Part 12

With these two quarters, one of hotels, the other of houses, the third element of the aspect presented by the City was a long zone of abbeys which bordered it in almost its entire circuit, from east to west, and behind the enclosure of fortifications that closed in Paris formed for it a second inner enclosure of convents and chapels. Thus, immediately beside the Tournelles park, between the Rue Saint-Antoine and the old Rue du Temple, there was Sainte-Catherine with its immense cultivated ground, bounded only by the wall of Paris. Between the old and the new Rue du Temple, there was the Temple, a sinister cluster of towers, tall, upright and isolated in the midst of a vast crenellated enclosure. Between the Rue Neuve-du-Temple and the Rue Saint-Martin, it was the abbey of Saint-Martin, in the middle of its gardens, a superb fortified church, whose girdle of towers, whose tiara of bell-towers, yielded only to Saint-Germain-des-Prés in strength and splendor. Between the two streets Saint-Martin and Saint-Denis, spread the enclosure of the Trinité. Finally, between the Rue Saint-Denis and the Rue Montorgueil, the Filles-Dieu. Next to it, one distinguished the rotten roofs and the unpaved enclosure of the Court of Miracles. It was the only profane link mingled with that devout chain of convents.

Then, the fourth compartment which outlined itself of its own accord in the agglomeration of roofs on the right bank, and which occupied the western angle of the enclosure and the riverside downstream, was a new knot of palaces and hotels crowded at the foot of the Louvre. The old Louvre of Philippe-Auguste, that disproportionate edifice whose great tower rallied twenty-three master towers around her, not counting the turrets, seemed from afar set like a jewel in the Gothic attics of the Hôtel d'Alençon and the Petit-Bourbon. This hydra of towers, giant guardian of Paris, with its twenty-four heads ever erect, with its monstrous haunches, leaden or scaled with slate, and all streaming with metallic reflections, terminated in a surprising manner the configuration of the City toward the west.

Thus, one immense block, what the Romans called an insula, of bourgeois houses, flanked on the right and left by two masses of palaces crowned one by the Louvre, the other by the Tournelles, bordered on the north by a long girdle of abbeys and cultivated enclosures, the whole amalgamated and fused to the eye; upon these thousand edifices, whose roofs of tile and slate cut one against another so many bizarre chains, the tattooed, fluted and guilloché bell-towers of the forty-four churches of the right bank; myriads of streets crossing through; as boundary on one side a closure of high walls with square towers (that of the University had round towers); on the other, the Seine cut by bridges and carrying many boats: such was the City in the fifteenth century.

Beyond the walls, a few faubourgs pressed at the gates, but less numerous and more scattered than those of the University. They were, behind the Bastille, twenty hovels huddled around the curious sculptures of the Croix-Faubin and the flying buttresses of the abbey of Saint-Antoine des Champs; then Popincourt, lost in the wheat; then the Courtille, a merry village of cabarets; the bourg 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; outside the Porte Montmartre, the Grange-Batelière ringed with white walls; behind her, with its chalky slopes, Montmartre which then had almost as many churches as mills, and which has kept only the mills, for society now asks only for the bread of the body. Finally, beyond the Louvre one saw stretching in the meadows the faubourg Saint-Honoré, already quite considerable then, and the Little Brittany growing green, and the Marché-aux-Pourceaux unfolding, in the center of which rounded the horrible furnace for boiling false coiners. Between the Courtille and Saint-Laurent your eye had already remarked at the crowning of a height crouching upon desert plains a kind of edifice which from afar resembled a ruined colonnade standing upon a undermined base. It was neither a Parthenon, nor a temple of Jupiter Olympien. It was Montfaucon.

