Paris from the Earliest Period to the Present Day. William Walton

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СКАЧАТЬ those on the northern side of the city, so as to include all the buildings erected outside the walls of Philippe-Auguste. The dauphin, with a force of seven thousand lances, occupied alternately Meaux, Melun, Saint-Maur, the bridge of Charenton, and shut off all the supplies coming from the upper Seine and the Marne. The attempt of Marcel to deliver the city to Charles le Mauvais, King of Navarre, was discovered, the prévôt was killed at the city gate, and the dauphin entered Paris triumphantly two days later.

      In 1364, he succeeded to the throne, under the title of Charles V, and by his wise administration, his prudent conduct of the war, and the judicious management of the finances, secured for himself the surname of "the Sage." He rendered the parliament permanent, instead of occasional, and he gave it for its sittings in the Cité the ancient palace of Saint-Louis, which became the Palais de Justice. A royal ordinance, which remained in force till the Revolution, fixed the majority of the kings of France at thirteen years of age, and provided that the regent should not be the guardian of the young prince; another, dated in 1370, authorized the bourgeois of Paris to wear the spurs of gold and other ornaments of the order of knighthood, and a third, of 1377, awarded titles of nobility to the prévôts and échevins, or aldermen, of the city. In 1369, the authority of the prévôt of Paris was officially confirmed in regard to all offences and misdemeanors committed within the city by any person whatsoever.

      Among the many important buildings which this king erected or commenced was the Bastile, founded in 1370, to replace the old Porte Saint-Antoine, and consisting at first of two towers, united by a fortified gate; the Louvre, repaired and enlarged; the fortifications of the city; the Hôtel Saint-Pol, the gardens of which descended to the Seine; the chapelle of Vincennes, and several châteaux in the environs of the city. Nevertheless, and in spite of the encouragement given by Charles V to letters, the capital and the nation shared in the general decadence of the century, in morals, in intellect, and even in physical force. It has been estimated that while the average duration of human life was thirty years during the Roman Empire, it had now diminished to seventeen. The readers of Voltaire will remember that in The Man with the Forty Écus his "geometer" gives it as twenty-two or twenty-three years for Paris, and contrives to reduce this brief span to practically two or three years of active, enjoyable life—ten years off the twenty-three for the period of youthful immaturity, ten more for the decline of old age, sleep, sickness, work, worry, etc.!

      Duruy cites two instances of feminine peers of France. In 1378, the Duchesse d'Orléans writes to excuse herself from coming to take her seat as a peer in the Parliament of Paris; the Duchesse d'Artois, Mahaut, had been present at the coronation of Philippe V, and had supported, with the other peers, the crown on the head of the king.

      The need of funds was so pressing at the very outset of the following reign that the young king, Charles VI, under the tutelage of his uncles, the dukes of Anjou, Burgundy, and Berry, entered into serious negotiations with the bourgeoisie of the city of Paris with a view of persuading them to accept a new tax on commodities. The people were obstinate in their refusal; a statute forbade the imposition of any new duties without previous public proclamation, and, in the actual condition of affairs, this proclamation was likely to lead to a popular outbreak. On the last day of April, 1382, however, a public crier presented himself on horseback at the Halles, where these proclamations were usually made, sounded his trumpet, and when he saw the people assembled around him, lifted his voice and announced that the king's silverware had been stolen and that a liberal reward would be paid for the discovery of the thieves. Then, profiting by the general surprise and commotion, he proceeded: "I have still another proclamation to make to you; to-morrow the new tax on produce will begin to be levied." After which he put spurs to his horse, and disappeared at full speed!

      Early the next morning the tax-collectors accordingly presented themselves at the Halles; one of them claimed the percentage on a little cresson which an old woman had just sold, the old woman raised an outcry, the unhappy collector was beaten and thrown in the gutter, another was dragged from the very altar of the church of Saint-Jacques-l'Hôpital and killed, and the mob rushed to the Hôtel de Ville, where it was known that Charles V had caused to be deposited the maillets or mallets of lead which he had had made in anticipation of an attack by the English, and armed themselves with these weapons—whence their name of Maillotins. But the new tax was withdrawn, and the popular fury speedily subsided.

