Metronome

1. The plaque and statue honoring the Admiral de Coligny on Rue de Rivoli. 2. The transformation of the Louvre. 3. The colonnade of Claude Perrault. 4. The Palais-Royal Métro stop. 5. The Petite Galerie. 6. The Grande Galerie. 7. The Carrousel. 8. The Napoleon Court. 9. The interior of the Louvre. 11. The marks of the kings on the Louvre. 12. The backward “N.” 13. Symbols of Napoleon III’s republic.

When you emerge from the Palais-Royal-Musée du Louvre Métro stop, all you have to do is take a look at the Kiosk des Noctambules—“Kiosk of the Night Owls”—to understand that you’ve entered into the realm of art. Constructed in Place Colette in the year 2000 to celebrate the centenary of the Métro, this brightly colored construction by Jean-Michel Othoniel has provoked as much fierce debate as those copper-green Art Nouveau entrances put over the subway entrances over a century ago. Hector Guimard, the champion of the curlycue style, conceived of these designs, which horrified our great-grandparents and today are universally adored. Moreover, there is also a Guimard entryway on the Place Palais-Royal, so you can compare them: one has the glass pearls embedded into a metal stem; and the other is more traditional, with its yellow-and-green signs, its wrought-iron frieze, and its red globes lit up like the eyes of two fanatics.

Palais-Royal-Musée du Louvre. The double appellation is misleading, for the Palais-Royal doesn’t designate the Louvre but the home Cardinal Richelieu built in order to be near Louis XII, who lived in the Louvre. After the death of the cardinal and the king, Anne of Austria became regent, and wanted to mark her authority and her taste by moving into the opulent new palace, which was more accommodating than the old Louvre. In fact, she had never been able to abide that austere old fort, with its freezing rooms and dark corridors along which cold breezes blew. The Louvre represented sadness and death. It had been pointed out to her that nonetheless the old place had many qualities and distinct advantages. For example, one could survive a siege there and protect royal prerogative from the power of the masses and invasions of foreign armies. However, the queen was not a military strategist and didn’t understand such logic. In 1644, with her two sons, the future Louis the XIV and Philippe d’Orléans, she settled into Richelieu’s old home, henceforth called Palais-Royal.

Heavily rebuilt, the main part of the palace is today occupied by the State Department, and its right wing by the Cultural Ministry. The real appeal of the Palais-Royal involved the galleries around the garden, which was one of the most pleasant places in Paris during the eighteenth century. The Palais-Royal theater (the Comédie Française), which sits at the end of the gardens, dates from the end of the eighteenth century and remains one of the most handsome in Paris.

However, let’s return to the Louvre, because we are in the sixteenth century and this is where the central events of the period took place. Go into the main courtyard, stand before the Lescot wing, and you will see lines marking where the ancient dungeon once was, as well as the fortress, whose total dimensions did not exceed a quarter of the current space.

Later the Louvre became the largest structure in Paris and the most resplendent museum in the world. All that started with François I, who ordered the construction that ended up taking three centuries and was not completed until Napoleon III’s rule in the nineteenth century.

Louis XIV, the Sun King, wanted the Louvre’s grand entrance to be oriented toward the city, as a way of demonstrating his domination over the Parisians. In 1671, he asked the architect Claude Perrault (the brother of Charles Perrault, the author of the Mother Goose fairy tales, including “Cinderella” and “Puss in Boots”) to build the sublime colonnade that faces Saint-Germain-l’Auxerrois Church. But it was never finished, in part because having turned his attention to Versailles, the king no longer lived in the Louvre. The work wouldn’t be completed until 1811, nearly a century and a half later.

H, K, HHH, HDB … How do we “read” the Louvre?

Each monarch contributed to the improvement of the palace and added his signature. The H on the front of it stands for Henri II. On the south façade, the HDB refers to Henri de Bourbon, meaning Henri IV. As for the K, it refers to King Charles IX.

The current courtyard was begun by Louis XII with the Sully wing. There you can see the king’s sign: the double Greek letter lambda, the A and L interwoven, which stands for Louis and his wife, Anne of Austria. Finally it was Louis XIV who completed the great project, following the plans done by Le Vau for the north and east wings which flank the central courtyard. One can see the royal insignia—the letter L crowned with the letters LB for Louis de Bourbon.

