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,--Vitr¨¦ 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-Chatelet on the right
bank, the Petit-Chatelet 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-Chatelet,
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, "Porte 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-Chatelet and the Petit-Chatelet. 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~.*
* The wall walling Paris makes Paris murmur.
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-Genevi¨¨ve 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 H?tel de Ville; the University, the Sorbonne.
The Town had the markets (Halles); the city, the Hospital;
the University, the Pr¨¦-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 Montfau?on;
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: apropos of fidelity: ~Civibus
fidelitas in reges, quoe tamen aliquoties seditionibus
interrypta, multa peperit privileyia~.
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'ile
aux Vaches, and l'ile 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'ile 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-Honor¨¦. 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 Barilleri¨¦ 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-Honor¨¦; 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 fa?ade of the H?tel 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
Glaueini~) to the slender needles of Saint-Pierre aux Boeufs
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 H?tel given by the city, under Charles VI., to Juv¨¦nal 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-Ch¨¤telet, 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 H?tel 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 H?tel 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-Genevi¨¨ve, 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-Benoit, 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 H?tels 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-S¨¦verin), 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-
Genevi¨¨ve 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 Bi¨¨vre, 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 Etampes; 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 Pr¨¦s. 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 Camulog¨¨nes entangled Caesar, was a pile of
palaces. The block extended to the very water's edge. Four
almost contiguous H?tels, 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
Nonaindi¨¨res, 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 H?tels, did not prevent one from seeing the fine
angles of their fa?ades, 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 H?tel 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 H?tel at the
royal H?tel. 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 H?tel de Saint-Pol was then. A city
within a city.
From the tower where we are placed, the H?tel 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 H?tels which
Charles V. had amalgamated with his palace: the H?tel du
Petit-Muce, with the airy balustrade, which formed a graceful
border to its roof; the H?tel 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 armorial bearings of the abb¨¦, between the two mortises
of the drawbridge; the H?tel 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 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 H?tel 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 H?tel Saint-Pol,
properly speaking, with its multiplied fa?ades, 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 Angoul¨ºme, 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 Daedalus 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 Platrerie, 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 Chalelet, 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 Gr¨¨ve of which we
have given the reader some idea; there was Saint-Gervais,
which a front "in good taste" has since spoiled; Saint-M¨¦ry,
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 Port-l'Ev¨ºque,
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 H?tels, 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 Vielle 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
Pr¨¦s. Between the Rue Saint-Martin and the Rue Saint-
Denis, spread the enclosure of the Trinit¨¦.
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 H?tels 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 H?tel d'Alen?on, 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 ~iusula~, 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-
Bateli¨¨re, 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-
Honor¨¦, already considerable at that time, could be seen
stretching away into the fields, and Petit-Bretagne gleaming
green, and the March¨¦ 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
Montfau?on.
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'Ev¨ºque. 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, Bic¨ºtre 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-Grace, 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 Moliere
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;*--the
Paris of Henri II., at the H?tel de Ville, two edifices
still in fine taste;--the Paris of Henri IV., at the Place
Royale: fa?ades of brick with stone corners, and slated roofs,
tri-colored houses;--the Paris of Louis XIII., at the Val-de-
Grace: 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"** taste;--the Paris of Napoleon in the Place
Vendome: 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.
* We have seen with sorrow mingled with indignation, that it
is the intention to increase, to recast, to make over, that is
to say, to destroy this admirable palace. The architects of our
day have too heavy a hand to touch these delicate works of the
Renaissance. We still cherish a hope that they will not dare.
Moreover, this demolition of the Tuileries now, would be not
only a brutal deed of violence, which would make a drunken vandal
blush--it would be an act of treason. The Tuileries is not simply
a masterpiece of the art of the sixteenth century, it is a page
of the history of the nineteenth. This palace no longer 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
two fa?ades, 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. (Note to the fifth edition.)
** The tenth month of the French republican calendar, from the
19th of June to the 18th of July.
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-Genevi¨¨ve 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 fa?ade; 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-Germaine des Pr¨¦s. 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.