Part 11

Apart from these two main streets, diametrical, piercing Paris through and through in its width, common to the whole capital, the City and the University each had its own particular great street, which ran the length of them, parallel to the Seine, and in passing cut at right angles the two arterial streets. Thus in the City one went straight down from the Saint-Antoine gate to the Saint-Honoré gate; in the University, from the Saint-Victor gate to the Saint-Germain gate. These two great ways, crossed with the first two, formed the canvas upon which was knotted and tightened in every direction the labyrinthine network of the streets of Paris. In the unintelligible design of this network one distinguished besides, on examining attentively, like two broad sheaves, one in the University, the other in the City, two clusters of large streets which spread out from the bridges to the gates.

Something of this ground plan still survives today.

Now, under what aspect did this whole present itself seen from the top of the towers of Notre-Dame, in 1482? That is what we shall try to tell.

For the spectator who arrived breathless upon this summit, it was first a dazzlement of roofs, of chimneys, of streets, of bridges, of squares, of spires, of belfries. Everything seized your eyes at once, the carved gable, the sharp roof, the turret hanging at the angles of the walls, the stone pyramid of the eleventh century, the slate obelisk of the fifteenth, the round and bare tower of the keep, the square and embroidered tower of the church, the great, the small, the massive, the aerial. The gaze lost itself long at full depth in this labyrinth, where there was nothing that had not its originality, its reason, its genius, its beauty, nothing that did not come from art, from the least house with painted and sculptured front, with outward framework, with surbased door, with overhanging stories, to the royal Louvre, which then had a colonnade of towers. But here are the principal masses that one distinguished when the eye began to grow accustomed to this tumult of buildings.

First, the Cité. The island of the Cité, as Sauval says, who amid his lumber has sometimes these happy turns of style, "the island of the Cité is made like a great ship sunk in the mud and stranded in the current toward the middle of the Seine." We have just explained that in the fifteenth century this vessel was moored to the two banks of the river by five bridges. This shape of a ship had also struck the heraldic scribes; for it is from this, and not from the siege of the Normans, that comes, according to Favyn and Pasquier, the ship which blazons the old escutcheon of Paris. For whoever knows how to decipher it, heraldry is an algebra, heraldry is a language. The whole history of the second half of the middle ages is written in heraldry, as the history of the first half is in the symbolism of the Romanesque churches. These are the hieroglyphs of feudality after those of theocracy.

The Cité then offered itself first to the eyes with its stern to the east and its prow to the west. Turned toward the prow, one had before one an innumerable flock of old roofs over which rounded broadly the leaded chevet of the Sainte-Chapelle, like the croup of an elephant charged with its tower. Only, here, this tower was the boldest spire, the most open-worked, the most joineried, the most jagged that ever let see the sky through its cone of lace. Before Notre-Dame, closest, three streets emptied into the parvis, a fine square with old houses. On the south side of this square leaned the wrinkled and surly façade of the Hôtel-Dieu and its roof which seems covered with pustules and warts. Then, to the right, to the left, to the east, to the west, within this enclosure so narrow nevertheless of the Cité, rose the belfries of its twenty-one churches, of every date, of every form, of every size, from the low and worm-eaten Romanesque bell-turret of Saint-Denys-du-Pas, carcer Glaucini, to the fine needles of Saint-Pierre-aux-Boeufs and Saint-Landry. Behind Notre-Dame unfolded, to the north, the cloister with its Gothic galleries; to the south, the half-Roman palace of the bishop; to the east, the deserted point of the Terrain. In this heap of houses the eye distinguished still, at those high stone miters pierced with day which then crowned upon the roof itself the highest windows of the palaces, the Hôtel given by the city, under Charles VI, to Juvénal des Ursins; a little farther, the tarred sheds of the Marché-Palus; elsewhere again the new apse of Saint-Germain-le-Vieux, lengthened in 1458 with an end of the rue aux Febves; and then, here and there, a crossroads encumbered with people, a pillory raised at a street corner, a fine piece of pavement of Philippe-Auguste, magnificent flagging striped for the feet of horses in the middle of the way and so ill replaced in the sixteenth century by the miserable cobbling called pavement of the League, a deserted back court with one of those diaphanous staircase turrets as were made in the fifteenth century, as one may still see one in the rue des Bourdonnais. Finally, to the right of the Sainte-Chapelle, toward the west, the Palais de Justice seated at the water's edge its group of towers. The groves of the king's gardens, which covered the western point of the Cité, masked the ferryman's islet. As for the water, from the top of the towers of Notre-Dame one scarcely saw it on either side of the Cité. The Seine disappeared under the bridges, the bridges under the houses.

