Notre-Dame de Paris
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 Hôtel de Ville; the
University, the Sorbonne. The Town had the markets (Halles); the
city, the Hospital; the University, the Pré-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
Montfaucon; 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: _àpropos_ of fidelity: _Civibus fidelitas in reges, quæ
tamen aliquoties seditionibus interrupta, multa peperit
privilegia_.
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’île aux Vaches,
and l’île 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’île 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-Honoré. 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 Barillerié 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-Honoré; 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 façade
of the Hôtel 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 Glaucini_) to the slender needles of
Saint-Pierre aux Bœufs 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 hotel given by
the city, under Charles VI., to Juvénal 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-Châtelet, whose yawning gate devoured