Notre-Dame de Paris
the end of the Petit-Pont. Then, if your view ran along the bank,
from east to west, from the Tournelle to the Tour de Nesle, there
was a long cordon of houses, with carved beams, stained-glass
windows, each story projecting over that beneath it, an
interminable zigzag of _bourgeois_ gables, frequently interrupted
by the mouth of a street, and from time to time also by the front
or angle of a huge stone mansion, planted at its ease, with
courts and gardens, wings and detached buildings, amid this
populace of crowded and narrow houses, like a grand gentleman
among a throng of rustics. There were five or six of these
mansions on the quay, from the house of Lorraine, which shared
with the Bernardins the grand enclosure adjoining the Tournelle,
to the Hôtel de Nesle, whose principal tower ended Paris, and
whose pointed roofs were in a position, during three months of
the year, to encroach, with their black triangles, upon the
scarlet disk of the setting sun.
This side of the Seine was, however, the least mercantile of the
two. Students furnished more of a crowd and more noise there than
artisans, and there was not, properly speaking, any quay, except
from the Pont Saint-Michel to the Tour de Nesle. The rest of the
bank of the Seine was now a naked strand, the same as beyond the
Bernardins; again, a throng of houses, standing with their feet
in the water, as between the two bridges.
There was a great uproar of laundresses; they screamed, and
talked, and sang from morning till night along the beach, and
beat a great deal of linen there, just as in our day. This is not
the least of the gayeties of Paris.
The University presented a dense mass to the eye. From one end to
the other, it was homogeneous and compact. The thousand roofs,
dense, angular, clinging to each other, composed, nearly all, of
the same geometrical element, offered, when viewed from above,
the aspect of a crystallization of the same substance.
The capricious ravine of streets did not cut this block of houses
into too disproportionate slices. The forty-two colleges were
scattered about in a fairly equal manner, and there were some
everywhere. The amusingly varied crests of these beautiful
edifices were the product of the same art as the simple roofs
which they overshot, and were, actually, only a multiplication of
the square or the cube of the same geometrical figure. Hence they
complicated the whole effect, without disturbing it; completed,
without overloading it. Geometry is harmony. Some fine mansions
here and there made magnificent outlines against the picturesque
attics of the left bank. The house of Nevers, the house of Rome,
the house of Reims, which have disappeared; the Hôtel de Cluny,
which still exists, for the consolation of the artist, and whose
tower was so stupidly deprived of its crown a few years ago.
Close to Cluny, that Roman palace, with fine round arches, were
once the hot baths of Julian. There were a great many abbeys, of
a beauty more devout, of a grandeur more solemn than the
mansions, but not less beautiful, not less grand. Those which
first caught the eye were the Bernardins, with their three bell
towers; Sainte-Geneviève, whose square tower, which still exists,
makes us regret the rest; the Sorbonne, half college, half
monastery, of which so admirable a nave survives; the fine
quadrilateral cloister of the Mathurins; its neighbor, the
cloister of Saint-Benoît, within whose walls they have had time
to cobble up a theatre, between the seventh and eighth editions
of this book; the Cordeliers, with their three enormous adjacent
gables; the Augustins, whose graceful spire formed, after the
Tour de Nesle, the second denticulation on this side of Paris,
starting from the west. The colleges, which are, in fact, the
intermediate ring between the cloister and the world, hold the
middle position in the monumental series between the hotels and
the abbeys, with a severity full of elegance, sculpture less
giddy than the palaces, an architecture less severe than the
convents. Unfortunately, hardly anything remains of these
monuments, where Gothic art combined with so just a balance,
richness and economy. The churches (and they were numerous and
splendid in the University, and they were graded there also in
all the ages of architecture, from the round arches of
Saint-Julian to the pointed arches of Saint-Séverin), the
churches dominated the whole; and, like one harmony more in this
mass of harmonies, they pierced in quick succession the multiple
open work of the gables with slashed spires, with open-work bell
towers, with slender pinnacles, whose line was also only a
magnificent exaggeration of the acute angle of the roofs.
The ground of the University was hilly; Mount Sainte-Geneviève
formed an enormous mound to the south; and it was a sight to see
from the summit of Notre-Dame how that throng of narrow and
tortuous streets (to-day the Latin Quarter), those bunches of
houses which, spread out in every direction from the top of this
eminence, precipitated themselves in disorder, and almost
perpendicularly down its flanks, nearly to the water’s edge,
having the air, some of falling, others of clambering up again,
and all of holding to one another. A continual flux of a thousand
black points which passed each other on the pavements made
everything move before the eyes; it was the populace seen thus
from aloft and afar.