And when the gaze passed these bridges, whose roofs greened to the eye, mildewed before their age by the vapors of the water, if it directed itself to the left toward the University, the first edifice that struck it was a thick and low sheaf of towers, the Petit-Châtelet, whose gaping porch devoured the end of the Petit-Pont; then, if your sight traveled the view from east to west, from the Tournelle to the tower of Nesle, it was a long cordon of houses with carved beams, with colored panes, overhanging story upon story over the pavement an interminable zigzag of bourgeois gables, frequently cut by the mouth of a street, and from time to time also by the face or the elbow of a great stone hôtel, squatting at its ease, courts and gardens, wings and main bodies, amid this populace of cramped and narrow houses, like a great lord in a heap of peasants; there were five or six of these hôtels on the quay, from the lodging of Lorraine which shared with the Bernardins the great enclosure near the Tournelle, to the hôtel de Nesle, whose main tower bounded Paris, and whose pointed roofs were in possession for three months of the year of notching with their black triangles the scarlet disk of the setting sun.

This side of the Seine moreover was the less mercantile of the two, the students made more noise and crowd there than the artisans, and there was, properly speaking, no quay except from the Pont Saint-Michel to the tower of Nesle. The rest of the bank of the Seine was sometimes a naked strand, as beyond the Bernardins, sometimes a heap of houses which had their foot in the water, as between the two bridges. There was a great clamor of washerwomen, they cried, talked, sang from morning to night along the bank, and beat the linen there right soundly, as in our days. That is not the least gaiety of Paris.

The University made a block to the eye. From one end to the other it was a homogeneous and compact whole. Those thousand roofs, thick, angular, adherent, composed almost all of the same geometrical element, offered, seen from above, the aspect of a crystallization of the same substance. The capricious ravine of the streets did not cut this pie of houses into too disproportionate slices. The forty-two colleges were scattered there in a rather equal manner, and there were some everywhere; the varied and amusing crests of these fine edifices were the product of the same art as the simple roofs they surpassed, and were in fine only a multiplication squared or cubed of the same geometrical figure, they thus complicated the whole without troubling it, completed it without overloading it. Geometry is a harmony. Some fine hôtels also made here and there magnificent projections upon the picturesque garrets of the left bank, the lodging of Nevers, the lodging of Rome, the lodging of Reims which have disappeared; the hôtel de Cluny, which still subsists for the consolation of the artist, and whose tower was so stupidly uncrowned a few years ago. Near Cluny, this Roman palace, with fine round-arched arches, were the Thermes of Julian. There were also plenty of abbeys of a more devout beauty, of a graver grandeur than the hôtels, and no less beautiful, no less great. Those which first awakened the eye were the Bernardins with their three belfries; Sainte-Geneviève, whose square tower, which still exists, makes one so regret the rest; the Sorbonne, half college, half monastery of which there survives so admirable a nave, the beautiful quadrilateral cloister of the Mathurins; its neighbor the cloister of Saint-Benoît, within whose walls one has had time to slap up a theater between the seventh and eighth edition of this book; the Cordeliers, with their three enormous juxtaposed gables; the Augustins, whose graceful needle made, after the tower of Nesle, the second indentation of this side of Paris, from the west. The colleges, which are in effect the intermediate ring from the cloister to the world, held the middle in the monumental series between the hôtels and the abbeys, with a severity full of elegance, a sculpture less evaporated than the palaces, an architecture less serious than the convents. There remains unfortunately hardly anything of those monuments where Gothic art intersected with such precision richness and economy. The churches (and they were numerous and splendid in the University, and they were ranged there also in all the ages of architecture from the round arches of Saint-Julien to the ogives of Saint-Séverin), the churches dominated the whole, and, like a harmony more in this mass of harmony, they pierced at every instant the multiple cut of gables with slashed spires, with open-worked belfries, with slender needles whose line was also but a magnificent exaggeration of the acute angle of the roofs.

