Most visitors to the Louvre come to see the Italian paintings and especially the Mona Lisa. This part of the museum, the Aile Denon, is flooded with light that pours in from the ceiling and the windows that look out onto the Seine. Even the gilded frames seem to give off light. To reach it one must ascend, climbing the grand Escalier Daru and turning right at the Winged Victory of Samothrace, before emerging into the brilliance of the Salon Carré.
But there is another part of the Louvre, rather less frequented, that seems to belong to a different world. Although it does indeed receive its share of visitors, it is unlikely to be the reason for which they have come to the museum. To reach it, one descends into the earth, into something like twilight or even night, to find the remains of the original Louvre: the fortress that Philippe Auguste built at the end of the twelfth century and the palace into which it evolved under Charles V, late in the fourteenth century.
For fully two hundred years after the last visible traces of the medieval Louvre were razed to the ground in 1660, these subterranean realms were completely forgotten. Not until 1866 did the archaeologist Adolphe Berty, on a hunch, begin to excavate the site. He discovered the intact remnants of the soubassement, the twenty-one-foot-high foundation of what had once been the eastern and northern walls of the palace, hidden beneath the modern Cour Carrée. But these stunning discoveries would soon be forgotten by all but a few scholars, not to be seen again for another century. Only when the great work began on the Grand Louvre, that pharaonic labor initiated by President François Mitterrand in the mid-1980s, was a systematic excavation finally undertaken, not only of the original palace, but also of the Cour Napoléon, where I. M. Pei’s Pyramide now sits, and—several hundred meters to the west—the area surrounding the Arc du Carrousel.
The circumstances under which the Louvre came into being, as well as the reasons for its construction in the first place, are intimately involved with the form and nature of Paris itself at the end of the twelfth century. Consider the magnificent opening of Victor Hugo’s 1831 novel Notre-Dame de Paris (better known in English as The Hunchback of Notre Dame): “Today it is three hundred and forty-eight years, six months and nineteen days since the Parisians awoke to the clamor of all the bells resounding mightily in the threefold enclosure of the Town (la Cité), the University and the City.”
There is nothing arbitrary in that wording. “The Town, the University and the City” succinctly sum up the tripartite division of Paris from medieval times down to the French Revolution (Hugo was writing about the 1480s). The town occupied the Île de la Cité, the largest island in the Seine and the natural bridging point between its right and left banks. This island had been the center of government and religion as far back as the Roman Empire, when, seven hundred feet west of today’s Notre-Dame, a palace was built that would serve for a thousand years as the official residence of the kings of France. Immediately to the south, on the left bank, rose the university, established in the year 1200 through the consolidation of several preexistent monastic schools. And finally there was la ville, the city. Not accidentally, Hugo mentions this part last. It had neither the royal and ecclesiastical glamour of the Île de la Cité nor the prestige of the schools and monasteries of the Left Bank. And yet, by the time the Louvre, in its earliest form, was completed around 1200, la ville accounted for most of Paris. This was its center of population and seat of commerce, the home of a restless and enterprising bourgeoisie. For centuries to come, the growth of Paris would occur here, while the Left Bank largely stagnated. And the immoderate growth of this part of Paris forced the king, Philippe II, to build the fortress of the Louvre.
Known to history as Philippe Auguste, he was one of the ablest and most powerful monarchs of the Capetian dynasty that ruled France from 987 to 1328. But when he ascended the throne at fifteen, in 1180, few kingdoms were in as weak or perilous a state. The realm he inherited was almost entirely blocked from the Atlantic by the Angevin kings of England, Henry II, Richard the Lionheart and John Lackland, who controlled the western third of modern France from Normandy down to the Pyrenees. To make matters worse, a wedge of English-controlled land jutted eastward along the Massif Central, cleaving his kingdom in two. Meanwhile, the eastern third was in the hands of the Duke of Burgundy, hardly a trusted ally. All told, the territory that Philippe ruled at the outset of his reign constituted barely a third of modern France, and even this was chipped away at many points by ecclesiastical lands ultimately subject to the pope in Rome. By the end of his forty-three-year reign, however, he had wrested most of Western France from the English, and greatly increased the crown lands, the territory that belonged to him outright, the source of his power and wealth.
Throughout his reign, Philippe was constantly on the move. In addition to embarking on the Third Crusade to the Holy Land and vanquishing the English at the Battle of Bouvines in 1214, he centralized the administration of his kingdom and crushed the Albigensian heretics in Provence. And yet, some of his greatest contributions were made in Paris itself. At this time the capital was undergoing an energetic urban development that, relative to its earlier condition, could be compared to its expansion under Henri IV in the seventeenth century or under Napoleon III in the nineteenth. Although it is common to treat the capital, and even the French monarchy itself, as weak and marginal at this time, no city of the second rank could have built one of the largest and greatest cathedrals in Christendom, Notre-Dame de Paris. Louis VII had begun construction in the 1160s and Philippe Auguste, his son, substantially completed the work by 1200. At this time as well, the convent schools on the Left Bank were consolidated into what would become one of the finest universities of Europe, the Sorbonne. Meanwhile there could be no greater testament to the vigor of the Right Bank than the new commercial area of les Halles, which Louis VI created in 1137 and Philippe Auguste greatly expanded early in his reign. At the same time, he enlarged the nearby cemetery known as the Cimetière des Innocents, thus creating one of the largest open spaces in a city that had very few of them. And for the first time, he paved over some of the city’s principal streets. As cause and consequence of these actions, in the year 1200 the city’s population surpassed one hundred thousand for the first time since the fall of the Roman Empire.
