We have just attempted to restore, for the reader's benefit, thatadmirable church of Notre-Dame de Paris. We have briefly pointed outthe greater part of the beauties which it possessed in the fifteenthcentury, and which it lacks to-day; but we have omitted the principalthing,--the view of Paris which was then to be obtained from the summitsof its towers.
That was, in fact,--when, after having long groped one's way up the darkspiral which perpendicularly pierces the thick wall of the belfries,one emerged, at last abruptly, upon one of the lofty platforms inundatedwith light and air,--that was, in fact, a fine picture which spreadout, on all sides at once, before the eye; a spectacle _sui generis_, ofwhich those of our readers who have had the good fortune to see aGothic 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,--Vitrein Brittany, Nordhausen in Prussia.
The Paris of three hundred and fifty years ago--the Paris of thefifteenth century--was already a gigantic city. We Parisians generallymake 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 ofLouis XI. It has certainly lost more in beauty than it has gained insize.
Paris had its birth, as the reader knows, in that old island of the Citywhich has the form of a cradle. The strand of that island was itsfirst boundary wall, the Seine its first moat. Paris remained for manycenturies in its island state, with two bridges, one on the north, theother on the south; and two bridge heads, which were at the same timeits gates and its fortresses,--the Grand-Chatelet on the right bank,the Petit-Chatelet on the left. Then, from the date of the kings of thefirst race, Paris, being too cribbed and confined in its island, andunable to return thither, crossed the water. Then, beyond the Grand,beyond the Petit-Chatelet, a first circle of walls and towers began toinfringe upon the country on the two sides of the Seine. Some vestigesof this ancient enclosure still remained in the last century; to-day,only the memory of it is left, and here and there a tradition, theBaudets or Baudoyer gate, "Porte Bagauda".
Little by little, the tide of houses, always thrust from the heart ofthe city outwards, overflows, devours, wears away, and effaces thiswall. Philip Augustus makes a new dike for it. He imprisons Paris in acircular chain of great towers, both lofty and solid. For the period ofmore than a century, the houses press upon each other, accumulate, andraise their level in this basin, like water in a reservoir. They beginto deepen; they pile story upon story; they mount upon each other; theygush forth at the top, like all laterally compressed growth, and thereis a rivalry as to which shall thrust its head above its neighbors, forthe sake of getting a little air. The street glows narrower and deeper,every space is overwhelmed and disappears. The houses finally leap thewall of Philip Augustus, and scatter joyfully over the plain, withoutorder, and all askew, like runaways. There they plant themselvessquarely, cut themselves gardens from the fields, and take theirease. Beginning with 1367, the city spreads to such an extent into thesuburbs, that a new wall becomes necessary, particularly on the rightbank; Charles V. builds it. But a city like Paris is perpetuallygrowing. It is only such cities that become capitals. They are funnels,into which all the geographical, political, moral, and intellectualwater-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, dropby drop, century by century.
So Charles V.'s wall suffered the fate of that of Philip Augustus. Atthe end of the fifteenth century, the Faubourg strides across it, passesbeyond it, and runs farther. In the sixteenth, it seems to retreatvisibly, and to bury itself deeper and deeper in the old city, so thickhad the new city already become outside of it. Thus, beginning with thefifteenth century, where our story finds us, Paris had already outgrownthe three concentric circles of walls which, from the time of Julian theApostate, existed, so to speak, in germ in the Grand-Chatelet and thePetit-Chatelet. The mighty city had cracked, in succession, its fourenclosures of walls, like a child grown too large for his garments oflast year. Under Louis XI., this sea of houses was seen to be piercedat intervals by several groups of ruined towers, from the ancient wall,like the summits of hills in an inundation,--like archipelagos of theold Paris submerged beneath the new. Since that time Paris has undergoneyet another transformation, unfortunately for our eyes; but it haspassed only one more wall, that of Louis XV., that miserable wall ofmud and spittle, worthy of the king who built it, worthy of the poet whosung it,--
_Le mur murant Paris rend Paris murmurant_.*
* The wall walling Paris makes Paris murmur.
In the fifteenth century, Paris was still divided into three whollydistinct and separate towns, each having its own physiognomy, its ownspecialty, its manners, customs, privileges, and history: the City, theUniversity, the Town. The City, which occupied the island, was themost ancient, the smallest, and the mother of the other two, crowded inbetween them like (may we be pardoned the comparison) a little old womanbetween two large and handsome maidens. The University covered the leftbank of the Seine, from the Tournelle to the Tour de Nesle, points whichcorrespond in the Paris of to-day, the one to the wine market, the otherto the mint. Its wall included a large part of that plain where Julianhad built his hot baths. The hill of Sainte-Genevieve was enclosed init. 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, whichwas 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 theplace where the granary stands to-day, to the present site of theTuileries. These four points, where the Seine intersected the wall ofthe capital, the Tournelle and the Tour de Nesle on the right, the Tourde Billy and the Tour du Bois on the left, were called pre-eminently,"the four towers of Paris." The Town encroached still more extensivelyupon the fields than the University. The culminating point of theTown wall (that of Charles V.) was at the gates of Saint-Denis andSaint-Martin, whose situation has not been changed.
