PARIS ITS SITES, MONUMENTS AND HISTORY PARIS ITS SITES, MONUMENTS AND HISTORY COMPILED FROM THE PRINCIPAL SECONDARY AUTHORITIES BY MARIA HORNOR LANSDALE WITH AN INTRODUCTION BY HILAIRE BELLOC, B. A. LATB BRACKENBUKY HISTORY SCHOLAR OP EALLIOL COLLEGE, OXFORD ILLUSTRATED PHILADELPHIA HENRY T. COATES & CO. 1899 Copyright, 1898, by HENRY T. COATES & CO. CONTENTS. CHAPTER PAGE I. Introduction, 1 II. LUTETIA, 43 III. Paris in the Dark Ages, . . • 74 IV. Paris of the Early Middle Ages, 125 V. Paris of the Later Middle Ages, 189 VI. The Medicean Period, 257 VII. Paris Under Henry IV., 296 VIII. The Seventeenth Century, from IGIO to 1661, . 321 IX. Louis XIV., 360 X. Louis XV., 406 XI. The Revolution, the Consulate, and the First Empire, 447 XII. Paris in the Nineteenth Century, 503 (v) LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS. PAGE Panorama of the Seven Bridges on the Seine, . Frontispiece Notre Dame from the Kiver, 9 Arc de Triomphe, 18 Conciergerie (Quai de l'Horloge), 22 MusEE DE Cluny, 64 Church of St. Germain des Pres, 115 St. Germain l'Atjxerrois, 140 Sainte Chapelle, 151 Notre Dame, West Front, 163 Statue of Jeanne d'Arc in Place de Rivoli, 200 The Louvre OF Charles v., 216 Courtyard of Musee de Cluny, 251 Hotel de Ville in the Time of Louis XIIL, 263 Tour St. Jacques, 269 House of Francis First, 283 St. Etienne du Mont, 293 Statue of Henry IV., by Lemot, 300 Pont Neuf, 315 Palais and Jardin Royal, 335 Salle des Cariatides in the Louvre, 346 Palace of the Luxembourg, 357 The Palace of the Louvre, 369 Rue Royale, 377 Hotel dp:s Invalides, 403 The Pantheon, 443 The Palace of the Tuileries, 476 Church of the Madeleine, 483 Hotel de Ville op To-Day, 506 Grand Opera House, 511 Tomb of Napoleon First in Hutkl des Invalides, . . 527 (Yii) 468308 PARIS. CHAPTER I. INTRODUCTION. When a man looks eastward from the western heights that dominate the city, especially from that great hill of Valerian (round which so many memories from Ste. Genevieve to the last war accumulate), a sight presents itself which shall be the modern start- ing-point of our study. Let us suppose an autumn day, clear, with wind following rain, and with a gray sky of rapid clouds against which the picture may he set. In such a weather and from such a spot the whole of the vast town lies clearly before you, and the impression is one that you will not match nor approach in any of the views that have grown famous 5 for Avhat you see is unique in something that is neither the nortli nor the south I something which contains little of scenic interest and nothing of dramatic grandeur ; some- thing whicli men have forborne to describe because when they hav(; known T*aris well enough to compre- 1 (1) 2 PARIS. hend that horizon, why then her people, her history, her life from Avithin, have dominated every other in- terest and have occupied all their powers. Never- theless this sight, caught from the hill-top, shall be our first introduction to the city ; for I know of no other which so profoundly stirs the mind of one to whom the story and even the modern nature of the place is vmknown. There lies at your feet — its fortifications some two miles away — 'a great plain of houses. Its inequalities are lost in the superior height from which you gaze, save where in the north the isolated summit of Mont- martre, crowned with the scaffolding of its half-finished church, looks over the city and ansAvers the hill of Valerian. This plain of houses fills the eye and the mind, yet it is not so vast but that, dimly, on the clearest days the heights beyond it to the east can be just per- ceived, while to the north the suburbs and the open country appear, and to the south the hills. Whiter than are the northern towns of Europe, yet standing under a northern sky, it strikes with the force of sharp contrast, and half ex])lains in that one feature its Latin origin and destiny. It is veiled by no cloud of smoke, for industry, and more especially the in- dustry of our day, has not been the motive of its growth. The fantastic and even grandiose efi'ects which are the joy of London Avill never be discovered here. It does not fill by a kind of gravitation tiiis or INTRODUCTION. 3 that group of arteries ; it forms no line along the water-course, nor does it lose itself in those vague contours which the necessity of exchange frequently determines, for Paris was not made by commerce ; nor will any theory of material conditions and envi- ronment read you the riddle of its growth and form. It is not the mind of the on-looker that lends it unity, nor the emotions of travel that make it, for those who see it thus, one thing. Paris, as it lies before you from those old hills that have watched her for two thousand years, has the effect and character of personal life. Not in a metaphor nor for the sake of phrasing, but in fact ; as truly as in the case of Rome, though in a manner less familiar, a separate existence with a soul of its own appeals to you. Its voice is no reflection of your own mind ; on the con- trary, it is a troubling thing, like an insistent de- mand spoken in a foreign tongue. Its corporate life is not an abstraction drawn from books or from things one has heard. There, visibly before you, is the com- pound of the modern and the middle ages, whose unity convinces merely by being seen. And, alxjve all, this thing upon which you are looking is alive. It needs no recollection of what has been taught in youth, nor any of those reveries which arise at the identification of things seen with names remembered. The antiquarian passion, in its best form pedantic and in its worst maudlin, finds little room in the first aspect of Paris. Jjater, it 4 PARIS. takes its proper rank in all the mass of Avhat we may learn, but the town, as you see it, recalls history only by speaking to you in a living voice. Its past is still alive, because the city itself is still instinct with a vigorous growth, and you feel with regard to Paris what you would feel with regard to a young man full of memories ; not at all the quiet interest which lies in the recollections of age ; still less that happy memory of things dead which is a fortune for so many of the most famous cities of the world. Whence proceeds this impression, and Avhat is the secret of its origin ? Why, that in all this immense extent an obvious unity of design appears ; not in one quarter alone, but over the whole circumference stand the evidences of this creative spirit. It is not the rich building for themselves in their own quarter, nor the officials concentrating the common wealth upon their own buildings j it is Paris, creating and re- creating her own adornment, realizing her own dreams upon every side, insisting on her own vagaries, committing follies which are her own and not that of a section of her people, even here and there chiselling out something as durable as Europe. Look at the great line before you and note these evidences of a mind at work. Here, on your right, monstrous, grotesque and dramatic in tlie extreme rises that great ladder of iron, the Eiffel, to its tliou- sand foct, meant to be merely engineering, and there- fore christened at its birth by all the bad fairies, but INTRODUCTION. 5 managing (as though the spirit of the city had laughed at its own folly) to assume something of grace, and losing in a very delicate grey, in a good curve, and in a film of fine lines, the grossness which its builders intended. It stands up, close to our western standpoint, foolishly. It is twice as high as this hill of Valerian from which we are looking ; its top is covered often in hurrying clouds, and it seems to be saying perpetually : " I am the end of the nine- teenth century ', I am glad they built me of iron ; let me rust." It is far on the outskirts of the tOAvn, where all the rest of the things that Paris has made can look at it and laugh contentedly. It is like a passing fool in a crowd of the University, a buffoon in the hall ; for of all the things that Paris has made, it alone has neither wits nor soul. But just behind it and somewhat to the left the dome you see gilded is the Invalides, the last and, perhaps, the best relic of seventeenth century taste, and with that you touch ground and have to do with Paris again ; for just beneath it is Napoleon, and in the short roof to the left of it, in the chapel, the flags of all the nations. Behind that, again, almost the last thing the eighteenth century left us, is the other dome of the Pantheon. How great a space in ideas between it and the Invalides ! Between Mansard and Soufflot ! Its dome is in a false proportion; a great hulking colonnade deforms its middle; its sides and its decorations are cold and bare. The gulf 6 PARIS. between these two, compared, is the gulf between Louis XIV. and the last years of decay that made necessary the Revolution. It stands, grey, ugly and without meaning, the relic of a grey and ugly time. But you note that it caps a little eminence, or what seems, from our height and distance, to be a little eminence. That hill is the hill of Ste. Genevieve, "Mons Lucotetius," Mont Parnasse. On its sides and summit the University grew, and at its base the Revolution was born in the club of the Cordeliers. It will repay one well to look, on this clear day, and to strain the eyes in watching that hummock — a grey and confused mass of houses, with the ugly dome we spoke of, on its summit. A lump, a little higher than the rest, half-way up the hill, is the Sor- bonne ; upon the slopes towards us two unequal square towers mark St. Sulpice — a heap of stones. Yet all this confusion of unlovely things, which the dis- tance turns into a blotch wherein the Pantheon alone can be distinguished, is a very noteworthy square mile of ground ; for at its foot Jidian the Apostate held his little pagan circle ; at its summit are the relics of Ste. Genevieve. Here Abelard awoke the " great curiosity " from its long sleep, and here St. Bernard answered him in the name of all the mystics. Here Dante studied, and here Innocent HI. was formed. Here is the unique arena where Catholicism and the Rationalists meet, and where a great strug- gle is never completed. Here, as in symbol of that INTRODUCTION. 7 wrestling, the cross is perpetually rising above and falling from the Pantheon — now torn down, now rein- stated. Beneath that ugly dome lie Voltaire and Rousseau ; in one of the gloomy buildings on that hill Robespierre was taught the stoicism of the ancients and sat on the bench with Desmoulins ; at its flank, in the Cordehers, Danton forged out the scheme of the Republic ; it was thence that the fire spread in '92 which overthrew the old nyime ; here, again, the students met and laughed and plotted against the latest despotism. It was from the steps of that unlovely Pantheon, with " To the great men of France " carved above him, that Gambetta declared the third RepubHc. It was the 4th of September, 1870, and it rained. There is, however, in the view before you another spot, touching almost the hill which we have been noting, and of yet more importance in the story of the city, though it may not be so in the story of the world, — I mean the Island of the Cite. From this distance we cannot see the gleam of the water on either side of it; moreover, the houses hide the river and the bridges. Nevertheless, knowing what lies there, we can make out the group of build- ings which is the historic centre of Paris, and from whence the town has radiated outwards during the last fourteen centuries. We are five miles away, and catch only its most evident marks. We see the square mass of the 8 PARIS. Palais, whence, uninterruptedly, for eighteen liundred years the government has held its courts and its share in the administration of the town. Perhaps, if it is very clear, the conical roofs of the twin towers of the Conciergerie can be made out ; and, certainly, to the right of them we see the high-pitched roof and the thin spire of the Sainte Chapelle, Avhich St. Louis built to cover the Holy Lance and the Crown of Thorns. But the most striking feature of the Island and the true middle of the whole of Paris will be clear always even at this distance, — I mean the Cathedral of Notre Dame. The distance and the larger aspect of nearer things make exiguous the far towers as they stand above the houses. You look, apparently, at a little thing, but even from here it has about it the reverence of the middle ages. In that distance all is subdued ; but these towers, which are grey to a man at their very feet, seem to possess to a watcher from Valerian the quality of a thin horizon cloud. I know not how to describe this model of the middle ages — built into the modern town, standing (from whichever way you look) in its very centre, so small, so distant, and yet so majestic. Amiens and Rheims, Strasburg, Chartres and Rouen — all the great houses of the Gothic, as they pass before our minds, have something at once less pathetic and less dignified. They are no larger than Notre Dame ; they have not — even Rheims has not — her force of repose, of INTRODUCTION. 9 height and of design. But they stand in provincial cities. The modern world affects, without trans- forming, their surroundings. Amiens stands head and shoulders above the town ; Rheims, as you see it coming in from camp, looks like a great sphinx brooding over the champaign and always gazing out to the west and the hills of the Tourdenoise; Stras- burg is almost theatrical in its assertion; Chartres is the largest thing in a rural place, and is the natural mother of the Beauce, the patroness and protectress of endless fields of corn; and even Rouen, though it stands in the hum of machinery and in the centre of countless industries, is so placed that, come from whichever way you will, it is the dominant fact in the town. But Notre Dame is always one of many things and not the greatest. She was built for a little Gothic town and a huge metropolis has outgrown her. The town was once, so to speak, the fringe of her garment ; now she is but the centre of a circle miles around. There are but three spots in Paris from which the old church alone takes up the mind, as do the churches of the provincial towns ; I mean from the Quai de la Tournelle, from the Parvis, and from the Place de Greve. And yet she gradually becomes more to the spirit of those who see her than do any of these other churches, for the very anomaly of her position leads to close observance, and she touches the mind at last like a woman Avho has been continually 10 PARIS. silent in a strange company. To a man who loves and knows the city, there soon comes a desire to con- stantly communicate with the memories of the Cathe- dral. And this desire, if he is wise, grows into a habit of coming close against the towers at evening, or of Avaiting under the great height of the nave for the voices of the middle ages. Notre Dame thus lost in distance, central and re- mote, is like a lady grown old in a great house, about whose age new phrases and strange habits have arisen, who is surrounded with the youth of her own lineage and yet is content to hear and understand without re- plying to their speech. She is silent in the midst of energy, and forgotten in the many activities of the household, yet she is the centre of the estate, and but for her the family would be broken up and the home grow desolate. And to me at least, when I see in that famous view her square towers draped and veiled by distance, it has something of the effect made by a single small harbor-light which shines Avhen one is coming in at the dead of a night, and with sweeps from lack of wind, while all about one, in a high port- city and in the great black landscape of cliffs, no other beacon is showing. There stands, then, in the midst of our view this little group of the Island of the Cite, the old Roman town Avith which so much of our history Avill deal. As the eye turns to the left, that is to the northern half of the town, it is passing over the place of its INTEODUCTION. 11 great expansion. It is here that Paris has worked and has grown, while Paris of the centre governed and Paris of the south thought and studied. It is in this half of the city that we shall note her greatest theatres, her most famous modern streets, her houses of rich men, her palaces, even her industries. But this northern half has little to distinguish it in a general panorama ; here and there a spire or tower or a column, but as a rule only a mass of high houses in which even the distant Louvre seems to possess no special prominence, and in which the Palais Royal, the Madeleine, the Bourse are so many roofs only, con- spicuous in nothing but their surface. The old world makes but little effect from the distance at which we stand, and indeed is less apparent in the northern half of the city even to a spectator who is placed within its streets. Close against the Island you may perhaps catch the fine square tower of St. Jacques, the last of the Gothic ; but with that exception the view of the left side is modern. If we may connect it with any one period or man rather than another, it is Napoleon that its few prominent points recall. Between us and the heart of the city is the ridge of Passy; less than a mile from the fortifications and on the summit of this ridge the great Trium})hal Arch full of his battles and his generals' names. You may see beyond it, towards the more central parts of the town, a line liere and tiicre of those straight streets so many of which he planned, and 12 PARIS. neai'ly all of wliicli are due to his influence upon Paris. Thus opening straiglit before you, but miles away, running to the Louvre and on to the Hotel de Ville, is that Rue de Rivoli Avhich is so characteris- tically his, obliterating, as did his own career, the memories of the Revolution. Running over the spot where the riding-school stood, and where Mirabeau helped to found a new Avorld, draining the Rue St. Honore (that republican gulf) of half its traffic, it strikes the note of the new Paris which the nine- teenth century has designed. Just off the line of this street you may catch the bronze column, the Vendome, which again perpetu- ates Napoleon ; it stands well above the houses and rivals the other column w^hich distance scarcely per- mits us to discern, and which overlooks the site of the Bastille. But when w^e have noted these few points, have tried to make out the new Hotel de Ville (as distant and less clear than Notre Dame), and have marked the great mass of the opera roof, the general aspect of the northern bank is told. There is nothing on which the eye rests as a central point. Only in itself, and without the aid of monuments, the great expanse of wealth and of energy fringing off into the indus- tries of the northern and western roads shows us at once the modern Paris that works and enjoys. One last feature remains to be spoken of while we are still looking upon the view at our feet, and before INTKODUCTION. 13 we go down into the city to notice the closer aspect of its streets and buildings. I mean the hill of Mont- martre. It Hes on the extreme left as Ave gaze, that is in the northernmost part of the city, just Avithin the fortifications, and rises isolated and curiously steep above the whole plain of the northern quarter. No city has so admirable a place of vantage, and in no other is the position so unspoiled as here. For cen- turies, from the time when it was far outside the medieval Avails, Montmartre has been the habitation of bohemians and chance poor men. Luckily it has remained undisturbed to this day. And if you climb it you look right doAvn upon the tOAvn from the best and most congenial of surroundings. Nothing there reminds you of a municipality forcing you to acknowl- edge the site and the a^cav. There is not a park or statue, not even a square. A ramshackle cafe Avith dirty plaster statues, a half-finished church, a pano- rama of the true Jerusalem (the same all falling to pieces Avith old age and neglect), a number of little houses and second-rate Adllas, a fcAv dusty studios ; this is the furniture of the platform beneath Avhich aU Paris lies like a map. Long may it remain so untouched. For the hill is now truly Parisian. The tourist does not hear of it, even the systematic traveller avoids it. But it is dear to the student, and to that ty[)e in Avhich Paris is so prolific. 1 mean tiie careless and disreputable young men who grow up to be bourgeois and pillars 14 PARIS. of society. For them the slopes of the hill are al- most sacred ground. Half the nunor verse of Paris has been born here, and that other hill of the Latin quarter has arranged, as it Avere, for its ])lay-ground in this forsaken and neglected place. Paris inspires you well as you look down upon it from such sur- roundings, and for one who understands the race there is a peculiar pleasure in noting that officialism, which is one product or rather aspect of the national character, has spared Montmartre to the carelessness and excess which is its paradoxical second half. Not so long ago a crazy Avindmill marked the summit. It has disappeared, but it is characteristic of the hill that it should have lingered to so late a date. Not another square yard of Paris, perhaps, has been so left to chance as this admirable opportunity for the interference of official effect. Such, imperfectly described, is Paris Avhen you see it first from the highest of the western hills. But our insistence upon this or that particular point must not misrepresent to the reader the general effect. These domes, arches, towers, spires — even the hills, are but incidents in the vast plain of houses with which our summary began, and wliich is the note of the whole scene. What is this plain, seen from Avith- in ? What is the character of its life, its architec- ture, its monuments ! AboA-e all, Avhat surmise gradiially rises in us as Ave pass through its streets INTRODUCTION. 15 and try to discover the historic foimdations upon which all this modern society rests ? To answer these questions let us go in to the city by one of the western gates and gain close at hand an impression of her buildings and streets. This is what you will notice as you pass through the thoroughfares of Paris. Two kinds of streets, and, to match them, two kinds of public buildings ; and yet neither clearly defined, but merging into one another in a fashion which, as will be seen later, gives the characteristic of continuity to the modern toAvn. As an example of the first, take the Rue St. Honore ; as an example of the second, its immediate neighbor the Boidevard des Italians. The Rue St. Honore is narrow, paved Avith square stones, sound- ing like a gorge on the sea-coast. Its houses are high, and with hardly a pretence of decoration. Their stone or plastered walls run grey and have black streaks with age. Commonly an old iron balcony will run along one or more of the upper stories. They are covered with green-grey Mansard roofs, high in proportion to the buildings. From these look the small windows of attics, where, in the time these houses were buik, the apprentices and servants of the bourgeois householders were lodged. The ground floor, as everywhere in Paris, is a line of shops. The street is not only narrow and high, but sombre in ef- fect. Here and there (but rarely) an open court, 16 PARIS. looking almost like a well, lets in more light. The street is not straight, but follows the curves of the old mediaeval artery upon which it was built. You would look in vain for the Gothic in such streets as these. Even the Renaissance has hardly remained. Their churches and their public buildings date from much the same time as the houses. They are uniformly of the seventeenth or early eighteenth centuries. It was in such surroundings that the grand siecle moved, and in such hotels lived the dramatists and the orators of the Augustan age of literature. These streets, all of much the same type, are the old Paris. They are least disturbed, perhaps, in the Latin quarter. They are, of course, not to be found in all that outer ring of the city which has been the creation of our own time, and in fine they still make up a good propor- tion of the circle within the boulevards, which is the heart of Paris. It is in them that you will note the famous sites of the last two hundred years almost unchanged, and waiting under their influence the student can at last reproduce the scenes and the spirit of the Kevolution. Whole sections of the town — the He St. Louis, for example — show no architectvire but this, and the high, sad houses, the narrow, sombre; str(!ets, the age- marked grey walls are still the impression left most vividly on one Avho knows a little more of ]^aris than the Grand Hotel. Through these old quarters, cutting them up, as it INTRODUCTION. 17 were, into isolated sections, run like a gigantic web of straight lines the modern streets. The founda- tion of the system is the ring of internal boulevards. Here and there great supplementary avenues cut through the heart of the city within their limits, and finally the inner and the outer boulevards are similar- ly connected with a series of broad streets lined with trees. Thus the new Paris holds the old, as a frame- work of timbers may hold an old wall, or as the veins of a leaf hold its substance. And what is to be said of these new streets and of the new quarters about the interior of the city ? It is the fashion to belittle their effect, and more espe- cially do foreigners, whose foreign pleasures are ca- tered for in the newest of the new streets, compare unfavorably this modern Paris with the old. They are heard to regret the rookeries of the Boucherie. They would not have the tower St. Jacques stand in a public square, and some, I dare say, have found hard words even for the great space in front of Kotre Dame and for its statue of Charlemagne. This attitude with regard to the new Paris seems to me a fcdse one. Certainly its architecture suffers from uniformity. Light rather than mystery, comfort rather than beauty, has been the object of its design. They are to be regretted, but they are the characters of our generation. And Paris being a living and a young city, not a thing for a museum, nor certainly a place for fads and make-believes, it is well that our 2 18 PARIS. century should confess itself even in the Haussman- ized streets, in the wide, shaded avenues of three or even five-carriage roads side by side, and the per- petual repetition of one type of modern house. Moreover, Paris is here very true to the character she has maintained in each one of her rebuildings. She shows the whole spirit of the time. If she gives us, in a certain monotony and scientific precision and an over-cleanliness, the faults of the new spirit, she cer- tainly has all its virtues. Her taste is excellent. These open spaces and broad streets make, for the monu- ments, vistas or approaches of an admirable balance. You will see them lead either to the best that is left of her past or to the more congruous designs of her modern public buildings, and the effect, never sink- ing to the secondary, often rises to the magnificent. Take (for example) the present treatment of the Tuileries. The Commune burnt that old palace, leaving the three sides of the Louvre surrounding a gaping space. It has been harmonized Avith the Tuile- ries gardens by planting, and the whole great sweep d(jwn from the Arc de I'Etoile, though the Tuileries gardens to the court of the Louvre is, as it were, an approach to the palace. The grandeur of that scene has the demerit of being obvious, but it has also the singular value of obtruding nothing that can offend or distract the eye. Even the Avenue de I'Opera, with the huge building at the end of it, will bear praise. If it lacks INTRODUCTION. 19 meaning yet it does not lack greatness, and the Opera itself has something in it of the fantastic Avhich avoids the grotesque. It is a " Palais du Diabic," and it is not a little to say for a modern building that it holds the statuary avcII and harmoniously, especially when there are such groups in that statu- ary as " La Danse." Moreover, if you will notice, Paris does not so an- nounce her failures ; no great avenue leads up to and frames, for instance the Trocadero. As to the silly reasoning that any rebuilding was an error, it is fit only for a club of antiquarians. Paris has rebuilt herself three separate times, and had she not done so we should have none of those archi- tectural glories which are her pride to-day. The Revolution was not the first profound change of ideas that the city experienced. The great awakening that made the University turned Paris into a Gothic city almost in a generation. The " Grand Siecle " swept awaj that Gothic city and replaced it by the tall houses that yet mark all her older quarters. In this last expansion Paris is but following a well- known road of hers, and the people who wiU come long after us Avill find it a good thing that she did so. This also is to be noted: that if Paris is somewhat negligent of what is curious, yet she is careful of what is monumental. As we shall see in this book, the twelfth and even the sixth centuries — the fourth also in one spot — come against one in the midst of a 20 PAEIS. modern street. Much that has been destroyed was not destroyed by the iconoclasm of the nineteenth, but by the sheer lack of taste of the eighteenth cen- tury — a time that coukl add the horrible false-Renais- sance portico to the exquisite Cathedral of Metz and that was capable of the Pantheon, pulled down without mercy. We suffer from it yet. There is one feature Avhich is perhaps not over- obvious in the buildings of Paris and which it is well to point out in this connection, especially as it is the modern parallel of a spirit which we shall hnd in all the history of the town. I mean a remarkable his- torical continuity. Paris to the stranger is new. Or at least where it evidently dates from the last or even from the seven- teenth century, it yet seems poor in those groups of the middle ages which are the characteristic of so many European towns, and one would say at first sight that it was entirely lacking in many relics of still earlier times. This impression is erroneous, not only as to the actual buildings of the city, but espe- cially as to its history and spirit. But it is not with- out an ample excuse. There is nothing in Paris so old but that its surroundings give it a false aspect of modernity, nor is there any monument so venerable but that some part of it (often some part connected with the identity of the main building) dates from our own time. The reason for this is twofold. First, Paris has INTRODUCTION. 21 never been checked in its development. You find no relics because it has never felt old age, and that species of forgetfulness which is necessary to the preservation of old things untouched has never fallen upon her. For, if you will consider, it is never the period just past which we revere and with which we forbear to meddle ; it is always something separated by a century at least from our own time. It needs, therefore, for the growth of ruins, and even for the preservation of old things absolutely unchanged, a certain period of indiiference in which they are neither repaired nor pulled down, but merely neg- lected. Thus we owe Roman ruins to the dark ages, much of the English Gothic to the indifference of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Such periods of indifference Paris has never experienced. Each age in her history, at least for the last six hundred years, has been "modern," has thought itself excel- lent, has designed in its own fashion. And on this account the conductor of Cook's tourists can find in the whole place but little matter for that phrase so dear to his flock : "It might have stepped out of the middle ages." Secondly, Her buildings are at the present mo- ment, and have been from the time of the Revolution, kept to a use, repaired and made to enter into the present life of the city. The modern era in Paris has had no sympathy with that point of view so com- mon in Europe, which would have a church or a 22 PARIS. palace suffer no sacrilegious hand, but remain a kind of sacred toy, until it positively falls with old age, and has to be rebuilt entirely. The misfortune (for ex- ample) which gives us in Oxford the monstrosity of BaUiol new buildings in the place of the exquis- ite fourteenth century architecture of which one corner yet remains to shame us ; or, again, the condi- tion of the west front of Peterborough Cathedral, which (apparently) must either be rebuilt or allowed to fall down — such accidents to the monuments of the past Paris has carefidly avoided. She was taught the necessity of this by the eighteenth cen- tury conservatism,- and if she is too continually re- pairing and replacing, it is a reaction from a time when the stones of the capital, like the institutions of the state, had been permitted to rot in decay. There are one or two points of view in Paris from which this character is especially notable. We shall see it best, of course, where the oldest monuments naturally remain, — I mean in the oldest quarter of the city. Stand on the northern quay that faces the Conciergerie and the Palais de Justice, and look at their walls as they rise above the opposite bank of the stream. What part of this is old and Avhat new? Unacquainted with the nature of the city, it would be impossible to reply. That Gothic archway might have been pierced in this century; the clock-tower, with its fresh paint and the carefully repaired mould- ings on its corners, might be fifty years old. Those INTRODUCTION. 23 twin towers of the Conciergerie might be of any age, for all the signs they give of it. Part of that build- ing was destroyed in the Comraime, and has been rebuilt. Which part ? There is nothing to tell. It is only when we know that it is against the whole genius of the people to imitate the styles of a dead age, — when we are told (for example) that such things as " the Gothic Revival," under which we groan in England to-day, and which is the curse of Oxford and Hampstead, has not touched Paris, — it is only when we appreciate that the French either create or restore, but never copy, that we can see hoAv great a work has been done on this one building. The wall and the towers before you are not a curiosity or a show; decay has not been permitted to touch them ; they are in actual service to-day in the working of the law-courts. Yet that corner clock- tower was the delight of Philippe le Bel. It was Philippe the Conqueror who built those two towers, with their conical roofs, and from one of their windows he would sit looking at the Seine flowing by, as his biographer describes him ; through that pointed arch- way St. Louis went daily to hear the pleas in the Palace gardens ; from such and such a window the last defense of Danton was caught by the mob that stretched along the quay and over the Pont Neuf. Or, again, take a contrasting case — one where a spectator would believe all to be old, and yet where the moderns have restored and strengthened. As you 24 PAKIS. stand on the quays that flank the Latin quarter and look northward to the Island and the Avhole southern side of Notre Dame, it is not only the thirteenth cen- tury at which you gaze ; at point upon point VioUet le Due rebuilt and refaced many of the stories — some, even, of the carvings are his Avork ; yet you could never distinguish in it all what aid the present time had given to the work of St. Louis. As for the Sainte Chapelle, it is at this day so exactly what it Avas when St. Louis first heard Mass in it, — and that has been done at the expense of so much blue and gold, just such color as he used, — that the traveller will turn from it under the impression that he is suffering at the hands of the third Republic, and will say, ^^How gaudy!" It is only when you note that the stained glass is the gaudiest thing in the place that you begin to feel that here alone, per- haps, in Europe, the men who designed the early Gothic Avould feel at home. And if this continuity in her buildings is so striking a mark of modern Paris, and goes so far to explain her newness, you will find something yet more re- markable in the preservation of her sites. To take but three. The place of the administration, of the central worship and of the markets are as old as the Roman occupation. The Louvre has grown steadily from similar use to similar use through more than a thousand years ; the Hotel de Ville, through more than seven hundred. And a man may go over the INTRODUCTION. 25 Petit Pont from the sovithern bank, cross the Island, and come over to the northern side by the Pont Notre Dame, and be following step by step the road that so spanned the two branches of the stream centuries and centuries ago, — not the road of Roman times, but one earlier yet, — back in the yague time when the Cite was a group of round Gaidish huts, and Avhen two rough wooden bridges led the traveller across the Seine on his way to the sea-coast. And this continuity in buildings and in places is matched by one spirit running all through the action of Paris for fifteen hundred years. This is the lixed interest of her history, and it is this which so many men have felt who in the studios, or up on the hill of the University, though they had learned nothing of the past of the city, yet feel about them a secular experience and a troubhng message difficult to under- stand — that seems to sum up in a confused sound the long changes of Christendom and of the West. Well, what is the peculiar spirit, the historical meaning, of the town whose outer aspect we have hitherto been describing? No history can have value — it would perhaps be truer to say that no his- tory can exist unless while it describes it also explains. Here we will have to deal Avith a city many of whose actions have been unicpie, much of whose life has been dismissed in phrases of wonder, of fear, or of efpuilly impotent anger. If this is all that a book 26 PAEIS. can do for Paris, it had better not have been written. To stand aghast at her excesses, to lift up the hands at her audacity, or to lose control over one's pen in expressing abhorrence for her success, is to do what any scholar might accomplish, but it would be to fail as an historian. Why has Paris so acted ? The answer to that question, and a sufficient answer, alone can give such a story value. AVhat is her nature? What is, if we may use a term properly applicable only to human beings, her mind ? You will not perceive the drift towards the true reply by following any of those laborious methods which stultify so much of modern analysis. You Avill not interpret Paris by any examination of her physi- cal environment, nor comprehend her by one of those cheap racial generalizations that are the bane of popular study. In all the great truths spoken by Michelet, one is perhaps pre-eminent, because it seems to include all the others. He says : " La France a fait la France ;" and if this be true (as it is) of the nation, it is more especially true of the town. There is within the lives of individuals — as we know by experience — a something formative that helps to build up the whole man and that has a share in the result quite as large as the grosser part for which science can account. So it is with states, and so, sometimes, with cities. A destiny runs through their development which is allied in nature to the human soul, and which material circumstance INTRODUCTION. 27 may bound or may modify, but which certainly it cannot originate. In the first place Paris is, and has known itself to be, the city-state of modern Europe. What is the importance of that character? Why that certain habits of thought, certain results in politics which we can observe in the history of antiquity, are to be noted repeating themselves in the actions and in the opinions of Paris. It is a phenomenon strange to the industrial nations of to-day yet one with which society will always have to deal, perhaps at bottom the most durable thing of all, that men wiU associate and act by neighborhood rather than by political definitions. And this influence of neighborhood, which (with the single important exception of tribal society) is the greatest factor in social history, has formed the vil- lage community and the walled town whose contrast and whose coexistence are almost the whole history of Europe. WTien great Empires arise, a fictitious veil is thrown over these radical things. Men are attached to a wide and general patriotism covering hundreds of leagues, and even in the last stages of decay and just before the final cataclysm. Rhetoricians love to talk of a federation of all peoples, and mer- chants ardently describe the advent of a universal peace. But even in such exceptional periods in the history of mankind, the village community and its parallel the city are the real facts in political life ; and when, in the inevitable fall and the subsequent recon- 28 PAKIS. struction of society, the fictions are destroyed and the phrases lose themselves in realities, these fundamen- tal and original units re-emerge in all their rugged- ness and strength. Upon the recognition of such units the healthy life of the middle ages reposed ; in the satisfactory and human conditions of such societies the arts and the enthusiasms of Greece took life. It is in the autono- mous cities of Italy that our civilization reappeared, and the aristocratic conceptions upon which the social order of Europe is stiU founded sprang from the isola- tion and local politics of the manor. In a time when the facility of communication has been so greatly augmented, and when therefore the larger units of political society should be at their strongest, Paris proves to the modern world how en- during the vdtimate instincts of our pohtical nature may be. The unit that can practically see, understand and act at once and together 5 the " city that hears the voice of one herald," is living there in the midst of modern Europe. By a paradox which is but one of many in French politics, the centre which first gave out to other societies the creed of the large self-gov- erning state, the power whence radiated the enthu- siasm even for a federal humanity, " the capital of the Republic of mankind " from which poor Clootz, the amiable but mad German Baron, dated his corres- pondence — this very town is itself an example of INTKODUCTION. 