CHARLES VIII died without direct heirs and the crown fell to Louis XII, a grandson of that duke of Orleans who had played so sorry a part in the reign of Charles VI, the mad king, and who had been assassinated by the ruffians of John the Fearless. This change threw the reigning line into the hands of what is known as the Valois-Orleans family. Of that branch of the Capets the most brilliant monarch was Francis I, Louis XII’s successor, a son of his cousin, the count of AngoulÊme.

Three score years had passed after the fall of Constantinople when Francis I came to the throne, young, alert, intelligent, progressive. He was fond of literature and the arts, and the revival of ancient letters and the importation of Italian paintings and architecture roused him to vivid interest; he was ambitious and the discovery of America spurred him to claim a share for France; the aspirations of Emperor Charles V, urged him to dispute a rivalry which threatened his own career and the integrity of his kingdom.

Louis XII had been called the “Father of his People” because of the care with which he had nursed back to economic health the depleted forces of France which Louis XI had begun to restore. It is even told of him that he returned part of a tax after it had paid the demand for which it had been levied. Such a proceeding was unknown before, and it is small wonder that his subjects adored him. Francis reaped the benefit of his predecessor’s social and financial intelligence.

Of united national feeling there was more at the beginning of Francis’s reign than there ever had been, and power was more concentrated in the king than it ever had been. Feudalism with its picturesque and brutal individualism had been outgrown. With the disappearance of the need for fortified dwellings the rural strongholds of the nobility were modified into pleasant chÂteaux, while their masters, not obliged to stay at home to be ready to fight quarrelsome neighbors, were free to join the king in Paris or at Fontainebleau. Thus there was formed for the first time a court consisting of more than the retinue necessary for the conduct of the royal household. For the first time, too, the nobles brought the women of their families to court, with the result that dress and festivities became more brilliant than ever before, and language developed a precision which marks this period as the beginning of the use of Modern French.

Francis himself wrote not badly and his encouragement of writers won him the title of “Father of French Letters.” Here is his tribute to the intelligent favorite of Charles VII.

EPITAPH ON AGNES SOREL[3]

Francis’s sister, Marguerite of Navarre, was equally enthusiastic and talented and gathered about her a notable group of writers. Her affection for her brother was extraordinarily tender. After his death she wrote the following poem, translated in Longfellow’s “Poetry of Europe.”

Francis founded the College of France in Paris for the study of classical languages, testimony to the influence that had seized the country after the southern expeditions of Charles VIII and Louis XII. Francis’s establishment provided merely for the maintenance of a faculty, and it was not until the next reign that the question of housing separate from any of the existing schools came up. It was not until the time of Marie de Medicis that the building really was provided. Since that time the college has been rebuilt twice, restored and enlarged until it is now an imposing pile rising on the Mont Sainte GeneviÈve near the Sorbonne. Its lectures which are intended for adults are free, and the institution is not a part of the University but is under the Minister of Education.

Francis established a government printing office and permitted the use of private presses though the books that issued from them were censored. There was a time, indeed, when it became evident that men were thinking for themselves and that untoward happenings were the result, when all printing of books was forbidden. Étienne Dolet, scholar, writer and printer, was one of those who suffered from the king’s inconstant mind. He was charged with heresy, tortured, hung and finally burned with his writings on the spot where his statue now stands in the Place Maubert.

This square is on the left bank, but the usual place for executions was the GrÈve in front of the HÔtel de Ville. Near the Halles was a pillory which Francis rebuilt a quarter of a century after the people had destroyed it. It was an open octagonal tower and the victims inside were placed on a revolving platform so that they might be exposed to the crowd below.

The gorgeous scene that was enacted when Francis made his formal entry into Paris after the death of Louis XII was indicative of the brilliance and extravagance of his whole reign. It was his superior magnificence that lost him the partisanship of Henry VIII of England whose eyes he over-dazzled at the Field of the Cloth of Gold. It was indeed well that he fell heir to Louis XII’s savings! The procession, according to the Austrian “special envoy,” was both “beautiful and gorgeous,” and Francis, arrayed in glistening armor, played to the gallery by making his handsome horse, white-and-silver decked, rear and prance so that his royal rider might display his horsemanship.

In the course of Francis’s prolonged contest with Charles V—a struggle in which he was even imprisoned at Madrid—he had many opportunities to see in Italy and Spain the art of a former time and the work of contemporary painters and sculptors as well. Not only did he send home many examples which were given him or which he captured or bought, but he invited to France Leonardo da Vinci, then an old man, Andrea del Sarto and Benvenuto Cellini. To the latter he gave a lodging in the HÔtel de Nesle, that left bank palace of which the Tour de Nesle was a part, on condition that he secured possession of it himself, as the king had previously made a present of it to the provost. Cellini armed his helpers and servants and defended his gift with such ferocity that the provost left him alone.