As we have just said, each of these three great divisions of Paris was atown, but too special a town to be complete, a city which could notget 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 secondaryimportance in old Paris, and the capricious regulations regarding thepublic highways, we will say, from a general point of view, taking onlymasses and the whole group, in this chaos of communal jurisdictions,that the island belonged to the bishop, the right bank to the provost ofthe merchants, the left bank to the Rector; over all ruled the provostof Paris, a royal not a municipal official. The City had Notre-Dame; theTown, the Louvre and the Hotel de Ville; the University, the Sorbonne.The Town had the markets (Halles); the city, the Hospital; theUniversity, the Pre-aux-Clercs. Offences committed by the scholarson the left bank were tried in the law courts on the island, and werepunished on the right bank at Montfaucon; unless the rector, feeling theuniversity to be strong and the king weak, intervened; for it was thestudents' privilege to be hanged on their own grounds.
The greater part of these privileges, it may be noted in passing, andthere were some even better than the above, had been extorted from thekings by revolts and mutinies. It is the course of things from timeimmemorial; the king only lets go when the people tear away. There is anold charter which puts the matter naively: apropos of fidelity: _Civibusfidelitas in reges, quae tamen aliquoties seditionibus interrypta, multapeperit privileyia_.
In the fifteenth century, the Seine bathed five islands within the wallsof Paris: Louviers island, where there were then trees, and where thereis no longer anything but wood; l'ile aux Vaches, and l'ile Notre-Dame,both deserted, with the exception o
f one house, both fiefs of thebishop--in the seventeenth century, a single island was formed out ofthese two, which was built upon and named l'ile Saint-Louis--, lastlythe City, and at its point, the little islet of the cow tender, whichwas afterwards engulfed beneath the platform of the Pont-Neuf. The Citythen had five bridges: three on the right, the Pont Notre-Dame, and thePont au Change, of stone, the Pont aux Meuniers, of wood; two on theleft, the Petit Pont, of stone, the Pont Saint-Michel, of wood; allloaded 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, thePorte Montmartre, the Porte Saint-Honore. All these gates were strong,and also handsome, which does not detract from strength. A large, deepmoat, with a brisk current during the high water of winter, bathed thebase 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 withhuge iron chains, and Paris slept tranquilly.
From a bird's-eye view, these three burgs, the City, the Town, andthe University, each presented to the eye an inextricable skein ofeccentrically tangled streets. Nevertheless, at first sight, onerecognized 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 theSeine, which bound them together, mingled them, infused them in eachother, poured and transfused the people incessantly, from one to theother, and made one out of the three. The first of these streets ranfrom the Porte Saint-Martin: it was called the Rue Saint-Jacques inthe University, Rue de la Juiverie in the City, Rue Saint-Martin in theTown; it crossed the water twice, under the name of the Petit Pont andthe Pont Notre-Dame. The second, which was called the Rue de la Harpeon the left bank, Rue de la Barillerie in the island, Rue Saint-Denison the right bank, Pont Saint-Michel on one arm of the Seine, Pont auChange 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 twoarteries of Paris. All the other veins of the triple city either derivedtheir supply from them or emptied into them.
Independently of these two principal streets, piercing Parisdiametrically in its whole breadth, from side to side, common to theentire capital, the City and the University had also each its own greatspecial 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 PorteSaint-Antoine to the Porte Saint-Honore; in the University fromthe Porte Saint-Victor to the Porte Saint-Germain. These two greatthoroughfares intersected by the two first, formed the canvas upon whichreposed, knotted and crowded together on every hand, the labyrinthinenetwork of the streets of Paris. In the incomprehensible plan ofthese streets, one distinguished likewise, on looking attentively, twoclusters of great streets, like magnified sheaves of grain, one in theUniversity, the other in the Town, which spread out gradually from thebridges 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 summitof the towers of Notre-Dame, in 1482? That we shall try to describe.
For the spectator who arrived, panting, upon that pinnacle, it was firsta dazzling confusing view of roofs, chimneys, streets, bridges, places,spires, bell towers. Everything struck your eye at once: the carvedgable, the pointed roof, the turrets suspended at the angles of thewalls; the stone pyramids of the eleventh century, the slate obelisks ofthe fifteenth; the round, bare tower of the donjon keep; the square andfretted tower of the church; the great and the little, the massive andthe aerial. The eye was, for a long time, wholly lost in this labyrinth,where there was nothing which did not possess its originality, itsreason, 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 theroyal Louvre, which then had a colonnade of towers. But these are theprincipal masses which were then to be distinguished when the eye beganto 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 ofexpression,--"the island of the city is made like a great ship, stuck inthe mud and run aground in the current, near the centre of the Seine."
We have just explained that, in the fifteenth century, this ship wasanchored to the two banks of the river by five bridges. This form of aship had also struck the heraldic scribes; for it is from that, andnot from the siege by the Normans, that the ship which blazons the oldshield of Paris, comes, according to Favyn and Pasquier. For himwho understands how to decipher them, armorial bearings are algebra,armorial bearings have a tongue. The whole history of the second half ofthe Middle Ages is written in armorial bearings,--the first half isin the symbolism of the Roman churches. They are the hieroglyphics offeudalism, succeeding those of theocracy.
