THE century of Louis XIV., whose triumphs have been so extravagantly celebrated by Voltaire, saw the culmination and declension of French military glory, literary splendour, and regal magnificence. Never did king of France inherit a more capable and patriotic generation of public servants, trained as they had been under the two greatest administrators the land had ever seen; never did king grasp the sceptre with more absolute and unquestioned power. “L’Etat c’est moi,” if not Louis’ words, were at least his guiding principle. Gone were the times of cardinal dictators. When the ministers came after Mazarin’s death to ask the king whom they should now address themselves to, the answer came like a thunderbolt: “To me!” and the Secretary for War, with affrighted visage, hastened to the queen-mother, who only laughed. Alone among his colleagues Mazarin knew his king, and warned them that there was enough stuff in Louis to make four kings and one honest man.

What brilliant constellations of great men cast their fair influences over the birth of Louis XIV.! “Sire,” said Mazarin, when dying “I owe you all—but I can partially acquit myself by leaving you Colbert.” Austere Colbert was a merchant’s son of Rheims; his Atlantean shoulders bore the burden of five modern ministries; his vehement industry, admirable science and sterling honesty created order out of financial chaos and found the sinews of war for an army of 300,000 men before the Peace of Ryswick and 450,000 for the war of the Spanish succession; he initiated, nurtured and perfected French industries; he created a navy that crushed the combined English and Dutch fleets off Beachy Head, swept the Channel for weeks, burnt English ports, carried terror into English homes, and for a time paralysed English commerce. Louvois, his colleague, organised an army that made his master the arbiter of Europe; CondÉ and Turenne were its victorious captains. Vauban, greatest of military engineers, captured towns in war and made them impregnable in peace; fortified 333 cities and places, and shared with Louvois the invention of the combined musket and bayonet, the deadliest weapon of war as yet contrived. De Lionne, by masterly diplomacy, prepared and cemented the conquests of victorious generals. Supreme in arts of peace were Corneille, MoliÈre, Racine, La Fontaine, Lebrun, Claude Lorrain, Puget, Mansard, and Perrault. We shall learn in the sequel what the Grand Monarque did with this unparalleled inheritance.

None of the great ones of the earth is so intimately known to us as the magnificent histrion, whose tinselled grandeur and pompous egoism has been laid bare by the Duke of St. Simon, prince of memoirists. Never has the frippery of a court been shrivelled by such fierce and consuming light glaring like a fiery sun on its meretricious splendours. And what a court it is! What a gilded crowd of princes and paramours, harlots and bastards, struts, fumes, intrigues through the Memoirs of the Duke of St. Simon! By a few strokes of his pen he etches for us, in words that bite like acid, the fools and knaves, the wife-beaters and adulterers, the cardsharpers and gamesters, the grovelling sycophants with their petty struggles for precedence or favour, their slang, their gluttony and drunkenness, their moral and physical corruption.

Place du Carrousel.
Place du Carrousel.

External grandeur and regal presence,[135] a profound belief in his divinely-appointed despotism, and in earlier years a capacity for work rare among his predecessors, the lord of France certainly possessed. “He had a grand mien,” says St. Simon, “and looked a veritable king of the bees.” Much has been made of Louis’ incomparable grace and respectful courtesy to women; but the courtesy of a king who doffs his hat to every serving wench yet contrives a staircase to facilitate the debauching of his queen’s maids-of-honour, and exacts of his mistresses and the ladies of his court submission to his will and pleasure, even under the most trying of physical disabilities, is at least wanting in consistency. The king’s mental equipment was less than mediocre; he was barely able to read and write, was ignorant of the commonest facts of history, and fell into the grossest blunders in public. Like all small-minded men, Louis was jealous of superior merit and preferred mediocrity rather than genius in his ministers. Small wonder that his reign ended in shame and disaster.

