Seven Ages of Paris (23 page)

But Bernini the architect was a different story. He contemptuously swept aside the sketches of his leading French contemporaries, terminating any argument by repeatedly quoting Michelangelo as the ultimate arbiter of good taste. His initial plans had to be modified, because the terraces and meridional flat roofs would not withstand the rain and snow of a Paris winter; the high pitches of the roofing genius François Mansart (great-uncle of the Louvre architect Hardouin-Mansart) were more suitable. Already, under construction just across the river, there was an example of glorious baroque in the shape of Le Vau’s Collège des Quatre Nations. Not all the Paris establishment was enamoured of it, but Bernini was encouraged. For the Louvre he came up with an even grander baroque façade of imposing convex arcs. But it involved demolishing houses to the east, and crowding in upon the antique Church of Saint-Germain-l’Auxerrois, much beloved by Parisians. And the ever practical Colbert wondered where the servants would sleep, and how food was to be brought from the kitchens.

After a six-month sojourn, during which he modified his “projects” for the Louvre several times and managed to offend almost everybody, Bernini was sent home laden with money, and his plans were discreetly dropped. Louis thought them just too florid for France’s sober northern clime. In any case, his brief attention span was already beginning to switch to schemes for Versailles. Instead of the Italian, Claude Perrault was brought in to design a classical storeyed building with the façade of a great Roman temple imposed on it. Perrault, brother of the artist Charles, was by profession a doctor (described as spending his spare time in the dissection of camels), an amateur rather than a professional architect who had never designed a building in his life before. Nevertheless, his plans were at least as ambitious as Bernini’s had been. For the façade’s massive central pediment, topping a majestic colonnade of fifty-two tall Corinthian pillars, Perrault selected two immense monolithic blocks from the quarries in nearby Meudon. Each of these, around twenty metres long and nearly three metres in height, weighed so much that to hoist them into position a special machine on rollers had to be constructed—not unlike the methods used by the ancient Eygptians to build the pyramids.

Begun in 1667 and completed three years later, the massive façade introduced on to the Paris landscape the “colossal” style of classical purism which was to be emulated by Napoleon with his construction of the Madeleine and its counterpart, the Chamber of Deputies, one and a half centuries later. It represented a complete break with the traditions of French architecture since Henri IV. But, as Louis’s interest shifted, so the interior of the Louvre remained unfinished, embraced by scaffolding until 1755—just in time for the Revolution. By then Perrault’s grand façade had lost its point, as the whole centre of gravity of the city had moved westwards, to the Tuileries Palace and, beyond, to what was to become the Concorde. The edifice which had been so grandly conceived as an imposing front was to be left high and dry as little more than a glorified tradesmen’s entrance, huddled about by insignificant houses. Between 1667 and 1680 Perrault went on to work at the long southern façade of the Louvre that bordered the Seine.

With Louis’s departure for Versailles and his accompanying switch of interests, the Louvre fell on hard times. Between 1670 and 1672 the sum earmarked for expenditure on the palace fell by 80 per cent. The great building came to house a miscellany of temporary occupants. First there were artists setting up their studios in the deserted galleries, together with their hangers-on. Then came a diversity of dealers, prostitutes included, building shacks within the precincts, and stabling their horses in the Cour Carrée. Some of the squatters made off with panelling and pictures, and progressively the palace was allowed to fall into disrepair. Over the years of neglect the Louvre was also used as a granary and a printing works. By 1750, its state had become so bad that demolition was considered; there were suggestions of installing an opera or a royal library there, but all such projects ran aground on the rocks of finance. It was a sorry plight for so historic a building, on which such grandiose efforts had been lavished over the ages; and the Roi Soleil has much to answer for here. Finally the Convention, in 1793, with one of its few sensible decrees, saved the Louvre by opening the Grande Galerie to exhibit choice artefacts from the royal collections of the fallen monarch—including the Mona Lisa. But the Louvre had to wait for Napoleon before its salvation was assured.