29 an intense local patriotism, peculiar, narrow and exclusive. Paris acts together, its citizens think of it perpetu- ally as of a kind of native country, and it has estab- lished for itself a definition which makes it the brain of that great sluggish body, the peasantry of France. In that definition the bulk of the nation has for cen- turies aquiesced, and the birthplace of government by majority is also the spot where distinction of political quality and the right of the head to ride all the mem- bers is most imperiously asserted. It is from this standpoint that so much of her his- tory assumes perspective. By recognizing this feat- ure the chaos of a hundred revolts assumes historical order. You will perceive from it the Parisian mob, with all the faults of a mob, yet organizing, creat- ing and succeeding ; you will learn why an ap- parently causeless outburst of anger has been fruitful, and why so much violence and so much disturbance should have aided rather than retarded the devel- opment of France. It is as the city-state (and the metropolis at that) that Paris has been the self-appointed guardian of the French idea. Throughout the middle ages you will see her anxious with a kind of prevision to safe- guard the unity of the nation. For this she watches the diplomacy of the Capetians and fights upon their side, for this she ceaselessly stands watch Avith the King over feudalism and doubles his strength in every 30 PARIS. blow that is dealt against the nobles. It is this feat- ure that explains her attitude as the ally of Philip the Conqueror, her leaning later on the Burgundian house, her hatred of the southerner in the person of the Armagnac. You will find it, without interruption, guiding her conduct in the history which links the middle ages to our own time. She is the faithful servant of Louis XI. ; she is the bitter fanatic for religious unity in the religious wars. Thus you see her withstand- ing Henry IV. to the last point of starvation, and thus a popidation, careless of religion, yet forces a religious formula upon the Huguenot leader ; and when the first Bourbon accepted the mass with a jest, it Avas Paris which had exacted, even from a con- queror, the pledge of keeping the nation one. In the Revolution all this character appears in especial relief. She claims to think for and to govern France ; she asserts the right by her energy and initiative to defend the whole people and their new institutions from the invader, and she ratifies that assertion by success. With this leading thought she first captures, then imprisons and finally over- throws the King ; lays (on the 2d of June) violent hands upon the Parliament, directs the terror, and then, when her system is no longer needed, per- mits in Thermidor the overthrow of her own spokes- man. If the condition of the city is considered, the INTKODUCTION. 31 causes of this strong local unity will become ap- parent. Paris is a microcosm. She contains all the parts proper to a little nation, and by the reaction of her own attitude this complete character is intensi- fied ; for since she is the head of a highly organized state all is to be found there. Here is at once the national and the urban government ; the schools for every branch of technical training. Here is the centre of the arts — not by a kind of accident such as will make the London artists live in Fitz-Johns Ave- nue, nor by the natural attraction of the great schools of the past, nor through peculiar collections such as cause the congeries at Munich, at Venice, or at Flor- ence or at Rome, but by a deliberate purpose : by the placing within the walls of the city of all the best teaching that the concentrated effort of the nation can secure. Within her walls are all the opposing factors of a vigorous life. She is not wholly student nor wholly industrial nor wholly mercantile, but something of all three. Even the noble is present to add his little different note to the harmonious discord of competing interests ; and, alone of the great capitals of the world, she is the seat of the old University of the nation. Here, running wild through a whole quarter of the city, is that vigorous youth, undiscoverable in London or in Berlin ; I mean the follies, the loves and the generous ideals of the students. They keep it fresh with a laughter that is lacking in the cen- 32 PAEIS. tres of the modern world, and they supply it with a frank criticism bordering on intellectual revolt, which the self-satisfaction of less fortunate capitals, mere seaports, or simple military centres, fatally ignores. They, from their high attic windows on the Hill, in- terpret her horizons ; and, as they grow to fill the ranks of her art and science, help to keep the city worthy of the impressions with which she delighted their twentieth year. And Paris has also the last necessary quality for the formation of a city-state. I mean that her stories are so many memories of action which she has un- dertaken unaided, and that her view of the past is one in which she continually stands alone. It is a record of great sieges, in which no outer help availed her, and in which she fell through isolation or suc- ceeded by her own powers. More than one of her monuments is a record of action that she undertook before the nation which depends upon her was willing to move 5 and she records herself, from the Column of July to the Arsenal of the Invalides, the successful leader in movements that the general people applauded but could not design. Her history has finally produced in her what was in the middle ages but a promise or perhaps a thing in germ, — I mean the sentiment and the expression of individuality. The story of her growth from the dim origins of her political position under the early Cape- tians, through the episode of Etienne Marcel to the INTEODUCTION. 33 definite action of the seventeenth century and finally of the Revolution, is the story of a personality grow- ing from mere sensation to self-recognition, and to functions determinate and understood. It is a transi- tion from instinct to reason, and at its close you have, as was expressed at the opening of this chapter, a true and living unit, not in metaphor but in fact, with a memory, a will, a voice, and an expression of its own. Such is the first great mark of Paris, and with that clue alone in one's hand the maze is almost solved. But, if Paris has these characteristics of continuity and of being the city-state, she has also a third, Avhich, Avhile it is less noticeable to her own citizens, is yet more interesting to the foreigner than the other two. She is the typical city, at least of the western civilization, — I mean, her history at any moment is always a reflection peculiarly vivid of the spirit which runs through western Europe at the time. To say that she leads and originates, which is a common- place with her historians, is not strictly true; it is more accurate to say that she mirrors. It cannot be denied that her action at such and such a crisis has differed from the general action of the European cities ; nor can it be forgotten that her course has more than once produced a sense of sharp and some- times painful contrast in the minds of her neighbors. Paris has not been typical in the sense of being the average. That character would have produced a 34 PAEIS. history devoid of features, whereas all the Avorld knows that the history of Paris is a series of strong pictures too often overdrawn. If she has been the typical city of the west, it is rather in this sense, that on her have been focussed the various rays of European energy ; that she has been the stage upon which the contemporary emotions of Europe have been given their Persona', through whose lips they found expression; that she has time and time again been the laboratory wherein the problems that per- plexed our civilization have always been analyzed and sometimes solved. It may be urged that every city partakes of this character, and that the civilization which has grown up upon the ruins of Rome is so much of a unity that its principal cities have always reflected the spirit of their time. This is true. But Paris has reflected that spirit with a peculiar fidelity. While it has, of course, been filled with her own strong bias of race and of local character, yet her treatment of this or that time has been remarkable for proportion; you feel, in reading of her past action, that not the north or the south, not this people or that, but all Europe is (so to speak) being " played" before your eyes. The actors are French and, commonly, Parisian ; the lan- guage they speak is strange and the action local, yet the subject-matter is something which concerns the whole of our world, and the place given to each part of the movement is that which, on looking over the INTRODUCTION. 35 surrounding nations, we should assign to it were we charged with drawing up an accurate balance of the time. Before pointing out the historical examples which show hoAV constantly Paris has been destined to play this international role, it is well to appreciate the causes of such a position. First among these comes the feature which has been discussed above. The fact that she contains within her walls all the parts of a state fits her for the character of representative, and makes her action more complete than is the case with another European city. The interests of exchange and of commerce, of finance (which in this age may almost be called a separate thing) ; the struggle be- tween the proletariat and capital ; the unsatisfied quarrel between dogmatic authority and the inductive method; militarism, and the reaction it creates; even the direction which literature and discussion may give to these energies, — all these are found within the city, and the general result is a picture of Europe. But this quality of hers is not the only cause of her typical character. Geographical position explains not a little of its origin. She is of Latin origin and of Latin tradition ; her law and much of her social custom is an inheritance from Rome, yet the basis of the race is not Latin, and among those in the studios who almost reproduce the Greek, there is hardly a southern face to be found. Her lawyers and orators will model themselves upon Latin phrases, but you 36 PARIS. would not match their expression among the Roman busts ; and it has been truly said that the Italian pro- file was more often met with in England than in northern France. Even the insular civilization of England, Avhich has had so great an effect upon the politics, if not the society, of the world, is to be found strongly represented in this medley. For England looks south (or, at least, the England which once possessed so great an influence did so), and Paris is the centre of those northern provinces upon Avhom the British influence has been strong. Though this part of her thought is of less importance than some others, yet it is worth carefully noting, for it has been neglected to a remarkable degree. It is from this that you obtain in Parisian history the attempts at a democracy based upon representation ; it is from this, again, that the principal modern changes in her judi- cial methods are drawn ; and so curiously strong has been the attraction of English systems for a certain kind of mind in Paris, that even the experiment of aristocracy and of its mask — a limited monarchy — has been tried in these uncongenial surroundings. The greatest of the men of '93 regret the English alliance. Mirabeau bases half his public action upon his mem- ories of the English wldgs. Lamartine delights in calling England the Marvellous Island. • And, if we go a little deeper than historical facts and examine those subtle influences of climatic con- dition (which, as they are more mysterious, are also INTRODUCTION. 37 of greater import than obvious things), we shall find Paris balanced between the two great zones of Europe. It is hard to say Avhether she is within or without the belt of vineyards ; a little way to the south and to the east you find the grapes ; a little way to the north and west, to drink wine is a luxury, and the peasants think it a mark of the southerner. There are days in Chevreuse, in the summer, when a man might believe himself to be in a Mediterranean valley, and, again, the autumn and the winter of the great forest of Marly are impressions purely of the north. The Seine is a river that has time and again frozen over, and the city itself is continually silent un- der heavy falls of snow. Yet she has half the custom of the south, her life is in the open air, her houses are designed for warmth and for sunlight; she has the gesture and the rapidity of a warmer climate. For one period of her history you might have called her a great northern city, when she was all Gothic and deeply carved, suited to long winter nights and to weak daylight. But in the course of time she has seemed partly to regain the traditions of the Mediterranean, so that you have shallow mouldings, white stone and open streets, standing most often under a grey sky, which should rather demand pointed gables and old deep thoroughfares. The truth is that she is neither northern nor southern, but, in either climate (they meet in her latitude) aii exile, satisfying neither, and yet containing both of 38 PAKIS. the ends between which Europe swmgs ; so that, in all that is done within Paris, you are at a loss whether to look for influence coming up from the Mediter- ranean, or to listen for the steep waves and heavy sweeping tides of the Channel and the North Sea. Only with one part of Europe — a part which may later transform or destroy the west — she has no sym- pathy, — I mean that which lies to the east of the Elbe. She was a town of the Empire, and the darker and newer part of Europe is as much a mystery to her as to the nations which are her neighbors. If you will notice her first prominence, you will discover that Paris rises upon Europe just where the modern period begins. It is as a town of the lower Empire, of the decline, of the barbarian invasions, of the advent of Christianity. Paris first becomes a great city just as the civilization to which we belong starts out upon its adventures, and her history at once assumes that character upon which these paragraphs insist. She receives the barbarian; the mingled language is talked in her streets; her palace is the centre of the Teutonic monarchy, which has carved its province from the Empire; of the two extremes, she seems to combine either experience. She does not lose her language (like the Rhine valley), nor her religion and customs (like Britain); but, on the other hand, she is strongly influenced by the conquest, and knows nothing of that lingering Roman civilization, almost untouched by the invader, which left to Nimes, INTEODUCTION. 39 Aries and the southern cities a municipal organization lasting to our own day. At the outset of her history she includes the experience of the south and of the north . During the Carlovingian epoch she loses her place for a time ; but, with the rise of the nationalities that followed it, and Avith the invasions, she is not only intimately concerned but again furnishes the example of which we have been speaking. She sustains siege after siege ; like the Europe of which she is the type, she finally, but Avith great pain, beats off the pirates, and in her Avails rises the first and Avhat is destined to be the most complete type of the national kingships. The Robertian House Avas neither feudal nor a reminis- cence of imperial power ; it was a mixture of both those elements. It was founded by a local leader Avho had defended his subjects in the " dark century," and in so much it attaches closely to the feudal character ; on the other hand, its members are consecrated kings ; they have the aim of a united and centraHzed power, and in this they hold even more than do the Ottos to the Imperial memory. Note hoAA^, as Europe develops, the experience of Paris sums up that of the surrounding peoples. The Roman laAV finds her an eager listener, but it does not produce in her case the rapid effect Avhich you may notice in some of the Italian cities. Custom weighs hard in the northern tOAvn, and Philip Au- gustus, after all his conquests, could never hear the 40 PAKIS. language which the professors of Bologna used to Barbarossa just before his defeat. On the other hand, the power of the king which that law was such a powerful agent to increase, was not destined to suffer from repeated reaction as it did in England, and the kings of Paris never fell beneath a direct victory of aristoci'acy such as that which crushed John at Runnymede, and centuries later destroyed the Stuarts. The struggle between government and feudalism was destined to last much longer in France than it did in the neighboring countries, and as it goes on, Paris sees all its principal features, and the cro^vn finally triumphs only in that same generation of the seventeenth century which saw the complete success of the aristocracy in England and in the Empire. In the religious world the experience of Paris has been equally typical. She heard the first changes of the twelfth century ; the schoolmen discussed in her University ; Thomas Aquinas sat at table with her king. When the sixteenth century shook and split the unity of Christendom, its treble aspect was vividly reflected in Paris. The evangelical, the Catholic and the Humanist are represented distinctly and in profusion there ; for it is in Paris that Calvin dedicates his book, that Rabelais is read, and, finally, that the St. BartholomcAv is seen. She does not change her creed at the word of a dynasty, nor is she swept by the same purely religious zeal for re- INTRODUCTION. 41 form that covers Geneva and so much of Holland ; nor does she stamp out the new movement with the ease of the Italian or the Spaniard ; but all the powers of the time seem to concentrate in her, and, as she has always done, she pays heavily for being the centre of European discussion. The appeal Avith her (as elsewhere) is to arms, and the struggle is still continuing under Louis XIV., when its importance Avanes before the rise of a rationalism around which the future battles of her religious Avorld will be fought. This is always the lesson of her history and the way we should read it if we wish to understand. We are looking down into a little space where all our society is working out its solutions. Whether we dwell upon the Gothic Paris of Louis XI., fixing nationality and centralized government, or upon the Paris of '93, — cutting once for all the knot of eigh- teenth century theories, — or the Paris of '48, where the old political and the new economic problems met; or upon the Paris of 1871, where the older social forces and the love of country just managed to defeat the revolt of the new proletariat; in whatever aspect or at whatever time, she is always the picture of Europe, catching, in a bright and perhaps highly colored mirror, the figures which are struggling in the nations around her. And it is in this character that her history will be most easy of comprehension and will leave with us an impression of greatest 42 PARIS. meaning. But whenever we think of the city we do well to remember Mirabeau : "Paris is a Sphinx." He added, "I will drag her secret from her;" but in this neither he nor any other man has suc- ceeded. LUTETIA. 43 CHAPTER II. LUTETIA. To understand the development of the city of Paris it is necessary to carry the reader back to the historical origins of the Celtic tribe whose rendezvous it was, and from whom the name of the modern town has been derived. As will be seen later in this chapter, the prehis- toric remains which some other portions of France furnish in such abundance have been but rarely dis- covered in the territory of the city or of its suburbs, and even the rough memorials of Celtic barbarism, such as are studded over Wales and Brittany, are scarcely to be found in the neighborhood. Our knowledge of the place and of its people can only be said to begin with the Roman invasion of Gaul under Ctesar, though he furnishes us with some clue as to the events immediately preceding his con- quest. What was the nature of the territory whicli this tribe of the " Parisii " occupied ? A modern traveller who looks over the town from the heights of Montmartre, or from the dome of the 44 PAEIS. Pantheon, on a clear day, sees before liim a great plain, encircled on almost every side by distant and low lulls, those on the south and west being nearer than those upon the north and east. The extent of this great " basin," as the geologists have called it, is larger than that occupied by any modern city, hardly ever less than twenty miles in diameter, in places far more. London itself, with its suburbs, woidd not till the vast circumference. Paris occupies but the southern portion. The river Seine enters this plain from the south- east, coming from the high land which separates Bur- gundy and Champagne, and which forms the main watershed of northern France. The river turns through this plain in a great arc or bow (of which the cord is the southern range of hills), strikes the western heights where the suburb of Sevres now stands, turns north-ward, skirts these hills for several miles, and finally escapes from the great plain by a wide gap, on the south of which stands the modern fort of Mount Valerian, and on the north the pointed hillocks of Enghien and Montmo- rency. It is by this gap that the Western Railway enters the plain of Paris, and a traveller who comes from Havre, Dieppe or Cherbourg, passes through it some twenty minutes before reaching the city. But it is so wide, and the hills on either side are compara- tively so low, that it is difficidt to distinguish the mo- ment of entry into the plain. LUTETIA. 45 From the above description it will be ai^parent that the river Seine confines its great bend to the southern and western extremities of the plain. It is never very far distant from the hills on the south, and runs, as we have said, quite close under those on the west, so that any city growing (as a city must groAv) round the waterway would be certain to lie on the southern side of the plain we have described, and this is, of course, the position which Paris occupies to-day. While we have spoken of this great circle, or oval, as a " plain," it must be noted that the surface of it is diversified by isolated ridges and hills, rising, in the extreme instance of Montmartre, to the height of three hundred feet or more. This is especially the case in the southern portion, where the city of Paris has arisen, and we will describe the appearance and situa- tion of these lesser heights after having given some account of the original site or nucleus of the town. A boatman roAving one of those light-draught vessels which, even before the Roman conquest, were plying a trade upon the Seine, if he were coming down stream, as did Labienus in his famous attack on the place, would have found his course following the great bend of the river, carrying him in a north- westerly direction, and leaving the southern hills at an increasing distance upon his left. After some miles of such a progress, just before he reached the northernmost ])ortion of the great bend, and before the river turned south^vard to meet the hills again, he 46 PARIS. Atould have noted three large islands lying in the stream, which here flowed between banks of from ten to twenty feet in height. The first two islands he would have left on his right and })assed, for they contained nothing but brushwood and marsh. They lay close up against the right bank of the river, and were uninhabited. But the third island would have fonned an excel- lent place to halt with his merchandise, for it was evi- dently a tribal centre of some kind. It lay right in midstream, was probably surrounded by a stockade of wood and pointed beams, and within this could be discerned a number of Gaulish huts, round, with flat dome-roofs, made of wattled boughs and daubed witli clay, dispersed in no very regular order, containing a population of a few hundred souls. On looking for a mooring-jjlace at which to land, he would have found none upon the island,* for such an arrangement would have spoiled its powers of de- fence ; but on the right bank, just opposite the isl- and, he would have noticed that the bank had been shelved, either naturally or artificially, and that there ran, for a hundred yards or more, a sloping shore upon which boats could be beached. Here he would land, finding probably a few of the local boatmen assembled, for the place seems to have had, even before the Roman conquest, a guild of such * There is some doubt on this. Some authorities believe the Port St. Landry to have been originally a Gaulish wharf. LUTETIA. 47 fellows. Crossing a wooden bridge lying immedi- ately to the west of the landing-place, he would find himself in the Island of Lutetia. This island is to Paris what the ^^ Urbs quadrata " is to Rome, and what the City is to London. It is the sacred spot of the whole city, the nucleus round which was to gather, ring by ring, the Paris of His- tory, till at last the little separate place appears, to those who do not know its story, like an insignificant accident upon the great map of the town, save that, even to the most casual observer, it would seem strik- ing that in this little space should be crowded the eccle- siastical, administrative and judiciary centres of the capital, almost to the exclusion of any private houses. But to return to our Gaulish boatman. Had he that curiosity which Csesar attributes to his country- men, he Avould have learned that the island was the stronghold and rendezvous in time of war of the Parisii. The old men (if the stranger is supposed to arrive just before the Roman invasion) would tell him that they could remember how this tribe had been chased from the north-east of Gaul by the Bel- gic confederation, whose frontiers lay close to their town ; how they sought protection of the great tribe of Senones lying to the west, their kinsmen, and were granted this land which t^iey now occupied, stretch- ing all over the distant hills, and especially into the woods on the west of the islands. The stranger, as he walked in the place, would 48 PARIS. have noted such features as the following : The length of the island upon which he found himself was just more than half a mile ; it was not much over a furlong in breadth, and even this space of less than fifty acres was not Avell filled. Towards the western extremity the houses failed altogether ; part of the open space was devoted, presumably, to gardens ; and beyond a narrow ditch lay two quite small islands — not one hundred yards in length — lying side by side, and bringing the total number of the group to five ; two that is beyond the three which he had al- ready noticed. Returning to the centre of the island, another wooden bridge would have been perceived, miiting the village to the left or southern bank of the river. This (he woidd have learned) connected the great road from the south with that which Avent north to Senlis, over the bridge by which he had entered. The two structures were probably in a line Avith each other, and the only regidar street in the little place was that which connected them. Thus Lutetia formed a halting-place for many a traveller or messenger coming from the Loire and going to certain parts of the sea-coast, or to some of the northern cities, though it lay too far to the w^est to be on the main line of communication between the Rhone valley and the channel, which formed the prin- cipal road in Gaul. It must be remembered that the great bulk of communication with the sea, especially in earlier Roman times, centred upon the Straits of LUTETIA. 49 Calais, and but few travellers in Gaul had occasion to pass through Paris in order to reach the narrow sea. Now let us suppose our traveller to observe his surroundings, what would he have noticed I From the level of the island little could be seen. On the south, within a very short distance of the river bank, rose a low but steep eminence, whose later Latin name was Mons Lucotetius. Down the side of this hill came the southern road to cross the bridge into the town. On the north, at a distance of some miles, he might have caught the sharp outline of a steep hill — higher by far than anything surrounding it, and iso- lated in the plain. If, however, he had climbed some fairly high building on the island, such as one of those wooden watch-towers which were raised in time of danger, he would have had on every side but that which was screened by the " Mons Lucotetius," a very extensive view. On the south-east side he woidd have looked up the river from which he had just landed. Perhaps he would have just barely caught a gleam of the Marne where it falls into the Seine, three miles away. Then, as his gaze swept round to the south, he would have noted the rise of the heights that bound the plain In this direction, and would have marked a little river (the Bicvre) coming through them and falling into the Seine almost immediately beneath him. The 4 50 PARIS. view due soutli woukl be masked, ns wo have said, by the hill on Avhich the Pantheon now stands ; but a little west of this he would again see the hills beyond all that Avide level space which is now tlie Faubourg St. Germain, the Invalides and the Champ de Mars. Here, as he looked to the south-west, he would see the Seine completing its great bend, and, very far away, turning suddenly to the I'ight and to the north, to skirt the western hills. Between himself and those hills, however, from two to three miles away, he would notice a long, low ridge covered with a dense wood. It is now known as the Heights of Passy. It rose from the river-bank and ran northnard, sinking into the plain at some little distance from that sharp hill of Montmartre, which would stand so clearly defined to the north of his position. If the day were clear he might see beyond this, very fointly, the heights of Enghien, where the river leaves the plain of Paris ; but in hardly any conditions could he catch, on the extreme verge of the horizon, the low hills that bound it on the north. To the right of IMont- martre more or less disconnected ridges and plateaus would be seen, growing lower and lower, until finally a perfect level completed the circle, and led the eye to the river again in the south-easterly direction, where it had begun its circuit. From this description it will be seen that a kind of great half-oval, level district lay on the right bank of the river, dotted round with ridges and low, iso- LUTETIA. 61 lated hills — a district some five miles from east to west — while from the islands to Montmartre, at its extreme northern point, would be about two and a half to three miles. It is upon this plain that the greater part of Paris has since been buUt, but at the time of which we speak it was a stretch of waste, swampy, unprofitable land, contrasting with the good, arable land on the other side of the river. This northern flat was on the eastern side a mere marsh, becoming in winter a kind of large, shallow lake, while its western side (below the heiglits of Passy, spoken of above) was drained by a rividet, to which a later age gave the name of Menil-Montant. It fell into the Seine just a mile and a half below the islands. Through this northern flat the road to Senlis picked its way across the driest portion, namely, from the Avooden bridge almost due north, till it passed just by the hill of Montmartre, to the east. It was the only sign of humanity in the malarious place, Avhfle the wooded bills to the south and west, though more beautiful, were equally lonely. In the centre of a sparse hunting tribe there lay this little fortified island, a group of barbarian huts, a community of fishermen and hunters. It Avas des- tined to become the great and typical city of the west. Where the boats are moored on the northern bank, the muddy shore, the Place de Greve (keeping the name of its origin) is to be the scene of the justice of medieval kings, of the rise of the city government ; 52 PAEIS. there the Hotel de Ville is to stand ; and on the spot which a few GauHsh fishermen made their meeting- place a great horde of their descendants were to stand, waiting in the night of the 9th Thermidor for the call to arms which Robespierre refused to sign. That distant Avooded ridge in the Avest is to be crowned with the triumphal arch of Csesar's I*arallel. The marsh will breed an insurrectionary mass of men. It will be the quarters in later days of the crowds that achieved all the glories and that perpe- trated all the crimes of 1793. On that little island the great Cathedral of the mid- dle ages will stand. A stone's throw from it the Courts of Justice and the Parliaments, and finally the terrible Tribunal of the Revolution will sit where the ragged gardens are. The hill to the south will be crowned by the most famous of universities ; on its summit will be buried the two men Avho, more than any other pair, have made our modern era. That little lonely village will shake the world. Let us now treat in some detail the story of the city, and especially of its outward aspect from the first known origins. At the head of these lie, of course, the scanty geological evidences of prehistoric conditions. Al- though the region occupied by the City of Paris and LUTETIA. 53 its surroundings is not rich in prehistoric remains, various burial-places and implements have been dis- covered in recent years in the Bois de Vincennes and at Varenne-Saint Hilaire ; on the banks of the Marne and the Seine; at Paris, Meiidon and Marly ; at Saint- Germain en Laye, at Argenteuil, and near the mouth of the Oise at Conflans-Sainte-Honorine — all these yield incontestable proof that this district has been inhabited by man from the earliest ages. To cite but one example — the Dolmen found at Conflans-Sainte-Honorine is a remarkably perfect specimen of these prehistoric buildings. When it was discovered, the stones at the sides and one be- longing to the roof were still in their place; a vesti- bule six and a half feet square was separated from the tomb itself by a huge slab of rock, and this slab was pierced with a round hole, near which was found the circular stone which had served to close the open- ing. Beyond this were two tombs, their combined length measuring about twenty-nine feet and their width about seven. An upright stone placed across the centre divided them into nearly equal parts, Avhile room was left for a narrow passage-way. This inter- esting monument was taken carefully apart and trans- ported to the Chateau of Saint-Germain en Laye, where the great museum is housed, and it was set up in the moat. In some of the burial-places discovered various implements and tools have been found. They are 64 PAEIS. made of flint and stag-horn, and comprise hatchets, harpoons, arrows, stilettos and swords. With the Celtic conquest a new order of things was introduced. The conquerors brought with them a distinct advance in civilization. There are indica- tions that they could irrigate tlie fields and that they could dig wells. Wooden bridges* Avere throAvn across the Seine, connecting the island with the main- land, where they pastured their domestic animals on the left bank in the plain of Grenelle, in the Green Valley (Vauvert), and in the Pre aux Clercs. On the right bank the large sAvamp mentioned above stretched from about where the jMilitary Hospital now stands as far south as the present Place de la Bastille, and from the Boulevard de Belleville on the east to about the line of the Rue Saint-Martin on the west. The Canal Saint-Martin of our day would act as a drain down the very centre of the marsh, did it still exist. The fields bordering the left bank, on the other hand, were arable. They Avere probably planted in Avheat, barley and hay, as Caesar describes those Avhich he saw along the shores of the Loire ; Avhile roads must have been opened, in order that the countrymen and farmers might convey their produce to tlic settle- ment confined Avithin the narrow limits of the island. * The Pont Notre Dame is thought to be identical with the northern one of tliese, though there is some uncertainty on this point. The soutliern one is known to he exactly where the Petit- Font to-day unites the ishind witli the left bank of the Seine. LUTETIA. 55 The industries of this period were presumably con- fined to the manufacture of rough pottery and the spinning of wool for clothing, both of them purely domestic. It was left for Rome to introduce the cen- tralized capital and the gangs of slaves which, after three centuries, proved her economic ruin. The real history of Paris begins with the " Com- mentaries " of Csesar, wherein, as he speaks of the collection of fishermen's huts on the island in the Seine, he calls it Lutetia, clearly employing* a latin- ized form of the name by which it was already knoAvn. Strabo writes it Lucotocia, and Ptolemy Lucotecia, while the Emperor Julian, writing from the city to which he was so deeply attached, calls it LoHclictia. Of these various spellings that employed by Cajsar is, however, the one commonly adopted, though it is worth noting that the hill of the Univer- sity was known for centuries as " Mons Lucotetius." The derivation of the name has been the subject of much research. Scholars have attempted to trace it to Celtic sources, and especially to the dialect surviving in lower Brittany, but no conclusive proof has been found to support any one theory. The settlement on the Island of the Seine was at this time hardly a town, but rather the central district of a tribe — an arrangement found in many other Celtic ■■ Carlyle's guess in this matter, when lie si)eaks of tlie " Mud- T(jwii of tlie Borderers (Lutetia Parisiorum, or Barsiorura)," is of course based on nothing. 56 PAEIS. groups. When Csesar attended the assemblage of the tribes of Gaul, convoked by him at Lutetia, its inhabitants formed a division of a clan or tribe called, by the author of the " Commentaries," the Parisli, a name used to indicate the district which they occupied. He says of this tribe, " The Parisii are inhabitants of a tract bordering vipon that of the Senones, with whom tradition says they Avere once allied." This tract must have covered about the same extent of ground as that included in the ancient diocese of Paris before the year 1622, that is the entire depart- ment of the Seine, and a part of that of Seine-et- Oise. The etymology of the name Parisii has been no less a subject of dispute than that of Lutetia, but in this instance the occupation of the inhabitants may serve us somewhat as a guide. According to Bullet's Celtic dictionary, the word Bar* or Par, in that tongue, signifies a boat. In lower Britanny the cargo of a ship is called the far or fanl. The Celtic word i^«r, then, signifying a boat, may well have pro- duced that of Parisii, meaning boatmen ; and it must be especially noted that the most ancient emblem of Lutetia is a boat, as may be seen by the very inter- esting carving which ornaments the base of one of the vaults of a roof in the ancient Palais des Thor- mes, on the left bank of the Seine ; that same boat * Let those wlio are Celtic scholars decide. Lavallee assures us that the same root signifies " Border." LUTETIA. 57 also to-day indicates the city on her public monu- ments.* Thus the powerful association of the Nautce Parisiaci — Parisian Boatmen — which, later on, Ave find playing so prominent a part in the affairs of the city, may be traced to a Celtic or Gallic origin. Caesar must have found it completely organized, since his contemporary, Strabo, refers to the various products transported from the south by the Gauls, as much by water-ways as overland. Those fifty boats em- ployed by Labienus to convey his army from Melo- dunum (Melun) to Lutetia, in order to make himself master of that town, probably belonged to the Nautai. This guild or association was the ancestry, no doubt, of that other which, in the reigns of Louis le Gros and Louis VII., Avas called Mercatores Aqme Parisiaci, who, in turn, Avere the forerunners of the municipal body charged Avith the oversight of the navigation of the Seine and the Avater-carriage. There is nothing more A'aluable as an object-lesson of the historical truth that the Roman Empire Avas transformed, and did not die, than the story of this association. It is one of a thousand continuities, but a striking one. At the same time it is AA^orth noting that Paris, Avhich (as Ave shall see) only becomes im- portant at the close of the Empire, is the typical transitional city just before the barbarian invasions. * The triple prows which you may see on the lamp-posts of modern Paris is an emblem 1500 years old, and without a break of continuity. 58 PAEIS. They had, just after the Roman conquest, a port of embarkation and disembarkation on that side of the island bordering on the wider arm of the Seine, which was always navigable. There their boats could be unloaded right in Lutetia. In the middle ages this port Avent by the name of Saint-Landry, that bishop having had an oratory, or possibly his dwelling there.