It was precisely this frantic pace of development that moved Philippe to construct a great wall, or enceinte, more than three miles in circumference, around his capital. And the Louvre itself was nothing more or less than a consequence of the wall. This structure was to be but a small part of a vast system of fortifications that would comprise twenty castles throughout France. Because an English onslaught was most likely to come from the northwest, Philippe began to fortify the Right Bank, the northern half of the city, in 1190, just before he embarked on the Third Crusade. This part of the wall was completed in 1202. The less urgent fortification of the Left Bank began in 1192, shortly after Philippe’s return, and was built by 1215. In one of the ironies of history, however, Philippe Auguste’s massive system of fortifications ultimately proved unnecessary, since he conquered and annexed Normandy in 1204, effectively ending the English threat.
Formed of mortar and rubble and faced with blocks of dressed limestone, the wall of Philippe Auguste was ten feet wide and twenty-five feet high. It was punctuated, at intervals of two hundred feet, by seventy-seven towers, while four massive towers, each more than eighty feet tall, guarded the points where the ramparts met the Seine. Although a few remnants of the wall are still visible on the rue Clovis and rue des Jardins Saint-Paul, as well as in some of the basements, back alleys and parking lots of the Left Bank, it has otherwise left little trace beyond what we can infer from certain lingering street patterns.
As impressive as these defensive walls surely were, one great tactical problem went unaddressed: the English could simply float down the Seine, slip through the iron chains suspended across the river from the Tour du Coin to the Tour de Nesle—the two large defensive towers to the west—and stand a good chance of entering the city unobserved. And so Philippe Auguste decided, soon after he returned from the Holy Land in 1191, to protect this weak flank with a fortification that initially stood, not in Paris itself, but on a plot of land just beyond the western border of the walls that now defined the capital. For centuries, the people of Paris had been in the habit of referring to this area as le Louvre. And so, by the early thirteenth century, shortly after its construction, the fortress was already being called le manoir du louvre près Paris, roughly translated as “the castle in the area known as ‘the Louvre’ next to Paris.”1
Perhaps the most intractable mystery of the Louvre has to do with the origin and meaning of its name. Over the centuries many hypotheses have been proposed, and all of them appear to be wrong. Of the two most prevalent explanations, one was put forward by the seventeenth-century French antiquary Henri Sauval, who claimed to have found an ancient Anglo-Saxon glossary—which no one since has ever seen—that contained the word loevar, which apparently meant “castle” in the Saxon language. (It is also worth noting that many of Sauval’s contemporaries firmly believed that the Louvre was not five hundred years old at the time of his writing, but well over a thousand and that it had been built by the Merovingian king Chilperic, who died in 584.) A more popular but even less plausible derivation is based on the similarity between the words louvre and louve, the latter word being French for she-wolf. According to this theory, the land now occupied by the Louvre was once infested by wolves or, alternatively, was used to train dogs to hunt them down.
What is important, and often overlooked, is that the Louvre was never formally designated as such, but gradually assumed the name of a preexisting feature of the right bank of the Seine as it flowed through medieval Paris. Thanks, however, to the inexhaustible industry of the first archaeologist of the Louvre, Adolphe Berty, whose six-volume Topographie historique du vieux Paris (1866) is a monument of nineteenth-century science, it is certain that the area was designated Luver in 1098, nearly a century before the Louvre itself existed, and that as early as the ninth century, the name Latavero was applied to this part of the French capital. With his punctilious reverence for the truth, however, Berty claimed to have no idea what the word meant, although he suspected that it was of Celtic origin. In any case, he recognized that the form Latavero precluded any connection to louve or to its Latin cognate lupa.2 As for the castle itself, it appears to have been known initially as the tour neuve, or in the Latin of Guillaume le Breton, turris nova extra muros (the new tower beyond the walls).3
This area of Paris, directly to the west of the wall of Philippe Auguste, lay near what in ancient days had been the main road through the right bank of the Seine: it lives on today as the rue Saint-Honoré and the rue du Faubourg Saint-Honoré. Although traces of farming, burial and the occasional hut came to light through excavations carried out during the creation of the Grand Louvre in the 1980s, the area largely remained in its natural state until Philippe Auguste came to power.
Before his accession, nothing of note had ever happened in this part of Paris, with one crucial exception. Between 885 and 887, the Normans, a Viking clan, descended from Scandinavia into the Île-de-France region and laid siege to the area of today’s First Arrondissement, west of le Grand Châtelet. Included therein was the Church of Saint-Germain l’Auxerrois, directly across from today’s Colonnade du Louvre, the museum’s easternmost extension. These nomadic invaders, however, had no interest in conquering the city: they wanted only to extort tribute from the Carolingian emperor Charles the Fat. This he was happy enough to give them, before sending them on their way to plunder the neighboring region of Burgundy. Once the invaders had left, the Parisians responded by erecting their first new city walls since antiquity, extending roughly one kilometer along the Right Bank from the Church of Saint-Gervais in the Marais to Saint-Germain l’Auxerrois. The western limit of the wall, like that of Philippe Auguste’s wall three centuries later, lay just east of the modern Louvre.
