Part 10

And who substituted for the old Gothic altar, splendidly encumbered with shrines and reliquaries, that heavy marble sarcophagus with heads of angels and clouds, which seems a mismatched sample from the Val-de-Grâce or the Invalides? Who foolishly set that heavy anachronism of stone into the Carlovingian pavement of Hercandus? Was it not Louis XIV fulfilling the vow of Louis XIII?

And who put in cold white panes in place of those "highly colored" stained-glass windows which made the wondering eye of our fathers hesitate between the rose of the great portal and the pointed arches of the apse? And what would a sub-chanter of the sixteenth century say, seeing the fine yellow whitewash with which our vandal archbishops have smeared their cathedral? He would remember that it was the color with which the executioner brushed "wicked" buildings; he would recall the Hôtel du Petit-Bourbon, likewise all smeared with yellow for the Constable's treason, "yellow, after all, of such good grain," says Sauval, "and so well recommended, that more than a century has not yet been able to make it lose its color." He would believe the holy place had become infamous, and would flee.

And if we climb up the cathedral, without stopping at a thousand barbarities of every kind, what has been done with that charming little spire which leaned upon the intersection of the transept, and which, no less slender and no less bold than its neighbor the flèche (also destroyed) of the Sainte-Chapelle, plunged into the sky further than the towers, slender, sharp, sonorous, openworked? An architect of good taste (1787) amputated it and thought it enough to mask the wound with that broad plaster of lead which resembles the lid of a stewpot.

Thus the marvelous art of the Middle Ages has been treated almost everywhere, especially in France. One may distinguish, upon its ruin, three kinds of lesions which all wound it to different depths: time first, which has insensibly chipped here and there and rusted everywhere its surface; next, political and religious revolutions, which, blind and angry by nature, have rushed in tumult upon it, have torn its rich garment of sculpture and chasing, burst its rose windows, broken its necklaces of arabesques and little figures, torn away its statues, now for their miter, now for their crown; finally, fashions, more and more grotesque and foolish, which since the anarchic and splendid deviations of the Renaissance have succeeded one another in the necessary decadence of architecture. Fashions have done more harm than revolutions. They have cut into the living flesh, they have attacked the bony framework of art, they have cut, carved, disorganized, killed the edifice, in form as in symbol, in its logic as in its beauty. And then they have remade; a pretension which at least neither time nor revolutions had had. They have shamelessly fitted, by virtue of "good taste," upon the wounds of Gothic architecture, their miserable trinkets of a day, their ribbons of marble, their pompons of metal, a veritable leprosy of oves, of volutes, of windings, of draperies, of garlands, of fringes, of flames of stone, of clouds of bronze, of plump cupids, of puffed-up cherubim, which begins to devour the face of art in the oratory of Catherine de' Medici, and makes it expire, two centuries later, tormented and grimacing, in the boudoir of the Dubarry.

Thus, to sum up the points we have just indicated, three sorts of ravages disfigure today the Gothic architecture. Wrinkles and warts upon the epidermis, that is the work of time; assaults, brutalities, contusions, fractures, that is the work of revolutions from Luther to Mirabeau. Mutilations, amputations, dislocation of the frame, "restorations," that is the Greek, Roman and barbarian work of the professors according to Vitruvius and Vignola. This magnificent art which the vandals had produced, the academies have killed. To the centuries, to the revolutions which devastate at least with impartiality and grandeur, has come to be joined the cloud of school architects, patented, sworn and attested, degrading with the discernment and choice of bad taste, substituting the chicories of Louis XV for Gothic lace to the greater glory of the Parthenon. It is the kick of the ass at the dying lion. It is the old oak which crowns itself, and which, to crown all, is stung, bitten, shredded by caterpillars.

How far we are from the time when Robert Cenalis, comparing Notre-Dame of Paris to that famous temple of Diana at Ephesus, "so claimed by the ancient pagans," which immortalized Herostratus, found the Gallic cathedral "more excellent in length, width, height and structure"!

