Chapter II: 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.