Now, if the enumeration of so many edifices, summary as we have wished to make it, has not pulverized, as we built it up, in the reader's mind the general image of old Paris, we shall sum it up in a few words. In the center, the Île de la Cité, resembling in its shape an enormous tortoise and thrusting its tiled, scaly bridges like legs from under its gray carapace of roofs. To the left, the monolithic trapezoid, firm, dense, crowded, bristling, of the University. To the right, the vast semicircle of the City much more mingled with gardens and monuments. The three masses, Cité, Université, Ville, marbled with countless streets. Right through it all, the Seine, the 'nourishing Seine,' as Father Du Breul says, obstructed with islands, bridges and boats. All around, an immense plain, patched with a thousand sorts of cultivation, sown with fair villages; to the left, Issy, Vanvres, Vaugirard, Montrouge, Gentilly with its round tower and square tower, etc.; to the right, twenty others from Conflans to the Ville-l'Évêque. On the horizon, a rim of hills arranged in a circle like the edge of a basin. Finally, in the distance, to the east, Vincennes and its seven quadrangular towers; to the south, Bicêtre and its pointed turrets; to the north, Saint-Denis and its spire; to the west, Saint-Cloud and its donjon. Such was the Paris seen from the tops of the towers of Notre-Dame by the crows that lived there in 1482.

And yet it is of this city that Voltaire said that 'before Louis XIV it possessed only four fine monuments': the dome of the Sorbonne, the Val-de-Grâce, the modern Louvre, and I know not which fourth, perhaps the Luxembourg. Fortunately Voltaire nonetheless wrote Candide, and is none the less, of all the men who have succeeded one another in the long series of humanity, the one who best possessed the diabolical laugh. This proves besides that one may be a fine genius and understand nothing of an art of which one is not a master. Did not Molière believe he was doing great honor to Raphael and Michelangelo in calling them 'those Mignards of their age'?

Let us return to Paris and the fifteenth century.

It was then not only a beautiful city; it was a homogeneous city, an architectural and historical product of the middle ages, a chronicle of stone. It was a city formed of only two layers, the Romanesque layer and the Gothic layer, for the Roman layer had long since disappeared, except at the Thermes of Julian where it still pierced the thick crust of the middle age. As for the Celtic layer, one no longer found even samples of it in digging wells.

Fifty years later, when the renaissance came to mingle with this unity so severe and yet so varied the dazzling luxury of its fancies and its systems, its excesses of Roman round arches, of Greek columns and Gothic depressed arches, its sculpture so tender and so ideal, its particular taste for arabesques and acanthus, its architectural paganism contemporary with Luther, Paris was perhaps yet more beautiful, though less harmonious to the eye and to the thought. But this splendid moment lasted but briefly. The renaissance was not impartial; it was not content to build, it wished to throw down. It is true it needed room. Thus the Gothic Paris was complete only for a moment. One had scarcely finished Saint-Jacques-de-la-Boucherie when the demolition of the old Louvre began.

Since then the great city has been deforming day by day. The Gothic Paris beneath which the Roman Paris was effaced has in its turn been effaced. But can one say which Paris has replaced it?

There is the Paris of Catherine de Medici, at the Tuileries, the Paris of Henri II, at the Hôtel de Ville, two edifices still of great taste; the Paris of Henri IV, at the Place Royale: brick façades with stone quoins and slate roofs, tricolored houses; the Paris of Louis XIII, at the Val-de-Grâce: a crushed and squat architecture, basket-handle vaults, I know not what of paunchy in the column and hunchbacked in the dome; the Paris of Louis XIV, at the Invalides: grand, rich, gilded and cold; the Paris of Louis XV, at Saint-Sulpice: volutes, ribbon knots, clouds, vermicelli and chicory, all in stone; the Paris of Louis XVI, at the Panthéon: Saint Peter's of Rome poorly copied (the edifice has settled awkwardly, which has not mended its lines); the Paris of the Republic, at the École de Médecine: a poor Greek and Roman taste which resembles the Coliseum or the Parthenon as the constitution of year III resembles the laws of Minos, it is called in architecture 'the Messidor taste'; the Paris of Napoleon, at the Place Vendôme: that one is sublime, a column of bronze made from 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.

To each of these characteristic monuments is attached, by a similarity of taste, manner and attitude, a certain quantity of houses scattered in divers quarters and that the eye of the connoisseur distinguishes and dates easily. When one knows how to see, one recovers the spirit of a century and the physiognomy of a king even in a door-knocker.

