Notre-Dame de Paris
other by the Tournelles, bordered on the north by a long girdle
of abbeys and cultivated enclosures, all amalgamated and melted
together in one view; upon these thousands of edifices, whose
tiled and slated roofs outlined upon each other so many fantastic
chains, the bell towers, tattooed, fluted, and ornamented with
twisted bands, of the four and forty churches on the right bank;
myriads of cross streets; for boundary on one side, an enclosure
of lofty walls with square towers (that of the University had
round towers); on the other, the Seine, cut by bridges, and
bearing on its bosom a multitude of boats; behold the Town of
Paris in the fifteenth century.
Beyond the walls, several suburban villages pressed close about
the gates, but less numerous and more scattered than those of the
University. Behind the Bastille there were twenty hovels
clustered round the curious sculptures of the Croix-Faubin and
the flying buttresses of the Abbey of Saint-Antoine des Champs;
then Popincourt, lost amid wheat fields; then la Courtille, a
merry village of wine-shops; the hamlet of 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; beyond the
Montmartre Gate, the Grange-Batelière, encircled with white
walls; behind it, with its chalky slopes, Montmartre, which had
then almost as many churches as windmills, and which has kept
only the windmills, for society no longer demands anything but
bread for the body. Lastly, beyond the Louvre, the Faubourg
Saint-Honoré, already considerable at that time, could be seen
stretching away into the fields, and Petit-Bretagne gleaming
green, and the Marché aux Pourceaux spreading abroad, in whose
centre swelled the horrible apparatus used for boiling
counterfeiters. Between la Courtille and Saint-Laurent, your eye
had already noticed, on the summit of an eminence crouching amid
desert plains, a sort of edifice which resembled from a distance
a ruined colonnade, mounted upon a basement with its foundation
laid bare. This was neither a Parthenon, nor a temple of the
Olympian Jupiter. It was Montfaucon.
Now, if the enumeration of so many edifices, summary as we have
endeavored to make it, has not shattered in the reader’s mind the
general image of old Paris, as we have constructed it, we will
recapitulate it in a few words. In the centre, the island of the
City, resembling as to form an enormous tortoise, and throwing
out its bridges with tiles for scales; like legs from beneath its
gray shell of roofs. On the left, the monolithic trapezium, firm,
dense, bristling, of the University; on the right, the vast
semicircle of the Town, much more intermixed with gardens and
monuments. The three blocks, city, university, and town, marbled
with innumerable streets. Across all, the Seine, “foster-mother
Seine,” as says Father Du Breul, blocked with islands, bridges,
and boats. All about an immense plain, patched with a thousand
sorts of cultivated plots, sown with fine villages. On the left,
Issy, Vanvres, Vaugirarde, Montrouge, Gentilly, with its round
tower and its square tower, etc.; on the right, twenty others,
from Conflans to Ville-l’Évêque. On the horizon, a border of
hills arranged in a circle like the rim of the basin. Finally,
far away 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 keep. Such was the Paris which the ravens, who lived
in 1482, beheld from the summits of the towers of Notre-Dame.
Nevertheless, Voltaire said of this city, that “before Louis
XIV., it possessed but four fine monuments”: the dome of the
Sorbonne, the Val-de-Grâce, the modern Louvre, and I know not
what the fourth was—the Luxembourg, perhaps. Fortunately,
Voltaire was the author of “Candide” in spite of this, and in
spite of this, he is, among all the men who have followed each
other in the long series of humanity, the one who has best
possessed the diabolical laugh. Moreover, this proves that one
can be a fine genius, and yet understand nothing of an art to
which one does not belong. Did not Molière imagine that he was
doing Raphael and Michael-Angelo a very great honor, by calling
them “those Mignards of their age?”
Let us return to Paris and to the fifteenth century.
It was not then merely a handsome city; it was a homogeneous
city, an architectural and historical product of the Middle Ages,
a chronicle in stone. It was a city formed of two layers only;
the Romanesque layer and the Gothic layer; for the Roman layer
had disappeared long before, with the exception of the Hot Baths
of Julian, where it still pierced through the thick crust of the
Middle Ages. As for the Celtic layer, no specimens were any
longer to be found, even when sinking wells.
Fifty years later, when the Renaissance began to mingle with this
unity which was so severe and yet so varied, the dazzling luxury
of its fantasies and systems, its debasements of Roman round
arches, Greek columns, and Gothic bases, its sculpture which was
so tender and so ideal, its peculiar taste for arabesques and
acanthus leaves, its architectural paganism, contemporary with
Luther, Paris, was perhaps, still more beautiful, although less
harmonious to the eye, and to the thought.
