[1] “Faudra recommencer” (“We must begin again”), said, to the present writer in 1871, a Communist refugee bearing a great scar on his face from a wound received fighting at the barricades.

[2] Inf. XXIX. 121-123. A French commentator consoles himself by reflecting that the author of the Divina Commedia is far more vituperative when dealing with certain Italian peoples, whom he designates as hogs, curs, wolves and foxes.

[3] Cobbett, comparing the relative intellectual culture of the British Isles and of France between the years 1600 and 1787, found that of the writers on the arts and sciences who were distinguished by a place in the Universal, Historical, Critical and Bibliographical Dictionary one hundred and thirty belonged to England, Scotland and Ireland, and six hundred and seventy-six to France.

[4] “Nous cuisinons mÊme l’amour.”—Taine.

[5] The Seine takes five hours to flow through the seven miles of modern Paris.

[6] “Cesare armato con gli occhi grifani.”—Inferno, iv. 123.

[7] Of some 10,000 ancient inscriptions found in Gaul, only twenty are in Celtic, and less than thirty words of Celtic origin now remain in the French language.

[8] The water supply of Paris is even now partly derived from these sources, and flows along the old repaired Roman aqueduct.

[9] Traces of the Gallo-Roman wall have been discovered, and are marked across the roadway opposite No. 6 Rue de la Colombe.

[10] The Isle de GalilÉe was joined to the CitÉ during the thirteenth century.

[11] In 1848 some remains were found of the old halls of this building, and of its columns, worn by the ropes of the boatmen who used to moor their craft to them.

[12] The exact position of this bridge is much disputed by authorities, some of whom would locate it on the site of the present Pont au Change. The balance of probabilities seems to us in favour of the position given in the text.

[13] “Jovem brutum atque hebetem.”

[14] Not to be confounded with the Royal Provost, a king’s officer, who replaced the Carlovingian counts and Capetian viscounts.

[15] The present writer recalls a similar glacial epoch in Paris during the early eighties, when the Seine was frozen over at Christmas time.

[16] By the law of 350 A.D. it was a capital offence to sacrifice to or honour the old gods. The persecuted had become persecutors. Boissier, La Fin du Paganisme.

[17] “He soon hugs himself in unconditioned ease.”

[18] To protect home producers against the competition of the Gallic wine and olive growers, Roman statesmen could conceive nothing better than the stupid expedient of prohibiting the culture of the vine and olive in Gaul.

[19] The favourite arm of the Franks, a short battle-axe, used as a missile or at close quarters.

[20] Her figure was a favourite subject for the sculptors of Christian churches. She usually bears a taper in her hand and a devil is seen peering over her shoulder. This symbolises the miraculous relighting of the taper after the devil had extinguished it. The taper was long preserved at Notre Dame.

[21] If we may believe Gregory of Tours, her arguments were vituperative rather than convincing. “Your Jupiter,” said she, “is omnium stuprorum spurcissimus perpetrator.”

[22] MerovÉe, second of the kings of the Salic Franks, was fabled to be the issue of Clodio’s wife and a sea monster.

[23] The palace in the CitÉ, where now stands the Palais de Justice.

[24] Roads in the Arrondissement of Amiens and Mondidier in Picardy are still known as ChaussÉes Brunehautes.

[25] The works of art traditionally ascribed to St. Eloy are many. He is reported to have made a golden throne set with stones (or rather two thrones, for he used his material so honestly and economically). He was made master of the mint and thirteen pieces of money are known which bear his name. He decorated the tombs of St. Martin and St. Denis, and constructed reliquaries for St. Germain, Notre Dame, and other churches.

[26] Five of them died between the ages of eighteen and twenty-six.

[27] It was during this struggle that St. Leger, bishop of Autun, whose name is dear to English sportsmen, one of the most popular of saints in his time, was imprisoned, blinded and subsequently beheaded by Ebrion’s orders in 678.

[28] The term CitÉ (civitas) was given to the old Roman part of many French towns.

[29] The Carlovingians had been careful to abolish the office of mayor of the palace.

