第 十五 章 · A BIRD’S-EYE VIEW OF PARIS.

. A BIRD’S-EYE VIEW OF PARIS.

We have just attempted to restore, for the reader’s benefit, that

admirable church of Notre-Dame de Paris. We have briefly pointed

out the greater part of the beauties which it possessed in the

fifteenth century, and which it lacks to-day; but we have omitted

the principal thing,—the view of Paris which was then to be

obtained from the summits of its towers.

That was, in fact,—when, after having long groped one’s way up

the dark spiral which perpendicularly pierces the thick wall of

the belfries, one emerged, at last abruptly, upon one of the

lofty platforms inundated with light and air,—that was, in fact,

a fine picture which spread out, on all sides at once, before the

eye; a spectacle _sui generis_, of which those of our readers who

have had the good fortune to see a Gothic city entire, complete,

homogeneous,—a few of which still remain, Nuremberg in Bavaria

and Vittoria in Spain,—can readily form an idea; or even smaller

specimens, provided that they are well preserved,—Vitré in

Brittany, Nordhausen in Prussia.

The Paris of three hundred and fifty years ago—the Paris of the

fifteenth century—was already a gigantic city. We Parisians

generally make a mistake as to the ground which we think that we

have gained, since Paris has not increased much over one-third

since the time of Louis XI. It has certainly lost more in beauty

than it has gained in size.

Paris had its birth, as the reader knows, in that old island of

the City which has the form of a cradle. The strand of that

island was its first boundary wall, the Seine its first moat.

Paris remained for many centuries in its island state, with two

bridges, one on the north, the other on the south; and two bridge

heads, which were at the same time its gates and its

fortresses,—the Grand-Châtelet on the right bank, the

Petit-Châtelet on the left. Then, from the date of the kings of

the first race, Paris, being too cribbed and confined in its

island, and unable to return thither, crossed the water. Then,

beyond the Grand, beyond the Petit-Châtelet, a first circle of

walls and towers began to infringe upon the country on the two

sides of the Seine. Some vestiges of this ancient enclosure still

remained in the last century; to-day, only the memory of it is

left, and here and there a tradition, the Baudets or Baudoyer

gate, _Porta Bagauda_.

Little by little, the tide of houses, always thrust from the

heart of the city outwards, overflows, devours, wears away, and

effaces this wall. Philip Augustus makes a new dike for it. He

imprisons Paris in a circular chain of great towers, both lofty

and solid. For the period of more than a century, the houses

press upon each other, accumulate, and raise their level in this

basin, like water in a reservoir. They begin to deepen; they pile

story upon story; they mount upon each other; they gush forth at

the top, like all laterally compressed growth, and there is a

rivalry as to which shall thrust its head above its neighbors,

for the sake of getting a little air. The street glows narrower

and deeper, every space is overwhelmed and disappears. The houses

finally leap the wall of Philip Augustus, and scatter joyfully

over the plain, without order, and all askew, like runaways.

There they plant themselves squarely, cut themselves gardens from

the fields, and take their ease. Beginning with 1367, the city

spreads to such an extent into the suburbs, that a new wall

becomes necessary, particularly on the right bank; Charles V.

builds it. But a city like Paris is perpetually growing. It is

only such cities that become capitals. They are funnels, into

which all the geographical, political, moral, and intellectual

water-sheds of a country, all the natural slopes of a people,

pour; wells of civilization, so to speak, and also sewers, where

commerce, industry, intelligence, population,—all that is sap,

all that is life, all that is the soul of a nation, filters and

amasses unceasingly, drop by drop, century by century.

So Charles V.’s wall suffered the fate of that of Philip

Augustus. At the end of the fifteenth century, the Faubourg

strides across it, passes beyond it, and runs farther. In the

sixteenth, it seems to retreat visibly, and to bury itself deeper

and deeper in the old city, so thick had the new city already

become outside of it. Thus, beginning with the fifteenth century,

where our story finds us, Paris had already outgrown the three

concentric circles of walls which, from the time of Julian the

Apostate, existed, so to speak, in germ in the Grand-Châtelet and

the Petit-Châtelet. The mighty city had cracked, in succession,

its four enclosures of walls, like a child grown too large for

his garments of last year. Under Louis XI., this sea of houses

was seen to be pierced at intervals by several groups of ruined

towers, from the ancient wall, like the summits of hills in an

inundation,—like archipelagos of the old Paris submerged beneath

the new. Since that time Paris has undergone yet another

transformation, unfortunately for our eyes; but it has passed

only one more wall, that of Louis XV., that miserable wall of mud

and spittle, worthy of the king who built it, worthy of the poet

who sung it,—

Le mur murant Paris rend Paris murmurant.[22]

In the fifteenth century, Paris was still divided into three

wholly distinct and separate towns, each having its own

physiognomy, its own specialty, its manners, customs, privileges,

and history: the City, the University, the Town. The City, which

occupied the island, was the most ancient, the smallest, and the

mother of the other two, crowded in between them like (may we be

pardoned the comparison) a little old woman between two large and

handsome maidens. The University covered the left bank of the

Seine, from the Tournelle to the Tour de Nesle, points which

correspond in the Paris of to-day, the one to the wine market,

the other to the mint. Its wall included a large part of that

plain where Julian had built his hot baths. The hill of

Sainte-Geneviève was enclosed in it. The culminating point of

this sweep of walls was the Papal gate, that is to say, near the

present site of the Pantheon. The Town, which was the largest of

the three fragments of Paris, held the right bank. Its quay,

broken or interrupted in many places, ran along the Seine, from

the Tour de Billy to the Tour du Bois; that is to say, from the

place where the granary stands to-day, to the present site of the

Tuileries. These four points, where the Seine intersected the

wall of the capital, the Tournelle and the Tour de Nesle on the

right, the Tour de Billy and the Tour du Bois on the left, were

called pre-eminently, _the four towers of Paris_. The Town

encroached still more extensively upon the fields than the

University. The culminating point of the Town wall (that of

Charles V.) was at the gates of Saint-Denis and Saint-Martin,

whose situation has not been changed.

