des Rosiers. The religious communities – in particular Saint-Catherine-du-Val-des-Écoliers, which owned the wide fields of Sainte-Catherine, towards Rue Payenne – likewise sold off their lands for building.70 The movement extended along Rue Barbette and Rue Elzévir. A modern quarter was built there, much influenced by the new taste that came in from Italy, the Hôtel Carnavalet being a sumptuous example among the buildings that remain.
This surge, held back for a long while by the Wars of Religion, the League, and the terrible siege, got under way again when Henri IV entered Paris in 1594. Through the voice of the provost marshal, he proclaimed that ‘his intention is to spend years in this city, and live there like a true patriot, to make this city beautiful, tranquil, and full of all the conveniences and ornaments that will be possible, desiring the completion of the Pont-Neuf and the restoration of fountains . . . even desiring to make a whole world of this city and a wonder of the world, in which respect he displays towards us a love that is more than fatherly’.71
What was then lacking in the Marais – and in Paris more generally – was a large square ‘for the inhabitants of our city, who are most tightly pressed in their houses owing to the multitude of people who arrive from all directions’.72 Henri IV and Sully had the idea of constructing this Place Royale (now the Place des Vosges) on the Parc des Tournelles, which had been neglected, being far from the centre. And to kill two birds with one stone, the king decided to establish on the north side of the square a manufactory for silk sheets embroidered with gold and silver thread, a luxury product that had up till then been imported from Milan:
And indeed in 1605 those who were to undertake these manufactories had put up a large building that occupied all of one side. The king for his part marked out there a large place some seventy-two yards square which he desired to be known as the Place Royale, and he gave sites on the three other sides for one gold écu in tax (cens), in return for covering them with pavilions according to the elevations to be supplied to them. As well as this, he had the streets leading to them widened and began at his own expense both the royal pavilion, placed at the end of Rue Royale [now de Birague], and the pavilion of the queen, placed at the end of Rue du Parc-Royal . . . Each pavilion consisted of three storeys, all built in brick, with stone arches, piers, embrasures, entablatures and pillars, all covered with a slate roof in two sections, ending in a ridge garnished with lead. The red of the brick, the white of the stone and the black of the slate and the lead made such an agreeable mixture or shading of colours . . . that it has since been used even for the houses of the bourgeois.73
Elegant shops were established under the arches, but there were also bawdy houses (tripots), as later at the Palais-Royal, and it became a favourite place for prostitutes.74 The centre of the square, inaugurated by Louis XIII at the great festival of 1612, was flat, sandy, and clear; it was used as a ground for equestrian events, tournaments, tilting, and sometimes also for duels, some of which have remained famous.75
Not far from here, Henri IV and Sully had conceived another great site, a kind of administrative complex that would house the Grand Conseil as well as other bodies. There was an opportunity to be had, as the grand prior of the Temple was dividing up his censive. The projected ‘Place de France’ was a semicircle whose diameter – close to two hundred metres – would coincide with the fortifications. A new royal gate, between Rue du Pont-aux-Choux and Rue des Filles-du-Calvaire, opened towards the road to Meaux and Germany. Six streets radiated from the place in the direction of the city, bearing the names of those provinces that were seats of sovereign courts – the first example, Sauval says, of streets named geographically. The design of diverging roads from a city gate was fashionable at the time, after the trident from the Porta del Popolo in Rome.76 The project came to an end with the death of Henri IV, but it persists in the name of certain streets (Poitou, Picardie, Saintonge, Perche, Normandie . . .), which, even if they do not correspond to the original plan, perpetuate its toponomy. The initial design is also recalled by the radial course of Rue de Bretagne, and especially the semicircle formed by Rue Debelleyme. There also remains the market of Les Enfants-Rouges,77 intended to supply these large establishments. Ravaillac had a greater influence than is generally imagined on the Paris cityscape, for if this great project had been concluded, the centre of gravity would have been permanently shifted eastward.
Since the timescale of places is neither continuous nor homogeneous, a quarter can suddenly gather speed, so that events that previously took two centuries now happen in twenty years. With the Place Royale and its surroundings, this was the first time that a Paris quarter was specifically designed for what was not yet called flânerie, a ‘promenade’ for a society that was reviving after the nightmare of the Wars of Religion. There was no peace as yet: in 1636, the very time when the fashion for Spain was at its height and Le Cid was having its premiere in Paris, the Spanish army had reached Corbie, three days’ march from the city; it was a good while yet until the danger was allayed, after the battle of Rocroi. Nor was there religious tolerance: in 1614, in a memorandum from the Ville de Paris to the États Généraux, the desire was expressed that Jews, Anabaptists and others not professing the Catholic faith, or the reformed religion ‘tolerated by the edicts’, should be put to death.78 All the same, a kind of love affair developed between the new quarter and a certain cultivated aristocracy, an open-minded haute bourgeoisie, and an intellectual and artistic milieu that was rapidly expanding. One of Corneille’s first plays was La Place Royale (1635); it did not actually deal with the place itself, but it is revealing that he chose this title for a play about fashionable youth.79 Ten years later, when the valet of Dorante, Corneille’s eponymous Liar, is charged with inquiring about a pleasant encounter in the street: ‘The coachman’s tongue has done its duty well/The fairest of the two, he says, is my mistress,/She lives on the place, and her name is Lucrèce.’/ ‘What place?’ ‘Royale, and the other lives there too.’ Paul Scarron, leaving the quarter, said his Adieux aux Marets et à la place Royale: ‘Farewell then until after the fair/When you shall see me return/For who can stand living for long /So far from the Place Royale?/Farewell fine place where only live/Persons of true elite,/And farewell such illustrious place/The lustre of an illustrious city.’
It was in the Marais that the intelligentsia of baroque Paris held their gatherings. In Rue de Béarn, behind the Place Royale, the new convent of the Minimes had just been completed, with a chapel decorated by Vouet, La Hyre and Champaigne, and a doorway that was seen as François Mansart’s masterpiece. Père Mersenne – ‘a savant in whom there was more than in all the universities together’, as Hobbes said of him in his own Paris exile – gave hospitality to Descartes for a number of months, before his move to Holland. Mersenne also received Gérard Desargues, a geometer who specialized in the design of staircases, along with his young student, Blaise Pascal, who lived not far away on Rue de Touraine. This was a curious establishment, in the lead not just in the struggle against misguided thinkers – the ‘confrérie des bouteilles’, Théophile de Viau, Saint-Amant, Guez de Balzac – but also in scientific research, with a library of 25,000 volumes. At the Hôtel de Montmort, on Rue du Temple, you could meet Huygens, Gassendi (who bequeathed Galileo’s personal telescope to Hubert de Montmort, counsellor to the Parlement), or Claude Tardy, the doctor who introduced into France William Harvey’s new ideas on the circulation of the blood and the role of the heart: there was a passionate controversy in the salons between the ‘circulationists’ and the ‘anti-circulationists’ who defended Galien’s system. Every Monday, Lamoignon de Malesherbes would invite writers to his hôtel on Rue Pavée80 – Racine, Bouleau, La Rochefoucauld, Bourdaloue – often also joined by Guy Patin, doctor to the king and professor at the Collège de France.
Women held salons as well. Some of them were what would later be called demi-mondaines: Marion Delorme, whose salon was on the Place Royale, and Ninon de Lenclos, whose residence on Rue des Tournelles was the rendezvous of the ‘libertines’, i.e., freethinkers, though this did not prevent her from having among her regulars La Rochefoucauld and Mme de Lafayette, Boileau, Mignard, and Lully. Legend has it that Molière read his Tartuffe here for the first time, before La