Walk along the Seine and you can see the long building that runs perpendicular to the river and extends the length of the palace. This is the Petite Galerie, which was built upon the moat of Charles V’s wall and whose construction Catherine de’ Medici ordered to connect the Louvre to the Tuileries, which she was having built. The Petite Galerie was turned into a sad place during the religious wars, as it was long thought that it was from the balcony at the top of the first floor and facing the Seine that Charles IX fired a crossbow at the Protestants during the massacre of Saint-Barthélmy. In fact this couldn’t be true, as the gallery wasn’t finished in 1572, which is when the massacre took place. Today, from the ground floor and particularly from the first floor, which is now the Apollo Gallery, you get a very good idea of the magnificence of the royal apartments during what is called the Grand Siècle (Great Century).

The Grande Galerie, which goes along the Seine toward the west, was finished under Henri IV. Hence we see the H and two interlaced Gs, for Henri and Gabrielle d’Estrées, his mistress. Under Louis XIII, here is where the royal coins were minted, the famous Gold Louis. On the first floor of the Louvre, Henri IV organized fox-hunting expeditions in order to initiate his son into the sport.

Starting with the gate leading to the Carrousel, the building that stands there today, extending all the way to the Flore Pavilion, is a reconstruction of the one that disappeared during a mudslide. You can see that the Hs for Henri have been replaced by the N for Napoleon III. The workers of this gigantic site may not have felt deep devotion to the emperor, for if you look at the top of the clock tower on the Lesdiguières Pavilion you can see that the N is backward, a reversal of imperial power.

Turn the corner of the Flore Pavilion and you come upon something no longer there: the Tuileries Palace. Catherine de’ Medici’s palace, damaged in a fire set by the Communards in 1871, was to have been restored but instead, stupidly, was razed a dozen years later. The Carrousel marked the entrance to the palace beginning in the First Empire and remains the only vestige.

Now let’s move on to the Napoleon Court, the one in which the glass pyramid is located today. Above us is an impressive gallery of statues of great men, gazing down upon us. We owe to Napoleon III the construction of these buildings that surround the court and whose function is to correct the absence of parallelism between the buildings along the Rue de Rivoli and the ones along the Seine. On the other hand it was to the first emperor, Napoleon I, that we owe the Rue de Rivoli, with its covered galleries, inaugurating a new century in which Parisians could indulge their passion for strolling. To Napoleon we also owe the buildings of the Louvre right up to the Rohan ticket counters, where, on the pyramid side, the bees recall Napoleon I’s sleeping partner, Josephine. On the street side, the marshals of the empire impassively observe the ballet of cars that cross Paris in this great east-west intersection; in order to leave the city these same cars will have to cross beneath the marshals’ gaze once again, now on the outer boulevards, before making their way to the périphérique.

Starting with the Rohan ticket booth, the buildings that face the Rue de Rivoli date from Napoleon III, the grand architect of this colossal edifice that has seen so many regimes come and go: even his own republic left its trace. If you look at the chimneys and the friezes of the Marsan Pavilion you can see inscribed RF—symbol of the Third Republic.

Now that we’ve done the tour of the outside, let’s go inside by means of the glass pyramid. The Louvre—called the Muséum de la République—first opened its doors in November 1793, during the Revolution. Its holdings vastly expanded by Napoleon’s campaigns, it continued to benefit from the generosity of prestigious donors and today possesses nearly three hundred fifty thousand objects. When it opened it had 650.

When they made the transition from palace to museum, the rooms were substantially changed, though a few of them reveal their earlier uses. To limit ourselves to the sixteenth century, Henri II’s chambre de parade is unchanged, as is the Henri II stairway and the Henri II room in the Hall of the Caryatids. From this magnificent spot, you can still see the back of Saint Louis’s chapel’s choir, which was integrated into the western wall; as it contains a remnant of Philippe Auguste’s Louvre, the wall is twice as thick as the others. This was the tribunal room, meaning where the king sat during festivals and receptions. His throne was set under the central arcade, between the two cannellated columns. There you can also see the four caryatids that date from the beginning of the Renaissance palace. If they could speak, they would doubtless have much to tell us about the Grand Siècle.

