HENRY IV (1589-1598), came to the throne after a career of strife which by no means ended at his accession. His family were ardent Protestants. Henry was born in the country and received an outdoor training which made him hardy and vigorous in wide contrast to the debauched youths who sat upon the throne in Paris. The religious wars were seething all through his boyhood. When he was but fifteen his mother, Jeanne d’Albret, a woman of exceptional courage and address, presented him to the Protestant army and he was made general-in-chief, with Admiral Coligny as his adviser. When he was nineteen he agreed to the marriage with Marguerite of Valois which was to reunite the contending parties—or to serve as a bait to entice the chief Protestants of the country to Paris, according as one interprets Catherine de Medicis.

Breaking harshly in upon the wedding festivities the bell of Saint Germain l’Auxerrois clanged its awful knell, and when the horror was over Protestant Henry was lucky still to be alive. It behooved him to be prudent, and he accepted Charles IX’s commanding invitation to stay in Paris. Here he was under surveillance, and here he learned the ways of the most corrupt court that France had known up to that time, immoral, deceitful, treacherous, the women in every way as bad as the men.

During these years Henry diplomatically declared himself a convert to Catholicism, but it was a change for the moment; he had reverted long before the monk’s dagger made him King by slaying Henry III.

This murder meant an accession of hard work for Henry of Navarre for the League under the Duke of Mayenne and supported by Spain and Savoy was determined to accept no Protestant as ruler. Henry won a brilliant victory at Arques and another at Ivry.

Then the “burghers of Saint Genevieve” were indeed forced to “Keep watch and ward” for Henry marched upon Paris without which he could not call his crown his own. At his approach the people from the suburbs crowded into the city till it held some 200,000. Henry had no trouble in taking the chief of the outer settlements and in controlling the town’s food supply. The resulting famine drove the Parisians to straits such as they had not known since the days of Sainte GeneviÈve and were not to know again until the Franco-Prussian War. The usual meat soon gave out and when all the horses and all the mules were eaten, any stray dog or cat was pursued by the populace and when caught, cooked and devoured in the open street. From dead men’s bones was made a sort of pasty bread, and mothers knew the taste of the flesh of their own children whose strength had not availed against the greater force of hunger.

Touched by the suffering of the city which he regarded as his own, Henry offered to let the besieged leave the town, but so earnest was the League, so inspiring the preaching of the priests that not more than 3000 took advantage of the opportunity.

The League was not at peace with itself, however. Mayenne disposed by death of the Leaguers whose importance threatened his power and there was stirring that feeling in favor of Henry which found voice a little later in the “Satire MÉnippÉe,” the essays which rallied Catholics to the support of their monarch. The papers were written by a canon of the Sainte Chapelle and half a dozen friends in the form of a burlesque report of a meeting of the States General. The following selection gives an idea of the spirit of unrest that was troubling Paris and of the lack of approval of Henry III’s assassination felt by the moderate party.

“O Paris who are no longer Paris but a den of ferocious beasts, a citadel of Spaniards, Walloons and Neapolitans, an asylum and safe retreat for robbers, murderers and assassins, will you never be cognizant of your dignity and remember who you have been and what you are; will you never heal yourself of this frenzy which has engendered for you in place of one lawful and gracious King fifty saucy kinglets and fifty tyrants? You are in chains, under a Spanish Inquisition a thousand times more intolerable and harder to endure by spirits born free and unconstrained as the French are than the cruelest deaths which the Spaniards could devise. You did not tolerate a slight increase of taxes and of offices and a few new edicts which did not concern you at all, yet you endure that they pillage houses, that they ransom you with blood, that they imprison your senators, that they drive out and banish your good citizens and counselors: that they hang and massacre your principal magistrates; you see it and endure it but you approve it and praise it and you would not dare or know how to do otherwise. You have given little support to your King, good-tempered, easy, friendly, who behaved like a fellow-citizen of your town which he had enriched and embellished with handsome buildings, fortified with strong and haughty ramparts, honored with privileges and favorable exemptions. What say I? Given little support? Far worse: you have driven him from his city, his house, his very bed! Driven him? you have pursued him. Pursued him? You assassinated him, canonized the assassin and made joyful over his death. And now you see how much this death profited you.”