As we have just said, each of these three great divisions of

Paris was a town, but too special a town to be complete, a city

which could not get along without the other two. Hence three

entirely distinct aspects: churches abounded in the City;

palaces, in the Town; and colleges, in the University. Neglecting

here the originalities, of secondary importance in old Paris, and

the capricious regulations regarding the public highways, we will

say, from a general point of view, taking only masses and the

whole group, in this chaos of communal jurisdictions, that the

island belonged to the bishop, the right bank to the provost of

the merchants, the left bank to the Rector; over all ruled the

provost of Paris, a royal not a municipal official. The City had

Notre-Dame; the Town, the Louvre and the Hôtel de Ville; the

University, the Sorbonne. The Town had the markets (Halles); the

city, the Hospital; the University, the Pré-aux-Clercs. Offences

committed by the scholars on the left bank were tried in the law

courts on the island, and were punished on the right bank at

Montfaucon; unless the rector, feeling the university to be

strong and the king weak, intervened; for it was the students’

privilege to be hanged on their own grounds.

The greater part of these privileges, it may be noted in passing,

and there were some even better than the above, had been extorted

from the kings by revolts and mutinies. It is the course of

things from time immemorial; the king only lets go when the

people tear away. There is an old charter which puts the matter

naively: _àpropos_ of fidelity: _Civibus fidelitas in reges, quæ

tamen aliquoties seditionibus interrupta, multa peperit

privilegia_.

In the fifteenth century, the Seine bathed five islands within

the walls of Paris: Louviers island, where there were then trees,

and where there is no longer anything but wood; l’île aux Vaches,

and l’île Notre-Dame, both deserted, with the exception of one

house, both fiefs of the bishop—in the seventeenth century, a

single island was formed out of these two, which was built upon

and named l’île Saint-Louis—, lastly the City, and at its point,

the little islet of the cow tender, which was afterwards engulfed

beneath the platform of the Pont-Neuf. The City then had five

bridges: three on the right, the Pont Notre-Dame, and the Pont au

Change, of stone, the Pont aux Meuniers, of wood; two on the

left, the Petit Pont, of stone, the Pont Saint-Michel, of wood;

all loaded with houses.

The University had six gates, built by Philip Augustus; there

were, beginning with la Tournelle, the Porte Saint-Victor, the

Porte Bordelle, the Porte Papale, the Porte Saint-Jacques, the

Porte Saint-Michel, the Porte Saint-Germain. The Town had six

gates, built by Charles V.; beginning with the Tour de Billy they

were: the Porte Saint-Antoine, the Porte du Temple, the Porte

Saint-Martin, the Porte Saint-Denis, the Porte Montmartre, the

Porte Saint-Honoré. All these gates were strong, and also

handsome, which does not detract from strength. A large, deep

moat, with a brisk current during the high water of winter,

bathed the base of the wall round Paris; the Seine furnished the

water. At night, the gates were shut, the river was barred at

both ends of the city with huge iron chains, and Paris slept

tranquilly.

From a bird’s-eye view, these three burgs, the City, the Town,

and the University, each presented to the eye an inextricable

skein of eccentrically tangled streets. Nevertheless, at first

sight, one recognized the fact that these three fragments formed

but one body. One immediately perceived three long parallel

streets, unbroken, undisturbed, traversing, almost in a straight

line, all three cities, from one end to the other; from North to

South, perpendicularly, to the Seine, which bound them together,

mingled them, infused them in each other, poured and transfused

the people incessantly, from one to the other, and made one out

of the three. The first of these streets ran from the Porte

Saint-Martin: it was called the Rue Saint-Jacques in the

University, Rue de la Juiverie in the City, Rue Saint-Martin in

the Town; it crossed the water twice, under the name of the Petit

Pont and the Pont Notre-Dame. The second, which was called the

Rue de la Harpe on the left bank, Rue de la Barillerié in the

island, Rue Saint-Denis on the right bank, Pont Saint-Michel on

one arm of the Seine, Pont au Change on the other, ran from the

Porte Saint-Michel in the University, to the Porte Saint-Denis in

the Town. However, under all these names, there were but two

streets, parent streets, generating streets,—the two arteries of

Paris. All the other veins of the triple city either derived

their supply from them or emptied into them.

Independently of these two principal streets, piercing Paris

diametrically in its whole breadth, from side to side, common to

the entire capital, the City and the University had also each its

own great special street, which ran lengthwise by them, parallel

to the Seine, cutting, as it passed, at right angles, the two

arterial thoroughfares. Thus, in the Town, one descended in a

straight line from the Porte Saint-Antoine to the Porte

Saint-Honoré; in the University from the Porte Saint-Victor to

the Porte Saint-Germain. These two great thoroughfares

intersected by the two first, formed the canvas upon which

reposed, knotted and crowded together on every hand, the

labyrinthine network of the streets of Paris. In the

incomprehensible plan of these streets, one distinguished

likewise, on looking attentively, two clusters of great streets,

like magnified sheaves of grain, one in the University, the other

in the Town, which spread out gradually from the bridges to the

gates.

Some traces of this geometrical plan still exist to-day.

Now, what aspect did this whole present, when, as viewed from the

summit of the towers of Notre-Dame, in 1482? That we shall try to

describe.

For the spectator who arrived, panting, upon that pinnacle, it

was first a dazzling confusing view of roofs, chimneys, streets,

bridges, places, spires, bell towers. Everything struck your eye

at once: the carved gable, the pointed roof, the turrets

suspended at the angles of the walls; the stone pyramids of the

eleventh century, the slate obelisks of the fifteenth; the round,

bare tower of the donjon keep; the square and fretted tower of

the church; the great and the little, the massive and the aerial.

The eye was, for a long time, wholly lost in this labyrinth,

where there was nothing which did not possess its originality,

its reason, its genius, its beauty,—nothing which did not proceed

from art; beginning with the smallest house, with its painted and

carved front, with external beams, elliptical door, with

projecting stories, to the royal Louvre, which then had a

colonnade of towers. But these are the principal masses which

were then to be distinguished when the eye began to accustom

itself to this tumult of edifices.