When François I came back to Paris in 1527, he returned as a vanquished and humiliated king. His expedition in Italy against the Holy Roman Emperor Charles V turned out to be a disaster. He was taken prisoner, and had to spend two million ecus to free himself after a year of captivity. The sum was paid, in part, by the Parisians, rich and poor alike. To show his gratitude, the king decided to move temporarily into the Louvre.

How did the Mona Lisa get to the Louvre?

After the death of François I, the portrait left Fontainebleau and was hung in the Louvre. Later, Louis XIV had it removed and put in the Cabinet du Roi in Versailles. In 1798, the painting was brought back to the Louvre, now of course a museum. Not for long, however. First Consul Napoleon Bonaparte had it taken down two years later and placed in Josephine’s apartments in the Tuileries. Eventually it was taken back to the Louvre in 1804.

In 1911, Leonardo’s painting was stolen by an Italian worker named Vincenzo Perugia, who wanted to return it to his country. For two years, Perugia kept it in the bottom of a suitcase under his bed in his small Parisian room. He would sometimes open the suitcase to have a look at that smile.

Rediscovered, the painting resumed its place in the Louvre. It has taken a few excursions since then—to the United States, Russia, and Japan. Since 2005, this most famous of all paintings has been on exhibit in the Salle des États, which was specially designed for the purpose.

From his Italian defeat François I fashioned a kind of victory—that of bringing the Renaissance to his realm, for from Italy he carried home both artistic treasures and new ideas. This was the continuation of a politics that had been going on for some time. In 1515, after his victory at the Battle of Marignan, he had brought Leonardo da Vinci back with him. The great man had the Mona Lisa packed among his things.

As a symbol of the new era, the Louvre’s massive old keep was destroyed. Clovis’s watchtower disappeared, as did the fortress of the Normans and the Count of Paris’s tower. In short, here was the end of the Middle Ages. Other works would follow while the medieval fortress was transformed into a Renaissance château. Starting in 1546, the architect Pierre Lescot built the southern half-wing on the western side, marking the arrival of the Renaissance style in Paris, with its anterooms, columns around the doors, statues, and the rounded or triangular pediments over the windows.

It nearly all added up to François I’s artistic last will and testament—he lived only one more year and would not see its completion. In the end, as far as Paris was concerned, however, the artistic promises embodied by the king’s return from Italy twenty years earlier didn’t really take. The king left the banks of the Seine for the banks of the Loire, where he built the château at Chambord and revamped the ones at Amboise and Blois. Indeed it was at Amboise that Leonardo da Vinci lived until his death; his emblematic painting was hung on the walls of the château at Fontainebleau, which was perhaps the king’s favorite residence.

The Renaissance entailed far more than flamboyant art and architecture; there was a darker side, and it involved religious intolerance.

On the morning of October 18, 1534, Parisians awakened to discover posters plastered on the walls across the city bearing these words: “True articles on the terrible, great, and unacceptable abuses of the Papal Mass.” “All it takes is a man hiding behind a piece of crust,” one author of a pamphlet wrote, referring to the host of the Eucharist, which, to believers, represents the very body of Christ.

This was the work of certain reforming Protestants who wanted to deepen the rupture with Catholic dogma. The result was scandal and indignation, particularly since someone had actually dared to hang one of these in the château at Amboise, near the room of François I himself. This made the king and country, and God himself, tremble with rage.

Paris’s three hundred thousand inhabitants—it was the most populous city in Europe—still lived to the rhythm of the Church and its rites. The Protestant community, whose number was at most between ten and fifteen thousand souls, had managed until now to live in a discreet manner. That all changed with this Affaire des placards, as it was called, which threw a harsh light on the Reformation and set off violent upheaval. To limit the development of such freethinking, François I banned all printing and ordered bookstores closed. At the very least, this would protect the people from these blasphemous works.

The hunt was on to find the heretics, and in the name of divine truth people were condemned and burned. There were processions through the streets, for the procession was and remained the highest expression of religious loyalty, and took place on every holiday, or to ward off an epidemic, or to avoid a bad harvest, or to seek the blessing of a saint, or to seek a miracle. In general, to calm God’s wrath, Parisians were called to join in the holy processions that went from one end of the city to the other.

