Notre-Dame de Paris
graft which shoots up, a sap which circulates, a vegetation which
starts forth anew. Certainly there is matter here for many large
volumes, and often the universal history of humanity in the
successive engrafting of many arts at many levels, upon the same
monument. The man, the artist, the individual, is effaced in
these great masses, which lack the name of their author; human
intelligence is there summed up and totalized. Time is the
architect, the nation is the builder.
Not to consider here anything except the Christian architecture
of Europe, that younger sister of the great masonries of the
Orient, it appears to the eyes as an immense formation divided
into three well-defined zones, which are superposed, the one upon
the other: the Romanesque zone[20], the Gothic zone, the zone of
the Renaissance, which we would gladly call the Greco-Roman zone.
The Roman layer, which is the most ancient and deepest, is
occupied by the round arch, which reappears, supported by the
Greek column, in the modern and upper layer of the Renaissance.
The pointed arch is found between the two. The edifices which
belong exclusively to any one of these three layers are perfectly
distinct, uniform, and complete. There is the Abbey of Jumiéges,
there is the Cathedral of Reims, there is the Sainte-Croix of
Orléans. But the three zones mingle and amalgamate along the
edges, like the colors in the solar spectrum. Hence, complex
monuments, edifices of gradation and transition. One is Roman at
the base, Gothic in the middle, Greco-Roman at the top. It is
because it was six hundred years in building. This variety is
rare. The donjon keep of d’Étampes is a specimen of it. But
monuments of two formations are more frequent. There is
Notre-Dame de Paris, a pointed-arch edifice, which is imbedded by
its pillars in that Roman zone, in which are plunged the portal
of Saint-Denis, and the nave of Saint-Germain des Prés. There is
the charming, half-Gothic chapter-house of Bocherville, where the
Roman layer extends half way up. There is the cathedral of Rouen,
which would be entirely Gothic if it did not bathe the tip of its
central spire in the zone of the Renaissance.[21]
However, all these shades, all these differences, do not affect
the surfaces of edifices only. It is art which has changed its
skin. The very constitution of the Christian church is not
attacked by it. There is always the same internal woodwork, the
same logical arrangement of parts. Whatever may be the carved and
embroidered envelope of a cathedral, one always finds beneath
it—in the state of a germ, and of a rudiment at the least—the
Roman basilica. It is eternally developed upon the soil according
to the same law. There are, invariably, two naves, which
intersect in a cross, and whose upper portion, rounded into an
apse, forms the choir; there are always the side aisles, for
interior processions, for chapels,—a sort of lateral walks or
promenades where the principal nave discharges itself through the
spaces between the pillars. That settled, the number of chapels,
doors, bell towers, and pinnacles are modified to infinity,
according to the fancy of the century, the people, and art. The
service of religion once assured and provided for, architecture
does what she pleases. Statues, stained glass, rose windows,
arabesques, denticulations, capitals, bas-reliefs,—she combines
all these imaginings according to the arrangement which best
suits her. Hence, the prodigious exterior variety of these
edifices, at whose foundation dwells so much order and unity. The
trunk of a tree is immovable; the foliage is capricious.
CHAPTER II. A BIRD’S-EYE VIEW OF PARIS.
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,—Vitré 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-Châtelet on the right bank, the
Petit-Châtelet 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-Châtelet, 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, _Porta 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-Châtelet and
the Petit-Châtelet. 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.[22]
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-Geneviève 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