Seven Ages of Paris (17 page)

Henri was inconsolable—for a while. But his sophisticated minister Baron de Rosny, though a lifelong Protestant, urged him to consider for dynastic purposes another Médicis, Marie. Habitually amenable to Rosny’s persuasion, Henri agreed. His country, impoverished by war, his building projects, his gambling and his amours, badly needed Florentine money. Marie arrived in Lyons, and to her intense rage Henri insisted on bedding her in advance of the marriage ceremony on 17 December 1600. Described unkindly as “the fat banker,” the twenty-eight-year-old Marie was certainly no beauty—but the following year she produced an heir for Henri, the future Louis XIII, and then settled down to an annual pregnancy. She also added, conspicuously, to the great buildings of Paris, most notably in the shape of the superlative Luxembourg Palace, built in her widowhood and in the style of her native Florence.

All Henri’s women had to be housed, or else financed to build their own sumptuous quarters. Above all, there was Margot, still entitled to call herself queen (part of the annulment deal with Henri). With typical generosity, the Vert Galant allowed her back to Paris after eighteen years’ exile in Provence and gave her a stretch of land along the Seine on the Left Bank, with an unrivalled view over her childhood home in the Louvre. Here she built a magnificent mansion just behind the present Académie Française.

While work was in progress, she lodged in the handsome Hôtel de Sens in the Marais, one of Paris’s last medieval buildings that still survive today. There ensued a grim tragedy, suggesting that though in her fifties Margot was by no means sexually extinct. Among her pages she had two young lovers—the Comte de Vermond, aged eighteen, and Dal de Saint-Julien, aged twenty. In a fit of jealousy Vermond shot his rival. Saint-Julien was the current favourite, and the murder drove Margot insane with rage; she had Vermond executed as she watched from a window. Depleted, d’un seul coup, of two young lovers, Margot quit the Hôtel de Sens for ever for the Left Bank. But her gardens, on which she lavished almost as much passion as she had upon her lovers, and which became the pride and joy of the quartier, soon aroused the jealousy of her successor, Queen Marie, gazing at them from the Right Bank. To trump Margot, she laid out the superb Cours de la Reine, the tree-lined quai 1,600 metres in length, reaching to the present-day Place de l’Alma. Her son, Louis XIII, later had to sell the property—to pay off Margot’s debts.

* “Vert Galant,” or “Gay Blade,” was the abiding Parisian nickname for Henri.

SULLY

Indebtedness was a constant problem for Henri throughout his reign. Fortunately he had the admirable Sully to help him. But before Sully could bring order to France’s derelict finances, Henri had had to put an end to strife, within and without the kingdom—something only he, with the immense moral stature he had now achieved, could do. As a first step, he succeeded, in 1595, in persuading Pope Clement VIII to lift the deadly ban of excommunication which had been placed upon him during the Siege of Paris. At a stroke the main weapon of the Catholic extremists of the Paris League was removed. In the spring of 1598, Henri signed both the Peace of Vervins, which ended the debilitating war with Spain, and the Edict of Nantes, which granted France, internally at least, an armistice in the Wars of Religion, which had paralysed her over the past half-century. The Edict, which granted France’s one million Protestants freedom of worship, rights to all state offices and other concessions, was by the standards of the time a visionary act of reconciliation and liberalism, and an important marker in the march of humanism.

To be considered truly great, a leader of men needs to be able to attract the best of talents to his side. If it was true of Napoleon, it was certainly true of Henri IV in his choice of Maximilien de Béthune, Baron de Rosny and—later—Duc de Sully to run his affairs. One of the most remarkable administrators ever produced by France, Sully had followed Henri’s flag since the age of sixteen. He was also a dedicated Protestant, so it was not until the settlements of 1598 that Henri was able to bring him forward, aged thirty-eight, as his grand voyer, or chief of the municipal inspectors of Paris—in effect, his finance minister. That rare combination, a soldier-financier, Sully was a man capable of extreme ruthlessness—and was strangely popular with, and acceptable to, Catholics and Protestants alike; they trusted him. He rose each morning at four, and worked till ten at night, and by 1608 he had stabilized the nation’s finances, massively reducing debt and accumulating a reserve of cash in hand.