THE BOULEVARDS AND THE DEVELOPING ARCHITECTURE

With the defeat of the Fronde, continuing peace and security at large had seemed to remove all direct military threat to Paris, and this now led Louis to undertake a still more sweeping alteration to the face of the city. With its population now bursting out of the confines of the old crumbling walls of Philippe Auguste and Charles V (which had become the dumping ground for all sorts of city rubbish and ordure), Louis decreed the levelling of the existing ramparts. In their place, he laid out long and straight promenades which came to be known as “boulevards”—a corruption of the German word Bollwerk, meaning a bulwark or rampart. Agreeably lined with shady trees, the grands boulevards from their earliest days became favourite places of promenade, while wealthy Parisians built stately houses looking out on to them. The greatest of all the boulevards, of course, was the new Champs-Elysées, laid out by Le Nôtre—who had been “liberated” from Vaux-de-Vicomte following the demise of Fouquet—from 1667 onwards. While it presented a magnificent vista leading to the Tuileries Palace, Le Nôtre’s inspired work further shifted the centre of gravity of the Louvre westwards, and away from Perrault’s grand façade.

Next, begun in 1671 (though not completed till the last years of Louis’s reign, when military triumphs were wearing a bit thin), came the monumental edifice of the Hôtel des Invalides on the Left Bank, eventually topped by Jules Hardouin-Mansart’s great dome.* At more than 100 metres high, it dwarfed Le Vau’s dome for Mazarin’s Collège upstream, and was the very apotheosis of baroque in Paris. Designed, generously, to house the old soldiers who would survive the wars that Louis was planning, construction of the Invalides was, uniquely, funded out of the army budget (indicating how much Louis was prepared to make available for military ventures). With its long avenues radiating out in all directions, which would find echoes in Versailles, the Invalides presented Parisians with the most exciting perspective yet seen in the city. Decorated only with helmets, prancing horses and other military paraphernalia, its rather austere frontage, 210 metres long, was a masterpiece of classical grandeur. The complex centres on Mansart’s magnificent church, which in 1840 became the final resting place of France’s greatest soldier, Napoleon.

Louis’s anciens combattants were not entirely happy with the Invalides; they chafed at the harsh military discipline maintained there—not least the regulation that, if caught in flagrante with a woman of the town, the veteran and his lover were to be exposed together, much to the delight of the Parisians. When complaints about the soup escalated into a full-scale riot, Colbert’s brutal successor, the Marquis de Louvois, did not hesitate to call in a firing squad.

Though the Invalides was built to house up to 7,000 pensioners, the last was admitted before the First World War, and since then it has housed various army offices and museums. In the aftermath of the First World War, captured Krupp cannon stood proudly in front of the façade; after the Second World War, these were replaced by two German Panzer tanks—until the new entente cordiale with the eastern neighbour prescribed their discreet withdrawal into the appropriate museum.

Among the other grand churches worked on in Louis’s first flurry of construction in Paris was the displeasingly hideous Saint-Sulpice (just north of the Luxembourg Palace), with its seemingly incomplete and asymmetrical eggcup towers (for Victor Hugo, they evoked two enormous clarinets). As with other major churches, including Saint-Roch (a little north of the Louvre), work was suspended after the move to Versailles and not recommenced until the next century.

In 1671, as the last in a series of similar academies created by Mazarin and Colbert, the Académie Royale d’Architecture was founded, its first director François Blondel. A passionate enthusiast for the ancient, classical tradition (Palladio was one of his heroes), Blondel fortuitously praised Louis as a king who had at last given Parisian architects the opportunity to build enduring monuments that could compete with those of ancient times and that would enhance the reputation of the ruler. Thus, declared Blondel to his captive students, “will architecture, restored by the French, appear in all its brilliance and all its glory.” Henceforth la Gloire and sheer spectacle were to be embraced as essential components of the style of the grander Parisian buildings.

Under Blondel, reinforced by the King’s patronage and the new wealth of the era, an unprecedented classical harmony prevailed, offering uniformity and even standardization. Strict rules were laid down: private dwellings had to be built of stone, instead of the fire-prone timber frames and lath and plaster of earlier ages;* they were forbidden by law to have first floors bulging out over the street, where carriages might collide with them; frontages could be no more than eight toises (15.6 metres) high; staircases were moved from the centre to the side, and kitchens transplanted from the wings to separate structures in the courtyard. Straight lines became the norm, irregular tiled roofs being replaced by a single roof of grey slate or lead. More ornate interiors were counterpointed by sober simplicity in exterior design.