On the 6th of June 1662, the young king, notwithstanding much public misery consequent on two years of bad harvests, organised a magnificent carrousel (tilting) in the garden that fronted the Tuileries. Five companies of nobles, each led by the king or one of the princes, were arrayed in gorgeous costumes as Romans, Persians, Turks, Armenians and Savages. Louis, who of course led the Romans, was followed by a superb train of many squires, twenty-four pages, fifty horses each led by two grooms, and fifty footmen dressed as lictors, carrying gilded fasces. The royal princes headed similar processions. So great was the display of jewels that all the precious stones in the world seemed brought together; so richly were the costumes of the knights and the trappings of the horses embroidered with gold and silver that the cloth beneath could barely be seen. The king and the princes rode by with a prodigious quantity of diamonds and rubies glittering on their costumes and equipages; an immense amphitheatre afforded seats for a multitude of spectators, and in a smaller pavilion, richly gilded, sat the two queens of France, the queen of England, and the royal princesses. The first day was spent in tilting at Medusa heads and heads of Moors: the second at rings. Louis is said to have greatly distinguished himself by his skill. Maria Theresa, his young queen, distributed the prizes, and the garden was afterwards named the Place du Carrousel.

Louis, however, hated Paris, for his forced exile during the troubles of the Fronde rankled in his memory. Nor were the associations of St. Germain any more pleasant. A lover of the chase and all too prone to fall into the snares of “fair, fallacious looks and venerial trains,” the retirement of his father’s hunting lodge at Versailles, away from the prying eyes and mocking tongues of the Parisians, early attracted him. There he was wont to meet his mistress, Madame de la ValliÈre, and there he determined to erect a vast pleasure-palace and gardens. The small chÂteau, built by Lemercier in the early half of the seventeenth century, was handed over to Levau in 1668, who, carefully respecting his predecessor’s work in the Cour de Marbre, constructed two immense wings, which were added to by J. H. Mansard, as the requirements of the court grew. The palace stood in the midst of a barren, sandy plain, but Louis’ pride demanded that Nature herself should bend to his will, and an army of artists, engineers and gardeners was concentrated there, who at the sacrifice of incredible wealth and energy, had so far advanced the work that the king was able to come into residence in 1682.

In spite of seas of reservoirs fed by costly hydraulic machinery at Marly, which lifted the waters of the Seine to an aqueduct that led to Versailles, the supply was deemed inadequate, and orders were given to divert the river Eure between Chartres and Maintenon to the gardens of the palace. For years an army of thirty thousand men were employed in this one task, at a cost of money and human life greater than that of many a campaign. So heavy was the mortality in the camp that it was forbidden to speak of the sick, and above all of the dead, who were carried away in cartloads by night for burial. All that remains of this cruel folly are a few ruins at Maintenon.

After the failure of this scheme, subterranean water-courses were contrived. The plaisir du roi must be sated at any cost, and at length a magnificent garden was created, filled with a population of statues and adorned with gigantic fountains. Soon the king tired of the bustle and noise of Versailles, and a miserable and swampy site at Marly, the haunt of toads and serpents and creeping things, was transformed into a splendid hermitage. Hills were levelled, great trees brought from CompiÈgne, most of which soon died and were as quickly replaced; fish-ponds, adorned by exquisite paintings, were made and unmade; woods were metamorphosed into lakes, where the king and a select company of courtiers disported themselves in gondolas; cascades refreshed their ears in summer heat. Precious paintings, statues and costly furniture charmed the eye inside the hermitage—and all to receive the king and his intimates from Wednesday to Saturday on a few occasions in the year. St. Simon writes of what he saw, and estimates that Marly cost more than Versailles.[136] Nothing remains to-day of all this splendour: it was neglected by Louis’ successors and sold in lots during the Revolution.