In the first place, the City.—“The island of the City,” as Sauval

says, who, in spite of his confused medley, sometimes has such

happy turns of expression,—“the island of the city is made like a

great ship, stuck in the mud and run aground in the current, near

the centre of the Seine.”

We have just explained that, in the fifteenth century, this ship

was anchored to the two banks of the river by five bridges. This

form of a ship had also struck the heraldic scribes; for it is

from that, and not from the siege by the Normans, that the ship

which blazons the old shield of Paris, comes, according to Favyn

and Pasquier. For him who understands how to decipher them,

armorial bearings are algebra, armorial bearings have a tongue.

The whole history of the second half of the Middle Ages is

written in armorial bearings,—the first half is in the symbolism

of the Roman churches. They are the hieroglyphics of feudalism,

succeeding those of theocracy.

Thus the City first presented itself to the eye, with its stern

to the east, and its prow to the west. Turning towards the prow,

one had before one an innumerable flock of ancient roofs, over

which arched broadly the lead-covered apse of the

Sainte-Chapelle, like an elephant’s haunches loaded with its

tower. Only here, this tower was the most audacious, the most

open, the most ornamented spire of cabinet-maker’s work that ever

let the sky peep through its cone of lace. In front of

Notre-Dame, and very near at hand, three streets opened into the

cathedral square,—a fine square, lined with ancient houses. Over

the south side of this place bent the wrinkled and sullen façade

of the Hôtel Dieu, and its roof, which seemed covered with warts

and pustules. Then, on the right and the left, to east and west,

within that wall of the City, which was yet so contracted, rose

the bell towers of its one and twenty churches, of every date, of

every form, of every size, from the low and wormeaten belfry of

Saint-Denis du Pas (_Carcer Glaucini_) to the slender needles of

Saint-Pierre aux Bœufs and Saint-Landry.

Behind Notre-Dame, the cloister and its Gothic galleries spread

out towards the north; on the south, the half-Roman palace of the

bishop; on the east, the desert point of the Terrain. In this

throng of houses the eye also distinguished, by the lofty

open-work mitres of stone which then crowned the roof itself,

even the most elevated windows of the palace, the hotel given by

the city, under Charles VI., to Juvénal des Ursins; a little

farther on, the pitch-covered sheds of the Palus Market; in still

another quarter the new apse of Saint-Germain le Vieux,

lengthened in 1458, with a bit of the Rue aux Febves; and then,

in places, a square crowded with people; a pillory, erected at

the corner of a street; a fine fragment of the pavement of Philip

Augustus, a magnificent flagging, grooved for the horses’ feet,

in the middle of the road, and so badly replaced in the sixteenth

century by the miserable cobblestones, called the _pavement of

the League;_ a deserted back courtyard, with one of those

diaphanous staircase turrets, such as were erected in the

fifteenth century, one of which is still to be seen in the Rue

des Bourdonnais. Lastly, at the right of the Sainte-Chapelle,

towards the west, the Palais de Justice rested its group of

towers at the edge of the water. The thickets of the king’s

gardens, which covered the western point of the City, masked the

Island du Passeur. As for the water, from the summit of the

towers of Notre-Dame one hardly saw it, on either side of the

City; the Seine was hidden by bridges, the bridges by houses.

And when the glance passed these bridges, whose roofs were

visibly green, rendered mouldy before their time by the vapors

from the water, if it was directed to the left, towards the

University, the first edifice which struck it was a large, low

sheaf of towers, the Petit-Châtelet, whose yawning gate devoured

the end of the Petit-Pont. Then, if your view ran along the bank,

from east to west, from the Tournelle to the Tour de Nesle, there

was a long cordon of houses, with carved beams, stained-glass

windows, each story projecting over that beneath it, an

interminable zigzag of _bourgeois_ gables, frequently interrupted

by the mouth of a street, and from time to time also by the front

or angle of a huge stone mansion, planted at its ease, with

courts and gardens, wings and detached buildings, amid this

populace of crowded and narrow houses, like a grand gentleman

among a throng of rustics. There were five or six of these

mansions on the quay, from the house of Lorraine, which shared

with the Bernardins the grand enclosure adjoining the Tournelle,

to the Hôtel de Nesle, whose principal tower ended Paris, and

whose pointed roofs were in a position, during three months of

the year, to encroach, with their black triangles, upon the

scarlet disk of the setting sun.

This side of the Seine was, however, the least mercantile of the

two. Students furnished more of a crowd and more noise there than

artisans, and there was not, properly speaking, any quay, except

from the Pont Saint-Michel to the Tour de Nesle. The rest of the

bank of the Seine was now a naked strand, the same as beyond the

Bernardins; again, a throng of houses, standing with their feet

in the water, as between the two bridges.

There was a great uproar of laundresses; they screamed, and

talked, and sang from morning till night along the beach, and

beat a great deal of linen there, just as in our day. This is not

the least of the gayeties of Paris.

The University presented a dense mass to the eye. From one end to

the other, it was homogeneous and compact. The thousand roofs,

dense, angular, clinging to each other, composed, nearly all, of

the same geometrical element, offered, when viewed from above,

the aspect of a crystallization of the same substance.

The capricious ravine of streets did not cut this block of houses

into too disproportionate slices. The forty-two colleges were

scattered about in a fairly equal manner, and there were some

everywhere. The amusingly varied crests of these beautiful

edifices were the product of the same art as the simple roofs

which they overshot, and were, actually, only a multiplication of

the square or the cube of the same geometrical figure. Hence they

complicated the whole effect, without disturbing it; completed,

without overloading it. Geometry is harmony. Some fine mansions

here and there made magnificent outlines against the picturesque

attics of the left bank. The house of Nevers, the house of Rome,

the house of Reims, which have disappeared; the Hôtel de Cluny,

which still exists, for the consolation of the artist, and whose

tower was so stupidly deprived of its crown a few years ago.