The present Paris therefore has no general physiognomy. It is a collection of samples from several centuries, and the finest have disappeared. The capital grows only in houses, and what houses! At the rate Paris is going, it will renew itself every fifty years. Thus the historical meaning of its architecture is effaced every day. Monuments become there more and more rare, and it seems one sees them engulfed little by little, drowned amid the houses. Our fathers had a Paris of stone; our sons will have a Paris of plaster.

As for the modern monuments of the new Paris, we shall willingly dispense with speaking of them. It is not that we do not admire them as is fitting. The Sainte-Geneviève of M. Soufflot is certainly the finest Savoy cake ever made in stone. The palace of the Legion of Honor is also a very distinguished piece of pastry. The dome of the Corn Exchange is an English jockey's cap on a large scale. The towers of Saint-Sulpice are two big clarinets, and that is a form like another; the telegraph, twisted and grimacing, makes an agreeable accident upon their roofing. Saint-Roch has a portal comparable for magnificence only to Saint-Thomas d'Aquin. It also has a calvary in the round in a cellar and a sun of gilded wood. These are quite marvellous things. The lantern of the labyrinth of the Jardin des Plantes is also very ingenious. As for the palace of the Bourse, which is Greek by its colonnade, Roman by the round arch of its doors and windows, of the renaissance by its great depressed vault, it is indubitably a very correct and very pure monument. The proof is that it is crowned with an attic such as was not seen at Athens, a fine straight line, gracefully cut here and there by stovepipes. Let us add that, if it is a rule that the architecture of an edifice be adapted to its destination in such a way that this destination reveals itself of itself at the mere aspect of the edifice, one cannot too much wonder at a monument which may indifferently be a king's palace, a house of commons, a town hall, a college, a riding school, an academy, a warehouse, a tribunal, a museum, a barracks, a sepulchre, a temple, a theater. Meanwhile it is a Bourse. A monument must besides be suited to the climate. This one is evidently built expressly for our cold and rainy sky. It has an almost flat roof as in the Orient, so that in winter, when it snows, one sweeps the roof, and it is certain that a roof is made to be swept. As for that destination of which we spoke just now, it fulfills it marvelously; it is a Bourse in France, as it would have been a temple in Greece. It is true the architect had quite some trouble hiding the clock dial which would have destroyed the purity of the fair lines of the façade; but in return one has this colonnade which circulates around the monument, and beneath which, on great days of religious solemnity, may majestically unfold the procession of stockbrokers and trade agents.

These are without any doubt very superb monuments. Let us join to them a force of fine streets, amusing and varied like the Rue de Rivoli, and I do not despair that Paris seen from a balloon may one day present to the eyes this richness of lines, this opulence of details, this diversity of aspects, this I know not what of grandiose in the simple and unexpected in the beautiful which characterizes a checkerboard.

However admirable the Paris of the present may seem to you, remake the Paris of the fifteenth century, rebuild it in your thought, look at the daylight through that surprising hedge of spires, towers and bell-towers, spread the Seine in the midst of the immense city, tear it at the points of the islands, wrinkle it at the arches of the bridges with its broad green and yellow pools, more changeable than a serpent's robe, detach sharply against an azure horizon the Gothic profile of that old Paris, make its outline float in a winter mist which clings to its numerous chimneys; drown it in a profound night, and watch the bizarre play of shadows and lights in that somber labyrinth of edifices; cast upon it a ray of moonlight which vaguely draws it, and makes the great heads of the towers emerge from the fog; or take up that black silhouette, revive with shadow the thousand acute angles of the spires and gables, and make it project, more jagged than a shark's jaw, upon the coppery sky of the sunset.—And then, compare.

