every book printed by royal privilege should be deposited
at the royal library. After Gering's death the forty presses then
working in Paris were reduced to twenty-four, in order that every
printer might have sufficient work to live by and not be tempted by
poverty to print prohibited books or execute cheap and inferior
printing.

CHAPTER XI

_Francis I.--The Renaissance at Paris_

The advent of the printing-press and the opening of a Greek
lectureship by Gregory Tyhernas and Hermonymus of Sparta at the
Sorbonne warns us that we are at the end of an epoch. With the
accession of Charles VIII. and the beginning of the Italian wars a new
era is inaugurated. Gothic architecture had reached its final
development and structural perfection, in the flowing lines of the
flamboyant style;[99] painting and sculpture, both in subject and
expression, assume a new aspect. The diffusion of ancient literature
and the discovery of a new world, open wider horizons to men's minds,
and human thought and human activity are directed towards other, and
not always nobler, ideals. Mediaevalism passes away and Paris begins to
clothe herself in a new vesture of stone.

[Footnote 99: Flamboyant windows were a natural, technical development
of Gothic. The aim of the later builders was to facilitate the
draining away of the water which the old mullioned windows used to
retain.]

The Paris of the fifteenth century was a triple city of overhanging
timbered houses, "thick as ears of corn in a wheatfield," of narrow,
crooked streets,[100] unsavoury enough, yet purified by the vast open
spaces and gardens of the monasteries, from which emerged the
innumerable spires and towers of her churches and palaces and
colleges. In the centre was the legal and ecclesiastical Cite, with
its magnificent Palais de Justice; its cathedral and a score of fair
churches enclosed in the island, which resembled a great ship moored
to the banks of the Seine by five bridges all crowded with houses. One
of the most curious characteristics of Old Paris was the absence of
any view of the river, for a man might traverse its streets and
bridges without catching a glimpse of the Seine.

[Footnote 100: The drainage of an old city was offensive to the smell
rather than essentially insanitary. "Mediaeval sewers," says Dr.
Charles Creighton in his _History of Epidemics in Britain_, pp. 323-4,
"were banked-up water-courses ... freely open to the greatest of all
purifying