Close to Cluny, that Roman palace, with fine round arches, were

once the hot baths of Julian. There were a great many abbeys, of

a beauty more devout, of a grandeur more solemn than the

mansions, but not less beautiful, not less grand. Those which

first caught the eye were the Bernardins, with their three bell

towers; Sainte-Geneviève, whose square tower, which still exists,

makes us regret the rest; the Sorbonne, half college, half

monastery, of which so admirable a nave survives; the fine

quadrilateral cloister of the Mathurins; its neighbor, the

cloister of Saint-Benoît, within whose walls they have had time

to cobble up a theatre, between the seventh and eighth editions

of this book; the Cordeliers, with their three enormous adjacent

gables; the Augustins, whose graceful spire formed, after the

Tour de Nesle, the second denticulation on this side of Paris,

starting from the west. The colleges, which are, in fact, the

intermediate ring between the cloister and the world, hold the

middle position in the monumental series between the hotels and

the abbeys, with a severity full of elegance, sculpture less

giddy than the palaces, an architecture less severe than the

convents. Unfortunately, hardly anything remains of these

monuments, where Gothic art combined with so just a balance,

richness and economy. The churches (and they were numerous and

splendid in the University, and they were graded there also in

all the ages of architecture, from the round arches of

Saint-Julian to the pointed arches of Saint-Séverin), the

churches dominated the whole; and, like one harmony more in this

mass of harmonies, they pierced in quick succession the multiple

open work of the gables with slashed spires, with open-work bell

towers, with slender pinnacles, whose line was also only a

magnificent exaggeration of the acute angle of the roofs.

The ground of the University was hilly; Mount Sainte-Geneviève

formed an enormous mound to the south; and it was a sight to see

from the summit of Notre-Dame how that throng of narrow and

tortuous streets (to-day the Latin Quarter), those bunches of

houses which, spread out in every direction from the top of this

eminence, precipitated themselves in disorder, and almost

perpendicularly down its flanks, nearly to the water’s edge,

having the air, some of falling, others of clambering up again,

and all of holding to one another. A continual flux of a thousand

black points which passed each other on the pavements made

everything move before the eyes; it was the populace seen thus

from aloft and afar.

Lastly, in the intervals of these roofs, of these spires, of

these accidents of numberless edifices, which bent and writhed,

and jagged in so eccentric a manner the extreme line of the

University, one caught a glimpse, here and there, of a great

expanse of moss-grown wall, a thick, round tower, a crenellated

city gate, shadowing forth the fortress; it was the wall of

Philip Augustus. Beyond, the fields gleamed green; beyond, fled

the roads, along which were scattered a few more suburban houses,

which became more infrequent as they became more distant. Some of

these faubourgs were important: there were, first, starting from

la Tournelle, the Bourg Saint-Victor, with its one arch bridge

over the Bièvre, its abbey where one could read the epitaph of

Louis le Gros, _epitaphium Ludovici Grossi_, and its church with

an octagonal spire, flanked with four little bell towers of the

eleventh century (a similar one can be seen at Étampes; it is not

yet destroyed); next, the Bourg Saint-Marceau, which already had

three churches and one convent; then, leaving the mill of the

Gobelins and its four white walls on the left, there was the

Faubourg Saint-Jacques with the beautiful carved cross in its

square; the church of Saint-Jacques du Haut-Pas, which was then

Gothic, pointed, charming; Saint-Magloire, a fine nave of the

fourteenth century, which Napoleon turned into a hayloft;

Notre-Dame des Champs, where there were Byzantine mosaics;

lastly, after having left behind, full in the country, the

Monastery des Chartreux, a rich edifice contemporary with the

Palais de Justice, with its little garden divided into

compartments, and the haunted ruins of Vauvert, the eye fell, to

the west, upon the three Roman spires of Saint-Germain des Prés.

The Bourg Saint-Germain, already a large community, formed

fifteen or twenty streets in the rear; the pointed bell tower of

Saint-Sulpice marked one corner of the town. Close beside it one

descried the quadrilateral enclosure of the fair of

Saint-Germain, where the market is situated to-day; then the

abbot’s pillory, a pretty little round tower, well capped with a

leaden cone; the brickyard was further on, and the Rue du Four,

which led to the common bakehouse, and the mill on its hillock,

and the lazar house, a tiny house, isolated and half seen.

But that which attracted the eye most of all, and fixed it for a

long time on that point, was the abbey itself. It is certain that

this monastery, which had a grand air, both as a church and as a

seignory; that abbatial palace, where the bishops of Paris

counted themselves happy if they could pass the night; that

refectory, upon which the architect had bestowed the air, the

beauty, and the rose window of a cathedral; that elegant chapel

of the Virgin; that monumental dormitory; those vast gardens;

that portcullis; that drawbridge; that envelope of battlements

which notched to the eye the verdure of the surrounding meadows;

those courtyards, where gleamed men at arms, intermingled with

golden copes;—the whole grouped and clustered about three lofty

spires, with round arches, well planted upon a Gothic apse, made

a magnificent figure against the horizon.

When, at length, after having contemplated the University for a

long time, you turned towards the right bank, towards the Town,

the character of the spectacle was abruptly altered. The Town, in

fact much larger than the University, was also less of a unit. At

the first glance, one saw that it was divided into many masses,

singularly distinct. First, to the eastward, in that part of the

town which still takes its name from the marsh where Camulogènes

entangled Cæsar, was a pile of palaces. The block extended to the

very water’s edge. Four almost contiguous hotels, Jouy, Sens,

Barbeau, the house of the Queen, mirrored their slate peaks,

broken with slender turrets, in the Seine.

These four edifices filled the space from the Rue des

Nonaindières, to the abbey of the Celestins, whose spire

gracefully relieved their line of gables and battlements. A few

miserable, greenish hovels, hanging over the water in front of

these sumptuous hotels, did not prevent one from seeing the fine

angles of their façades, their large, square windows with stone

mullions, their pointed porches overloaded with statues, the

vivid outlines of their walls, always clear cut, and all those

charming accidents of architecture, which cause Gothic art to

have the air of beginning its combinations afresh with every

monument.