Henry of Navarre became king of Paris as well as of the rest of France though it required a considerable concession to achieve that position. Still it was not the first time that he had made a mental somersault, so when he found that Paris was stubborn in spite of more than three years and a half of hunger, sickness and death, and that his enemies outside of the city were strong enough to inflict upon him a defeat of some moment, he yielded to the urging of his counselors, admitted with a shrug “So fair a city is well worth a mass” and declared his willingness to turn Catholic. After suitably prolonged disputations with theologians he declared himself convinced of the error of his belief, and on a Sunday in July, 1593, he appeared at Saint Denis where an imposing body of prelates was arrayed before the great door, and professed his new faith. Then he was allowed to enter the building and to repeat his profession before the altar.

Paris was not sorry to have an excuse for submitting and in the following March when Henry’s troops entered the city in the grayness of dawn one day toward the end of the month there was no opposition. On his way to Notre Dame to hear mass, Henry, resplendent in velvet, gold-embroidered, mounted on a handsome gray charger and constantly doffing his white-plumed helmet, was greeted with cries of “Long live the king” and “Hail to peace.” When the Provost of the Merchants and some of the principal citizens the day after his entry brought him a gift of sweetmeats, the king, though not fully dressed, for his subjects’ ardor had brought them at an unduly early hour, accepted the offering graciously, saying, “Yesterday I received your hearts; to-day I receive your comfits no less willingly.”

A Spanish troop had been called in by the League to assist them in holding the city against Henry. He allowed them to leave unmolested, contenting himself with watching them from a window as they passed through the Porte Saint Denis, and calling to them with cheerful insolence, “Gentlemen, my regards to your master—and never come back here!”

In the calm that succeeded the nation began a career of prosperity which it had not known for two generations. With cheerful severity Henry caused a gallows to be erected near the Porte Saint Antoine “Whereon to hang any person of either religion who should be found so bold as to attempt anything against the public peace.” He was determined that every peasant in the kingdom should have a chicken in the pot for his Sunday dinner, and he used intelligent methods of bringing about that result. Not only was he a man of practical good sense himself, but he was able to recognize that quality in others, and he chose men of prudence and intelligence as his advisers, chief of them the Duke of Sully. He encouraged agriculture, introduced new industries, permitted religious toleration through the Edict of Nantes, made himself the friend alike of peasant and of noble. France throve as she had not had a chance to do for many a decade—and the power of the crown became stronger than ever.

Henry’s early life had taught him to be active, and he lost no time in winning Paris to his friendship in various ways. He did not treat it like an enemy but as a returned prodigal, and the citizens lost none of their old privileges while they gained the civic improvements about which their new monarch busied himself promptly. He began the rebuilding of the city with the high roofed structures of brick and stone combined which showed that the classic outlines of the Renaissance were on the wane and which prefaced the Italian forms of the next reign.

In the place des Vosges of to-day may be seen the best extant examples of this style. Catherine de Medicis had made Henry II’s death at the HÔtel des Tournelles an excuse to leave a building damp and malodorous from the ill-drained marsh on which it was built. For a long time it housed only some of Charles IX’s pet animals, and then it was torn down except for a wing where Henry IV installed some of the silk workers whom he introduced into France that his people might learn a new industry. The palace park was used as a horse market, and finally all memory of the past was cleared away and Henry IV caused to be laid out the Place Royale now called the Place des Vosges. “The spear-thrust of Montgomery,” said Victor Hugo, “was the origin of the Place Royale.”

The king built at his own expense several of the houses along the south side and gave the remainder of the land to people who would finish the remainder of the quadrangle in harmonious style. An arcade runs about the whole square whose north and south entrances are under pavilions which break the monotony of the architecture. The effect is wonderfully pleasing even to-day when most of the houses show signs of dilapidation and the park which they enclose is noisy with the overflow of children from the old and crowded streets round about. In the days of its prime it must have been extremely dignified and handsome.

Many great names are connected with this square. Richelieu lived here, Madame de SÉvignÉ was born here, and here in the house where Victor Hugo had an apartment is the museum where Paris has collected mementoes of the man the people loved. Backing against the southern houses of the square still stands the house which Sully built for himself, its once imposing faÇade whose windows show signs of occupation by many small businesses, looking down upon a disheveled courtyard.

Another step that tended to beautify Paris was the opening of the Place Dauphine from the western end of the palace of the CitÉ through the palace garden westward. It was surrounded by houses like those on the Place Royale. Madame Roland lived in one of them, situated where the place opens on the Pont Neuf which Henry finished. On it he planned to place his own equestrian statue, but that ornament underwent so many misfortunes, even to being shipwrecked on its way from Italy where it had been cast, that Henry was dead before it was set in place. It seems to have been fated to ill-luck, for during the Revolution it was melted down and made into cannon, although up to that time the people had laid their petitions at its foot. The existing statue replaced the old one in 1818.

