THE OLD LOUVRE AND ITS HISTORY

A stroll by the banks of the Seine will review much of the history of the capital, as much of it as was bound up with Notre Dame, the Louvre and the Palais de la Cite (now the Palais de Justice), and that was a great deal, even in mediaeval and Renaissance times.

The life of the Louvre was Paris; the life of Paris that of the nation; and the life of the nation that of the people. This even the Parisians of to-day will tell you. It is scant acknowledgment of the provinces to be sure, but what would you? The French capital is much more the capital of France than London is of England, or Washington of America leaving politics out of the question.

Paris before the conquest by the Franks was practically only the Seine-surrounded isle known as Lutetia, and later as “La Cite,” and the slight overflow which crept up the slopes of the Montagne de la Sainte Genevieve. From the Chatelet to the Louvre was a damp, murky swamp called, even in the moyen-age, Les Champeaux, meaning the Little Fields, but swampy ones, as inferred by studying the evolution of the name still further.

A rapid rivulet descended from Menilmontant and mingled with the Seine somewhere near the Garden of the Tuileries.

Clovis and his Franks attacked the city opposite the isle, and, upon the actual achievement of their conquest, threw up an entrenched camp on the approved Roman plan in what is now the courtyard of the old Louvre, and filled the moat with the waters of this rivulet. The ensemble was, according to certain authorities, baptized the Louvre, or Lower, meaning a fortified camp. This entrenchment was made necessary in order that the Franks might sustain themselves against the Gallo-Roman occupants of Lutetia, and in time enabled them to acquire the whole surrounding region for their own dominion. This the Lower, or Louvre, made possible, and it is well deserved that its name should be thus perpetuated, though actually the origin of the name is in debate, as will be seen by a further explanation which follows.

Little by little this half-barbaric camp in contradistinction to the more solid works of the Romans became a placefort, then a chateau, then a palace and, finally, as the young lady tourist said, an art museum. Well, at any rate, it was a dignified evolution.

Two Louvres disappeared before the crystallization of the present rather irregularly cut gem. From the Merovingians dates the Louvre des Champs, the hostile, militant Louvre, with its high wood and stone tower, familiar only in old engravings. After this the moyen-age Louvre, attributable to Saint Louis and Charles V, with its great tower, its thick walls of stone and its deep-dug moats, came into being. With Francis I came a more sympathetic, a more subtle era of architectural display, a softening of outlines and an interpolation of flowering gables. It was thus that was born that noble monument known as the New Louvre, which combined all the arts and graces of a fastidious ambition.

Nothing remains of the old Louverie (to which the name had become corrupted) which Philippe Auguste early in the thirteenth century caused to be turned into an ambitious quadrangular castle from a somewhat more humble establishment which had evolved itself on the site of the Frankish camp, save the white marble outline sunken in the pavement of the courtyard of the palace of to-day. By destiny this palace, set down in the very heart of Paris, was to dominate everything round about. From the date of its birth, and since that time, it has had no rivals among Paris or suburban palaces. Its very situation compelled the playing of an auspicious part, and the Seine flowing swiftly by its ramparts added no small charm to the fêtes and ceremonies of both the Louvre and the Tuileries.

Never was a great river so allied with the life of a royal capital; never a stream so in harmony with other civic beauties as is the Seine with Paris. When Henri II entered Paris after his Sacrament he contemplated a water-festival on the Seine, which was to extend from the walls of the Louvre to the towers of Notre Dame, a festival with such elaborate decorations as had never been known in the French capital.

The kings of France after their Sacrament entered the Louvre by the quay-side entrance, followed by their cortege of gayly caparisoned cavaliers and gilded coaches with personages of all ranks in doublet and robe, cape and doublet. The scintillating of gold lace and burnished coats gave a brilliance which rivalled that of the sun.

No sooner had the cavalcade entered the gates of the Louvre than it came out again to participate in the day and night festival, which had the bosom of the Seine for its stage and its bridges and banks for the act drop and the wings.

The receptions of Ambassadors, the baptisms of royalties, royal marriages and celebrations of victories, or treaties, were all feted in the same manner.

Napoleon glorified the Peace of Amiens under similar conditions, and there is scarce a chronicler of any reign but that recounts the part played by the Seine in the ceremonies of the court of the New and Old Louvre.

It was amid a setting which lent itself so readily to all this that the Old Louvre, which was rebuilt by Francis I, first came to its glory.

The origin of the name Louvre has still other interpretation from that previously given. It seems to be a question of grave doubt among the savants, but because the note is an interesting one it is here reproduced. The name may have been derived as well from the word oeuvre, from the Latin opus; it may have been evolved from lupara, or louverie (place of wolves), which seems improbable. It may have had its evolution from either one of these origins, or it may not.