Philippe was well aware that, by the last quarter of the twelfth century, a change had come over Paris. After nearly a thousand years of torpor or decline, the city had begun to expand to the north and to the east, but also, in a very limited degree, to the west. When Thomas à Becket, the archbishop of Canterbury, was murdered in his cathedral in 1170, a wave of revulsion and sorrow reached many parts of Europe, including Paris. Perhaps only a few months later, but decades before the fortress of the Louvre had even been conceived, a church was dedicated to him just beyond where the fortress would rise thirty years later, on the land where I. M. Pei’s Pyramide stands today. In 1191, a decade before the Louvre was completed, perhaps before its cornerstone was even laid, a document referred to this church as the hospital pauperum clericorum de Lupara, the shelter of the poor clerics of the Louvre.4 It was more commonly called Saint-Thomas du Louvre, and it remained standing into the 1750s. That church appears to be the first substantial structure ever built on the land now occupied by the Louvre Museum.
Philippe Auguste, who ruled France from 1180 until his death in 1223, was more renowned as a warrior king than as a patron of the arts. Although he chartered the University of Paris, established churches and granted land to monasteries, it is difficult to find, amid his full and tumultuous life, any avid pursuit of culture as such, any aliveness to the life of the mind, any alertness to the refinement of a building or the charm of a painted manuscript.
Not surprisingly, then, his Louvre was no thing of beauty and was never intended to be. Standing just beyond the western limit of Philippe’s new walls, ninety miles from the English Channel and thirty-five from lands occupied by the bellicose king of England, its simple, uninflected square-massing was not really meant to be seen at all, except by the marauding English troops, whom it was intended to cow into retreat. Other than the soaring donjon—its central tower—that rivaled the belfries of Notre-Dame, the bulk of the fortress was largely invisible from inside the capital, especially from the right bank, where the many intervening structures would have made it difficult to see. The castles and fortifications of France are among the finest works of medieval architecture: one thinks of the hard splendor of the walls of Carcassonne or the combined solidity and grace of Pierrefonds in Picardy. But the Louvre of Philippe Auguste knew nothing of such presence or grace. No contemporary image of it survives, and what we know of it is only what can be inferred from the archaeological remains of its successor, the palace of Charles V, completed two centuries later. From this evidence it appears to be the progenitor of all those drab barracks, blockhouses and flak towers of a later and far less chivalrous age.
Its four massive walls, rising forty feet, were entirely bereft of ornament. To the north and east were curtain-walls, purely defensive structures that extended—like curtains—between the towers. To the west and south, the corps-de-logis—the living quarters as opposed to the fortifications—provided shelter for a small garrison of several dozen men and their commanding officers, but the accommodations could hardly have been pleasant: beyond the narrow slits in the walls, few windows admitted light into this sullen fortification. Of its two entrances, one faced south, toward the Seine, while the other faced east, toward the city. Visitors entered each through a gate flanked by two cylindrical towers. With a tower at each corner and at the midpoint of the southern and western walls, the fortress had ten in all, crowned with a toit en poivrière, a pepperpot dome, that shielded the sentries from the elements and from incoming fire. The waters of the Seine flowed through a moat that surrounded the fortress on all sides except to the east, and untilled fields extended just beyond the northern and western walls.
The most distinguishing feature of the fortress, perhaps its only one, was the keep, or donjon, la Grosse Tour, whose cylindrical mass rose nearly one hundred feet and could be seen, for centuries to come, from almost any point in Paris. It occupied the center of the fortress and was separated from the rest of the interior by the deep, waterless moat that encircled it. The Grosse Tour served as a prison for high-value captives. In 1216, only a few years after its completion, it received its first important prisoner, Ferrand, Count of Flanders, an ally of the English who was taken prisoner at the Battle of Bouvines. In what appears to be the earliest mention of the Louvre that we have, this event is described in Guillaume Le Breton’s Philippide, a poem in Latin hexameters devoted to the reign of Philippe Auguste and completed before 1225. In its second book, the author vividly describes Ferrand’s arrest:
At Ferrandus, equis evectus forte duobus …
Civibus offertur Luparae claudendus in arce
Cujus in adventu clerus populusque tropheum
Cantibus hymnisonis regi solemne canebant.