On the northern part of the Pont Neuf Henry built the famous “Samaritaine,” a pump which forced water to the Louvre and the Tuileries, was crowned by a clock tower and a chime of bells, and was decorated with statues and carving. The name is perpetuated to-day in a department store on the right bank and in a public bath floating in the stream. On other bridges there were several of these pumps. One on the Pont Notre Dame was destroyed within the remembrance of people now living.

Berthod, a seventeenth-century writer of doggerel, who describes “La Ville de Paris” in “burlesque verses,” draws a lively picture of the activities of Henry’s great esplanade in

THE RASCALITIES OF THE PONT-NEUF

Two hospitals were built in Henry’s reign, one on the left bank, l’HÔpital de CharitÉ, and the other outside of the city on the northeast, for contagious diseases.

Improvement of the quays was a manifold benefit to the city.

A satirical prescription warranted to cure the plague, was quoted then as it had been for the previous hundred years:

RECIPE FOR THE CURE OF THE EPIDEMIC

Queen Marguerite of Valois, the wife whose wedding festivities had precipitated the massacre of Saint Bartholomew, proved herself Catherine de Medicis’ own daughter in point of morals. Henry’s were none of the best and they were divorced, he to contemplate marriage with Gabrielle d’EstrÉes and after her death to clinch his Italian alliance by wedding Marie de Medicis, while Marguerite entertained herself with numerous lovers at the HÔtel de Sens and at a new house which she built on the left bank, finding it “piquant” to look across to the Louvre where her successor lived. In moments of emotion, conventionality or fright she founded several religious houses. Of the Monastery of the Petits-Augustins there is a remnant left, the chapel, which has been secularized and now houses the Renaissance museum of the School of Fine Arts. Its faÇade is, incongruously enough, the faÇade of Diane de Poitiers’ chÂteau d’Anet, mentioned above.

Henry’s devotion to Gabrielle d’EstrÉes, a rarely beautiful woman, made him have her initial carved in parts of the Louvre which he built. The letters are gone now except in one overlooked instance, and they were erased, it is said, by the order of Marie de Medicis. If this is true she seems to have had more feeling about this past love affair of the king’s than about his former wife, for she is said to have been friendly with Marguerite across the river even to the point of paying her debts.

In spite of Henry’s warlike career and his rough-and-ready manners he was not without the ability, which many early kings cultivated, to express his lighter emotions in verse. To-day this royal skill seems to have left the monarchs of Europe with the exception of Carmen Sylva and of Nicholas of Montenegro who writes and fights with equal enthusiasm. Here is a poem addressed to

CHARMING GABRIELLE[4]

The most ambitious architectural work of Henry’s reign was the addition which he made to the Louvre. Catherine de Medicis had begun a wing extending from the right angle of Francis I and Henry II toward the Seine, and then continued it in a gallery parallel with the river, and intended to meet the palace of the Tuileries. Henry IV finished both and added the story which was rebuilt in Louis XIV’s reign after a fire. It is now called the Gallery of Apollo and contains to-day a few of the crown jewels kept when the rest were sold twenty-five years ago. Out of this splendid hall opens the small square room in which hung Leonardo’s “Mona Lisa” until its unexplained disappearance two years ago.

Popular as Henry was personally the political situation was so embroiled that he had many enemies. Soon after his triumphal entry into Paris he was unsuccessfully attacked by a youth named Chastel, and it is a testimony to the king’s openness of mind and tact that after a few year’s he caused the demolition of the monument which enthusiasts raised to commemorate his escape. As a further expression of the people’s horror at Chastel’s act his house, opposite the Cour du Mai, was razed and on its site the public executioner branded his victims.

A half dozen other attempts upon Henry’s life followed, and at last one was successful. Driving in an open carriage through a narrow street (rue de la Ferronerie) near the markets, he was stabbed by one Ravaillac who leaped upon the wheel of the carriage as it halted in a press of traffic. A fortnight later the assassin was tortured to death on the GrÈve. The body of the most popular sovereign that France has ever known lay in state in the Hall of the Cariatides, that huge gallery of the Louvre which had served as a guardroom in the days of Henry II and Catherine de Medicis. There could be no better testimony to the regard in which the “roi galant” was held not only in his own time but later than the fact that during the Revolution his body and tomb at Saint Denis were not disturbed.