Occasionally, when the city felt itself in particular danger, the spirit of Saint Geneviève was called upon. The monks of Saint-Germain-des-Prés, their white robes covered with flowers, would carry the relics of the city’s patroness saint through the streets, and this would in turn incite a host of processions through the city—starting in the churches, municipal buildings, the royal courts at the Palais de Justice, and Notre-Dame.

Given this outrage on the part of the Protestants, a mere procession wouldn’t do. Something far grander was called for. On January 21, 1535, François I joined in a grand parade of expiation in which the city’s most holy relics were carried. Sainte-Chapelle was emptied of its treasures, including the crown of thorns, the droplet of Christ’s blood, and the droplet of milk from the breast of the Virgin Mary. And to be absolutely certain of appeasing God, six Protestants were burned in the square before Notre-Dame. Caught up in this atmosphere of perfect faith, the king spoke publicly to vilify the errors of the Reformation:

“I desire these errors to be chased from my kingdom and forgive no one. If my own children were implicated, I would burn them myself.”

On that day, in Paris and throughout France, the Renaissance, celebrating the arts and human creation, died, supplanted by hatred and suspicion. It would later start up again, more slowly but also irreversibly.

Late in the evening of Saturday the twenty-third of August in 1572, Charles IX, the grandson of François I, convened a meeting with the provost of the merchants at the Louvre and asked him to close the city’s gates, to raise chains across the river to prevent river traffic, and to ready the cannons in all the city’s main squares.

What has been the afterlife of Admiral de Coligny?

The building where he lived and died was torn down during the extension of the Rue de Rivoli. But its location is recalled on a plaque at 144 Rue de Rivoli. In 1811, Napoleon gave to the reformed church the Oratory Temple that is located nearby, at 160 Rue de Rivoli. To honor this place of Protestant martyrdom, a statue of the admiral was raised in 1889. Twenty-five feet high and made of white marble, it is the work of Gustave Crauck. The money for it was raised by a national subscription to which both Catholics and Protestants contributed in a spirit of reconciliation.

At dawn on Sunday morning, which was Saint Bartholomew’s Day, a group headed toward the building on the corner of the Rue Béthisy and Rue de l’Arbre-Sec, where Admiral Gaspard de Coligny, the main leader of the reformers, was in bed, recovering from a crossbow attack two days earlier.

The Catholic soldiers broke down the doors and did away with the guards barring their way. From his room, the admiral realized what was happening and urged his companions to get out. Jumping from windows and roofs, a number of them managed to get away. Coligny faced his attackers.

“Young man, respect my gray hair and my age,” said this man of fifty-three to the thug who had broken in.

They were the last words he spoke. A sword came crashing down on his skull. His lifeless body was thrown into the street from the window.

At the moment that the admiral was being dispatched, the lugubrious bell of Saint-Germain-l’Auxerrois began to sound. The massacre was beginning. At the Louvre, Protestant gentry, though guests of the king, were woken, disarmed, and led out into the courtyard. There, with discipline, the Swiss Guards, assisted by the French guard, murdered them one after the other with blows of the halberd. Some of them tried to escape and ran into the galleries, where they were trapped. Blood flowed through the rooms of the palace. Meanwhile, the troop that had led the attack on the Rue Béthisy headed toward Saint-Germain-des-Prés, where there were other Protestants to take care of. The troop had to cross Île de la Cité to reach the Left Bank, and go through the Buci Gate, which was closed due to royal decree. The key was sought, found, and finally the gate was opened. But by now the sun was fully up and the Protestant leaders, alerted as to what was heading their way, had gathered together on the banks of the Seine on a barren piece of land called Pré-aux-Clercs. They saw the soldiers heading toward them and realized that fighting would be useless. They tried to flee on foot or horse. The chase lasted until Montfort-l’Amaury, where some managed to get out and others were put to the sword.

In Paris, in the Cemetery of the Innocents, the flowering of a hawthorn bush that had been stunted and assumed dead for several years was considered a divine sign. Crowds came to witness this amazing event. The little white flower was proof positive that God Himself was smiling down upon the massacre of these heretics.