But Ferrand, led on perchance by two horses, was delivered
to the citizens [of Paris] to be imprisoned in the fortress of the
Louvre. At his coming, the clergy and the people solemnly
sang hymns to the king in celebration of his triumph].5
The drab utilitarianism of the fortress of Philippe Auguste stands in stark contrast to the Louvre that we know today, where ornament often seems to take on a life of its own. But even though the differences are obvious, even though not a stone of the original structure survives above ground, still the ghost of the medieval building can be summoned from the Corinthian pillars, the oculi and the sculpted swags of the modern Cour Carrée, which rise over the site of the original fortress. For the scale of the Louvre, so arbitrarily determined eight centuries ago, remains embedded in much that we see today. Each side of the original building was 236 feet across, dimensions that survived its transformation into a medieval palace and then into a Renaissance palace. And even when Louis XIII decided to enlarge the structure to its present dimensions around 1640, his architect Jacques Lemercier simply recreated the original building a little to the north, linking the two identical structures by means of the Pavillon de l’Horloge that we see today. The influence of the fortress extends nearly half a mile to the westernmost parts of the Louvre, whose height and width are largely determined by the fortress of Philippe Auguste. The fortress was exactly one-quarter the size of the modern Cour Carrée, fitting into the southwest quadrant in such a way that its northeast corner rose over the spot now occupied by the central fountain.
If this aesthetic assessment seems unduly harsh, let it be said that what little survives of the original structure, especially the twenty-foot-tall soubassement, or base, in the Aile Sully, has been well made. Its dressed stone is more finely cut and finished, perhaps, than was necessary for a fortification that few Parisians would ever see, especially since much of what survives lay submerged beneath the waters of the Seine. One historian has stated that “the Louvre, together with [Philippe Auguste’s] other constructions, fully merits inclusion in the pantheon of French castle architecture.”6 Philippe’s Louvre also influenced subsequent castles: Seringes-et-Nesles and Dourdan, with their corner and median turrets set into a square enclosure, follow the model of the Louvre in their rejection of the generally irregular footprint of most earlier castles. Even on the outskirts of Paris itself, this influence persisted one and a half centuries later in the Château de Vincennes, not to mention the legendary Bastille itself.
Presumably for reasons of defense, the Louvre fortress did not border the Seine, but was recessed nearly three hundred feet to the north. For centuries to come this decision would bedevil the monarchs and masons of France. As we will see in later chapters, the creation of a second palace, the Tuileries, half a kilometer to the west, and the ambition to join these palaces by means of the Grande Galerie—which now houses the Louvre’s collection of Italian paintings—resulted in all kinds of odd asymmetries. A solution, and a fine one, was found only in the 1850s, with the completion of the Nouveau Louvre under Napoleon III. Still, that original decision to recess the fortress from the Seine is the reason why, to this day, the Cour Carrée does not feel organically connected to the rest of the Louvre, and it is also why, in moving from one building to the other, the uninitiated visitor is apt to feel that he is passing through a labyrinth.
In the century and a half between the completion of Philippe Auguste’s fortress and Charles V’s decision to transform it into a royal palace, the Louvre was visited only rarely by the nomadic kings of France, and it sustained few modifications. Other than incarcerating prisoners of rank and holding jousting tournaments, it served little function, since the Anglo-Norman threat had receded and the threat of the Plantagenets had not yet emerged. One section of the fortress was placed at the disposal of the royal treasury, and another part was allocated to the manufacture of cross-bows.
But the French monarchy gradually came to see the advantages to being closer to the ville of Paris, the Right Bank, that center of its enterprising bourgeoisie. As the royal bureaucracy became ever larger at the Palais de la Cité, the Louvre began to seem like a quieter, more convenient alternative to the bustle of officialdom on the Île de la Cité. Philippe Auguste’s grandson, Louis IX, better known as Saint Louis, ordered the construction of a chapel in the southwest corner of the fortress, at the southern end of what is now the Salle des Caryatides. Underneath that chapel was a crypt whose remains were discovered in the 1880s and are now part of the medieval excavations in the Aile Sully.
In short order the fortress engendered a small town—later known as the Quartier du Louvre—where before there had been little or nothing. As this area evolved, it did not become a typically medieval tangle of streets, such as one still finds elsewhere in Paris in the Marais or the Quartier Latin, but a fairly orderly development. Its two main avenues, stretching north to south from the rue Saint-Honoré to the Seine, were the rue Saint-Thomas and the rue Froidmanteau, the latter possibly older than the fortress itself. The rue Saint-Thomas extended roughly from the Pavillon Denon to the Pavillon Richelieu, the rue Froidmanteau to its east, from the Pavillon Daru to the Pavillon Colbert. As a direct consequence of the fortress’s construction, five other streets came into being: the rue Beauvais, which ran parallel to its northern edge, and the rue Jean Saint-Denis, rue du Chantre, rue du Champ-Fleury and rue du Coq, all extending northward from the rue Beauvais. Little trace of these streets remains today. The easternmost, the rue du Coq, was widened, and, now reborn as the rue de Marengo, leads up to the Pavillon Marengo, which stands at the center of the Cour Carrée’s northern façade. By the time Philippe Auguste died in 1223, Adolphe Berty writes, “he was able, from the height of the towers of his Louvre, to contemplate at the foot of the castle an entire new quartier whose buildings … were sufficiently numerous to reveal no trace of the tilled earth that was there before.”7
Some idea of the emerging bustle of this new district will be found in Christine de Pizan’s description, less than two centuries later under Charles VI, of “the multitude of people and diverse nationalities, princes and others, who arrive from all over chiefly because [the Louvre] is the main seat of the noble court.”8 Most of the resulting building stock was fairly humble, unlike the proud aristocratic dwellings that arose there at the end of the next century. As for the expansive area west of the rue Saint-Thomas, all the way to the modern place de la Concorde, it largely remained arable land, although tile factories—required, as a potential fire hazard, to lie at some distance from the wooden houses that predominated in medieval Paris—began to appear there under Louis IX.