Behind these palaces, extended in all directions, now broken,

fenced in, battlemented like a citadel, now veiled by great trees

like a Carthusian convent, the immense and multiform enclosure of

that miraculous Hôtel de Saint-Pol, where the King of France

possessed the means of lodging superbly two and twenty princes of

the rank of the dauphin and the Duke of Burgundy, with their

domestics and their suites, without counting the great lords, and

the emperor when he came to view Paris, and the lions, who had

their separate hotel at the royal hotel. Let us say here that a

prince’s apartment was then composed of never less than eleven

large rooms, from the chamber of state to the oratory, not to

mention the galleries, baths, vapor-baths, and other “superfluous

places,” with which each apartment was provided; not to mention

the private gardens for each of the king’s guests; not to mention

the kitchens, the cellars, the domestic offices, the general

refectories of the house, the poultry-yards, where there were

twenty-two general laboratories, from the bakehouses to the

wine-cellars; games of a thousand sorts, malls, tennis, and

riding at the ring; aviaries, fishponds, menageries, stables,

barns, libraries, arsenals and foundries. This was what a king’s

palace, a Louvre, a Hôtel de Saint-Pol was then. A city within a

city.

From the tower where we are placed, the Hôtel Saint-Pol, almost

half hidden by the four great houses of which we have just

spoken, was still very considerable and very marvellous to see.

One could there distinguish, very well, though cleverly united

with the principal building by long galleries, decked with

painted glass and slender columns, the three hotels which Charles

V. had amalgamated with his palace: the Hôtel du Petit-Muce, with

the airy balustrade, which formed a graceful border to its roof;

the Hôtel of the Abbé de Saint-Maur, having the vanity of a

stronghold, a great tower, machicolations, loopholes, iron

gratings, and over the large Saxon door, the armorial bearings of

the abbé, between the two mortises of the drawbridge; the Hôtel

of the Comte d’Étampes, whose donjon keep, ruined at its summit,

was rounded and notched like a cock’s comb; here and there, three

or four ancient oaks, forming a tuft together like enormous

cauliflowers; gambols of swans, in the clear water of the

fishponds, all in folds of light and shade; many courtyards of

which one beheld picturesque bits; the Hôtel of the Lions, with

its low, pointed arches on short, Saxon pillars, its iron

gratings and its perpetual roar; shooting up above the whole, the

scale-ornamented spire of the Ave-Maria; on the left, the house

of the Provost of Paris, flanked by four small towers, delicately

grooved, in the middle; at the extremity, the Hôtel Saint-Pol,

properly speaking, with its multiplied façades, its successive

enrichments from the time of Charles V., the hybrid excrescences,

with which the fancy of the architects had loaded it during the

last two centuries, with all the apses of its chapels, all the

gables of its galleries, a thousand weathercocks for the four

winds, and its two lofty contiguous towers, whose conical roof,

surrounded by battlements at its base, looked like those pointed

caps which have their edges turned up.

Continuing to mount the stories of this amphitheatre of palaces

spread out afar upon the ground, after crossing a deep ravine

hollowed out of the roofs in the Town, which marked the passage

of the Rue Saint-Antoine, the eye reached the house of Angoulême,

a vast construction of many epochs, where there were perfectly

new and very white parts, which melted no better into the whole

than a red patch on a blue doublet. Nevertheless, the remarkably

pointed and lofty roof of the modern palace, bristling with

carved eaves, covered with sheets of lead, where coiled a

thousand fantastic arabesques of sparkling incrustations of

gilded bronze, that roof, so curiously damascened, darted upwards

gracefully from the midst of the brown ruins of the ancient

edifice; whose huge and ancient towers, rounded by age like

casks, sinking together with old age, and rending themselves from

top to bottom, resembled great bellies unbuttoned. Behind rose

the forest of spires of the Palais des Tournelles. Not a view in

the world, either at Chambord or at the Alhambra, is more magic,

more aerial, more enchanting, than that thicket of spires, tiny

bell towers, chimneys, weather-vanes, winding staircases,

lanterns through which the daylight makes its way, which seem cut

out at a blow, pavilions, spindle-shaped turrets, or, as they

were then called, _tournelles_, all differing in form, in height,

and attitude. One would have pronounced it a gigantic stone

chess-board.

To the right of the Tournelles, that truss of enormous towers,

black as ink, running into each other and tied, as it were, by a

circular moat; that donjon keep, much more pierced with loopholes

than with windows; that drawbridge, always raised; that

portcullis, always lowered,—is the Bastille. Those sorts of black

beaks which project from between the battlements, and which you

take from a distance to be cave spouts, are cannons.

Beneath them, at the foot of the formidable edifice, behold the

Porte Sainte-Antoine, buried between its two towers.

Beyond the Tournelles, as far as the wall of Charles V., spread

out, with rich compartments of verdure and of flowers, a velvet

carpet of cultivated land and royal parks, in the midst of which

one recognized, by its labyrinth of trees and alleys, the famous

Dædalus garden which Louis XI. had given to Coictier. The

doctor’s observatory rose above the labyrinth like a great

isolated column, with a tiny house for a capital. Terrible

astrologies took place in that laboratory.

There to-day is the Place Royale.

As we have just said, the quarter of the palace, of which we have

just endeavored to give the reader some idea by indicating only

the chief points, filled the angle which Charles V.’s wall made

with the Seine on the east. The centre of the Town was occupied

by a pile of houses for the populace. It was there, in fact, that

the three bridges disgorged upon the right bank, and bridges lead

to the building of houses rather than palaces. That congregation

of _bourgeois_ habitations, pressed together like the cells in a

hive, had a beauty of its own. It is with the roofs of a capital

as with the waves of the sea,—they are grand. First the streets,

crossed and entangled, forming a hundred amusing figures in the

block; around the market-place, it was like a star with a

thousand rays.