After a life of wanton licentiousness, Louis, at the age of forty, was captivated by the mature charms of a widow of forty-three, a colonial adventuress of noble descent, who after the death of her husband, the crippled comic poet Scarron, became governess to the king’s illegitimate children by Madame de Montespan. Soon after the death of the queen Maria Theresa, the widow Scarron, known to history as Madame de Maintenon, was secretly married to her royal lover, who for the remainder of his life was her docile slave. At the famous military manoeuvres at CompiÈgne after the Peace of Ryswick, organised to display the resources of the country and to enable the court to witness the circumstance of a great siege, Louis was seen, hat in hand, bending over Madame de Maintenon’s sedan-chair, which stood at a coign of vantage on the ramparts, explaining to her the various movements of the troops. “I could describe the scene,” says St. Simon, “as clearly forty years hence as I do now.” An aide-de-camp, approaching from below to ask the king’s orders, was dumbfoundered by the sight and could scarcely stammer out his message. The effect on the soldiers was indescribable: every one asked what that chair meant over which the king was bending uncovered.

Versailles—Le Tapis Vert.
Versailles—Le Tapis Vert.

A narrow bigot in matters of religion and completely under the influence of fanatics, Madame de Maintenon persuaded Louis that a crusade against heresy would be a fitting atonement for his past sins. In 1681 she writes, “The king is seriously thinking of his salvation and of that of his subjects, and if God spares him to us there will soon be but one religion in his kingdom.” Colbert, who had always stood by the Protestants, died (1683) in disfavour, protesting that if he had done for God what he had done for the king, he would have been saved ten times over. At first political pressure and money were tried; a renegade Protestant was given control of a “conversion fund,” and six livres were paid for each convert. Children were seduced from their parents; brutal dragoons were quartered on Protestant families, and as a result many of the wretched people submitted. “Every post,” wrote Madame de Maintenon, “brings tidings which fill the king with joy; conversions take place daily by thousands.” Thousands too, proved stubborn, and on 22nd October 1685, the first blow was struck. By the revocation of the Edict of Nantes the charter of Protestant liberties was destroyed, and those who had given five out of ten marshals to France, including the great Turenne, were denied the right of civil existence. Whole cities were depopulated; tens of thousands (for the Huguenots had long ceased to exist as a political force) of law-abiding citizens expatriated themselves and carried their industries to enrich foreign lands.[137] Many pastors were martyred, and drummers were stationed at the foot of the scaffold to drown their exhortations to the spectators. Let us not say persecution is ineffective; Duruy estimates the Calvinist population of France before the revocation of the Edict at 1,000,000: in 1870 at 15,000 to 18,000. On the whole, the measure was approved by the nation; Racine, La Fontaine, the great Jansenist Arnault, as well as Bossuet and Massillon, applauded. The king was hailed a second Constantine, and believed he had revived the times of the apostles. But the consequences to France were far-reaching and disastrous. In less than two months the Catholic James II. of England was a discrowned fugitive, and the Calvinist William of Orange, the inveterate enemy of France, sat in his place; England’s pensioned neutrality was turned to bitter hostility, and every Protestant power in Europe stirred to fierce resentment. Seven years of war followed, which exhausted the immense resources of France; seven years,[138] rich in glory perhaps, but lean years indeed to the dumb millions who paid the cost in blood and money. “Nearly the tenth part of the nation,” writes Vauban, after the Peace of Ryswick, “is reduced to beggary; of the nine other parts, five are little removed from the same condition; three-tenths are very straitened; the remaining tenth counts no more than a hundred thousand, of which not ten thousand may be classed as very well off” (fort À l’aise.)

Three short years of peace and recuperation ensued, when the acceptance of the crown of Spain by Louis’ grandson, Philip of Anjou, in spite of Maria Theresa’s solemn renunciation for herself and her posterity of all claim to the Spanish succession, roused all the old jealousy of France and brought her secular enemy, the House of Austria, to a new coalition against her.