[30] St. Pierre was subsequently enriched by the possession of the body of St. Maur, brought thither in the Norman troubles by fugitive monks from Anjou, and the monastery is better known to history under the name of St. Maur des FossÉs. The entrails of our own Henry V. were buried there. Rabelais, before its secularisation, was one of its canons, and Catherine de Medicis once possessed a chÂteau on its site. Monastery and chÂteau no longer exist.

[31] The villa of those days was a vast domain, part dwelling, part farm, part game preserve.

[32] The remains of the great Viking’s castle are still shown at Aalesund, in Norway.

[33] When Allan Barbetorte, after the recovery of Nantes, went to give thanks to God in the cathedral, he was compelled to cut his way, sword in hand, through thorns and briers.

[34] It must be admitted, however, that the poet’s uncouth diction is anything but Virgilian.

[35] Abbo’s favourite epithet. They were without a head, for they knew not Christ, the Head of Mankind.

[36] In the Middle Ages and down to 1761 Montfaucon had a sinister reputation. There stood the gallows of Paris, a great stone gibbet with its three rows of chains, near the old BarriÈre du Combat, where the present Rue de la Grange aux Belles abuts on the Boulevard de la Villette.

[37] William the Conqueror was also known as William the Builder.

[38] The surname Capet is said to have originated in the capet or hood of the abbot’s mantle which Hugh wore as lay abbot of St. Martin’s, having laid aside the crown after his coronation.

[39] Carducci. In una Chiesa gotica.

[40] A dramatic representation of the delivery of the papal bull, painted by Jean Paul Laurens, hangs in the museum of the Luxembourg.

[41] It must be remembered that heresy was the solvent anti-social force of the age, and was regarded with the same feelings of abhorrence as anarchist doctrines are regarded by modern statesmen.

[42] The Rue des Francs Bourgeois in Paris reminds us that there dwelt those who were free to move without the consent of their feudal superiors.

[43] It was the conduct of this campaign that won for Robert the title of Robert the Devil.

[44] The possession of an oven was a lucrative monopoly in mediÆval times. The writer knows of a village in South Italy where this curious privilege is still possessed by the parish priest, who levies a small indemnity of a few loaves, made specially of larger size, for each use of the oven.

[45] He was said to be “kind even to Jews.”

[46] The indignant scribe is most precise: they walked abroad artatis clunibus et protensis natibus.

[47] The reformers always discover the nunneries to be so much more corrupt than the monasteries, but it is a little suspicious that in every case the former are expropriated to the latter. The abbot of St. Maur evidently had some qualms concerning the expropriation of St. Eloy, and wished to restore it to the bishop.

[48] The abbey was suppressed at the time of the Revolution, and the site is now occupied by the Halle aux Vins.

[49] In the ardour of the fight the king found himself surrounded by the enemy’s footmen, was unhorsed, and while they were vainly seeking for a vulnerable spot in his armour some French knights had time to rescue him.

[50] Jeanne de Bourgogne, queen of Philip le Long, lived at the HÔtel de Nesle, and is said to have seduced scholars by night into the tower, had them tied in sacks and flung into the Seine. If we may believe Villon, this was the queen—

Legend adds that the schoolman, made famous by his thesis, that if an ass were placed equidistant between two bundles of hay of equal attraction he would die of hunger before he could resolve to eat either, was saved by his disciples, who placed a barge, loaded with straw, below the tower to break his fall.

[51] She was wont to say to her son—“I would rather see thee die than commit a mortal sin.”

[52] By a subtle irony, part of the money was derived from the tribute of the Jews of Paris.

[53] In the catalogue of the Acts of Francis I., quoted by Lavisse, is an order to pay the Dames des Filles de Joie, which follow the court, forty-five livres tournois for their payments, due for the month of May 1540, as it has been the custom to do from most ancient times (de toute anciennetÉ.)

[54] On account of the cord they wore round their habit.

[55] St. Louis loved the Franciscans, and in the Fioretti a beautiful story is told how the king, in the guise of a pilgrim, visiting Brother Giles at Perugia, knelt with the good friar in the embrace of fervent affection for a great space of time in silence. They parted without speaking a word.