* In addition to these known facts w^e may fairly presume that the Nautse must have had a central ad- ministration for the traffic on the river. As Ave have said earlier in the chapter, the princi- pal place for unloading was on the other bank of the Seine at the Greve, Avhere later Ave find the Pre vote de I'eau established, out of Avhich grcAV the municipal body of Paris. These riA^er tradesmen formed a poAverful corpora- tion, from Avhose number Avere chosen for a long pe- riod the magistrates charged Avith the conduct of the GoA-ernment. It developed later mto the Hanse Parisienne, that company of merchants which achieved such celebrity in the middle ages, the kernel of the College of Magistrates or Corps of the City of Paris. In the time of the LoAver Empire, in the reign of Posthumus, the northern faubourg developed to such an extent that it became necessary to establish a * The Gallo-Eoman ruins discovered in 1844, when the Kue de Constantine was opened, may have belonged to a forum or food market. LUTETIA. 59 market there. And in connection with this is a very interesting example of that continuity which is so marked a feature in the story of the town. This market has occupied for centuries exactly the same spot, and to-day the vast city uses it for its central Ilallcs, and the Quai de la Greve must assuredly have been then, as it has been ever since, a port where merchandise, transported thither from the upper Seine, could be unloaded for the use of this place of exchange. When the southern suburb, situated near the line of the great road leading from Lutetia to Grenabum,* spread and increased in importance, still another quay was created, situated apparently on the southern bank of the river, on the spot which, ever since the middle ages, has gone by the name of Quai de la Tournelle, from the great tower erected there in place of one which had formed a part of the south- ern walls of defense constructed under Philip Au- gustus. The chief settlement of the Parisii was situated, as has been already stated, on the largest island in the Seine, now forming I'Isle de la Cite. At the time of the Roman conquest it had made but little ad- vance towards civilization. Though they had ap- parently submitted to the conqueror, the Parisii were loyal at heart to the national cause ; for when, in the year 54, Vercingetorix summoned all * Orleans. 60 PAEIS. the people of Gaul to take part in the final struggle against the Romans, they, together with the neigh- boring tribes, undertook to intercept Labienus, one of Csesar's lieutenants, who, with four legions, was march- ing south, endeavoring to rejoin his commander. Deeming their town insufficiently provided with the means of defense, they burned it, and destroyed the bridges which connected it with the mainland. Then they proceeded to entrench themselves behind those marshes that extended along the Seine near Juvisy and the mouth of the Orge. After sundry strategic movements, the encounter finally took place probably at some spot lying between the modern villages of Ivry and Vitry, on the left bank of the Seine. After a fierce struggle the legions, moulded in a superior discipline, triumphed over the allied forces, and the latter were completely subdued. The obstinate resistance of the Parisii drew down upon them the wrath of their conquerors, and Lutetia was ranked among the " Vectigal " or tributary cities ; that is, in the lowest grade of conquered towns. The assertions sometimes made that Csesar took pleasure in strengthening and beautifying Lu- tetia, and that it was he who built the defenses on the mainland, to protect the northern and southern bridges (defenses afterward called Grand and Petit Chatelets), are without contemporary proofs. At the same time, in spite of the disadvantages under which she labored, in less than a century after Csesar's time, LUTETIA. 61 the settlement of the Parisii, risen from her ruins, had become one of the great centres of water-carriage in the interior of Gaul. In the reign of Tiberius — that is, some time between the years 14 and 37 of our era, the Society of Nautse, or Navigators, already spoken of, erected an altar to Jupiter on the eastern extremity of the island. The ruins of this altar were discovered in 1711, in the course of some excava- tions made beneath the choir of the Cathedral Church of Notre Dame. And here, even more than in the instances already mentioned, the characteristic of continuity appears; for within a few yards of the spot on which that altar stood, rose the high altar of the first Christian church, again, the present high altar of Notre Dame, is but a few feet to the west. This pagan relic appears, after more than 1700 years, to confound us with our Roman origin. On a stone set in the principal facade of this monument may be read the following inscription : " Under Tiberius Csesar Augustus the Parisii sailors have pubHcly raised this altar to Jupiter, most good, most mighty." We thus have most satisfying proof, by the way, of the existence of this Society in the time of Ti- berius. The next event of importance in the history of the city, of which we have any record, is the arrival, towards the middle of the third century, of Saint Denis with his two companions, a priest named Rus- ticus and a deacon called Eleutherius, charged with a 62 PAEIS. mission to preach the Gospel to the people of Lu- tetia. In Csesar's time the national — that is, the Druidical — religion was still in force. Augustus for- bade its practice by Roman citizens, and in the reign of Claudius it had entirely disappeared. These mis- sionaries of still another form of religion do not seem to have been well received by the people of Gaul, for Gregoire de Tours tells us that " under the Emperor Decius (249-251) Saint-Denis, sent to Gaul and made Bishop of Paris, having suffered many tor- ments for the name of Christ, ended his earthly life by the sword." (Hist. Francor., i., xxx.) It is worthy of note that the above reference constitutes the sole historical account of the death which gave Bayard his battle-cry and St. Just his repartee, and which produced so vast a mass of mediaeval legend. During the ensuing century a number of emperors came to Lutetia, sometimes residing there, and it was now that the city began to issue from its obscurity and to take a prominent position in the world. It is with the end of Rome that the city destined to per- petuate the Latin idea in modern times becomes great. Constantius Chlorus, Constantino the Great, and his two sons, Constantino the younger and Constan- tius, in turn lived in the capital of the Parisii. To the hrst-named is usually credited the erection of the Palais des Thermos, the ordinary residence of the Emperors. LUTETIA. 63 Julian, Constantine's nephew, commonly called Ju- lian the Apostate, spent the winters of the years 358 and 359 there, as well as a part of the year 360, and occupied the Palais des Thermes, This prince was deeply attached to the place. He calls it his " Darling Lutetia." Here he lived in great contentment, far removed from the troubling and dangerous life of the imperial court, surrounded by a little household of philosophers and scholars, steeped in the pleasant but misleading dream that the pro- gress of the mystics and the tide of the Faith would be turned. One of this circle, the physician, Oribasius, edited a curtailed edition of the writings of Galen — " the first work," says Chateaubriand, in his Etudes Historiques, " that was published in this city destined to enrich literature Avith so many masterpieces." It is interesting to note that thus early in her history Paris is the chosen abiding-place of Julian and of his little coterie of pagan philosophers, and that her first book issues from such a place as her greatest men of the Revolutionary time woidd have delighted to honor. In his writings Julian speaks with enthu- siasm of the climate of Lutetia, of her vineyards and fig trees ; and — an opinion that should please the for- eign ear to-day — he speaks, above all else, of the austere morals of her inhabitants, who, for the most part, were still pagans. It was here that the Roman soldiers, refusing to obey the order issued by Constantius in 360, calling 64 PAEIS. them to the East, arrayed Julian in the imperial pur- ple and invested him with the title of Augustus. Valentinian and Gratian also loved Lutetia, in the neighborhood of which the latter gave battle to Maximus in 383 ; and Maximus, when he gained the victory, celebrated his conquest by erecting a tri- umphal arch in Lutetia. Remains of this work have been discovered near the Church of St. Landry, in risle de la Cite. To turn again to the Palais des Thermes let us examine briefly that part of it which has been pre- served to the present day. These vast ruins, among the most important in France, will serve to give us some idea of the extent and importance (relative to Lutetia) of the great building which dominated not only the city itself, but the approach to it from the south by the Roman road, which led through Gena- bum (Orleans) to the south of Gaul, and to Italy. Most of what is still standing is to be seen on the left as you go up the Boulevard >>t. Michel, that is, as you go out by the line of the old southern road just after crossing the Boulevard St. Germain. It is in- corporated with the Musee de Cluny. Other por- tions have been found at various times beneath the level of the adjacent houses and streets. The palace probably extended west almost as far as St. Ger- main des Pres, that is, the large gardens of which we have spoken above stretched so f^ir, a matter of nine hundred yards, and it was surrounded by a fairly dense LUTETIA. 65 population. Remains of a great wall have been dis- covered south of the palace, and traced as far as the Rue Soufflot. The aqueduct, a description of which is given below, supplied the imperial baths with an abundance of pure water, and likewise fed the foun- tains in the palace and the adjoining neighborhood. It is this part that is still standing that has given the name, Palais des Thermes, to the Avhole building, the interior arrangements clearly indicating its use. Vetruvius states that in all Roman establishments the baths were found on the western side of the edifice, which is the relative position occupied by these ruins. More than this, we can readily recognize the great apartments used for the warm and cold baths, the piscina or swimming-pool, the furnace and the reser- voir, and trace the route of the aqueduct, which brought the water from Rungis, Paray, and Mont Jean, situated in the hill-country on the south. This aqueduct was nineteen thousand metres, or about eleven miles, long ; the water ran through a channel of about one yard square ; along the slopes of the hills which skirt the valley of the Bievre on the east ; portions of it have been found near the cha- teau of Mont Jean, and at Fresnes, Bourg-la-Reine and Hay. At Arcueil it was necessary to cross both the valley and the river, and this was done by a great row of arches one hundred and fifty yards long- by fifty feet high. Ruins of this huge; construction still exist, and por- 5 66 PAEIS. tions of the reservoir connected with it were discov- ered in the Rue Sainte Catherine d'Enfers when the Rue Gay-Lussac was opened. It is probable that this part of tlie imperial palace has survived almost intact, as during the early ages of Christianity, when the habits and customs of Ro- mans still prevailed, this great bathing establishment was still kept up, and only abandoned at the time of the Norman siege of Paris in the ninth century, when the palaces, churches and dwelling-houses situated around the city were destroyed by fire. Indeed, we have here one principal instance of what we shall see in the next chapter to have been the case all over Europe, namely, that Rome and the life of Rome lingered on, though in decay, till after Charlemagne ; that the nadir was not reached after the first invasions of the fifth and sixth centuries. It Avas the violent incursions of the ninth century, the " Darkness of the death of Charlemagne," that brought our civilization to its lowest ebb. History does not tell us the precise epoch to which Lutetia owes the palace on the left bank of the river, and the aqueduct connected with it. Julian's name has been associated with it, but probably only because of his residence there, it being hardly likely that, in the course of his brief sojourns, he could have car- ried on building operations of such magnitude. In the great apartment still standing we find the carving, before alluded to, which represents the prow LUTETIA. 67 of a ship laden with merchandise, and may point to the Society of the Nautte as having co-operated in the erection of the building. Then behind the palace, south of it, that is, and right upon the southern "svall, stood the citadel of Lutetia, It probably occurs to every student that this was a strange site for the stronghold of a city. Far from the centre, dominated by the high ground of the Mons Lucotetius, it woidd seem a bad place for any stubborn defense. But this situation, like that of so many citadels in Roman Gaul, is a striking proof of Avhat the Roman Empire had become. A huge and orderly body, hav- ing established its domination and its unity, the army (at least that part of it well within the borders) Avas the " occupation " of the cities. They feared no sieges. They took the most convenient, not the strongest, place for their residence, rather than their refuge. As a fact, when defense is actually needed again (as in the Norman siege), the old unit of Gaulish resistance be- comes once more the true " arx Parisiorum." The route of the aqueduct described above lay be- tween the two Roman roads of Montrouge and Ar- cueil, the former identical Avith the modern BoulcA'ard St. Michel, and the latter the road from the south, with the Rue St. Jacques. After entering the city by means of the Petit-Pont, it crossed the Grand- Pont to the right bank and led off northeastAvards to Senlis, foUoAving the line of the modern Rue de Faubourg St. 68 PARIS. Martin and the Rue d'AUemagnc. There are a few other points of correspondence between the ancient Roman city and Paris of to-day — as, for example, the great unfinislied Church of Sacre-Coeur, standing to- day midway between the sites of the two heathen temples on Montmartre ; the Rue du Faubourg St. Denis, which follows the Roman road to the north ; and the old roads leading off to the south-west, now known, the one as the Rue Lecourbe, and the other by its ancient name of Vaugirard ; while, on the other hand, the Roman Grenelle and Issy road has disappeared, except for a short distance, where its name as well as its track have been preserved by the modern Rue de Grenelle — that is, it exists only between the Champ de Mars and the University. The drain Avhich runs in a westerly direction from the Place de la Republique, and, describing a half cir- cle, enters the Seine near 1' Avenue de Trocadcro, fol- lows the exact course of a stream of Roman and me- diseval times, namely, that of Menil-Montant. Fi- nally, the district lying south and west of the Luxem- bourg Gardens was the Roman Terra ad Fiscum Isclacenseni — that is, its produce went to feed the public treasury. The altar to Jupiter, already spoken of, in all probability formed a part of a heathen temple which was replaced by a Christian basilica when, under Constantine, Christianity was proclaimed the religion of the Empire. The other end of the island, the site LUTETIA. 69 on which the Palais de Justice now stands, has been, since the fourth century (the period when Paris re- ceived the full municipal status), constantly occupied by a building- of some sort devoted to the use of the governing body. The date of the construction of the first boundary- walls has never been established, but it is knoAvn that by the middle of the fifth century the island was com- j)letely surrounded by them. Remains of a low Gallo-Roman rampart were found in 1847 in the course of the excavations conducted in front of Notre Dame. On the right bank of the Seine, a region much more sparsely settled, traces of important buildings have likewise been discovered. Two burial-grounds lay in what would now be the neighborhood of the Rue Vivienne and the Palais Saint Jean. The great reservoir which supplied the public baths stood on the site of the Palais Royal, and was fed by an aque- duct wdiich brought the water from the heights of Chaillot, while a Pioman fleet charged with the sine- cure of the defense of the Seine was stationed near Paris. To the beginning of the fifth century is attributed the Episcopate of Saint-Marcel. He died about the year 436, and was buried on a height outside the city, Mons Citardus.* In the folloAving century a * "Mouffetard." 70 PAEIS. church was erected over his tomb, around which a settlement rapidly grew up called the Bourg St. Marcel, incorporated later into Paris under the name of Faubourg St. Marceau. And here, thirteen hun- dred years later, the turbulence that formed Danton's army came to hear him and march with him from the Cordeliers. Upon these few facts the meagre history of Roman Lutetia hangs. But while contemporary Avriting tells us so little, the inferences we can draw from archae- ology leave us free to form a fairly accurate picture of what the Roman city A\as like. To view it, let us imagine ourselves in the fifth cen- tury, just before the Frankish conquest. Let us go to the heights on the south and look northward, recon- structing point by point that which we actually know was there. The impression is full and vivid. We will suppose ourselves to be stationed at a point overlooking the valley of the Bievre, some sixty feet above the Roman aqueduct of Arcueil, and a hundred yards or so behind it. Were we to follow the valley we would come to the Roman road of Mons Citardus (corresponding to the modern Rue Mouffetard), lined on either side with tombs. A little further away, on the eastern slope of Mons Lucotetius (Mont Ste. Genevieve), we see the Amphitheatre. As a fact, the Amphitheatre in the fifth century had disappeared. Its stones had been largely used to build a ncAv wall round the island, and the great building LUTETIA. 71 Avhose remains lie beneath the Rue Monge, riglit in the University quarters of to-day, was a ruin before the Franks came to the city. To the left of the Amphitheatre, and a little be- yond it, may be seen the port of the Nautic, just where the present Rue de Pontoise ends, in the Quai de la Tournelle. Mons Lucotetius cuts off a little of the view of the most important part of the city, as there stood the first Christian church, a basilica dedicated to Saint Stephen, built just after the reign of Julian the Apostate, and replacing a temple to Jupiter. It cov- ered the site of the present Sacristy of Notre Dame, reaching nearly to the Presbytery. Factories and furnaces stand on the summit of the hill, while on the southern slope, facing us, is a burial-ground ; on the west it is built up with dwelling-houses and some of the out-buildings of Julian's palace, and nearby stands the reservoir supplied by the aqueduct of Arcueil, and the barracks of the garrison. The palace gardens stretching off to the left, along the Seine, are bounded on the south and Avest by a wall, and on the north by the river. It is worthy of note that until the thirteenth century this enclosure remained unbuilt upon, and was called by a name indicating its origin, viz., Jardin or " Clos de Laas," i.e., of the Palace. Beyond the palace and Mons Lucotetius we see the white buildings of the city, standing out clearly against the green background of the fields which lie 72 PAKIS. between the Seine and the stream of Menil-Montant. On the right, near the extremity of the island, rise the imperial statue on the quay of the Nauta^ and the altars raised to Jupiter and the gods. Further to the left, facing the road that traverses the city, is the southern gate, and beyond it, on the far side of the island, the northern one. The forum, or market- place, occupies the space lying between the two gates, while the administrative Palace — the Palais de la Cite — and, close by the northern boundary wall the prison, can be clearly traced against the fields of the northern bank. Just where the street now runs to the Pont au Change, by the palace, the walls are pierced with a gateway, ornamented with columns, opening directly upon the river front. On this side the city overlooks a small arm of the Seine, filled in somewhere about the thirteenth century. The little island that separated it from the larger branch went, later on, by the name of He de Galilee. Continuing still further to the left, we come first to the palace, then to the palace-gardens, and finally to the tower Avhicli guarded this western extremity of the city. Above it, and still more to the left, we can see the reservoir of the Passy aqueduct, behind which the green plain extends to right and left, bounded by the heights of Chaillot, Montmartre and Menil-Montant, composed for the most part of meadow-lands and marshes, and crossed by roads LUTETIA. 73 leading to the eastern, northern and maritime prov- inces. The little stream of Menil-Montant gleams like a silver thread in the distance, reaching from the marsh on our right to the forest of Coiivre on the left, that forest of which the Bois de Boulogne is the last relic. Mons Martis (Montmartre), on the horizon, is crowned by the temples of Mars and Mercury, by this time either deserted or used as Christian churches, and at its base is the northern burial- ground. At this period the Roman Empire was falling into its transformation and decline, while from all parts the barbarian, who had long been passing into the happier plains of the south, came Avith increasing pressure. Still Paris continued to be a purely Roman city until very nearly the end of the fifth century. The Franks are pushing forward in the north, the Saxons have landed in Britain ; even Attila sweeps in that great cavalry charge over the west, but Paris is spared. Before this century, the fifth, came to a close however, the barbarian is within her walls, and in the next chapter we shall deal with the long twi- light wliicli fell upon her civilization, and which only broke in the dawn of the middle ages. 74 PARIS. CHAPTER III. PARIS IN THE DARK AGES. What kind of city did Paris become when the order and pomp of Rome had grown old, crmnbled and fallen into decay ? To answer this question it is necessary to form a clear idea of the long, dark time that followed the bar- barian invasions. That vast period which Ave vaguely call the " middle ages," with which we connect the feudal state of* society, and whose interest and tenor of thought appear to us so distinct from those of modern times, is by no means the one continuous era Avhich our imagination too frequently pictures it. Apart from the innumerable minor changes and developments which make every part of it as diversi- fied in its way as our own or the last century, the great epoch falls into two well-defined divisions, to the first of which the name " dark ages " may properly be given; to the second only should the term of "middle ages " be applied. We must remember that these two together deal with the space of a thousand years ; and the marvel is not so much that one revolution and total change in society should have occurred in such a prodigious lapse of time, but rather that only one such complete PAKIS IN THE DAKK AGES. 75 renewal should have taken place. The short four centuries since their close have given us, in the Ref- ormation and the Industrial and Political Revolution of the last hundred years, at least three such move- ments, and the immediate promise of more. The two principal epochs of this thousand years are distinguished as follows : The first is that process of continual decline which, having its origin in the breakdown of Rome, — that is, in the lower empire of the fourth and fifth centuries, — reaches its nadir or lowest point in the generation which saw the millennium. The year 1000, or more accurately the generation immediately succeeding it, marks the turning-point. The ninth and tenth centuries may be said to vie with one another for the evil primacy as to which was the most terrible : the heathen onslaught of the former and the brutal anarchy of the latter appear almost equally worthy to be called a furnace in which our civilization was tried. The second great epoch is connected, of course, with the first by a transitional period, but that period is comparatively short for the astounding work which it accomplishes. The long life of one man might cover it, for a person born be- fore the Norman conquest of Calabria might easily have lived to see the discovery at Amalfi of the Roman code. The whole of Europe awakes. The Normans show, first, how a true kingdom, with peace and order 76 PAEIS. and unity, may be established. They accomplish this feat at the two extremities of Europe, the islands of Sicily and England. The Capetian House establishes in France the origin of that strong, central govern- ment without which a nation cannot live. The sen- timent of nationality slowly emerges from the confu- sion of feudalism ; then come the forging blows of the Hildebrandine reform and of the Crusades, and the brilliant career of the middle ages has definitely begun. The great kingships, the Roman law, the universi- ties, the vernacular literature have appeared, and with them the Gothic architecture, whose survivals can prove to our generation, better than any histori- cal evidence, how intense and how vivid was the ncAV life of Christendom. From that day to our own Europe has never lost its eagerness, its abundant vigor, its power of expan- sion, and, in its mental attitude, the spirit of inquiry ; Avhat Renan so admirably calls "la grande Curiosite" — the basis of all her grandeur. It is with the first period, however, with the " dark ages," that we have to deal in this chapter. We have to trace the story of Paris during that long dotvmcard half of the valley that covers a thousand years. What characteristics shall we discover in the five hundred years and more Avhich this degradation covers ? Of the details in its history we shall treat later in the chapter ; but before reaching these it is necessary to draw up some kind of picture of the time. PARIS IN THE DARK AGES. 77 In the first place, to repeat a phrase Avhich has ah'cady been used more than once in this history, Rome did not die ; it was transformed. On all sides, it is true, her civilization lost ground ; her art was rude, inaccurate, and at the same time less idealized; her production of Avcalth less great ; her architecture had become a matter of routine ; her letters had grown crabbed. Only in one department of human energy had a change occurred, which a simple history such as this dares neither praise nor blame — the phi- losophy of the empire had been touched with mysti- cism ; the Orient had convinced the Occident ; the shrine, the miracle, the unseen had replaced the clear and positive attitude, the speculative and cold intel- lect, which had distinguished the philosophy of Rome in her time of greatest power. Mediseval religion, Avith its legends, its marvels, its passionate abnega- tions and its theories of the superhuman, had ap- peared. Was this advance of mysticism part of the uni- versal decay, or was it, on the contrary, the one good counterbalance that viltimately saved the world from barbarism ? The answer can only be discovered in the attitude of the reader's own mind; it is a problem, the solution of which lies not in the region of his- torical proof, but in the department of mental habit, of conviction and of faith. Gibbon would tell us that it was the natural conse- quence of disaster and of decay ; that with the 78 PARIS. Saxons harrying the channel, the Hunnish cavalry laying Avaste the central west, fear produced its inva- riable accompaniment of superstition ; that Gene- vieve (if she existed ever) was some leader of strong character, capable of organizing a prosaic resistance, and that an ignorant and debased populace saw in her mission something of the incomprehensible, and therefore of the divine. But Michelet, who is as great as Gibbon, and has for his own people a far truer sympathy, would un- doubtedly yield to the mystic influence, and would picture to us almost with devotion the church of the fifth and sixth centuries, because for him the people are its authors, and this conception of the people is, for him, the soul of history. What were the causes of this beginning of de- cline ! Perhaps the best general answer to this ques- tion is to say "old age;" but the proximate and im- mediate cause, or, if you will, the most obvious symp- tom of the break-down was economic. It was in the form of a decline of wealth, especially of the method of producing wealth which the Roman Empire had fostered with such marvellous success, that the pinch began to be felt. It was (roughly speaking) towards the close of the third century that the evil became marked. The system which Rome had spread over the whole of the west was one admirably suited to an immense expansion of wealth, and therefore of popu- lation. At the basis of it lay the conception of Order. PARIS IN THE DARK AGES. 79 The Pax Romana was a domestic as well as a politi- cal thing, and Rome had made this duty of police the most sacred foundation of her power. She was sav- age in repressing savagery, and Avhen her task was completed she had so strongly succeeded that perfect order and peace had atrophied her powers. In the second place, the idea of absolute property and of its concomitant, the sanctity of contract, was very prominent in her civilization. The right, " utere at abutere," to use or to wantonly destroy, was her exaggerated way of asserting this dogma of individ- ualism. It is from this we get in our common law the conception of inviolable property in land ; and from this, again, that the extreme and harsh deduc- tions of the Common Law (which Equity came in to rectify on lines more consonant with Christian morals) proceed. In the third place, excellent communications and practically free exchange completed the edifice. Such rules of government are obviously calculated to increase productive power ; and, indeed, those nations which to-day regard the accumulation of wealth as the end of civilization have adopted a very similar code. Rome's success was the proof of the soundness of her premises. In places that are now deserts, wheat-fields furnished the vast capital with food ; in the now half-barren uplands of Asia Minor she nourished a teeming population, and easily sup- ported half a hundred of great cities. In Britain 80 PAEIS. alone, and almost by agriculture alone, she found place for ten millions of people ; and in Gaul the villages became great and flourishing towns. How did such a system begin to fall "I The con- ditions which Rome had established were favorable — only too favorable — to the growth of that disease of which our present civilization stands in such terror. A few accumulated the means of production, and upon a few (but not the same) fell the burden of the state. A system of taxation which w^ell suited a })opidation among which wealth had been not ill-distributed be- came onerous and almost intolerable as the conditions changed. What we should now call " the upper mid- dle class " bore the chief share of the public burden. Will it be credited that when Gaul had passed through less than four hundred years of the Roman system, many of this class voluntarily sank into a semi-servile status rather than continue to support the fisc. The system of production which Rome had intro- duced gave to the rich man great advantages. With his gangs of slaves, making use of the admirable roads, of a sea protected from piracy, and competing with the poorer man under conditions where protec- tion was unknown, he built up, not only in industry but in agriculture, a highly capitalistic system. The smaller men fell more and more into dependence, sometimes actually into servitude; and when the empire was at its height, great prosperity was gained at this price, namely, that but a few were actively PAKIS IN THE DARK AGES. 81 concerned even with the economic welfare of the state, and that the stability of the system depended upon the conservation of every iota of its gigantic energies. Were these to fail at any point, nothing could save it from decay. This catastrophe (which was bound sooner or later to occur) was determined more rapidly than one might, in reading the glories of the Antonines, have anticipated. Within a century or a century and a half the great scheme of production is found " not to be paying." Civil Avar, the apathy of the general citi- zen, a little less order, a certain shaking of security, and the decline began. The initiative which might have saved it could only come from the energy of a mass of small owners, and they had disappeared. In their place men in every stage of dependence, the great bulk of them actually slaves, cultivated the vast estates or worked in the centralized manufactories, and it even began to be more profitable to ask of these masses a constant fraction- of the produce of their labor than to directly exploit them. Custom, in the decay of public order, was replacing competi- tion, and the first note of mediaeval industry had sounded. It Avas upon such a society that the barbarian inva- sions fell ; and that the reader may form a picture of the fifth century citizen who endured them, we will ask him to imagine an owner of property in the neighborhood of Lutetia, and watching the course of 6 82 PAEIS. events from the mental standpoint of that city whose outward aspect we described in our last chapter. Such a man would have a house, let us say, on the southern road between the Mons Lucotetius and the hills. Before him to the north would lie the city, which he would frequent for its baths, for its news and for its merchandise — possibly, also, for its public worship. He would probably be a Christian. That large body of Paganism which Avas left in Gaul was found rather among the people of the outlying dis- tricts, among the very poorest of the cities, or here and there in the members of some old family still maintaining the tradition of their ancestors of a hun- dred years before. But his Christianity would be of the official Roman sort — his bishop at Lutetia virtu- ally an officer of the State, his religion the state religion. About his house, however, a great estate woidd lie, and this was called a vUla. The ancestor of our modern village, it was tenanted by a very different kind from the master — dependents, freedmen, slaves, living presumably in a cluster of houses along the road, the origin of the mediaeval village, and culti- vating the area of its parish. They woidd have their priest, their regular time and place of meeting, their customs and traditions even as to their method of cultivation, in which their master would less and less interfere, and in their religion much of legend, of local tradition, of national folk-lore was included. PARIS IN THE DARK AGES. 83 They worshipped many saints whose very names their master had never heard, and they reverenced some who were indeed nothing but the old gods under new names ; they kept the feasts with half- pagan ceremonies which all the Avorld has since loved to observe, and it is this lower comraunitv which forms our link with the prehistoric past. We owe it all. The master of the villa spoke Latin, not more differ- ent from that of the Augustan era than is our English from that of the Elizabethans. His dependents spoke the more corrupt speech which they had learned from the Roman soldiery, and in a hundred matters of ordinary life they used words of which the classics knew nothing. Their accent, in the growing diffi- culty of communications, was taking a strongly local tone, and the termination of the cases were already clipped in ordinary speech. Still more curious, the accusative was being more commonly used for most of the other cases, and no doubt Avhere their master would still talk of " Mons Lucotetius," they would make some such sound as "mont'm," or even "mont'," serve to describe it. What would be the attitude of the master of the villa relative to the break-up of the empire going on around him ? In the first place, we must dismiss from our minds the conception of any patriotism. Tlie enqjire was not a nation to be loved ; it was the whole of civilization — it was the Avorld. That it could 84 PAKIS. fall was inconceivable, and remained inconceivable to the middle ages. The mind had long grown familiar to the idea of infiltration of the outer barbarians. They had served, of course, in the armies | as pensions they had received frontier lands, and there was a long and continuous intercourse between the two sides of the border. Even with invasion there Avas a considerable famil- iarity ; invasion was a part of the weakness of the government, but then the government w^as known to have weakened. The number of the clamorers, and their pressure, increased 5 the shores of the narrow seas became untenable ; at last even Britain is aban- doned ; still the Roman citizen cannot conceive that his empire — the whole Avorld — is coming to an end. Tribes of barbarians break through the lines on the north-east ; he hears that advantage has been taken of their prowess — that they are allied to the Roman forces. Some of them are given land — what of that? It is but an exaggeration of an old custom^ anxiety, however, loss of security, cutting off the main roads, — all these show his civilization to be failing. Visiting, perhaps, that Roman Marcellus, the Bishop of the city, he hears from one event to another the symptoms of the fall. Before he is a man of middle age the final occupation of northern Gaul, and that dreadful name of sovereignty, given to the barbarian, is heard ; in Lutetia probably chance warriors come, unmolested and stared at. PAEIS IN THE DARK AGES. 85 Attila strikes the city with a terrible fear; hut (how shall we represent in anything like sober his- tory the story of Genevieve?) it is spared, and the poorer people, the makers of religion, found her legend and her sainthood. Still our Roman provincial land-owner might have lived to see Clovis entering Paris, and to know that the land from the Loire northAvard was separated from the body of Rome. NoAv, this catastrophe would have made less im- pression on him — or, let us say, on his successors, for he would have reached extreme old age — than the modern reader might imagine. The shell of Roman life remained : the buildings, the language, the organization, the administrative and domestic arrangements, — all these Avere captured by the bar- barian, transformed by his arrival, but by no means destroyed. The war band of Clovis numbered some 8000 men, and the whole nation of the Burgundians but 40,000. These comparatively small forces came into a Gaul of millions upon millions. They could not do more than affect it ; they could not (as they did in Britain) change its language, nor could they even greatly change the institutions. Well, as time went on, the predominance of these men, fighting battles between themselves " over the heads " (as it were) of the tillers of the soil, settling in the abandoned villages, intermarrying with the 86 PARIS. Roman nobles and proprietors, continues to drag down the falling civilization. In this Lutetia the Roman palaces were the scenes of their revels ; de- graded Gallo-Roman and new Teutonic chieftain sit together, drinking on ruder benches than the Romans knew, beneath the half-barbarian trophies of the Merovingian kings. Even at last the new-comer learns (though he deforms) the tongue of the con- quered, and beneath them all the huge majority, the people, go on at their servile work, paying the accus- tomed dues to the owners of the " villse." The new garrison (for it was little more) brought with it no arts, no memories and no attachments. A violent prejudice (brought about by the sharp national differentiation of to-day) has tried to give the Teutonic tribes characteristics Avliich all positive history denies. They demanded nothing better than to take Roman titles, to adopt the Roman habits, to be absorbed in this glittering and superior thing, Rome, not to prey upon it. Yet, as we have said, they debase it. Their own peculiar society disappears immediately; for a short Avhile the "mallus"* or meet- ing of armed men is held ; for a yet shorter time they hold to the vague gods of the forests and marshes, and then definitely merge in the vast population about them. * You get, of course, a resurrection of German speech and customs with the advent of the Austrasian dynasty much later, but they do not affect Gaul. PARIS IN THE DARK AGES. 87 But the effect of their conquest is tremendous, though that of their personahties is shght. Order, security and one code of laws — all these go down, and with them civilization itself. For three hundred years the ruin continues. In Clovis' time the merchants of Paris still traded Avith the East. Who shall say what vague and distorted conception of foreign places lay in the brains of those later traffickers who haunted the palace doors where the " mayors " kept prisoners the last feeble descend- ants of the Merovingian line ! Paris grows barbarous — her population not less dense, but how lowered in its standard of subsistence ! Her walls, her streets, her churches are still Roman (excepting those new churches and abbeys which the new kings had endowed), but those walls are repaired with clumsy masonry and buttressed here and there with mere rough heaps of stone ; every new church would show an architecture more simple and more squat than the last ; her streets and public squares are filled in and narrowed with the private buildings, which, Avhen government weakens, can encroach upon public lands. To all this decay a sudden halt is given by the personality of Charlemagne. He becomes almost the saviour of Europe. Nay, he really saves it, insomuch that but for his efforts Christendom would probably never have survived the evil time that followed his death. 