Woe to the nation whose king is thrall to women. The manner in which this momentous step was taken is characteristic of Louis. Two councils were held in Madame de Maintenon’s room; her advice was asked by the king; and apparently turned the scale in favour of acceptance. “For a hundred years,” says Taine, “from 1672 to 1774, every time a king of France made war it was by pique or vanity, by family or private interest, or by condescension to a woman.” Still more amazing is the fact that, for years, the court of Madrid was ruled by a Frenchwoman, Madame des Ursins, the camerera major of Philip’s queen, who made and unmade ministers, controlled all public appointments, and even persuaded the French ambassador to submit all dispatches to her before sending them to France. Madame de Maintenon was equally omnipotent at Versailles; she decided what letters should or should not be shown to the king, kept back disagreeable news, and held everybody in the hollow of her hand, from humblest subject to most exalted minister. This was the atmosphere from which men were sent to meet the new and more potent combination of States that opposed the Spanish succession. Chamillart, a pitiful creature of Madame de Maintenon’s, sat in Colbert’s place. Gone were Turenne and CondÉ and Luxembourg; the armies of the descendant of St. Louis were led by the Duke of VendÔme, a foul lecher, whose inhuman vices went far to justify the gibe of Mephistopheles that men use their reason “um thierischer als jedes Thier zu sein.”

The victories of the Duke of Marlborough and of Prince Eugene spread consternation at court. When, in 1704, the news of Blenheim oozed out at Versailles, the king’s grief was piteous to see. Scarce a noble family but had one of its members killed, wounded, or a prisoner. Two years later came the defeat of Ramillies, to be followed in three months by the disaster at Turin. The balls and masquerades and play at Marly went merrily on; but at news of the defeat of Oudenarde and the fall of Lille, even the reckless courtiers were subdued, and for a month gambling and even conversation ceased. At the sound of an approaching horseman they ran hither and thither, with fear painted on their cheeks. Wildest schemes for raising money were tried; a large sum was wasted on mining for gold in the Pyrenees; taxes were levied on baptisms and marriages. Sums raised for the relief of the poor and the maintenance of highways were expropriated, and the wretched peasants were forced to repair the roads without payment, some dying of starvation at their work. The coinage was debased. King and courtiers, with ill-grace, sent their plate to the mint. A plan for the recapture of Lille was mooted, in which Louis was to take part, but, for lack of money, the king’s ladies were not to accompany him to the seat of war as they had hitherto done.[139] The expedition was to remain a secret; but the infatuated Louis could withhold nothing from Madame de Maintenon, and she never rested until she had foiled the whole scheme and disgraced Chamillart, who had concealed the preparations from her.

The court had now grown so accustomed to defeats that Malplaquet was hailed as half a victory; but, in 1710, so desperate was the condition of the treasury, that a financial and social dÉbÂcle was imminent. The Dauphin, on leaving the opera at Paris, had been assailed by crowds of women shouting, “Bread! bread!” He only escaped by throwing them money and promises, and never dared show his face in Paris again. To appease the people, the poor were set to level the boulevard near St. Denis, and were paid in doles of bread—bad bread. Even this failed them one morning, and a woman who made some disturbance was dragged to the pillory by the archers of the watch. An angry mob released her, and proceeded to raid the bakers’ shops. The ugly situation was saved only by the firmness and sagacity of the popular Marshal Boufflers. Another turn of the financial screw was now meditated, and, as the taxes had already “drawn all the blood from his subjects, and squeezed out their very marrow,” the conscience of the lord of France was troubled. His Jesuit confessor, Le Tellier, promised to consult the Sorbonne, whose learned doctors decided that, since all the wealth of his subjects rightly belonged to the king, he only took what was his own.

Grand Palais and Pont Alexandre.
Grand Palais and Pont Alexandre.

Towards the end of the seventeenth century, the quarrel between the Jansenists and the Jesuits concerning subtle doctrinal differences had grown acute through the publication of Pascal’s immortal Lettres Provinciales, and by Quesnel’s RÉflexions Morales which the Jesuits had succeeded in subjecting to papal condemnation. In 1709, Le Tellier induced his royal penitent[140] to decree the destruction of one of the two Jansenist establishments, and Port Royal des Champs, between Versailles and Chevreuse, rendered famous by the piety and learning of Arnault, Pascal and Nicolle, was doomed. On the night of 28th October 1709, the convent was surrounded by Gardes FranÇaises and Suisses, and on the following morning the chief of the police, with a posse of archers of the watch entered, produced a lettre de cachet, and gave the nuns a quarter of an hour to prepare for deportation. The whole of the sisters were then brutally expelled, “comme on enlÈve les crÉatures prostituÉes d’un lieu infÂme,” says St. Simon, and scattered among other religious houses in all directions. The friends of the buried were bidden to exhume their dead, and all unclaimed bodies were flung into a neighbouring cemetery, where dogs fought for them as for carrion. The church was profaned, and all the conventual buildings were razed like houses of regicides; the materials were sold in lots, and not one stone was left on another; the very ground was ploughed up and sown, “not, it is true with salt,” adds St. Simon, and that was the only favour shown.

