HISTORY repeated itself when Louis XIII died, leaving as his heir a child of five, Louis XIV (1643-1715), whose kingdom was ruled by a regent, the queen mother, Anne of Austria, who took as her adviser another cardinal, the Italian, Mazarin. This newcomer to power was a different sort of man from his predecessor, Richelieu. “He possessed wit, insinuation, gayety and good manners,” says de Retz, but “he carried the tricks of the sharper into the ministry.”

War with Spain brought success at the beginning, but the Parisians were all too soon quarreling over the finances, and in the thick of a civil war. The people resented the arrest of a member of Parliament, Broussel, which had been accomplished while the general attention was engaged by the celebration at Notre Dame and in the streets over the victory at Lens. De Retz, who was at that time archbishop suffragan of Paris, went to Anne to ask for Broussel’s release. The queen laughed at him and so roused his wrath that he joined the insurgents. He did it whole-heartedly, for for some time to come he fought in the streets—alternately with trying to calm the people—and once was seen at a sitting of the Parliament of Paris with a dagger carelessly protruding from his pocket—“the archbishop’s breviary,” some wit called it.

After de Retz’s failure the Parliament sent a delegation to the regent at the Palais Royal to demand the release of Broussel. Anne refused and the burghers tucked up their gowns and clambered over the street barricades to report their failure to the people. Half way across town they were met by a mob who declined to accept any such decision as final, and once more the envoys turned about and made their laborious way back to the regent.

Anne finally yielded her prisoner, but her action did not end the struggle, which was carried on for some years and was called the Fronde (sling) because the members of Parliament behaved like the stone-slinging youngsters of the faubourg Saint HonorÉ who gave way before the king’s archers, but renewed their sport as soon as their backs were turned. The contest seems to have been rather absurd, for while the personal courage of the Parisians was unquestioned there was no organization, and the troop that rode gaily out to meet the royal regulars was pretty sure to ride back sad and bedraggled.

The little king was taken to Saint Germain for protection during this year-long commotion, and it was not until peace between the warring parties had been formally proclaimed that he returned to Paris.

This peace did not last long, for the bourgeoisie, some members of the nobility and even a few princes of the blood royal were among the disaffected Parisians. Anne and Mazarin adopted high-handed measures, but they soon found that imprisoning men like the Prince de CondÉ of the Bourbon family did not ingratiate the court with the people or advance its cause. Two years later on a summer’s day Mazarin took the child king to the top of the hill on which is now the cemetery of PÈre Lachaise that he might watch a battle between his own troops under Turenne and those under CondÉ just outside the city walls on the east. CondÉ’s force was out-numbered and it looked as if he were going to be crushed between Turenne’s army and the wall when the Porte Saint Antoine was suddenly opened and the guns of the Bastille were used against Turenne while CondÉ’s army gained this unexpected refuge.

It turned out that the king’s cousin, the Duchesse de Montpensier, known as “La Grande Mademoiselle,” had taken upon herself to give the orders which defeated the royal troops. This strong-minded young woman was the bachelor girl of her time, and a “character.” What she would do next was the constant guess and the constant diversion of the court. Although she was eleven years older than Louis he was so captivated by her vivacity that the cardinal thought it judicious to keep the cousins apart, and gave her apartments at the Louvre. At one time during the siege of OrlÉans she made her way across the moat in a small boat and squeezed her way into the town through a postern gate. At love she scoffed and she refused every offer of marriage that was made to her until she was of an age ostensibly of discretion when she fell madly in love with an adventurer. Her marital experiences undoubtedly made her return to her earlier beliefs in the foolishness of love and marriage.

The court retreated to Saint Denis. The city was given over to internal dissension for some of the city officials were accused of sympathizing with the hated foreign cardinal and his party, and the HÔtel de Ville became the center of violent scenes, its besiegers men who wore in their hats a tuft of straw, the badge of the Frondeurs. It was only when Anne consented to send Mazarin away that the Fronde came to an end and once again Louis could return to Paris.

With such youthful experiences of his chief city it is small wonder that Louis XIV had no great love for it as a place of residence and that he spent most of his life at Versailles. The hunting lodge which Louis XIII had built was the nucleus of the huge palace which his son made large enough not only for his family and retinue but for a large number of the nobles whom it was his policy to gather about him so that he could keep his eye on them. By this means the power of the nobles was decreased on their own estates while their respect for the king, on whose words and smiles they hung, was enormously increased. A lord was grateful for a room at Versailles even though it were so far from private as to be used as a passage-way. Many of the nobility paid handsomely for positions in the royal kitchens. Later in the reign these offices were held by bourgeois, for the finances of this class improved as those of the upper class lessened on account of decreased revenues from their neglected estates. The burghers aped the nobles in manners and in dress, and by favoring them, from whom he had nothing to fear, Louis gained the friendship of an important body. He raised no objection when the citizens took nobles into business partnership, for that served him both by lowering ancient pride and by providing money upon which he could make some demand.