But this splendid moment lasted only for a short time; the
Renaissance was not impartial; it did not content itself with
building, it wished to destroy; it is true that it required the
room. Thus Gothic Paris was complete only for a moment.
Saint-Jacques de la Boucherie had barely been completed when the
demolition of the old Louvre was begun.
After that, the great city became more disfigured every day.
Gothic Paris, beneath which Roman Paris was effaced, was effaced
in its turn; but can any one say what Paris has replaced it?
There is the Paris of Catherine de Medicis at the
Tuileries;[23]—the Paris of Henri II., at the Hôtel de Ville, two
edifices still in fine taste;—the Paris of Henri IV., at the
Place Royale: façades of brick with stone corners, and slated
roofs, tri-colored houses;—the Paris of Louis XIII., at the
Val-de-Grâce: a crushed and squat architecture, with vaults like
basket-handles, and something indescribably pot-bellied in the
column, and thickset in the dome;—the Paris of Louis XIV., in the
Invalides: grand, rich, gilded, cold;—the Paris of Louis XV., in
Saint-Sulpice: volutes, knots of ribbon, clouds, vermicelli and
chiccory leaves, all in stone;—the Paris of Louis XVI., in the
Pantheon: Saint Peter of Rome, badly copied (the edifice is
awkwardly heaped together, which has not amended its lines);—the
Paris of the Republic, in the School of Medicine: a poor Greek
and Roman taste, which resembles the Coliseum or the Parthenon as
the constitution of the year III., resembles the laws of
Minos,—it is called in architecture, “the Messidor”[24]
taste;—the Paris of Napoleon in the Place Vendôme: this one is
sublime, a column of bronze made of 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 there is attached by a
similarity of taste, fashion, and attitude, a certain number of
houses scattered about in different quarters and which the eyes
of the connoisseur easily distinguishes and furnishes with a
date. When one knows how to look, one finds the spirit of a
century, and the physiognomy of a king, even in the knocker on a
door.
The Paris of the present day has then, no general physiognomy. It
is a collection of specimens of many centuries, and the finest
have disappeared. The capital grows only in houses, and what
houses! At the rate at which Paris is now proceeding, it will
renew itself every fifty years.
Thus the historical significance of its architecture is being
effaced every day. Monuments are becoming rarer and rarer, and
one seems to see them gradually engulfed, by the flood of houses.
Our fathers had a Paris of stone; our sons will have one of
plaster.
So far as the modern monuments of new Paris are concerned, we
would gladly be excused from mentioning them. It is not that we
do not admire them as they deserve. The Sainte-Geneviève of M.
Soufflot is certainly the finest Savoy cake that has ever been
made in stone. The Palace of the Legion of Honor is also a very
distinguished bit of pastry. The dome of the wheat market is an
English jockey cap, on a grand scale. The towers of Saint-Sulpice
are two huge clarinets, and the form is as good as any other; the
telegraph, contorted and grimacing, forms an admirable accident
upon their roofs. Saint-Roch has a door which, for magnificence,
is comparable only to that of Saint-Thomas d’Aquin. It has, also,
a crucifixion in high relief, in a cellar, with a sun of gilded
wood. These things are fairly marvellous. The lantern of the
labyrinth of the Jardin des Plantes is also very ingenious.
As for the Palace of the Bourse, which is Greek as to its
colonnade, Roman in the round arches of its doors and windows, of
the Renaissance by virtue of its flattened vault, it is
indubitably a very correct and very pure monument; the proof is
that it is crowned with an attic, such as was never seen in
Athens, a beautiful, straight line, gracefully broken here and
there by stovepipes. Let us add that if it is according to rule
that the architecture of a building should be adapted to its
purpose in such a manner that this purpose shall be immediately
apparent from the mere aspect of the building, one cannot be too
much amazed at a structure which might be indifferently—the
palace of a king, a chamber of communes, a town-hall, a college,
a riding-school, an academy, a warehouse, a court-house, a
museum, a barracks, a sepulchre, a temple, or a theatre. However,
it is an Exchange. An edifice ought to be, moreover, suitable to
the climate. This one is evidently constructed expressly for our
cold and rainy skies. It has a roof almost as flat as roofs in
the East, which involves sweeping the roof in winter, when it
snows; and of course roofs are made to be swept. As for its
purpose, of which we just spoke, it fulfils it to a marvel; it is
a bourse in France as it would have been a temple in Greece. It
is true that the architect was at a good deal of trouble to
conceal the clock face, which would have destroyed the purity of
the fine lines of the façade; but, on the other hand, we have
that colonnade which circles round the edifice and under which,
on days of high religious ceremony, the theories of the