88 PARIS. Of pure Latin stock on his father's side (though we cannot tell, in these times, how far the Teutonic strain entered through the mother), he led the forces which still moved eastward upon the empire. For the empire, Avith all its diseases, yet had buildings and land, and, above all, political opportunities for the infinitely less developed peoples of the Rhine. The immediate predecessors of Charlemagne conquer the western Franks just as Clovis had conquered the Gallo-Roman — not from any superiority of courage or method of discipline, but because the society Avhich they entered lacked cohesion. Moreover, the method of that conquest was eminently political. The Aus- trasian "mayors" become the tutors of the Neustrian kings after a decisive battle, and that is all. Another comparatively small war band comes in and inherits another batch of empty villai, but the civilization is and remains debased Roman. By this time interior paganism has disappeared, but, on the other hand, the heathendom without is pressing closely upon the little island of Christendom. A little way beyond the Rhine, a little south of the Pyrenees, the pagan or the Mussulman limited the faith. Charlemagne is heir to that island of Christendom — its necessary defender — and for a little while he re-embodies the ghost of Rome, which has been dead or dying these three hundred years. During his life- time the old order, the old conception of unity come PAKIS IN THE DARK AGES. 89 bcack into the now limited territory of the empire, and Avork in it with a difficuhy only barely surmounted by the superb energy of the leader. It is like the soid coming back to a body long mummied, or even falling to dust. That attempt left Paris to one side. The city could never have made a good centre for a govern- ment which was ever on the march, and whose main quarrel lay far east and south ; and, moreover, Avith all his southern blood and Roman conceptions, the Emperor was of German speech and clothing, and Avas more at home upon those frontier toAvns of the empire Avhere the German tongue held its OAvn Avith the loAv Latin. And thus, though the great bulk of his court held to the civilized language and habits, Aix Avas his centre, and he was buried there. Paris, save perhaps for unheard levies of which history makes no mention, does not enter into his plans; a passage here or there in the capitularies relating to an abbey or to a local custom is all Ave can glean of his connection Avith the toAvn. The Thermes are no longer kingly, and only the local under-leader can hang his trophies on the Avails of the Palace Avhen he comes back from Lombardy or Saxony or Roncesvalles. Charlemagne's attempt Avas fore-doomed to failure; he Avas fighting against the force of things. He did indeed for his one long life maintain with desperate energy the order of the empire, but even as he 90 PARIS. marched across them the floors of society shook be- neath his feet. The great task was accomplished at the expense of ceaseless wars, a life spent in the saddle ; every man that was free to travel became familiar with continual combat, though unable to turn it to the Emperor's majestic ends. Let the head of such an experiment fail and chaos is certain. They say that as a very old man he saw from a southern seaport palace the distant sails of the pirates, and that he turned to his counts and told them what would follow his death. What follows it is " the darkness of the ninth cen- tury." It is probable that Charlemagne's rule had given Europe just the strength to resist the onslaught; at any rate, our civilization barely escaped destruc- tion. The Mussulman, the Hungarian and the Dane pour in like lava streams. Those invasions were ten times worse than the old attacks of the early barba- rians. Then there had come small Avar bands, intent only on being admitted to the pleasures of a higher society, and easily accepting its faith and habits; but now came whole nations, bitterly hating the wretched, disunited remnants of what had once been Rome, and especially its creed. They burnt and they looted ; they killed for the sake of killing, and they could see nothing worth adopting, in the base Europe of their time, but the silver and the gold of its churches or the rich clothes of the owners of its " villae." Almost in proportion as they are able to meet the PARIS IN THE DARK AGES. 91 storm, almost in that proportion do various centres of Europe prosper in tlie future. We all know how admirably Wessex weathered it under Alfred. Paris, also, just rides through it, and from the moment of accomplishing this feat she enters on the career which only ends when she has built up, with herself for a centre, the kingdom of France. In such a time, which seemed almost as though the end of the world had come, no common action of Christendom appeared ; it needed a Charlemagne to weld even the elements of his time into great armieo ; no one could hope to do it fifty or sixty years after his death. Every group, almost every town and village, fought out its own salvation or died in its own agony. In this chaos the last vestige of clear Roman distinction falls, and everywhere it is the good leader who de- fends the isolated community. True, it would be the owner of the " villa," the professional soldier or the rich man Avho tended to be such a leader; but it is accurate to say that the extraordinary hold of the " noble " upon the mind — and purse — of Europe came out of that time of despair. How many families can trace themselves to this mist and no further ! The Angevin, the " Aquitarian," the Tolosian houses arise from it 5 and so, also, with the house of Paris. The man to whom Lutetia is entrusted (or has fallen a prey) at this moment is the forefather of the stout young man who to-day 92 PARIS. aspires to the throne of France, but of the ancestry beyond him we know nothing. He chiims to be con- nected with Charlemagne, and that is alL The storm fell on Paris in the shape of the Norman siege, and the family that led the city out of this danger are destined to be kings. The chaos, in breaking up so much that was but a relic and a shadow, had left standing the ultimate political re- alities of Europe, as rocks remain when a flood destroys the buildings, and from all this turmoil Gaul re-emerges; the Latin people and the German cannot mix again, and Paris becomes the historic centre round which the former very gradually recognizes itself and grows. The name takes substance ; and from the moment that a Capet drives an Otto over the place where Valmy was to be fought, France has begun to exist. Oh ! if Rome could have formed in Italy a similar unit round which a Latin nation might through slow centuries have grown ! Such is the rough sketch of the line which her time and civilization followed before the city was shaken off, in the hurricane of the invasions, to form an iso- lated body round which the state could grow. Let us now turn, in more detail, to the story of the kings and monuments in the town itself. The Franks, already, by the end of the fifth cen- tury, in possession of the greater part of northern PARIS IN THE DARK AGES. 93 Gaul, had pushed their incursions even across the Seine, and probably, as we shall see, had built a block-house where the Louvre now stands. Then came the victory achieved by Clovis over the Roman forces under Syagrius, and it resulted in the sub- mission of all that district lying between the Somme and the Loire ; so, about the year 496, Paris came under the Frankish rule, and the sharp differentiation of the "langue d'oil" was begun. During the years that innnediately followed his conquest, Clovis, occu- pied in extending and strengthening his new empire, had no fixed place of residence; but it is certain that, at the time Avhen he determined upon the expulsion of the Visigoths from the southern provinces of Gaul, he had established himself at Paris. Clovis had married Clotilde, who was a niece of Gondeband, the King of Burgundy; this marriage did much to reconcile the native population to their new ruler, for Clotilde was a Catholic, while Gondeband and Alaric, King of the Visigoths, were both Arians, and thus at issue with the Catholic Bishops, who were the last relic of the official empire, and Avhose influence, there- fore, over the Gallo-Romans was very great. Every one knows the picturesque story of Clovis' vow to become a Christian if the battle turned in his favor. As a fact, all over Europe, Christianity, the official religion of civilization, easily absorbed the new tribes, Avho wished nothing more than to be what Rome had been. Clovis was baptized with great pomp by 94 PARIS. Saint Remi, Bishop of Rhcims, on Christmas day, 496. Gregory of Tours quotes what purports to be the phrase Avhich tlie Roman bishop used to the tribal chief; it has a fine refrain: "Bow the head down, Sicambrian." In truth, the spirit of the em- pire easily bowed down those barbarians' heads, who loved to submit to its idea and its superb traditions. Clovis' sister and a whole army of Franks were bap- tized at the same time. There is a letter often quoted as having been written by Pope Anastasius on this occasion, but it has been recently shown to be a forgery, probably of the eighteenth century; an authentic letter of con- gratulation, however, written by Saint Avitus, Arch- bishop of Vienne, and the most prominent ecclesiastic in Gaul at that day, shows the importance attached to the conversion of Clovis. After lengthy con- gratulations, the official assures the Barbarian that the Church watches his career, and that every battle waged by him now is a victory for her. Clovis began the erection of a church on the Mons Lucote- tius dedicated to Saints Peter and Paul, and called the Church of the Apostles. Saiute Genevieve was buried there, and, as Ave shall see later, it took her name. He lived in the Palais des Thermos, which he decorated with trophies of his numerous Avars, some of his successors foUoAving his example. Dying in 511, he was interred in the Church of the Apostles, Avhich, already far advanced, was completed by his AvidoAv. PARIS IN THE DARK AGES. 95 When the kingdom of Paris, in the division made of Clovis' possessions among his sons, fell to the share of Childebert, the long list of crimes and con- fused plots wliich is the Avhole story of the Merovin- gians, begins. Thus, this Childehert is the accomplice, if not the actual instigator, of the murder of two of his young nephews, heirs to the Kingdom of Orleans. The third, Clodoald, took refuge in a hermitage near Paris, and was canonized. St. Cloud is the spot named from him. The See of Paris being vacant, Childebert appointed Saint German to it, and, again an example of the official meeting the Barbarian, he ff\lls under the influence of that holy man, at whose instigation he built the Church of Ste. Croix and St. Vincent (the present Church of St. Germain des Pres) for the reception of the stole of Saint Vin- cent and a golden cross wdiich had been brought from Spain. We still have Saint Germain's signature affixed to the Acts of the Fourth Council of Paris, and it is w^orth quoting ; it is : " Germain, sinner, and — though all unworthy — Bishop of Paris, in the name of Jesus Christ." Dying in 558, Childebert was succeeded by his brother, Clotaire; and this, by the way, was the first recorded operation of the Salic law, his daughters being excluded from the throne. The regular Merovingian episode occurred. Violent discussions broke out among the four sons of Clotaire. Sigebert, to whose share had fallen the Kingdom of Metz, or Austrasia, — practically, the German-s])eak- 96 PAEIS. ing government, — overran the country surrounding Paris, and burned the -wooden parts of the capital. The brothers, recognizing the advantage which the possession of Paris would give to any one of them, had agreed, on their father's death, to enjoy equal rights in it. Chilperic, however, had broken this pact, and on various occasions had stayed in the capital and performed official acts there. A series of misfortunes then fell upon the city. First, there was an inundation, due to a rising of the Seine, in 583, — probably an example of how the old Roman work in the river was falling into decay. It did much damage, and in the midst of this misery the inhabitants suffered still more from the disorderly conduct of the troops brought hither by Chilperic; and when that prince added a new form of oppression to his other acts of tyranny, the public discontent almost reached the point of revolt. Rigon, the king's daughter, was married to a son of the king of the Visigoths, and her father forced a number of families to accompany her to Spain. Gregory of Tours gives a vivid description of the misery caused by this oppressive measure, as well as of the violent means adopted by Chilperic in order to enforce it. During these calamities the commercial prosperity, with every other sign of civilization, was rapidly declining. In the reign of Clovis we are told that there were merchants in Paris Avho travelled to Syria, where they purchased silks and ivory and costly PARIS I>^ THE DARK AGES. 97 materials ; a number of these men had accumulated large fortunes. In the time of Chilperic one of the squares of the city, called the " Merchants' Square," was surrounded by the houses of merchants and traders whose shops were filled with jewelry, silver- plate and all sorts of carved metal-work, and per- fumes, but the foreign merchandise was less no- ticeable. The Paris tradesmen had just at the close of the Roman dominion extended their business even into Egypt ; in a couple of hundred years Egypt was a name. Clotaire had a son and successor, Chilperic, of whose reign the principal matter of note for Paris is a fire in which nearly all the private buildings on the He de la Cite were destroyed. Dago- bert was the next king, and he has left a very pow- erful impression on the folk-lore of the country, — evidently a ruler under whom Paris enjoyed compara- tive prosperity, and occupied a position of political im- portance, the capital of a powerful northern kingdom the various provinces of which were now united under one crown. By the advice of Saint Eloi, who was Bishop of Noyon, and his constant counsellor, Dagobert built the church and abbey of St. Martial in the Cite. His successor is Clovis II., and with him begins that line of decadent sovereigns who fall more and more under the power of their ministers, the "mayors of the Palace." In this decline of the dynasty the royal authority was only nominally in 7 98 PAKIS. the hands of a succession of degenerate men who passed their time shut up in their great manors on the banks of the Oise, or seen now and then by the people wandering from place to place in ox-drawn carts. The whole story reads like a legend of primi- tive folk. We are very far indeed from the splendors of Rome. The rule of Charlemagne, of whose spirit we have given a very brief summary in the beginning of this chapter, passed without incident for the city of Paris. As we have said above, he was neither by training nor by the nature of his constant warfare fitted to settle down in the old Merovingian capital ; and if we wish to get an accurate picture of how Paris fared during the sixty years or so between his accession and the first of the Norman troubles, it may best be put as follows: After the gradual decay of society which had marked the Merovingian decline, the men of local eminence had, of course, assumed a preponderance far greater than the strong and united law of the Roman world would have allowed; added to this was the Teutonic sentiment of an exclusive and almost sacred aristocratic class — "The Sons of Odin." Those two forces between them tended to the estab- lishment of that personal local rule which we call feudalism, but the full system was not yet by any means affirmed. Charlemagne, with his vigorous Roman conceptions and imperial methods, rudely PARIS IN THE DARK AGES. 99 disturbs it; in many places (not in all, be it remem- bered) his "counts" are real "comites/' — personal followers that is, whom he appoints for life only, to local governorships. With his death, however, in the general dissolution, individual men found families which are the hered- itary leaders of particular districts and towns. One such family inherited or acquired Paris, and it is the story of their action during the barbarian siege which we are about to describe that explains hoAV they be- came later the kings of France. Although these Norman invasions began as early as the time of Charlemagne, Paris, owing to her pro- tected position, escaped for nearly fifty years. In 845, however, a fleet appeared at the mouth of the Seine, and, after pillaging Rouen, proceeded up as far as St. Cloud; after ravaging the city, they w'ere bought off, and returned, laden with booty and an enormous ransom, to encourage their countrymen to similar enterprises. Consequently, in 861, and again four or five years later, other fleets appeared before Paris. The second one met with less success, for Charles the Bald, stung to attempting some sort of resistance, managed to cut ofi" their retreat, and forced them to surrender, to give up their booty and leave the country. Some years later a detachment of only two hundred men left their companions at the mouth of the Seine and boldly advanced nearly as far as Paris for the purpose of demanding a supply 100 PARIS. of wine and provisions. The account goes on to say that they returned without any booty, but whether because they were repulsed or because there was none is not stated. An expedition in the spring of 867 came only as far as St. Denis, and confined itself to raiding the immediate neighborhood. It is supposed that they were afraid to attack Paris because of the Grand Pont, which, although unfinished, already acted as a considerable barrier. About this time the Parisians, seeing that they would have to adopt entirely new means of defence, built some sort of fortifications on the spots where the Grand and Petit Chatelet stood later, in addition to which Charles the Bald erected a strong fortress at Pistres, to protect the approach to Paris from down the stream. Robert the Strong, great-grandfather of Hugh Capet, was given the government of the Duchy of France — that is, the country lying between the Seine and the Loire. Under his vigorous and decided ride the Normans were driven back, and Paris having strengthened her defences, little or no apprehension was felt as far as the English channel was concei'ned. It was, however, from the barbarians of the East and North that she was to sustain the siege of 885, of which historians have given so many details. Abbo, a monk of St. Germain des Pres, a contemporary, wrote an epic of twelve hmidred verses on it. An act of treachery on the part of Charles le Gros PAKIS IN THE DAEK AGES. 101 was the immediate cause of this invasion of the North- men. Godfrey having been 1-ured to an island in the Rhine and there murdered, his kinsman, Sigfried, raised an army of forty thousand men and marched through Picardy, burning and ravaging as they went. At Pontoise, which they captured, they were rein- forced by a fleet of seven hundred ships. Sigfried's demand to be allowed to pass Paris having been re- fused by Gozlin, preparations for the siege were at once begun, while Paris, on the other hand, put her- self in a state of defense. The forerunner of the Grand Chatelet was finished and a garrison placed there, as well as in the tower that guarded the ap- proach to the small wooden bridge on the south. Odo, Robert the Strong's son, and King of France later, was then Count of Paris. He gathered about him his brother Robert, grandfather of Hugh Capet ; Count Ragenaire, who had just carried on a long struggle with the Normans at Pontoise; Hascheim, brother of the Count of Meaux ; the Abbot Hugh, the Marquis of Anjou, and a host of warlike lords of the Duchy of France and Neustria. The siege was, therefore, conducted almost entirely by Latin-speaking lords ; it was, moreover, Paris defending itself against a foreign enemy ; the king — utterly ineffectual — did not enter into the question. On the 25th of November, 885, Sigfried and RoUo — he who was Duke of Normandy later on — appeared before Paris with a large force. By the following 102 PAEIS. day they had set up niaiigonelles for hiirHng javelins or combustible material into the city; had erected covered ways of approach to protect the besiegers and allow them to approach close to the walls, and towers to which they proposed setting fire. Fire- ships Avere floated on the Seine, against the bridges and the houses along its banks, closely followed by boats loaded with men armed with slings, bows and javelins, who kept the towns-people from flying to the defence of the threatened buildings. The first and most violent of the assaults was car- ried on in regular medieval fashion. Unlike former barbarian invasions, it had all the apparatus of a mediaeval siege — ^its towers, catapults, etc. It reads like any of the assaults of the next four hundred years — the siege of Jerusalem itself. The first attack repulsed, the besiegers next tried to starve out the town. Count Eudes took advan- tage of this respite to establish such order and dis- cipline in the city as would serve to protect it better than any ramparts. The Bishop — Gozlin — not con- tent with merely exhorting the people, appeared be- fore them casque on head, and, armed with a bow and an axe, planted a cross on the outer defences, while his nephew, Ebles, a man of enormous physical strength, fought beside him, exciting the enemy to attack him and pursuing them to their trenches. The Scandinavian cavalry having returned, and there being danger that reinforcements for the be- PARIS IN THE DARK AGES. 103 sieged might arrive at any moment, the Norman leader determined upon a general assault. This at- tempt was even more unsuccessful than the preced- ing ones. Feigned attacks were made at various places, but the real point of attack was the Great Tower. Count Eudes divided his men into three parts. Two were given the defence of the bridges, and the third, which he commanded himself, was shut up in the Great Tower. The siege dragged slowly on. Skirmishes and single combats were of daily occurrence. In these the defenders yielded nothing in courage or vigor to their adversaries. The latter being, however, more dextrous in handling their arms, the advantage usu- ally remained with them. At last an event occurred that threw the city into consternation. In February heavy rains swelled the Seine and caused an overflow. The Parisians hailed this with delight, as it promised to give them an advantage and to shelter them from the enemy. But the Nor- mans in attempting to fill in the small branch of the river south of the city had choked it with fagots and earth, with the bodies of horses, oxen, and it was even said soldiers who had been slain, and of pris- oners. The water, thus impeded in its course, swept violently against the piles of the small wooden bridge leading to the left bank ; these ])rescntly gave way, leaving the tower of the fortress called hiter the Petit- Chatelet cut off from the city, and hemmed in on 104 PAEIS. one side by the river and on the other by the detach- ment of the enemy stationed at the foot of Mont Ste. Genevieve. At the sight of this disaster a cry of dismay went up from Paris, so loud as fairly to drown the joyous shouts of the Normans. The defenders of the tower were summoned to surrender, but this they proudly refused to do, although numbering but a dozen, and a mere handful of men, they held out until they were overpowered by the enemy. Eleven were killed, but Herve, whom the chroniclers describe as being of great beauty, tall, well-made, and richly dressed, was taken prisoner, the Normans supposing him to be a great noble and hoping for a large ransom ; but they were disappointed, for lie got loose from his captors, and seizing a sword, sold his life dearly. The tower was razed to the ground, but its destruction hardly compensated for the heavy losses of the Normans on that day. Historians state that the besieged expected from day to day to see the imperial army niarching to their relief. " It becomes known," says one of them, " that Count Eudes has left for Metz secretly ; the bourgeois believe they have been deserted ; the only gate of Paris is guarded by the Normans, so that no one can get in, and Eudes will be stopped if he at- tempts to return to the city." Just as they began to fear that they would have to treat with the enemy the Count of Paris reap- PAEIS IN THE DAKK AGES. 105 peared, with the news that he had wrung from the Emperor promise of a speedy relief, mider the com- mand of Henry of Bavaria. Taking advantage, one day, of a part of the besieg- ing force having gone off to plunder in the neighbor- ing districts, a sortie Avas attempted, under cover of which some reinforcements and provisions were intro- duced into the city. The Parisians began to take courage ; six months had elapsed and the Normans were no nearer their end than on the first day. Sig- fried became discouraged and asked to treat. An interview was arranged between him and Eudes, but the latter suspected treason. It had been agreed that each was to go entirely alone to a spot equally distant from the outposts of both armies ; but while the negotiations Avere in progress Eudes either saw, or thought he saw, some of the enemy's soldiers creeping forward under cover of the trenches and inequalities of the ground, and, fearing that he would be surrounded, he broke off the con- ference. It was with the Abbot of St. Germain des Pres that a treaty was concluded ; Sigfried offered to retire on receipt of a heavy ransom. To refuse would have meant the pillage and ruin of this abbey, as it was poorly garrisoned and its situation outside of the citv put it at the mercy of the invaders. Henry of Bavaria was kUled in bringing the rein- forcements, and Charles le Gros thereupon deter- 106 PARIS. mined himself to go to the relief of Paris at the head of quite a large army. This prince, who owed his croAvn wholly to the blind partiality and trust with which the French people regarded this degenerate inheritor of the name of Charlemagne, appeared upon the heights of Mont- martre. Pitching his camp in this advantageous position, he might well have afforded to await a favorable moment to annihilate the besieging army. But he had probably counted upon his mere appear- ance in the neighborhood to drive them off, for when he found that they showed no signs of retreating the cowardly prince opened negotiations, preferring that means of getting rid of them to a pitched battle. The residt was a shameful treaty by which the Nor- mans were not only to receive a large sum of money, but to be allowed to occupy Burgundy and Cham- pagne until the entire amount of this species of tribute had been paid. The Parisians meanwhile, left to themselves, kept their gates shut, refused to agree to the terms of the treaty, and harassed the retreating forces of the enemy, obliging them to drag their boats overland as far as the Marne in order to reach Champagne. In the following year Count Eudes marched against the Normans and drove them out of that province ; he came upon them between Verdun, Stenay and Mont- medy, and forced them to retreat into the forest of Montfaucon. Eudes was nearly killed in the on- PARIS IN THE DARK AGES. 107 slaught, but the rout of the Normans was so com- ]>lete that only a verj small remnant of their army, by taking refuge in the forest of Ardennes, was ena- bled to regain northern Germany. Thus the Carlovingian dynasty had proved hope- lessly incapable not a century after the death of its founder. One of the most important towns of the Empire had been left practically to defend itself, and the local lord who had done it, and his house, are marked for the local kingship on the break-up of the Empire. When Charles le Gros was deposed after the siege of 885, the family of Eudes, Count of Paris, became the practical rulers of the duchy of France. Count Robert fought with and defeated the forces of Charles the Simple, and was succeeded by his son and grandson. In 978 the Emperor Otto, who was at war with the Carlovingian Lothaire, appeared on the heights of Montmartre with an army of 60,000 men. Here, with a mystical spirit thoroughly German, they in- toned the Te Deum on the summit of the hill and retreated, either afraid to undertake a siege or driven off by Hugh Capet, Count of Paris. Nine years later Hugh was declared King of France and the Car- lovingian dynasty closed. In the first generation in the succeeding century, that is till about 1030, the history of Paris contains nothing of moment. We will make this point the end of our sketch of the 108 PAETS. Dark Ages and turn to the changes which Paris has seen in its buildings during these 500 years. We have seen that under the Romans Lutetia be- came a municipahty with a prefect, who later on took the title of count. This prefect, who represented the central power, lived without doubt on the island, whose name, la Cite, is proof of the municipal gov- ernment of Gallo-Roman Paris ; and the present Palais de Justice stands on the spot once occupied by this first municipal building, at once palace and prefecture, remains of which have been found in the course of various excavations. Some authorities think the Emperor Julian lived here, and not in the Palais des Thermes. M. Four- nier argues that the allusions to the Seine in the Mlsopogon could not have been made had he been writing in the Thermes ; he speaks of seeing pieces of ice floating down the stream ; says that Lutetia is supplied with water by the Seine, and that the cold in his rooms was intense, the only means of heating them being the stoves, the coals of which nearly asphyxiated him ; none of wliich remarks apply to the Palais des Thermes, situated some distance from the river, and supplied Avith complete heating appa- ratus and plenty of pure water. The first revolution that took place in Paris broke out in the square in front of the Palais de I'Isle, when the legions whom Constantius had ordered to the east revolted and proclaimed Julian Caesar Augustus. PARIS IN THE DARK AGES. 109 " To find the next instance," says Chateaubriand, " of an Emperor being proclaimed in Paris we must pass from JuHan to Napoleon." When this palace Avas enlarged, a small chapel, dedicated to Saint Michel, Avas built into it, and thus preserved until the present day, having only been pulled down in 1847 in order to carry on the fagade begun under Louis XVI. Dagobert lived in the Palais de la Cite, following the example of most of the Prankish kings Avho had preceded him. They thought that it helped to estab- lish their right to the throne to live in the palace of the Roman Csesars. We ha\'e no certain proof that CloA'is lived there, but his sons Clotaire and Childebert did, and it is supposed that the murder of their tAvo young nephcAvs took place there. Although Childe- bert is said to have had a horror of the place after this, and to have gone elscAvhere to live, the Palais de la Cite continued after his day to be the residence of the kings of France. When Count Eudes strength- ened and fortified Paris the Palais Avas almost rebuilt, losing the look of a royal residence, — a basilica A\'hich it had worn under the Romans and Merovingians, and taking on the form of a square fortification, something like the first Louvre, Avith the additional advantage of the tower at the extremity of the island to act as an outer defence. The Counts of Paris continued to make the "New Palace," as it Avas called, the royal residence, and it Avas only finally abandoned for the Louvre. 110 PARIS. AA'as tlie building of the municipality, Avherc the affairs of the government were conducted by a chosen body, also on the island ? It seems most probable, but at the other end, close to where the Corporation of the Nautse had erected their altar in the reign of Tiberius. That altar was demolished when Christianity Avas established in Paris, and the huge stones of which it was built buried, in order to erect a Christian church in its place ; they have been found beneath the choir of Notre Dame, and it is likely that the principal establishment of this powerful association, the real centre of the municipality, Avas not far distant. These river tradesmen would naturally have placed their " College " on the water, and on that side where the stream is widest and most navigable ; and, as a matter of fact, in the seventeenth century, the spot pointed out as having been occupied by the first Hotel de Yille of Paris, Avhich means the same thing as the " College " of the Nautse, was that on which the great Hotel des ITrsins stood later, in the line of the present Rues Basse and Milieu des Ursins. This tradition is supported by a passage in Greg- ory of TourSj where he speaks of a sort of perma- nent fair which had been held in front of the prin- cipal church from the time of Chilperic, as it is quite certain that the " bureau " of the Nautse would not have been far from this fair, and would also have stood somewhere between the bridge and their land- ing-place, that is right on this spot; for the first bridge PAEIS IN THE DARK AGES. Ill of Lutetia Avas not the Pont an Change, but the bridge of Notre Dame, much nearer the centre of the island. Finally, the remains of a large Roman building have been found there in the present century. Just opposite was the Place de Greve, about which, during the middle ages, there is practically nothing to be said : it probably continued to be a landing- place. Of its enormous importance during the Revo- lution this book wiU treat later. The sole port of Gallo-Roman Paris, the port of St. Landry, was on the north-east side of the Island of the City, where it is nearest to the island of St. Louis ; it was gradually encroached upon more and more by the neighboring buildings until it was finally swallowed up in the Quai Napoleon. A square tower built into the walls of a house in the Rue Chanoin- esse,* which goes by the name of King Dagobert's Tower, though it probably only dates from the fif- teenth century, marks the site of the ancient port. At the time of the Norman invasion the Nautse moved their " College " across the island, near the Petit-Pont, on the smaller arm of the Seine, that being a more protected spot and less open to attack from the barbarians who came up the river. Just here the fortress called the Petit Chatelet stood later. The course of the terrible fire of 1718 was blocked by a huge mass of masonry on the bank between the * No. 18, belonging to M. Aley. 112 PARIS. Marche Neuf and the Petit-Pont, -which went by the local name of " I'Ancien Hotel de Ville/' or, more common still, " I'Hotel de Ville du roi Pepin." We have spoken of the Petit Chatelet; was the Grand Chatelet in existence imder Charles le Chauve? In Abbo's poem on the siege of 885, mention is made of a tower or fortress Avhich guarded either the Grand-Pont, called later tlie Pont Notre-Dame, or another further down the stream, built, according to some, entirely of wood, while others say the lower part was of stone ; all of this is very vague, and it is not until 1149 that we have any definite mention of the Chatelet, though it certainly was then a cen- tury and a half old. A Latin document of Louis le Jeune's time speaks of it and of the shambles lying either to the north or the south — " Inter domum Carnifiimi et regis Castclluciumy The term ^^ regis Castellncium " suggests to Dulaure the idea that this building of wood or stone was put up by the king who preceded Louis le Grqs, and that under his son, Louis VII., it was already occupied by the Grand- Prevot. Before leaving the right bank of the river let us see what stamp this age set upon a district lying a little below the island. Nowhere do we find so many names of Teutonic origin as in this corner of the suburbs of Paris. AVe have, for instance, two villages whose names are entirely German, Stein or Stain, and two called Francon ville, " Francorum Villa," as it is writ- PARIS IN THE DARK AGES. 113 ten in the old charts ; near the one above Argenteuil there stood until the last century " the Castle of Mail," or of MdhJ, a word which, in the language of the Franks, meant a meeting-place. Ermonvillej "Ermenoldi Villa," says Abbe Le Beuf, "bears a Teutonic or Frankish name." It is the same with Coye, derived from the Saxon " Cote," meaning cot- tage, and with the village of Piscot, above Montmor- ency, which the will of Saint Remy shows to have been a name of Frankish origin. The etymology of the name of the village of Vemars, which Abbe Le Beuf made such eiforts to trace without success, is still more significant. Except for the speUing it is the very same as that of a certain town in Saxony. It was, in fact, on the right bank, and just below the Island of la Cite, that the Saxon and Frankish tribes had their camp before they got pos- session of Paris, and it was here that they built their block-house, calling it leovar, lovar, lover, or lower, meaning a castle or fortified place ; thus the district and the fortress-palace built on the site of the block- house got the name of Louvre. If we turn back now and cross the bridge Notre Dame we shall find ourselves in the central part of la Cite. Off to the right stood the Palais already noticed, and immediately on our left the small oratory of Saint Denis, who was imprisoned there ; opposite it was a church and convent, built in 1015, and called by the same name. On the other side of the island, 8 114 PAEIS. and a little to the west, was the Church of St. Gcr- main-le-Vieux, founded by Chilperic with the idea of transferring the body of Saint Germain there from an oratory close to the Abbey of St. Vincent, though this was never done. The church was consecrated under his name long before the abbey ceased to be called St. Vincent, and during the Xorman siege the monks brought the Saint's body there for safe-keeping. It is very possible that St. Gerraain-le-Vieux may originally have been the baptistery of the Cathedral Church St. Etienne — built on the river-bank because of the custom of baptism by immersion that prevailed in the early church. St. Etienne was the first Chris- tian church erected on the Island of la Cite ; after Julian's death it replaced a temple to Jupiter on a spot partly covered by the present sacristy of Notre Dame, and for nearly three hundred years was the Cathedral of Paris. When Saint Germain cured Childebort of a serious illness the King, to show his gratitude, built a fine new church at the eastern end of the island, and on the site of the altar raised by the Nautse to Jupiter. From that time — the early part of the sixth century — until now, Notre Dame has been the Cathedral Church of Paris. There are some colunnis of Childebert's church preserved in the Hotel Cluny. Although much injured by the Nor- man invasions, it stood until 11 Gl. Other Merovingian foundations in the city Avere first the Church of St. Bartholomew, near the Palais. PARIS IN THE DARK AGES. 115 Tradition says it was a heathen temple, where Saint Denis was preaching when he was seized and thrown into prison. Hugh Capet enlarged it and called it St. Bartholomew and St. JMagloire. Next St. Martial, already an ancient church when Saint Aure's body was brought there in the latter part of the seventh century. Saint Eloi had built it and the adjoining convent for nuns — so in the ninth century it took the name of St. Eloi and St. Aure. And, finally, the little chapel of St. Pierre des Arcis, standing between the two others. Let us now cross the Petit-Pont to the left bank and see what the origin Avas of St. Germain des Pres. It was not solely to please Saint Germain that Childebert built the Church of St. Vincent and Ste.