The Rues Saint-Denis and Saint-Martin, with their innumerable

ramifications, rose one after the other, like trees intertwining

their branches; and then the tortuous lines, the Rues de la

Plâtrerie, de la Verrerie, de la Tixeranderie, etc., meandered

over all. There were also fine edifices which pierced the

petrified undulations of that sea of gables. At the head of the

Pont aux Changeurs, behind which one beheld the Seine foaming

beneath the wheels of the Pont aux Meuniers, there was the

Châlelet, no longer a Roman tower, as under Julian the Apostate,

but a feudal tower of the thirteenth century, and of a stone so

hard that the pickaxe could not break away so much as the

thickness of the fist in a space of three hours; there was the

rich square bell tower of Saint-Jacques de la Boucherie, with its

angles all frothing with carvings, already admirable, although it

was not finished in the fifteenth century. (It lacked, in

particular, the four monsters, which, still perched to-day on the

corners of its roof, have the air of so many sphinxes who are

propounding to new Paris the riddle of the ancient Paris. Rault,

the sculptor, only placed them in position in 1526, and received

twenty francs for his pains.) There was the Maison-aux-Piliers,

the Pillar House, opening upon that Place de Grève of which we

have given the reader some idea; there was Saint-Gervais, which a

front “in good taste” has since spoiled; Saint-Méry, whose

ancient pointed arches were still almost round arches;

Saint-Jean, whose magnificent spire was proverbial; there were

twenty other monuments, which did not disdain to bury their

wonders in that chaos of black, deep, narrow streets. Add the

crosses of carved stone, more lavishly scattered through the

squares than even the gibbets; the cemetery of the Innocents,

whose architectural wall could be seen in the distance above the

roofs; the pillory of the Markets, whose top was visible between

two chimneys of the Rue de la Cossonnerie; the ladder of the

Croix-du-Trahoir, in its square always black with people; the

circular buildings of the wheat mart; the fragments of Philip

Augustus’s ancient wall, which could be made out here and there,

drowned among the houses, its towers gnawed by ivy, its gates in

ruins, with crumbling and deformed stretches of wall; the quay

with its thousand shops, and its bloody knacker’s yards; the

Seine encumbered with boats, from the Port au Foin to

For-l’Évêque, and you will have a confused picture of what the

central trapezium of the Town was like in 1482.

With these two quarters, one of hotels, the other of houses, the

third feature of aspect presented by the city was a long zone of

abbeys, which bordered it in nearly the whole of its

circumference, from the rising to the setting sun, and, behind

the circle of fortifications which hemmed in Paris, formed a

second interior enclosure of convents and chapels. Thus,

immediately adjoining the park des Tournelles, between the Rue

Saint-Antoine and the Vieille Rue du Temple, there stood

Sainte-Catherine, with its immense cultivated lands, which were

terminated only by the wall of Paris. Between the old and the new

Rue du Temple, there was the Temple, a sinister group of towers,

lofty, erect, and isolated in the middle of a vast, battlemented

enclosure. Between the Rue Neuve-du-Temple and the Rue

Saint-Martin, there was the Abbey of Saint-Martin, in the midst

of its gardens, a superb fortified church, whose girdle of

towers, whose diadem of bell towers, yielded in force and

splendor only to Saint-Germain des Prés. Between the Rue

Saint-Martin and the Rue Saint-Denis, spread the enclosure of the

Trinité.

Lastly, between the Rue Saint-Denis, and the Rue Montorgueil,

stood the Filles-Dieu. On one side, the rotting roofs and unpaved

enclosure of the Cour des Miracles could be descried. It was the

sole profane ring which was linked to that devout chain of

convents.

Finally, the fourth compartment, which stretched itself out in

the agglomeration of the roofs on the right bank, and which

occupied the western angle of the enclosure, and the banks of the

river down stream, was a fresh cluster of palaces and hôtels

pressed close about the base of the Louvre. The old Louvre of

Philip Augustus, that immense edifice whose great tower rallied

about it three and twenty chief towers, not to reckon the lesser

towers, seemed from a distance to be enshrined in the Gothic

roofs of the Hôtel d’Alençon, and the Petit-Bourbon. This hydra

of towers, giant guardian of Paris, with its four and twenty

heads, always erect, with its monstrous haunches, loaded or

scaled with slates, and all streaming with metallic reflections,

terminated with wonderful effect the configuration of the Town

towards the west.

Thus an immense block, which the Romans called _insula_, or

island, of _bourgeois_ houses, flanked on the right and the left

by two blocks of palaces, crowned, the one by the Louvre, the

other by the Tournelles, bordered on the north by a long girdle

of abbeys and cultivated enclosures, all amalgamated and melted

together in one view; upon these thousands of edifices, whose

tiled and slated roofs outlined upon each other so many fantastic

chains, the bell towers, tattooed, fluted, and ornamented with

twisted bands, of the four and forty churches on the right bank;

myriads of cross streets; for boundary on one side, an enclosure

of lofty walls with square towers (that of the University had

round towers); on the other, the Seine, cut by bridges, and

bearing on its bosom a multitude of boats; behold the Town of

Paris in the fifteenth century.

Beyond the walls, several suburban villages pressed close about

the gates, but less numerous and more scattered than those of the

University. Behind the Bastille there were twenty hovels

clustered round the curious sculptures of the Croix-Faubin and

the flying buttresses of the Abbey of Saint-Antoine des Champs;

then Popincourt, lost amid wheat fields; then la Courtille, a

merry village of wine-shops; the hamlet of Saint-Laurent with its

church whose bell tower, from afar, seemed to add itself to the

pointed towers of the Porte Saint-Martin; the Faubourg

Saint-Denis, with the vast enclosure of Saint-Ladre; beyond the

Montmartre Gate, the Grange-Batelière, encircled with white

walls; behind it, with its chalky slopes, Montmartre, which had

then almost as many churches as windmills, and which has kept

only the windmills, for society no longer demands anything but

bread for the body. Lastly, beyond the Louvre, the Faubourg

Saint-Honoré, already considerable at that time, could be seen

stretching away into the fields, and Petit-Bretagne gleaming

green, and the Marché aux Pourceaux spreading abroad, in whose

centre swelled the horrible apparatus used for boiling

counterfeiters. Between la Courtille and Saint-Laurent, your eye

had already noticed, on the summit of an eminence crouching amid

desert plains, a sort of edifice which resembled from a distance

a ruined colonnade, mounted upon a basement with its foundation

laid bare. This was neither a Parthenon, nor a temple of the

Olympian Jupiter. It was Montfaucon.