Lastly, in the intervals of these roofs, of these spires, of
these accidents of numberless edifices, which bent and writhed,
and jagged in so eccentric a manner the extreme line of the
University, one caught a glimpse, here and there, of a great
expanse of moss-grown wall, a thick, round tower, a crenellated
city gate, shadowing forth the fortress; it was the wall of
Philip Augustus. Beyond, the fields gleamed green; beyond, fled
the roads, along which were scattered a few more suburban houses,
which became more infrequent as they became more distant. Some of
these faubourgs were important: there were, first, starting from
la Tournelle, the Bourg Saint-Victor, with its one arch bridge
over the Bièvre, its abbey where one could read the epitaph of
Louis le Gros, _epitaphium Ludovici Grossi_, and its church with
an octagonal spire, flanked with four little bell towers of the
eleventh century (a similar one can be seen at Étampes; it is not
yet destroyed); next, the Bourg Saint-Marceau, which already had
three churches and one convent; then, leaving the mill of the
Gobelins and its four white walls on the left, there was the
Faubourg Saint-Jacques with the beautiful carved cross in its
square; the church of Saint-Jacques du Haut-Pas, which was then
Gothic, pointed, charming; Saint-Magloire, a fine nave of the
fourteenth century, which Napoleon turned into a hayloft;
Notre-Dame des Champs, where there were Byzantine mosaics;
lastly, after having left behind, full in the country, the
Monastery des Chartreux, a rich edifice contemporary with the
Palais de Justice, with its little garden divided into
compartments, and the haunted ruins of Vauvert, the eye fell, to
the west, upon the three Roman spires of Saint-Germain des Prés.
The Bourg Saint-Germain, already a large community, formed
fifteen or twenty streets in the rear; the pointed bell tower of
Saint-Sulpice marked one corner of the town. Close beside it one
descried the quadrilateral enclosure of the fair of
Saint-Germain, where the market is situated to-day; then the
abbot’s pillory, a pretty little round tower, well capped with a
leaden cone; the brickyard was further on, and the Rue du Four,
which led to the common bakehouse, and the mill on its hillock,
and the lazar house, a tiny house, isolated and half seen.
But that which attracted the eye most of all, and fixed it for a
long time on that point, was the abbey itself. It is certain that
this monastery, which had a grand air, both as a church and as a
seignory; that abbatial palace, where the bishops of Paris
counted themselves happy if they could pass the night; that
refectory, upon which the architect had bestowed the air, the
beauty, and the rose window of a cathedral; that elegant chapel
of the Virgin; that monumental dormitory; those vast gardens;
that portcullis; that drawbridge; that envelope of battlements
which notched to the eye the verdure of the surrounding meadows;
those courtyards, where gleamed men at arms, intermingled with
golden copes;—the whole grouped and clustered about three lofty
spires, with round arches, well planted upon a Gothic apse, made
a magnificent figure against the horizon.
When, at length, after having contemplated the University for a
long time, you turned towards the right bank, towards the Town,
the character of the spectacle was abruptly altered. The Town, in
fact much larger than the University, was also less of a unit. At
the first glance, one saw that it was divided into many masses,
singularly distinct. First, to the eastward, in that part of the
town which still takes its name from the marsh where Camulogènes
entangled Cæsar, was a pile of palaces. The block extended to the
very water’s edge. Four almost contiguous hotels, Jouy, Sens,
Barbeau, the house of the Queen, mirrored their slate peaks,
broken with slender turrets, in the Seine.
These four edifices filled the space from the Rue des
Nonaindières, to the abbey of the Celestins, whose spire
gracefully relieved their line of gables and battlements. A few
miserable, greenish hovels, hanging over the water in front of
these sumptuous hotels, did not prevent one from seeing the fine
angles of their façades, their large, square windows with stone
mullions, their pointed porches overloaded with statues, the
vivid outlines of their walls, always clear cut, and all those
charming accidents of architecture, which cause Gothic art to
have the air of beginning its combinations afresh with every
monument.
Behind these palaces, extended in all directions, now broken,
fenced in, battlemented like a citadel, now veiled by great trees
like a Carthusian convent, the immense and multiform enclosure of
that miraculous Hôtel de Saint-Pol, where the King of France
possessed the means of lodging superbly two and twenty princes of
the rank of the dauphin and the Duke of Burgundy, with their
domestics and their suites, without counting the great lords, and
the emperor when he came to view Paris, and the lions, who had
their separate hotel at the royal hotel. Let us say here that a
prince’s apartment was then composed of never less than eleven
large rooms, from the chamber of state to the oratory, not to
mention the galleries, baths, vapor-baths, and other “superfluous
places,” with which each apartment was provided; not to mention