- Croix. Gregory of Tours tells us that Avhen the king besieged Saragossa in 5-42 the inhabitants had re- coui'se to an odd means of defense; putting on hair- cloth, they marched around the town several times chanting psalms and bearing aloft the tunic of Saint Vincent. Childebert was so much astonished that he consented to withdraw his army if they would give him the relic, and on his return to Paris built a church to receive it, which he dedicated to St. Vincent, adding the name of Ste. -Croix because of a gold cross, supposed to have belonged to Solomon, which he had also ])rought with him from Spain. (Jisleinar, an eleventh century clironiclcr, gives a glowing description of the original basilica, which 116 PARIS. was dedicated in 558, and a religious order estab- lished in the abbey attached to it. Saint Germain was buried in an oratory close by, but in the middle of the eighth century his body was transferred to the basilica, which henceforth went by his name, and placed behind the altar of Ste. -Croix. Childebert and his wife had already been laid there, as were their successors of the Merovingian line until Dagobert founded St. Denis in the seventh century. The church and abbey of St. Vincent were richly endowed by their founder. In addition to the enor- mous fief of Isciac or Issy, which stretched away to the west as far as across the Meudon, it owned the exclusive right to fish in the Seine, a roadway eigh- teen feet wide on both banks, from the Petit-Pont to Sevres, gardens, vineyards, the Church of St. Andre des Arts, which had replaced the oratory of St. An- deol, and much other property, so that by the be- ginning of the ninth century St. -Germain des Pres owned land inhabited by more than ten thousand souls, yielding an enormous income. In the Norman inva- sions the abbey was particularly unfortunate ; repeat- edly pillaged and nearly destroyed three times, it had to be rebuilt in the beginning of the eleventh cen- tury. The large square tower of the present facade is thought to be a part of the Merovingian Church. It only now remains for us to speak of the Church of St. Peter and St. Paul, built by Clovis on Mons Lucotetius J he was buried there, and after him Clo- PAKIS IN THE DARK AGES. 117 tilde and Sainte-Genevieve. It was plundered and burned by the Normans, but rebuilt, and from its association with the patroness of Paris, came to be called by her name. This ends the list of buildings belonging to this period ; most of them, as will be noticed, Merovingian in their origin, the Carlovingian kings having hardly even preserved what their predecessors left them. In closing this chapter it will be well to take a rapid survey of the town, just as the pivot-point is reached, after which the ascent of Europe is so marked and so continuous. Let us imagine a distant traveller from Toulouse or from Provence arriving by the great southern road at the period where this division closes — I mean toward the end of the first third of the eleventh century. In the first place, he is approaching a foreign town. For hundreds of miles already the language has been all but unintelligible to him, save where he could talk low-Latin with some priest or bailiff — and even then the southern accent would make it difficult to follow. The Paris which is before him is, to him, a great town of the north, the centre of a country of which he has often heard, the " Duchy of France." He knows, however, that quite lately, in his own lifetime, perhaps, the title of " King " has been given to its particular lord. This title gives him a vague — a very vague — feeling of the old unity of Gaul ; but certainly in his mind the conception of sovereignty is attached 118 PAETS. to the lord of his own country, as, for instance, the Count of Toulouse, or even (if he be a countryman) to the little local lord of the manor from which he comes. That vague feeling, however, will be the more enduring, and on it the strong edifice of Fr6nch patriotism is soon to be founded. He comes over the brow of a hill which has lost its old name of '^Lucotetius," and which he hears the peas- ants call ''Mont de Ste. Genevieve," and as he crosses the summit, the squat Romanesque church where she is buried, which had been in view for miles, lies close to him on his right. Its architecture is that part of the northern country which most reminds him of home. Indeed, all the western world was building in the same way ; copying, that is, the later Roman work. Thick pillars cro^^^led with rude capitals, these carved now and then with rough foliage, or attempts to represent animals and men ; a flat or wide-angled roof; sometimes a massive square tower, and everywhere in window and door the plain round arch, three great specimens of which would form the main entrance on the west front — such Avere the feat- ures of this and of a hundred other buildings with Avhich he was already familiar. But he would cer- tainly notice how much ruder was this than the south- ern work, and especially how terribly fallen from the relics of the fourth and fifth centuries, in Avhich his native province abounded. Strength obtained only by thickness, irregularity PAEIS IN THE DARK AGES. 119 of outline, lack of finish in the surface of the stone, — all this Avould contrast unpleasantly, in his eyes, Avith the memories of his own towns. The church would have about it much scafFoldinsr. It was indeed a feature of every town for generations to come ; for the buildings undertaken were great and the progress made was extremely slow. About the church a great burial-place still stood, but already numerous houses, a kind of little village, had grown up. Square, with low doorways and few windows, they formed the Avorst dwellings that the place had knoA\ai since the Gaulish huts gave place to the dwellings of the Romans. Beneath him as he passed this suburb the town of Paris would be spread out. First he would notice to his left, and close to him, — less, indeed, than a mile away,— a large monastery and church, the latter mcomplete, covered with a tem- porary Avooden roof, Avliile the Avorkmen Avere still laboring at its Avails. In some places these Avails Avould be evidently far older than in others, and such spots Avould haA^e often a charred and dark surface. All round the monastery and church a great Avail would be seen, enclosing many acres of ground. These Avere the house and garden of the ncAv St. Germain des Pres — the great shrine which had been l)urnt more than a century ago by the Normans, and which the last two generations had been rebuilding. About this church was a little village, like that uoiw 120 PARIS. which he stood. Following the view to the right, and along the river, he would come to a great square enclosure, round which ran a wall still Roman in its brick-work, but buttressed here and there by the rude masonry of liis own time. This garden, he M^oidd be told, was the " Clos deLaas," and he would see it stretching right up to the river in a northerly direction, while easterly it ran three-quarters of a mile, all the way from the abbey of St. Germain to the great ruin at his feet. This great ruin, a con- fused mass of burnt and charred stone, built up here and there into temporary dwelling-places, and in other places again quarried of its old stones for the purposes of the later buildings, was, of course, the palace of the Thermes — the road ran right past it, through the wall of the " Clos deLaas," and reached a little Avooden bridge going over to the island. Round the island itself was a great and thick wall, while on the main-land end of the little bridge a has- tion, as it were, called the " Petit Chatelet," defended its approach. The walls, both of the Petit Chatelet and of the island were of that large, coarse work which distinguishes all the works of defense up to the Cru- sades. The best idea of this kind of building may be found by looking at one of those great " keeps " which yet remain in some of those castles of England that date from the eleventh century. Probably these walls of the Cite were not thirty feet high, but immensely thick — fifteen feet, let us PAEIS IN THE DARK AGES. 121 say — built of two outer cases of masonry and tilled in between with clay and large stones. This wall would have neither battlement nor projection of any kind. Here and there a window in places where a house stood against the inside of it ; at long inter- vals a slightly projecting square tower, a little higher than the rest of the structure, would defend it by flanking its assailants. Finally, around it all Avas a continuous and broad walk, on which, as he ap- proached the city, our traveller would probably have seen a watch stationed. On the island itself wvas a dense mass of private build- ings, hemming in the public monuments on all sides. Indeed, the traveller would see little more than the roofs of the churches and the upper story of the palace. Still, by what could be seen, he would have made out on the extreme left of the island the old Roman palace, little changed, and having a garden between it and the western point of the island. Outside the wall at this spot lay two small islands, which were, and remained for many centuries, uninhabited and unused. Beside the palace, and to the right of it, that isj towards the eastern end of the island, he would have seen the Church of St. Stephen, close to the river bank and just to the right of the bridge. The walls would appear to him partly old and partly repaired, for the edifice had suffered greatly in the Norman siege of more than a century before. 122 PAKIS. Behind this cliurch (which was of the Basiliean type), overlapping it as it were, and partly appear- ing to the left of it, stood the Romanesque Church of Notre Dame ; low, flat-roofed, Avith small, round windows on the south side, which Avas turned to the spectator. The Church of St. Martial, and probably a great square prison tower on the northern bank of the island, standing above the churches and towers, would be all he would see of the town. Beyond it, however, a northern wooden bridge, in a line wdth the southern one, connected the island with the further bank, and, where the bridge reached the shore,* a very strong building, corresponding to the smaller one on his side of the river, would arrest the traveller's attention. It was called " Le Grand Chatelet," and was indeed the principal defense of the city. Massive, perfectly plain, and probably higher than any part of the island, it must have formed the principal object in his view. To the left of this a small and unimportant block- house marks the site of the future Louvre, while on the right a dense but small undefended suburb sur- rounded the Place de Greve ; while further yet to the right the two large islands spoken of in the last chap- ter still lay, unbuilt upon and unbridged, close against the northern shore. * There is some ambiguity on this point. The Chatelet may have been to the rir/ht of the bridge if, as we suppose, from M. Jules Cousin's hypothesis, it (the Grand Pont) was identical with the Pont Notre Dame. PARIS IN THE DAEK AGES. 123 Such was the Paris of the early Capetians, upon which our traveller would gaze. On the road there might be passing him, going into the city, a group of villeins in rough tunics, entering it to sell their market-produce, or perhaps a group of nobles and fighting men, the former armed with a great sword, a long kite-shaped shield, a little conical cap of iron, and the body only covered Avith links of mail, Avhile the legs remained unarmed. They would be riding on great thick-set horses. These were by no means like our riding-horses (whose Arab blood was intro- duced through the Crusades), but rather like our cart-horses. By the side of these lords of manors, or independ- ent knights, went their footmen, who, for all their insignificance, were the bulk of fighting men even then. They were clothed in no mail, but only thick leather coats, armed with a dirk. Some had small bows and arrows, and some would be wearing little steel caps on their heads, as did their masters. Following one or other of these groups our travel- ler would })ass through the Petit Chatelet, cross the wooden bridge (exactly where the Petit-Pont now stands), and would enter the narroAv central street on which stood the market-place, already encroached upon by the private houses. Directing himself to some of the inns, the southerner would pass (prob- ably) through a low, round doorw.ay to find himself in a great common hall. And there, after eating, the 124 PARIS. long evening (for tlio principal meal came early in the day) Avould pass in songs. He might well hear from a travelling singer, of such as were beginning to awaken the north, a passage from one of the great war epics of the langue d'Oil, Roncesvalles, or Ogier, or the Kings of Lombardy. With such sights and soimds he would have seen and heard rude origins of a city and of a literature which were to mould the character of the west. PAEIS OF THE EARLY MIDDLE AGES. 125 CHAPTER IV. PARIS OF THE EARLY MIDDLE AGES. It is necessary to deal in this one short chapter with the story of the city during a period as marvel- lous and as fruitfid as has ever changed the civiliza- tion of the Avest. It would be possible — we had almost said it woidd be necessary — to write a volume on the three hundred years which Ave must compress into the space of a fcAv pages. It may be remembered that at the beginning of the last chapter Ave spoke of the great " A^alley " that characterized the history of Europe betAveen the days of the Roman Empire and our OAvn. It Avas remarked that in the declining road on the far side of that de- pression the civilization of the Empire had fallen and decayed upon every side, and Ave noted a certain turn- ing-point at or about the first generation of the eleventh century, after Avhich the Avhole of society leads up- Avard again towards a kind of perfection. To that first process, Avith Avhich we have just dealt in the preced- ing chapter, the name " dark ages " is very properly given ; to the second, upon which Ave are now enter- ing, the name " middle ages" (though it is a term of the vaguest significance, and calls up no particular 126 PAEIS. picture in the mind) must be applied, simply because it is that to which the historical reader is most accus- tomed. But the term " early middle ages " seems to con- note a set of ideas from Avhich ^ve are very far in- deed in the description which we desire to give. To regard that long period from the awakening of Europe down to the Reformation as a kind of inclined plane, up which society marches with contented and ever-ris- ing feet, would be the grossest of errors. The period of which we are to deal was a period unique in the history of the world and of the city. Its central monument was the thirteenth century, " the flower of the middle ages," an epoch beside whose sim- plicity the fourteenth century is theatrical and the fifteenth simply vicious. It produced characters not only of such an altitude, but of such a quality, and those secure in such conspicuous and eminent places; it allowed the true leader his place so readily, and even Avitli such insistence, that it is no wonder if many men, hoping everything of Europe's ideals and fully trusting in her future, should look back regretfully to this time. It had not conquered brutality nor given good laws the machinery of good communications and of a good police, but its ideals were of the noblest, and, what is more, they were sincerely held. Of all the phases through which our race has passed this was surely the one least tainted with hypocrisy, and per- haps it was the one in which the more oppressed PAEIS OF THE EAKLY MIDDLE AGES. 127 classes of society were less hopelessly miserable than at any future time. As to Paris, the change passes over it as follows : We left it a small town, thick in walls and squat in architecture, squalid and rude, half-barbarous ; but there sat in its Palace of the city, under old, grey, round arches that were still Roman, or drinking at long tables in square, unvaulted halls, the beginners of the great dynasty of the Capetians. They were called Kings of France, and in that name and idea was the seed of a very vigorous plant, but as yet the seed remained unbroken. It was dead, in dead earth. At his crowning the lords of the great provinces came, as it were, to act as symbols ; in a vague theory he was superior to any in the space from the Saone Valley and the Rhone Valley to the Atlantic ; but in fact he Avas a crowned noble, given, by the symbolism and the Roman memories of his time, the attributes of central government, allowed to personify that dim, half-formed but gigantic idea of the nation ; there his poAver ended. It all lay in a phrase and a conception. But with the people over whom he was nominally set a phrase or an idea is destined to be of awful weight; and the force of things, the bHnd, almost unconscious powers of the national spirit, like some organic law, forces the Capetians on a certain path towards the inevitable Latin nationality. Already the epics were singing " Doulce France Tere Majeure," and Roland has 128 PARIS. been made a patriot saint, for all the -world like Hoclie or Marceau. The character of the Kings corresponded to this power, and no wonder, for it was a time all of soldiers, when a William of Falaise had only to call for vol- unteers on the Beach of the Caux Country and have men from Italy and from Spain coming at his heels. With fate offering such work, it is no wonder that one after the other, Avith very few exceptions, the early Kings are hard fighters •, but still, till the great change of the twelfth century, they are only the lords of a little territory which, with change of horses, you might cover in a day's hard riding ; here and there a royal town far off, and always the title of King. At their very gates the castles of their little under- lords defy them. Montlhery was all but independ- ent, Enghien was a tiny kingdom, and one tower of the one, the hill of the other, are visible from the Mont St. Genevieve to-day. As for their great vas- sals, the peers, the Dukes of Normandy and of Aquitaine, the Count of Champagne and the Lords of the Marches beyond the Loire, they are treaty-mak- ing sovereigns, that make war at their pleasure upon the King of France. William of Normandy, when he held England, or even before that, was a better man in the field. The Duke of Aquitaine let no writs run beyond his boundaries. The Lords of Toulouse would have had difficulty in telling you what their relation was to the distant successor of Charlemagne. PAKIS OF THE EAELY MIDDLE AGES. 129 So througli the eleventh centiuy the Kings of Paris drag on, always fighting, making little headway. The equals, and by times the inferiors of the provincial over-lords, you might have thought that these would end in the making of minor kingdoms, or even that the lords of separate manors might in time become the aristocracy of settled community ; but behind them all was the infinite aggregate of little permanent forces, the national traditions, the feeling of unity, the old Roman memory, and, though it was centuries before the provincial over-lord disappeared forever, and even centuries more before the lord of the vil- lage succumbed, still a future history was making very slowly all the while the central government and the King. It is with the close of the eleventh century that the flow of the tide begins. The great crusading march has shaken Europe out of its routine and tor- por. The " Dust of Villages," already someAvhat united by the Hildebrandine reform, is taught the folly of disintegration as each community watches strange men, with a hundred foreign dialects, and with the habits, the laws, the necessities of a hundred vary- ing places, all passing on with the common purpose of Christendom. Trade is opened between towns that had hardly known each other by name ; the Mediterranean begins to reassume its old place in the western civilization ; the necessity of interchange, both social and material, grows in the experiences of 9 130 PAKIS. tliat vast emigration ; and when, with the last years of the old century, the code of Roman law is redis- covered, Europe is ready for the changes which the pandects are to produce. This discovery must certainly be made the start- ing-point for observing the effects of the new devel- opment in European life. As Ave have said, all Europe was awake. The code alone would never have revolutionized society, but the Roman law fall- ing upon a society already alert, vigorous, attentive, and awaiting new things, had a most prodigious effect. It gave to what Avould have been in any case a period of great forces a particular direction to which we owe the character of all the succeeding centu- ries. At Paris the King of the eleventh century is a great noble ; he is conscious, vaguely, that he stands for government, bvit government is little more than an idea. What woidd France have been if the Capetians had not had to fight their Avay forward inch by inch till the destiny of national unity was ac- complished ? Certainly a very different thing from the highly centralized society that we know. As it was, the law which handed down to the mid- dle ages, across a gap of many centuries, the spirit of absolute and central authority came Avith an im- mense moral force to the help of governments, and therefore of civilization. It takes a centiiry to leaven the Avhole of society, but when this work is done it produces a very marvellous society, for the thirteenth PAKIS OF THE EARLY MIDDLE AGES. 131 century is a little gem in the story of mankind. It produced tins effect because its logic^ its sense of order, its basis of government, were combined Avith those elements of tribal loyalty and of individual ac- tion which had emerged in the decline of the Empire, and Avhose excess had caused many of the harsh and picturesque features of the dark ages. Later on the Roman law becomes all poAverful, and in its too great preponderance the localities and the individuals de- cay — till the crown is too heavy for the nation. While the first three Crusades are being fouglit Paris is growing in numbers as well as in light. The rough suburbs to the north and south of the island have become larger than the parent city. The one climbs up and covers the hill of Ste. G-enevieve ; the other, in a semicircle of nearly half a mile in depth, densely fills the surroundings of the Chatelet and the Place de Greve. Meanwhile, doubtless, as in other parts of France, the rude and debased architecture is struggling to an improvement. The spirit that made the Abbaye aux Dames in Caen must have been present in Paris ; but nothing remains of its work, for the Gothic came immediately and trans- formed the city. This great change (and the greatest change — to the eye — that ever passed over our European cities) marks the middle and end of the twelfth century, and there goes side by side with it a startling develop- ment of learning and of incpiiry. That central 132 PARIS. twflftli century, shaken and startled hy the march- ing of the second Crusade, is the lifetime of Abelard and of KSaint Bernard. Upon every side the liuman intellect, Avhich had, so to speak, lain fallow for these hundreds of years, arises and begins again the end- less task of questions in which it delights. Religion is illuminated with philosophy as the stained glass of a church, unperceivcd in darkness, may shine out when the sun rises. As though in sympathy with this movement and stirring of the mind, the houses and the churches change. The low, clear, routine method of the Romanesque, that round arch and wide, the flat roof, the square tower and low walls which had corresponded with an unquestioning period, suddenly take on the anxiety and the mystery of the new time. Contact Avith the east has done this. The pointed arches, the long line pillars, the high pitched gable roofs, and at last the spires — all that we call " the Gothic,'' — a})pears, and is the mark of the great epoch upon which Ave are entering. Already the first stones of Notre Dame are laid, and already its sister thing, the University of Paris, is chartered, and the build- ings rise Avith the first years of the thirteenth century, standing in numerous colleges on the hill of Ste. Genevieve. When the full tide of this movement Avas being felt there arose, to the singular good fortune of the French people, the personality of Philip the Cou' queror. PARIS OF THE EARLY MIDDLE AGES. 133 It was he avIio turned the King of Paris truly into the King of France. Not Montlhery nor Enghien were the prizes of his adventures, but Normandy, Poitou, Aquitaine. The centre of what is now a kingdom, the town of Paris, became with the close of his reign in the early thirteenth century a changed town. He has paved its streets, surrounded it with a great wall and many towers ; outside this wall to the west, his own stronghold of the Louvre, a square tower of stone, is standing, and Saint Louis inherits a capital worthy of the perfect chapel which he will build at its centre, and almost worthy of his own ad- mirable spirit. He and the century which he fills are the crown and perfection, and also the close of this great epoch in the history of the town. With Saint Louis' reign practically closes the bril- liant thirteenth century of Paris. There are, it is true, sixty years more before the outbreak of the English wars, but they are sixty years in which the w^ork is being consolidated rather than increased. The Paris we shall leave at the end of this chapter is the Paris of Saint Louis. As to the government, its final changes followed the social movement of the time. France just before the English wars was a centralized monarchy; already the knell of feudalism is rung, already the King's jurisdiction is paramount throughout the territory. It will pass through many vicissitudes, the English wars will all but destroy it ; the close of the fifteenth / 134 PARIS. century will resuscitate it under Louis XI., and keep it strong for a hundred years^ only to be jeopardized again and almost ended in the century of the re- ligious wars and of the " Fronde." It will reappear with Louis XIY., and be imperilled yet again by the Girondin movement of the Revolution ; but our own century will once more reassert those primary facts — the unity and centralization of France under Paris. It is, as we have said, with Saint Louis that this great achievement is first clearly recognized. Long the dream of all the common people, heard in their popular songs and reflected in their ecclesiastical at- titude, it is made a real thing by the hard blows of Philip the Conqueror, it is administered in peace and order by Louis the Saint. France henceforward is a one particular thing : with a voice, her vernacular literature ; with a soul, the national character ; to which, in its highest plane. Saint Louis himself so admirably conforms ; and Paris is the brain. But the decay which was to put her vitality to so terrible a test in the century of the wars, that dis- ease had already touched the city and the nation after the death of the Saint. The last thirty years of the thirteenth century disclose it, the beginning of the fourteenth century makes it terribly plain. It is clearest in the character of Philippe le Bel. Saint Louis' time of greatness and of power had been all simplicity and conviction. You see in Join- ville (which is, as it were, a little window opening PAEIS OF THE EAELY MIDDLE AGES. 135 into the past) wonderful descriptions of how the vari- ous classes of society mingled in amity, of the villein and the noble talking together as they follow the King from Mass, of the personal justice which the King gives, so often with smiles, in the garden of the Palace. It was an age which was simple because of its intense convictions. There succeeds a period in which those convictions are lost, and in which the whole of society rings false. Philippe le Bel rules from a strong centre, but as a tyrant ; the Church and the Papacy are using the old terms, but the Pope is at Avignon, and Boniface has been condemned. The Templars are a large secret society, whose riches are a menace to Europe. Their savage extermina- tion shows as an evil even worse than their existence. The stidtification of society, class aloof from class, runs apace, and the hierarchy begin that fatal alli- ance with the rich that has been the greatest peril of Christianity in Europe. And we catch in Joinville's old age a kind of unrest, as though the simple atti- tude of his mind, full of the memories of Saint Louis, were disturbed and made uncertain by the new society which he saw growing up around him. To suit and symbolize the period the palaces grow larger, the streets more narrow, the people poorer, and our next chapter will trace the story of the city during the worst hundred years of its existence. Such is a rough sketch of the development of the 136 PAEIS. spirit of the place during the growth with which Ave are about to cleaL Let iis turn to consider in detail the varying aspect of the city during these twelfth, thirteenth and early fourteenth centuries. Our point of departure is not material, but per- haps it is best to consider iirst the meagre details that have come down to us of the origin of the Hotel de Ville. So, to proceed westward to the Louvre, to consider then the Island, the Hill of Ste. Genevieve, and, finally, the outskirts of the northern and eastern suburbs. While it has been often conjectured that the guild, who certainly used the shelving shore of the Greve as a port, had some common-room there, its earHest association with the Hotel de Yille is in 1141, when the bourgeois de la marcliandise, whose trade had out- grown the small port of St. Landry, purchased part of the site from the King and established a new port there. As they were forbidden to build on the Place de la Greve itself, which remained a fief royal, they erected a house on some land belonging to the Bishop of Paris lying to the east. This house, known in the beginning of the next century as the " Maison aux Piliers," from the heavy columns that supported the second story, Avas bought by Philip Augustus in 1212. Why is not known, unless the King wished to check the further advance of the Templars, who threatened to swallow up everything in their vast estate in the Sainte-Catherine mai'shes. The next PARIS OF THE EARLY MIDDLE AGES. 137 allusion to tlie Place de la Greve is in 1310, when Philippe le Bel, exercising his right to act as judge on his own property, had a priest convicted of heresy, a woman who had circidated heretical writings, and a relapsed Jew, burned there on the feast of Pentecost. Here, too, were executed Gauthier and Philippe d'Aulnay, the lovers of the wives of Louis le Hutin and his brother Charles, who succeeded him. The open place where these and subsequent executions took place was near the water, close by a street Avhich bore the same name of Martroy (from Martreium, in allusion to the executions). It was long marked by a cross. For the benefit of the wretched population that dwelt in this quarter, a certain official of the royal household and his wife founded a home for poor widows, called, after them, the Hospice of the Ilau- driettes. The Martroy, which was like a continua- tion of the Place de la Greve, in the direction of St. Gervais, was gradually encroached upon by the neighboring buildings until it came to be merely a rather narrow street. The memory of a Church of St. Jean, formerly the baptistery of St. Gervais, was preserved when the Hotel de Ville absorbed it later, the " room of St. Jean " being built on its site. Up to the middle of the fourteenth century the Maison aux Piliers changed hands repeatedly. Bought by Philippe le Bel, as though he feared a 138 PAKIS. growing municipal power, resold, given to his brother, retaken by his successor, Philip V., and given by him to the Lord of Sully, the history of the House of Pillars up to the middle of the fourteenth century is one of continual transference ; but, as we shall see in the next chapter, it becomes, immediately after, the true centre of a vigorous municipal move- ment, and from that time onward is the focus of Paris. Making our way along Avhat have become, in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, with the great ex- tension of commerce, the crowded quays of Paris, going Avestward from the Place de la Greve, we pass close by the Grand Chatelet, standing at the north- ern end of the Pont au Change. Of its importance at this period there can be no doubt, both as a fortress and as the seat of one of the royal courts, presided over by the " Prevot de Paris." Here, we are told. Saint Louis used frequently to come, and, seated under a dais beside his provost, Etienne Boisleve (Boileau), listen to the pleadings.* In 1270, or according to other accounts about forty years later, the chapel and Society of Notaries was founded in the Chatelet " to the honor of God and of our Lady Saint Mary," from which time until the eighteenth century the Chatelet, although in the parish of St. Germain I'Auxerrois continues to have its own chapel. Of its appearance * This provost is described as living in the Chatelet, and even sleeping, all dressed, in the great hall, so as to be always in readi- ness to perform his judicial functions. PARIS OF THE EARLY MIDDLE AGES. 139 at this date, all that we can say positively is that the great tower Avith its crenelated parapet was standing, having been erected probably about the time of Louis le Gros. The Pont aux Meuniers, curious for its seven mills upon the bridge itself, was a little further down the stream. It was of wood, but an act of 1273 speaks of " the old stone bridge which used to be where the Pont des Monlins is now." Below this we find our- selves in the flourishing suburb which sprang up after the Norman invasions from the ruins of the old Frankish settlement. The spot Avhere Sainte Gene- vieve and Saint Germain met on the road leading from Lutetia to Nanterre had been commemorated by the building of St. Germain le Rond ; no doubt, from its shape, a baptistery. This building was used by the Normans as a sort of nucleus for the great fortress they constructed, on the very site of the Frankish camp, which, with its palisades, its stone ramparts and its deep trenches, is still brought to our memory in the name of the Rue des Fosses St. -Germain VAux- errois. When more peaceful times came for Paris, many people were attracted to the neighborhood by the special privileges attaching to Episcopal territory, all of this district having been given by Clovis to the Bishop of Paris. The suburb grew rapidly ; it had its market-place, called later Place de I'Ecole from the school attached to St. Germain I'Auxerrois, and, what was still more important, a number of public 140 PAEIS. ovens, where anyone could bake his own bread. The best known of these was near the place where Clovis had had his camp, and is called the ^^fiirnus de Lovres," in the Livre Noir, under date of 1203. The great street running parallel with the Seine, which was long the " Strand " of Paris, was, after 1204, called the Rue St.-Honore, from a religious house of that name. Then there was a collegiate church, dedicated to Saint Thomas of Canterbury ; soon after his murder and canonization, it became better known as St. -Thomas du Louvre, from the Palace close by. A little chapel that stood on the bank, sub- ject here to frequent inundations, was called from that circvunstance St. Nicholas, he being the patron of water and all inundated places. It was annexed to St. Thomas when the latter was built. But far more important than all these minor foun- dations clustering about it was the Church of St. Germain I'Auxerrois itself, reconstructed by King Robert in token of gratitude when the year 1000 had passed and the destruction of the Avorld been happily averted by the prayers of the Church. Of this build- ing, all that remains is the tower standing on the south side of the entrance to the choir, from whence the signal was given for the massacre of St. -Bar- tholomew. When Philip- Augustus determined to join the Cru- sade of 1190, in order to leave his capital in a better state of defense he began the great wall with which PARIS OF THE EARLY MIDDLE AGES. 141 he subsequently surrounded it ; it Avas twenty-one years in building, but after the first thirteen years the great bulk of it had been put up. It enclosed a space of almost exactly a square mile, but in shape, of course, a broad oval, and included Avithin its limits not only all the closely populated districts, but those suburbs Avhich had sprung up on both banks of the river, among them the settlement about St. Ger- main I'Auxerrois. Of the space it enclosed, by far the greater part Avas on the northern bank, for that is the side on AA'hich the development of Paris began. On the southern bank it is marked by the A\^ord "fosses," given to a Avhole line of streets in the Latin quarter. On the site of the old camp of the Franks, hoAA^- CA^er, it Avas evident that something more than a simple Avail Avith toAvers and trenches Avas needed. Experience had proved this to be the most vulner- able side of Paris, and consequently the one to be most strongly fortified. FolloAving the example of William the Conqueror, Avho had no sooner gotten possession of London than he erected a strong toAver of defense close to the Thames, Philip-Augustus built a massive toAA'er, directly on the river and but a fcAv feet from the Avail, Avhich soon took the name of the place Avhere it .stood. Thus the Louvre Avas to Paris for a long time just Avhat the ToAver Avas to London, a sort of dun- V geoii fortress. In form it Avas an elongated square, J 142 PAKIS. an enlarged and strengthened reproduction of the loiver of the Franks, but it would hardly have cov- ered more than a corner of the court of the present palace. The two longer sides faced, one towards the east, where it was divided from St. Germain I'Aux- errois by the city wall, and the other towards the Tuileries of to-day, on this side, which reached from the modern wing along the Seine to the great doorway of the Pavilion Sully — a part of the original build- ing is still standing ; it forms one of the walls of the Salle des Cariatides. The small stairway in the rear of the last embrasure, to the left of the window, and hidden by a door, dates from the same period, and probably belonged to the tower that stood at the angle of the southern and western fa9ades. On the north and east the enclosure was protected merely by a battlemented wall, having towers at the corners and in the middle. The two main entrances were on the south and east — great gateways flanked by massive towers and approached by drawbridges. The precise date at which Philip-Augustus began the Louvre is not known; it has been suggested though that, having taken advantage in 1191 of Richard Coeur-de-Lion being still in Palestine to seize a part of Normandy, he may have thought it more prudent to fortify the most exposed side of Paris in anticipation of an attack from his rival. The work must have been pushed rapidly on, for in 1202, as an account of that date proves, the fortress PARIS OF THE EARLY MIDDLE AGES. 143 was finished. (It had been built at the King's own / expense, while the great boundary wall was paid for by the city of Paris.) The account spoken of above reveals one point of especial interest. It mentions the sum, considerable for that day, paid for wine for the bourgeois em- ployed to guard the Louvre. This is another proof of the policy of Philip-Augustus, which was to strengthen the power of the bourgeois, and to look to them rather than to the nobles for his real support. In 1190, when leaving for the Crusade, he had con- fided the care of his treasure to six prominent bour- geois ; and now we find him in 1202, when the con- sequences of that excursion to Normandy might be looked for at any time, again giving proof of his re- liance upon the bourgeois by putting them to guard his great new tower and fortress, which he had made the key to Paris itself. And what service is required of the nobles at that time ? Nothing less than to pull their towers down or abandon them. Jean and Robert de Moret are forced to destroy their tower at Rade- pont. The Sire de Montferrand is allowed to pre- serve his on condition that it shall be garrisoned by the King ! And Matthew de ]\Iontmorency is forced to pledge himself to build nothing on the Seine on the Island of St. Denis ; should he break his word, the King claims the right to pull down what he puts up. Apparently from the moment that his own tower 144 PAEIS. was completed, Philip determined that not another one was to be built, so far as his power extended. [ It was at the Louvre that the vassals of the crown took the oath of allegiance, the King counting, no doubt, on the eflect his great fortress might be ex- pected to produce on those headstrong and turbulent chiefs. The first to defy the power which the tower of the Louvre represented was Ferrant, Count of Flanders, who conspired with John of England against Philip. Defeated by the latter, he was brought to Paris in chains and imprisoned there until the beginning of Saint Louis' reign, Avhen he regained his freedom by paying a large ransom. The only association we find of Louis VIII. with the Louvre is a clause in his Avill directing that his treasure should be deposited in '' our ToAver of Paris near St. Thomas." Under Saint Louis, however, it plays an important part ; all grave offenders were brought there for trial, as Enguerrand de Coucy, for instance, who in a spirit of defiance had built a tower much stronger than, and at least twice as high as the King's, and, in order to show that his powers were in no sense inferior to those of the crown, had hung three young gentlemen of Flanders for having shot some rabbits which had been chased from his prop- erty onto their own. The King, having caused En- guerrand to be brought before him, was so moved out of his ordinary mildness that it was only on the PARIS OF THE EAELY MIDDLE AGES. 145 instance of his nobles that he substituted an enor- mous ransom for the death-penalty. Louis soon fitted up a chapel at the Louvre, and founded a home for three hundred poor blind persons a little beyond St. Thomas. Such pious works as these, and the large amounts which he gave con- stantly to the poor, seem to be the only expenditures amounting to anything in his reign. The accounts mention only twenty pounds and thirteen sous as hav- ing been spent on works connected with the Louvre, Chatelet, etc., during his whole reign, while in less than six months of one year he spent more than eight thousand pounds in gifts and charities. On the other hand, it must be remembered that his grandfather had very thoroughly completed the defensive works. The Governor of the Louvre took rank among the chief officers of the realm on all great occasions of ceremony, as the translation of Saint Martin in July of the year 1250, when we find Regnault, Chatelain of the Louvre, almost at the head of the procession, and a few days later, when the Bishop of Paris was in- stalled, he is one of the four " Porteurs," a much coveted honor. It was probably under Philippe le Bel that the Louvre was made a captaincy. Its chatelain, hence- forth a captain, had not only all the privileges be- longing to that rank, but was obliged to stand only in the presence of the King, and to take orders from no one else. 10 146 PAKIS. During this reign the royal treasury accounts show a very different method of expenditure from those of Saint Louis. Large sums are used for supplies for the Louvre armory and to build palisades around the lists. These lists were probably between the Church of St. Thomas and the Seine, and the Tower, which got the name of the " tower where the King went when they tilted," was no doubt that one whose stair we have indicated as stiU standing. The central tower now cambined its former func- tion of a prison with that of a treasury. Here was kept all the state treasure, and, after the death of Philip, when the Temple had ceased to be an equally safe place of deposit, that of the King as well. On the death of Louis X., his