Now, if the enumeration of so many edifices, summary as we have

endeavored to make it, has not shattered in the reader’s mind the

general image of old Paris, as we have constructed it, we will

recapitulate it in a few words. In the centre, the island of the

City, resembling as to form an enormous tortoise, and throwing

out its bridges with tiles for scales; like legs from beneath its

gray shell of roofs. On the left, the monolithic trapezium, firm,

dense, bristling, of the University; on the right, the vast

semicircle of the Town, much more intermixed with gardens and

monuments. The three blocks, city, university, and town, marbled

with innumerable streets. Across all, the Seine, “foster-mother

Seine,” as says Father Du Breul, blocked with islands, bridges,

and boats. All about an immense plain, patched with a thousand

sorts of cultivated plots, sown with fine villages. On the left,

Issy, Vanvres, Vaugirarde, Montrouge, Gentilly, with its round

tower and its square tower, etc.; on the right, twenty others,

from Conflans to Ville-l’Évêque. On the horizon, a border of

hills arranged in a circle like the rim of the basin. Finally,

far away to the east, Vincennes, and its seven quadrangular

towers to the south, Bicêtre and its pointed turrets; to the

north, Saint-Denis and its spire; to the west, Saint Cloud and

its donjon keep. Such was the Paris which the ravens, who lived

in 1482, beheld from the summits of the towers of Notre-Dame.

Nevertheless, Voltaire said of this city, that “before Louis

XIV., it possessed but four fine monuments”: the dome of the

Sorbonne, the Val-de-Grâce, the modern Louvre, and I know not

what the fourth was—the Luxembourg, perhaps. Fortunately,

Voltaire was the author of “Candide” in spite of this, and in

spite of this, he is, among all the men who have followed each

other in the long series of humanity, the one who has best

possessed the diabolical laugh. Moreover, this proves that one

can be a fine genius, and yet understand nothing of an art to

which one does not belong. Did not Molière imagine that he was

doing Raphael and Michael-Angelo a very great honor, by calling

them “those Mignards of their age?”

Let us return to Paris and to the fifteenth century.

It was not then merely a handsome city; it was a homogeneous

city, an architectural and historical product of the Middle Ages,

a chronicle in stone. It was a city formed of two layers only;

the Romanesque layer and the Gothic layer; for the Roman layer

had disappeared long before, with the exception of the Hot Baths

of Julian, where it still pierced through the thick crust of the

Middle Ages. As for the Celtic layer, no specimens were any

longer to be found, even when sinking wells.

Fifty years later, when the Renaissance began to mingle with this

unity which was so severe and yet so varied, the dazzling luxury

of its fantasies and systems, its debasements of Roman round

arches, Greek columns, and Gothic bases, its sculpture which was

so tender and so ideal, its peculiar taste for arabesques and

acanthus leaves, its architectural paganism, contemporary with

Luther, Paris, was perhaps, still more beautiful, although less

harmonious to the eye, and to the thought.

But this splendid moment lasted only for a short time; the

Renaissance was not impartial; it did not content itself with

building, it wished to destroy; it is true that it required the

room. Thus Gothic Paris was complete only for a moment.

Saint-Jacques de la Boucherie had barely been completed when the

demolition of the old Louvre was begun.

After that, the great city became more disfigured every day.

Gothic Paris, beneath which Roman Paris was effaced, was effaced

in its turn; but can any one say what Paris has replaced it?

There is the Paris of Catherine de Medicis at the

Tuileries;[23]—the Paris of Henri II., at the Hôtel de Ville, two

edifices still in fine taste;—the Paris of Henri IV., at the

Place Royale: façades of brick with stone corners, and slated

roofs, tri-colored houses;—the Paris of Louis XIII., at the

Val-de-Grâce: a crushed and squat architecture, with vaults like

basket-handles, and something indescribably pot-bellied in the

column, and thickset in the dome;—the Paris of Louis XIV., in the

Invalides: grand, rich, gilded, cold;—the Paris of Louis XV., in

Saint-Sulpice: volutes, knots of ribbon, clouds, vermicelli and

chiccory leaves, all in stone;—the Paris of Louis XVI., in the

Pantheon: Saint Peter of Rome, badly copied (the edifice is

awkwardly heaped together, which has not amended its lines);—the

Paris of the Republic, in the School of Medicine: a poor Greek

and Roman taste, which resembles the Coliseum or the Parthenon as

the constitution of the year III., resembles the laws of

Minos,—it is called in architecture, “the Messidor”[24]

taste;—the Paris of Napoleon in the Place Vendôme: this one is

sublime, a column of bronze made of cannons;—the Paris of the

Restoration, at the Bourse: a very white colonnade supporting a

very smooth frieze; the whole is square and cost twenty millions.

To each of these characteristic monuments there is attached by a

similarity of taste, fashion, and attitude, a certain number of

houses scattered about in different quarters and which the eyes

of the connoisseur easily distinguishes and furnishes with a

date. When one knows how to look, one finds the spirit of a

century, and the physiognomy of a king, even in the knocker on a

door.

The Paris of the present day has then, no general physiognomy. It

is a collection of specimens of many centuries, and the finest

have disappeared. The capital grows only in houses, and what

houses! At the rate at which Paris is now proceeding, it will

renew itself every fifty years.

Thus the historical significance of its architecture is being

effaced every day. Monuments are becoming rarer and rarer, and

one seems to see them gradually engulfed, by the flood of houses.

Our fathers had a Paris of stone; our sons will have one of

plaster.

So far as the modern monuments of new Paris are concerned, we

would gladly be excused from mentioning them. It is not that we

do not admire them as they deserve. The Sainte-Geneviève of M.

Soufflot is certainly the finest Savoy cake that has ever been

made in stone. The Palace of the Legion of Honor is also a very

distinguished bit of pastry. The dome of the wheat market is an

English jockey cap, on a grand scale. The towers of Saint-Sulpice

are two huge clarinets, and the form is as good as any other; the

telegraph, contorted and grimacing, forms an admirable accident

upon their roofs. Saint-Roch has a door which, for magnificence,

is comparable only to that of Saint-Thomas d’Aquin. It has, also,

a crucifixion in high relief, in a cellar, with a sun of gilded

wood. These things are fairly marvellous. The lantern of the

labyrinth of the Jardin des Plantes is also very ingenious.