The Catholic people of Paris gave themselves over to this horrific nightmare—slaughtering men, women, and children. Coligny’s remains were found and emasculated, then thrown into the Seine, where they rotted for three days before being hanged from the gallows at Montfaucon. The bodies of the dead were disfigured, for it was imperative to show that these were not human beings but demons that needed to be disposed of like garbage. The king tried weakly to stop the killing, which continued for several days and spread to other cities in the realm.

How many died in Paris? Estimates vary, but most historians put the number at three thousand.

During the course of the years that followed, religious tension remained high, and when it was clear that Henry III would die without an heir, and that the throne might pass to the Protestant Henri of Navarre, French Catholics were again enraged. The Holy League and its leader, Duke Henri de Guise, simply could not accept such an outcome and mobilized their forces. On May 14, 1588, early in the morning, the king, hoping to prevent an insurrection, placed four thousand Swiss Guards in Saint-Denis. They occupied the city’s strategic points—the Petit Pont, the Saint-Michel Bridge, the Marché Neuf, the Place de la Grève, and the Cemetery of the Innocents—as well as surrounded the Louvre.

The king planned to arrest and execute the leaders of the Holy League, but before he could do that Parisians rose up to defend them. A citywide militia was formed and led by prominent citizens, representing the city’s sixteen quartiers, consisting of artisans, merchants, and students. They took up arms—halberds, harquebuses, swords, picks, scythes, anything they could get hold of—and stood ready. By midday the population had blocked the city’s main roads by piling up dirt and paving stones. These blockages were called “barricades.” Companies of Swiss Guards in the Cemetery of the Innocents were trapped; others were stranded on the Left Bank; shots were fired and tiles thrown from the roofs. Some fifty Swiss Guards were killed and their bodies piled up in the streets. Finally, not willing to get themselves killed for the king, these mercenaries laid down their arms before the armed masses.

“Courage, men! We’ve been patient long enough! Let us barricade this pathetic excuse for a king in his Louvre!”

Henri III decided to appeal to the leader of the Catholic party, who had spent this “day of barricades” in his home in the Marais. Dressed in his white satin doublet, his rallying sign, the Duc de Guise left his house, took possession of Paris, and deployed his troops before City Hall.

The next day the king emerged from the Louvre. Everyone assumed that he was simply going for his daily walk in the Tuileries. Suddenly he jumped on a horse and galloped out of town, heading toward the cathedral town of Chartres, where he was sure he would find some faithful royalists.

Determined to retake power, Henri III had the Duc de Guise assassinated the following December in Blois; he also arrested the members of the Holy League and laid siege to Paris.

At the end of July 1589, Henri and his troops occupied the heights of Saint-Cloud. Parisians armed themselves, fearing the worst—that the Protestants and the king would seek to avenge Saint Bartholomew. But this fight never happened. On the first of August, a fanatical monk named Jacques Clément plunged his dagger into the stomach of the king.

“You evil monk, you have killed me!” exclaimed Henri III. Though horribly wounded, the king nonetheless took several hours to die.

The sole inheritor of the crown was Henri of Navarre, famous for using the phrase “Paris is well worth a Mass” in order to open the gates of the divided capital. Navarre converted to Catholicism and ascended the throne in 1594, taking the title of Henri IV.

The century ended on a harmonious note. On April 30, 1598, the king of France signed the Edict of Nantes, which, despite its imperfections, recognized Protestantism and represented a step toward religious freedom, putting an end to decades of civil war. Thus did Henri IV give to Paris and to France the most handsome monument of the century, which, despite the agonies and strife, longed to be humanist in character and to be marked by freedom.

It was not to last. A dozen years later, on May 14, 1610, the king’s carriage was headed to the Hôtel de l’Arsenal where his minister Sully was in bed with a sudden fever. On the Rue de la Ferronnerie, the carriage was caught in a traffic jam caused by a hay cart and a wine tank that were blocking the road. To get through, the king’s valets left the king’s carriage, and this was perceived by a fanatical Catholic named François Ravaillac. He believed that God had spoken to him and told him that his mission was to convert the Protestants of the realm to the True Faith. Ravaillac jumped into the royal carriage and stabbed the king twice (the king’s coat of arms scraped the sidewalk and today you can see the mark where the regicide took place). They rushed the king to the Louvre but by then he had lost too much blood. He died the moment he entered the palace.