uncle, Charles of Valois, determined, if possible, to hold on to the power he had enjoyed during this brief reign, seized the Louvre as the first and most important step towards proclaiming himself regent, retaining the young Queen Clemence there under guard ; but the Constable Gaucher de Chatillon, by right of a law (enforced up to the reign of Louis XIII.) which for- bade any prince of the blood to lodge at the Louvre in the King's absence, raised an army of bourgeois and citizens, and, regaining possession of the fortress, was able to deliver it into the hands of Philip, the late King's brother, when he reached Paris. On the 15th of November, 1316, Queen Clemence gave birth there to a son, who was baptized Jean PARIS OF THE EARLY MIDDLE AGES. 147 in the Church of St. Germain I'Auxerrois. Philip, who had been busily employed in getting the State and Parliament to confirm the Salic law and his right to the throne in case the child proved to be a girl, was about to content himself Avith the regency when the little prince died, leaving him the way to the crown clear. Charles le Bel lived certainly a part of the time at the Louvre ; the accounts show that his third wife, Jeanne d'Evreux, kept a part of her suite, the pages, called "the children of the Louvre," there, even when she herself was absent. In fine, the story of the Louvre during this period (that is, from the time of its building to the English wars) is that of a dungeon or fortress, gradually be- coming a palace as the King tends to move further and further away from the heart of the city. Shortly after (as we shall see in the next chapter) the King abandons the Island of the Cite permanently, gives its Palace over to the lawyers, and settles definitely in the Louvre. Having followed the northern bank from the Place de Greve to the very outskirts of Paris, let us now cross over opposite the Louvre, and keeping on our right the great chain that swings across the river from its south-east tower to the Tour de Nesle on the left bank, let us land at the western end of the Island of the Cite, Avhere the Palace stands. Mention has been made in the last chapter of the 148 PARIS. vigorous measures taken by Count Eudes to protect Paris from fresh attacks of the Normans. Chief among these was the conversion of tlie Royal PaLace of la Cite into a strong, square fortification, pro- vided with lofty towers, which Hugh Capet, llobert, Henry L, and Philip L, all seem to have left pretty much as they found it. We learn nothing more of the Palais until we find Louis le Gros, who died there, establishing canons for the oratory of St. Nicolas, in existence since the successor of Count Eudes, and which he had converted into a chapel. The canons were to be entitled to six hogsheads of Avine from the royal vineyards — a privilege confirmed by Louis le Jeune, who also built an oratory in the Palace dedi- cated to Our Lady of the Star. It disappeared when Saint Louis erected the Sainte Chapelle. Philip-Augustus usually lived in the Palais de la Cite when he was in Paris. The Louvre was his fortress, but at the Palace he held his court and ad- ministered justice. Here he summoned John of England to appear and answer for his crimes in seiz- ing the Duchy of Arthur of Brittany and putting him to death. Philip, we are told, loved to be in Paris. Raoul Glaber describes him as pacing up and down the Cour royal, that is, in the part looking north, and stationing himself at the window, from whence he liked to watch the Seine flowing by. Unfortunately, however, this pleasure was a good deal spoiled by the PARIS OF THE EARLY MIDDLE AGES. 149 very bad smells that came from the city mud con- stantly ploughed up by the heavy wagons passing to and fro. At last these became so intolerable, pene- trating into the palace itself, that the King felt he could stand it no longer, and something would have to be done. " He contemplated," says Raoul Glaber, '' an un- dertaking as difficult as it Avas necessary, the obstacles to which, and its enormous expense, had always fright- ened off his predecessors ; but now calling the bour- geois and the Prevot de la Ville together, he com- manded, in the name of the royal authority, that each quarter should be solidly paved with hard stones." The room where this scene took place was afterwards called the Hall Royal, or the Great Hall. The apart- ments of the King looked westward over the garden on one side, and on the other into a square court surrounded by a sort of cloister, which later became one of the inner yards of the Conciergerie. The garden was of considerable size 5 it covered nearly the whole site of the present Prefecture de Police, running out to the Place Dauphine *, a door in the northern wall communicated with the interior of the Palace. Later it was used as an egress by those who had brought their minor grievances and complaints to be heard by Saint Louis. There is the doorway still standing to-day between the twin towers on the quay, and there is perhaps no building in the whole town where the old and the new of two thousand 150 PAEIS. years, from the Romans to the third Republic, are so blended. All hearings of importance were held in the room called later the Grande Chambre, but it was one of Louis' greatest pleasures to hold this informal court, to which the poor and friendless could bring their wrongs and have them promptly redressed. These simple processes were called pleadings of the door, from the place where they were held. When the weather was fine Louis sometimes held these sit- tings in the garden, where Joinville describes him seated on a carpet with the officers of his court, giv- ing audiences to all who chose to come. Simplicity yet hngered, the hollo^\^less of the fourteenth century was yet to come. A memento of his more practical charities is still to be found in the yard of the Con- ciergerie, where some large stones, near Marie An- toinette's cell, are called the tables of Saint Louis' charity, as he is supposed to have been in the habit of leaving bread on them for the poor. Although we have no actual proof, it seems prob- able that Philip-Augustus began the alterations and additions of the Palace of Hugh Capet, and that Saint Louis carried the work on. The two towers, the Tour d^ Argent and the Tour de Cesar, which we have referred to as flanking the doorway on the north, then the principal entrance to the Palais, are of pre- cisely the same size and height as those which Philip built at intervals in the wall surrounding the Louvre, and would hence seem to belong to the same period. PAKIS OF THE EARLY MIDDLE AGES. 151 The labyrinth of constructions which reach, on the ground floor, ahnost from the Conciergerie to the Sainte Chapelle, correspond so exactly with the char- acter and details of the latter that there can be no doubt of their having been built at the same time. The cii'cumstances which led to the building of the Sainte Chapelle are well known. Baldwin, the son- in-law of Jean de Brienne, Emperor of Constanti- nople, had promised the crown of thorns, which Avas preserved in the treasury of the Byzantine Em- perors, to the King of France ; but on his return to Constantinople he found his father-in-law dead and the relic in the hands of the Venetians, wdio held it as a pledge for a sum of about a hundred thousand francs (in modern money), loaned by them. This Saint Louis paid, and, to his inexpressible joy, be- came its possessor. It was in August, 1239, that the crown of thorns reached Paris ; it was first de- posited at Vincennes, whence the monks of St. Denis transported it, first, to Notre Dame, and then to the Chapel of St. Nicolas in the Palace. Three years later, Baldwin, who hoped the King might be induced to undertake another Crusade, sent him that famous iron tip of the lance that had pierced the Saviour's side, the holy lance of Antioch, the chief glory of the first Crusade, also a piece of the true cross, and other precious objects. During a serious illness, in 1244, Louis did in fact make a vow to go on a new Crusade, but not until he had pro- 152 PAEIS. vidcd a suitable place for the precious relics. M. Edouard Founder states that Michelet is mistaken when ho says of the Sainte Chapelle that the King " had it built on his return from the Crusade by Eudcs de Montreuil, whom he brought Avith him," as it was biult before the Crusade by Pierre de Montereau. This exquisite building, a veritable shrine, just as it was intended to be, a " model of pure Gothic," was completed in three years. The upper chapel was dedicated to the Holy Cross and the Holy Crown, the lower to the Virgin ; in the tympanum of the latter was a bas-relief of the death of the Virgin; there was also a statue of Our Lady, and in the losanges of the stylobate of the arches the lilies of France alternated with the towers of Castile in memory of Queen Blanche, the King's mother. In the upper chapel were sculptures of the Last Judgment, Christ bless- ing with the right hand and holding a globe in the other, and curious figures of two angels, one thrust- ing his hand in a pot and the other holding his in a cloud. The original building probably had a spire, but not the outer stair, which we shall find to have been added later. The upper chapel was reached from the Palace by galleries on the same level ; here Louis erected a smaller building of similar style, also in two stories. The lower was used as a sacristy, while in the upper, under the protection, as it were, of the Holy Relics, was the Tresor dcs charfes, property of the crown. All that now remains of this annex is PARIS OF THE EARLY MIDDLE AGES. 153 the little gallery that connected it with the Sainte Chapelle ; the remainder Avas swept away in 1777 to make room for the Great Court. Of the two wooden stairways enclosed in open-work turrets, which stand on either side of the sanctuary, that on the north is the one by which kSaint Louis used to mount to the great golden tabernacle studded Avith precious stones, whence on the great feasts he would display the Holy Crown to the faithful kneeling devoutly in the nave below, he only having the right to take it from the reliquary. On the Sunday after Easter, April 25, 1248, the chapel was consecrated with a double ser- vice, the Bishop of Tusculum, Papal Legate, dedi- cating the upper church, and the Archbishop of Bourges the lower. In August of the same year Louis set forth on the Crusade to which he Avas pledged. Sailing first for Egypt, which a tradition current in the Royal Palace said was to be conquered by a King of France, Saint Louis got nothing there but imprisonment. The tradition only needs time ; it was nearly verified in Napoleon's campaign. On his return from the first Crusade Louis enter- tained the King of England (Henry HI.) in the Palais de la Cite, receiving his allegiance for the fief of Aquitaine in the Palace garden ; but the building was liardly large enough to accommodate such guests comfortably, and Saint Louis' grandson, Philip le Bel, determined to enlarge it, with the result that Enguer- rand de Marigny, who had charge of the work, added 154 PAEIS. one apartment after another until the original palace "was completely overshadowed by the new and mag- nificent structure, and came to be spoken of as " the little palace called the hall of Saint Louis." The additions were made principally on the south and east. All the buildings that stood in the way on the Rue Barillerie (nearly identical with the present Bou- levard du Palais) Avere demolished, just as woidd be done to-day, by " dispossession for public purposes." The little Church of St. -Michel de la Place, stand- ing about where the offices of the Jugcs d'lnstruc- tion do now, Avas spared, however, and enclosed within the precincts of the Palais. The eastern fa9ade now stood on a line with the bridge that had replaced the one swept away in the inundation of 1296 ; this new bridge, called Pont au Change, connected the Rue Barillerie Avith the Grand Chatelet, and Avas lined on either side Avith goldsmiths, jewellers and money- coiners' establishments, from the last of Avhom it got its name. On this side of the Palace was a deep trench or moat, across A\diich draAvbridges Avere throAvn from each of the two entrances flanked by toAvers. The northern facade of the Palace had only to be carried on a little further in order to join it to the ncAv Avail on the east. To do this a bit of marshy bank had to be filled in, and a Avindmill, called the Chante-Reitie, from the mud-bank into Avhich its piles Avere driven, pulled doAvn. The square tOAver erected on this site is still standing, and goes by its original name, the Tour PAEIS OF THE EAKLY MIDDLE AGES. 155 de THorlogc. As you come over the bridge to-day to go to the Palais de Justice (if you are approaching from the northern bank) it is the conspicuous near corner with its great gilt clock. The chief glory of the new Palace Avas the Grande Salle, with its great double-arched roof of carved and gilded wood-work against a blue background (much as in the Sainte Chapelle). Down the centre a row of eight huge columns supported the spring of the arches and divided the hall in two. The floor was paved with alternate blocks of white and black marble, as were almost all the great Halls of Justice of that period, a circumstance that gave the name of echiquier to the supreme court of Normandy.* But the most curious feature of the Grande Salle was the series of painted and gilded statues of all the Kings who had ever reigned over France. They were placed high up on brackets against the central columns and the pilasters from which the vaultings of the roof sprang, and under each statue was inscribed a summary of the reign. This custom was kept up until the time of Charles IX. Enguerrand de Marigny, who had di- rected all the work on the new Palace, wishing to share some of the glory, caused a statue of himself to be placed over the stairway to the Gallerie aux Merciers which led from the Grande Salle to the Sainte Chapelle •, a rather unfortunate choice of a * But this custom, again, may be traced to the earlier one of a similar pattern on the Kirufs money-table, to facilitate counting. 156 PAEIS. position, since he had been accused of hiring out the stalls of this gallery (supposed to be given free to tlie trades people) and keeping the proceeds. The memory of these stalls or booths, where all sorts of merchandise, and especially gold ornaments and jew- elry, were sold, is still preserved, for in the same gal- lery, called to-day MarcJicoide, caps and gowns are exposed for hire. The magnificent new Palace Avas opened with great rejoicings in 1313, the King making it a double fete by knighting his three sons, Louis, Philip, and Charles, at the Louvre. The festivities lasted eight days, during which period the people of Paris kept their shops closed so as to " accommo- date themselves to the joy of the Prince," though hardly, as M. Fournier observes, to share it, since, by means of a special tax, they were obliged to bear the enormous expenses of the joyful occasion. The policy of Philip le Bel was in fact very differ- ent from that of his grandfather Saint Louis, notably in his attitude towards the clergy, the distinctly lay constitution that he gave to his Parliament being a blow directed against their growing influence and pretensions. From 1289 there was an order in force, issued by him, forbidding the doorkeepers to admit any prelates to the chamber without the consent of the heads of the Parlement. Under his successors, Louis X. and Philip le Long, the functions of this Parliament, the real foundation of the French courts PARIS OF THE EARLY MIDDLE AGES. 157 of to-day, became more clearly defined, and a cham- ber of inquiry and a chanihcr for pleading were es- \ tablished. When Philippe Y. inherited the throne on the death of his brother's posthumous child, there was a solemn assembly at the Palais of all the officers of the crown — a great Parliament — to confirm the succes- sion. Nothing had ever been held on a similar scale. Geoffry of Paris tells how all the merchants and hangers-on of the court were driven out, in order to clear the galleries and approaches. No doubt these, disappointed of a closer view, joined the crowds swarming up the Rue de la Pelleterie and the Rue de la Calandre into the Barillerie, striving to catch at least a glimpse of all the grandeur and magnifi- cence within. The part of the Island of la Cite lying between the z' Palais and the Church of Notre Dame Avas a tangle W of little crooked streets, flanked by closely built-up houses and churches, no less than four of the latter in this narrow district alone — Ste. Croix, St. Bar- tholomew, St. Eloy and St. Germain ; the last three have been alluded to in a former chapter. St. Bartholomew we find taking a position of great im- portance in 1140; from being the chapel Royal it now becomes the parish church of the Palace, its out-buildings and dependencies. Even the found- ing of the Sainte Chapelle itself is not allowed to in- terfere with its peculiar rights; rights which the clergy 158 PARIS. proclaim yearly by Avalking in solemn procession around the palace, and through the court, the gal- leries, and into the great hall, where, moreover, they preach on all the Sundays of Lent, Good Friday, and on Easter day. To the Cure of St. Bartholomew are given the offerings made at the red Mass, celebrated when Par- liament meets, in the Chapel of St. Nicolas. li North and east of the church was the Jewish quar- ter, the Ghetto of Paris, a swarming district through which ran the street called de la Pelleterie, after the Jews had been expelled by Philip-Augustus, their , property confiscated, and the tanners installed in their / place. The synagogue of these unfortunate people, \ which was on the other side of the Rue de la Juiverie (Rue de la Cite of to-day), was given to the Bishop of Paris to be turned into a church — La Madeleine de la Cite — whose history can be traced to the middle of the present century, when it gave way to the Boulevard Constantine. Walking along this street to the south we Avould have reached, on our right, the Rue de la Calandre, and, the fifth house on the right, la maison clii Paradis, called later the house of the images of St. Marcel and Ste. Genevieve. Here, according to a well-founded tradition, Marcel, Bishop of Paris, was born in the end of the fourth century. The Chapel of St. Marcel consequently acquired pos- session of it in 1230, while the Chapter of Notre Dame visited it in solemn procession every year on the feast PARIS OF THE EARLY MIDDLE AGES. 159 of the Ascension. A little further on this street, which to-day would run through the middle of the Barrack of the Republican Guard, skirted the southern limit of the Ceinture Saint Eloy. We have told in the last chapter of the founding of this convent, dedicated first to Saint IMartial, and later to Saint Eloy and Saint Aure, when it had become an abbey under the jurisdiction of the Bishop of Paris, By the twelfth century the discipline had groAvni extremely lax ; the close proximity of the court may have been too great a temptation to worldliness, but at all events in 1107, Galon, Bishop of Paris, with the approval of the King, Philip I., scattered the nuns about in various religious houses and established the monks of St. Pierre des Fosses in their place. Between the Rue Calandre and the southern branch of the Seine were the Marche-Palu and the Grande Orberie — the former where from very ancient times a provision market had been held, and the latter, a long, open space, sometimes under water, and at others covered with a rich vegetation, the site of the Marche Neuf of a later period. The only building of interest in this quarter has no especial connection with the time of which we are treating — St. Ger- main le Vieux — its origin has already been told. If we follow the line of the old Roman wall east, through the closely built-up town of that time, we will come out in front of Notre Dame. To-day this is all in- cluded in the open Place du Parvis Notre Dame. 160 PAEIS. St. Germain le Vieux stood Avliere the eastern side of the Barrack of the RepubUcan Guard is now, near the southern corner. When we last spoke of Notre Dame, the building erected by Childebert, seriously damaged by the Nor- man invasions, was in constant need of repairs. Charles the Simple, Eudes, Louis le Gros, Etienne de Garlande, Archdeacon of Paris, M'ho died in 1142, Suger, the Abbot of Saint-Denis, all contributed towards its restoration. Thus, for nearly three hun- dred years, the church which had served as a place of worship for the Merovingian Kings was the Cathe- dral of Paris. In 1161, however, it became neces- sary to rebuild it from the foundations, and Maurice I de Sully, Bishop of Paris, began the work. Pope V, Alexander III., who had taken refuge in France, laid the corner-stone, while the workmen knelt about him. The building advanced with extraordinary rapidity, / for in 1185 Heraclius, Patriarch of Jerusalem, two / years before his town fell forever to the Moslem, cele- , , brated mass at the newly -finished altar, in front of I which two years later Jeoffry, son of Henry II. of ■ England, was buried, while Maurice de Sully, who died in September, 1196, left a hundred pounds to pay for lead to overlay the roof of the choir, show- V ing hoAv far the work must have advanced. In 1218 some thieves, while attempting to drag down the silver chandeliers in which candles were burning, set fire to the hangings of the choir, and so to the PARIS OF THE EARLY MIDDLE AGES. 161 whole church. The result was disastrous. The flying buttresses, corresponding to two arches of the nave and choir, were seriously damaged, and instead of restoring them they seized the opportunity to adopt a new style of decoration, then becoming very popular. The rose-windows above the gallery w^ere done away wdth, the upper windows cut down as far as the archi- volt of the galleries, the flying buttresses with their double arches were demolished, and the vaults of the triforium lowered so as to reduce the height of its wmdows. According to Guilhermy and Viol- let-le-Duc, these alterations destroyed the majes- tic effect of the original plan. The western fac^ade was erected about the beginning of the thirteenth century, and it was then that the old Cathedral Church, St. Etienne, Avhich had been left standing while the other was building, so that the services of the church might continue without interruption, was pulled down. As has been mentioned before, the present sacristy stands on the site of its eastern end. The relics preserved in St. Etienne were transported to the new church. When Philip- Augustus died the great doorway had been carried up as far as the base of the open gallery connecting the two towers ; these towers were fin- ished in the reign of Saint Louis. The Porte -Rouge and chapels immediately beyond tlie transept prob- ably date from the early part of the thirteenth cen- tury, while an inscription on the base of the statue 11 162 PAEIS. of Simon de Buci, Bishop of Paris, who died in 1304, states that he built three of the chapels of the Apse, and that the others followed immediately after. This statue was found in the cellar of the sacristy, and has been placed behind the sanctuary. By the middle of the thirteenth century, that is, when Saint Louis was grown a man, the church seems to have been completed in all its details, and from then to the seventeenth century to have undergone no alterations of any consequence. It would be quite out of the scope of this work to enter into detailed descriptions of buildings the out- lines of whose histories we have barely space to trace. Especially is this so of Notre Dame, which has been alone the subject of numberless volumes. " There is hardly any work of architecture in the whole world," says Philip Gilbert Hamerton, " except one or two Greek temples, which has evoked the same kind and degree of admiration as the west front of Notre Dame." And the same remark might almost be made of that wonderful interior, in whose majestic proportions we see traces of that Romanesque spirit which had not as yet completely yielded to the Gothic. From the upper gallery, called Les Tribunes, running around the inner of the two aisles, how many mag- nificent ceremonies have been witnessed in the six hundi'ed years of its existence! Of the old building, probably the last great function was when Alix of Champagne, third wife of Louis VII., was married, PARIS OF THE EARLY MIDDLE AGES. 163 consecrated and crowned on the 13th of Novem- ber, 1160, by the Archbishop of Sens. In 1229 Raymond VII., Count of Toulouse, knelt barefoot before the Papal Legate in the newly-finished cathe- dral to receive absolutix)n ; and here ten years later comes the Saint-King, he, too, barefoot and clad only in a simple tunic, bearing in deepest humility the sacred Crown of Thorns. After his death in 1270 his body was laid before the high altar before being taken to St. Denis. The first assembly of the states-general under Philippe le Bel was held in Notre Dame in 1302, and this King, in accordance with a vow made on the battlefield of Mons-en-Puelle, rode into the church on horseback to present his suit of mail to the Virgin, by whose intercession the vic- tory had been won. The space before the west front, called the Parvis Notre Dame, was formerly only about one-fifth the size of the present Place ; it was surrounded by high walls and entered by gates to which steps led from the lower level of the surrounding streets. In the thir- teenth century a market was held here every Sunday by the bakers, who then sold all the bread they had been unable to dispose of during the week to the poor. It was the custom for many hundreds of years to bring criminals here on their way to execution, that they might make public expression of repentance for their crimes. On the west of the Parvis Notre Dame there y 164 PARIS. was, in all probability from very early times, some sort of hospital for the sick and needy ; it is not, how- ever, until 829 that we find any distinct mention of it imder the name of St. Christopher. This Car- lo vingian building was pulled down in 1184, when the Rue Notre Dame was opened. Philip-Augustus then began the new one, the Hotel-Dieu ; it was car- ried on by Blanche of Castile, and completed by her son. Saint Louis, who erected a long hall on the southern arm of the Seine, supported on piles, called the Salle Neuve or Salle Jeune, and to which he added two chapels. For nearly two hundred years after this we hear but little of the Hotel-Dieu. No less than eight smaller churches clustered around the Cathedral on the eastern end of the island. St. Landry, where the north-east corner of the Hotel- Dieu now stands, which had been the chapel of St. Nicolas; St. Agnan, east of the Rue de la Colorabe, established in 1118 by Etienne de Garlande, who is said to have found Saint Bernard prostrate before its altar, where he had passed a whole day in fasting and tears because he thought that God had withdrawn from him the power to bring sinners to repentance ; St. Marine, across Avhose western end the Rue d' Areola would now run ; its origin is unknown, but it existed in 1045, the parish consisting of twenty houses, all embraced within the court of the Episcopal Palace ; St. Pierre aux Boeufs, partly where the eastern fa9ade of the Hotel-Dieu now stands and PAKIS OF THE EARLY MIDDLE AGES. 165 partly where the Rue d'Arcole lies, the special church of the Corporation of Butchers ; St. Jean le Rond, standing just where the Rue du Clotre Notre Dame opens into the Place, and originally the Baptistery of the Church ; St. Christopher, which the line of the southern wall of the Hotel-Dieu would divide in half, and of whose early history nothing definite is known ; Ste. Genevieve des Ardents, near the north-west corner of the present Place, of which we have noth- ing trustworthy at this period ; and St. Denis du Pas, directly behind the church, its east end extend- ing into the site of the present square. A little to the south-west of this, between the Cathedral and the south arm of the Seine, rose the Episcopal Palace built by Maurice de Sully; the sacristy now stands on a part of its site. Running along the entire north- east bank were the cloisters. These were quite un- like the usual cloisters of a monastery, and resembled more a small village or settlement surrounded by walls, whose gates were kept carefully closed. There were a number of separate houses, each surrounded by its own garden and commanding a view of the river. Here Louis le Jeune declared he had passed the happiest months of his life, and here Saint Dom- inic lived during his brief stay in Paris. But what reflects perhaps more glory upon the cloister of Notre Dame than the sojourn there of Saint or King, is its association with the University of Paris. Before the first schools were opened on the Montagne Ste. 166 PAEIS. Genevieve there were others established here, to which students flocked from all over Europe — schools with which the names of William of Champeaux, Abelard and Saint Bernard are indissolubly connected. When the University was transported to the left bank of the Seine, all that remained to tell of its former existence near the Cathedral was the little college of / the Dix-Huit, which occupied a shigle room in the Hotel-Dieu. Let us walk down the Rue du Marche Palu, and crossing the Petit-Pont, where, by the Avay, we shall have to pay toll, follow the University to its new home. At the south end of the bridge we pass under the Petit-Chatelet, rebuilt after the Norman siege. Both it and the Petit-Pont were carried away by an inundation in 1296, and neither of them recon- structed until the early years of the reign of Charles V. in the next century. Before us stretches the Rue St. Jacques, the Roman road to Genabum, and, off to the left, first the Rue de la Bucherie and then the Rue Galarde, run- ning nearly parallel with the river. Between them stands the Priory of St. Julien le Pauvre, where Gregory of Tours lodged when he visited Paris in 580. After the thirteenth century the University v^ frequently held its meetings there, and there came the Provost of Paris every two years, in obedience to a decree of Phihppe le Bel, to make solemn oath that he would see the rights of the masters and students respected, and would himself respect them. PARIS OF THE EARLY MIDDLE AGES. 167 Behind St. Julien le Pauvre (that is, east of it) was and still is the Rue Fouarre. Here, in the thirteenth century, Avere the earhest scliools des Qiiatre Nations, the Faculty of the Arts ; the four nations were France, V Normandy, England and Picardy. The only seats provided for the students consisted of some straw {feuarre or fouarre) scattered over the floor ; from . this the street took its name. The name of the street that now crosses diagonally from the Rue Lagrange to the junction of the Rue St. Jacques and the Boulevard St. Germain recalls the tradition founded on an allusion in II Paradise, that Dante was one of the scholars who here thronged to the lectures of the learned Siger de Brabant.* Near by, in the Rue Bucherie, was the School of y/ Medicine, the first record of Avhich dates from the beginning of the thirteenth century, though there can be no doubt that one had existed much earlier. The medical faculty seem to have been less fortunate in obtaining a building of their own, than the arts for instance ; some time after the establishment of a number of other colleges, some of them even well endowed, they were obliged to meet in different places, sometimes at Ste. -Genevieve des Ardents and sometimes in Notre Dame itself, where masters and * Essa la luce eterna de Sigeri, Che leggendo nel vico degli strami. Sillogizzo invidiosi veri. — Paeadiso, Canto X. 168 PAEIS. scholars gathered about tlie great stone Holy Water basins placed under the towers. Just in the line of the modern Rue des Ecoles stood the Commandery of the Knights Hospitallers, St. Jean de Jerusalem, a Hotel, a church, and a square, four-storied tower; and a little higher up the hill, wdiich had now come to be called Mont Ste.- Genevieve, the Church of St.-Etienne du Mont, the Abbey of Ste. -Genevieve, whose earlier history we have already given, standing close by. Notwith- standing the miracles worked at the Saint's tomb, and her growing popularity Avith the people, this church, originally dedicated to the Apostles Peter and Paul, had been more or less neglected until 1148, when it was given to the Canons of St. -Victor, in W'hose hands it became one of the most flourishing abbeys in France. The modest Avooden shrine in which the relics had been kept was replaced by one made of gold and silver, studded with precious stones, and ornamented with a statue of the Saint, the Vir- gin, and the Twelve Apostles ; this the canons car- ried through the streets in procession whenever any public calamity threatened the city ; and before it the swollen waters of the Seine seemed to subside, and plagues and pestilences to cease. The Chancellor of the Abbey exerted a good deal of influence upon the affairs of the University ; he had the right to appoint teachers and to select the examiners, received their oaths faithfully to fulfll the duties of their offices, and, PARIS OF THE EARLY MIDDLE AGES. 169 finally, it was he who conferred the degrees upon the successful students. It is on the site of this Abbey that the Pantheon now stands. On a part of the site of the Lycee Louis-le-Grand stood the CoUege des Cholets, founded in 1295 by Cardinal Jean Cholet for poor students from the dioceses of Beaudair and Amiens ; it was entirely devoted to the study of sacred science, the students qualifying only for degrees in theology. Directly opposite it, but facing on the Rue St. Jacques, was one of the oldest churches in Paris, St.-Etienne des Gres, which ex- isted, at least as an oratory, as far back as the sev- enth century. Here came Saint Francis de Sales, when he was a student, to pray before the statue of Our Lady of Good Dehverance. The church Avas demolished during the Revolution, but the statue of the Virgin was saved, and may now be seen in the Chapel of the Sisters of St.-Thomas de Villeneuve, in the Rue Sevres. On the other side of the Rue St. Jacques was the Jacobin convent, covering the entire space between the present Rue St.-Jacques and Rue St.-Michel, with the Hotel Cluny on the north, and on the south the site of the wall of Philip-Augustus. This famous con- vent was at first nothing but a chapel dedicated to Saint Jacques, and under the patronage of the Uni- versity, but in 1221 it was given to seven brothers of the Order of Preachers, lately founded by Saint Dominic ; the people called them Jacobins, from the 170 PAEIS. name of the chapel. The monks, determined to take part in the intellectual life about them, founded chairs of theology, and their convent soon became so cele- brated as a seat of learning that the University, which at first had been friendly to the Jacobins, now tried to suppress them. The attempt fortunately failed, and the lectures and writings which emanated from this convent contributed not a little to the glory of the University. Let us now skirt the wall of Philip- Augustus to the Gate of St. -Michel, sometimes called Gibard, and sometimes D'Enfer ; turning to the right we find the College de Cluny, founded in 1269 by an Abbot of Cluny. The church, built some years later, is de- scribed by M. de Guilhermy as having been a mas- terpiece of architecture, worthy to be compared Avith the Ste. Chapelle itself. Here the painter David had his studio for some years, but it Avas pulled down in the present century, and a few fragments of stone carving in the Musee de Cluny are all that remain to bear witness to its exquisite beauty. Close by, where the Place de la Sorbonne and the Boulevard St.- Michel meet now, was the College du Tresorier, founded in 1268 for twelve students of theology and twelve of arts, the originals of the Archdeaconries of the Grand and Petit Caux. Some twelve years ear- lier a professor of theology, a native of Cerbon (Sor- bon, Sorbonne), had purchased a number of houses standing a little further north, to establish a college PAKIS OF THE EAKLY MIDDLE AGES. 171 for poor theological students. Saint-Louis added another house nearer the Palais des Thermos, and the Church from the beginning protected and helped the new foundation. The legacy of the library of Gerard d' Abbeville (about three hundred volumes, one hundred and eighteen of which are now in the Bibliotheque Nationale) was the beginning of the magnificent library for which the institution became famous. On the other side of the Rue de la Harpe (Boulevard St.-Michel) the College d'Harcourt cov- ered a part of the site of the present Lycee St.-Louis. It was founded in 1280 by Raoul d'Harcourt Avith forty scholarships ; opposite stood the less important colleges of Narbonne and Bayeux, and, Avhere the Rue de I'Ecole de Medecine begins, the Church of St. -Come and St.-Damien, then belonging to St. -Ger- main des Pres. Following this street we come, on our left, to the establishment of the Franciscans, called Cordeliers, from the cord worn about the waist. When they first came to Paris they only occupied this property as the guests of the Abbey of St. -Ger- main des Pres, but they later acquired it for them- selves. Saint Louis gave them a part of the ransom of Enguerrand de Coucy* to build a church with, and they soon established chairs of theology. Alexander de Halles, Bonaventura, and Duns Scot all figured at one time or another among the corps of teachers, and in its vaulted hall, six hundred years later, Dan- * See page 144. 172 PARIS. ton led in oratory the most Revolutionary quarter of Paris. Again following- the line of Philip-Augustus' wall we come to the Rue Dauphine, near the end of which, on the right, stood the Convent of the Grands Augus- tins, dating from the end of the thirteenth century ; the quarter was called after the Church of St. Andre des Arts. According to the best authorities its name (des Arts) was a corruption of Laas, it having been built in the Clos de Laas. We will now pass over to the Place Maubert, a name that in all probability has come down from an Abbot of St. -Germain des Pres of the twelfth cen- tury, one Monsignor Aubert, as this Avas a part of the vast possessions of the abbey at that time. The College de Bernardins, where the Fireman's Barrack now stands, was founded in 1245, and endowed by Alphonse de Poitiers, a brother of Saint Louis ; close to it w^as the college founded in 1302 by Cardinal Lemoine, and the College des Bons Enfants St.-Vic- tor, dating back to the first half of the thirteenth century. From thence the line of the wall of Philip- Augustus takes us right down to the Porte St. -Ber- nard, built at the same time, and beyond it on the bank, the Tournelle, erected as a defense to the ap- proach to the south arm of the river, and connecting at will, by means of a chain, with the tower of Loriaux on I'Isle St. Louis. If we follow the river bank for a short distance we PARIS OF THE EARLY MIDDLE AGES. 173 will reach, Avhere the Halle aux Vins now stands, the Abbey of St. Victor, founded in the early part of the twelfth century by William of Cliampeaux, who sought the retirement of the cloister, it is said, to soothe his spirit after his defeat at the hands of his former student Abelard. The new establishment, favored by Kings and Popes, became wealthy and important, and numbered many brilliant scholars among its masters. It was the favorite burial-place of the Bishops of Paris for several centuries. Among the many legacies of books made to its library, a Bible given by Blanche of Castile is now in the Bibliotheque Rationale. We Avill pass by the Col- leges d' Arras and des Ecossais, and pause before the College de Navarre (the Polytechnic now), founded by the wife of Philippe le Bel at the time of the victory of Mons en Puelle in 1304. The queen bequeathed her " house of Navarre, near the Porte St. -Germain," to be an establishment for " six stu- dents of the kingdom of France." The executors of her Avill sold the house, hoAvever, and built the college on the northern slope of the Montague Ste. Genevieve. We will close the enumeration of the colleges of this period with the Carmelite Convent. Saint Louis brought six Carmelites back Avith him from Palestine and established them on the Quai des Celestins, but Philip IV. and Philip V. gave them property on the Montague Ste. Genevieve, where in the middle of the 174 PARIS. fourteenth centiiiy we find them building a church and convent. Before leaving the left bank of the Seine let us pass outside the new boundary-walls of Philip-Augus- tus and see what changes have taken place in the district lying to the west. We can go through either the Porte de Buci — sold by the monks of St. Ger- main to the Counsellor of that name in 1250 — or the gate they built themselves a little further south, about where the streets of I'Ecole de Medccine and Larrey meet to-day. The great church of the Abbey St. Germain had been built in the beginning of the eleventh century. " The Abbot," writes the historian, with unconscious irony, " finding that his church needed repairs after having been burned three times by the Normans, decided to rebuild it." As has been mentioned, however, in the last chapter, the great scpiare tower of Childebert's Church was preserved, at any rate as far up as the bell, and is still standing on the east side. It is the principal relic of Bar- barian Paris, and to be watched with awe standing above that highly modern Boidevard. During the thirteenth century the Abbey Avas greatly enlarged. Pierre de Montereau, the architect of the Ste. Chapelle, had constructed a Refectory and an exquisite Lady Chapel, and in 1273 a great dormitory had been built. These all stood north-west of the church, Avithin a boundary-wall ei'ccted in 1239, which Philip- Augustus made the monks replace by a real wall of de- PAKIS OF THE EAELY MIDDLE AGES. 175 feiise at the time that he was enclosing the rest of the city. The Abbey was proprietor of an immense dis- trict, reaching ahnost as far as the present Champ de Mars, and planted out in orchards and vineyards. It was first called the Pre St. Germain and later Pre aux Clercs. On the east it was bounded by a canal, la None or la petite Seine, on the other side of which lay the |7e^/^ Pre aux Clercs, also the property of the Abbey, between what now are the Rues Bonaparte, Jacob, and Seine. It was here that the clercs or Uni- versity students disported themselves, their brawls, debauches, and acts of insubordination stirring up dissensions between the Abbey and the University for two whole centuries. The extreme privileges granted by Philip- Augustus to the University caused them to resent the smallest interference from without, no matter how well deserved. For instance, in 1278 the students pidled down a building that had been erected on the Pre aux Clercs by the Abbot. The toc- sin was promptly sounded, and the whole popidation of the bourg St. Germain poured out and overpowered the students, some of whom were killed and others im- prisoned in the convent. The University thereupon brought complaint to the Cardinal-Legate, Simon de Brie, and threatened to suspend all lectures and courses if the most complete reparation possible were not made within fifteen days. When the matter was submitted to the King's privy council it was decided against the monks, and the Provost of the Abbey expelled. 