Old and New Paris: Its History, Its People, and Its Places, v. 2. Edwards Henry Sutherland
are the kinds of death which feed the Morgue? From 1826 to 1846, out of 1745 cases of apparent suicide represented at the Morgue, there were 1,414 deaths by drowning, 114 by hanging, ninety-eight by fire-arms, forty-six through the fumes of charcoal, fifty-six through falls from heights, sixteen through sharp weapons, eleven by poison, seven by crushing beneath vehicles, and 4 by alcohol. About two-thirds of the bodies exposed at the Morgue are never recognised.
There is so much that is beautiful and elevating, so much that is curious and interesting, to be seen in Paris, that a visit to the Morgue – by many persons thought indispensable – should surely, by persons of ordinary taste and feeling, be regarded as time ill-spent. It ought to be sufficient to read of it in Jules Janin’s strange novel already referred to.
CHAPTER VIII.
THE REFORMATION IN PARIS
PERMANENT head-quarters of science and study, the left bank of the Seine was also in the fifteenth century the home of a great religious movement, by which, for some time, the right bank was scarcely touched.
“Few persons,” says M. Athanase Coquerel Fils, “know that the Reformation of the sixteenth century, before it flamed forth in Germany and elsewhere, had already been kindled in the capital of France. It had for its cradle that left bank of the Seine which was then separated from the town and its suburbs, and divided into two quarters subjected to special jurisdictions: the University and the vast territory of the Abbey of Saint-Germain-des-Prés. Was it not natural, despite the jealous vigilance of the Sorbonne, that the Paris schools where Abailard had boldly attacked school-divinity should be the first to awake to the new spiritual life?”
A professor of the college of Cardinal Lemoine Lefèvre, d’Étaples by name, produced in 1512, within the precincts of the Abbey, his “Commentary on St. Paul,” in whose epistles he indicated, five years before Luther, the essential doctrines of the Reformation. This book was dedicated to the powerful abbot of Saint-Germain, Briçonnet, and, under his auspices, assembled in Paris a first group of ardent propagators of the new ideas. During forty-three years the Reformation spread gradually to the University, to the town and to the court, though it maintained its head-quarters in the suburb of Saint-Germain, which people became accustomed to call “the little Geneva,” and which is to-day the most Catholic quarter of Paris. The first Protestant put to death for his religion was one of the pupils of Lefèvre, by name Pauvent, burned on the Place de Grève in 1524. His martyrdom was followed ere long by that of many a Huguenot.
Calvin at this period was studying at Paris, but he could not stay there. The rector of the University, Nicolas Cop, a secret propagator of the Reformation, had commissioned young Calvin to write a discourse which, on a formal occasion, he had to deliver in the church of the Mathurins. Several monks denounced in Parliament the heresies contained in this discourse. The rector fled to Bâle, where he became a pastor. Calvin, it is said, had to escape by a window of one of the colleges.
It was in the Louvre that the Reformation was first publicly preached at Paris. Queen Marguerite of Navarre, sister of Francis I. and the friend of Briçonnet, caused her chaplain and other disciples of Lefèvre to preach before her in that palace. Thereupon the Franciscan friar, Lemaud, declared from his pulpit that she ought to be thrown into the Seine in a sack. The priestly rage which had now been excited soon spread to the people, and the streets began to resound with cries of “Death to the Heretics.” “To be thrown into the river,” says Bèze, writing of this period, “it was only necessary to be called a Huguenot in public, no matter what one’s religion might be.” A series of religious murders were now perpetrated; and Francis I., a bigot like his people, headed one day in 1535 a procession in which he was followed by his three sons, the court, the parliaments, the trade corporations, and the brotherhoods, and of which the object was to burn at the stake six Protestants at six different halting-places. Henri II. took after his father. On one occasion he assisted, from a window of the Hôtel de la Rochepot, Rue Saint-Antoine, at the execution of a Protestant tailor who was burned alive. It is said, however, that the martyr’s eyes, fixed as they were upon him, inspired him with terror, and that this was the last heretic whose dying pangs he ever witnessed.
As yet the Protestants of Paris had neither temple nor pastor. But already they had schools, “hedge schools,” as they were termed, because, prohibited within the city walls, the teachers took refuge in the country.
The secret meetings of the Protestants of Paris were often surprised. In 1557 services were held and the Communion was administered in one of the houses of the Rue Saint-Jacques, beside the building where is now established the Lyceum of Louis the Great. Excited by the seminarists of the Collège Duplessis, the populace besieged the assembly for six hours, stoning many persons as they came out. Several were killed, and 135 prisoners were taken to the Châtelet. Among those who were executed may be mentioned the young and beautiful widow of a member of the Consistory, “who,” says a chronicler of the times, “seated on the tumbril, showed a face of rosy complexion and of excellent beauty.” The poor woman’s tongue had been cut out, which was often done at that time in order to prevent the martyrs from addressing the crowds. As a special mark of favour, the beautiful widow was only scorched in the face and on the feet; and she was then strangled before the body was finally consigned to the flames.
The Protestant poet, Clement Marot, to whom Francis I. had given a house, called the “House of the Bronze Horse,” translated at this epoch some of the Psalms into French verse, and his work obtained extraordinary vogue even at the court. The students, who used to amuse themselves in the evening in the Pré aux Clercs, opposite the Louvre, replaced their customary songs by the Psalms of Marot; and it became the fashion for a time among the lords and ladies of the court to cross the Seine in order to hear the chants of the students. Often they joined in; and the Huguenot king of Navarre, Antoine de Bourbon, was seen walking round the Louvre and singing a psalm at the head of a long procession of courtiers and scholars.
The persecution, which for a time had slackened, was soon revived in all its fury. Marot took flight. Paris had grown too hot for him; “Paris,” he says, in an epigram dated 1537, “Paris, thou hast given me many a fright, even to the point of chasing me to death”: —
“Paris, tu m’as fait maints d’allarmes
Jusqu’à me poursuyvre à la mort.”
In spite of everything the deputies of the reformed church continued to meet at Paris in the Faubourg Saint-Germain, where they held secretly their first national synod in 1559. This assembly, of which not one member would have escaped the block had they been discovered, bound into one corporation the reformed churches of France, until then without cohesion.
Francis II., husband of Mary Queen of Scots, and through her nephew of the Guises, allowed this persecuting family to carry on the cruel work of his father. The illustrious chancellor, Du Bourg, was hanged and burned in the Place de Grève, as to which Voltaire wrote: “This murder was of more service to Protestantism than all the most eloquent works written by its defenders.” Cardinal de Lorraine captured many other victims by surrounding a Protestant hotel in the Rue des Marais Saint-Germain. This street was the head-quarters of the reformed church, and many of its houses communicated with one another by means of mysterious apertures through which the inhabitants passed when threatened with arrest. The street in question, one of the most historic in all Paris, was lately rechristened by the name of Visconti in place of the one which it had borne for more than three centuries, and by which it was known, not only to the first Protestants of Paris, the d’Aubignés and the Du Moulins, but later on to the Duke de la Rochefoucauld and Mme. de Sévigné, to Racine and Voltaire, to Mlle. Clairon and Adrienne Lecouvreur, who all for a considerable time inhabited it, or were accustomed to visit its inhabitants. Meanwhile the reform continued to spread. Coligny and his two brothers, one of whom was a cardinal, joined it openly. These three Châtillons were now violently attacked in the Paris churches, and Jean de Han, a monk, took one day for his text, “Ite in Castellum quod contrà vos est,” which he thus translated; “March upon Châtillon, who is against you.”
On assuming