Thus the City first presented itself to the eye, with its stern to theeast, and its prow to the west. Turning towards the prow, one had beforeone an innumerable flock of ancient roofs, over which arched broadly thelead-covered apse of the Sainte-Chapelle, like an elephant's haunchesloaded with its tower. Only here, this tower was the most audacious, themost open, the most ornamented spire of cabinet-maker's work that everlet the sky peep through its cone of lace. In front of Notre-Dame, andvery near at hand, three streets opened into the cathedral square,--afine square, lined with ancient houses. Over the south side of thisplace bent the wrinkled and sullen facade of the Hotel Dieu, and itsroof, which seemed covered with warts and pustules. Then, on the rightand the left, to east and west, within that wall of the City, which wasyet 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 wormeatenbelfry of Saint-Denis du Pas (_Carcer Glaueini_) to the slender needlesof Saint-Pierre aux Boeufs and Saint-Landry.
Behind Notre-Dame, the cloister and its Gothic galleries spread outtowards the north; on the south, the half-Roman palace of the bishop; onthe east, the desert point of the Terrain. In this throng of houses theeye also distinguished, by the lofty open-work mitres of stone whichthen crowned the roof itself, even the most elevated windows of thepalace, the Hotel given by the city, under Charles VI., to Juvenaldes Ursins; a little farther on, the pitch-covered sheds of the PalusMarket; 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, inplaces, a square crowded with people; a pillory, erected at the cornerof a street; a fine fragment of the pavement of Philip Augustus, amagnificent flagging, grooved for the horses' feet, in the middle of theroad, and so badly replaced in the sixteenth century by the miserablecobblestones, called the "pavement of the League;" a deserted backcourtyard, with one of those diaphanous staircase turrets, such as wereerected in the fifteenth century, one of which is still to be seen inthe Rue des Bourdonnais. Lastly, at the right of the Sainte-Chapelle,towards the west, the Palais de Justice rested its group of towers atthe edge of the water. The thickets of the king's gardens, which coveredthe western point of the City, masked the Island du Passeur. As for thewater, from the summit of the towers of Notre-Dame one hardly saw it, oneither side of the City; the Seine was hidden by bridges, the bridges byhouses.
And when the glance passed these bridges, whose roofs were visiblygreen, rendered mouldy before their time by the vapors from the water,if it was directed to the left, towards the University, the firstedifice which struck it was a large, low sheaf of towers, thePe
tit-Chatelet, whose yawning gate devoured the end of the Petit-Pont.Then, if your view ran along the bank, from east to west, from theTournelle to the Tour de Nesle, there was a long cordon of houses, withcarved beams, stained-glass windows, each story projecting over thatbeneath it, an interminable zigzag of bourgeois gables, frequentlyinterrupted by the mouth of a street, and from time to time also by thefront or angle of a huge stone mansion, planted at its ease, with courtsand gardens, wings and detached buildings, amid this populace of crowdedand 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 ofLorraine, which shared with the Bernardins the grand enclosure adjoiningthe Tournelle, to the Hotel de Nesle, whose principal tower ended Paris,and whose pointed roofs were in a position, during three months of theyear, to encroach, with their black triangles, upon the scarlet disk ofthe 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 PontSaint-Michel to the Tour de Nesle. The rest of the bank of the Seine wasnow a naked strand, the same as beyond the Bernardins; again, a throngof houses, standing with their feet in the water, as between the twobridges.
There was a great uproar of laundresses; they screamed, and talked, andsang from morning till night along the beach, and beat a great deal oflinen there, just as in our day. This is not the least of the gayetiesof Paris.
The University presented a dense mass to the eye. From one end tothe other, it was homogeneous and compact. The thousand roofs, dense,angular, clinging to each other, composed, nearly all, of the samegeometrical element, offered, when viewed from above, the aspect of acrystallization of the same substance.
The capricious ravine of streets did not cut this block of houses intotoo disproportionate slices. The forty-two colleges were scattered aboutin a fairly equal manner, and there were some everywhere. The amusinglyvaried crests of these beautiful edifices were the product of the sameart as the simple roofs which they overshot, and were, actually, only amultiplication of the square or the cube of the same geometricalfigure. Hence they complicated the whole effect, without disturbingit; completed, without overloading it. Geometry is harmony. Somefine mansions here and there made magnificent outlines against thepicturesque attics of the left bank. The house of Nevers, the house ofRome, the house of Reims, which have disappeared; the Hotel de Cluny,which still exists, for the consolation of the artist, and whose towerwas 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 ofJulian. There were a great many abbeys, of a beauty more devout, of agrandeur more solemn than the mansions, but not less beautiful, not lessgrand. Those which first caught the eye were the Bernardins, with theirthree bell towers; Sainte-Genevieve, whose square tower, which stillexists, makes us regret the rest; the Sorbonne, half college, halfmonastery, of which so admirable a nave survives; the fine quadrilateralcloister of the Mathurins; its neighbor, the cloister of Saint-Benoit,within whose walls they have had time to cobble up a theatre, betweenthe seventh and eighth editions of this book; the Cordeliers, with theirthree enormous adjacent gables; the Augustins, whose graceful spireformed, after the Tour de Nesle, the second denticulation on this sideof Paris, starting from the west. The colleges, which are, in fact, theintermediate ring between the cloister and the world, hold the middleposition 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, hardlyanything remains of these monuments, where Gothic art combined withso just a balance, richness and economy. The churches (and they werenumerous and splendid in the University, and they were graded there alsoin all the ages of architecture, from the round arches of Saint-Julianto the pointed arches of Saint-Severin), the churches dominated thewhole; and, like one harmony more in this mass of harmonies, theypierced in quick succession the multiple open work of the gables withslashed spires, with open-work bell towers, with slender pinnacles,whose line was also only a magnificent exaggeration of the acute angleof the roofs.