The biggest single structure on the grounds of the modern Louvre, other than the palace itself, was the Hôpital des Quinze-Vingts (the Hospital of the Three Hundred) founded by Saint Louis around 1260 and so named because it had a capacity of three hundred beds for patients who were blind and poor. Situated west of the rue Saint-Thomas du Louvre it stretched from the rue Saint-Honoré south to what is now the Pavillon de Turgot, built by Napoleon III in the 1850s. It comprised a church and chapel as well as a small cemetery. As such it was one of three burial grounds in what is now the Cour Napoléon, together with those of the Churches of Saint-Nicolas and Saint-Thomas. Among those buried—several centuries later—in the last of these churches was Pierre Bréant, “barber to the great man and powerful prince the Duc of Bretagne,” as well as Robert Rouseau, “priest, native of the islands of the Philippines and, during his lifetime, a canon of this church.” Perhaps the most important tomb belonged to Mellin de Saint-Gelais, an important figure in the history of French poetry, who may well have introduced the sonnet into France.9
We know little if anything about the appearance of Philippe Auguste: he hardly emerges from the shadows of the Middles Ages, and his main chronicler, Guillaume Le Breton, comes closer to hagiography than to history. But as regards the appearance of Charles V and his wife, Jeanne de Bourbon, we are singularly well informed: a life-sized statue of each ruler—made during their reign—now stands beside the Cour Marly, in the Richelieu Wing of the Louvre. Especially the king, with his flabby cheeks and weak chin, bulbous nose and oddly parted hair, seems true to life, looking weary and older than his years. Since he was only forty-two when he died in 1380, the statue could not have been made long before his death. Together, the paired images represent an important example of the late Gothic naturalism that prefigures the advances of Jan Van Eyck and the other Flemish masters fifty years later. These crowned figures, which retain traces of their original polychrome, are thought to have stood high up on the eastern façade of the Louvre palace, the part that faced the city of Paris and would be instantly seen by all who entered. There the pair remained for nearly three centuries until, in 1660, Louis XIV ordered the destruction of the last visible remnants of the medieval Louvre.
Charles V, who ruled from 1364 to 1380, had the demeanor of a scholar, but the circumstances of the realm that he inherited, especially early on, forced upon him the role of a man of action. He was the son and successor of Jean II of France, who ruled from 1350 to 1364 and sired four of the greatest artistic patrons of the later Middle Ages: in addition to Charles, these were Louis I of Anjou, Jean, Duc de Berry and Philippe II of Burgundy. Not the least of Jean II’s distinctions is a portrait of him, now in the Louvre, that was painted at the outset of his reign in 1350. Depicting him in profile, with a mane of red hair and a scruffy beard against a golden background, this panel has the distinction of being, for all we can determine, the first painted portrait of an individual human being to survive since the end of antiquity. It is not, of course, the direct progenitor of the Mona Lisa and of portraits painted by Raphael and Rembrandt, but it is the earliest example we have of a genre that would prove supremely important for the future of Western art.
Statues of Charles V and his queen, Jeanne de Bourbon, c. 1380, that adorned the eastern entrance to the original Louvre, which he converted from a fortress into a palace. Now in the Aile Richelieu.
But Jean was destined to come to a bad end. He was defeated by Edward of Woodstock, the Black Prince of England, at the Battle of Poitiers in 1355, one of the most important early battles in the Hundred Years War. While Jean was imprisoned in the Tower of London, his eldest son, Charles, then seventeen years old, served as regent in his absence. History affords few more inspiring examples of chivalrous conduct than Jean’s after he gained his freedom by paying a steep ransom and—as was customary at the time—offering one of his sons, Louis of Anjou, as hostage: when Louis escaped, Jean was so troubled by what he saw as a dishonorable act that he returned, voluntarily and for the remainder of his life, to imprisonment in England (admittedly in the Savoy Palace), where he died in 1364. Thereupon Charles became king outright.
The Parisians had always been and would always be restive subjects of the crown. Even before Charles became king he found himself in the midst of a civil war that pitted the monarchy against Étienne Marcel (the provost of merchants and, in effect, the mayor of Paris), who sought to curb royal power and even, some said, to seize the crown itself. Only with Marcel’s assassination in 1358—soon after he burst into Charles’s council chamber in the Palais de la Cité and killed two of his advisors—did something like peace return, thanks in large part to Charles’s issuing a general amnesty that conciliated the nobles and the Parisian bourgeoisie. By the end of his reign, with Normandy and Brittany having been recaptured from the English some years before, Charles left the kingdom far stronger than when he had received it.