And if you would receive from the old city an impression the modern one can no longer give you, mount, on a morning of high festival, at the sunrise of Easter or Pentecost, mount upon some elevated point whence you dominate the entire capital, and assist at the awakening of the carillons. See at a signal departed from the sky, for it is the sun that gives it, those thousand churches start at once. These are first scattered tinklings, going from one church to another, as when musicians warn one another that one is about to begin; then suddenly see, for it seems that at certain instants the ear too has its sight, see rise at the same moment from each bell-tower like a column of noise, like a smoke of harmony. At first, the vibration of each bell rises straight, pure and so to speak isolated from the others, in the splendid sky of the morning. Then, little by little, swelling they fuse, they mix, they efface one another, they amalgamate in a magnificent concert. It is no longer but a mass of sonorous vibrations which unceasingly escapes from the innumerable bell-towers, which floats, undulates, bounds, whirls over the city, and prolongs far beyond the horizon the deafening circle of its oscillations. Meanwhile this sea of harmony is not a chaos. However thick and deep it be, it has not lost its transparency. You see there serpentine apart each group of notes which escapes from the peals; you can there follow the dialogue, now grave now shrill, of the rattle and the bourdon; you see there leap the octaves from one bell-tower to another; you watch them spring winged, light and whistling from the silver bell, fall broken and limping from the wooden bell; you admire amid them the rich scale which descends and rises unceasingly the seven bells of Saint-Eustache; you see run right across the clear and rapid notes which make three or four luminous zigzags and vanish like lightning. Yonder, it is the abbey Saint-Martin, a shrill and cracked singer; here, the sinister and surly voice of the Bastille; at the other end, the great Tower of the Louvre, with its bass. The royal carillon of the Palais unceasingly casts on all sides resplendent trills upon which fall at equal times the heavy strokes of the belfry of Notre-Dame, which make them sparkle like the anvil beneath the hammer. At intervals you see pass sounds of every shape which come from the triple peal of Saint-Germain-des-Prés. Then again from time to time this mass of sublime noises opens and gives passage to the stretta of the Ave-Maria which bursts and crackles like a tuft of stars. Below, in the deepest of the concert, you confusedly distinguish the inner chant of the churches which transpires through the vibrating pores of their vaults.—Certainly, that is an opera worth the hearing. Usually, the rumor which escapes from Paris by day, it is the city that speaks; by night, it is the city that breathes: here, it is the city that sings. Lend therefore your ear to that tutti of bell-towers, spread over the whole the murmur of half a million men, the eternal plaint of the river, the infinite breaths of the wind, the grave and distant quartet of the four forests arranged on the hills of the horizon like immense organ lofts, and extinguish therein as in a half-tint all that the central carillon might have too raucous and too sharp, and say if you know in the world anything richer, more joyous, more golden, more dazzling than that tumult of bells and peals; than that furnace of music; than those ten thousand voices of bronze singing at once in stone flutes three hundred feet high; than that city which is no longer but an orchestra; than that symphony which makes the noise of a tempest.

BOOK FOURTH

I

THE GOOD SOULS

There were sixteen years at the epoch when this history takes place that, on a fine Sunday morning of Quasimodo, a living creature had been deposited after mass in the church of Notre-Dame, upon the wooden bed fastened in the parvis on the left hand, opposite that 'great image' of Saint Christopher which the figure sculpted in stone of messire Antoine des Essarts, knight, had regarded on his knees since 1413, when it was thought fit to throw down both the saint and the faithful one. It is upon this wooden bed that it was the custom to expose found children to public charity. Who would took them there. Before the wooden bed was a copper basin for alms.

The sort of living being which lay upon that plank on the morning of Quasimodo in the year of our Lord 1467 appeared to excite to a high degree the curiosity of the rather considerable group which had gathered around the wooden bed. The group was formed in great part of persons of the fair sex. They were almost only old women.

In the front rank and the most bent over the bed, one remarked four whom by their gray cuckle, a sort of cassock, one guessed attached to some devout brotherhood. I do not see why history should not transmit to posterity the names of these four discreet and venerable damsels. They were Agnès la Herme, Jehanne de la Tarme, Henriette la Gaultière, Gauchère la Violette, all four widows, all four good-women of the chapel of Étienne-Haudry, issued from their house, with the permission of their mistress and conformably to the statutes of Pierre d'Ailly, to come hear the sermon.

