Notre-Dame de Paris
the private gardens for each of the king’s guests; not to mention
the kitchens, the cellars, the domestic offices, the general
refectories of the house, the poultry-yards, where there were
twenty-two general laboratories, from the bakehouses to the
wine-cellars; games of a thousand sorts, malls, tennis, and
riding at the ring; aviaries, fishponds, menageries, stables,
barns, libraries, arsenals and foundries. This was what a king’s
palace, a Louvre, a Hôtel de Saint-Pol was then. A city within a
city.
From the tower where we are placed, the Hôtel Saint-Pol, almost
half hidden by the four great houses of which we have just
spoken, was still very considerable and very marvellous to see.
One could there distinguish, very well, though cleverly united
with the principal building by long galleries, decked with
painted glass and slender columns, the three hotels which Charles
V. had amalgamated with his palace: the Hôtel du Petit-Muce, with
the airy balustrade, which formed a graceful border to its roof;
the Hôtel of the Abbé de Saint-Maur, having the vanity of a
stronghold, a great tower, machicolations, loopholes, iron
gratings, and over the large Saxon door, the armorial bearings of
the abbé, between the two mortises of the drawbridge; the Hôtel
of the Comte d’Étampes, whose donjon keep, ruined at its summit,
was rounded and notched like a cock’s comb; here and there, three
or four ancient oaks, forming a tuft together like enormous
cauliflowers; gambols of swans, in the clear water of the
fishponds, all in folds of light and shade; many courtyards of
which one beheld picturesque bits; the Hôtel of the Lions, with
its low, pointed arches on short, Saxon pillars, its iron
gratings and its perpetual roar; shooting up above the whole, the
scale-ornamented spire of the Ave-Maria; on the left, the house
of the Provost of Paris, flanked by four small towers, delicately
grooved, in the middle; at the extremity, the Hôtel Saint-Pol,
properly speaking, with its multiplied façades, its successive
enrichments from the time of Charles V., the hybrid excrescences,
with which the fancy of the architects had loaded it during the
last two centuries, with all the apses of its chapels, all the
gables of its galleries, a thousand weathercocks for the four
winds, and its two lofty contiguous towers, whose conical roof,
surrounded by battlements at its base, looked like those pointed
caps which have their edges turned up.
Continuing to mount the stories of this amphitheatre of palaces
spread out afar upon the ground, after crossing a deep ravine
hollowed out of the roofs in the Town, which marked the passage
of the Rue Saint-Antoine, the eye reached the house of Angoulême,
a vast construction of many epochs, where there were perfectly
new and very white parts, which melted no better into the whole
than a red patch on a blue doublet. Nevertheless, the remarkably
pointed and lofty roof of the modern palace, bristling with
carved eaves, covered with sheets of lead, where coiled a
thousand fantastic arabesques of sparkling incrustations of
gilded bronze, that roof, so curiously damascened, darted upwards
gracefully from the midst of the brown ruins of the ancient
edifice; whose huge and ancient towers, rounded by age like
casks, sinking together with old age, and rending themselves from
top to bottom, resembled great bellies unbuttoned. Behind rose
the forest of spires of the Palais des Tournelles. Not a view in
the world, either at Chambord or at the Alhambra, is more magic,
more aerial, more enchanting, than that thicket of spires, tiny
bell towers, chimneys, weather-vanes, winding staircases,
lanterns through which the daylight makes its way, which seem cut
out at a blow, pavilions, spindle-shaped turrets, or, as they
were then called, _tournelles_, all differing in form, in height,
and attitude. One would have pronounced it a gigantic stone
chess-board.
To the right of the Tournelles, that truss of enormous towers,
black as ink, running into each other and tied, as it were, by a
circular moat; that donjon keep, much more pierced with loopholes
than with windows; that drawbridge, always raised; that
portcullis, always lowered,—is the Bastille. Those sorts of black
beaks which project from between the battlements, and which you
take from a distance to be cave spouts, are cannons.
Beneath them, at the foot of the formidable edifice, behold the
Porte Sainte-Antoine, buried between its two towers.
Beyond the Tournelles, as far as the wall of Charles V., spread
out, with rich compartments of verdure and of flowers, a velvet
carpet of cultivated land and royal parks, in the midst of which
one recognized, by its labyrinth of trees and alleys, the famous
Dædalus garden which Louis XI. had given to Coictier. The
doctor’s observatory rose above the labyrinth like a great
isolated column, with a tiny house for a capital. Terrible
astrologies took place in that laboratory.
There to-day is the Place Royale.
