HENRY IV’S death left France with a nine-year-old king, Louis XIII, (1610-1643), whose Italian mother, acting as regent, had small sympathy with her adopted land. Sully she soon dismissed and the court witnessed a greedy scramble for money and preferment between imported favorites and French nobles. In the brief period of four years the financial state of the country was such that it became necessary to summon the States General to see if any way out of the trouble might be found. France’s regeneration under Henry of Navarre had been a growth too rapid to have roots firm enough to withstand rough handling.

The Assembly was to accomplish nothing for it. It was in the autumn of 1614 that the Estates met in a hall in the HÔtel de Bourbon just east of the Louvre. The body was a unit in demanding reform, but unity ceased with that demand. The nobles were indignant at certain encroachments on their aristocratic rights, the queen having given privileges to some middle-class professional people for a financial consideration. The clergy were shocked at the suggestion that they pay taxes—an idea not to be considered, they said, for it would be giving to man what was due to God. The Third Estate had a just grievance in the fact that upon them fell all the expenses of the government, and their representatives, speaking kneeling as was the dispiriting custom, succeeded nevertheless in giving some caustic warnings.

The only result of all this quarreling was that a petition was sent to the king asking him to give his attention to the questions under discussion. The only reply from the Louvre was the information that greeted the deputies when they gathered the next day that the queen wanted their hall of meeting for a ball and that the Assembly was therefore disbanded. It was a hundred and seventy-five years after this brusque treatment before it met again just before the outbreak of the Revolution.

Richelieu, Paris born, Sorbonne educated, and at that time a bishop, was a member of this Assembly of 1614. When he became Marie de Medicis’ adviser, and, diplomatic and inflexible, imposed his will upon the country, the situation cleared. There was need of high-handed action at first. The minister had the greedy Prince of CondÉ arrested within the palace of the Louvre and sent to the Bastille; a force was sent against other hungry and violent nobles; the king himself, though then but a lad of sixteen, felt the bracing atmosphere of this change and ordered the arrest—possibly the death—of the Italian Concini, who, with his wife, Leonora GaligaÏ had ruled the nation through the queen. Concini was shot as he was crossing the bridge across the eastern moat of the Louvre, and the king looked on from a window. Leonora was beheaded and burned as a witch on the GrÈve.

Richelieu, become a cardinal, ruled with wisdom and vigor. He treated high and low with equal impartiality, even causing the execution of some of the greatest nobles in the land for the breaking of the law which forbade dueling. The Place de GrÈve witnessed the punishment for the sport of the Place Royale. Legalized struggles by the Parliament in the palace on the CitÉ, underhand plots by men very near the throne—all were met and overthrown by the sagacious premier, and his every act tended to confirm the strength of the crown. He fought sturdily against the Huguenots and conquered them with the fall of La Rochelle, a conquest which the church of Notre Dame-des-Victoires was established to commemorate, the original building serving as the sacristy of the present edifice. He confirmed Henry of Navarre’s Edict of Nantes, however, giving to the Protestants religious liberty and civil rights. Abroad the cardinal’s policies brought territory and prestige to the crown.

Louis lived but a scant half year longer than Richelieu. The king’s whole life was passed under the domination of a determined mother, Marie de Medicis, and a masterful prime minister. It would have required a stronger personality than his to make itself felt, though Rubens has recorded in a series of pictures now in the Louvre the quarrels and reconciliations of the royal family. His only interests were hawking, drilling soldiers, and craftsmanship in leather. He was terribly bored most of the time, apparently without any initiative toward remedying the situation. His court reflected his own disposition and was incredibly dull, though ordered in etiquette and brilliant in garb.

It is to the regent and the cardinal and not to the king that Paris was indebted for the many embellishments of this reign and for any impetus that it gained toward the standards of art and literature which rose to their climax in the next reign.

Henry IV had made Paris so pleasant a place to live in that the city was constantly growing. Rivaling the Marais in popularity a new section became fashionable, the Quarter Saint HonorÉ on the northwest of the town. By way of protecting this rapidly enlarging district Louis swung the city wall so far west as to include the Tuileries gardens. It was in this newly popular quarter that Richelieu built for himself the Palais Cardinal which he bequeathed to the king and which then took its present name, the Palais Royal. He encountered difficulties in the construction of his new home for his ideas of what he wanted did not harmonize with what he could have. The hÔtels of other men were in the way and sometimes even the cardinal’s expressed desire was not enough to make them turn over their property to him. When they were citizens of small account he brought pressure, not always honest, to bear upon them; when they were people of importance he sometimes had to keep his wishes in abeyance. The result was an irregularity of outline that was not beautiful. To secure a symmetrical garden Richelieu did from within what few of the city’s enemies ever have succeeded in doing—he pierced the king’s new wall. After the cardinal’s death the queen-regent, Anne of Austria, moved into the palace, and in its garden Louis XIV grew up, a rather forlorn little figure so uncared for that once he was found after dark asleep under a bush.