Besides, if these brave haudriettes observed for the moment the statutes of Pierre d'Ailly, they violated, certainly with great joy, those of Michel de Brache and of the cardinal of Pise which prescribed to them so inhumanly silence.

'What is that, my sister?' said Agnès Gauchère, considering the little creature exposed which squealed and twisted upon the wooden bed, all frightened at so many looks.

'What are we coming to,' said Jehanne, 'if it is thus they make children now?'

'I know nothing of children,' resumed Agnès, 'but this must be a sin to look at this one.'

'It is not a child, Agnès.'

'It is a botched monkey,' observed Gauchère.

'It is a miracle,' resumed Henriette la Gaultière.

'Then,' remarked Agnès, 'it is the third since the Sunday of the Lætare. For it is not eight days since we had the miracle of the mocker of pilgrims divinely punished by Notre-Dame d'Aubervilliers, and that was the second miracle of the month.'

'It is a true monster of abomination that this so-called found child,' resumed Jehanne.

'He bawls enough to deafen a chanter,' pursued Gauchère.—'Hush then, little howler!'

'To think that it is M. of Reims who sends this enormity to M. of Paris!' added la Gaultière, joining her hands.

'I imagine,' said Agnès la Herme, 'that it is a beast, an animal, the product of a Jew with a sow; something finally that is not Christian and that must be thrown into the water or the fire.'

'I hope well,' resumed la Gaultière, 'that he will be claimed by no one.'

'Ah my God!' cried Agnès, 'those poor nurses who are there in the foundlings' home which makes the bottom of the lane going down the river, right next to my lord the bishop, if one were to bring them this little monster to nurse! I should prefer to give suck to a vampire.'

'Is she innocent, this poor la Herme!' resumed Jehanne. 'You do not see, my sister, that this little monster is at least four years old and that he would have less appetite for your teat than for a spit-turner.'

Indeed, it was not a new-born that 'this little monster' was. (We should be much embarrassed ourselves to qualify it otherwise.) It was a little mass very angular and very restless, imprisoned in a sack of printed cloth with the cipher of messire Guillaume Chartier, then bishop of Paris, with a head which came out. This head was something rather deformed. One saw there only a forest of red hair, an eye, a mouth and teeth. The eye wept, the mouth cried, and the teeth seemed to ask only to bite. The whole struggled in the sack, to the great amazement of the crowd which grew and renewed itself unceasingly around.

Dame Aloïse de Gondelaurier, a rich and noble woman who held a pretty girl of about six years by the hand and dragged a long veil at the gold horn of her headdress, stopped as she passed before the bed, and considered a moment the unhappy creature, while her charming little daughter Fleur-de-Lys de Gondelaurier, all clothed in silk and velvet, spelled with her pretty finger the permanent placard hung upon the wooden bed: FOUND CHILDREN.

'In truth,' said the lady turning away with disgust, 'I thought one exposed here only children.'

She turned her back, throwing into the basin a silver florin which rang among the farthings and made the poor good-women of the chapel of Étienne-Haudry open wide eyes.

A moment after, the grave and learned Robert Mistricolle, protonotary of the king, passed with an enormous missal under one arm and his wife under the other (damsel Guillemette la Mairesse), having thus at his sides his two regulators spiritual and temporal.

'Found child!' said he after having examined the object. 'Found apparently upon the parapet of the river Phlegethon!'

'One sees but one eye of him,' observed damsel Guillemette. 'He has upon the other a wart.'

'It is not a wart,' resumed master Robert Mistricolle. 'It is an egg which encloses another devil all alike, who bears another little egg containing another devil, and so on.'

'How do you know that?' asked Guillemette la Mairesse.

'I know it pertinently,' answered the protonotary.

'Monsieur the protonotary,' asked Gauchère, 'what do you prognosticate of this pretended found child?'

'The greatest misfortunes,' answered Mistricolle.

'Ah! my God!' said an old woman in the audience, 'with that there was a considerable pestilence last year and that they say the English are going to land in company at Harfleur.'

'That may perhaps prevent the queen from coming to Paris in the month of September,' resumed another. 'Merchandise is already going so badly!'

“Stories of the world, in your language.”