[56] The sale or the provostship of Paris was abolished and a man of integrity, Etienne Boileau, appointed with adequate emoluments. So completely was this once venal office rehabilitated, that no seigneur regarded the post as beneath him.

[57] It was buried in the church of Monreale at Palermo.

[58] Joinville was a brave and tender knight; he tells us that before starting to join the crusaders at Marseilles he called all his friends and household before him, and prayed that if he had wronged any one of them he would declare it and reparation should be made. After a severe penance he was assoiled, and as he set forth, durst not turn back his eyes lest his heart should be melted at leaving his fair chÂteau of Joinville and his two children whom he loved so dearly.

[59] The relics were transferred to a new church of St. Stephen (St. Etienne du Mont), built by the abbot of St. Genevieve as a parish church for his servants and tenants.

[60] The early glass-workers were particularly fond of their beautiful red. “Wine of the colour of the glass windows of the Sainte-Chapelle,” was a popular locution of the time.

[61] Brunetto Latini, in the thirteenth century contrasted the high towers and grim stone walls of the fortress-palaces of the Italian nobles with the large, spacious and painted houses of the French, their rooms adorned pour avoir joie et delit (to have joy and delight) and surrounded with orchards and gardens.

[62] Another delusion of moderns is that there was an absence of personal cleanliness in those ages. In the census of the inhabitants of Paris, who in 1292 were subject to the Taille, there are inscribed the names of no less than twenty-six proprietors of public baths: a larger proportion to population than exists to-day.

[63] Hence the name of clerc applied to any student, even if a layman.

[64] “Love is quickly caught in gentle heart.”

[65] Afterwards bishop of London.

[66] The two churches still existed in the eighteenth century and stood on the site of the southern Cours Visconti and Lefuel of the present Louvre.

[67] The actual originator was, however, the queen’s physician, Robert de Douai, who left a sum of money which formed the nucleus of the foundation.

[68] The Montaigue scholars were called capetes from their peculiar cape fermÉe, or cloak, such as Masters of Arts used to wear. The BibliothÈque St. Genevieve occupies the site of the college.

[69] The Rue des Anglais still exists in the Latin Quarter.

[70] This interesting twelfth-century building will be found in the Rue St. Julien le Pauvre, and is now used as a Uniat Greek church.

[71] Par. X. 136. “Who lecturing in Straw St. deduced truths that brought him hatred.”

[72] Benvenuto was certainly in France and possibly in Paris during the fourteenth century. At any rate he would be familiar with Parisian students, many of whom were Italians.

[73] In the seventeenth century the councillors had increased to one hundred and twenty and the courts to seven.

[74] The term “Parlement” was originally applied to the transaction of the common business of a monastic establishment after the conclusion of the daily chapter.

[75] The contemporary chronicler, Villani, says of one of these scoundrels that he “was named Nosso Dei, one of our Florentines, a man filled with every vice.”

[76] The indictment covers seven quarto pages. The charges may be briefly classified as blasphemy, heresy, spitting and trampling on the crucifix, obscene and secret rites, and unnatural crimes.

[77] There is a significant entry on page 273 of the published trial: in ista pagina nihil est scriptum. The empty page tells of the moment when the papal commissioners, having heard that the fifty-four had been burned, suspended the sitting.

[78] Nihil sibi appropriare intendebat.

[79] Or the isle of the Jews, which, with its sister islet of Bussy, were subsequently joined to the island of the CitÉ, and now form the Place Dauphine and the land that divides the Pont Neuf. Philip watched the fires from his palace garden.

[80] It is to be hoped that some English scholar will do for these most important records, the earliest report of any great criminal trial which we possess, what Mr T. Douglas Murray has done for the Trial and Rehabilitation of Joan of Arc.

[81] During John the Good’s reign, the province of Dauphiny had been added to the French crown, and the king’s eldest son took the title of Dauphin.

[82] So called from the familiar appellation “Jacques Bonhomme,” applied half in contempt, half in jest, by the seigneurs to the peasants who served them in the wars.

[83] The bastilles were fortified castles before the chief gates of Paris.

[84] Howell mentions the locution in a letter dated 1654.

[85] Charles taxed and borrowed heavily. Even the members of his household were importuned for loans, however small. His cook lent him frs. 67.50.