It was the time of the early scramble for colonies in the New World, but Sully saw France’s map of the world lying entirely in Europe. “Things which remain separated from our body by foreign lands or seas will only be ours at great expense and to little purpose” was his view. Instead he performed wonders to repair the damages of war, reconstructing bridges, rebuilding roads (and lining them with trees), laying out a network of canals, draining marshes and improving afforestation, and spending more money on these areas than at any other time during the century. Modern France is greatly indebted to Sully for the ordered beauty of her countryside, as well as for the establishment of industries making carpets, tapestries and glass. In Paris he ordered new streets to be cut which would allow carriages and merchants’ carts to pass. Soon, residence in a broad, straight street was to become a mark of social status.

Sully left to posterity a fine hôtel between the Place des Vosges and the Rue Saint-Antoine, but he was something of a puritan, opposed to the idle and pleasure-loving ways of life, and Henri’s wanton extravagances were a constant worry to him. Having to squeeze Parisians to meet the gigantic costs of the King’s improvements to the Louvre was bad enough, but on top of that were all the women—and his profligacy as a gambler. As age began to exact its toll, affecting at least his external aspects, and the Vert Galant remained galant but no longer green, Parisians—ever restless and impatient—found the image less enchanting, and now tended to see instead the cost of it all. Catholics chafed under the terms of Nantes, and the League began to raise its head again. By 1610, Henri’s popularity was distinctly waning.

From 1601 to 1610, a delicate Pax Gallicana had been maintained on Henri’s borders, during which time France—and Paris especially—had prospered. The King, through the voice of Sully, began to talk ominously about the “Grand Design,” whereby the continent would be ruled by a council of sixty elected members. More specifically, the Design targeted Flanders and the Rhineland (an orientation that was to bring to ruin Henri’s grandson Louis XIV). There the death of the Duke of Jülich-Cleves had left this important principality in a power-vacuum, enticing to Spain. But, in the eyes of Parisians, there was far more to it than mere power politics. Henri had unbecomingly fallen in love with a fifteen-year-old girl, Charlotte, daughter of the Constable of France, from the powerful house of Montmorency, who had captured his imagination dancing before him in a fête as one of the nymphs of the goddess Diana. Suspicious (rightly) of the King’s intentions, her fiancé, the Prince de Condé, fled with Charlotte across the border to Brussels in November 1609, escaping ahead of the King’s prévôts by only a few hours.

Stricken, the lovelorn King wrote that, from misery, “I am now nothing more than skin and bone. Everything displeases me; I run away from company and if I permit myself to be brought into any gathering, instead of cheering me up, it succeeds in killing me.” Shocking though it was to the French body politic, it looked as if Henri was prepared to go to war to get her back. The atmosphere in Paris particularly was tense as the war on which Henri seemed to be embarking threatened completely to redraw the map of Europe, placing France squarely in the camp of the Protestant nations. By May 1610 a powerful (and expensive) French army 50,000 strong, backed by English and Dutch troops, was poised to invade Flanders; but on the 14th of that month, on the eve of Henri going off to join his soldiers, something unimaginable occurred.

SIX

*

Regicide, Regent and Richelieu

An entire city, built with pomp, seems to have arisen miraculously from an old ditch.

CORNEILLE, LE MENTEUR, 1643

ASSASSINATION OF HENRI IV

At 4 p.m. on 14 May 1610, Henri was travelling from the Louvre to meet Sully at the Arsenal when his coach became stuck in congested traffic in the narrow Rue de la Ferronnerie, close to today’s Centre Pompidou. Since his formal accession in 1593 there had been twenty-four known plots to assassinate him, but Henri was careless of danger, perhaps believing that destiny would protect him. Nevertheless, in recent months he had apparently had several premonitions of his death. After going to Mass at the Church of Saint-Roch that morning, he had met with Marshal de Bassompierre, who had found him “strange in his manner”; his thoughts seemed fixed on his death. Bassompierre chided him for his uncharacteristic gloom, remarking that he was just in the prime of life: “Had he not the finest kingdom in the world, a beautiful wife, a beautiful maîtresse and two lovely children?” It was to no avail. “Mon ami,” said the King, “I’ve got to leave it all!” Because of the narrowness and congestion of the Paris streets, Henri was travelling in a small, light phaeton with open sides. Yet that same Bassompierre had just received from Italy a remarkable invention: a heavy coach enclosed by glass windows, the armoured limousine of its day. Had the King been in Bassompierre’s Italian vehicle, less accessible from the street, he might well have survived.