In manners, dress and literature this reign was increasingly formal following upon the example of Louis who was formal because he honestly believed himself godlike and insisted on formality as appropriate. His was a grand manner and his an incomparable selfishness. His belief in the divine right of kings stretched until “right” meant the right to do whatever he chose however unkind or immoral. Beneath the gorgeousness of the court was a life of hypocrisy, self-seeking, and crime almost beyond belief.

The godlike sovereign certainly had a more than human appetite. It is related that at one dinner he ate:

In theatrical parlance, he was “playing to capacity.”

Upon Mazarin’s death the king, then twenty-three years old and ignorant of independent action, had made known his intention of conducting affairs himself. For the rest of his life he worked hard every day at the affairs of the state, comforted when things went wrong with the refreshing thought that the fault was not his because he had acted with God-given intelligence. The early part of his career was marked by such advance in the condition of the finances, the laws, education, the army, and industrial achievement that, provided he blinded himself to the fact that in Colbert, Vauban and Louvois he had exceptionally efficient administrators, he might well think himself a paragon of intelligence. Great generals won his battles; great writers praised his power; great artists and architects built grandly in his honor. It is not strange that he thought himself what others called him, the “Grand Monarque” and the “Roi Soleil.”

Centralization was the basic policy of Louis’s career. In Paris it took the form of substituting a law court under royal control for the local courts in different parts of the city, and in making the municipal offices purchasable from the king. Municipal improvements made the city pleasanter to live in. An effort was made—not very successfully from the modern point of view—to keep the streets clean, and at night a lantern was hung midway between cross streets and burned until midnight. As the number of lights installed was but 6,500 and Paris at that time covered some four square miles of territory it may be seen that the illumination was not dazzling. It was enough, however, to be of assistance to Louis’ new police force, and to make visible in the evening as well as the morning the two gates—of Saint Denis and Saint Martin—erected by the admiring Parisians to do honor to his early victories. The fire department became a lay institution at this time for, rather curiously, fire fighting had previously been the work of a religious house. The population is estimated at between eight and nine hundred thousand.

Two new squares of this century were the Place des Victoires, in front of Notre Dame des Victoires, and the Place VendÔme, north of the rue Saint HonorÉ. By a city regulation no change is permitted to-day of the faÇades of the buildings on these two open places.

At the extreme eastern end of modern Paris the Place de la Nation is the former Place du TrÔne, which received its name when in 1660 Louis sat upon a temporary throne beyond the city wall to receive congratulations upon having secured the Peace of the Pyrenees.

The poet Scarron, husband of FranÇoise d’AubignÉ who, after his death, became the governess of the king’s children by Madame de Montespan, and who later was married secretly to Louis, has left a description of Paris in the “Great Century.” The translation is by Walter Besant.

An epitome of society this. Paris was indeed full of adventurers, of criminals even among the high-born, of gamblers so mad over games of chance that special laws had to be passed driving them out of the city. There is still standing near the HÔtel de Ville the HÔtel d’Aubray where lived the famous poisoner, the Marquise de Brinvilliers.

A glance at the career of this woman shows a social condition amazing in its calm iniquity. The marquise herself, of seemingly guileless charm, acquired from a lover the destructive skill which she utilized in removing from her path her relatives and any other people who interfered with her in any way. Her trial is a “celebrated case” not only because of her own rank but because other people of note were suspected of being in collusion with her. Torture was abolished under Louis XIV but not until after Madame de Brinvilliers had been made to drink many buckets of water and to be sadly bent across wooden horses.

She was beheaded on the GrÈve, her body burned and the ashes thrown to the winds. At about the same time accident disclosed an astounding number of cases of poisoning or attempted poisoning. Mme. de Montespan undoubtedly tried to make way with the father of her children, the king, and rumors were constant of many other instances. “So far,” said Mme. de SevÍgnÉ’s son, “I have not been accused of attempting to poison little mamma, and that is a distinction in these days.”