[86] The scene is quaintly illustrated in an illuminated copy of Froissart in the British Museum.

[87] The scene of the assassination is marked by an escutcheon and an inscription.

[88] They melted down the reliquaries in the Paris churches.

[89] In 1417 Charles, returning from a visit to the queen at the castle of Vincennes, met the Chevalier Bois-Burdon going thither. He ordered his arrest, and under torture a confession reflecting on the queen’s honour was extorted. Bois-Burdon was sewn in a sack and dropped into the Seine. The queen was banished to Tours, and her jewels and treasures confiscated. Furious with the king and the Armagnac faction, she made common cause with the Duke of Burgundy.

[90] A portrait of Jean sans Peur exists in the Louvre, No. 1002.

[91] An equestrian statue in bronze stands at the south end of the Rue des Pyramides, a few hundred yards from the spot where the Maid fell before the Porte St. HonorÉ.

[92] The faculty of Theology declared her sold to the devil, impious to her parents, stained with Christian blood. The faculty of Law decreed her deserving of punishment, but only if she were obstinate and of sound mind.

[93] In 1421 and 1422 the people of Paris had seen Henry V. and his French consort sitting in state at the Louvre, surrounded by a brilliant throng of princes, prelates and barons. Hungry crowds watched the sumptuous banquet and then went away fasting, for nothing was offered them. “It was not so in the former times under our kings,” they murmured, “then there was open table kept, and servants distributed the meats and wine even of the king himself.”

[94] Part of the Rue de l’Homme ArmÉ still exists.

[95] The fifteenth-century goldsmiths of Paris: Loris, the Hersants, and Jehan Gallant, were famed throughout Europe.

[96] The reader will hardly need to be reminded that this amazing folly forms one of the principal episodes in Scott’s Quentin Durward.

[97] Flamboyant windows were a natural, technical development of Gothic. The aim of the later builders was to facilitate the draining away of the water which the old mullioned windows used to retain.

[98] One of the faÇades of this remarkable building may be seen in the courtyard of the Beaux Arts at Paris.

[99] Brittany was incorporated with the Monarchy 1491.

[100] The good king’s portrait by an Italian sculptor may be seen in the Louvre, Room VII., and on his monument in St. Denis he kneels beside his beloved and chÈre Bretonne, Anne of Brittany, whose loss he wept for eight days and nights.

[101] “He was well named after St. Francis, because of the holes in his hands,” said a Sorbonne doctor.

[102] “Ah! me, how thou art changed! See, thou art neither two nor one.”

[103] Travellers to Paris in the days of King Francis had cause to remember gratefully that monarch’s solicitude, for a maximum of charges was fixed, and an order made that every hotel-keeper should affix his prices outside the door, that extortion might be avoided. Among other maxima, the price of a pair of sheets, to “sleep not more than five persons,” was to be five deniers (a penny).

[104] The salamander was figured on the royal arms of Francis.

[105] About £600,000 in present-day value.

[106] For the first offence a fine; for the second, the lips to be cloven; for the third, the tongue pierced; for the fourth, death.

[107] The image was stolen in 1545 and replaced by one of wood. This was struck down in 1551, and the bishop of Paris substituted for it one of marble.

[108] One thousand two hundred are said to have suffered death during the month of vengeance.

[109] Henry of Guise had succeeded to the dukedom after his father’s assassination.

[110] Suspicions of poison were entertained by the Huguenots. Jeanne, in a letter to the Marquis de Beauvais, complained that holes were made in her rooms that she might be spied upon.

[111] FÉlibien and LobÏneau, 1725.

[112] “That to show pity was to be cruel to them: to be cruel to them was to show pity.”

[113] The municipality gave presents of money to the archers who had taken part in the massacre, to the watermen who prevented the Huguenots from crossing the Seine, and to grave-diggers for having buried in eight days about 1,100 bodies.

[114] Now known as the Galerie d’Apollon.

[115] Ugonottorum strages. Inscription on the obverse of the medal.

[116] Examples of magnificent costumes of the order may be seen in the Cluny Museum.

[117] The Duke of Guise was so called from his face being scarred by a wound received at the battle of Dolmans.