As we have just said, the quarter of the palace, of which we have
just endeavored to give the reader some idea by indicating only
the chief points, filled the angle which Charles V.’s wall made
with the Seine on the east. The centre of the Town was occupied
by a pile of houses for the populace. It was there, in fact, that
the three bridges disgorged upon the right bank, and bridges lead
to the building of houses rather than palaces. That congregation
of _bourgeois_ habitations, pressed together like the cells in a
hive, had a beauty of its own. It is with the roofs of a capital
as with the waves of the sea,—they are grand. First the streets,
crossed and entangled, forming a hundred amusing figures in the
block; around the market-place, it was like a star with a
thousand rays.
The Rues Saint-Denis and Saint-Martin, with their innumerable
ramifications, rose one after the other, like trees intertwining
their branches; and then the tortuous lines, the Rues de la
Plâtrerie, de la Verrerie, de la Tixeranderie, etc., meandered
over all. There were also fine edifices which pierced the
petrified undulations of that sea of gables. At the head of the
Pont aux Changeurs, behind which one beheld the Seine foaming
beneath the wheels of the Pont aux Meuniers, there was the
Châlelet, 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 pickaxe could not break away so much as the
thickness of the fist in a space of three hours; there was the
rich square bell tower of Saint-Jacques de la Boucherie, with its
angles all frothing with carvings, already admirable, although it
was not finished in the fifteenth century. (It lacked, in
particular, the four monsters, which, still perched to-day on the
corners of its roof, have the air of so many sphinxes who are
propounding to new Paris the riddle of the ancient Paris. Rault,
the sculptor, only placed them in position in 1526, and received
twenty francs for his pains.) There was the Maison-aux-Piliers,
the Pillar House, opening upon that Place de Grève of which we
have given the reader some idea; there was Saint-Gervais, which a
front “in good taste” has since spoiled; Saint-Méry, whose
ancient pointed arches were still almost round arches;
Saint-Jean, whose magnificent spire was proverbial; there were
twenty other monuments, which did not disdain to bury their
wonders in that chaos of black, deep, narrow streets. Add the
crosses of carved stone, more lavishly scattered through the
squares than even the gibbets; the cemetery of the Innocents,
whose architectural wall could be seen in the distance above the
roofs; the pillory of the Markets, whose top was visible between
two chimneys of the Rue de la Cossonnerie; the ladder of the
Croix-du-Trahoir, in its square always black with people; the
circular buildings of the wheat mart; the fragments of Philip
Augustus’s ancient wall, which could be made out here and there,
drowned among the houses, its towers gnawed by ivy, its gates in
ruins, with crumbling and deformed stretches of wall; the quay
with its thousand shops, and its bloody knacker’s yards; the
Seine encumbered with boats, from the Port au Foin to
For-l’Évêque, and you will have a confused picture of what the
central trapezium of the Town was like in 1482.
With these two quarters, one of hotels, the other of houses, the
third feature of aspect presented by the city was a long zone of
abbeys, which bordered it in nearly the whole of its
circumference, from the rising to the setting sun, and, behind
the circle of fortifications which hemmed in Paris, formed a
second interior enclosure of convents and chapels. Thus,
immediately adjoining the park des Tournelles, between the Rue
Saint-Antoine and the Vieille Rue du Temple, there stood
Sainte-Catherine, with its immense cultivated lands, which were
terminated only by the wall of Paris. Between the old and the new
Rue du Temple, there was the Temple, a sinister group of towers,
lofty, erect, and isolated in the middle of a vast, battlemented
enclosure. Between the Rue Neuve-du-Temple and the Rue
Saint-Martin, there was the Abbey of Saint-Martin, in the midst
of its gardens, a superb fortified church, whose girdle of
towers, whose diadem of bell towers, yielded in force and
splendor only to Saint-Germain des Prés. Between the Rue
Saint-Martin and the Rue Saint-Denis, spread the enclosure of the
Trinité.
Lastly, between the Rue Saint-Denis, and the Rue Montorgueil,
stood the Filles-Dieu. On one side, the rotting roofs and unpaved
enclosure of the Cour des Miracles could be descried. It was the
sole profane ring which was linked to that devout chain of
convents.
Finally, the fourth compartment, which stretched itself out in
the agglomeration of the roofs on the right bank, and which
occupied the western angle of the enclosure, and the banks of the
river down stream, was a fresh cluster of palaces and hôtels
pressed close about the base of the Louvre. The old Louvre of
Philip Augustus, that immense edifice whose great tower rallied
about it three and twenty chief towers, not to reckon the lesser
towers, seemed from a distance to be enshrined in the Gothic
roofs of the Hôtel d’Alençon, and the Petit-Bourbon. This hydra
of towers, giant guardian of Paris, with its four and twenty
heads, always erect, with its monstrous haunches, loaded or
scaled with slates, and all streaming with metallic reflections,
terminated with wonderful effect the configuration of the Town
towards the west.
Thus an immense block, which the Romans called _insula_, or
island, of _bourgeois_ houses, flanked on the right and the left
by two blocks of palaces, crowned, the one by the Louvre, the