purpose, he concealed himself in a house in the Rue des Fossés Saint Germain l’Auxerrois, whence, just as Coligny passed by, on his way from the Louvre to dine at his house in Rue Béthizi, he fired at him with an arquebus, wounding him severely in the left arm and cutting off the forefinger of his left hand. Without showing much emotion, Coligny pointed to the house from which the shots had proceeded (the arquebus was loaded with several bullets), and tried to get the assassin arrested; but he had already fled. Then, leaning on his servants, he finished the journey to his own house on foot.

The king was playing at tennis when the news of the infamous act was brought to him. “Shall I never have any peace?” he exclaimed, as he threw down his racquet. The admiral’s friends resolved to complain at once to the king, and to demand justice. For this purpose Henry, King of Navarre, accompanied by the Prince de Condé, went to the palace, when Charles replied, with an oath, that he would inflict punishment. It was evident, he added, that a crime of this kind was a threat against the life of the king himself, and that no one would henceforth be safe if it were left unavenged.

The king, profanely as he spoke, was sincere; nor had the remotest thought of a massacre yet entered his head. The very day of the attack on Coligny he paid a visit of sympathy to the wounded admiral, accompanied by his mother, the Duke of Anjou, and a brilliant suite. He called him the bravest general in the kingdom, and assured him that his assailant should be terribly punished, and the edict in favour of Protestants in France absolutely obeyed.

Hitherto the queen had not dared to breathe to the king a word of her murderous designs, fearing an explosion of indignation on his part; and Charles’s first bursts of passion were always terrible. But as they were returning to the Louvre from their visit to the admiral she succeeded in frightening her royal son by hinting at the dark and foul projects which she attributed to the admiral. So enraged was the king that she could now fearlessly own to him that everything had taken place by her orders and those of the Dukes of Anjou and Guise.

The too credulous Charles vowed that in face of such nefarious plots on the part of the Protestants, Coligny should die, and the Huguenots be put wholesale to the sword, so that not one should survive to reproach him with the act.

The massacre being thus decided upon, it now only remained to put the infamous project into execution. In a conference at the Tuileries between the king, the Duke of Anjou, the Duke of Nevers, the Count of Angoulême, illegitimate brother of the king, the keeper of the seals, Birague, Marshal de Tavanne and Count de Retz, the slaughter was fixed for Sunday, August 24th, 1572, the day of the Feast of St. Bartholomew. There was a difference of opinion as to whether the King of Navarre, the Prince de Condé, and the Montmorencys should be included in the massacre. Then Tavanne summoned Jean Charron, provost of the merchants, and in the king’s presence ordered him to arm the Citizen Companies, and to march them at midnight to the Hôtel de Ville for active service.

The ferocious impatience of the Duke of Guise, who had undertaken the murder of Coligny, did not allow him to await the signal agreed upon for the massacre. He hurried, at two o’clock in the morning, to the house of the admiral, and ordered the gates to be opened in the name of the king. An officer, commanding the guard stationed in the court-yard to protect the admiral’s person, turned traitor, and admitted the assassins with a deferential salute. Three colonels in the French army, Petrucci, Siennois, and Besme; a German, a native of Picardy named Attin, Sarlaboux, and a few other gentlemen, rushed up the staircase, shouting, “Death to him!” At these words Coligny, understanding that his life was as good as lost, got up, and leaning against the wall, was saying his prayers, when the assassins broke into his room. Besme advanced towards him. “Are you Coligny?” he asked, with the point of his sword at the old man’s throat. “I am,” he replied with calmness; “but will you not respect my age?” Besme plunged his sword into the admiral’s body, drew it out smoking, and then struck his victim several times in the face. The admiral fell, and Besme, hastening to the window, cried out to the Catholic noblemen who were waiting in the court-yard, “It is done!” “M. d’Angoulême will not believe it till he sees the corpse at his feet,” replied the Duke of Guise. Sarlaboux and Besme seized the body and threw it into the court-yard. The Duke of Angoulême wiped the admiral’s face with his handkerchief; Guise said, “It is really he”; and both of them, after kicking the body with ferocious delight, leaped on horseback, and exclaimed, “Courage, soldiers! we have begun well; let us now see to the others. By order of the King!”

This crime had scarcely been consummated when the great bell of St. – Germain-l’Auxerrois gave the signal for the massacre, which soon became general. At the cries and shrieks raised round them, the Calvinists came out of their houses, half-naked and without arms, to be slain by the troops of the Duke of Guise, who himself ran along the streets, shouting “To arms!” and inciting the people to massacre. The butchery was universal and indiscriminate, without distinction of age or sex. The air resounded with the yells of the assassins and the groans of their victims. When daylight broke upon the hideous picture, bodies bathed in gore were everywhere to be seen. Dead and dying were collected, and thrown promiscuously into the Seine. Within the precincts of the palace, the royal guards, drawn up in two lines, killed with battle-axes unhappy wretches who were brought to them unarmed and thrust beneath their very weapons. Some fell without a murmur; others protested with their last breath against the treachery of the king, who had sworn to defend them. At daybreak the king went to the window of his bedroom, and seeing some unfortunate Protestants making a frantic attempt to escape by swimming across the river, seized an arquebus and fired upon them, exclaiming, “Die, you wretches!”

