Old places

One of the things I am really looking forward to about Paris is all of its old buildings. I grew up in Phoenix, where almost everything seemed to have been built since World War II. When I was a child, if a building was 50 years old, it was a really old building. (The Arizona desert has thousands of years of history, of course, but the streets of the city I walked as a child, and the buildings I saw, seemed to have sprung up only yesterday, and indeed many of them had.) As I moved east in the US, I saw older and older places, culminating in a visit to Jamestown, Virginia. It's a logical next step to keep going east to Europe, and I'm glad I've finally got the opportunity to do that.

One thing that old cities have is a lot of layers of context and history. I recently read a short history of Paris, and particularly of its buildings and monuments. One story that particularly caught my eye was that of a statue of King Henri IV on Pont Neuf, the new bridge, which is now supposedly the oldest bridge in the city (in terms of physical structures anyway; I think other bridges may have been located at one spot under one name for longer, but the originals of those bridges are long gone). King Henri was the king who renounced Protestantism in favor of Catholicism and was supposed to have claimed that Paris was well worth a Mass; he was humane enough to enact the Edict of Nantes, which gave Huguenots the freedom to practice their religion without fear of persecution. 

When he died, his widow, Marie de Médici, commissioned a statue of him on a horse for the Pont Neuf, which actually was new at the time. During the Revolution, the statue was melted down for cannon. (The French call Henri IV "le bon roi Henri," but perhaps even a bon roi did not seem all that bon at the time.) When the monarchy was restored, a statue of Napoleon (according to some sources) or Louis Desaix, a nobleman who escaped death during the Revolution and wound up fighting for the Republic (according to Wikipedia) was melted down to replace the statue of Henri IV. The book I read claimed that the fellow who made the new statue of Henri IV secretly sympathized with Napoleon and placed a small bronze of Napoleon and "other seditious artifacts" in the hollow belly of the horse. Online sources list several much more pedestrian documents that are supposedly inside the horse (basically the equivalent of the plaque on modern buildings that lists the donors and the architect). Either way, I am looking forward to seeing this statue, wondering what's inside, and thinking of both the religious upheavals of the 16th and early 17th centuries, which Henri IV helped end, and the Revolution and its aftermath.

(My source for the story of the statue is Paris From the Ground Up by James H. S. McGregor, Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press, 2009.)