Chapter II: 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.