[118] The king had premonitions of a violent end. One day, after keeping Easter at Negeon with great devotion, he suddenly returned to the Louvre and ordered all the lions, bears, bulls, and other wild animals he kept there for baiting by dogs, to be shot. He had dreamt that he was set upon and eaten by wild beasts.

[119] So called derisively, because he was born and brought up in the poor province of Bearn, in the Pyrenees.

[120] Her majesty, we learn from the MÉmoires of L’Estoile, was of a rich figure, stout, fine eyes and complexion. She used no paint, powder or other vilanie.

[121] The new palace was situated in the parish of St. Germain l’Auxerrois, the parish church of the Louvre.

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

[123] By a curious coincidence the widening of the Rue de la Ferronnerie had been ordered just before the king was assassinated.

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

[125] The Grande Galerie.

[126] In the HÔtel de Bourbon, east of the old Louvre, sometimes known as the Petit Bourbon.

[127] The church of Notre Dame des Victoires commemorates the victory.

[128] The MarchÉ St. HonorÉ now occupies its site.

[129] 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.

[130] A letter from Paris to Lyons was taxed at two sous: it now costs three.

[131] The Rue Poulletier marks the line of the old channel between the islands.

[132] 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.

[133] One of the schemes of Francis I. to raise money had been to offer the benches to the highest bidders, and under the law of 1604 the office of councillor became a hereditary property on payment to the court of one-sixtieth of its value. Moreover, the Parlement was but a local body, one among several others in the provinces.

[134] The added indignity of the whip is an invention of Voltaire.

[135] Louis used, however, to stilt his low stature by means of thick pads in his boots.

[136] Taine, basing his calculation on a MS. bound with the monogram of Mansard, estimated the cost of Versailles in modern equivalent at about 750,000,000 francs (£30,000,000 sterling.)

[137] The writer, whose youth was passed among the descendants of the Huguenot silk-weavers of Spitalfields, has indelible memories of their sterling character and admirable industry.

[138] Marshal Luxembourg was dubbed the Tapissier de Notre Dame (the upholsterer of Notre Dame), from the number of captured flags he sent to the cathedral.

[139] In a previous campaign the king had taken his queen and two mistresses with him in one coach. The peasants used to amuse themselves by coming to see the “three queens.”

[140] When the Duke of Orleans was about to start for Spain, the king asked whom he had chosen to accompany him. Orleans mentioned, among others, Fontpertius. “What, nephew!” exclaimed Louis, “a Jansenist!” “So far from being a Jansenist,” replied Orleans, “he doesn’t even believe in God.” “Oh, if that is so,” said the king, “I see no reason why he should not go.”

[141] Among the privileges granted to England was the monopoly of supplying the Spanish Colonies with negro slaves.

[142] Levau’s south faÇade was not completely hidden by Perrault’s screen, for the roofs of the end and central pavilions emerged from behind it until they were destroyed by Gabriel in 1755.

[143] Jules Hardouin, the younger Mansard, was a nephew and pupil of FranÇois Mansard, who assumed his uncle’s name. The latter was the inventor of the Mansard roof.

[144] The sixth part of a sou.

[145] Twelve alone were added to the St. HonorÉ quarter by levelling the Hill of St. Roch and clearing away accumulated rubbish.

[146] It extended as far as the entrance to the quadrangle opposite the Pont des Arts. A double line of trees, north and south, enclosed a Renaissance garden of elaborate design, and a charming bosquet, or wood, filled the eastern extremity.

[147] “By order of the king, God is forbidden to work miracles in this place.”

[148] In 1753 between 20th January and 20th February two hundred persons died of want (misÈre) in the Faubourg St. Antoine.

[149] Some conception of the insanitary condition of the court may be formed by the fact that fifty persons were struck down there by this loathsome disease during the king’s illness.

[150] “I have seen the Louvre and its huge enclosure, a vast palace which for two hundred years is always being finished and always begun. Two workmen, lazy hodmen, speed very slowly those rich buildings, and are paid when they are thought of.”

[151] The aspect of the west front with Soufflot’s “improvements” is well seen in Les Principaux Monuments Gothiques de l’Europe, published in Brussels, 1843.