Marsillac, Count de la Rochefoucauld, one of the king’s favourites, had passed a portion of the night with him, when Charles, who had some thought of saving his life, advised him to sleep in the Louvre. But he at last let him go, and Marsillac was stabbed as he went out.

Antoine of Clermont Renel, running away in his shirt, was massacred by his cousin, Bussy d’Amboise. Count Teligni, who, ten months before, had married Admiral de Coligny’s daughter, possessed such an agreeable countenance and such gentle manners that the first assassins who entered his house could not make up their minds to strike him. But they were followed by others less scrupulous, who at once put the young man to death. An advocate named Taverny, assisted by one servant, resisted at his house a siege which lasted nine hours; though, after exhausting every means of defence, he was at last slain. Several noblemen attached to the King of Navarre were assassinated in his abode. The prince himself and Condé, his cousin, were arrested, and threatened with death. Charles IX., however, spared them on their abjuring Calvinism.

A few days before the massacre Caumont de la Force had bought some horses of a dealer, who, chancing to be in the immediate neighbourhood when Admiral de Coligny was assassinated, hastened to inform his customer, well known as one of the Protestant leaders, of what had taken place. This nobleman and his two sons lived in the Faubourg St. – Germain, which was not yet connected with the right bank by any bridge. The horse-dealer, therefore, swam across the Seine to warn La Force, who, however, had already effected his escape. But as his children were not following him, he returned to save them, and had scarcely set foot in his house when the assassins were upon him. Their leader, a man named Martin, entered his room, disarmed both father and sons, and told them they must die. La Force offered the would-be murderers a ransom of 2,000 crowns, payable in two days. The chief accepted, and told La Force and his children to place in their hats paper crosses, and to turn back their right sleeves to the shoulder: such being the signs of immunity among the slaughterers. Thus prepared, Martin conveyed them to his house in the Rue des Petits Champs, and made La Force swear that neither he nor his children would leave the place until the 2,000 crowns were paid. For additional security, he placed some Swiss soldiers on guard, when one of them, touched with compassion, offered to let the prisoners escape. La Force, however, refused, preferring, he said, to die rather than fail in his word. An aunt of La Force’s furnished him with the 2,000 crowns, and he was about to count them out to Martin, when a French nobleman came to inform La Force that the Duke of Anjou wished to speak to him. On this pretext the emissary conducted both father and sons from the house without their caps: with nothing, that is to say, to distinguish them from the victims of assassination. They were at once set upon. La Force’s eldest son fell, crying out “Je suis mort.” The father, pierced to the heart, uttered a similar exclamation; on which the youngest La Force had the presence of mind to throw himself to the ground as if dead. Supposed to be a corpse, he was gradually stripped of his clothes, until a man who intended to steal from him a pair of woollen stockings, of which he had not yet been divested, could not restrain, as he looked upon the boy’s pallid face, some expression of sympathy. Seeing that the stranger had taken pity on him, young La Force whispered that he was not dead. He was told to keep quiet; and the man with a taste for woollen stockings wrapped him up in his cloak and carried him away. “What have you there?” asked an assassin. “My nephew,” replied the man. “He went out last night and got dead drunk, and I mean, as soon as I get him home, to give him a good thrashing.” Young La Force made his preserver a present of thirty crowns, and had himself conveyed in safety to the Arsenal, of which his uncle, Marshal de Biron, was governor.

The most famous, or rather infamous, of those who took part in the massacre as leaders or principal agents were Jean Férier, an advocate, and at that time captain of his quarter, Peyou, a butcher, and Curcé, a goldsmith, who, with upturned sleeves and bloody arms, boasted that 400 Huguenots had died beneath his blade. The massacre lasted in Paris with diminishing fury for a whole month. It was enacted, moreover, in nearly all the large towns; though in some few the governors refused to execute the orders transmitted to them. At Lyons 4,000 were killed. Here the governor, Mandelot by name, finding after several days’ massacre that there were still a number of Huguenots to slay, ordered the executioner to despatch them; on which that functionary replied that it was his duty to execute criminals convicted of violating the laws of State, but that he was not an assassin, and would not do assassins’ work. This spirited reply recalls Joseph de Maistre’s celebrated paradox about the executioner and the soldier: the former putting to death only the worst offenders in virtue of a legal mandate, yet universally loathed; the latter plunging his sword into the body of anyone he is told to slay, yet universally honoured. The explanation of the ingenious paradox is, after all, simple enough. The executioner kills in cold blood, without danger to himself; the soldier risks his life in the performance of his duty.