Despite the tumult of his early years, however, he seems to have preferred the vita contemplativa to the vita activa. In her Livre des fais et bonnes meurs du sage roy Charles V of 1404 (Book of the Deeds and Good Character of the Wise King Charles V), Christine de Pizan calls him “a true philosopher and lover of wisdom.” Surnamed le Sage, the Wise, he was renowned among his contemporaries for his manifold intellectual attainments. At his death, more than nine hundred volumes were inventoried in his library at the Louvre, a staggering number for that age. An additional three hundred were dispersed among his palaces in or near Paris. As one of his services of enlightenment, he lent books to scholars and to men of wealth who wished to commission a copy. His library, which included devotional works as well as volumes of political theory, history, astronomy and fiction, occupied three levels of the Tour de la Fauconnerie (the Falconry Tower), which he had built in the northwest corner of the Louvre when he turned the fortress into a palace. The most precious manuscripts were kept on the ground floor, while lighter fare, such as The Travels of Sir John Mandeville and Jean de Meun’s Roman de la rose (The Romance of the Rose), occupied the intermediary level. The highest level was reserved for learned and devotional works, in both French and Latin: among these were Guillaume Peyraut’s Livre du gouvernement des rois et des princes (Book of the Government of Kings and Princes), John of Salisbury’s Policraticus and Aristotle’s Economics, Politics and Nicomachean Ethics.10
Although these precious volumes were mostly dispersed after his death, a number of them found their way early on into the Bibliothèque nationale. Indeed, they may fairly be seen as the foundational tomes of the national library of France. In 1986, after preliminary excavations had been carried out for the Grand Louvre of François Mitterrand, one of the stones from the tower of Charles’s library came to light. In an extraordinary act of symbolism, it was taken across the Seine to the Left Bank, where it now forms the cornerstone of the new national library, the Bibliothèque nationale de France.
As much as Charles cherished the life of the mind, he shared with many potentates a love of great building projects, among these the Château de Vincennes at the eastern limit of modern Paris and the now vanished Hôtel Saint-Pol in the Marais. Writing of his love of architecture, Christine de Pizan described him as a “wise artist who showed himself to be a true architect, and confident deviser and prudent arranger … when he laid the beautiful foundations [of his buildings].”11 The largest of his undertakings was the construction of a new wall around the northern half of Paris, to encompass all those areas that had emerged since the completion of Philippe Auguste’s wall nearly two centuries before. This fortification, far more sophisticated in conception and construction than its predecessor, encircled only the right bank. And it too would have an incalculable effect on the fortunes of the Louvre.
If the earlier wall was three miles in total on both sides of the Seine, this new one, although confined to the Right Bank alone, had a longer circuit, embracing most of today’s First, Second, Third and Fourth Arrondissements. As such it extended roughly half a kilometer further to the east and to the west and one kilometer further to the north. In terms of urban development, the Left Bank would lag behind the Right for several centuries to come.
This wall of Charles V had been initiated, in fact, by Étienne Marcel in 1356, but was completed only in 1383, three years after Charles died, in the reign of his son Charles VI. Unlike the earlier wall, which rose directly out of the ground, Charles’s wall emerged from a broad and continuous earthwork whose sequence of crests and valleys, 280 feet wide, held the English at a sufficient distance that their arms could have no effect on the capital. Much later, these ramparts would come to be known as boulvars (cognate with the English word bulwark), from which is derived the modern English word boulevard. What connects these two seemingly disparate concepts is the fact that Paris’s grands boulevards—which technically refer only to the boulevards of the First through the Fourth Arrondissements—are the remains of Charles V’s fortifications. His bulwarks—together with those that were added to them by Louis XIII—were dismantled, flattened and filled in by Louis XIV starting around 1670, to be replaced by the sort of broad, landscaped avenues to which we now refer, wherever we find them in the world, as boulevards.
Interrupting the fourteenth-century bulwarks were grandiose gates through which pedestrians and riders passed into and out of the capital, among these the Porte Saint-Martin, the Porte Saint-Denis and an entirely new fortification all the way at the eastern end of the wall, known as la Bastille: this term referred to a specific kind of fortified gateway. Initially the Bastille, as conceived by Étienne Marcel in the 1350s, had been little more than the entrance to Paris through the rue Saint-Antoine, whose eastern extremity was flanked by two imposing towers. A decade later, however, Charles V found it to be inadequate in its initial form, and so he transformed it into a castle, whose regular and rectangular footprint was defended by eight towers, one at each corner, together with two additional towers in the middle of the eastern and western exposures. Its overall conception, in fact, was modeled on the Louvre’s—as was Charles V’s Château de Vincennes two miles further east—and it is surely not an accident that it came into being at precisely the moment when the Louvre itself, freed from any military function, was beginning its metamorphosis into a palace.
At the opposite, western limit of Paris, the new wall shifted sharply from the rue Saint-Honoré toward the Seine, slicing through what are now the Pavillon de Rohan and les Grands Guichets (two nineteenth-century entrances to the Louvre), before reaching the river in the form of a new tower, la Tour de Bois. A few feet from the Pavillon de Rohan, beside the Porte Saint-Honoré, Joan of Arc was wounded in 1429 by a cross-bow as she led an assault against the English occupiers of Paris who had briefly taken up residence in the Louvre. One of the great revelations of the work on the Grand Louvre in the 1980s was the discovery of a part of this fortification, a fifth of a mile in length, that had previously been known through old engravings (and some superficial archaeological soundings in the 1860s). The two sides of the fortification, its scarp and counterscarp, can be seen today at the western entrance to the Carrousel du Louvre, a vast subterranean shopping area at the museum’s western limit. What we now encounter differs slightly, however, from what one would have seen in the days of Charles V, due to repairs carried out in 1512 by Louis XII, when the wall was fortified with dressed stone.