The ground of the University was hilly; Mount Sainte-Genevieve formed anenormous mound to the south; and it was a sight to see from the summitof Notre-Dame how that throng of narrow and tortuous streets (to-daythe Latin Quarter), those bunches of houses which, spread out in everydirection from the top of this eminence, precipitated themselves indisorder, and almost perpendicularly down its flanks, nearly to thewater's edge, having the air, some of falling, others of clambering upagain, and all of holding to one another. A continual flux of a thousandblack points which passed each other on the pavements made everythingmove before the eyes; it was the populace seen thus from aloft and afar.
Lastly, in the intervals of these roofs, of these spires, of theseaccidents of numberless edifices, which bent and writhed, and jagged inso eccentric a manner the extreme line of the University, one caught aglimpse, 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 suburbanhouses, which became more infrequent as they became more distant. Someof these faubourgs were important: there were, first, starting from laTournelle, the Bourg Saint-Victor, with its one arch bridge over theBievre, 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 similarone can be seen at Etampes; it is not yet destroyed); next, the BourgSaint-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 crossin its square; the church of Saint-Jacques du Haut-Pas, which was thenGothic, pointed, charming; Saint-Magloire, a fine nave of the fourteenthcentury, 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 edificecontemporary with the Palais de Justice, with its little garden dividedinto compartments, and the haunted ruins of Vauvert, the eye fell, tothe west, upon the three Roman spires of Saint-Germain des Pres. TheBourg Saint-Germain, already a large community, formed fifteen or twentystreets in the rear; the pointed bell tower of Saint-Sulpice markedone corner of the town. Close beside it one descried the quadrilateralenclosure of the fair of Saint-Germain, where the market is situatedto-day; then the abbot's pillory, a pretty little round tower, wellcapped with a leaden cone; the brickyard was further on, and the Rue duFour, 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 longtime on that point, was the abbey itself. It is certain that thismonastery, which had a grand air, both as a church and as a seignory;that abbatial palace, where the bishops of Paris counted themselveshappy if they could pass the night; that refectory, upon which thearchitect had bestowed the air, the beauty, and the rose window of acathedral; that elegant chapel of the Virgin; that monumental dormitory;those vast gardens; that portcullis; that drawbridge; that envelopeof battlements which notched to the eye the verdure of the surroundingmeadows; those courtyards, where gleamed men at arms, intermingled withgolden copes;--the whole grouped and clustered about three lofty spires,with round arches, well planted upon a Gothic apse, made a magnificentfigure against the horizon.
When, at length, after having contemplated the University for a longtime, you turned towards the right bank, towards the Town, the characterof the spectacle was abruptly altered. The Town, in fact much largerthan the University, was also less of a unit. At the first glance, onesaw that it was divided into many masses, singularly distinct. First, tothe eastward, in
that part of the town which still takes its name fromthe marsh where Camulogenes entangled Caesar, was a pile of palaces. Theblock 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 Nonaindieres, tothe abbey of the Celestins, whose spire gracefully relieved their lineof gables and battlements. A few miserable, greenish hovels, hangingover the water in front of these sumptuous Hotels, did not preventone from seeing the fine angles of their facades, their large, squarewindows with stone mullions, their pointed porches overloaded withstatues, the vivid outlines of their walls, always clear cut, and allthose charming accidents of architecture, which cause Gothic art to havethe 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 Carthusianconvent, the immense and multiform enclosure of that miraculous Hotelde Saint-Pol, where the King of France possessed the means of lodgingsuperbly two and twenty princes of the rank of the dauphin and the Dukeof Burgundy, with their domestics and their suites, without counting thegreat 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 thata prince's apartment was then composed of never less than eleven largerooms, from the chamber of state to the oratory, not to mention thegalleries, baths, vapor-baths, and other "superfluous places," withwhich each apartment was provided; not to mention the private gardensfor each of the king's guests; not to mention the kitchens, thecellars, the domestic offices, the general refectories of the house, thepoultry-yards, where there were twenty-two general laboratories, fromthe 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 aking's palace, a Louvre, a Hotel de Saint-Pol was then. A city within acity.