As for the Palace of the Bourse, which is Greek as to its

colonnade, Roman in the round arches of its doors and windows, of

the Renaissance by virtue of its flattened vault, it is

indubitably a very correct and very pure monument; the proof is

that it is crowned with an attic, such as was never seen in

Athens, a beautiful, straight line, gracefully broken here and

there by stovepipes. Let us add that if it is according to rule

that the architecture of a building should be adapted to its

purpose in such a manner that this purpose shall be immediately

apparent from the mere aspect of the building, one cannot be too

much amazed at a structure which might be indifferently—the

palace of a king, a chamber of communes, a town-hall, a college,

a riding-school, an academy, a warehouse, a court-house, a

museum, a barracks, a sepulchre, a temple, or a theatre. However,

it is an Exchange. An edifice ought to be, moreover, suitable to

the climate. This one is evidently constructed expressly for our

cold and rainy skies. It has a roof almost as flat as roofs in

the East, which involves sweeping the roof in winter, when it

snows; and of course roofs are made to be swept. As for its

purpose, of which we just spoke, it fulfils it to a marvel; it is

a bourse in France as it would have been a temple in Greece. It

is true that the architect was at a good deal of trouble to

conceal the clock face, which would have destroyed the purity of

the fine lines of the façade; but, on the other hand, we have

that colonnade which circles round the edifice and under which,

on days of high religious ceremony, the theories of the

stock-brokers and the courtiers of commerce can be developed so

majestically.

These are very superb structures. Let us add a quantity of fine,

amusing, and varied streets, like the Rue de Rivoli, and I do not

despair of Paris presenting to the eye, when viewed from a

balloon, that richness of line, that opulence of detail, that

diversity of aspect, that grandiose something in the simple, and

unexpected in the beautiful, which characterizes a checker-board.

However, admirable as the Paris of to-day may seem to you,

reconstruct the Paris of the fifteenth century, call it up before

you in thought; look at the sky athwart that surprising forest of

spires, towers, and belfries; spread out in the centre of the

city, tear away at the point of the islands, fold at the arches

of the bridges, the Seine, with its broad green and yellow

expanses, more variable than the skin of a serpent; project

clearly against an azure horizon the Gothic profile of this

ancient Paris. Make its contour float in a winter’s mist which

clings to its numerous chimneys; drown it in profound night and

watch the odd play of lights and shadows in that sombre labyrinth

of edifices; cast upon it a ray of light which shall vaguely

outline it and cause to emerge from the fog the great heads of

the towers; or take that black silhouette again, enliven with

shadow the thousand acute angles of the spires and gables, and

make it start out more toothed than a shark’s jaw against a

copper-colored western sky,—and then compare.

And if you wish to receive of the ancient city an impression with

which the modern one can no longer furnish you, climb—on the

morning of some grand festival, beneath the rising sun of Easter

or of Pentecost—climb upon some elevated point, whence you

command the entire capital; and be present at the wakening of the

chimes. Behold, at a signal given from heaven, for it is the sun

which gives it, all those churches quiver simultaneously. First

come scattered strokes, running from one church to another, as

when musicians give warning that they are about to begin. Then,

all at once, behold!—for it seems at times, as though the ear

also possessed a sight of its own,—behold, rising from each bell

tower, something like a column of sound, a cloud of harmony.

First, the vibration of each bell mounts straight upwards, pure

and, so to speak, isolated from the others, into the splendid

morning sky; then, little by little, as they swell they melt

together, mingle, are lost in each other, and amalgamate in a

magnificent concert. It is no longer anything but a mass of

sonorous vibrations incessantly sent forth from the numerous

belfries; floats, undulates, bounds, whirls over the city, and

prolongs far beyond the horizon the deafening circle of its

oscillations.

Nevertheless, this sea of harmony is not a chaos; great and

profound as it is, it has not lost its transparency; you behold

the windings of each group of notes which escapes from the

belfries. You can follow the dialogue, by turns grave and shrill,

of the treble and the bass; you can see the octaves leap from one

tower to another; you watch them spring forth, winged, light, and

whistling, from the silver bell, to fall, broken and limping from

the bell of wood; you admire in their midst the rich gamut which

incessantly ascends and re-ascends the seven bells of

Saint-Eustache; you see light and rapid notes running across it,

executing three or four luminous zigzags, and vanishing like

flashes of lightning. Yonder is the Abbey of Saint-Martin, a

shrill, cracked singer; here the gruff and gloomy voice of the

Bastille; at the other end, the great tower of the Louvre, with

its bass. The royal chime of the palace scatters on all sides,

and without relaxation, resplendent trills, upon which fall, at

regular intervals, the heavy strokes from the belfry of

Notre-Dame, which makes them sparkle like the anvil under the

hammer. At intervals you behold the passage of sounds of all

forms which come from the triple peal of Saint-Germain-des-Prés.

Then, again, from time to time, this mass of sublime noises opens

and gives passage to the beats of the Ave Maria, which bursts

forth and sparkles like an aigrette of stars. Below, in the very

depths of the concert, you confusedly distinguish the interior

chanting of the churches, which exhales through the vibrating

pores of their vaulted roofs.

Assuredly, this is an opera which it is worth the trouble of

listening to. Ordinarily, the noise which escapes from Paris by

day is the city speaking; by night, it is the city breathing; in

this case, it is the city singing. Lend an ear, then, to this

concert of bell towers; spread over all the murmur of half a

million men, the eternal plaint of the river, the infinite

breathings of the wind, the grave and distant quartette of the

four forests arranged upon the hills, on the horizon, like

immense stacks of organ pipes; extinguish, as in a half shade,

all that is too hoarse and too shrill about the central chime,

and say whether you know anything in the world more rich and

joyful, more golden, more dazzling, than this tumult of bells and

chimes;—than this furnace of music,—than these ten thousand

brazen voices chanting simultaneously in the flutes of stone,

three hundred feet high,—than this city which is no longer

anything but an orchestra,—than this symphony which produces the

noise of a tempest.

BOOK FOURTH.