Henry began at once to change for the worse his mother’s already vile court. Occasionally he was stricken with remorse and made such public exhibition of repentance as caused excessive mirth to all beholders of the processions wherein he and the dissolute young men, his “minions,” walked barefooted through the city. It is related that the court pages were once sharply switched in the Hall of the Cariatides in the Louvre for having indulged in a take-off of one of these penitential exercises of their king’s. Except for the continuing of the work on the Louvre, decorating the old clock on the palace on the Cité (see Chapter VI) beginning the Pont Neuf across the western tip of the Cité, and establishing a few religious houses, Henry III was too busy contending with the Parisians to have time or inclination to beautify the city. The Parisians not only objected to the continual financial drain made upon them by the king’s constant appeals for money for his minions, but they openly showed themselves favorable to the Duke of Guise, the leader of the Catholic party. For his own defense Henry brought into the city a band of Swiss soldiers. To the citizens it was the final outrage. Every section of the town hummed with preparations for revolt. A rumor of an attack upon the Temple made Henry send a body of troops there. For the first time in the history of Paris the people made use of a defense habitual with them two centuries later. They erected across the streets barricades made of _barriques_ (hogsheads) filled with earth, took shelter behind them and attacked the mercenaries so vigorously that the Duke of Guise was forced to come to their rescue. The day after the Day of Barricades the troops sent to the defense of the Temple helped the populace seize it. When the governor of the Bastille went to the palace, and, entering the Great Hall, summoned the sixty members of the Parliament of Paris then in session, to follow him, and led them in their red and black robes through the streets to the prison where they were held for ransom, the citizens felt themselves to be in real possession of the town. Henry had been warned of trouble on the Day of Barricades by a man who made his way to the royal apartments by the staircase existing even now in a corner of the Hall of the Cariatides. Reversing the direction taken by the Empress Eugénie when the news of the battle of Sedan reached Paris on the fourth of September some three hundred years later, the king fled through the Louvre westward, gained the stables of the Tuileries, mounted a horse, and fled once more, though not pursued as he had been in Poland. The Parisians did not want to keep him.