From the tower where we are placed, the Hotel Saint-Pol, almost halfhidden by the four great houses of which we have just spoken, wasstill very considerable and very marvellous to see. One could theredistinguish, very well, though cleverly united with the principalbuilding by long galleries, decked with painted glass and slendercolumns, the three Hotels which Charles V. had amalgamated with hispalace: the Hotel du Petit-Muce, with the airy balustrade, which formeda graceful border to its roof; the Hotel of the Abbe de Saint-Maur,having the vanity of a stronghold, a great tower, machicolations,loopholes, iron gratings, and over the large Saxon door, the armorialbearings of the abbe, between the two mortises of the drawbridge; theHotel of the Comte d' Etampes, whose donjon keep, ruined at its summit,was rounded and notched like a cock's comb; here and there, three orfour ancient oaks, forming a tuft together like enormous cauliflowers;gambols of swans, in the clear water of the fishponds, all in folds oflight and shade; many courtyards of which one beheld picturesque bits;the Hotel of the Lions, with its low, pointed arches on short, Saxonpillars, its iron gratings and its perpetual roar; shooting up abovethe whole, the scale-ornamented spire of the Ave-Maria; on the left, thehouse of the Provost of Paris, flanked by four small towers, delicatelygrooved, in the middle; at the extremity, the Hotel Saint-Pol, properlyspeaking, with its multiplied facades, its successive enrichments fromthe time of Charles V., the hybrid excrescences, with which the fancy ofthe architects had loaded it during the last two centuries, with allthe apses of its chapels, all the gables of its galleries, a thousandweathercocks for the four winds, and its two lofty contiguous towers,whose conical roof, surrounded by battlements at its base, looked likethose pointed caps which have their edges turned up.
Continuing to mount the stories of this amphitheatre of palaces spreadout afar upon the ground, after crossing a deep ravine hollowed outof the roofs in the Town, which marked the passage of the RueSaint-Antoine, the eye reached the house of Angouleme, a vastconstruction of many epochs, where there were perfectly new and verywhite parts, which melted no better into the whole than a red patch on ablue doublet. Nevertheless, the remarkably pointed and lofty roof of themodern palace, bristling with carved eaves, covered with sheets of lead,where coiled a thousand fantastic arabesques of sparkling incrustationsof gilded bronze, that roof, so curiously damascened, darted upwardsgracefully from the midst of the brown ruins of the ancient edifice;whose huge and ancient towers, rounded by age like casks, sinkingtogether with old age, and rending themselves from top to bottom,resembled great bellies unbuttoned. Behind rose the forest of spires ofthe Palais des Tournelles. Not a view in the world, either at Chambordor at the Alhambra, is more magic, more aerial, more enchanting, thanthat 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, asthey 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 asink, 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,--isthe Bastille. Those sorts of black beaks which project from between thebattlements, and which you take from a distance to be cave spouts, arecannons.
Beneath them, at the foot of the formidable edifice, behold the PorteSainte-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 ofcultivated land and royal parks, in the midst of which one recognized,by its labyrinth of trees and alleys, the famous Daedalus garden whichLouis XI. had given to Coictier. The doctor's observatory rose above thelabyrinth 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 justendeavored to give the reader some idea by indicating only the chiefpoints, filled the angle which Charles V.'s wall made with the Seine onthe east. The centre of the Town was occupied by a pile of houses forthe populace. It was there, in fact, that the three bridges disgorgedupon the right bank, and bridges lead to the building of houses ratherthan palaces. That congregation of bourgeois habitations, pressedtogether like the cells in a hive, had a beauty of its own. It is withthe roofs of a capital as with the waves of the sea,--they are grand.First the streets, crossed and entangled, forming a hundred amusingfigures in the block; around the market-place, it was like a star with athousand rays.
The Rues Saint-Denis and Saint-Martin, with their innumerableramifications, rose one after the other, like trees intertwining theirbranches; and then the tortuous lines, the Rues de la Platrerie, de laVerrerie, de la Tixeranderie, etc., meandered over all. There were alsofine edifices which pierced the petrified undulations of that sea ofgables. At the head of the Pont aux Changeurs, behind which one beheldthe Seine foaming beneath the wheels of the Pont aux Meuniers, there wasthe Chalelet, no longer a Roman tower, as under Julian the Apostate, buta feudal tower of the thirteenth century, and of a stone so hard thatthe pickaxe could not break away so much as the thickness of the fistin a space of three hours; there was the rich square bell tower ofSaint-Jacques de la Boucherie, with its angles all frothing withcarvings, already admirable, although it was not finished in thefifteenth century. (It lacked, in particular, the four monsters, which,still perched to-day on the corners of its roof, have the air of somany sphinxes who are propounding to new Paris the riddle of the ancientParis. Rault, the sculptor, only placed them in position in 1526, andreceived twenty francs for his pains.) There was the Maison-aux-Piliers,the Pillar House, opening upon that Place de Greve of which we havegiven the reader some idea; there was Saint-Gervais, which a front "ingood taste" has si
nce spoiled; Saint-Mery, whose ancient pointed archeswere still almost round arches; Saint-Jean, whose magnificent spire wasproverbial; there were twenty other monuments, which did not disdain tobury their wonders in that chaos of black, deep, narrow streets. Addthe crosses of carved stone, more lavishly scattered through thesquares than even the gibbets; the cemetery of the Innocents, whosearchitectural wall could be seen in the distance above the roofs; thepillory of the Markets, whose top was visible between two chimneys ofthe Rue de la Cossonnerie; the ladder of the Croix-du-Trahoir, in itssquare always black with people; the circular buildings of the wheatmart; the fragments of Philip Augustus's ancient wall, which could bemade out here and there, drowned among the houses, its towers gnawed byivy, its gates in ruins, with crumbling and deformed stretches of wall;the quay with its thousand shops, and its bloody knacker's yards; theSeine encumbered with boats, from the Port au Foin to Port-l'Eveque, andyou will have a confused picture of what the central trapezium of theTown was like in 1482.