External modesty was also a feature of the grand hôtels particuliers of the epoch (and indeed of later ones), where extensive private gardens and displays of conspicuous consumption within lay concealed from public gaze behind a sombre porte-cochère which gave on to the street. Typical of the finest of these is
Mme.
de Sévigné’s in the Marais, now the home of the Carnavalet Museum; only a little less grand was the Rue des Tournelles mansion built by Jules Mansart for Ninon de Lenclos. The grand siècle was to be also the age of the emancipation of the French bourgeoisie; Louis needed the money with which they had managed to enrich themselves. Perhaps as a consequence of the days of the Fronde, or of their own shady dealings, the Paris financiers had become obsessed by their own security. Affluent Paris was to become, and remain, a city as secret as any North African casbah. Meanwhile, over a relatively short space of time, a significant step had been taken towards the monochrome Paris of the nineteenth century. As was later remarked, Louis XIV inherited a city of brick and left it marble. But, with the disappearance of the warm brickwork panels of Henri IV and Louis XIII, as the Place Royale gave way to the bourgeois vulgarity of Vaux-le-Vicomte, architecturally what was gained did not always compensate for what was lost—at any rate in terms of colour and texture.

* Its restoration in 1934 required 250 tonnes of lead roofing, and 360,000 sheets of gold leaf.

CLEANING UP

All the time the wealthy financiers and their mansions were moving steadily westwards away from the compressed and smelly confines of the Marais. Instead, new faubourgs like Saint-Germain were opening up to smart, bourgeois Paris. In terms of salubrity, the old centre of Paris had not come all that far from the stink and the plagues of black flies of the days of Philippe Auguste. As one of his last contributions to the city he was abandoning, in 1680 Louis—appalled by its “thousand intolerable stenches”—petitioned to have water closets installed in the Louvre. During those years when building enthusiasm reigned, main thoroughfares were paved and streets were widened.

Colbert was to go down in the history of Paris as the city’s “greatest urbanist,” second only to Louis Napoleon’s Baron Haussman. But Colbert’s truly remarkable accomplishment was that his modernizing was carried out without the brutal demolitions of Haussmann which so ravaged the old Paris. Colbert dreamed of creating “a new Rome” of obelisks, triumphal arches, a new royal palace—and a pyramid (at the western end of the Louvre, more than two centuries before I. M. Pei conceived his structure). Yet they were never completed. Apart from the odd Italianate domes of the Invalides, the Collège de France and the Church of Val-de-Grâce, in its overall aspect seventeenth-century Paris remained by and large a city of gothic spires. In the words of the great twentieth-century songster of the Seine, Charles Trenet, under Colbert “Paris reste Paris.” Colbert deplored the expenditure on Versailles, which he regarded as “an isolated, rural château,” in no way fit for the headquarters of Europe’s greatest king, and a distraction from the rebuilding of Paris. But one year after Louis’s move to Versailles, Colbert was dead.

Foremost of the problems confronting Colbert were Paris’s endemic, and linked, problems of drains and the provision of pure drinking water. Right in the heart of the city, the ancient Ile de la Cité had no sewers, and its sewage flowed directly into the Seine through open gutters. Just opposite, on the Right Bank, up to 1666 butchers were still heaping all the slaughterhouse waste into the river; tanners and dyers continued to dump their evil-smelling effluents off the Quai de la Mégisserie; while from the new Ile Saint-Louis’s Pont Marie the scraps left by the poultry-dealers caused the area to be known as the “Vallée de la Misère.”

Colbert issued every sort of ordinance banning the dumping of excrement on ramparts and in moats, and forbidding pollution of the Seine. Citizens were encouraged to report offenders, and personally bring them to jail. By 1676, a handsome new quay with a roadway eight metres wide had been constructed between the Louvre and the Saint-Antoine quarter to the east, thus clearing out an area of maximum pollution. Offending enterprises were relocated to the suburbs. But these efforts met with traditional resistance, with some of the tanneries and dyers moving upstream, so pollution was still preoccupying Parlement in 1697. To “embellish the River Seine,” in 1676, Louis had imported a large flock of white swans, but they took one look and flew back to their native Rouen. More successfully, many kilometres of covered sewer were installed under Colbert’s orders, and fifteen new fountains brought pure water from safe sources twenty-five kilometres outside the city via the imposing new Aqueduct of Arcueil.