[152] Taine estimates the revenues of thirty-three abbots in terms of modern values at from 140,000 to 480,000 francs (£5600 to £19,200). Twenty-seven abbesses enjoyed revenues nearly as large.

[153] The score of Rousseau’s opera is still preserved in the BibliothÈque Nationale.

[154] The Excise duty.

[155] Personal and land-taxes paid by the humbler classes alone.

[156] It is difficult, however, to read the sober and irrefutable picture of their miserable condition, given in the famous Books II. and V. of Taine’s Ancien RÉgime, without deep emotion.

[157] After the Thermidorian reaction in 1795, ninety-seven Jacobins were massacred by the royalists at Lyons on 5th May; thirty at Aix on 11th May. Similar horrors were enacted at Avignon, Arles, and Marseilles, and at other places in the south.

[158] When de BrÉzÉ reported this to the king, he seemed vexed, and answered petulantly, “Well, if they won’t go they must be left there.”

[159] A whole library has been written concerning the identity of this famous prisoner. There is little doubt that the mask was of velvet and not of iron, and that the mysterious captive who died on 19th November 1703 in the Bastille was Count Mattioli of Bologna, who was secretly arrested for having betrayed the confidence of Louis XIV.

[160] Only five francs were allowed for a bourgeois, a man of letters was granted ten; a Marshal of France obtained the maximum.

[161] It was composed by one of the ÉmigrÉs, M. de Limon, approved by the Emperor of Austria and the King of Prussia, and signed, against his better judgment, by the Duke of Brunswick.

[162] The numbers have been variously estimated from 100 to 5000 killed on the popular side.

[163] “Sew we, spin we, sew we well, behold the coats we have made for the winter that is coming. Soldiers of the Fatherland, ye shall want for nothing.”

[164] Inferno. XV. 76-78.—“In whom lives again the seed of those Romans who remained there when the nest (Florence) of so much wickedness was made.”

[165] Mdlle. Curchod, for whom Gibbon “sighed as a lover.”

[166] “We could rouse no enthusiasm,” said the head of a State Department to the writer at the time of the Fashoda incident, “even for a war for the recovery of Alsace and Lorraine, much less against England.”

[167] See p. 41.

[168] According to Sir Thomas Browne, bodies soon consumed there. “‘Tis all one to lie in St. Innocents’ churchyard as in the sands of Egypt, ready to be anything, in the ecstasy of being ever, and as content with six feet as the moles of Adrianus.”—Urn Burial, p. 351.

[169] The picture subsequently found its way to the apartments of Louis XVI., and followed him from Versailles to Paris. The attitude of this ill-fated monarch towards his advisers, says Michelet, was much influenced by a fixed idea that Charles I. lost his head for having made war on his people, and that James II. lost his crown for having abandoned them.

[170] French Painting in the Sixteenth Century, by L. Dimier. London, 1904.

[171] The picture, Une Dame prÉsentÉe par la Madeleine, attributed to the MaÎtre de Moulins at the Exhibition of Primitifs in the Pavilion de Marsan has now been acquired by the Louvre.

[172] M. Lafenestre, the Director of the Louvre, informs the writer that he sees no sufficient reason at present for modifying the traditional attributions of the pictures loaned by the Louvre to the Exhibition of the Primitifs in the Pavilion de Marsan.

[173] One of the few non-dramatic compositions of MoliÈre is an eulogistic poem on Mignard’s decoration of this dome.

[174]

[175]

[176] A description of this and of other public balls of the Second Empire will be found in Taine’s Notes sur Paris, which has been translated into English.

[177] In 1664 we find Guilliaume roy des MÉnÉstriers, the viol players and masters of dancing, acting in the name of the foundation against the usurpations of the Fathers of the Christian Doctrine. In 1720 the title of the church was confirmed by royal decree as St. Julian of the Minstrels. The church and the street of the minstrels were swept away to make the Rue Rambuteau.

[178] It became the second ThÉÂtre FranÇais in 1819.

[179] It became the ThÉÂtre FranÇais in 1799, and was burnt down in 1900.

[180] The word is derived from basilica, a law court.