With these two quarters, one of Hotels, the other of houses, the thirdfeature of aspect presented by the city was a long zone of abbeys, whichbordered it in nearly the whole of its circumference, from the rising tothe setting sun, and, behind the circle of fortifications which hemmedin Paris, formed a second interior enclosure of convents and chapels.Thus, immediately adjoining the park des Tournelles, between theRue Saint-Antoine and the Vielle Rue du Temple, there stoodSainte-Catherine, with its immense cultivated lands, which wereterminated only by the wall of Paris. Between the old and the new Rue duTemple, there was the Temple, a sinister group of towers, lofty, erect,and isolated in the middle of a vast, battlemented enclosure. Betweenthe Rue Neuve-du-Temple and the Rue Saint-Martin, there was the Abbeyof Saint-Martin, in the midst of its gardens, a superb fortified church,whose girdle of towers, whose diadem of bell towers, yielded inforce and splendor only to Saint-Germain des Pres. Between the RueSaint-Martin and the Rue Saint-Denis, spread the enclosure of theTrinite.
Lastly, between the Rue Saint-Denis, and the Rue Montorgueil, stood theFilles-Dieu. On one side, the rotting roofs and unpaved enclosure of theCour des Miracles could be descried. It was the sole profane ring whichwas linked to that devout chain of convents.
Finally, the fourth compartment, which stretched itself out in theagglomeration of the roofs on the right bank, and which occupied thewestern angle of the enclosure, and the banks of the river down stream,was a fresh cluster of palaces and Hotels pressed close about the baseof the Louvre. The old Louvre of Philip Augustus, that immense edificewhose great tower rallied about it three and twenty chief towers, not toreckon the lesser towers, seemed from a distance to be enshrined in theGothic roofs of the Hotel d'Alencon, and the Petit-Bourbon. This hydraof 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 wonderfuleffect the configuration of the Town towards the west.
Thus an immense block, which the Romans called _iusula_, or island, ofbourgeois houses, flanked on the right and the left by two blocks ofpalaces, crowned, the one by the Louvre, the other by the Tournelles,bordered on the north by a long girdle of abbeys and cultivatedenclosures, all amalgamated and melted together in one view; upon thesethousands of edifices, whose tiled and slated roofs outlined upon eachother so many fantastic chains, the bell towers, tattooed, fluted, andornamented with twisted bands, of the four and forty churches on theright bank; myriads of cross streets; for boundary on one side, anenclosure of lofty walls with square towers (that of the University hadround towers); on the other, the Seine, cut by bridges, and bearingon its bosom a multitude of boats; behold the Town of Paris in thefifteenth century.
Beyond the walls, several suburban villages pressed close aboutthe gates, but less numerous and more scattered than those of theUniversity. Behind the Bastille there were twenty hovels clustered roundthe curious sculptures of the Croix-Faubin and the flying buttresses ofthe Abbey of Saint-Antoine des Champs; then Popincourt, lost amid wheatfields; then la Courtille, a merry village of wine-shops; the hamlet ofSaint-Laurent with its church whose bell tower, from afar, seemed toadd itself to the pointed towers of the Porte Saint-Martin; theFaubourg Saint-Denis, with the vast enclosure of Saint-Ladre; beyondthe Montmartre Gate, the Grange-Bateliere, encircled with white walls;behind it, with its chalky slopes, Montmartre, which had then almost asmany 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-Honore, already considerableat that time, could be seen stretching away into the fields, andPetit-Bretagne gleaming green, and the Marche aux Pourceaux spreadingabroad, in whose centre swelled the horrible apparatus used for boilingcounterfeiters. Between la Courtille and Saint-Laurent, your eye hadalready noticed, on the summit of an eminence crouching amid desertplains, a sort of edifice which resembled from a distance a ruinedcolonnade, mounted upon a basement with its foundation laid bare. Thiswas neither a Parthenon, nor a temple of the Olympian Jupiter. It wasMontfaucon.
Now, if the enumeration of so many edifices, summary as we haveendeavored to make it, has not shattered in the reader's mind thegeneral image of old Paris, as we have constructed it, we willrecapitulate it in a few words. In the centre, the island of the City,resembling as to form an enormous tortoise, and throwing out its bridgeswith tiles for scales; like legs from beneath its gray shell of roofs.On the left, the monolithic trapezium, firm, dense, bristling, of theUniversity; on the right, the vast semicircle of the Town, muchmore 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 withislands, bridges, and boats. All about an immense plain, patched witha thousand sorts of cultivated plots, sown with fine villages. On theleft, Issy, Vanvres, Vaugirarde, Montrouge, Gentilly, with its roundtower and its square tower, etc.; on the right, twenty others, fromConflans to Ville-l'Eveque. On the horizon, a border of hills arrangedin a circle like the rim of the basin. Finally, far away to the east,Vincennes, and its seven quadrangular towers to the south, Bicetre andits pointed turrets; to the north, Saint-Denis and its spire; to thewest, Saint Cloud and its donjon keep. Such was the Paris which theravens, who lived in 1482, beheld from the summits of the towers ofNotre-Dame.
