Paris was so embellished, and so many houses were rebuilt and new finer ones built, that rents rose greatly, and the authorities published five abortive ordinances regulating the excessive rents between 1622 and 1649. The new luxury had to be paid for. Under Marie de’ Medici and Richelieu, a new city with characteristics of utility, beauty and magnificence arose. Corneille’s _le Menteur_ (1642) notes the wonderful change: “_Paris semble à mes yeux un pays de romans; J’y croyais ce matin voir une île enchantée; Je la laissai deserte et la trouve habitée. Quelque Amphion nouveau sans l’aide des maçons En superbes palais a changé ces buissons._ * * * * * _Toute une ville entière avec pompe bâtie, Semble d’un vieux fossé par miracle sortie._” So Corneille tells us that the striking change in Paris was one to pomp and grandeur. Even more than the magnificence of the dwellings, the change to comfort is to be observed. Far from increasing during the reigns of the Valois kings, comfort had suffered. Viollet le Duc says: “The excessively laboured refinement of the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Centuries and the internal luxury of the apartments of the beginning of the Sixteenth had been lost or laid aside during the long religious wars of the close of the Sixteenth Century, and the furniture of a great lord under Louis XIII. would have appeared barbarous and coarse to one of Charles VII.’s vassals. Perhaps it was better to live under the reign of Louis XIV. than under that of Charles V.; but certainly Charles V. and the nobles and middle classes of his time had better lodgings and were more comfortably furnished than the lords and common people were under the reign of the Great King.” However barbarous an interior of the Louis XIII. period might have been in comparison with one of the age of Charles VII., it certainly was changing for the better. Convenience was being sacrificed less for magnificence. There was an attempt to combine usefulness with elegance. Mme. de Rambouillet was one of the heads of this movement; and, according to Tallement des Réaux, was the originator of it. She established her salon as early as 1608. Tallement says that she was the first to arrange suites of rooms through which guests could move easily. “Being dissatisfied with the plans submitted to her (it was in the Maréchal d’Ancre’s time) for at that time they only knew how to make a hall on one side, a chamber on the other, and a staircase in the middle, one day, after long reflection, she cried: ‘Quick! some paper! I have found how to do what I wanted.’ She drew the plan, and it was followed exactly.... She it was who taught people how to put the staircases to one side, so as to have a large suite of rooms, to make high windows from the floor up and to make high and broad doorways opposite one another.”