Two years after the scene at Port Royal, amid the heartless gaiety of the court, the Angel of Death was busy in Louis’ household. On 14th April 1711, the old king’s only lawful son, the Grand Dauphin, expired; on 12th February 1712, the second Dauphiness, the sweet and gentle Adelaide of Savoy, the king’s darling, died of a malignant fever; six days later the Duke of Burgundy, her husband, was struck down; on 8th March, the Duke of Brittany, their eldest child, followed them. Three Dauphins had gone to the vaults of St. Denis in less than a year; mother, father, son, had died in twenty-four days—a sweep of Death’s scythe, enough to touch even the hearts of courtiers. In a few days the king gave orders for the usual play to begin at Marly, and the dice rattled while the bodies of the Dauphin and Dauphiness lay yet unburied. Well may St. Simon exclaim, “Are these princes made like other men?”

In 1712, some successes in Flanders enabled Louis to negotiate the Peace of Utrecht. France retained her old boundaries, and a Bourbon remained on the throne of Spain; but she was debased from her proud position of arbiter of Europe, and the substantial profits of the war went to England[141] and Austria.

In May 1714, the Duke of Berri, son of the Grand Dauphin, died, and the sole direct heir to the throne was now the king’s great-grandson, the Duke of Anjou, a sickly child of five years. On September 1715, the Grand Monarque made a calm and an edifying end to his long reign of seventy-two years, declaring that he owed no man restitution, and trusted in God’s mercy for what he owed to the realm. He called the young child, who was soon to be Louis XV., to his bedside, and apparently without any sense of incongruity, exhorted him to remember his God, to cherish peace, to avoid extravagance, and study the welfare of his people. After receiving the last sacraments he repeated the prayers for the dying in a firm voice and, calling on God’s aid, passed peacefully away. None but his official attendants, his priest and physicians, saw the end: two days before, Madame de Maintenon had given away all her furniture, and retired to St. Cyr.

The demolition of what remained of mediÆval Paris proceeded apace during Louis XIV.’s lifetime, and, at his death, the architectural features of its streets were substantially those of the older Paris of to-day. Colbert had taken up the costly legacy of the unfinished Louvre before the petrified banalities of Versailles and Marly had engulfed their millions, and, in 1660, the HÔtel de Bourbon was given over to the housebreakers to make room for the new east wing of the palace. So vigorously did they set to work that when MoliÈre, whose company performed there three days a week in alternation with the Italian opera, came for the usual performance, he found the theatre half demolished. He applied to the king, who granted him the temporary use of Richelieu’s theatre in the Palais Royal, and his first performance there was given on 20th January 1661.

Portion of the East FaÇade of the Louvre from Blondel’s Drawing, showing Perrault’s base.
Portion of the East FaÇade of the Louvre from Blondel’s Drawing, showing Perrault’s base.

Levau was employed to carry on Lemercier’s work on the Louvre, and had succeeded in completing the north wing and the river front when Colbert stayed further progress and ordered him to prepare a model in wood of his proposed east wing. Levau was stupefied, for he had elaborated with infinite study a design for this portion of the palace, which he regarded as of supreme importance, and which he hoped would crown his work. He had already laid the foundations and erected the scaffolding when the order came. Levau made his model, and a number of architects were invited to criticise it: they did, and unanimously condemned it. Competitive designs were then submitted to Colbert, who took advantage of Poussin’s residence at Rome to send them to the great Italian architects for their judgment. The Italians delivered a sweeping and general condemnation, and Poussin advised that Bernini should be employed to design a really noble building. Louis was delighted by the suggestion, and the loan of the architect of the great colonnade of St. Peter’s was entreated of the pope by the king’s own hand.