Notre-Dame of Paris is not, moreover, what one might call a complete, defined, classified monument. It is no longer a Romanesque church, it is not yet a Gothic church. This edifice is not a type. Notre-Dame of Paris has not, like the abbey of Tournus, the grave and massive squareness, the round and wide vault, the glacial nakedness, the majestic simplicity of buildings which have the round arch for generator. It is not, like the cathedral of Bourges, the magnificent, light, multiform, dense, bristling, efflorescent product of the pointed arch. Impossible to rank it in that ancient family of dark churches, mysterious, low and as if crushed by the round arch; almost Egyptian save for the ceiling; all hieroglyphic, all priestly, all symbolic; more loaded in their ornaments with lozenges and zigzags than with flowers, with flowers than with animals, with animals than with men; the work of the architect less than of the bishop; the first transformation of art, wholly imprinted with theocratic and military discipline, which takes root in the lower empire and stops at William the Conqueror. Impossible to place our cathedral in that other family of high churches, aerial, rich in stained glass and sculpture; sharp of form, bold of posture; communal and bourgeois as free political symbols, capricious, unbridled, as work of art; second transformation of architecture, no longer hieroglyphic, immutable and sacerdotal, but artistic, progressive and popular, which begins at the return of the crusades and ends at Louis XI. Notre-Dame of Paris is not of pure Roman race like the first, nor of pure Arab race like the second.

It is an edifice of transition. The Saxon architect was finishing the raising of the first pillars of the nave, when the pointed arch, arriving from the crusade, came to pose as a conqueror upon those broad Romanesque capitals which were to bear only round arches. The pointed arch, thenceforth mistress, has built the rest of the church. However, inexperienced and timid at its beginning, it spreads, widens, contains itself, and dares not yet leap into spires and lancets as it did later in so many marvelous cathedrals. One would say it is conscious of the neighborhood of the heavy Romanesque pillars.

Besides, these edifices of the transition from Romanesque to Gothic are not less precious to study than the pure types. They express a nuance of art which would be lost without them. It is the grafting of the pointed arch upon the round arch.

Notre-Dame of Paris is in particular a curious sample of this variety. Each face, each stone of the venerable monument is a page not only of the history of the country, but still of the history of science and of art. Thus, to indicate here only the principal details, while the little Porte-Rouge reaches almost to the limits of the Gothic delicacies of the fifteenth century, the pillars of the nave, by their volume and their gravity, recede to the Carlovingian abbey of Saint-Germain-des-Prés. One would believe there are six centuries between that door and those pillars. There is not even the hermeticists who do not find in the symbols of the great portal a satisfactory abridgment of their science, of which the church of Saint-Jacques-de-la-Boucherie was so complete a hieroglyph. Thus, the Romanesque abbey, the philosophical church, the Gothic art, the Saxon art, the heavy round pillar which recalls Gregory VII, the hermetic symbolism by which Nicolas Flamel preluded to Luther, the papal unity, the schism, Saint-Germain-des-Prés, Saint-Jacques-de-la-Boucherie, all is fused, combined, amalgamated in Notre-Dame. This central and generative church is among the old churches of Paris a sort of chimera; it has the head of one, the limbs of that, the rump of the other; something of all.

We repeat it, these hybrid constructions are not the least interesting for the artist, for the antiquary, for the historian. They make one feel to what point architecture is a primitive thing, in that they demonstrate, as the cyclopean vestiges also demonstrate, the pyramids of Egypt, the gigantic Hindu pagodas, that the greatest products of architecture are less individual works than social works; rather the childbearing of peoples in labor than the throw of men of genius; the deposit left by a nation; the heapings made by the centuries; the residue of the successive evaporations of human society; in a word, kinds of formations. Each wave of time superposes its alluvium, each race deposits its layer upon the monument, each individual brings his stone. Thus do the beavers, thus do the bees, thus do men. The great symbol of architecture, Babel, is a hive.

