الفصل الفصل 8 · THE PLACE DE GRÈVE.

“At least,” he said to himself, “I shall there have a firebrand

of joy wherewith to warm myself, and I can sup on some crumbs of

the three great armorial bearings of royal sugar which have been

erected on the public refreshment-stall of the city.”

CHAPTER 8. THE PLACE DE GRÈVE.

There remains to-day but a very imperceptible vestige of the

Place de Grève, such as it existed then; it consists in the

charming little turret, which occupies the angle north of the

Place, and which, already enshrouded in the ignoble plaster which

fills with paste the delicate lines of its sculpture, would soon

have disappeared, perhaps submerged by that flood of new houses

which so rapidly devours all the ancient façades of Paris.

The persons who, like ourselves, never cross the Place de Grève

without casting a glance of pity and sympathy on that poor turret

strangled between two hovels of the time of Louis XV., can easily

reconstruct in their minds the aggregate of edifices to which it

belonged, and find again entire in it the ancient Gothic place of

the fifteenth century.

It was then, as it is to-day, an irregular trapezoid, bordered on

one side by the quay, and on the other three by a series of

lofty, narrow, and gloomy houses. By day, one could admire the

variety of its edifices, all sculptured in stone or wood, and

already presenting complete specimens of the different domestic

architectures of the Middle Ages, running back from the fifteenth

to the eleventh century, from the casement which had begun to

dethrone the arch, to the Roman semicircle, which had been

supplanted by the ogive, and which still occupies, below it, the

first story of that ancient house de la Tour Roland, at the

corner of the Place upon the Seine, on the side of the street

with the Tannerie. At night, one could distinguish nothing of all

that mass of buildings, except the black indentation of the

roofs, unrolling their chain of acute angles round the place; for

one of the radical differences between the cities of that time,

and the cities of the present day, lay in the façades which

looked upon the places and streets, and which were then gables.

For the last two centuries the houses have been turned round.

In the centre of the eastern side of the Place, rose a heavy and

hybrid construction, formed of three buildings placed in

juxtaposition. It was called by three names which explain its

history, its destination, and its architecture: “The House of the

Dauphin,” because Charles V., when Dauphin, had inhabited it;

“The Marchandise,” because it had served as town hall; and “The

Pillared House” (_domus ad piloria_), because of a series of

large pillars which sustained the three stories. The city found

there all that is required for a city like Paris; a chapel in

which to pray to God; a _plaidoyer_, or pleading room, in which

to hold hearings, and to repel, at need, the King’s people; and

under the roof, an _arsenac_ full of artillery. For the

_bourgeois_ of Paris were aware that it is not sufficient to pray

in every conjuncture, and to plead for the franchises of the

city, and they had always in reserve, in the garret of the town

hall, a few good rusty arquebuses. The Grève had then that

sinister aspect which it preserves to-day from the execrable

ideas which it awakens, and from the sombre town hall of

Dominique Bocador, which has replaced the Pillared House. It must

be admitted that a permanent gibbet and a pillory, “a justice and

a ladder,” as they were called in that day, erected side by side

in the centre of the pavement, contributed not a little to cause

eyes to be turned away from that fatal place, where so many

beings full of life and health have agonized; where, fifty years

later, that fever of Saint Vallier was destined to have its

birth, that terror of the scaffold, the most monstrous of all

maladies because it comes not from God, but from man.

It is a consoling idea (let us remark in passing), to think that

the death penalty, which three hundred years ago still encumbered

with its iron wheels, its stone gibbets, and all its

paraphernalia of torture, permanent and riveted to the pavement,

the Grève, the Halles, the Place Dauphine, the Cross du Trahoir,

the Marché aux Pourceaux, that hideous Montfaucon, the barrier

des Sergents, the Place aux Chats, the Porte Saint-Denis,

Champeaux, the Porte Baudets, the Porte Saint Jacques, without

reckoning the innumerable ladders of the provosts, the bishop of

the chapters, of the abbots, of the priors, who had the decree of

life and death,—without reckoning the judicial drownings in the

river Seine; it is consoling to-day, after having lost

successively all the pieces of its armor, its luxury of torment,

its penalty of imagination and fancy, its torture for which it

reconstructed every five years a leather bed at the Grand

Châtelet, that ancient suzerain of feudal society almost expunged

from our laws and our cities, hunted from code to code, chased

from place to place, has no longer, in our immense Paris, any

more than a dishonored corner of the Grève,—than a miserable

guillotine, furtive, uneasy, shameful, which seems always afraid

of being caught in the act, so quickly does it disappear after

having dealt its blow.