Outside of the city wall running along the river bank was the Cours la Reine laid out by

Marie de Medicis as a parade ground for the satins and velvets, the flowing cloaks and plumed hats of her courtiers. A similar sight was to be seen in the gardens of the left bank palace which Marie, disgusted with the gloom of the Louvre which she could not believe was really the palace when she first came to Paris, had rebuilt on the site of an old residence of the dukes of Luxembourg. To-day, with that combination of thrift and love of beauty which characterizes the Frenchman, the Senate occupies one part and the President of the Senate lives in another section. The national museum of contemporary art is housed in a modern building adjoining. The garden is still carefully ordered, the only renaissance garden in Paris, and is a fitting adjunct to the beautiful and varied Italian edifice which looks down upon it. The grounds are dotted with statues of eminent men and women, most of them portraits. To the east of the palace is an elaborate Florentine fountain and basin called the Fountain of the Medicis.

It was in Louis’ reign that Paris became the seat of an archbishop who used as his episcopal residence the bishop’s palace on the south side of Notre Dame. Of a half-dozen religious houses founded or enlarged at this time the best known is the Val-de-GrÂce, made prominent by its gift from Louis’ wife, Anne of Austria, of a handsome church, a thank-offering for the birth of a son after a childless wedded life of twenty-three years. This son ruled as Louis XIV, the “Grand Monarque.” The church of the Val-de-GrÂce was dome-crowned in the fashion set by the left bank monastery of the Carmelites and followed in the construction of the near-by palace of the Luxembourg, of the chapel of the Sorbonne in which is Richelieu’s tomb, of the Church of Saint Paul-Saint Louis, in whose graveyard Rabelais was buried, and, in the next reign, of the College Mazarin (the Institute) and of the Dome of the Invalides beneath which Napoleon sleeps. The popularity of the dome continued far into the next century, for Sainte GeneviÈve’s church, now called the Pantheon, is topped in the same majestic style.

Now was the beginning, too, of the so-called “Jesuit” style, seen to-day in not undignified form in the faÇades of Saint Paul-Saint Louis near the Place de la Bastille, Saint Thomas Aquinas, the left bank church of fashionable weddings, Saint Roch on the rue Saint HonorÉ, from which the crowds watched the daily passing of the tumbrils during the Revolution, Saint Gervais, east of the HÔtel de Ville, which cherishes a crucifix from the ancient abbey of Sainte GeneviÈve, and the Oratory also on the rue Saint HonorÉ, now a Protestant church and serving as a background for a fine group of statuary representing Admiral Coligny between Fatherland and Religion.

The main feature of these faÇades is the superposition of columns. All three orders are used in Saint Gervais, the simplest, Doric, at the bottom, the Ionic above, and the most florid, the Corinthian at the top. The others employ but two orders, always with the more elaborate above.

Decoration was of the heavy style called baroque which developed later into the slightly more acceptable rococo, so called from its use of rocks, shells, and foliage combined with conventional scrolls. Louis’ addition to the Louvre, however, of a part of the eastern courtyard, reproduced the renaissance decorations of the constructions of Francis I and Henry II to which they were attached.

Far to the east of the city Louis’ physician started a botanical garden which developed into the present huge Jardin des Plantes with its connecting collections of animals. One of the sights of the garden is a spreading cedar tree which the famous eighteenth century botanist, Jussieu, is said to have brought from the Andes, a tiny plant, slipped under the band of his hat.

An important addition to the Paris of Louis XIII’s time was the construction of what is now called the Île Saint Louis to the east of the CitÉ. This island was made by uniting two small islands, one of which had belonged to the bishop and the other to the canons of the cathedral. With bustling Paris only the cast of a stone away on each bank these two islets were devoted to such rural uses as the pasturage of cows and the whitening of linen. One of them, however, in Charles V’s time, had been the scene of a strange combat between a man and a dog, the property of his enemy whom he was accused of murdering from the fact that the dog attacked him whenever they met. Lists were enclosed on the then barren island and the king and a great crowd of men from court and town stood about to see the outcome of the “ordeal.” The man was allowed a stick; the dog had a barrel open at both ends into which he might retreat and from which he could plunge forth. When he was loosed he rushed about his enemy, evading his blows, threatening him now on one side and now on another until he was worn out, and then flew at his throat and threw him down so that he was forced to make confession of his crime thus proven by the “wager of battle.”

Henry IV built a chapel which became in the eighteenth century the present church of Saint Louis-in-the-Island, whose delicately pierced spire shows glints of sky through its openings. The first union with the main land was by a