The great edifices, like the great mountains, are the work of centuries. Often art transforms itself while they still hang: _pendent opera interrupta_[32]; they continue peacefully according to the transformed art. The new art takes the monument where it finds it, incrusts itself there, assimilates it, develops it at its fancy and completes it if it can. The thing is accomplished without trouble, without effort, without reaction, following a natural and tranquil law. It is a graft which occurs, a sap which circulates, a vegetation which resumes. Certainly, there is matter for very bulky books, and often universal history of humanity, in these successive solderings of several arts at several heights upon the same monument. Man, the artist, the individual efface themselves upon these great masses without author's name; human intelligence sums itself up and totals itself there. Time is the architect, the people is the mason.

To consider here only Christian European architecture, that younger sister of the great masonries of the Orient, it appears to the eye as an immense formation divided into three sharply cut zones which superimpose themselves: the Romanesque zone[33], the Gothic zone, the Renaissance zone, which we would willingly call Greco-Roman. The Romanesque layer, which is the oldest and deepest, is occupied by the round arch, which reappears borne by the Greek column in the modern and superior layer of the Renaissance. The pointed arch is between the two. The edifices which belong exclusively to one of these three layers are perfectly distinct, whole and complete. It is the abbey of Jumièges, it is the cathedral of Reims, it is Sainte-Croix of Orléans. But the three zones mingle and amalgamate by the edges, like colors in the solar spectrum. Hence the complex monuments, the edifices of nuance and of transition. One is Romanesque by the feet, Gothic in the middle, Greco-Roman by the head. It is that six hundred years were taken to build it. This variety is rare. The donjon of Étampes is a sample. But the monuments of two formations are more frequent. It is Notre-Dame of Paris, ogival edifice, which sinks by its first pillars into that Romanesque zone where are plunged the portal of Saint-Denis and the nave of Saint-Germain-des-Prés. It is the charming half-Gothic chapter house of Bocherville to which the Romanesque layer comes up to mid-body. It is the cathedral of Rouen which would be entirely Gothic if it did not bathe the extremity of its central spire in the Renaissance zone[34].

Besides, all these nuances, all these differences affect only the surface of the edifices. It is art which has changed skin. The very constitution of the Christian church is not attacked by it. It is always the same internal framework, the same logical disposition of the parts. Whatever the sculpted and embroidered envelope of a cathedral, one always finds underneath, at least in the state of germ and rudiment, the Roman basilica. It develops eternally upon the soil according to the same law. These are imperturbably two naves which intersect in a cross, and whose upper extremity rounded in apse forms the choir; these are always the side aisles, for the interior processions, for the chapels, sorts of lateral promenades where the main nave empties itself through the intercolumniations. This being posited, the number of chapels, of portals, of bell towers, of needles, is modified to infinity, following the fancy of the century, of the people, of art. The service of worship once provided and assured, architecture does what seems good to it. Statues, stained glass, rose windows, arabesques, denticulations, capitals, bas-reliefs, it combines all these imaginations according to the logarithm which suits it. Hence the prodigious exterior variety of these edifices in the depths of which resides so much order and unity. The trunk of the tree is immutable, the vegetation is capricious.

II

PARIS AS THE BIRD FLIES

We have just tried to repair for the reader this admirable church of Notre-Dame of Paris. We have indicated summarily most of the beauties it had in the fifteenth century and which are lacking to it today; but we have omitted the principal one, which is the view of Paris that one discovered then from the top of its towers.

It was indeed, when, after having groped long in the tenebrous spiral which pierces perpendicularly the thick wall of the bell towers, one suddenly emerged upon one of the two high platforms, flooded with light and air, it was a fine picture that unrolled at once on all sides beneath your eyes; a spectacle _sui generis_, of which those of our readers who have had the happiness to see an entire Gothic city, complete, homogeneous, as there still remain some, Nuremberg in Bavaria, Vittoria in Spain; or even smaller samples, provided they are well preserved, Vitré in Brittany, Nordhausen in Prussia, can easily form an idea.

The Paris of three hundred and fifty years ago, the Paris of the fifteenth century, was already a giant city. We are mistaken in general, we Parisians, upon the ground which we believe to have gained since. Paris, since Louis XI, has not grown by much more than a third. It has, certainly, lost much more in beauty than it has gained in size.