Map of Paris from 1553 by Olivier Truschet and Germain Hoyau. The dominant oval shape represents the walls of Charles V that surround the city, with the Louvre near the base of the oval, beside the Seine.
With the completion of the wall, the Louvre now stood for the first time squarely within the city of Paris. What had been a sort of frontier fortress now ceased to have any defensive function at all. At the same time, however, it had certain advantages over Charles V’s other palaces in and around Paris. The Hôtel Saint-Pol and the Château de Vincennes were too far removed from the center of the city, while the Palais de la Cité, the traditional home of the monarch when visiting Paris, had only recently been the scene of mob violence that Charles had witnessed with his own eyes. The events of that day surely weighed on his decision both to reside in a fortified structure like the Louvre and to transform it into a palace worthy of a king.
According to Christine de Pizan, Charles V rebuilt the Louvre de neuf, from scratch. Surely this is an exaggeration, but there can be no question that he completely altered the spirit, and largely altered the form, of the fortress of Philippe Auguste. As with so many of the labors of the Louvre, work proceeded slowly: Charles’s alterations would consume ten of the sixteen years of his reign. To oversee the work he chose Raymond du Temple, one of the few architects of the Middle Ages whom we can name and to whom we can attribute a legible aesthetic profile. Like Jacques Lemercier under Louis XIII and Percier and Fontaine under Napoleon I, he created many buildings for a monarch who had full confidence in his talents. Although almost no trace remains of his Hôtel Saint-Pol in the Marais, one of the largest urban interventions in fourteenth-century Paris, the Château de Vincennes survives splendidly intact, its chapel rivaling the better-known Sainte-Chapelle, which inspired it. In addition to overseeing the reconstruction of the Cathedral of Notre-Dame, Raymond du Temple was probably responsible for an early version of the Petit Pont, the bridge that connected the cathedral with the Left Bank, and for the Bastille itself.
Even though nothing survives of Charles’s Louvre beyond the foundation of its eastern and northern wings, we have a very good idea of how it looked, thanks to three painted depictions: the Retable du Parlement de Paris and the Pietà of Saint-Germain-des-Prés, both in the Louvre, and the page representing the month of October in Les très riches heures de Jean, duc du Berry (the Book of Hours), painted by the Limbourg brothers before 1416, and one of the masterpieces of late-medieval art. There is a fairyland quality to this lustrous depiction of the Louvre, seen from across the Seine, roughly where the Tour de Nesle once stood. Despite the painting’s somewhat willful proportions, the evidence it provides is corroborated by the remains that came to light in the 1980s and that can now be visited in the Aile Sully.
Preserving the footprint and the general dimensions of the old fortress, Charles’s most substantive act was to build up the northern and eastern sides of the square-shaped enclosure. What had been mere curtain-walls now acquired a living area, of similar size to what Philippe Auguste had attached to the southern and western sides of the fortress. Thus the Grosse Tour, or donjon, that had originally stood at the center of the interior courtyard now found itself closer to the expanded northern wing, where Charles had his public and private apartments. To allow access befitting a king, either Raymond du Temple or his assistant Drouet de Dammartin designed a prodigious spiral stairway that was famous in its day. Known as la Grande Vis—the Big Screw, or the Big Spiral—this stunning piece of engineering, decked out in all the filigreed elegance of the later Gothic style, stood between the Grosse Tour and the new northern wing. This was one of the first of those grand stairways that would figure so prominently in the stately homes and palaces of France, down to the end of the nineteenth century. Nearby stood the Petite Vis, a smaller stairway by which the king and queen alone were able to reach their private apartments. Some remains are visible in the excavations of the Aile Sully.
To admit light and air into the palace, the architect breached the thick walls with windows that would hardly have been acceptable in a fortress. Lancet, cross and dormer windows suddenly pierced the ramparts and turrets alike. Even the donjon now had windows. In addition to sculptures of the king and queen, decorative string coursings enlivened the upper levels of the walls. With its chimneys and pepperpot domes covered in bluish gray slate and fleur-de-lis weather vanes gleaming in the sun, the palace came to dominate the skyline of the Right Bank. In his eagerness to transform the Louvre into a palace, Charles had stone brought down the Seine from Vitry, as well as from the local Parisian quarries of Bicêtre, Gentilly and Vaugirard. Such was his hunger for fine stone that, in creating la Grande Vis, he did not scruple to acquire tombstones from the Cimetière des Innocents, the cemetery beside les Halles.
Part of the remains of the wall of Charles V in the Carrousel du Louvre, a shopping center.
