IT was a pitiful country to which Louis XV fell heir (in 1715) when his great-grandfather died. The peasants had been taxed to the last sou, the nobles, untaxed and selfish, scrambled greedily for court preferment and left their estates uncared for, many of the bourgeois tried to emulate the nobles in extravagance, and all of them seemed to view with apathy a government in which the most intelligent part of the community had an extremely small share.

The nouveau riche has his place in the picture. It is related of a rich salt manufacturer, for instance, that he was asked by a friend to whom he was showing a fine villa that he had just built, why a certain niche was left vacant. Proud of his occupation the owner replied that he intended to fill the space with a statue symbolic of his business. To which the friend retorted with a prompt suggestion, “Lot’s wife.”

At the time of his accession Louis was but five years old, and the regency was given into the hands of the unscrupulous Duke of Orleans. Both courtiers and Parisians were delighted at the removal of the court from Versailles to the city, but the good people of the town soon realized that the added liveliness was a doubtful advantage, for the gayeties of the Palais Royal in which the regent lived were gross debaucheries. Even holy days were not held sacred, and Orleans is said to have expressed extravagant admiration for a certain church dignitary who was reputed not to have gone to bed sober for forty years. To such a pass did the extravagances fostered by the regent grow that even Louis the Well-Beloved, himself the Prince of Extravagance, was compelled later to pass sumptuary laws regulating dress and the expense of entertainments.

There is in the French character to-day a certain credulity as concerns “get-rich-quick” schemes which renders the people astonishingly responsive to the efforts of swindlers like Madame Humbert, notorious a few years ago. It is a quality in curious contrast to the shrewdness which makes them the readiest financiers of modern Europe, yet in a way it supplements the thrift which some students look upon as a result of the bitter days of the “Old RÉgÎme,” the pinching period that resulted in the Revolution. It would seem that this characteristic is not a modern phenomenon, for at the beginning of Louis XV’s reign a Scotsman named Law proposed a paper money scheme that was seized upon with eagerness by all classes of an impoverished society. Nor was it a phenomenon peculiar to France, for at about the same time the South Sea Bubble was exciting England to a frenzy of acquisitiveness. Whatever the psychology, all France and especially all Paris went wild over Law’s propositions. He issued small notes which he redeemed in specie until he won the confidence of the public and the government endorsed his bank and permitted the use of his paper in payment of taxes. The Mississippi valley was supposed at that time to abound in gold and silver and Law’s office in the rue Quincampoix, near the Halles and the church of Saint Leu, was fairly besieged by courtiers and clergy, by tradesmen and ladies of the nobility eager to buy stock in a mining company which Law organized. West of the Halles, near the HÔtel de Soissons, was a Bourse des Valeurs established entirely for the conduct of business connected with Law’s schemes.

It is probable that Law was self-deceived. At any rate, when the bubble burst he was as hard hit financially as any of his victims, and, in addition, barely escaped with his life from their wrath, when they besieged his bank in the Place VendÔme and rushed, howling with rage, to the Palais Royal where they thought he had taken refuge. The government repudiated its debts, but private individuals could not do that and the ruin was general. A rhyme of the day says:

Louis ruled—or misruled—for sixty years. In the space of six decades much may happen for good or ill, but this long reign was marked by no rises and by few falls, merely by a gradual, consistent decadence. The country engaged in the War of the Polish Succession, the War of the Austrian Succession, and the Seven Years’ War, and in all lost territory, men and prestige, while the effects of the hated tax collector added to the ever-growing misery. The people were too crushed to do more than look on dully while their sovereign secured in infamous ways the wherewithal for his infamous pleasures. He sold the liberty of his subjects, for any one who could pay for a warrant (lettre de cachet) could put a private enemy into prison where he might lie forgotten for years. He sold the lives of his people, for he starved them to death by scores through the negotiation of a successful corner in food stuffs. Even when he disbanded the parliaments (courts) the only bodies that were trying to do anything, there was small stir made about it.

Louis encouraged a persecution of the Huguenots, yet, Catholic though he was, he favored the expulsion of the Jesuits against whom the Jansenists, also Catholics, were contending. Friend was pitted against friend, neighbor against neighbor in these fierce quarrels based on religious differences, always the fiercest quarrels that man can know.