Anglo-Saxons may be proud of the fact that certain French savants have acknowledged that the name of the most celebrated of all Paris palaces is a derivation from a word belonging to their tongue and meaning habitation. This, then, is another version and one may choose that which is most to his liking, or may go back and show his preference for lower, meaning a fortified place.

A palace something more elaborate than a mere habitation stood on the same site in the twelfth century, a work which, under the energies of Philippe Auguste, in 1204 began to grow to still more splendid proportions, though infinitesimal one may well conclude as compared with the mass which all Paris knows to-day under the inclusive appellation of “The Louvre.”

The Paris of Philippe Auguste was already a city of a hundred and twenty thousand inhabitants, with mean houses on every side and little pretense at even primitive comforts or conveniences. This far-seeing monarch laid hand first on the great citadel tower of the fortified lower, added to its flanking walls and built a circling rampart around the capital itself. It is recounted that the rumbling carts, sinking deep in mud and plowing through foot-deep dust beneath the palace windows, annoyed the monarch so much that he instituted what must have been the first city paving work on record, and commanded that all the chief thoroughfares passing near the Louvre should be paved with cobbles. This was real municipal improvement. He was a Solon among his kind for, since that day, it has been a sine qua non that for the well-keeping of city streets they must be paved, and, though cobblestones have since gone out of fashion, it was this monarch who first showed us how to do it.

The Louvre of Philippe Auguste was the most imposing edifice of the Paris of its time. To no little extent was this imposing outline due to its great central tower, the maîtresse, which was surrounded by twenty-three dames d’honneur, without counting numberless tourelles. This hydra-towered giant palace was the real guardian of the Paris of mediaevalism, as its successor is indeed the real centre of the Paris of to-day.

The city was but an immense mass of low-lying gable-roofed houses, whose crowning apex was the sky-line of the Louvre, with that of Tournelles only less prominent to the north, and that of La Cite hard by on the island where the Palais de Justice and Notre Dame now stand.

Before the hand of Francis fell upon the Louvre it was but an isolated stronghold a combined castle, prison and palace, gloomy, foreboding and surrounded by moats and ramparts almost impassable. Philippe Auguste built well and made of it an admirable and imposing castle and a place of defence, and a defence it was, and not much more.

For its time it was of great proportions and of an ideal situation from a strategic point of view; far more so than the isolated Palais de la Cite in the middle of the Seine.

Four gates led out from the inner courtyard of the Old Louvre: one to the Seine; one to the south, facing Saint Germain l’Auxerrois; another towards the site of the later Tuileries; and the other to about where the Rue Marengo cuts the Rue de Rivoli of to-day.

With the endorsement given it by Philippe Auguste the Louvre now became the official residence of the kings of the Capetian race, whereas previously they had dwelt but intermittently at Paris, chiefly in the Palais de la Cite.

The monarch, as if to test the efficiency of his new residence as a stronghold, made a dungeon tower, his greatest constructive achievement until he built the castle of Gisors, and in the tower imprisoned the Comte de Flandre, whom he had taken prisoner at Bouvines. Louis IX (Saint Louis), in his turn, built a spacious annex to Philippe Auguste’s Louvre, to which he attached his name.

Charles V totally changed the aspect of the palace from what it had formerly been half-fortress, half-residence and made of it a veritable palace in truth as well as in name, by the addition of numerous dependencies.

Within a tower which was built during the reign of this monarch, called the Tour de la Librairie, he assembled his royal bibelots and founded what was afterwards known as the Bibliotheque du Louvre, the egg from which was hatched the present magnificently endowed Bibliotheque Nationale in the Rue Richelieu.

It is related that in 1373 the valet-de-chambre of Charles V made a catalogue of the nine hundred and ten volumes which formed this collection, an immense number for the time when it is known that his predecessor, Jean-le-Bon, possessed but seven volumes of history and four devotional books as his entire literary treasure.

This seems to be a bibliographical note of interest which has hitherto been overlooked. Charles V was evidently a man of taste, or he would not have built so well, though all is hearsay, as not a fragment remains of the work upon which he spent his talents and energies.

From the death of Charles V, in 1364, until 1557 the Louvre by some caprice ceased to be a permanent royal residence. At the latter epoch the ambitious, art-loving Francis I conceived the idea that here was a wealth of scaffolding upon which to graft some of his Renaissance luxuries and, by a process of “restoration” (perhaps an unfortunate word for him to have employed, since it meant the razing of the fine tower built by Charles V), added somewhat to the splendours thereof, though in a fickle moment, as was his wont, allowed a gap of a dozen years to intervene between the outlining of his project and the terrifically earnest work which finally resulted in the magnificent structure accredited to him, though indeed it meant the demolition of the original edifice.

It was at this period that Charles V entered into the ambitious part which Francis was to henceforth play in the Louvre, so perhaps the interruption was pardonable.