The ground of the University was hilly. The Sainte-Geneviève mountain made there to the southeast an enormous swelling, and it was a thing to see from the top of Notre-Dame this crowd of narrow and tortuous streets (today the Latin Quarter), these clusters of houses which, spread in all directions from the top of this eminence, precipitated themselves in disorder and almost sheer down its flanks to the water's edge, seeming, some to fall, others to climb back, all to hold to one another. A continual flux of a thousand black points which crossed upon the pavement made everything move to the eyes. It was the people, seen thus from high and far.

Finally, in the intervals of those roofs, of those spires, of those accidents of innumerable edifices which bent, twisted and indented in so bizarre a manner the extreme line of the University, one caught sight from space to space of a great mossy stretch of wall, a thick round tower, a crenelated city gate, figuring the fortification: it was the enclosure of Philippe-Auguste. Beyond, the meadows were green; beyond, the roads fled, along which still trailed some suburb houses, the rarer as they withdrew farther. Some of these suburbs had importance. It was first, starting from the Tournelle, the bourg Saint-Victor, with its one-arch bridge over the Bièvre, its abbey, where one read the epitaph of Louis the Fat, epitaphium Ludovici Grossi, and its church with octagonal spire flanked by four eleventh-century belllets (one may see a like at Étampes; it is not yet thrown down); then the bourg Saint-Marceau, which already had three churches and a convent. Then, leaving to the left the Gobelins mill and its four white walls, it was the faubourg Saint-Jacques with the beautiful sculptured cross of its crossroads, the church of Saint-Jacques du Haut-Pas, which was then Gothic, pointed and charming, Saint-Magloire, fine nave of the fourteenth century, of which Napoleon made a hayloft, Notre-Dame-des-Champs where there were Byzantine mosaics. Finally, after leaving in open field the monastery of the Chartreux, a rich edifice contemporary with the Palais de Justice, with its little compartmented gardens and the ill-frequented ruins of Vauvert, the eye fell to the west upon the three Romanesque needles of Saint-Germain-des-Prés. The bourg Saint-Germain, already a thick commune, made fifteen or twenty streets behind. The sharp belfry of Saint-Sulpice marked one of the corners of the bourg. Right beside it one distinguished the quadrilateral enclosure of the Saint-Germain fair, where is today the market; then the abbot's pillory, a pretty little round tower well capped with a cone of lead. The tile-works was farther, and the rue du Four, which led to the ban-oven, and the mill on its mound, and the leper-house, an isolated and ill-seen cottage. But what above all attracted the gaze, and fixed it long upon this point, was the abbey itself. It is certain that this monastery, which had a great air both as church and as lordship, this abbatial palace, where the bishops of Paris esteemed themselves happy to pass a night, this refectory to which the architect had given the air, the beauty and the splendid rose-window of a cathedral, this elegant chapel of the Virgin, this monumental dormitory, these vast gardens, this portcullis, this drawbridge, this envelope of crenellations which notched to the eyes the green of the neighboring meadows, these courts where shone men-at-arms mingled with golden copes, the whole grouped and rallied around the three high round-arched towers well seated upon a Gothic apse, made a magnificent figure on the horizon.

