Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: CHAPTER II PARIS IN THE REIGN OF LOUIS XIII.—RICHELIEU- MARIE DE MEDECIS " What is our life but a sudden flight of winged facts or events 1 In splendid variety these changes come, all putting questions to the human spirit." A setting for our picture, we must imagine the Paris, the quarter of St. Germain, and the Palaces of the Grand and Petit Luxembourg in the last days of Louis XIII. and Richelieu—that Paris of ill-paved, ill-lighted streets, of narrow boundaries, of licence and uproar, of bravado and brawls. A city of mud, a city of dirt, a city of mire! Yet in the midst of the mud and the dirt, the gloom and the confusion, rose a few stately buildings ; and out of the squalor, from behind the menacing face of ugly towers and battlements, there peeped forth many lovely gardens: the Tuileries, the Cours la Reine, the Jardin des Plantes and the Palais Royal. And thus Paris appeared, says Dulaure, like a poor proud man wearing gilded garments on top of dirty linen peopled by vermin! The Louvre dominated all ; as in the days of Charles VII. it was still the stronghold of royalty; still its name the oak round which were entwined the thick parasites of royal authority and power. And it is as difficult to picture the Louvre of the early seventeenth century as to imagine anything but a modern Paris. Yet how different from the city of broad boulevards, of asphalted, shaded streets, of order and cleanliness, known to the traveller of our day, was the still mediaeval town upon which Louis XIII. looked down on that memorable day in 1617 when he declared his kingship and saw his mother, the Queen Regent, depart into exile! From where he stood, on the terrace of his moated chateau—at once a fortress, a treasury, a palace and a prison, as it is described in the old books —he saw...