Nevertheless, Voltaire said of this city, that "before Louis XIV.,it possessed but four fine monuments": the dome of the Sorbonne, theVal-de-Grace, the modern Louvre, and I know not what the fourth was--theLuxembourg, perhaps. Fortunately, Voltaire was the author of "Candide"in spite of this, and in spite of this, he is, among all the men whohave followed each other in the long series of humanity, the one who hasbest possessed the diabolical laugh. Moreover, this proves that one canbe a fine genius, and yet understand nothing of an art to which onedoes not belong. Did not Moliere imagine that he was doing Raphael andMichael-Angelo a very great honor, by calling them "those Mignards oftheir age?"
Let us return to Paris and to the fifteenth century.
It was not then merely a handsome city; it was a homogeneous city, anarchitectural and historical product of the Middle Ages, a chronicle instone. It was a city formed of two layers only; the Romanesque layer andthe Gothic layer; for the Roman layer had disappeared long before, withthe exception of the Hot Baths of Julian, where it still piercedthrough the thick crust of the Middle Ages. As for the Celtic layer, nospecimens were any longer to be found, even when sinking wells.
Fifty years later, when the Renaissance began to mingle with thisunity which was so severe and yet so varied, the dazzling luxury ofits fantasies and systems, its debasements of Roman round arches, Greekcolumns, and Gothic bases, its sculpture which was so tender and soideal, its peculiar taste for arabesques and acanthus leaves, itsarchitectural paganism, contemporary with Luther, Paris, was perhaps,still more beautiful, although less harmonious to the eye, and to thethought.
&nb
sp; But this splendid moment lasted only for a short time; the Renaissancewas not impartial; it did not content itself with building, it wishedto destroy; it is true that it required the room. Thus Gothic Paris wascomplete only for a moment. Saint-Jacques de la Boucherie had barelybeen completed when the demolition of the old Louvre was begun.
After that, the great city became more disfigured every day. GothicParis, 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;*--theParis of Henri II., at the Hotel de Ville, two edifices still in finetaste;--the Paris of Henri IV., at the Place Royale: facades of brickwith stone corners, and slated roofs, tri-colored houses;--the Paris ofLouis XIII., at the Val-de-Grace: a crushed and squat architecture, withvaults like basket-handles, and something indescribably pot-bellied inthe column, and thickset in the dome;--the Paris of Louis XIV., inthe Invalides: grand, rich, gilded, cold;--the Paris of Louis XV., inSaint-Sulpice: volutes, knots of ribbon, clouds, vermicelli and chiccoryleaves, all in stone;--the Paris of Louis XVI., in the Pantheon: SaintPeter of Rome, badly copied (the edifice is awkwardly heaped together,which has not amended its lines);--the Paris of the Republic, in theSchool of Medicine: a poor Greek and Roman taste, which resemblesthe Coliseum or the Parthenon as the constitution of the year III.,resembles the laws of Minos,--it is called in architecture, "theMessidor"** taste;--the Paris of Napoleon in the Place Vendome: thisone is sublime, a column of bronze made of cannons;--the Paris of theRestoration, at the Bourse: a very white colonnade supporting a verysmooth frieze; the whole is square and cost twenty millions.
* We have seen with sorrow mingled with indignation, that itis the intention to increase, to recast, to make over, that is to say,to destroy this admirable palace. The architects of our day have tooheavy a hand to touch these delicate works of the Renaissance. We stillcherish a hope that they will not dare. Moreover, this demolition of theTuileries now, would be not only a brutal deed of violence, whichwould make a drunken vandal blush--it would be an act of treason.The Tuileries is not simply a masterpiece of the art of the sixteenthcentury, it is a page of the history of the nineteenth. This palace nolonger belongs to the king, but to the people. Let us leave it as it is.Our revolution has twice set its seal upon its front. On one of its twofacades, there are the cannon-balls of the 10th of August; on the other,the balls of the 29th of July. It is sacred. Paris, April 1, 1831. (Noteto the fifth edition.)
** The tenth month of the French republican calendar, from the19th of June to the 18th of July.
To each of these characteristic monuments there is attached by asimilarity of taste, fashion, and attitude, a certain number ofhouses scattered about in different quarters and which the eyes of theconnoisseur easily distinguishes and furnishes with a date. Whenone knows how to look, one finds the spirit of a century, and thephysiognomy of a king, even in the knocker on a door.
The Paris of the present day has then, no general physiognomy. It isa collection of specimens of many centuries, and the finest havedisappeared. The capital grows only in houses, and what houses! At therate at which Paris is now proceeding, it will renew itself every fiftyyears.
Thus the historical significance of its architecture is being effacedevery day. Monuments are becoming rarer and rarer, and one seems to seethem gradually engulfed, by the flood of houses. Our fathers had a Parisof stone; our sons will have one of plaster.
