There remains to-day but a very imperceptible vestige of
the Place de Gr¨¨ve, such as it existed then; it consists in the
charming little turret, which occupies the angle north of the
Place, and which, already enshrouded in the ignoble plaster
which fills with paste the delicate lines of its sculpture, would
soon have disappeared, perhaps submerged by that flood of
new houses which so rapidly devours all the ancient fa?ades
of Paris.
The persons who, like ourselves, never cross the Place de
Gr¨¨ve without casting a glance of pity and sympathy on that
poor turret strangled between two hovels of the time of Louis
XV., can easily reconstruct in their minds the aggregate of
edifices to which it belonged, and find again entire in it
the ancient Gothic place of the fifteenth century.
It was then, as it is to-day, an irregular trapezoid, bordered
on one side by the quay, and on the other three by a series of
lofty, narrow, and gloomy houses. By day, one could admire
the variety of its edifices, all sculptured in stone or wood, and
already presenting complete specimens of the different domestic
architectures of the Middle Ages, running back from
the fifteenth to the eleventh century, from the casement
which had begun to dethrone the arch, to the Roman semicircle,
which had been supplanted by the ogive, and which
still occupies, below it, the first story of that ancient house de
la Tour Roland, at the corner of the Place upon the Seine, on
the side of the street with the Tannerie. At night, one could
distinguish nothing of all that mass of buildings, except the
black indentation of the roofs, unrolling their chain of acute
angles round the place; for one of the radical differences
between the cities of that time, and the cities of the present
day, lay in the fa?ades which looked upon the places and
streets, and which were then gables. For the last two centuries
the houses have been turned round.
In the centre of the eastern side of the Place, rose a heavy
and hybrid construction, formed of three buildings placed in
juxtaposition. It was called by three names which explain
its history, its destination, and its architecture: "The House
of the Dauphin," because Charles V., when Dauphin, had
inhabited it; "The Marchandise," because it had served as
town hall; and "The Pillared House" (~domus ad piloria~), because
of a series of large pillars which sustained the three
stories. The city found there all that is required for a city
like Paris; a chapel in which to pray to God; a ~plaidoyer~, or
pleading room, in which to hold hearings, and to repel, at
need, the King's people; and under the roof, an ~arsenac~ full
of artillery. For the bourgeois of Paris were aware that it is
not sufficient to pray in every conjuncture, and to plead for the
franchises of the city, and they had always in reserve, in the
garret of the town hall, a few good rusty arquebuses. The
Gr¨¨ve had then that sinister aspect which it preserves to-day
from the execrable ideas which it awakens, and from the
sombre town hall of Dominique Bocador, which has replaced
the Pillared House. It must be admitted that a permanent
gibbet and a pillory, "a justice and a ladder," as they were
called in that day, erected side by side in the centre of the
pavement, contributed not a little to cause eyes to be turned
away from that fatal place, where so many beings full of life
and health have agonized; where, fifty years later, that fever
of Saint Vallier was destined to have its birth, that terror of
the scaffold, the most monstrous of all maladies because it
comes not from God, but from man.
It is a consoling idea (let us remark in passing), to think
that the death penalty, which three hundred years ago still
encumbered with its iron wheels, its stone gibbets, and all its
paraphernalia of torture, permanent and riveted to the pavement,
the Gr¨¨ve, the Halles, the Place Dauphine, the Cross
du Trahoir, the March¨¦ aux Pourceaux, that hideous Montfau?on,
the barrier des Sergents, the Place aux Chats, the
Porte Saint-Denis, Champeaux, the Porte Baudets, the Porte
Saint Jacques, without reckoning the innumerable ladders of
the provosts, the bishop of the chapters, of the abbots, of the
priors, who had the decree of life and death,--without reckoning
the judicial drownings in the river Seine; it is consoling
to-day, after having lost successively all the pieces of its
armor, its luxury of torment, its penalty of imagination and
fancy, its torture for which it reconstructed every five years
a leather bed at the Grand Chatelet, that ancient suzerain of
feudal society almost expunged from our laws and our cities,
hunted from code to code, chased from place to place, has no
longer, in our immense Paris, any more than a dishonored
corner of the Gr¨¨ve,--than a miserable guillotine, furtive,
uneasy, shameful, which seems always afraid of being caught
in the act, so quickly does it disappear after having dealt its
blow.
CHAPTER III.