176 PARIS. The great CJos dc Laas, stretching from the Petit- Pont to the None (the canal following the line of the present Rue Bonaparte), Avas also at one time the property of the monks of St. Germain, and Childe- bert had granted them the iishing rights of the Seine all the way to Sevres. Some time in the thirteenth century, probably about the middle, one Seigneur de Nesle bought a part of the Clos de Laas, Avest of where the Grands Augustins was built a little later, and erected a great stronghold on the river-bank, reaching as far as the city a\ all. From the hotel the ground sloped gently down to the water's edge, and during the summer months we are told, the people of the neighborhood came to enjoy the fresh air and shade of the numerous willows planted there. During the winter, however, the water often rose so high that it reached the walls, and in time began to undermine them. When Philippe le Bel bought the Hotel of Nesle, he had the willows cut down and re- placed by solid blocks of stone, with a view to con- fining the river to its bed, and from this action we have the first quay of Paris, the " Quai de Nesle." On the death of Philippe le Long, his widow, Jeanne of Burgundy, took up her residence in the Hotel de Nesle, and to her are attributed the crimes that have made the Tour de Nesle so notorious. On her death, in 1328, she left a part of the property to be sold for the purpose of establishing a college for poor students, natives of Burgundy. PAEIS OF THE EARLY MIDDLE AGES. 177 We will now take a boat at Philippe le Bel's new quay, pull up the left branch of the Seine under the Petit-Pont, between the He de la Cite and the He aux Vaches, and then a little further to the right, until we reach the Port of St. Paul, where we will land on the north bank again, close to where the Place de la Bastille is now. This port reached from the little Rue des Barres, on the modern map, to the Quai des Celestins, At either end stood a low, strong, round tower, les Tours de Barres and Billy respec- tively, from which chains could be stretched across to others placed the one on the He aux Vaches and the other on the south bank of the Seine, thus shut- ting off both arms of the river. It is probable that even in Gallo-Roman times all the heavier boats coming from the upper Seine and the Marne were moored here rather than in the smaller and less secure port of the Greve ; it was subdivided into a number of little ports, whose names indicate the nature of the cargoes landed there. We have, for instance, the fresh-water-fish-port, the hay- port, the grain-port, and so on. The ground lying a little away from the river, low, damp, and unheahhy, was occupied almost exclusively by buildings con- nected in some way with the traffic of the port. Even u]) to the middle of the thirteenth century the only religious establishment Avas the Church of St. Paul, built by Dagobert. This Church of St. Paul was originally merely a 12 178 PAEIS. mortuary chapel standing in the cemetery founded by Saint Eloy for a burying-place for the sisters of liis great Convent of St. Martial in the city. It was not customary yet to bury in churches, and the Koman rule of placing tombs without the city, one of the many things to which the modern time has returned, still prevailed. About the end of the eleventh century St. Paul aux Champs was converted into a parish church for the convenience of the people living in the neighbor- hood, there being no other church near. It stood about in the middle of the present Rue St. Paul. When Bishop Galon was forced to disperse the sisters of St. Aure (St. Martial), in 1107, on account of some irregidarities in the discipline of the con- vent, the cemetery ceased to be the burying-place of the order. There is one association in this neighborhood which seems to link the time of St. Louis with our own. The first Carmelite establishment in Paris, as has already been noted, was founded by the King on his return from Palestine, when six of the order accom- panied him. They settled first in a small building belonging to the Hotel Barbeaux, and went by the name of Ics Sarrcs, from their long cloaks with alter- nate divisions of black and white. As the order in- creased they were obliged to move into larger quar- ters, but to this day the street where they first lived continues to be called the Rue des Barres. The PAEIS OF THE EARLY MIDDLE AGES. 179 name of this Avliole suburb was St. Paul ; later it be- came the Quartier de la Bastille. Bounding it on the north-west lay the Quartier du Marais, in which, like a little walled city, stood the great establishment of the Templars. Just when this was founded is not certainly known ; it may have started as a simple chapel, where priests of the order officiated. A docu- ment of 1211 speaks of the Commandery of the Tem- ple, and before 1222 Hubert, treasurer of the order, had built the great tower — " one of the most powerful buildings in the kingdom," writes Felibien in his His- tory of Paris. As early as 1147, just before the Second Crusade, the Templars are known to have assembled at Paris, under the auspices of Pope Eugenius III. and Louis VII., and it was probably this King that granted them the great tract of land lying beyond the north bank of the river. Here they established a Ville Neuve {Villa Nova Templii it was called in the end of the thirteenth century), they drained the great marshy district lying beyond their Avails, and jjlanted it out in orchards and vineyards, converting a dreary waste into a beautiful and fertile suburb. In 1354, when Henry HI. passed through France on his way back to England from Guyenne, he stayed at the Temple, but with so imposing a suite that even that great enclosure could not accommodate them all. During his eight days' visit Paris was the scene of a constant succession of feasts and revels, one of the 180 PARIS. most magniticent being given in the great hall of the Temple, when the English King acted as host. The order had, however, reached the height of its prosperity, and the decline was not long in beginning. In the reign of Philip III. there Avas some friction with the Crown regarding rights of jurisdiction within the city walls, and the question was decided against the Knights. Philippe le Bel seemed at first inclined to favor them, and confirmed the enormous privileges Philip -Augustus and Louis VII. had conferred upon them, but for some cause, possibly their refusal to contribute to the heavy tax levied against the city in 1296, he became their bitter enemy. In 1305 Philip fled from the Louvre, Avhere he was threatened by a serious uprising of the people, who could not forgive his currency reforms, and took refuge at the Temple. He probably during this visit saw for himself the enormous treasure collected in the Great Tower and formulated plans to get possession of it ; at all events, it was only two years later that the same Grand Master who had received him so hospitably and protected him from the violence of the populace, was seized by the King's command, together with one hundred and forty knights of the order, Avho had come to take part in an assembly at the Temple. Grave charges of heresy and disorderly living had already been brought against them, which were confirmed by admissions made Avhile under torture, but Clement V. reserved the right to give sentence and they were sent back to PARIS OF THE EARLY MIDDLE AGES. 181 prison. Other trials Avere held in which the order throughout the whole of Europe became involved, and finally the Pope, yielding to the pressure brought by Philip, abolished it in 1313. All of their property was forfeited to the Knights of Saint John, or Knights of Rhodes, as they were now called (the King had already, however, seized the treasure in the Great Tower), and the Grand Master Jacques Molay and the Commanders of Aquitaine and Normandy were burned in 1314 on the little island which was later joined to the west end of the Island of la Cite, just where the Place Dauphine is now. Two other buildings near by, belonging to this period, were, first, the Hotel of the King of Sicily, the property later of the Count of Anjou, Saint Louis' brother ; it was rebuilt in 1621, and its only import- ant history belongs to the time of the Revolution, when it became the prison of La Force ; and sec- ondly, the Hotel Barbette, erected by the Prevot of Paris under Philippe le Bel, Etienne Barbette, it be- came the property successively of Isabella of Bavaria and Diana of Poitiers, and was finally demolished to make room for the Rue Barbette, whose name still preserves its memory. Under the Romans the road leading to the provinces of the north was lined with tombs ; the Christians continued to bury their dead there, and a large cemetery was early established, having a mortuary chapel dedicated, as was the general custom, to Saint Michael. This chapel gave 182 PAEIS. place, under Louis le Gros, to a larger church, which got the name of The Holy Innocents, why or when is not precisely known, unless it was due to Louis VII., who is said to have had an especial feeling of venera- tion for the Holy Innocents, his favorite oath accord- ing to one historian being, ^^er sanctos dc Bctlileliem ; at all events that was the name both of the church and the great cemetery, which, intended at first as the burial-place of only the people of the parish of St. Germain I'Auxerrois, was used later by all the neighboring parishes and a number of hospitals and religious establishments as well, so that it became the largest cemetery of Paris. The close vicinity of the Halles, with their mar- kets and fairs, frequented by crowds of rough and lawless people, made it necessary to surround the cemetery with walls. Philip-Augustus carried out this work, at the same time enclosing a part of the district called "Clianqjeaiix,^^ where animals were sold at that time. The only other addition of which we have any record was made by the Bishop of Paris, Pierre de Nemours, who presented a piece of ground adjoining the Halles to the Chapter of St.-Germain I'Auxerrois, to be added to the cemetery. At an early day charnel-hoiases were established in Paris where in times of unusual mortality large numbers of the dead could be buried at once, and in the fourteenth century we find mention of a sort of covered gallery or pent-house built along the walls PAEIS OF THE EARLY MIDDLE AGES. 183 of the aristocratic burial-ground of Saint-Paul, and the common one of The Innocents for the reception of bones unearthed in digging new graves. After the last of the Norman invasions the regions lying west of the Halles remained for many years sparsely populated. What dwellings there Avere were scattered along the roads leading from Paris to ChaU- lot and Clicliy, the first the present Rue St.-Honore, the other the Rue des Bons-Enfants. Towards 1204 the wall of Philip- Augustus, that had been building for thirteen years, had just been completed near the Louvre ; a certain noble and his wife founded a church and cloister dedicated to Saint-Honore, Bishop of Amiens, near the gate of the new Avail, close to Avhere the Oratoire now stands. From the amount of ground presented by the founders it got the name of The Thirteen Acres, even long after it had acquired much more. The people of the neigh- borhood Avere poor, many of them pork merchants, whose market-place close by-Avas called St.-Honore- aux-Porcians ; but the bakers from the Louvre Bakery {fiirnus de Lure) were the most important members of the parish, and had a chapel of their own in the church — it was from this that St.-Honore became the patron of the bakers of Paris, and then of all France, as he is to this day. The Bons Enfants, who gave their name to the road to Clicliy, were a certain body of poor clerks or students avIkj lived in Paris on public charity, and 184 PAEIS. had been celebrated ever since the days of Kmg Robert for their deeds of mercy. In 1208 a " col- lege " was erected for them near St.-Honore, with which it was associated ; it was provided with a chapel of its own, dedicated first to the Virgin and then to Saint Clair, which occupied the space on the Rue Bons Enfants between the covered cloister of St.-Honore and the Rue Montesquieu until 1792, when it was torn down. Saint Louis was a liberal friend to the College of the Bons-Enfants, only re- quiring in return for his generosity that the students should aid the choir in the services held in the City Palace and the Louvre. They had indeed acquired a reputation as choristers si/ni2)honiaclpucri, and it is said thatoneof Louis'great pleasures was to hear them chant the mass or vesper service on some great feast day. We will now close with a short survey of the city as we leave it at the end of this period. It has been, especially the last Inmdred and fifty years of it, a period of extraordinary, growth and change 5 like our own time, it has ruthlessly destroyed the past, it has altered its institutions, changed its streets and pri- vate houses, pulled down and rebuilt its monuments and churches. We left Paris at the end of the last chapter the city of a local King claiming, but not exercising, sovereignty over the great vassals ; we find it at the opening of the next the great capital of a centralized kingdom. PAKIS OF THE EARLY MIDDLE AGES. 185 We left it at that period a small borough, the Island, a northern suburb, and scattered groups of houses round the churches of the southern bank ; we leave it now a densely-packed circumference of nearly four miles, with suburbs streaming out along the main roads as they leave the city. It entered this transformation with but isolated forts : the chatelets, the palace, like a prison of thick walls, the stockade on the north-east. Now it is sur- rounded by a great Avail on every side, flanked with more than a hundred toAvers. The eastern stockade has been replaced by the strong, square tOAvers of the LouA-re. But, aboA'e all, the soul and the body of the place haA'e changed. The soul, because the UniA^ersity has arisen. The body, because the Gothic has appeared and is transforming northern Europe. In the eleventh century Ave might ha\^e noted rou- tine teaching, ancient unquestioned things droned out in the monastic and parish schools 5 but in the tAvelfth the Crusaders haA'C marched out and haA'e returned, the East has inflamed the imagination of the West, the cloisters of Notre Dame have heard Abelard and Saint Bernard, and now the great exodus to the hill of 8te. GenevicA'C has taken place, and the colleges of the University are planted thick on the sides of the hill. Did one look doAvn from the towers of the new great Cathedral upon Paris before the wars, it Avould 186 PAKIS. have been to see in the place of her old squalor and barbarism something fantastic ; the mediaeval city to which our modern dreams perpetually return. Every- Avhere high gables, everywhere spires, towers, in- numerable carvings, her great wall shining here and there at the ends of streets, high above the houses her equal towers. Before you Avould be that little permanent miracle, the Ste. Chapelle, to its right the great square of the palace, Avith its round-pointed towers and its delicate inner court. To the left the slope of the hill w^ould stand thick with the new churches, with the Cordeliers, the Carmelites, the Jacobins of Ste. Genevieve, and the colleges. To the right, on the north, an expanse of steep gables, broken only by the square of the Greve ; but the dull roofing would here and there be contrasted with gleaming lead on the high-pitched naves of the churches, standing, as they always did in a mediaeval city, head and shoulders above the town. To the west, beyond the wall of St. Honore, you would see, higher than anything in the town, the square, gloomy dungeon of the Louvre, wdth its great central tower and its four-story corner turrets, from the south-eastern one of which ran the chain that stretched from the Tour de Nesle on the southern bank. Finally, like messengers leaving the new city, along the St. Honore, the St. Denis, the St. Marcel, the Orleans roads, and especially thick beside the PARIS OF THE EARLY MIDDLE AGES. 187 great oblong of St. Germain des Pres, ran the suburbs, which were later to build up the outer city. And of all this the characteristic would have been the height, the narrowness, the points. The win- dows of the palace, of the churches, and of many of the rich men's houses stood upon the thin exquisite pillars, and were shaped in the mystical-pointed arch of which the St. Chapelle is the great example ; the ridges of the roofs ran in the same assemblage. Points innumerable, ends always tapering upward. It was as though the city had adopted an attitude of prayer, and as though the buildings looked above them and joined their hands together. This spirit of the Grothic took the north, and Paris with it, in one great movement. Almost a single gen- eration of men saw the change complete. A man born in the time of Saint Bernard's old age would have lived his youth in a city of the Romanesque ; he would, had he lived to seventy or eighty years of age, have died in a city of the pointed arch, of the high steep roof, and even of the spire. Men worshipped in the Ste. Chapelle or in Notre Dame, still using the words and the habit of that rough youth of Europe, during which the first Crusaders stood for the blessing under the round arches and beside the thick pillars of Childebert's church ; but, whether as a cause or an effect, the Gothic Avent with a profound mental change, and for the three centuries of its rule this architecture is the environment of a profound mysticism, of a kind of 188 PAEIS. dreaming attitude of the mind — subtle disquisition upon the metaphysic — gorgeous pageantry and highly- colored clothing, keen and silent forces, such as we find in the front of Rheims and Amiens — poetry of short themes and of amazing verbal aptitude — a de- sire everywhere for the unknown in the things of the soul, for the marvellous in the stories of far countries, of delicate tAvilight and of silence, and in everything an appetite for the hidden and for the strange. This is the spirit that holds Europe for three hun- dred years, and that makes, as it slowly changes from the manhood of Saint Louis and Joinville to the mad- ness of Louis XL and Villon, what we call Paris of the middle ages. The Renaissance was to wither it with a flood of warmth and light, and its last ruins fell down at the noise of Rabelais laughing. PARIS OF THE LATEK MIDDLE AGES. 189 CHAPTER V. PARIS OF THE LATER MIDDLE AGES. The period covered by this chapter will lead us through not quite two hundred years. From the be- ginning of the English wars to the death of Louis XII. Of what nature are those two centuries in the history of Paris ? They are essentially the close of the middle ages. The great divisions Avhose origins are to be found in the awakening of the eleventh century, and whose dramatic and almost tragic close is marked by the opening of the new world, by the discovery of print- ing, by the Renaissance, and by the Reformation. From such shocks no system and no society could have escaped unchanged. But, by an accident which has not on the whole clone hurt to our civilization, the blows happened to fall on a body already near to death. The result Avas that the modern world Avas developed Avith extreme rapidity, and that the date we have chosen for the close of this chapter marks, not so much a boundary as a gulf, on the far side of Avhich lie the times to Avhich Ave belong, and Avhose divisions, violent discussions, bcAAdlderment and hopes are our own. 190 PARIS. You will discover that during these two hundred years Paris suffers and changes in a manner very typical of the time. Her adventures are, as it were, the epitome of what Europe is passing through. The theatrical apparatus which feudalism puts on in its dotage, the useless plumes, the fantastic heraldry, the cumbersome trappings of the charger, the fool- ish embroidered bridle — all these paraphernalia of the fourteenth and fifteenth century chivalry are the life of her palaces and the gaiety of her streets. The tournament has taken the place of private war, and the whole appearance of the soldiery — in such times an excellent test of what society in gen- eral was feeling — is transformed. During these many earlier centuries, in which the knight had been simply bent upon his trade of fighting and upon its object, armor had been simple and useful. The out- ward appearance of the knight reflected the sim- plicity of heroic times. This spirit died with Saint Louis on the Tunisian sand. It had produced the Song of Roland and a hundred other majestic epics ; it gave us the Gothic, the Parliaments, the Univer- sities. It is there that an historian may place with so much security his admiration of the middle ages. But now this child-like nature which looked out- ward and was brave is replaced by the clearest evi- dences of decay. It is getting dark, the footlights are lit, and in a kind of false glare the sham heroes of Froissart come on to the stage. They fight one PARIS OF THE LATER MIDDLE AGES. 191 liardly knows for what, unless it is to have the op- portunity of making line phrases and of achieving the picturesque. Later, the beginning of diplomacy enters to make things worse, and a thousand dynastic conspiracies fill up the time, till at last a double figure, mad enough for any play, and yet the full represen- tative of national feeling, appears in Louis XL If the spirit which we shoidd find in the upper classes of Paris was of this nature, and if such figures are to lend color to her movement, we may naturally expect some similar phase in the buildings whose aspect and whose changes are the chief theme of this book. This expectation is not disappointed, but the background which architecture furnished to this fan- tastic time is nobler than the figures which it frames. The Gothic stoops, of course, to a certain littleness, but it increases in charm and gains in beauty what it loses in majesty. The simple spire, the strong, suffi- cient pillars, the just proportion of the thirteenth cen- tury building, have something about them as certain as the creed and as full of satisfaction as a completed love. These qualities the later architects fail to at- tain, but they were desirous of putting grace and charm and subtlety into their work, and they suc- ceeded. The pillars are too thin for what they sup- port, but this very insufficiency gives them the char- acteristic of fantasy. They spring up to immoderate heights, but it is in such deep roof-trees that one can best feel the spirit that haunted their builders. 192 PARIS. The carving is more delicate, the allegory deeper than what the earlier period could design, and they grow so perfect in the art of expression that there is produced in this false time a pair of statues which cannot, I think, be matched in the whole world. I mean the Madonna over the southern portal at Rheims, and the statue of Our Lady of Paris, which stands in Notre Dame. With the first a history of Paris is not concerned, and this is just as well, for it would be impossible to describe it in moderate terms. As to the second, it is one of the principal glories of the city. It stands at the corner where the southern transept meets the nave, and, as you come up the southern aisle, you see it all surrounded with lighted candles. It is upon coming closer and looking at the face that you understand the cause of this decoration. As the period closes architecture goes further and further along this road. The carvings jostle one another. Every church front is a kind of foliage of detail. The windows especially display this luxuri- ance. They attempt every manner of re-entrant curve, the lines pass one into the other, and there finally appears that effect of a fire burning which has given the last style of mediajval architecture its French name. This feverish close of the great three hundred years is best described in the phrase of Michelet, " The Gothic caught fire, leapt up in the tongues of the Flamboyant, and disap- peared." PARIS OF THE LATER MIDDLE AGES. 193 But while we have described this de-^^elopment of fourteenth and fifteenth century art as being less vain than the men for whom it was built, yet it must not be forgotten that the kind of building upon which all this lavish imagination was poured out indicates very well the social change. Such masses of detail are luxuries. Expense is the first character of these gems, and the flamboyant, exquisite as it is, could not have existed but for the growing evil of social con- ditions. Property was concentrating in great masses, and though (luckily) the means of production, espe- cially the land, do not get into fewer hands, yet the rich become richer, the poor poorer, during that period. The classes divide. The writing of romances and of histories, the admirable illuminations Avhich we cherish so carefully, the growing power of art — all these things are at the disposition of what has now definitely become a luxurious upper class. The old idea of a man in high position having a definite duty as the price of his dignity, the hierarchical concep- tion of the thirteenth century, still exists in the letter, ]jut the spirit is fast disappearing. The fatal line be- tween the upper and the lower clergy has been drawn. These churches that delight us were the playthings of rich dignitaries, and the closing energy of Gothic architecture is expended upon the chapels or upon the palaces of men who are merely rich. In the religious and civil tumult of the sixteenth century the people took their revenge. But that revenge did 13 194 PARIS. not settle matters, and we suffer to-day from evils which the fifteenth century })repared. It is then with such a society, growing in social differences, in luxury, in misery, in the power of ex- pression, that the Paris we are about to describe is peopled. What was the history of the city as this development, or rather decay, took place ? When we left the monarchy in the last chapter the work of consolidation and unity had been finally accomplished. The Capetian house had worked steadily towards one end for the better part of four hundred years, or rather it had during all that time been at the helm directing the natural course of the nation. By a striking coincidence the succession during all that period had been perfect. The task of guiding the national development is regularly handed down from father to son. The prince is crowned in the king's lifetime, and all this long line of kings is a continuous chain whose links are periods of increasing power. We have seen how the king's government succeeded in enforcing itself over all France. Philippe the Conqueror fought its last bat- tles. Saint Louis inherits its perfection. Philippe le Bel pushes it to the point of despotism. NoAv, in the first generation of the fourteenth cen- tury, when the work is thoroughly accomplished, the direct line ends, and, as though a kind of spell were connected with the Capetian succession, upon the failure of a direct heir, this great and successful effort PARIS OF THE LATER MIDDLE AGES. 195 of the dynasty goes through a hundred years of trial The hundred years' war comes directly upon the heels of the success, and we may compare it to the furnace in which a Avork of art is either perfected or destroyed, but which is necessary for it to reach its final purpose. Charles le Bel was the last of the direct line. It was necessary to cast about for a successor, and three claimants present themselves: Philip of Valois, Charles of Navarre, and EdAvard III, of England. It would not come Avithin the scope of this book to trace at any length the various values of these claims, or hoAV lightly the English King may have treated his legal rights. Suffice it to say that it is made the pretext for the beginning of those Avars which nearly ended in the coalescence of France and England. The motive of the English attack Avill be clear Avhen Ave consider the spirit of the time. There Avas a memory, loose in the matter of legal right, but strong in tradi- tion and sentiment, of the Angevin house. The kings of England had not been technically sovereigns of their French fiefs, but virtually these formed part of a united empire. These times Avere not far re- moved. Henry III., the son of the man who had lost the French possessions and Avho had himself fought to recover them, had been dead for only seventy years or so. French AA^as still the language of the court and upper classes, though English Avas rapidly superseding it. And above all there was a 196 PARIS. desire to " Faire Chevalerie." That spirit of which we spoke above, the theatrical knighthood of the fourteenth century, was strong on both sides of the channeL It is this last feature which lends so inde- terminate a character to the first part of the hundred years' war. Rapid raids going deep into the heart of France, followed by equally rapid retreats heavy with booty ; a lack of permanent garrisons, and, finally, as everybody knows, the clearing out of the foreigner from French soil. This earlier period of the wars, covering, roughly speaking, the latter half of the fourteenth century, might have passed with little eff'ect upon either country, save only for this. France Avas greatly impoverished and the nobility were hard hit in the great defeats. Nothing formative appears. Paris, vaguely con- scious of its mission, passes indeed through the strange episode of Etienne Marcel's rule. It is the first note of that civic attitude which will later make Paris lead France ; but it was out of due season and it failed, because even those who took part in it doubted the moral right of their action. StiU it was a memory to look back to and to strengthen further developments in the idea of the city. One may say that the Hotel de Ville arose in these famous riots, and that the House of the Pillars Avas the direct ancestor of the place where they plotted in the night of the ninth Thermidor and of the walls which the Commune de- stroyed. PAKIS OF THE LATER MIDDLE AGES. 197 With the next century a very different prospect opens on the war. England is ruled by English- speaking nobles, the Hou ^e of Lanca ster, and they must prove their right to usurpation by adding to the national power, while the attempt was peculiarly suited to a family whose genius was for diplomacy and intrigue, and who had in their blood the instinct which tells a conqueror the moment at which to strike. The old King spent his reign in affirming a very un- stable throne, surrounded by nobles Avho were his equals. The task of the French invasion was left to Henry V. Of all the circumstances favoring his attempt, none was more powerful than the condition of Paris and of the French court. These we will describe ; for, in order to follow the strange story of how the French crown fell into foreign hands, and of how, almost by a miracle, it was recaptured, it is necessary to appre- ciate what the Burgundian party meant and why P%i*is adhered to it. Ever since the time of Saint Louis, that is, ever since the unity of France under the crown had been achieved, the fatal custom had obtained of granting " appanage." The " appanage " Avas a great fief, lapsed from its old Feudal Lord, fallen to the King, and regranted by him to a brother or a son. This policy was imagined to be wise. It was thought that the immediate relation of the royal family would help it upon all occasions, and that this relegation of power 198 PARIS. was far more practical than any system of governors — which, in the conditions of the middle ages, would have meant so many potential rohols. But as a fact the "Tippanao'e " turned out more dangerous than the feudal family. It had all the vices of an independent fief, and added to these its ruler Avould remember the pride of the Royal blood but not his duty to the family of which he was a member. In a few genera- tions his house woidd grow into a distinct and almost foreign menace to the throne, and so to the unity of the nation. When John the Loyal was taken prisoner at Poictiers his little son had defended him in the battle, and in memory of this his father gave him the prov- ince of Burgundy in fee. In less than ffty years Burgundy was almost like another kingdom — not its people, but its policy — and the Duke of Burgundy is the overshadowing protector of the throne. Now, when Henry V. was about to invade France, the King, Charles VI., was mad — he had periods ^ff sanity, but his personal hold on the government Avas gone. From the Tower of the Louvre not the old familiar, if sometimes terrible, face of the King awed and controlled Paris, but rather there sounded the voices of two factions, each claiming to rule in the Mad King's name, and between these Paris had to choose. They were the family of Armagnacs — south- erners — and the Duke orBurgimdyVpeople. ' Into the treachery, the murders and the bitter personal PARIS OF THE LATER MIDDLE AGES. 199 enmity between these two we cannot enter here, but in brief Paris, upon whose decision at this stage of French history the whole nation ah-eadv depended, declared for Burgundy. The southerner has always meant for Paris the danger of national disunion, and again the Duke of Burgundy was at least a Capet. The choice was not ill-considered, and yet events proved it unwise. The Duke of Burgundy felt against the Armagnac a violent and personal hatred in which dynasty and nationality had nothing to do, and since the southern faction continued to hold the Dauphin, he declared for the English invader. Paris followed him even in this extreme step, and Henry V. was welcomed as he entered the citv. Lest this grave misjudgment should appear inex- plicable, it must be understood that the city saw in the advent of the Lancastrian the only opportunity for national unity and for the end of a disastrous struggle. It was only as a means of affirming the dynasty through the female line and being rid of the Armagnac that Henry was admitted. He was to marry the daughter of the Mad King, and his son was to inherit the crowns of England and France. These terms Paris actually applauded, and after his father's death the poor little child of less than a year old doomed with tainted blood, and heir to all the misery (if the wars of the Koses, was crowned in Notre Dame. All the world knows how this false step on the j)art 200 PAEIS. of the capital was redeemed by the Peasantry. The social differentiation which had cursed France with a clique of professional lawyers and diplomats had not destroyed the people nor lessened their hold on the soil. And while the upper class was achieving the ruin of the nation, Joan of Arc comes out of the new class of peasants Avho own the land, the direct ancestors of the proprietors of to-day, and saves it. Her story does not directly affect the city, save that she fell wounded in attacking its gate of St. Honore (close to where her statue now stands, in the Place des Pyra- mides), and that her success, though long after her death, changed the views of Paris as it did those of the Dukes. Richemont re-enters the city, and the English retreat fighting from the Bastille. Louis XI. at last inherits the peace that succeeds these victories. The figure of Louis XL though not the best is yet the most striking figure at the close of this period ; not as a fighter (for the time of that has passed) nor merely as a patriot (for that has not yet come), but as an upholder of the dynasty, as a true heir of the Capetians, this King, who was so deeply touched with his grandfather's madness, reconsoli- dates the nation under the royal power. In the brief period between his death and the Italian wars the Renaissance is already upon us, and the chapter of mediaeval France and Paris is closed. We leave the city and the nation safely pulled out of that furnace of the wars, but at this expense that PAEIS OF THE LATER MIDDLE AGES. 201 they will never live strongly again, save with a highly centralized government, and Paris in the three centuries between that time and the Revolution will be found steadily supporting her own hegemony and the necessity of a strong rule in one hand. As Ave turn to the detailed history of the buildings of the city during these two hundred years, let us begin Avitli the quarter which is the centre of the municipality, and which (with the Palais) is the prin- cipal interest of the time, I mean that which was later called the Hotel de Ville. In 1328 Clemence of Hungary, widow of Louis X., died in the ]\Iaison aux Piliers, on the Place de la Greve, and left it by will to her nephew, Guy, Dauphin of Vienne. His brother and heir, Humbert, being childless, ceded all his possessions to the King, Philip VI., in behalf of his grandson Charles, for a sum of money, and on condition that the Province of Dau- phine should be kept distinct from the CroAvn of France. From henceforth the eldest son of the royal family is called the Dauphin, and the House of Pil- lars becomes for a time the '' Dauphin's House." It was enlarged — probably about the middle of the fourteenth century — not towards the Place do la Greve but in the rear, where stood the Church of St. Jean, for a document of 1357 mentions the little street that had bounded this church on the east as being then the eastern liniit of the Maison aux Dauphins. This piece of evidence is of the greatest 202 PAKIS. importance, as the existence of a Hotel de Ville in Paris dates from that moment. Etienne Marcel, the famous Prevot des Marchands, during King John's captivity, who had done so much already to advance the power of the Bourgeois, liad determined to establish some sort of municipal centre or communal building, modelled on those of several Flemish towns, and the Maison aux Piliers, situated in the heart of the city and close to the principal port, was precisely suited to his purpose. The Dau- phin tried hard to prevent his house from becoming the headquarters of an already threatening faction, finally giving it to Jean d'Auxerre, in the hope that as the property of a private citizen it might escape ; but Marcel overreached him, and the document above referred to is nothing less than a record of the pur- chase, with public money, of the Dauphin's House. Within a year, when the Prevot had the artillery of the Louvre moved there, and transformed it into a sort of revolutionary headquarters, it is called "la Meson de la Ville," and with that phrase begins the long story of the Hotel de Ville. It was here that the people assembled after the murder of the Marshals of Champagne and Nor- mandy, in February, 1358, and when jMarcel ha- rangued them from the window they, from the Place de la Greve, replied by shouting : " We acknowledge the deed, and Avill abide by it !" And it was also here that in August of the same year, when the Dau- PAKIS OF THE LATER MIDDLE AGES. 203 phin had reasserted his power, Toussac and Macon, two of the Prevot's warmest supporters, were beheaded. When the revolution Avas suppressed the Dauphin allowed the Prevot des Marchands to remain at the Place de la Greve, but transferred some of his poAvers to his own Prevot de Paris, Hugues Aubriot, whose headquarters were at the Chatelet. The Hotel de Ville seems, however, from its incep- tion destined to be the core and centre of revolution- ary enterprises ; for when, during the minority of Charles VL, the people of Paris rebelled against the authority of the King's uncles, it was there they as- sembled and armed themselves with those leaden mallets from which the rebels got the name of maillotins. This time the punishment was severe. In the following year, 1383, when the King returned flushed with his victory over the Flemish Communes, one of his first acts was to install the Provost of the Crown in the place of the Prevot des Marchands, and for thirty-two years the Hotel de Ville appears in the public documents as the " House of the Provost of Paris," or worse still, the " King's Hotel at the Greve." In 1415, notwithstanding the general state of disorder and bad government, the municipal body of Paris succeeded in effecting the reorganization of tlie Prevote des Marchands. Paris once more gains possession of her Hotel de Ville, not to lose it again till nearly four hundred years had brought it to Thermidor. 