Paris was lively enough during this reign, for Versailles was not so far away but that its people could go to town for city diversions, and as Louis grew more serious with age and court etiquette more rigorous and burdensome, the town made its call more and more insistently. Louis himself, hugely bewigged and elaborately elegant, however, does not often appear in the picture. Once he took part in a gorgeous carrousel—a carnival chiefly of equestrian sports—which took place in the large square—now called the Place du Carrousel—lying between the Louvre and the Tuileries. Once, twenty-five years later, he was entertained at the HÔtel de Ville at a dinner at which the city officials waited upon him in person. Yet neither of these pictures lingers in the memory like that of the bewigged monarch usually most punctilious in his dress for occasions, appearing in the palace of the CitÉ before the Parliament, booted for the chase, arrogantly careless of any courtesy toward the body he addressed and haughtily insisting with the full force of his sincere belief that he and the State were one,—“L’État c’est moi.”

Power was dear to the king’s heart and he so impressed his magnificence on his people that they thought it only fitting that he should have a rising sun carved on the buildings which he erected, such as that part of the Louvre which he built to complete the eastern quadrangle. (See plan, Chapter XXII). The eastern exterior of this section, facing the church of Saint Germain l’Auxerrois, shows the superb colonnade designed by Perrault, a sort of universal genius, who was both a physician and an architect. Another piece of his work was the Observatory, still in active use on the left bank near the University. The king’s appreciation of splendor demanded completeness, and so his handsome buildings were placed in the setting of stately gardens, his chief designer being Le NÔtre whose work is still to be seen encircling the palaces in the environs of Paris. In the city he laid out the gardens of the Tuileries, and that superb avenue, the Champs ElysÉes, which leads from the broad Place de la Concorde to Napoleon’s Arch of Triumph. The four hundredth anniversary of Le NÔtre’s birth was celebrated on March 12, 1913, when Parisians recalled his work with almost unanimous approval because of its harmony with the impressive buildings which it supplemented.

Other important buildings of Louis’ reign were the Invalides or Soldiers’ Home with its church and its later addition, the work of Mansard who gave his name to the curb-roof which we know. Beneath Mansard’s beautiful dome the body of Napoleon now lies “among the people whom I loved.”

Louis’ contest with the pope over the king’s position as head of the French church tended to lessen his interest in the establishment of religious institutions, but the famous church of Saint Sulpice, whose twin towers are landmarks on the left bank, was begun by him, together with the seminary whose square ugliness is soon to house the overflow from the near-by Luxembourg museum. Since the quarrel between church and state in 1902-03, the building has stood bleakly empty except when it was used to shelter some of the refugees made homeless by the Seine floods a few years ago.

The Abbey-in-the-Woods, removed by Louis from Picardy to Paris and made famous by the residence there in the middle of the last century of the witty Madame RÉcamier, has been until very recently one of the chief historic “sights” near the celebrated left bank department store, the Bon MarchÉ.

The Church of Saint Nicholas-du-Chardonnet is interesting chiefly because of the tomb which LeBrun, the painter, designed in honor of his mother, a sepulcher opening at the summons of a hovering angel.

Among Louis’ good works must be counted the union of several hospitals into one known as the SalpÊtriÈre from its occupying the site of a saltpeter manufactory, and devoted to-day to the care of nervous diseases and insanity.

The tapestry manufactory of the Gobelins family was received into royal favor by Louis and then as now did its work only for the government. Its products to-day, painstakingly made by skillful workmen who have given their lives to this task as did their fathers before them, are never sold, but are used for the decoration of public buildings and as gifts for people whom the state wishes to honor.

Of comparatively small houses belonging to this century the best remaining instances are the Pavilion of Hanover, in which is the Paris office of the New York Times; the HÔtel Mazarin which now contains the fine collection of books known as the National Library; the HÔtel de la VrilliÈre, now the Bank of France, with an Échauguette (observation turret) by Mansard; the HÔtel de Soubise, used with the HÔtel de

Clisson to house the national archives; the near-by HÔtel de Hollande, once the Dutch embassy; and the HÔtel Beauvais from whose balcony the queen-mother, the Queen of England, Cardinal Mazarin and Turenne watched the entrance of Louis XIV and his bride, Maria Theresa of Spain.

The latter part of Louis’ reign showed a constant decline in power resulting from a decline in common sense no less than from the loss of able advisers. Taxes brought the peasants to poverty, famine killed them when disease did not. Territory was lost. As a last burst of stupidity the revocation of the Edict of Nantes drove out of the country the best class of artisans who took their intelligence and skill to the enrichment of other countries. The beginning of the eighteenth century found France with a selfish nobility, and a disordered bourgeoisie and a peasantry in whose hearts was smoldering the fire of bitter hatred that was to burst forth into flame at the Revolution. During the winter of 1709, six years before Louis’ death, the cold was so severe that five thousand people died of their sufferings in Paris alone, and the scarcity of food was so pronounced that the purveyors of the court had difficulty in securing enough for the king himself to eat.

So ended in suffering and sullenness the reign of the Grand Monarque.