The king’s influence weighed heavily on the side of the humanist reaction against the austerities of art and life which had developed under the influence of an all-dominant church. The pendulum swung back and painters and sculptors chose less ascetic themes for brush and chisel. From Francis’s time on there was also a keen interest in portraiture.

A man of this king’s nature was not content to stay long in one place. When war was not making its demands upon him he was visiting all parts of his kingdom and spending no little time in the districts where hunting was good and where he built splendid chÂteaux so that he and his retinue might be comfortably housed. Fontainebleau and St. Germain-en-Laye are the two best known, while the chÂteau de Madrid in the Bois de Boulogne, adjoining the town was a charming retreat from the noise of the city. Except for a small bit included in a restaurant this building is no longer in existence, but in the Cours la Reine on the right bank facing the Seine is the small “House of Francis I” which the king built at Moret in 1572, and which an admirer bought and removed to Paris in 1826. It is an exquisite example of Renaissance architecture.

During the peaceful moments of the reign, there was a craze for building and Italian architects were offered handsome inducements to exercise their talents on French soil. It was a French architect, however, Pierre Lescot, who pulled down the Great Tower, the oldest part of the Louvre, and designed that portion which Francis and his son, Henry II, built, the southwestern corner of the eastern quadrangle. Henry’s initial, combined with the “D” and crescent of Diane de Poitiers, are visible in many places. Francis’s signature was the salamander, whose lizard-like length fitted comfortably into many decorative schemes.

Below the Great Tower there must have been a bed of soft earth of some sort, for it was found to be almost impossible to fill the huge hole left when the Tower was demolished. The populace saw in the strange sinking of the material dumped into the cavity the fulfillment of a legendary threat that, the fortress being meant to stand forever, its fall would be marked by untoward happenings. In fact it was nearly three hundred years before modern engineering knowledge was able to stop the seepage that caused the trouble.

During one of the intervals of peace with Charles V the emperor visited Paris. Indeed it was the necessity for making elaborate preparations for his visit that brought about the rebuilding of the Louvre whose dilapidation had not been appreciated before. The emperor was met outside the eastern wall and presented with the keys of the city. At the Saint Antoine gate there was a triumphal arch and the cannon of the Bastille roared a greeting as the monarch passed

beneath it. Farther on the procession stopped for the imperial guest to witness an allegorical play depicting the friendship of France and Germany. Over the Notre Dame Bridge, covered with ivy, Charles went to the cathedral and then to the palace of the CitÉ, where he supped. During his visit of a week he stayed at the Louvre, and was so brilliantly entertained that upon his departure he exclaimed, “Other cities are merely cities; Paris is a world in itself.”

The chief churches built in Francis’s reign were Saint Étienne-du-Mont (on the site of an earlier edifice) in which Sainte GeneviÈve’s ashes now rest, Saint Eustache, the church of the market people at the Halles, and the flamboyant tower of Saint Jacques-de-la-Boucherie. This tower is the last expression of the Gothic, while Saint Étienne and Saint Eustache show the Transition combination of Gothic and Renaissance.

Étienne Marcel’s Maison aux Piliers had been but a second-hand affair. By 1530 a new City Hall was imperative. Its corner stone was laid amid feasting on the open square with bread and wine for all comers and cries of “Long live the king and the city fathers!” This enthusiastic beginning did not foretell quick work, however, for eighty years elapsed before the building was done. Its style was the same that it is to-day except in the development of details.

It was the old Maison aux Piliers that had seen the dinner given to Queen Claude by the city fathers on the occasion of her entrance into Paris after Francis’s accession. Louis XII’s third queen, Mary, an English princess, was the first royal lady whom the city fathers had ventured to invite to partake of their hospitality. The occasion had not been entirely successful, for so great a throng pressed in to the city hall to observe the unusual guests that the waiters “hardly had room to bring the food upon the tables.” The arrangements for Queen Claude’s entertainment included precautions against such an invasion. When the great day came the provost of the Merchants and the lesser officials, clothed flamingly in red velvet and scarlet satin and followed by representatives of the guilds of drapers, grocers, goldsmiths, dyers, and so on, went to a suburb to meet their lady and act as her escort, and her majesty was graciously appreciative of all their attentions.

