A real Downie of a day – Place des Vosges edition

After the detour into the life of Beaumarchais (whom I hope you found as interesting as I), it’s time to resume our walk through le Marais with our last stop before lunch at the place that David calls the jewel of the district and the most alluring of Paris’ squares – the Place des Voges. Before I charge into my usual digressions about the Place des Voges and David’s infatuation with it, I’ll share my first impression of the square. We entered from the north walking south along rue de Béarn.

The arch passes beneath the queen’s apartment and you can see the trees of the square beyond. I’m using the photo below from Google Street View to provide a look back whence we came and to better emphasize what I found so striking about the Place.

And this, also from Google Street View, after crossing the street called Place des Vosges and looking back at the façade of the queen’s apartment that faces the square.

My first thought was, “It’s in color!” You see, among my earliest impressions of Paris was that the city is largely monochromatic. Nearly all the buildings seemed to fall within a very narrow color band of yellow sandstone and if you look for that trait in the images above – either my photo or the screen capture from Google Maps – you should see what I mean. Walking into the park of the Place de Vosges and being surrounded by all this brickwork (or at least what looks like brickwork) felt almost liberating – a bit like Dorothy leaving the sepia tones of Kansas and arriving in the technicolor Land of Oz.

Le Swamp Royale.

In nearly every history you might read of the the district known as le Marais, you’ll learn that this area on the right bank of the Seine was at one time a swamp or, in French un marais. Learn this simple fact, et voilà, you’ve learned the etymology of the district’s name. Perhaps you have. But slog your way past the reeds and paddle more deeply into the marsh and you’ll find another possible explanation and it’s one that, at least in this case, I think needs to be reclaimed.

The first piece of evidence we need to examine comes from the late seventh century. In that era monks had constructed a church on a hill, the Monceau Saint-Gervais, close to the Place de Grève. This construction suggests that the land had been at least partially reclaimed sometime prior to the year 700 CE. In 879, Charles II (the Bald) continued the reclamation process when he donated the land to a religious order that began continuously draining the marshes over the next several centuries slowly transforming the land.

I’m now going to ask you to recall a bit of information from an early post about this trip – that the seat of Paris’ government, the Hôtel de Ville, was established in 1357 at the Place de Grève a kilometer or so west of our current location in the Place des Vosges. This increased the residential and commercial activity of the formerly swampy area and, to accommodate the agricultural needs of a growing city, these former marshes became used for market gardening or, in French, ‘culture maraîchère‘. Thus, it can be argued that this land use had a plausible role in planting the permanent name of the district. And now you know the rest of the story.

Looking at the district throughout the fourteenth century we find it was a busy time for the now filled Marais. The Hôtel de Sens was constructed in 1345 then appropriated by Charles V for use as part of his royal getaway – the Hôtel Saint-Pol. In 1388, Pierre d’Orgemont a feudal lord under Charles VI, rebuilt a house that would become part of a larger complex called the Hôtel des Tournelles that was spread over more than eight hectares. In 1550, the area looked like this (As we have seen on other maps of the era, this map is also oriented with east at the top.):

Through a complicated series of inheritances, the Hôtel des Tournelles passed into the possession of Charles VI in 1417. Over the generations, different kings would stay there for different lengths of time. One of those monarchs was Henri II who would not only celebrate his coronation there in 1547 but would die there in 1559.

The latter happened on the event of a particularly extravagant party hosted by Henri to celebrate the double wedding of Élisabeth of France to Philip II of Spain and the King’s sister, Marguerite to the Duke of Savoy. Henri was taking part in a joust with Gabriel de Lorges de Montgomery the captain of his Scots Guards. (The Garde Écossaise was an elite Scottish Military unit established in 1418 by Charles VII that served as bodyguards to the French monarchy.) Montgomery’s lance dislodged Henri’s helmet shattering as it did so. A shard from the lance pierced the king’s eye and he died ten days later.

(In an interesting side note, the section of the wall built by Philippe-Auguste that David pointed out to us at the beginning of our walk, is known as Montgomery Tower because the captain was held there for a short time after accidentally killing Henri. In a curious coincidence, the Auld Alliance between Scotland and France dating from 1295 {that I mentioned in the post about la Roche-Guyon} ended with the Endinburgh Treaty which was signed just five days short of the first anniversary of the death of Henri II. )

Henri’s widow, Catherine de’ Medici, playing the part of the grief stricken spouse to the hilt, ordered the destruction of the Hôtel des Tournelles using her authority as queen regent for her underage sons. In truth, not only did she despise its architecture but Catherine had other reasons to dislike the site – the main one being that Henry had used it to lodge his mistress Diane de Poitiers. (If you’re not familiar with the story of Catherine de’ Medici, it’s certainly worth looking into.)

Note: In keeping with my 2022-2023 reformation of the blog into shorter entries, backdated to maintain their sequence, any comments on this post might pertain to its new configuration. See the full explanation in the post Conventions and Conversions.