When at last, after having long considered the University, you turned toward the right bank, toward the City, the spectacle changed abruptly in character. The City, in effect, much larger than the University, was also less of a piece. At first sight, one saw it divide into several singularly distinct masses. First, to the east, in that part of the City which still receives today its name from the marsh where Camulogene bogged Caesar, it was a heap of palaces. The pie came clear to the water's edge. Four almost adherent hôtels, Jouy, Sens, Barbeau, the lodging of the Queen, mirrored in the Seine their slate roofs cut with slender turrets. These four edifices filled the space from the rue des Nonaindières to the abbey of the Célestins, whose needle gracefully raised their line of gables and crenellations. Some greenish hovels leaning over the water before these sumptuous hôtels did not prevent seeing the fine angles of their façades, their large square windows with stone mullions, their ogive porches overloaded with statues, the lively edges of their walls always cleanly cut, and all those charming hazards of architecture which make Gothic art seem to recommence its combinations at every monument. Behind these palaces, ran in all directions, now split, palisaded and crenelated like a citadel, now veiled with great trees like a charterhouse, the immense and multiform enclosure of that miraculous hôtel de Saint-Pol, where the king of France had wherewith to lodge superbly twenty-two princes of the quality of the Dauphin and the duke of Burgundy with their servants and their suites, without counting the great lords, and the emperor when he came to see Paris, and the lions, who had their hôtel apart in the royal hôtel. Let us say here that an apartment of a prince was not then composed of less than eleven rooms, from the state chamber to the prie-Dieu, not to speak of the galleries, the baths, the sweating-rooms and other "superfluous places" with which each apartment was provided; not to speak of the particular gardens of each guest of the king; not to speak of the kitchens, the cellars, the offices, the general refectories of the house; of the lower courts where there were twenty-two general laboratories from the bakehouse to the butlery; of the games of a thousand sorts, the mall, the tennis, the ring; of the aviaries, the fishponds, the menageries, the stables, the cattle-sheds; of the libraries, the arsenals and the foundries. Such was then a king's palace, a Louvre, an hôtel Saint-Pol. A city within the city.

From the tower where we have placed ourselves, the hôtel Saint-Pol, almost half hidden by the four great lodgings of which we have just spoken, was still very considerable and very marvelous to see. One distinguished there very well, though skillfully soldered to the main building by long galleries with glass and little columns, the three hôtels which Charles V had amalgamated with his palace, the hôtel du Petit-Muce, with the lace balustrade which gracefully edged its roof; the hôtel of the abbot of Saint-Maur, having the relief of a fortified castle, a thick tower, machicolations, loopholes, iron swallow-tails, and on the broad Saxon door the abbot's shield between the two notches of the drawbridge; the hôtel of the count of Étampes whose donjon ruined at its summit rounded to the eyes, notched like a cock's comb; here and there, three or four old oaks making a clump together like enormous cauliflowers, gambols of swans in the clear waters of the fishponds, all plaited with shadow and light; plenty of courts of which one saw picturesque ends; the hôtel des Lions with its low ogives on short Saxon pillars, its iron portcullises and its perpetual roaring; right through this whole the scaled spire of the Ave Maria; to the left, the lodging of the provost of Paris flanked by four finely voided turrets; in the middle, at the back, the hôtel Saint-Pol properly so called with its multiplied façades, its successive enrichments since Charles V, the hybrid excrescences with which the fancy of the architects had loaded it for two centuries, with all the apses of its chapels, all the gables of its galleries, a thousand weathervanes to the four winds, and its two high contiguous towers whose conical roof, surrounded with crenellations at its base, had the air of those pointed hats of which the brim is turned up.

In continuing to mount the stories of this amphitheater of palaces developed afar upon the ground, after having crossed a deep ravine hollowed in the roofs of the City, which marked the passage of the rue Saint-Antoine, the eye, and we still limit ourselves to the principal monuments, arrived at the lodging of Angoulême, a vast construction of several epochs where there were parts quite new and very white, which blended hardly better in the whole than a red piece on a blue doublet. However the singularly acute and elevated roof of the modern palace, bristling with chiseled gutters, covered with sheets of lead where rolled in a thousand fantastic arabesques glittering incrustations of gilded copper, this roof so curiously damascened sprang with grace from the midst of the brown ruins of the old edifice, whose old thick towers, bulged by age like casks collapsing upon themselves with decay and tearing from top to bottom, resembled great unbuttoned bellies. Behind, rose the forest of needles of the palace of the Tournelles. No glimpse in the world, neither at Chambord nor at the Alhambra, more magic, more aerial, more prestigeful than this wood of spires, of belllets, of chimneys, of weathervanes, of spirals, of winding stairs, of lanterns pierced by the day which seemed struck with a punch, of pavilions, of turrets in spindles, or, as was then said, of tournelles, all diverse in forms, in height and in attitude. One would have said a gigantic chessboard of stone.

