St. Bartholomew's Day massacre published his "Discours contre Machievel" in 1576, which was printed in ten editions in three languages over the next four years. Gentillet held, quite wrongly according to Sydney Anglo, that Machiavelli's "books [were] held most dear and precious by our Italian and Italionized courtiers" (in the words of his first English translation), and so (in Anglo's paraphrase) "at the root of France's present degradation, which has culminated not only in the St Bartholemew massacre but the glee of its perverted admirers". In fact there is little trace of Machiavelli in French writings before the massacre, and not very much after,
Paris in the 16th century art, did not come until the very end of the century with the reign of Henry IV. Through the 16th century, there were only four bridges across the Seine, two on each bank, insufficient for the growing city and the amount of traffic they carried. The Paris bridges at the beginning of the 16th century were largely made of wood, and were frequently washed away in floods or knocked down by ice on the frozen river. The most important bridge was the Pont au Change, which had been built in 1304 under Philip le Bel, and was site where the