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Henry IV, who favored the building of the Place, remains the most beloved French king: le bon roi or le vert galant (the ladies’ man), as he is traditionally called, famous for his wit, good cheer, sound judgment, and all-around hearty appetite. Every French peasant, he said, would have a chicken in his pot each Sunday. When told that he could become a French king provided he converted from Protestantism to Catholicism, he did not bat an eyelash. Paris, he declared, was well worth a Mass. Like the Place Dauphine, the square’s cousin on Île de la Cité, the Place des Vosges is built in a style that is recognizably Henry IV: all brick and stone facings, brick being, like the personality of Henry IV, down-to-earth, practical, basic, made for all times and all seasons. Though the Place des Vosges is elegant and posh, and is hardly spare, there is nothing palatial here. It also reflects the spirit of the high-ranking officials, entrepreneurs, and financiers to whom the king and his finance minister, Sully, had parceled out the land in 1605 on condition that each build a home, at his own expense, according to a predetermined design. Some of them were born rich; others had made vast fortunes and, no doubt, intended both to keep them and to flaunt them. But like their king, they were neither garish nor gaudy; wealth hadn’t gone to their heads, just as power hadn’t gone to their king’s. Both forms of intoxication were due to happen, of course, but in another generation and under a very different monarch: Henry IV’s grandson Louis XIV, the Sun King.

The grounds on which Henry IV decided to build the new square had once been the site of the Hôtel des Tournelles, famous for its turrets, where King Henry II had died in 1559 as a result of a wound inflicted during a friendly joust with a man bearing the rather foreign-sounding name of Gabriel de Montgomery. Following Henry II’s death, his wife, Catherine de Médicis, had the Hôtel des Tournelles razed. To this day, Catherine is regarded as a mean, cunning, and vindictive queen, whose ugliest deed was the St. Bartholomew’s Day Massacre of 1572, during which hundreds of French Protestants were put to the sword. It is another one of those ironies of history that the Protestant Henry IV, who had hoped to placate French Catholics by marrying Catherine and Henry II’s daughter Queen Margot, was not only unable to forestall the massacre, which erupted immediately after his wedding, but would himself be felled by a religious fanatic forty years later, a few blocks from where Henry II had died. He thus did not live to see his square completed.

Henry IV and Sully were far too practical to be called visionaries, but surely there must have been something of the visionary in each. They had originally intended the arcades to house common tradesmen, cloth manufacturers, and skilled foreign workers, most likely subsidized by the government. The idea was a good one, since Sully, like France’s other finance ministers, had had the wisdom to attract foreign workers to help France produce domestically and ultimately export what it would otherwise have had to purchase abroad. But in this case it proved too impractical. This, after all, was prime real estate. It was so exclusive an area that, rather than design a square whose buildings would boast façades looking out on the rest of Paris, the planners turned these elegant forefronts in on themselves—as though the enjoyment of façades were reserved not for the passerby, who might never even suspect the existence of this secluded Place, but strictly for the happy few.

The Place des Vosges has all the makings of a luxurious inner courtyard turned outside in, which is exactly what Corneille saw in his comedy La Place Royale. Everyone lives close together, everyone moves in the same circles, and everyone knows everyone else’s business. Look out your window and you’ll spy everyone’s dirty laundry. And yet don’t be so sure, either: as Madame de La Fayette said of life at court, here nothing is ever as it seems. The Place