A thirty-two-year-old with red hair, François Ravaillac, was awaiting his opportunity. Ravaillac was a rejected monk and failed schoolteacher from Angoulême who had done time in a debtors’ prison; he was also a fanatical Catholic, given to hallucinations and delusions about his role as deliverer of France and said to have declared that he would “prefer the honour of God to all else” and that he would like to see all heretics subjected to fire and brimstone. He had come to Paris in December 1609 seeking, in vain, an audience with the King in order to tell him to banish the Protestants, or else force conversion upon them. Returning to Paris the following April, Ravaillac was appalled to learn of the preparations for war, a war against the Pope, which, in his eyes, “meant war against God.” He stole a short kitchen knife from an inn, determined to kill the King, but changing his mind at least once.

In the Rue de la Ferronnerie, Henri’s coach was blocked by a broken-down haycart in collision with a wagon laden with provisions, while another cart had collapsed under the weight of its load of barrels—a typical Parisian scene. The King’s attendants dispersed to help with the carts. Ravaillac, having stalked Henri all morning, now saw his chance, leaped on to the running-board of the coach and stabbed the King three times, just as he was reading a letter. After the first blow Henri heroically murmured, “Ce n’est rien,” but Ravaillac’s second blow severed his aorta, killing him instantly. The assassin made no attempt to flee, and was seized by Henri’s travelling companion, the Duc d’Epernon. The King was rushed to a neighbouring apothecary, but there was no hope. His body was taken back to the Louvre, where he had been living, while overnight Paris was assured that he had only been wounded.

When the truth finally got out the next day, a horrified Paris began to look for vengeance. The tax burden and the sex scandals were forgotten; the ill-conceived expedition to Jülich swiftly put on hold. But who, apart from the madman Ravaillac, was to blame? Ravaillac, subjected to the most appalling tortures, was insistent that he had acted alone. Most of Paris refused to believe this; there was evidence that there had been several plots in hand, Henri having earned the hatred of extremists on both sides for his efforts towards religious reconciliation. Heavily under suspicion was his former mistress the Marquise de Verneuil, known to have been hoping that, upon Henri’s death, her son, the bastard child of the King, would succeed. And there was always the sinister hand of Spain. A paralysing fear spread through the city that, after two decades of peace, civil war would grip the land once more. The Jesuits, for one, fearful that they would be blamed, hastened to praise the King and acquired his heart to bury in their chapel at La Flèche, on the Ile de la Cité; while Huguenot leaders rushed forward to acclaim him the best king Providence had granted them.

On 27 May, still protesting that he had acted as a free agent on a divinely inspired mission, Ravaillac was put to death. Before being drawn and quartered, the fate of a regicide, on the scaffold erected at the Place de Grève, he was scalded with burning sulphur, molten lead and boiling oil and resin, his flesh then being torn by pincers. After this hors d’oeuvre of inhumanity, his arms and legs were attached to horses which then pulled in opposite directions. One of the horses “foundered,” so a zealous chevalier offered his mount; “the animal was full of vigour and pulled away a thigh.” After an hour and a half of this cruelty, Ravaillac died, as the mob tried to prevent him from receiving the last rites and urged the horses to pull harder. When what remained of the regicide finally expired, “the entire populace, no matter what their rank, hurled themselves on the body with their swords, knives, sticks or anything else to hand and began beating, hacking and tearing at it. They snatched the limbs from the executioner, savagely chopping them up and dragging the pieces through the streets.” Children made a bonfire and flung remnants of Ravaillac’s body on to it. According to a witness, one woman actually ate some of the flesh. The executioner, who was supposed to have the body of the regicide reduced to ashes in order to complete the ritual as demanded by the law, could find nothing to bring his task to completion but the assassin’s shirt. Seldom, even at the height of the Terror, can the Paris mob have acted with greater ferocity, a ferocity born as much of fear as of grief and vengeance. But their frenzy also attested to the powerful sentiments of loyalty to the Crown which Henri had done so much to rekindle.

The King’s embalmed corpse was placed on display in the Louvre until 29 June, then conducted solemnly to Saint-Denis, where he had first made his vows as a Catholic monarch seventeen years before, and where a solemn funeral service was held on 1 July. The cortège then processed across Henri’s own recently completed Pont Neuf.