While the Renaissance, humanism and the discovery of the New World were exciting men to new interests they also did their part in promoting independence of thought. With ability to read the Bible in the original came questioning of previous interpretations. There grew up both within and without the Church a desire to reform it, and with Calvin and Luther there came into expression not only a protest against the present state of affairs but a formulation of a new belief. Rabelais and Montaigne in their vastly different ways worked toward the same end. The movement proved to be one of those appeals which spread like a flame when the air touches it. Rich and poor, noble and simple responded to the plea, and Francis found himself the ruler of people ready to fly at each other’s throats and clamoring for him to let loose the dogs of persecution.

Francis was a Catholic and condemned Protestantism in Francis, but in Germany he allied himself to the Protestant party against the emperor. Henry II (1547-1559), Francis’s son, did the same—and won some territory by the manoeuver—although he had strengthened his Catholic interests by marrying Catherine de Medicis, a niece of the Pope, and showed himself by no means friendly to the democratic ideas which the new religion fostered. His strength constantly was spent against the movement even to the end of his reign when he made an alliance for purposes of persecution with Philip II of Spain, husband of “Bloody Mary” of England. One of the first fruits of this union with the land of the Inquisition was the trial of a distinguished member of the Parliament, Anne du Bourg. Henry’s death merely interrupted the examination and du Bourg was burned on the GrÈve before the City Hall.

The Paris Protestants or Huguenots lived chiefly in the Faubourg Saint Germain on the left bank.

Henry’s chief exploit was the capture of Calais which had been in the hands of the English ever since the Hundred Years’ War, and whose loss meant so much to Queen Mary of England that she is said to have declared that when she died “Calais” would be found written on her heart.

The celebration in Paris of the capture of the long-lost city was one of the greatest possible failures. The main festivity was to be in the evening at the Maison aux Piliers. It poured in torrents sufficient to put a literal as well as a figurative damper on any pleasure-making. When Henry arrived at the Place de GrÈve the salutes of artillery frightened his horses and he was almost thrown down as he alighted from his carriage. At supper the crowd was so great that it was almost impossible to get anything to eat. The main part of the program within the hall was a play by the poet Jodelle who has left an amusing account of the evening of “My Disaster.” There were twelve actors in his musical sketch, he says. Of these six were so hoarse that they could not be heard, and the remaining six did not know their parts. One of the characters, Orpheus, was to sing a song in the king’s praise so literally moving that the very stones followed the singer about the stage. But, alas, the property man had misunderstood his orders and instead of preparing two rocks (rochers) he had arranged two steeples (clochers). When the unfortunate author, who had a part himself, saw these unexpected constructions coming across the stage he forgot his own lines, so utter was his amazement and misery.

Henry’s restless reign left him little time to spend in Paris or to devote to its beautifying. Whenever he came to the city festivities of all sorts ran high and the citizens paid for it all, though their temper grew sullen as the demands and the power of the crown increased. Henry expected the city fathers to meet expenses which they, quite reasonably, classed as personal matters; for instance, a charge for the food and shelter and care of a lion, a dromedary and a jaguar, which had been sent to the king from Africa.

Beyond the strengthening of the right bank fortifications, some addition to the palace of the CitÉ, and the continuation of the new HÔtel de Ville and of Francis I’s Louvre Henry did practically no building. His “H,” sometimes interlaced with his wife’s “C” and sometimes with Diane de Poitiers’ initial topped by her crescent, is by no means so frequent in Paris as, for example, in Fontainebleau, and other suburbs. In the courtyard of the Palais des Beaux-Arts is the faÇade of the chÂteau d’Anet which shows the monogram, and is a beautiful example of renaissance architecture.

A needed charity was instituted by the establishment of a Foundling Hospital. So usual was it to dispose of unwelcome infants that cradles for their reception were placed in the porch of Notre Dame itself. The hospital proved not an entire success, for about a century later Saint Vincent de Paul found that sorcerers, beggars and gymnasts were buying babies from the hospital at a franc apiece. His own foundation of a children’s home came from a chance meeting with a beggar who was breaking his purchase’s legs so that its wails might excite pity from passers-by.

Henry’s death was brought about by one of those tragic happenings that mar times of attempted gayety. Henry was marrying off his daughter and his sister for political reasons and he arranged a double wedding. The festivities included an elaborate supper in the Great Hall of the palace of the City and a tournament in the rue Saint Antoine. The king himself took part in the joust, by accident was mortally wounded by Montgomery, the captain of the Scottish guards, and died in the near-by HÔtel des Tournelles a few days after.