A needed charity was instituted by the establishment of a Foundling Hospital. So usual was it to dispose of unwelcome infants that cradles for their reception were placed in the porch of Notre Dame itself. The hospital proved not an entire success, for about a century later Saint Vincent de Paul found that sorcerers, beggars and gymnasts were buying babies from the hospital at a franc apiece. His own foundation of a children’s home came from a chance meeting with a beggar who was breaking his purchase’s legs so that its wails might excite pity from passers-by. Henry’s death was brought about by one of those tragic happenings that mar times of attempted gayety. Henry was marrying off his daughter and his sister for political reasons and he arranged a double wedding. The festivities included an elaborate supper in the Great Hall of the palace of the City and a tournament in the rue Saint Antoine. The king himself took part in the joust, by accident was mortally wounded by Montgomery, the captain of the Scottish guards, and died in the near-by Hôtel des Tournelles a few days after. CHAPTER XIII PARIS OF THE REFORMATION While Henry II lived Catherine de Medicis was not conspicuous, Henry yielding rather to Diane de Poitiers than to his wife, but the queen-mother wielded a ruthless power over her three young sons who succeeded their father in turn. Through her, also, Italian pictures and books were brought in by their painters and authors, Italian architects transformed French buildings, Italian favorites filled the court, where they introduced the ruffs and padded trunks and soft crowned toques of Italian fashions. Paris streets, narrow as in the days when their Gothic houses were first built, widened into occasional squares meant to remind the queen of her southern home. Francis II (1559-1560) was Henry’s oldest son, known to-day only as the husband of Mary, Queen of Scots, whom he married in Notre Dame when he was fourteen and she was sixteen. He came to the throne a twelvemonth later and during the one short year of his reign he was a tool in the hands of the ex-Italian family of the Guises of which Mary’s mother was a member. Throughout France quarrels and conspiracies were rife, all having for their basic reason differences in religion and the lack of tolerance which could not allow freedom of belief. Of Francis’s reign as it concerns Paris there is nothing of interest except the fact that his wedding supper, like that of his sister a year later, was given in the Great Hall of the palace of the Cité.