Paris: The Novel

de Médicis’s daughter, back in 1572, had not been a success. Henry and his wife had been cheerfully unfaithful to each other and in the end the pope had obligingly annulled their marriage. They remained friends, however, and Henry had recently built her a splendid palace near the Louvre. For years he had lived only with his mistresses. But finally he had married yet another of the Médicis family.
    Marie de Médicis was not among his women today, however.
    “They say her conversation’s pretty limited,” Robert informed his brother. “But she is wonderful at breeding children.” The Bourbons didn’t want to run out of heirs like their Valois cousins.
    A courtier came to intercept them, remembered Robert, greeted Alain most amiably and led them toward the king. As he approached, Alain had a chance to observe the monarch. His curly hair and pointed beard were graying and clipped short. His face was full of intelligence and cunning, and amusement. He wasn’t especially tall, but he held himself very erect. He reminded Alain of a ram entering a field of sheep.
    “Remember the fourth thing I told you,” whispered Robert. The king was only ten paces away now.
    And then it hit them. Robert smiled. Alain also tried to smile, but it wasn’t easy.
    For he had just smelled the king.
    King Henry IV stank. He did not like to wash. The acrid smell of stale sweat that emanated from his body was striking even in an age when baths were rare. As for his breath … the combination of garlic, fish, meat and wine consumed over days, and never washed out of his mouth, produced a halitosis so thick, so putrid, that as Alain drew close, he almost retched.
    How in the world, he wondered, can he stink so badly and still keep all these women?
    But he made his deepest bows and found the king’s swarthy, intelligent face looking at him with every sign of approval.
    “Welcome to Paris,” the monarch said genially. “Do you like it?”
    “Most certainly, Your Majesty.”
    “Have you seen my bridge?”
    “I understand, Your Majesty, that they started building it wide, to support the usual houses, but that you forbade them to build any houses. I think it will look magnificent.”
    “Excellent. Whoever told you to say that was quite right.” The king laughed. Alain almost winced as the breath reached him, but managed to smile instead. “Rather than putting houses on the bridge and spoiling the view, I intend to build some splendid town houses on the triangle of land where the bridge crosses the tip of the island.” The king nodded with satisfaction. “And as you see,” he continued, making a sweeping gesture toward the long building behind him, “we are building in the Louvre as well.”
    It had to be confessed, the huge palace was still a mess. During the course of the last century, the kings of France had discovered that it was one thing to abandon the old royal palace on the Île de la Cité for the huge site around the Louvre, but it was another to decide what they wanted once they got there.
    Not that anyone wanted to move back to the island. Apart from the Gothic glories of the Sainte-Chapelle, the old palace on the Île de la Cité had turned into a huge warren of law courts, dungeons and royal offices. But over at the Louvre, each generation seemed determined to make their mark, and the result was a failure of unity.
    The central, Renaissance palace was promising, but Catherine de Médicis had built a palace of her own at the far end of the Tuileries, cutting off what might have been a noble view toward the west. A much better enterprise, which King Henry had now taken in hand personally, was the splendid series of galleries running westward from the Renaissance palace along the bank of the Seine. It ran for a quarter of a mile.
    “Some people say,” Robert had told his brother, “that if there’s ever serious trouble, King Henry reckons he can run along the galleries and escape from a discreet side door at the western end. Like some of the palaces in Florence.”
    More likely, the galleries were to be a noble setting for impressing visiting foreigners with the splendors of the royal art collections.
    So when the king turned to Alain now and asked him, “Do you know what is so important about the long gallery?” Alain went for the art collection.
    “Not at all. It’s the lower floor that’s the best thing about this new wing. Do you know what I’m going to use it for? Workshops. Artists’ studios.