A Lyons butcher, less scrupulous than the executioner, killed so many Huguenots that, according to Dulaure, in his Singularités Historiques, he was invited to dinner by the Pope’s Legate, passing through Lyons on his way to Paris. The number of Huguenots massacred throughout France was estimated at 60,000. Though the murders were generally due to fanaticism, many persons were put to death for purely private reasons. Heirs killed those from whom they expected to inherit, lovers their rivals, candidates for public offices those whom they wished to replace. On the third day of the massacre Charles IX. went to Parliament, and avowed that the slaughter of the Huguenots had taken place by his command, and in order to anticipate an intended Huguenot rising organised by Coligny. The Parliament accepted this announcement with approval; and despite the absence of all evidence against the admiral, it was decreed that his body should be dragged through the streets on a hurdle, then exhibited in the Place de Grève, and ultimately hung by the heels on a gibbet at Montfaucon. His house was at the same time to be destroyed, the trees in his garden cut down, and the members of his family reduced to the condition of plebeians, or roturiers, and declared unable to hold any public office; which, however, did not prevent Coligny’s daughter from becoming soon afterwards the wife of the Prince of Orange.

Not many years after the massacre of St. Bartholomew, the Church of St. – Germain-l’Auxerrois, in September, 1581, was the starting-point of a very different series of performances. “On Monday, September 18th,” says the writer of a contemporary account, “the Duc de Joyeuse (Henry III.’s favourite ‘minion’) and Marguerite of Lorraine, daughter of Nicholas de Vaudemont, and sister of the queen, were betrothed in the Queen’s Chamber, and the following Sunday were married at three o’clock in the afternoon at the parish church of Saint-Germain-l’Auxerrois. The king led the bride, followed by the queen, the princesses, and other ladies in such superb attire that no one recollects to have seen anything like it in France so rich and so sumptuous. The dresses of the king and of the bridegroom were the same, and were so covered with embroidery, pearls, and precious stones, that it was impossible to estimate their value. Such an accoutrement had, for instance, cost ten thousand crowns in the making; and at the seventeen feasts which were now from day to day given by the king to the princes and lords related to the bride, and by other great persons of the Court, the guests appeared each time in some new costume, gorgeous with embroidery, gold, silver, and diamonds. The expense was so great, what with tournaments, masquerades, presents, devices, music, and liveries, that it was said the king would not be quit for twelve hundred thousand crowns. On Tuesday, October 16th, the Cardinal de Bourbon gave his feast in the palace attached to his abbey, St. – Germain-des-Prés, and caused to be constructed on the Seine a superb barque in the form of a triumphal car, which was to convey the king, princes, princesses, and the newly married pair from the Louvre to the Pré-aux-Clercs in solemn pomp. This stately vehicle was to be drawn on the water by smaller boats disguised as sea-horses, Tritons, dolphins, whales, and other marine monsters, to the number of twenty-four. In front, concealed in the belly of the said monsters, were a number of skilled musicians, with trumpets, clarions, cornets, violins, and hautboys, besides even some firework-makers, who, at dusk, were to afford pastime not only to the king, but to fifty thousand persons on the banks.” The piece, however, was not well played, and it was impossible to make the animals advance as was intended, so that the king, after having from four o’clock in the afternoon till seven watched at the Tuileries the movements and workings of these animals without perceiving any effect, said sarcastically, “Ce sont des bêtes qui commandent a d’autres bêtes,” and drove away with the queen in his coach, to be present at the cardinal’s feast, which was the most magnificent of all. Among other entertainments, his Eminence gave that of an artificial garden, luxuriant with growing flowers and fruits, as if it had been May or August.

On Sunday, the 15th, the queen gave her feast at the Louvre, and after the feast the ballet of “Circe and her Nymphs.” This work, otherwise entitled “Ballet Comique de la Reine,” was represented in the large Salle de Bourbon by the queen, the princes, the princesses, and the great nobles of the Court. It began at ten o’clock in the evening, and did not finish till three the next morning. The queen and the princesses, who represented the Naiads and the Nereids, terminated the ballet by a distribution of presents to the princes and nobles, who, in the shape of Tritons, had danced with them. For each Triton there was a gold medal with a suitable inscription; and the composer, Baltazarini – or Beaujoyeux, as he was now called – received flattering compliments at the end of the representation from the whole Court. His genius was extolled and his glory celebrated in verses which hailed him as one who “from the ashes of Greece had revived a new art,” who with “divine wit” had composed a ballet, and who had so placed it on the stage that he surpassed himself in the character of “inventive geometrician.”

