The Invention of Paris by Eric Hazan Page A

Petit-Musc andde la Cerisaie.’ 69 Like all of the Marais that was built in the Renaissance, this part of the Saint-Paul quarter, despite the street names that seem taken from an illuminated manuscript, was designed in a modern fashion: the plots are regular, and the streets laid out in a grid, in contrast with the medieval lattice beside the Hôtel de Sens, Rue des Nonnains-d’Hyères and Rue de l’Ave-Maria.
    The destruction of the Hôtel des Tournelles was not provoked by financial difficulties but by an accident: in 1559, while a tournament was being held in Rue Saint-Antoine to celebrate the marriage of the princesses, Henri II was mortally wounded in front of the palace by the blow of a lance wielded by Gabriel de Montgomery, ‘the fairest man and the best man-at-arms of that time’, according to Sauval. Catherine de Médicis, his widow, decided to raze the hotel to the ground, and moved into her new hotel close to the Halles. The abandoned park was for many years the site of a horse market.
    During this time, however, in the more central part of the Marais, a new quarter was constructed between the two fortifications – the wall of Philippe Auguste around the central and denser part of the city, and the wall of Charles V, which ran through open fields. Once the ‘false gates’ of the old fortifications were crossed, you entered a region where gardeners peacefully cultivated their cabbages and leeks. This was a paradise for property developers, as demand was strong in the first half of the sixteenth century, before the Wars of Religion. François I set the example by dividing up the Hôtel de Tancarville, whose lands were located on each side of the wall of Phillipe Auguste, at the corner of Rue Vieille-du-Temple and Rue 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 truepatriot, 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