Paris was born, as is known, in that old island of the Cité which has the form of a cradle. The strand of this island was its first enclosure, the Seine its first moat. Paris remained several centuries in the state of island, with two bridges, one to the north, the other to the south, and two bridgeheads, which were at once its gates and its fortresses, the Grand-Châtelet on the right bank, the Petit-Châtelet on the left bank. Then, from the kings of the first race, too cramped in its island, and no longer able to turn around in it, Paris crossed the water. Then, beyond the Grand, beyond the Petit-Châtelet, a first enclosure of walls and towers began to cut into the countryside on both sides of the Seine. Of this ancient enclosure there still remained in the last century some vestiges; today there remains of it only the memory, and here and there a tradition, the porte Baudets or Baudoyer, _porta Bagauda_. Little by little, the wave of houses, always pushed from the heart of the city outward, overflows, gnaws, wears away and effaces this enclosure. Philippe-Auguste makes it a new dike. He imprisons Paris in a circular chain of big towers, high and solid. For more than a century, the houses press together, accumulate and raise their level in this basin like water in a reservoir. They begin to become deep, they put stories upon stories, they climb one upon the other, they spring upward like all compressed sap, and it is a question of who shall pass his head above his neighbors to have a bit of air. The street more and more hollows and narrows; every square fills and disappears. The houses at last jump over the wall of Philippe-Auguste, and scatter joyfully in the plain without order and all askew, like runaways. There, they square themselves, cut themselves gardens in the fields, take their ease. From 1367, the city spreads so much in the faubourg that a new enclosure is needed, especially on the right bank. Charles V builds it. But a city like Paris is in perpetual flood. There are only those cities which become capitals. They are funnels where all the geographic, political, moral, intellectual slopes of a country come to an end, all the natural declivities of a people; 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 soul in a nation, filters and amasses itself unceasingly drop by drop, century by century. The enclosure of Charles V therefore has the fate of the enclosure of Philippe-Auguste. From the end of the fifteenth century, it is straddled, surpassed, and the faubourg runs further. In the sixteenth, it seems to recede visibly and sink more and more into the old city, so much does a new city already thicken without. Thus, from the fifteenth century, to stop there, Paris had already worn out the three concentric circles of walls which, in the time of Julian the Apostate, were, so to speak, in germ in the Grand-Châtelet and the Petit-Châtelet. The powerful city had successively cracked its four belts of walls, like a child who grows and who bursts his clothes of last year. Under Louis XI, one saw, in places, piercing, in that sea of houses, some groups of ruined towers of the ancient enclosures, like the peaks of hills in a flood, like archipelagos of old Paris submerged under the new.

Since then, Paris has still transformed itself, unfortunately for our eyes; but it has crossed only one more enclosure, that of Louis XV, that miserable wall of mud and spittle, worthy of the king who built it, worthy of the poet who sang it:

_The wall walling Paris makes Paris murmuring._

In the fifteenth century, Paris was still divided into three cities quite distinct and separated, each having their physiognomy, their specialty, their mores, their customs, their privileges, their history: the Cité, the Université, the Ville. The Cité, which occupied the island, was the oldest, the least, and the mother of the two others, confined between them, if we may be permitted the comparison, like a little old woman between two great beautiful daughters. The Université covered the left bank of the Seine, from the Tournelle to the tour de Nesle, points which correspond in today's Paris the one to the Halle aux vins, the other to the Monnaie. Its enclosure notched rather widely that countryside where Julian had built his baths. The mountain of Sainte-Geneviève was enclosed there. The culminating point of this curve of walls was the porte Papale, that is to say approximately the present site of the Panthéon. The Ville, which was the largest of the three pieces of Paris, had the right bank. Its quay, broken however or interrupted in several places, ran along the Seine, from the tour de Billy to the tour du Bois, that is to say from the place where is today the Grenier d'abondance to the place where are today the Tuileries. These four points where the Seine cut the enclosure of the capital, the Tournelle and the tour de Nesle on the left, the tour de Billy and the tour du Bois on the right, were called par excellence _the four towers of Paris_. The Ville entered into the land more deeply still than the Université. The culminating point of the enclosure of the Ville (that of Charles V) was at the porte Saint-Denis and porte Saint-Martin whose site has not changed.