On the evening of Monday, the 16th, at eight o’clock, the garden of the Louvre was the scene of a torch-lit combat between Fourteen Whites and Fourteen Yellows. On Tuesday, the 17th, there were conflicts with the pike, the sword, and the butt end of the lance, on foot and on horseback. On Thursday, the 19th, took place the Ballet of the Horses, in which Spanish steeds, race-horses, and others met in hostile fashion, retired, and turned round to the sound of trumpets and clarions, having been trained to it five months beforehand. “All this,” says the chronicler, “was beautiful and agreeable, but the finest feature of Tuesday and Thursday was the music of voices and instruments, being the most harmonious and most delicate that was ever heard. There were also fireworks, which sparkled and burst, to the fright and joy of everyone, and without injury to any.”

It was in the Church of St. – Germain-l’Auxerrois, too, three centuries earlier, that a priest astonished his congregation – and afterwards, when the incident was reported, the whole of Europe – by his mode of pronouncing the excommunication decreed by Pope Innocent IV. against the Emperor Frederick II. “Hearken to me, my brethren,” he said. “I am ordered to pronounce a terrible anathema against the Emperor Frederick to the accompaniment of bells and lighted candles. I am ignorant of the reasons on which this judgment is based. All I know is that discord and hatred exist between the Pope and the Emperor, and that they are accustomed to overwhelm each other with insults. Therefore I excommunicate, as far as lies in my power, the oppressor, and I absolve the one who is suffering a persecution so pernicious to the Christian religion.” It has been said that a report of this strange excommunication found its way all over Europe. The priest, as might have been expected, was rewarded by the Emperor and punished by the Pope.

CHAPTER VI

THE PONT-NEUF AND THE STATUE OF HENRI IV

The Oldest Bridge in Paris – Henri IV. – His Assassination by Ravaillac. – Marguerite de Valois – The Statue of Henri IV. – The Institute – The Place de Grève.

PARIS in 1886 contained, according to the census of that year, 2,344,550 inhabitants, of whom 1,714,956 (or 73.15 per cent.) lived on the right bank of the Seine. So much more important indeed by the number of its population as well as by its manifestations of life in every form is the right bank than the left, that a man might live all his life in the former division of Paris and, without ever having crossed the Seine, be held to know the French capital thoroughly. One may indeed be a thorough Parisian without ever having quitted the Boulevards.

Ancient Paris, as represented by the “Cité” of to-day, the Paris of the left bank, and the Paris of the right bank are bound together by the Pont-Neuf: the one structure which they have all three in common. The Pont-Neuf may, therefore, be made a convenient starting-point from which to approach the right bank, the left bank, and finally the “City.”

The Pont-Neuf is, in spite of its name, the oldest bridge in Paris; and it is almost the only one which retains without alteration its original form. From time to time it has been partially repaired, but the lines on which it was originally constructed were never changed. Parisians have for the last three centuries regarded the Pont-Neuf as the type of solidity; and a Parisian who does not aspire to originality in conversation will not hesitate, even to this day, when asked how he is, to reply that he is “as strong as the Pont-Neuf.” The first stone of the bridge was laid on Saturday, May 31, 1578, by King Henri III., in presence of his mother, Queen Catherine de Medicis, his wife, Queen Louise, and the principal officials of the kingdom. As the king had just been assisting at the obsequies of his favourites, Quélus and Maugiron, killed in a duel, he was very melancholy, and the bridge acquired everywhere the name of the Bridge of Tears. The idea of connecting the left bank with the island and the island with the right bank had been entertained by King Henri II. Henri III. undertook to defray the cost of construction. But this he did only in a theoretical way; for three years after his death, in 1592, the chief builder of the bridge, Guillaume Marchand, was still unpaid. The work, meanwhile, was far from complete, interrupted as it had been by the troubles of the League; and it was not until Henri IV. had established his power at Paris and throughout France that, in May, 1598, it was resumed. Three arches of the principal arm had yet to be reared, and it was only in 1603 that the king was able to perform the ceremony of crossing the bridge from left bank to right; part of the journey even then having to be made on a temporary plank, so insecurely fixed that it was by a mere piece of royal luck that the venturesome monarch did not go over into the Seine. In undertaking the hazardous passage, he indicated to the friends who tried to dissuade him his belief in the “divinity that doth hedge a king;” and he, in any case, failed on this perilous occasion either to break his neck or drown. The builder of the Pont-Neuf, Guillaume Marchand, was also its architect: so, at least, asserts his epitaph in the Church of St. Gervais: “The celebrated architect,” he is called, “who created two admirable works: the Royal Castle of St. Germain and the Pont-Neuf of Paris.” Marchand, however, died in 1604, so that although the bridge may have been originally planned by him, it is quite possible that the design may have been completed by another hand, and that the official title of “architect to the bridge” may have belonged to Baptiste du Cerceau, for whom it is often claimed.