Bernini came to Paris where he was treated like a prince, and drew up a scheme of classic grandeur. Levau’s work on the east front was destroyed, and in October 1665, Bernini’s foundations were begun. The new design, however, ignored the exigencies of existing work and of internal convenience, and gave opportunities for criticisms and intrigue, which the French architects, forgetting for the moment all domestic rivalry, were not slow to make the most of. The offended Italian left to winter in Rome, and was never seen in Paris again. A munificent gift of 3000 gold louis and a pension of 12,000 livres solaced his pride.

Among the designs originally submitted to Colbert was one which had not been sent to Rome. It was the work of an amateur, Claude Perrault, a physician by profession, whose brother, Charles Perrault, was chief clerk in the Office of Works. This was now brought forth, and a commission, consisting of Levau, Lebrun, and Claude Perrault, appointed to report on its practicability. Levau promptly produced his own discarded designs, which won Lebrun’s approval, and both were submitted to the king for a final decision. Louis was fascinated by the stately classicism of Perrault’s design, and this was adopted. “Architecture must be in a bad state,” said his rivals, “since it is put in the hands of a physician.” The new wing was raised and found to be seventy-two feet too long, whereupon the whole of Levau’s river front was masked by a new faÇade, rendered necessary to correct the mistake, if mistake it were, and the whole south wing[142] is in consequence much thicker than any of the others which enclose the great quadrangle. Poor Levau is said to have died of vexation and grief. Even to this day the north-east end of Perrault’s faÇade projects un-symmetrically beyond the line of the north front. Perrault’s work has been much criticised and much praised. It evoked Fergusson’s ecstatic admiration, and is eulogised by another critic as one of the finest pieces of architecture in any age. Strangely enough, neither of these ever saw, nor has anyone yet seen, more than a partial and stunted realisation of Perrault’s design (which involved a broad and deep fosse), for, as the accompanying reproduction of a drawing by Blondel demonstrates, the famous east front of the Louvre is like a giant buried up to the knees, and the present first-floor windows were an afterthought, their places having been designed as niches to hold statues. The exactitude of Blondel’s elevations was finally proved in 1903 by the admirable insight of the present architect of the Louvre, Monsieur G. Redon, who was led to undertake the excavations which brought to light a section of Perrault’s decorated basement, by noticing that the windows of the ground floor evidently implied a lower order beneath. This basement, seven and a half metres in depth, now buried, was in Perrault’s scheme designed to be exposed by a fosse of some fifteen to twenty metres in width, and the whole elevation and symmetry of the wing would have immensely gained by the carrying out of his plans.

Hotel des Invalides.
Hotel des Invalides.

The construction, begun in 1665 was, however, interrupted in 1676, owing to the king’s abandonment of Paris. Colbert strenuously protested against the neglect of the Louvre, and warned his master not to squander his millions away from Paris and suffer posterity to measure his grandeur by the ell of Versailles. It availed nothing. In 1670, 1,627,293 livres were allotted to the Louvre; in 1672 the sum had fallen to 58,000 livres; in 1676 to 42,082; in 1680 the subsidies practically ceased, and the great palace was utterly neglected until 1754 when Perrault’s work was feebly continued by Gabriel and Soufflot.

Two domed churches in the south of Paris—the Val de GrÂce and St. Louis of the Invalides—were also erected during Louis XIV.’s lifetime. Among the many vows made by Anne of Austria during her twenty-two years’ unfruitful marriage was one made in the sanctuary of the nunnery of the Val de GrÂce, to build there a magnificent church to God’s glory if she were vouchsafed a Dauphin. At length, on 1st April 1645, the proud queen was able to lead the future king, a boy of seven years, to lay the first stone. The church was designed by F. Mansard on the model of St. Peter’s at Rome, and was finished by Lemercier and others. The thirteenth-century nunnery had been transferred to Paris from Val Profond in 1624, and was liberally patronised by Anne.