An important element of the Louvre’s transition from a fortress to a palace was the sumptuous gardens planted along its northern and western flanks, stretching beyond the walls to the former rue Froidmanteau in the west and in the north to the rue Beauvais, now part of the rue de Rivoli. The northern garden contained five pavilions, four round and one square, with hedges, arbors and a wicker trellis covered in vines. As was usual with medieval gardens, it was divided up into square segments arrayed with a variety of flowers and plants chosen for their colors and scents, among them rose and strawberry bushes. Beyond the western garden, but still within the grounds of the palace, a court was built for the fashionable game of jeu de paume, a prototype of tennis. There was also a menagerie that included falcons, hawks and a cage of nightingales. A few of the Louvre’s smaller gardens to the south, along the Seine, were transformed under Charles’s successor, Charles VI, into a basse-cour where farm animals and plants were raised and then brought to the kitchens of the Louvre.
Henri Sauval, the seventeenth-century historian of Paris, has left a fairly extensive description of the gardens of the Louvre, which still existed when he was a young man and which occupied the northwest quadrant of what became the Cour Carrée. These gardens were surrounded from one end to the other by trellises, rosebushes and hedges. Chard, lettuce and purslane were grown for consumption in the palace. In addition to having a menagerie, l’Hostel des Lions, the garden’s four corners were enhanced with a pavilion of either round or square footprint that offered seating to guests.12 It is a curious coincidence that, six centuries later and in the same location, the two landscaped areas on either side of the Pavillon de Marengo would once again be used to grow leeks amid the rationing of the Second World War.
Soon a fruitful coexistence emerged between the Louvre palace, where Charles lived when he was in Paris, and the Palais de la Cité, the seat of his administration. While this latter structure housed the king’s ever expanding bureaucracy, the Louvre increasingly became the ceremonial center of Paris. Here, in 1368, Charles received with full honors the Duke of Clarence, second son of Edward III of England. And it was here, eleven years later, that he chose to receive the Holy Roman emperor, Charles IV. On this occasion, as on others, the king seemed to take considerable satisfaction in his new palace. According to Christine de Pizan, he showed off to the emperor “the beautiful walls and masonry that he had ordered to be built at the Louvre.”13 Indeed, Pizan spoke of Charles’s belle manière de vivre, his “beautiful way of living.”14
Because so many people, including nobles, commoners and strangers wanted to see the king with their own eyes, the Louvre became a very crowded place. According to Pizan, there was hardly space to turn around. Naturally, all these crowds created logistical and sanitary issues. Just as the day and night chambers of the king and queen had their aisances, or lavatories, some now had to be provided for the public, a provision that continues to challenge the administration of the museum more than six centuries later. The accommodations of around 1400, however, apparently proved difficult to access, since it was deemed necessary to prohibit members of the public from urinating in the halls and gardens of the palace.15
As soon as Charles chose the Louvre as his principle dwelling in Paris, two changes occurred in this part of the city. First, prostitutes, drawn to centers of power and wealth, installed themselves in the rue Champfleury, near the museum’s Porte Marengo in the Cour Carrée.16 At the same time, the French aristocracy, including the bishops, began to build stately homes in direct vicinity to this new center of royal power. Two of the largest of these dwellings stood immediately to the east of the Louvre, just beyond Philippe Auguste’s wall, bordering the now vanished rue d’Autriche. Known by their later names, these were the Hôtel du Petit-Bourbon, built around 1390 (in the reign of the king’s son and successor, Charles VI), and the Hôtel d’Alençon, which stood on land that had been variously occupied since the middle of the previous century. Each of these structures was almost as large as the fourteenth-century Louvre, and together they occupied the entire eastern half of the modern Cour Carrée. In subsequent centuries both would play an important role in the history and cultural life of France. The splendor of the Hôtel du Petit-Bourbon especially reflected the extravagance of the reign of Charles VI, an extravagance that extended to the aristocracy as well. Its Grande Salle was famous three centuries later. Sauval, who would have seen it shortly before its destruction in 1660, could claim that “without fear of contradiction, it is the broadest, highest and longest [chamber] in the entire kingdom.”17 Seized by François I in 1527, le Petit-Bourbon functioned as an extension of the Louvre, and it remained a prominent feature of the Parisian cityscape until Louis XIV razed it to build his great Colonnade, the easternmost point of what is now the modern museum.
After the early death of Charles V in 1380, the fortunes of the Louvre itself fell into steep decline. The Hundred Years War, which pitted the French crown against England, Burgundy and sundry domestic enemies, was entering its deadliest phase. Few cities would be more directly or adversely affected than Paris. Although armed insurgents, known as the Maillotins, or Hammer-Wielders, were unsuccessful in their quest to tear down the Louvre under Charles VI in 1383, the amount of damage they caused was considerable. Even as Charles VI received the emperor of Byzantium at the Louvre in 1400, the physical condition of the palace was beginning to deteriorate, together with the mental condition of the king: during his recurring bouts of insanity, he forgot he was king, forgot his own name, could not recognize his wife or children, and believed he was Saint George of Cappadocia. The physical decay of the Louvre accelerated between 1431 and 1439, when Paris itself suffered the indignity of an English occupation, during which the ten-year-old Henry VI of England was crowned in Notre-Dame and lived for a time in the Louvre. Another century would pass before a very different French king, François I, took up residence in the palace and began to transform it beyond recognition into something like what we see today.