      When the young king attained his majority, in 1388, the former councillors of his father, the petty nobles, or marmousets, as the great seigneurs contemptuously called them, resumed the direction of affairs, but, with all their prudence and ability, were quite unable to restrain the prodigal wastefulness of the prince. The entry of the queen, Isabeau de Bavière, whom he had married three years before, was made the occasion of extravagant processions, pomps, diversions, and mystery-plays in Paris, as was the marriage of his brother, the Duc d'Orléans, with the beautiful Valentine Visconti, and the conferring of the order of knighthood on the children of the Duc d'Anjou. When, finally, worn out with dissipation, with the license of unlimited power from the age of twelve, the king went mad, his uncles resumed the regency and the marmouset ministry prudently sought safety in flight. The Duc de Bourgogne, Philippe le Hardi, died in 1404; his son, Jean sans Peur, wished to succeed to his father's authority in the State, but found himself opposed at every turn by the Duc d'Orléans; the old Duc de Berry interposed and effected a formal reconciliation; three days later the Duc d'Orléans was assassinated in the Rue Vieille-du-Temple by the bravos of Jean sans Peur, who did not fear to do murder on a prince of the blood.

       LOUIS XVI, WITH HIS FAMILY, IN THE LOGOGRAPHIC BOX AT THE ASSEMBLY, WITNESSING HIS DEPOSITION; AUGUST 11, 1792. From a drawing by Georges Cain.

      In the civil war which followed, the Parisians profited at first by the concessions which were made to them in order to secure their support—open opposition to all new taxes, restoration of their old free constitution, the right to elect their prévôt and other officers, to organize their bourgeois militia under officers elected by themselves, even that of holding fiefs like the nobles, with the accompanying privileges, provided they were well born, and of Paris. The nobility, on the contrary, were even less disposed to pardon him for thus seeking the aid of the populace than for having compromised the seignorial inviolability by laying violent hands on a brother of the king. The Comte d'Armagnac, father-in-law of one of the sons of the Duc d'Orléans, placed himself at the head of the opposing party; both parties made advances to the English to secure their aid on different occasions, but it was the Armagnacs who fought Henry V at Azincourt and sustained that disastrous defeat; the Duc de Bourgogne secured possession of the queen and proclaimed her regent; negotiating first with one and then with another, he finally ended by being assassinated in his turn by Tanneguy Duchâtel, prévôt of Paris, and other servants of the dauphin, on the bridge of Montereau, at the confluence of the Yonne and the Seine.

      "That which neither Crécy nor Poitiers nor Azincourt had accomplished, the assassination on the bridge of Montereau did—it gave the crown of France to a king of England." In the following year, 1420, the treaty of Troyes, concluded between Henry V, the Queen Isabeau, and the new Duc de Bourgogne, Philippe le Bon, recognized the King of England as regent and heir to the throne of France, he having married Isabeau's daughter, Catherine of France. "All the provisions of this treaty were read publicly, in a general assembly held by the Parliament on the 29th of April. The governor of Paris, the chancellor, the prévôt, the presidents, counsellors, échevins, merchants, and bourgeois, all were unanimous in accepting this treaty." On the 30th of May it was formally ratified in another general assembly, and on the 1st of December the bourgeois turned out in great state and with much pomp to receive the two kings, who entered, walking side by side, Charles VI on the right. "The streets were richly decorated and tapestried from the Porte Saint-Denis to Notre-Dame, 'and all the people cried Noël! to show their joy.'" The English king, with his two brothers, the dukes of Clarence and of Bedford, were lodged at the Louvre; the poor French king, at СКАЧАТЬ