As we have just said, each of these three great divisions of Paris was a city, but a city too special to be complete, a city which could not do without the two others. Hence three perfectly separate aspects. In the Cité abounded churches, in the Ville palaces, in the Université colleges. To neglect here the secondary originalities of old Paris and the caprices of the right of way, we shall say, from a general point of view, taking only the ensembles and the masses in the chaos of communal jurisdictions, that the island was to the bishop, the right bank to the provost of merchants, the left bank to the rector. The provost of Paris, royal officer and not municipal, over the whole. The Cité had Notre-Dame, the Ville the Louvre and the Hôtel de Ville, the Université the Sorbonne. The Ville had the Halles, the Cité the Hôtel-Dieu, the Université the Pré-aux-Clercs. The offense that the schoolboys committed on the left bank, in their Pré-aux-Clercs, one judged it in the island, at the Palais de Justice, and one punished it on the right bank, at Montfaucon. Unless the rector, feeling the Université strong and the king weak, intervened; for it was a privilege of the schoolboys to be hanged at home.

(Most of these privileges, to note in passing, and there were better ones than this, had been extorted from the kings by revolts and mutinies. Such is the immemorial march. The king lets go only when the people tear away, there is an old charter which says the thing naively, with regard to fidelity: _Civibus fidelitas in reges, quæ tamen aliquoties seditionibus interrupta, multa peperit privilegia_[35].)

In the fifteenth century, the Seine bathed five islands within the enclosure of Paris: the île Louviers, where there were then trees and where there are now only wood; the île aux Vaches and the île Notre-Dame, both deserted, save one hovel, both fiefs of the bishop (in the seventeenth century, from these two islands one has made one, which has been built, and which we call the île Saint-Louis); finally the Cité, and at its tip the islet of the cow-ferryman which has since sunk under the terre-plein of the Pont-Neuf. The Cité then had five bridges; three on the right, the pont Notre-Dame and the Pont-au-Change, in stone, the Pont-aux-Meuniers, in wood; two on the left, the Petit-Pont, in stone, the Pont-Saint-Michel, in wood: all loaded with houses. The Université had six gates built by Philippe-Auguste: they were, starting from the Tournelle, the porte Saint-Victor, the porte Bordelle, the porte Papale, the porte Saint-Jacques, the porte Saint-Michel, the porte Saint-Germain. The Ville had six gates built by Charles V; they were, starting from the tour de Billy, the porte Saint-Antoine, the porte du Temple, the porte Saint-Martin, the porte Saint-Denis, the porte Montmartre, the porte Saint-Honoré. All these gates were strong, and beautiful too, which does not spoil strength. A ditch wide, deep, with swift current in the winter floods, washed the foot of the walls all around Paris; the Seine supplied the water. At night one closed the gates, one barred the river at the two ends of the city with big iron chains, and Paris slept tranquil.

Seen as the bird flies, these three boroughs, the Cité, the Université, the Ville, presented each to the eye an inextricable knit of streets bizarrely tangled. However, at first sight, one recognized that these three fragments of city formed a single body. One saw right away two long parallel streets without break, without perturbation, almost in a straight line, which crossed the three cities at once from one end to the other, from south to north, perpendicular to the Seine, linked them, mixed them, infused, poured, decanted without cease the people of one into the walls of the other, and of the three made but one. The first of these two streets went from the porte Saint-Jacques to the porte Saint-Martin; it was called rue Saint-Jacques in the Université, rue de la Juiverie in the Cité, rue Saint-Martin in the Ville; it crossed the water twice under the name of Petit-Pont and pont Notre-Dame. The second, which was called rue de la Harpe on the left bank, rue de la Barillerie 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, went from the porte Saint-Michel in the Université to the porte Saint-Denis in the Ville. Besides, under so many diverse names, these were still only two streets, but the two mother streets, the two generative streets, the two arteries of Paris. All the other veins of the triple city came to draw from them or to empty into them.

“Stories of the world, in your language.”