So far as the modern monuments of new Paris are concerned, we wouldgladly be excused from mentioning them. It is not that we do not admirethem as they deserve. The Sainte-Genevieve of M. Soufflot is certainlythe finest Savoy cake that has ever been made in stone. The Palace ofthe Legion of Honor is also a very distinguished bit of pastry. Thedome of the wheat market is an English jockey cap, on a grand scale. Thetowers of Saint-Sulpice are two huge clarinets, and the form is as goodas any other; the telegraph, contorted and grimacing, forms anadmirable accident upon their roofs. Saint-Roch has a door which, formagnificence, is comparable only to that of Saint-Thomas d'Aquin. Ithas, also, a crucifixion in high relief, in a cellar, with a sun ofgilded wood. These things are fairly marvellous. The lantern of thelabyrinth 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 Renaissanceby virtue of its flattened vault, it is indubitably a very correct andvery pure monument; the proof is that it is crowned with an attic, suchas was never seen in Athens, a beautiful, straight line, gracefullybroken here and there by stovepipes. Let us add that if it is accordingto rule that the architecture of a building should be adapted to itspurpose in such a manner that this purpose shall be immediately apparentfrom the mere aspect of the building, one cannot be too much amazed at astructure which might be indifferently--the palace of a king, a chamberof communes, a town-hall, a college, a riding-school, an academy, awarehouse, 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 constructedexpressly for our cold and rainy skies. It has a roof almost as flat asroofs in the East, which involves sweeping the roof in winter, when itsnows; and of course roofs are made to be swept. As for its purpose, ofwhich we just spoke, it fulfils it to a marvel; it is a bourse in Franceas it would have been a temple in Greece. It is true that the architectwas at a good deal of trouble to conceal the clock face, which wouldhave destroyed the purity of the fine lines of the facade; but, on theother hand, we have that colonnade which circles round the edifice andunder which, on days of high religious ceremony, the theories ofthe stock-brokers and the courtiers of commerce can be developed somajestically.
These are very superb structures. Let us add a quantity of fine,amusing, and varied streets, like the Rue de Rivoli, and I do notdespair of Paris presenting to the eye, when viewed from a balloon, thatrichness 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, reconstructthe Paris of the fifteenth century, call it up before you in thought;look at the sky athwart that surprising forest of spires, towers, andbelfries; spread out in the centre of the city, tear away at the pointof the islands, fold at the arches of the bridges, the Seine, withits broad green and yellow expanses, more variable than the skin of aserpent; project clearly against an azure horizon the Gothic profileof this ancient Paris. Make its contour float in a winter's mist whichclings to its numerous chimneys; drown it in profound night and watchthe 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 toemerge from the fog the great heads of the towers; or take that blacksilhouette again, enliven with shadow the thousand acute angles of thespires and gables, and make it start out more toothed than a shark's jawagainst a copper-colored western sky,--and then compare.
And if you wish to receive of the ancient city an impression with whichthe modern one can no longer furnish you, climb--on the morning of somegrand festival, beneath the rising sun of Easter or of Pentecost--climbupon some elevated point, whence you command the entire capital; and bepresent at the wakening of the chimes. Behold, at a signal given fromheaven, for it is the sun which gives it, all those churches quiversimultaneously. First come scattered strokes, running from one churchto 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 earalso possessed a sight of its own,--behold, rising from each belltower, something like a column of sound, a cloud of harmony. First, thevibration of each bell mounts straight upwards, pure and, so to speak,isolated from the others, into the splendid morning sky; then, littleby little, as they swell they melt together, mingle, are lost in eachother, and amalgamate in a magnificent concert. It is no longe
r anythingbut a mass of sonorous vibrations incessantly sent forth from thenumerous belfries; floats, undulates, bounds, whirls over the city,and prolongs far beyond the horizon the deafening circle of itsoscillations.
Nevertheless, this sea of harmony is not a chaos; great and profound asit is, it has not lost its transparency; you behold the windings ofeach group of notes which escapes from the belfries. You can follow thedialogue, by turns grave and shrill, of the treble and the bass; you cansee the octaves leap from one tower to another; you watch them springforth, winged, light, and whistling, from the silver bell, to fall,broken and limping from the bell of wood; you admire in their midst therich gamut which incessantly ascends and re-ascends the seven bellsof Saint-Eustache; you see light and rapid notes running across it,executing three or four luminous zigzags, and vanishing like flashesof lightning. Yonder is the Abbey of Saint-Martin, a shrill, crackedsinger; here the gruff and gloomy voice of the Bastille; at the otherend, the great tower of the Louvre, with its bass. The royal chime ofthe palace scatters on all sides, and without relaxation, resplendenttrills, upon which fall, at regular intervals, the heavy strokes fromthe belfry of Notre-Dame, which makes them sparkle like the anvil underthe hammer. At intervals you behold the passage of sounds of all formswhich come from the triple peal of Saint-Germaine des Pres. Then, again,from time to time, this mass of sublime noises opens and gives passageto the beats of the Ave Maria, which bursts forth and sparkles likean aigrette of stars. Below, in the very depths of the concert, youconfusedly distinguish the interior chanting of the churches, whichexhales through the vibrating pores of their vaulted roofs.
Assuredly, this is an opera which it is worth the trouble of listeningto. Ordinarily, the noise which escapes from Paris by day is the cityspeaking; by night, it is the city breathing; in this case, it is thecity singing. Lend an ear, then, to this concert of bell towers; spreadover all the murmur of half a million men, the eternal plaint of theriver, the infinite breathings of the wind, the grave and distantquartette 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, andsay whether you know anything in the world more rich and joyful, moregolden, more dazzling, than this tumult of bells and chimes;--thanthis furnace of music,--than these ten thousand brazen voices chantingsimultaneously in the flutes of stone, three hundred feet high,--thanthis city which is no longer anything but an orchestra,--than thissymphony which produces the noise of a tempest.
BOOK FOURTH.
CHAPTER I. GOOD SOULS.