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Parisians, of course, have always known this, and during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries routinely overwhelmed foreign dignitaries by escorting them to the Place before returning them to the business of their visit. What must have struck these foreigners was something perhaps more dazzling and arresting than French magnificence or French architecture. For the Place des Vosges is not magnificent in the way, say, Versailles, or the Louvre, or the Palais Royal are magnificent. And the thirty-six cloned, slate-roofed, redbrick and white-stone “row house” pavilions—with the interconnecting arcades, or promenoir, running the length of all four sidewalks of a square no larger than the size of a Manhattan city block—can by no stretch of the imagination be called a miracle of seventeenth-century architecture. As with any cour carrée, what is striking is not necessarily each unit but the repetition thirty-six times of the same unit, many of which already boast a small square courtyard within. It is the symmetry of the square that casts a spell, not each segment—except that here the symmetry is projected on so grand a scale that it ends up being as disorienting and as humbling as quadratic symmetry is in Descartes or contrapuntal harmonies are in Bach. If the French have nursed an unflagging fondness for Cartesian models, it is not because they thought nature was framed in quadrants but, rather, because their desire to fathom it, to harness it, and ultimately to explain it as best they could led them to chop up everything into pairs and units of two. Drawing and quartering may have been one of the worst forms of execution, but the French mania for symmetry has also given us palaces and gardens and the most spectacular urban planning imaginable, the way it gave us something that the French have treasured since long before the Enlightenment and of which they are still unable to divest themselves even when they pretend to try: a passion for clarity.

It is hard to think of anyone who lived on or around the Place des Vosges during the first half of the seventeenth century who didn’t treasure this one passion above all others. Even in their loves—hapless and tumultuous and so profoundly tragic as they almost always turned out to be—the French displayed intense levelheadedness when they came to write about them. They had to dissect what they felt, or what they remembered feeling, or what they feared others thought about their feelings. They were intellectuals in the purest—and perhaps coarsest—sense of the word. It was not what they saw that was clear; human passions seldom are. It was how they expressed what they saw that was so fiercely lucid. In the end, they preferred dissecting human foibles to doing anything about them. They chatted their way from one salon to the next, and on the Place des Vosges this was not difficult to do. Almost every pavilion on the square had a précieuse eager to host her little salon, or ruelle, in her bedroom. It is difficult to know whether there was more action than talk in these intimate ruelles. What is known is that everyone excelled at turning everything into talk. They intellectualized everything.

And it shows everywhere. Charles Le Brun, an ardent disciple of Descartes, remains one of the principal decorators of the Place des Vosges. His style is frequently considered Baroque; yet few would argue that if anything was alien to the Baroque sensibility it was Cartesian thinking. On the Place des Vosges, the dominance of intellect over excess is never hard to detect. Yet there are still telltale signs of sublimated trouble. The street level and first and second floors of every pavilion may have been the picture of architectural harmony and were built according to very strict specification; there were to be no deviations from the model supplied by King Henry IV’s designers (often thought to be Androuet du Cerceau and Claude Chastillon). But the dormer windows on the top floors do not always match; they are each builder