The persecution was often petty, always bitter, yet it had its serious side when Pascal and the writers who gathered at Port Royal entered into philosophic discussion. This serious addiction of the people was a curious aspect of the mental and moral state of the period. While some people were entering heart and soul into these arguments there was at the same time an ample number of readers who devoured with gusto poems, plays and novels so coarse that to-day they never would reach print. That the same people might be interested in both sorts of literature is attested by the temper of some of the highest ecclesiastics who not only connived at the king’s immoral life, but furthered it. In some temperaments the extremes of the age produced an unbalanced state. This showed itself at one time throughout Paris in the behavior of the “Convulsionaries of Saint MÉdard,” who hysterically proclaimed the miracles performed at the tombs of two priests buried in the ancient churchyard of Saint MÉdard, near the Gobelins factory. So wide-spread and so distracting was this belief that the graveyard was closed to the public. This step caused a wit to fasten upon the wall an inscription.

Contemporary accounts of the execution of a man who had made an attempt upon the life of the king shows a callousness to suffering that would seem impossible if one had not read recently of the brutalities of the Balkan war, nearly three hundred years later. The execution took place as usual in the Place de GrÈve, and every window and balcony was filled with eager spectators, many of them elegantly dressed ladies of the court who played cards to while away the moments of waiting. The poor wretch who was to furnish amusement for this gay throng was placed on an elevated table where all might see him, and he was gashed and torn and twisted and burned and broken for an hour before the breath mercifully left his mangled body.

Like his great-grandfather, Louis preferred Versailles to Paris, but not for the Sun King’s reason. He had no especial desire to keep his eye on his courtiers, but kindred spirits he gathered about him and the favorites of Madame de Pompadour ruled and of Madame du Barry vulgarized the once decorous though far from impeccable salons of Versailles.

With lowered taste architecture became rococo and decoration a mass of wreaths and shells and leaves and scrolls.

In Paris, meanwhile, the Louvre fell into such disrepair that it was habitable only by people willing to live in haphazard fashion for the sake of a free lodging, while private stables occupied much of the ground floor and the government post horses stamped and kicked beneath Perrault’s unfinished colonnade. Disgusted at this eyesore in their once beautiful city the Parisians authorized the Provost of the Merchants to offer to repair the building at the expense of the town. Louis, however, seems to have thought that if the citizens had so much money to spend it had better be on him, and he refused the offer and set about devising new ways of capturing the hidden coin.

Of building there could not be much at a time when the monarch took no pride in his own chief city and suffered no expenditures except those that he saw no way of diverting to his own yawning purse. One of the few constructions of Louis’ date is the Mint, built on one of the left bank quays on a part of the site once occupied

by the ancient HÔtel de Nesle. It contains a museum of coins and medals as well as the workshops for the making of coins.

Another of the king’s languid interests was the Military School which looms imposingly across the southeastern end of the Champ de Mars as the modern tourist sits at luncheon on the first ‘stage’ of the Eiffel Tower. The Field of Mars itself, now green with lawns and bright with flowers, was laid out as a drill ground on the very spot where a battle with the Normans took place during the siege of 885 A.D. Its great size has frequently made it useful for large gatherings of people, and no fewer than four World Exhibitions have erected their plaster cities upon its ample space.

Another open place of impressive size was the present Place de la Concorde, first called the Place Louis XV. This vast square, now the center of Paris, was framed on the side of the Tuileries gardens by balustrades designed by Gabriel, the architect of the Military School, and was planned as a setting for that colossal statue of the King on which a wag pinned a placard saying:

The square stood on the western edge of the settled part of the city, but not too far away for the appropriate erection of the handsome buildings still standing on the north side restored to their early dignity. One of these, built as a storehouse for state effects, is now used by the Ministry of Marine. The other was a private hÔtel. Between the two the rue Royale runs a little way northward to the classic church of the Madeleine, whose cornerstone Louis laid on the site of a former chapel, but whose construction was long delayed. Standing on its broad steps to-day the eye follows the vista of the rue Royale across the square and over the river to the Palace of Deputies, begun as the Palais Bourbon in the early part of Louis XV’s reign.

