In the religious wars that followed, the city paid dearly for this wholesale murder. The population, during the siege by the King of Navarre, was reduced to the last extremity of famine, even to cannibalism, and when that monarch had retired from before the walls, the horrors of anarchy and civil war succeeded. The Parlement, terrified by the execution of the first president, Brisson, refused to sit, and, when summoned to do so, replied to the agents of the _Seize_, the chiefs of the sixteen quarters of Paris who had formed a council to aid the work of the _Sainte Ligue_ of the Catholics, that they would return to their functions only to hang those who had participated in the official murder of the president. The Duc de Mayenne, summoned to the rescue of public order, carried out these hangings in a summary manner; and the first care of the Parlement, when a government was partially established again, was to disarm the factious bourgeois.
Henri IV, who disputes with Dagobert in the legends of the people the honor of being the most popular of the French kings, was not exclusively the jovial monarch he is generally portrayed. His answer to some remonstrances of the Parlement, which have been preserved, would have been worthy of François I or Louis XIV. "My will should serve as a reason. In an obedient State, reasons are never required of the prince. I am king: I speak to you as a king; I desire to be obeyed." His nomination of a governor of Paris was sufficiently scandalous: on the death of the Sieur d'O, who held that office, the king sent to the Hôtel de Ville to say that he would not appoint a successor, that he would honor his good city of Paris by assuming that charge himself; the Parlement, the next day, despatched several of its presidents and members to thank the king for this great honor, and the gracious monarch thereupon nominated as his lieutenant-general Antoine d'Estrées, the father of his famous mistress.
[Illustration: OFFICIAL RESIDENCE OF THE PRESIDENT. ENTRANCE TO THE PALAIS DE L'ÉLYSÉE FROM THE RUE DU FAUBOURG SAINT-HONORÉ.]