A refuge had been founded as early as Henry IV.’s reign in an old abbey in the Faubourg St. Marcel, for old and disabled soldiers. Louis XIV., the greatest creator of invalides France had seen, determined in 1670 to extend the foundation, and erect a vast hospital, capable of accommodating his aged, crippled or infirm soldiers. Bruant and J. H. Mansard[143] among other architects were employed to raise the vast pile of buildings which, when completed, are said to have been capable of housing 7,000 men. A church dedicated to St. Louis was comprehended in the scheme, and, in 1680, a second Eglise Royale was erected, whose gilded dome is so conspicuous an object in south Paris; the Eglise Royale, which Mansard designed, was subsequently added to the church of St. Louis, and became its choir. Louis XIV., anticipating Napoleon’s maxim that war must support war, raised the funds needed for the foundation by ingeniously requiring all ordinary and extraordinary treasurers of war to retain two deniers[144] on every livre that passed through their hands.

The old city gates of the Tournelle, PoissonniÈre (or St. Anne), St. Martin, St. Denis, the Temple, St. Jacques, St. Victor, were demolished, and triumphal arches, which still remain, erected to mark the sites of the Portes St. Denis and St. Martin. Another arch, of St. Antoine, was designed to surpass all existing or ancient monuments of the kind, and many volumes were written concerning the language in which the inscription should be composed, but the devouring maw of Versailles had to be filled, and the arch was never completed. The king for whose glory the monument was to be raised, cared so little for it, that he suffered it to be pulled down.

RIVER AND PONT ROYAL.
RIVER AND PONT ROYAL.

Many new streets[145] were made, and others widened, among them the ill-omened Rue de la Ferronnerie. The northern ramparts were levelled and planted with trees from the Porte St. Antoine in the east to the Porte St. HonorÉ in the west, and in 1704 it was decided to continue the planting in the south round the Faubourg St. Germain. The Place Louis le Grand (now VendÔme), and the Place des Victoires were created; the river embankments were renewed and extended, and a fine stone Pont Royal by J. H. Mansard, the most beautiful of the existing bridges of Paris, was built to replace the old wooden structure that led from the St. Germain quarter to the Tuileries. This in its turn had replaced a ferry (bac) established by the Guild of Ferrymen, to transport the stone needed for the construction of the Tuileries, and the street which leads to the bridge still bears the name of the Rue du Bac. The Isle Louviers was acquired by the Ville, and the evil-smelling tanneries and dye-houses that disfigured the banks of the Seine between the GrÈve and the ChÂtelet were cleared away; many new fountains embellished the city, and ten new pumps increased the supply of water. The poorer quarters were, however, little changed from their old insanitary condition. A few years later Rousseau, fresh from Turin, was profoundly disappointed by the streets of Paris as he entered the city by the Faubourg St. Marceau. “I had imagined,” he writes, “a city as fair as it was great, and of a most imposing aspect, whose superb streets were lined with palaces of marble and of gold. I saw only filthy, evil-smelling, mean streets, ugly houses black with dirt, a general air of uncleanness and of poverty, beggars and carters, old clothes shops and tisane sellers.”

It is now time to ask what had been done with the magnificent inheritance which the fourteenth Louis had entered upon at the opening of his reign: he left to his successor a France crushed by an appalling debt of 2,400,000,000 livres; a noblesse and an army in bondage to money-lenders; public officials and fund-holders unpaid, trade paralysed, and the peasants in some provinces so poor that even straw was lacking for them to lie upon, many crossing the frontiers in search of a less miserable lot. Scarcity of bread made disease rampant at Paris, and as many as 4,500 sick poor were counted at one time in the HÔtel Dieu alone. Louis left a court that “sweated hypocrisy through every pore,” and an example of licentious and unclean living and cynical disregard of every moral obligation, which ate like a cancer into the vitals of the aristocracy.