To the right of the Tournelles, this bundle of enormous towers of inky black, entering one into another, and tied, so to speak, by a circular ditch, this donjon much more pierced with loopholes than with windows, this drawbridge always raised, this portcullis always fallen, is the Bastille. Those sorts of black beaks which come out between the crenellations, and which you take from afar for gutters, are cannons.

Under their bullet, at the foot of the formidable edifice, here is the Saint-Antoine gate, buried between its two towers.

Beyond the Tournelles, to the wall of Charles V, unrolled with rich compartments of verdure and flowers a velvet tapestry of cultures and royal parks, amid which one recognized, by its labyrinth of trees and alleys, the famous Dédalus garden which Louis XI had given to Coictier. The doctor's observatory rose above the maze like a great isolated column having a little house for capital; there were made in this workshop terrible astrologies.

There is today the Place Royale.

As we have just said, the quarter of palaces of which we have tried to give some idea to the reader, indicating nevertheless only the summits, filled the angle which the enclosure of Charles V made with the Seine to the east. The center of the City was occupied by a heap of houses of the people. It was there in effect that the three bridges of the Cité emptied onto the right bank, and bridges make houses before palaces. This mass of bourgeois dwellings, pressed like the cells in the hive, had its beauty. It is with the roofs of a capital as with the waves of a sea, that is grand. First, the streets, crossed and confused, made in the block a hundred amusing figures. Around the Halles, it was like a star with a thousand rays. The streets Saint-Denis and Saint-Martin, with their innumerable branches, climbed one after the other like two thick trees which mingle their branches. And then, tortuous lines, the streets of the Plâtrerie, of the Verrerie, of the Tixeranderie, etc., serpentined over the whole. There were also fine edifices which pierced the petrified undulation of this sea of gables. It was, at the head of the Pont-aux-Changeurs behind which one saw the Seine foam under the wheels of the Pont-aux-Meuniers, it was the Châtelet, 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 pick in three hours did not raise the thickness of a fist. It was the rich square belfry of Saint-Jacques-de-la-Boucherie, with its angles all blunted by sculpture, already admirable, though it was not finished in the fifteenth century. There lacked to it in particular those four monsters which, even today, perched at the corners of its roof, have the air of four sphinxes who give to guess to the new Paris the enigma of the old; Rault, the sculptor, placed them only in 1526, and he had twenty francs for his pains. It was the Maison-aux-Piliers, open upon that place de Grève of which we have given some idea to the reader. It was Saint-Gervais, which a portal of good taste has spoiled since; Saint-Méry whose old ogives were almost still round arches; Saint-Jean whose magnificent needle was proverbial; they were twenty other monuments which disdained not to bury their marvels in this chaos of black, narrow and deep streets. Add the stone crosses sculptured more profusely still in the crossroads than the gibbets; the cemetery of the Innocents whose architectural enclosure one perceived afar above the roofs; the pillory of the Halles, whose ridge one saw between two chimneys of the rue de la Cossonnerie; the ladder of the Croix-du-Trahoir in its crossroads always black with people; the circular hovels of the Halle au blé; the fragments of the old enclosure of Philippe-Auguste which one distinguished here and there, drowned in the houses, towers gnawed by ivy, ruined gates, crumbling and deformed stretches of wall; the quay with its thousand shops and its bleeding slaughter-houses; the Seine charged with boats from the Port-au-Foin to the For-l'Évêque; and you will have a confused image of what was in 1482 the central trapezoid of the City.

“Stories of the world, in your language.”