It was in the rue Royale that most of the deaths occurred during Louis XVI’s wedding festivities, and it was through this street that the tumbrils laden with victims for the guillotine came from the rue Saint HonorÉ.

A little way from the place on the west is the Palace of the ÉlysÉe, which the government furnishes as a mansion for the President of the Republic. It has been rebuilt and restored since its first condition as a private house which Louis XV bought and gave to Madame de Pompadour.

Not being of a markedly religious turn except when he was ill, it is not surprising that Louis promoted the construction of very few churches. One of them, Saint Philippe-du-Roule, replaced a leper hospital. A few years before the Madeleine was begun, a new church of Sainte GeneviÈve was planned as a crown for the Mont Sainte GeneviÈve. Great difficulties had to be overcome in providing a firm foundation, for the elevation was found to be honeycombed with the quarries of Gallo-Roman days. It was fifty years after its beginning before the adjoining abbey chapel of Sainte GeneviÈve, which the new building was to replace, was torn down, leaving the fine dome-crowned church—now the Pantheon—to stand uncrowded.

Opposite the Pantheon to the west is the Law School, designed by the same architect, Soufflot.

In public utilities Paris found herself somewhat richer than before Louis’ reign. The postal service attained such effective organization that it made three deliveries a day and was housed in a large and adequately equipped building. It became usual to number all the houses as had been done for some two hundred years on the house-laden bridges. The names of streets were cut on stone blocks and affixed to a corner building.

In spite of the discomfort of getting about the large city through dirty streets carriages had been introduced but slowly into the city. As late as the sixteenth century only the king and ladies of the court used the heavy coaches which were called “chariots.” In the next century chairs carried by porters became fashionable among the extravagantly dressed and bewigged. A cab service, established midway through the hundred years won instant favor, and was greatly improved in Louis XV’s time, though Parisians were condemned for many decades longer to traverse the town through streets unprovided with sidewalks and defiantly dirty.

It is hard for the admirers of twentieth century Paris cleanliness to realize that an English traveler, writing just before the French Revolution, complains bitterly of the dirt and disorder and danger of the streets and compares them most unfavorably with London thoroughfares.

Another undertaking, this time of scientific interest, was the tracing of the meridian of Paris from the Observatory of the left bank across the river to Montmartre on the right of the Seine. In the left transept of the church of Saint Sulpice is a section of the line, and a small obelisk on which a ray of sunlight falls from the south at exactly noon. At the same moment the sun’s rays set off a cannon, placed where the meridian crosses the garden of the Palais Royal.

That the fire service was not astonishingly competent seems to be indicated by the disasters

of this century. Twice serious fires destroyed large parts of the Hotel Dieu, the old general hospital. It had become so crowded in the Sun King’s time that six and eight patients were put into one bed. Nothing was done to relieve the situation, however, until it reached such a pass that even the careless Regent was aroused and provided money for the building of a new wing by taxing public amusements. The second conflagration (in 1772) was not extinguished for eleven days. Many sufferers were burned in their beds, and hundreds of others, turned out into the December cold, took refuge in near-by Notre Dame.

In the same year with the earlier fire at the hospital (1737) a two-day conflagration started by prisoners worked havoc with the palace of the CitÉ. In 1777 another destroyed the front of the palace. Another fire earlier in the century had its origin in the efforts of a poor woman to recover the body of her drowned son through the mediation of Saint Nicholas. To that end she set afloat in the Seine a wooden bowl containing a loaf of bread and a lighted candle. The candle set fire to a barge of hay. Some one cut the boat loose and it was swept by the current under the Petit Pont which was consumed with all its burden of houses. The bridge was quickly replaced, but without any buildings on it, a fashion followed toward the end of Louis XVI’s reign when the Pont Neuf and the Pont Notre Dame were cleared.

The Pont Neuf’s broad expanse became at once the field for hucksters and mountebanks of all sorts; here strikers assembled near the statue of Henry IV; here, according to an old verse-maker, there was much love-making near the “Bronze Horse;” and here the enlisting officers plied their activities even up to a quarter of a century ago when army service became compulsory.