204 PAEIS. During the English occupation the Place de la Greve, deserted and neglected, presents a most mel- ancholy picture. Sauval quotes a document dated 1430, whose significance he himself does not take in. It refers to the sole embellishment of the building during this period, when a certain room is decorated by Mahiet Biterne with the ship — the city's emblem — surrounded by lilies interlaced with roses, un- doubtedly the red roses of Lancaster, the mark set by the Duke of Bedford on the Avails of the Hotel de Ville. After the entry of Charles VII. the English taken at Pontoise were sent by hundreds, according to the Journal (Vun Bourgeois, to the Greve, tied hand and foot and drowned, ^' in the presence of all the peo- ple." Although Charles VII. absented himself from the capital as much as possible, and maintained the seat of his government elsewhere, it was in his name that a most happy transformation of the administrative body of Paris was accomplished, and the national unity re-established. In the month of July, 1450, the Prevot des Marchands and the four sheriffs ask the King's permission to appoint a commission for the purpose of examining all the ancient registers and documents of the Hotel de Ville, with a view to thoroughly reorganizing their body. The result was that by the close of this reign the municipality was established upon so firm a basis that in the next it PAEIS OF THE LATER MIDDLE AGES. 205 Avas able to render substantial service and support to the Crown. It was in fact upon the bourgeois that Louis XI. chiefly relied. From almost the moment of his coro- nation he set himself to gain their confidence and good-will. We find him taking part in the election of the Provost, becoming a member of the " Brother- hood of the Bourgeois," even taking supper in the Hotel de Ville Avith the Provost and sheriffs, and in 1471, Avith his own hand, lighting the great bonfire which (a custom older than Christianity) burned every year on Saint John's eve in the Place de la Greve. Less than tAvo years later Jean le Hardi, AA'ho had conspired Avith the Duke of Burgundy to poison the King, Avas executed on the same spot, and his head stuck on the point of a lance in front of the Hotel de ViUe. Here, too, took place the execution of the treacherous Constable of St. Pol, Avho, however, just before " little John," the executioner, cut off his head, publicly repented and asked the King's pardon. Louis, in order to keep his people in mind of the risks they ran in resisting him, and also of hoAv in this case the justice of the sentence had been recog- nized by even the victim himself, put up a column tAvelve feet high, on the spot where M. de Saint Pol had been executed, on Avhich were engraved his epi- taph and his last words. Meanwhile the Hotel de Ville was getting very much out of i-epair; during the last two or three reigns 206 PARIS. but little had been done for it, and now, moreover, its functions were increasing so rapidly that it liad become much too small. Fortunately money Avas not wanting under Louis XT. for public works. When royal visitors came to the capital the King paid all the costs of their entertainment ; the citi- zens were neither required to serve in the army themselves nor to send substitutes, and an act of 1465 provides against soldiers being quartered on them ; thus the city was able to spend its income upon itself. In 1470 work was begun on the Hotel de Ville, and the Maison aux Piliers, which was already more than three hundred years old, was thor- oughly repaired and enlarged. At the beginning of the reign of Louis XIL a gal- lery was built around the court, and the crumbling wood-work renewed, not however at the reigning King's expense, Avho merely took advantage of the improvements to give the Archduke of Austria a more imposing reception when he visited Paris, and who, moreover, required the city to pay all the costs. Charles VIII. made Paris contribute pretty heavily towards his Italian campaign, but Louis went much further. The seventeen years of his reign present a long series of demands, now on one pretext and now on another ; but Avith it all he continued to keep on good terms with the bourgeois. At the time of his third marriage the young Queen, Mary of England, was Avaited upon by the Prevot des Marchands and PAKIS OF THE LATER MIDDLE AGES. 207 four sheriffs, and laresented with the gift of the city, " silver-gilt plate to the value of about six thousand pounds." They ventured, moreover — a thing never done before — to ask her to do them the honor to dine at the Hotel de Ville. Accordingly, on Sun- day, the 26th of November, 1514, the first really royal repast Avas served in the old Maison aux Piliers, the Queen being seated at table with Louise of Savoy, mother of Prince Francis of Angouleme, who but a few weeks later was to become King of France. The residence of the Provost of Paris had fared no better than the Hotel de Ville as far as its preserva- tion went, for Felibien says that in 1460 the Chatelet had become so out of repair that the pleas had to be heard in the Louvre. The Avork of reconstruction seems to have progressed but slowly, for in 1506 it was still far from completed, though Corrozet notes that in that year the " seat and jurisdiction of the Provost of Paris " was re-established at the Chatelet. One description of the building states that the vari- ous offices, quarters for the guard, and so forth, were on the east, while the prisons were on the lower side, overlooking the Rue St. Denis ; the cells under the prisons and the cellars along the river-bank were used as store-rooms, either for arms or provisions. The prisons just mentioned were more than twenty in number, each having its especial name, as the Griesche, where only women were confined ; the Fin- 208 PAEIS. d^aise, described as the worst of all the Chatelet dun- geons, " where the air was so fetid that a candle Avould not burn ; " the Gloricftc, and so on. As a rule persons Avere only detained here while awaiting trial ; after that they Avere liberated, executed or com- mitted to other prisons, according to the nature of their sentence. Prisoners had to pay a regular tax to the gaoler for their keep ; this was fixed by the state, and varied according to their station or means. Articles taken from thieves or found were kept at the Chatelet forty days, if not reclaimed they were then sold, and the price turned over to the Crown. The entrance to the prisons was, as it had been for centuries past, by the arched passage-way from the Rue St. Leufroi. Persons accused of crime were first conducted to a room on the ground-lloor, called the lower gaol or morgue, where they were examined attentively by the agent of the police (" on les 7nor- guaient^^), so that they could be recognized if they escaped. A good deal later this room was used for the reception of bodies found in the Seine. From very early times, however, some spot was set aside for this purpose, and a document of 1372 refers to the fact that the Sisters Hospitallers of Ste. Cathe- rine were obliged by their rule to receive the corpses of any persons who had either died in prison or on the public highways, or been dro^A'ned in the river, and to provide tliem with shrouds, and have them buried in the neighboring cemetery of The Holy Innocents. PARIS OF THE LATER MIDDLE AGES. 209 In front of the Chatelet on the north was an open square, where to-day is the short " Avenue Victoria." It was called the Porte-Paris or Apport-Paris, and there from time immemorial a market had been held. It was bounded on the east by the facade of the Grande BoKcJierie or Slaughter-House, and on the west by a continuation of the Rue St. Denis, which still bears the same name. From there the Pont au Change led over the river to the Cite. It had been rebuilt in Avood in the be- ginning of the fourteenth century, and two hundred years later had become so out of repair as to be (ac- cording to Dulaure) useless. Still it had a long life for a mere trestle bridge, for it was again rebuilt, or possibly only strengthened, in 1510, and so effectu- ally as to resist the inundation that carried away the Pont aux Meuniers some ninety years later. The Hotel du Chevalier du Guet stood north-west of the Chatelet, between the present Avenue Vic- toria and the Rue de Rivoli ; it was, as its name in- dicates, the headquarters of the 7-oyal tvatch, a body of militia whose duty it was to patrol certain parts of the city at night. The commander or chevalier was appointed by the Provost of Paris. The Jour- nal Sous Charles VI. mentions a certain Gaulthier Rallard, Chevalier du Guet in 1418, who when on duty always had four or five minstrels march ahead of him playing on loud instruments, " which seemed to the people to be a very strange thing, as it Avas 14 210 PARIS. like telling wrong-doers to get out of the way of his coming." Charles VII. bestowed the emblem of the lately- suppressed Order of the Star upon the Chevalier du Guet and his servants ; they had the exclusive priv- ilege of Avearing it, and could also have access to the King at all hours, " even booted." South of the Chatelet, close to the river, stood the Parloir aux Bourgeois, the meeting-place of the municipality before its regular reorganization, and adjoining it, the Chapel of St. Lefroi, belonging originally to the parish of St. Germain I'Auxerrois. The mention of this last church naturally leads us to the Louvre, which was its iuimediate neighbor on the west. The reigns of Philip le Bel's first and last sons had terminated under very similar circumstances, but in the latter case the child born at the Louvre after its father's death proved to be a girl, and there were, moreover, no uncles ready to carry on the direct succession from father to son. The throne remained in the same branch of the family, but a new dynasty was established. Immediately on the death of Charles lY. Edward III. of England, nephew of the late King, claimed the regency. The Peers of France meeting to consider the question, appointed Philip of Valois — grandson of Philip le Hardi and the only heir to the throne through the male succession — regent, with the understanding that in case the child should be a girl PARIS OF THE LATER MIDDLE AGEvS. 211 he was to succeed to the crown. On the 1st of April, 1328, a httle princess was born, " whereat," says Froissart, " most of the kingdom was greatly trou- bled." Not so Philip ; he was already in possession of the Louvre, which meant nearly the same as hold- ing the crown itself, and he had, moreover, the sup- port of the chief barons and the twelve peers. He was crowned without opposition at Rheims in the fol- lowing month. As de Montfort knew to his cost, Philip of Valois kept his political prisoners in the Louvre, but their history hardly belongs to so purely domestic a chron- icle as this; other prisoners that more nearly concern us occupied a little vine-shaded building in one cor- ner of the palace garden, the " lion's house," as it was called, and there was housed the royal menagerie until the time of Charles V., when the animals Avere moved to the garden of the Hotel St. Paul, and the Rue des Lions got the name it has ever since gone by. After King John's defeat and capture at Poictiers, the Dauphin returned to Paris, and establishing him- self in the Louvre, opened negotiations with Marcel and the States General. The Provost at first ap- peared with a strong, armed following, but later, fearing that even these would not be sufficient to protect him should the Louvre once fairly hold him in its grasp, he declined to venture fui'ther than St. Germain I'Auxerrois. We have already seen how in April, 1358, he succeeded in ca})turing the artillery 212 PARIS. stored at the Louvre, and transferring it to the Hotel de Ville ; his next move was more important still. Having managed to force the Dauphin out of the Louvre, he took measures to prevent its ever again becoming the redoubtable stronghold of the Crown that it had been hitherto, and this he effected by simply extending the city Avails as far as the site of the present Tuileries Gate in the Carrousel. Thus commu- nication with the country outside the city was cut off, and the terrible prison found itself in turn a prisoner. When the Dauphin, after the downfall and death of Marcel, returned to Paris he allowed these arrange- ments to stand, but, since the Louvre had lost its importance as a fortress, he determined to transform it into a palace, albeit a fortified one. The moat was cleared and repaired, and the Tour du Bois, corresponding to the Tour du Coin, constructed, as Avell as the Avail along the bank of the Seine be- yond the point where that of Philip-Augustus stopped. It may be remembered that the Fortress of Philip- Augustus had on its eastern and northern sides only low, battlemented Avails. The first Avork undertaken after the moats had been repaired Avas that of pull- ing these Avails doAvn (after extending the facades of the Avestern and southern sides for a considerable distance) and erecting in their stead tAvo Avings cor- responding in height, size and appearance to the others. Thus the Louvre has noAv become a com- plete rectangle, built up on all four sides. PARIS OF THE LATER MIDDLE AGES. 213 The great tower in the centre was left intact with its moat, no attempt being made either to heighten or to ornament it, only it was connected Avith the main bnilding on the north hy a sort of covered gal- lery supported by a single arch of masonry. On the left, and nearly touching it, the architect, Raymond du Temple, had placed a covered stairway built against the wing that overlooked the garden. The lower part of this stair led to the first four floors ; each landing was paved with tombstones like those in the galleries of the cemetery of the Innocents, and furnished with a bench, so that the King might rest when mounting to the top stories, as he had to do occasionally when the high rank of his guests made it necessary to quarter them in his own apart- ments. The narrow stair at the top led to the attics, and even to the little lead-covered terrace which opened out from the garrets, " la terrasse plomee, par oil le Roy monte an galetas," as it is called in an account of the head-carpenter under date of 1364. The walls of the stairway were carved and decorated, niches contained statues of the King and Queen and other members of the royal family, and a carved stone window, ornamented with the arms of France, overlooked the court. The state chamber of the King, of great size and magnificently fitted up, was in this new wing on the north, while the apartments of the Queen were in 214 PAEIS. the wing overlooking the river, called " le grand pavilion." The small chapel or oratory of the King, as well as his library and " study," was also in the north wing which overlooked the gardens. The Queen had her private chapel as well, while attached to the suite occupied by each " Child of France " was a small oratory, usually situated in one of the towers and surmounted by a little spire. Immediately on the birth of the Dauphin Charles caused a suite of apartments, nearly as large and richly furnished as his own and the Queen's, to be set aside for his use. In the tower was a chapel, and, what none of the others had, in the steeple over- head a clock, the second to appear in Paris, that in the tower of the Palais being the first. This chapel was situated just where the southern extremity of the Salle des Cariatides is noAv. It was not long, however, in spite of all the additions made by Charles V., before the Louvre became too small for the King's numerous suite, especially when, as was more and more frequently the case, he had royal personages to entertain. Thus Charles VI. spent almost his entire reign at the Hotel St. Paul; after this the Louvre ceased to be used by the court, and was relegated to the royal princes. The Due de Guienne, for instance, lived there long enough to completely transform the Grand Salle and open a doorway on to the court. So many princes and princesses of the blood claimed PARIS OF THE LATER MIDDLE AGES. 215 the right to occupy an apartment — a complete suite, that is — in the Louvre that the servants and various officials were crowded out ; these occupied buildings of all styles and sizes outside the moats, and, grouped under the general name of Basses Cours, threw a sort of girdle of noise and life and movement around the stately fortress, from whose towers floated banners bearing aloft the emblem of the lilies of France. In front Avas an open space (converted by Charles VI. into a garden) and stairs leading down to the water's edge, where all the materials used in the neAV constructions were landed. On the north, as we have said, Avas the garden, called the large garden, to dis- tinguish it from a smaller one on the south. Charles Y. was exceedingly proud of his enlarged an'd embellished Louvre, and especially of his library, Avhich occupied three floors of one of the towers, and which was valuable enough to arouse the cupidity of the Duke of Bedford, who carried off all but about fifty of its thousand and odd volumes, first to the Tournelles and then to England. -During the English occupation the Louvre sus- tained serious injury ; it was in fact too much out of repair for Charles VII., on his return to his capital, to live there, even had he wished to. Louis XL, not caring to undertake the costly operation of restoring it as a palace, contented himself with fitting it out as a prison, and from the reign of Charles VIII. it 216 PARIS. ceased to figure at all as a residence, or even as a royal prison ; the Duke d'Alenf;on, confined there by Louis XI., was in fact the last prisoner of the great tower. But as the Louvre falls into disuse another fortress- palace at the opposite end of Paris rises into im- portance — that which was to become, by an accident, so famous under the name of the Bastille. It was in anticipation of an attack from the Eng- lish that Etienne Marcel hastily enclosed the new suburbs beyond the wall of Philip-Augustus on the right bank of the Seine. This remarkable piece of work was accomplished in the short space of four years, and at comparatively small expense. The new wall was lofty, crenelated, and furnished here and there with watch-towers, attached to the battlements by heavy iron clamps. A deep and wide moat filled with water guarded the approach to the walls, which were further protected at regular intervals by mas- sive square towers. Each gate was flanked with round towers, and acted as a sort of ordinary fortress; these were called bastille or hastide (Latin hastilia). Two of these gates, which were more strongly forti- fied than the others, were named the Bastille St. Denis and the Bastille St. Antoine. The new wall began at the Tour Barbeau — which stood on what is now the Quai des Celestins, directly opposite the market, and was a gate of Philip- Augustus' wall — continued along the right bank of the river as far as PAEIS OF THE LATER MIDDLE AGES. 217 the Tour do Billy, then took a sharp turn to the north-west, and describing a wide semicircle, includ- ing both the Temple and the Louvre within its limits, joined the old wall at a point about half-way between the modern bridges called des Arts and Carrousel. In July of the year 1358 the Dauphin, who had succeeded in eluding Etienne Marcel, was encamped with quite a strong force in the neighborhood of Paris, engaged in checking the advance of the Eng- lisli, and also of the army headed by Charles the Bad, King of Navarre. Marcel, whose popularity had been waning for some time, Avas now openly accused of conspiring to betray Paris into the hands of the King of Navarre. On the afternoon of the 31st he appeared before the Bastille St. Denis and called upon his former supporter, Jean Maillard, to deliver up the keys, but Maillard had been won over to the Dauphin's side, he refused, and, as Marcel with his band of fifty or sixty followers began retreating towards the Bastille St. Antoine, seized a banner bearing the arms of the city, leaped on horseback, and rallying the citizens about him with the cry of Monfjoie Saint Denis, gave chase. The Prevot knew that if he could once get possession of the St. An- toine gate he was safe, as it was there that he pro- posed admitting Charles of Navarre and his troops, but the soldiers on guard refused to open the gates, and Maillard coming up shortly, the whole band were cut to pieces. Three days later the Dauphin entered 218 PARIS. Paris. As he passed in front of the Church of Ste. Catherine du Val des Ecoliers he saw three bodies, stripped and mutilated, lying exposed on the paving ; they were Marcel and his two companions, Giffart and Jean de I'Lsle. These, together with the bodies of various other persons executed for having sup- ported Marcel, Avere thrown into the Seine, at the Port of St. Paul. When the Dauphin succeeded his father in 1364, under the title of Charles V., he brought the experi- ences of a long and troubled regency to aid him in the task of governing Paris. One of his first acts shows that the lesson of Marcel's rule had not been thrown away on him. In order to oppose some sort of check to the powerful and sometimes seditious in- fluence of the Prevot des Marcliands, the representa- tive of the people, he appointed as Prevot de Paris the representative of the Crown, Hugues Aubriot, a man of marked ability, intelligent and active, and on whose loyalty he could rely implicitly. Aubriot at once set about completing and adding to the fortifications of Marcel, and as the new quarter containing the Hotel St. Paul now seemed to be not only very difficult to defend, but especially exposed in case of a siege, he advised the King to convert the Bastille of St. Antoine into a regular fortress, which could likewise be used as a state prison. The first stone was laid in the month of April, 1370, and by 1374 the building was finished. At first it con- PARIS OF THE LATER MIDDLE AGES. 219 sisted only of two great towers, each seventy-three feet in height, which flanked the old gate of the Bas- tille St. Antoine, left intact as well as the draw- bridge. A little later two other towers like the first were built opposite them, overlooking the Quartier St. Antoine, also provided with a gate and a moat. But Aubriot was not satisfied. The entrance to the city traversing the middle of the fortress by means of this double gateway seemed to ofi'er an element of danger ; he accordingly built four other towers, and connected the whole with walls of solid masonry, of the same height. The Porte St. Antoine was left on the right, and served to defend the fortress. All documents relating to the defences erected by Aubriot have been either lost or suppressed, but it is safe to affirm that the Bastille with its eight towers complete was standing in 1380. Charles VI. regained possession of his capital in 1382, and from his reign the Bastille is used almost exclusively as a state prison, with a governor appointed by the King. During the early years of the fifteenth century it was the object of endless skirmishes between the two factions of the Armag- nacs and the Burgundians, each rightly consider- ing it the key to Paris. It remained, however, in tlie hands of the King. On the night of the 29th of May, 1418, when the massacre of the Armagnacs, incited by the Duke of Burgundy, had begun, it sheltered for a moment the escape of the Dauphin, 220 PAKIS. for the Provost of Paris, Tanneguy du Chatel, rush- ing into the neighboring Pahiee of the Hotel St. Paul, where the young Dauphin lay asleep, seized him, half-dressed, and carried him off to the Bastille in his arms. During the English occupation the Duke of Exeter was placed in command of the Bastille, Avhich, how- ever, seems not to have played any part in the mili- tary operations of the English. In 1464, once more garrisoned by Frenchmen, it resumed its functions of state prison and defense to Paris. It Avas in September of that year that Louis XL, lying in the Hotel des Tournelles (near where the street of that name now stands), was all but lost through his own soldiers giving up the Bastille to the Duke of Burgundy's troops. The plot was discovered by the Provost of the Merchants — that is the head of the municipality — and from that moment Louis places his dependence on his Parisian Militia of a hundred thousand men. But as a fortress the days of the Bastille were numbered. The Faubourg St. Antoine increasing very rapidly, the time came when the great pile found itself hemmed in on all sides by a densely populated district. As a defense for this district it was useless, but its artillery could and did command it, and so there grew up that feeling of hatred and fear, which the Bastille inspired in the people of Paris for more than three hundred years. Although PARIS OF THE LATER MIDDLE AGES. 221 its guns were only used to announce the peaceable entries of kings and queens, of bishops and ambas- sadors, the common people and the bourgeois per- sisted in regarding them as a menace, and the build- ing itself as the symbol of royal oppression and tyranny, directed against themselves. Charles V. had removed his residence to the neigh- borhood of the Bastille. Here he bought a large house from the Count d'Etampes, which the new Prevot des Marchands, Marcel's successor, and the sheriffs had undertaken to pay for with money fur- nished by the city. To this the Dauphin added a number of other buildings, with their grounds, courts, and dependencies, so that when the walls around his new palace were finished they enclosed six or seven great hotels, twelve galleries, eight gardens, six yards and a number of courts, the largest of which, the Coiir des JeuXj was used for military exercises. This great establishment reached from the Port of St. Paul to the Rue St. Antoine, Avhich it followed to the east as far as the Bastille, but did not trespass upon the grounds of Celestins lying south. On the modern map it would be bounded by the Quai des Celestins, the Rue St. Paul, the Rue St. Antoine, the Rue du Petit Muse as far north as the Rue de la Cerisai, and on the extreme east by the Boulevard Bourdon ; the space covered by the Celestins Barrack, a part of the Boulevard Henry IV., and all the ad- joining houses, was the property of the Celestins. 222 PARIS. The Church and Cemetery of St. Paul and the Grange of St. Eloi, standmg close together on the north-west, were also left intact. Charles V. lived in this palace throughout his en- tire reign ; he seems to have felt more safe there from the plots of the Prevote des Marchands and up- risings of the people ; he was, moreover, close by the headquarters, at the Port of St. Paul, of the Hanse Parisienne, a corporation that had always lent liim its loyal support. Even when he had occasion to hold his court either in the Palais de la Cite or at the Louvre, it is stated that he always returned to the Hotel St. Paul at night. He was succeeded in 1380 by his unfortunate son, Charles lo Bien-Aime, who here passed, almost without interruption, t]ie forty- two years of his long, wretched reign, during thirty of which he was subject to periodical attacks of insanity. During the last eleven years of his life the poor King, now left by his wife and children entirely in the care of servants, lived like a prisoner in his own palace. On his death, however (October 20, 1422), he was given a grand funeral ; the body lay in state for nearly three weeks before being taken to Notre Dame. When the Queen died (also in the Hotel St. Paul), thirteen years later, she had become so unpopular among the Parisians that her body, escorted only by two or three servants, was put by night in a small boat and carried off to St. Denis, where it was given " the burial of any simple demoiselle." PAKIS OF THE LATER MIDDLE AGES. 223 When Charles VII. entered Paris in 1437, after the evacuation of the English, he showed no desire to occupy either the Hotel des Tournelles, whose last tenant had been the Duke of Bedford, nor the Hotel St. Paul, filled with painful associations both of his father and mother, but established himself at the Hotel Neuf close by on the Rue du Petit-Musc. (It took later the name of Hotel de Bretagne, "vvhen Charles VIII. gave it to Anne of Brittany.) But in fsict Charles le Victoriux did not like Paris, and stayed there as little as possible. Then came Louis XI., who, notwithstanding the Patents of Charles V., by which the Hotel St. Paul was always to be royal property, began its alienation from the crown by giving a part of the Hotel de la Peine to his Chamberlain, and from then on this hotel ceased to be the residence of the court. The Church of St. Paul (called originally aux Cliamijs) was entirely rebuilt during the latter part of the fourteenth and early part of the fifteenth cen- turies ; the principal relic, a black font wherein at least two Kings of France were baptized (John the Loyal and Charles V.) is now in the Church of Medan, near Poissy. The establishment of the Celestins, mentioned above as adjoining the Palais de St. Paul on the south, was founded by Garnicr Marcel in a very small way, but afterwards so enriched and enlarged by Charles V., who built the church, dormitory, re- 224 PAKIS. fectory, cloister and chapter house, that he was con- sidered the founder, and so represented in a statue over the principal entrance to the church, -with his wife beside him, holding in his hands a model of the building. The Celestin Convent was the seat of the King's notaries or secretaries in all matters relating to the canon law, and as such acquired enormous wealth. The church, built in a rather heavier and ruder style than most other buildings of the period, was nevertheless filled with magnificent tombs, statues, stained-glass windows and rich decorations. It be- came very much the fashion to be buried there, and many prominent persons who had made gifts to the convent claimed the right to receive their last com- munion, die and be buried, wearing the dress of the order, in which, moreover, they were represented in bas-relief on the tops of the flat tombs. This cus- tom continued until the sixteenth century. . The Hotel des Tournelles, which lay just north of this group, and which we have already mentioned more than once, was built by Charles V., and took its name from the quantity of little towers with which the architect had crowned it, more by way of orna- ment than with a view to defense. It stood on the site of the old palace of the Chancellor Pierre Orge- mont. It was surrounded originally by a small wood, called pare des Tournelles, which gave its name to the present Rue du Pare Royal that opens from the Rue Turenne, at the end of the Rue Sevigne. PARIS OF THE LATER MIDDLE AGES. 225 The palace Avas enlarged and beautified by the Duke of Bedford, Avho lived there throughout the occupa- tion of Paris by the English, preferring it to the Royal Palace of St. Paul, even Avhen, by the death of his brother, Henry V., he became Regent of France. Although Louis XI., on the night of his formal entry into Paris in 1461, slept, according to custom, in the Palais de la Cite, he made the Tournelles his residence on that and all subsequent visits to the capital. Under Charles VIII. the court remained most of the time in the Chateau de Blois, built by him. But Louis XII. had the greatest liking for the Tournelles Palace, where, in fact, he spent the happiest years of his reign in the company of his beloved Anne of Brittany ; here he brought his third wife, the youth- ful Mary of England, and here he died on January 2, 1515, the crieurs des corps running through the streets of Paris ringing their bells and calling out mournfully, " Good King Louis, father of his people, is dead !" The district lying north and west of the Bastille, " the Marsh," had undergone great changes since the suppression of the Order of Templars in 1313. Their great commandery, become the property of the Knights Hospitallers of St. John (at this time called the Knights of Rhodes), remained, it is true, for two hundred years pretty much as they left it, and for half a cen- tury the towers were used as State Prisons, but the 15 226 PAKIS. great estate which had formerly belonged to it was divided into three parts when the wall of Charles V. {i.e., the wall originated by Etienne Marcel) enclosed the whole within the city limits. Two of these divis- ions were covered with streets and houses, while the third was left unbuilt upon till the time of Louis XIII. The palace of Charles de Savoisy, Chamberlain of Charles VI., in the present Rue Pavee, was pulled down under circumstances which give striking proof of the autocratic power of the University at that time. In July, 1408, some students were going in procession to the Church of Ste. Catherine du Val des Ecoliers, when a servant of the Chamberlain's re- turning from the river, where he had been bathing a horse, galloped through the midst of them and spat- tered one of the company with mud; this one promptly struck him with his fist. The servant called his mates, and they chased the students to the church door. As Savoisy declined to dismiss his men, the Rector of the University cited him to appear before the State Coun- cil, with the extraordinary result that he was con- demned to pay a fine of fifteen hundred pounds to the students wounded in the melee, one thousand pounds to the University, to require three of his people to do public penance in shirts and with torches in their hands in front of three churches, and to pull down his dwelling. Although the King gave his consent to the rebuild- ing of the hotel in 1416, the University still ob- PAKIS OF THE LATER MIDDLE AGES. 227 jected, and when a hundred years later consent was finally obtained, it was only on condition that an in- scription recording the sentence should be placed over the main entrance. A little distance to the north stood the Hotel de Clisson, built for the Constable in the reign of Charles VI. with money given him for the purpose by the late King. The Prevote of Paris presented the land on which the hotel was erected, or rather reconstructed out of the house of the Grand- CJiantier du Temple^ Avhicli already stood there. Dur- ing the English occupation it was confiscated and given to the Duke of Clarence, brother of Henry V. We have seen how the Cemetery of the Holy In- nocents had been enclosed by Philip-Augustus with a wall in order to keep out the roughs and hangers-on of the Halles close by, but as it was left open during the day, these disorders soon recommenced. The neighborhood Avas always the resort of idlers and knaves, who found there convenient nooks, especially in the cemetery, for spending the night, and plenty of dupes attracted by the market, innocents, as they were called in an old play on the word. The " Jour- nal d'un Bourgeois " describes the coming of a Cor- delier called Brother Richard to Paris, and how he preached at the Innocents, a Vendroit de la Dance Macabre, on Sunday, beginning at five in the morn- ing and keeping on till between ten and eleven o'clock, to a crowd of five or six thousand persons. In the sixteenth century the people living in the 228 PARIS. adjoining Kue aux Fers brought an injunction to compel the Chapter of St. Germain to barricade the gate of the cemetery in that street in order to pre- vent the poor people from lodging there at night, as they brought contagious diseases and indulged in dis- orderly conduct. We have spoken of the charnel-houses, for tlie re- ception of bones unearthed in digging fresh graves, which had been jjlaced along the Avails in the Ceme- tery dcs Innocents ; in the arcades of one of these, bordering on the Rue Ferronnerie, Avas the original representation of the Dance Macabre.* Abbe Du- four quotes a notice in the Journal de Paris sous Charles VI. et Charles VII., which, under date of 1424, says that this wall painting Avas begun about August and finished in the follo\A'ing Lent ; he at- tributes it to Jean d'Orleans. In the divisions Avere painted liA'ing figures representing all the different grades of society from Popes and Emperors doAvn, each accompanied by a skeleton, Avhile beloAV ran a rhyming dialogue, the address made by Death, and the reply of the living. On the principal entrance to the cemetery AA-as carved, in 1408, the legend of the " three dead and the three living," suggested by Orcagna's " Triumph of Death " in the Campo Santo of Pisa. This sculpture Avas executed by order of the Due de Berry in memory of his nephew, * Dance, in the sense of a procession ; macabre, from an Arabic Avord signifying a place Avhere there are tombs, — a cemetery. PAKIS OF THE LATER MIDDLE AGES. 229 Louis, Duke of Orleans, murdered by his cousin the Duke of Burgundy three days after they had supped together, in sign of reconciliation, at the house of their old uncle. North of the cemetery, and close to the Halles, was an open space, the place mix Marchands, in the centre of which stood a cross and a pillory. This last was a two-storied octagonal tower, the upper part having a high window in each division ; in the cen- tre was a large iron wheel, by whose means the frame (through round holes in Avhich the head and hands of the offender were thrust) could be made to revolve slowly so that all the spectators should have equal opportunities for beholding the edifying show. The exhibition extended over three market-days, three hours every day, the wheel being turned every half hour. Here took place as well some of the public execu- tions. The executioner had the right to live on the Plme de Pilori and nowhere else, and was also allowed a certain fixed amount of each kind of merchandise ex- posed for sale in the adjoining Halles. The pillory and scaffold had to be rebuilt in 1516, when the people became so indignant with a certain Fleurant, who had to strike a number of times before sever- ing the head of a criminal, that they burned them both down, the executioner being suffocated by the smoke in the cellar underneath, where he had taken refuge. At the foot of the great stone cross hard by 230 PAKIS. the condemned formally assigned their property to their creditors and had the green cap placed on their heads by the executioner. Without this ceremony the transfer was not considered valid. Following the Rue St. Honore to the west, a few minutes' walk would have brought us to the new quar- ter, once a faubourg, but now enclosed by the walls of Charles V. The swine-market and gallows be- longing to the jurisdiction of the Bishop were moved outside the walls to the small hill formed from the earth dug out of the new trenches, only the sheep- market being left in its old place, and before long a number of houses and hotels were put up. The large gardens of the College des Bons Enfants ran nearly as far as the Rue des Petits-Champs, which we now call Rue Croix-des-Petits-Champs ; facing this street, and backing on the garden, were some houses belonging to a loyal supporter of the Constable d'Armagnac, one de Bonpuits, who held, under the Constable, the office of sheriff. In the open space before his houses he erected a large stone cross, which stood there until the Revolution. When the Burgundians got possession of Paris he was obliged to flee, and all his property was confiscated. The hotels of his patron in the neighborhood, the principal one of which stood at the corner of the Rues St. Honore and Bons Enfants, met with a similar fate ; Jean sans Peur acquired them for his son, the Count de Charolais. Under Louis XT. the property PAKIS OF THE LATER MIDDLE AGES. 231 was divided up, and passed into the hands of a great many proprietors before the main hotel finally came into the possession of Richelieu. The great Hotel d'Angennes stood further down the Rue St. Honore, being, in fact, bounded on one side by the walls of the town. This hotel, probably put up by Regnauld d'Angennes, Captain of the Louvre under Charles VL, was confiscated by the English and given to a Seigneur de Villiers, Simon Mohrier, who had become their ally. On September 8, 1429, when Jeanne d'Arc led the army of Charles VII. against Paris, this person- age was one of the most active in driving back the besiegers. The Duke d'Alen^on, with a body of men, ap- peared before the barriere St. Denis, in order to create a diversion, Avhile the Maid, clad in armor from head to foot, and bearing her standard ornamented with the lilies of France, advanced with a troop of chevaliers towards the Porte St. Honore. After cross- ing the road running in front of the swine-market, and planting some cidverins on the mound alluded to above, she made a rapid advance towards the walls, driving back the English, panic-stricken at the sight of her. A fierce skirmish foUoAved ; the Duke d'Alen^on and the Count of Clermont expecting a sortie, stationed an ambuscade behind the hillock where the swine-market stood. But the besieged had all they could do to defend themselves without 232 PAKis. thinking of taking the offensive. La Pucelle had now crossed the outer trench and stood on the edge of the moat, whose waters lapped the foot of the city walls. Gauging its depth with the staff of her stand- ard, she called for " Logs, timber, something to make a bridge and help us to mount the walls !" She her- self was the first to make this dangerous attempt, calling meanwhile for her " gentil Dauphin" to come to her aid. But the King failed to appear, and her own people lent but a half-hearted support. " Yield," she shouted to the Parisians ; " yield now while you can, for if by night time you have not surrendered, we will enter the city whether or no, and every one shall be put to death Avithout mercy !" But in spite of these brave Avords the city held out, and, worse still, Jeanne Avas presently severely wounded by an arrow from a cross-bow, and fell from her horse, cov- ered with blood, on a spot lying a little to the north of the present Place du Theatre Franf;ais, a stone's throAV from Avhere her statue stands to-day. According to some accounts she not only lay there until even- ing, still encouraging her men Avith her A^oice although unable to stand, but Avas abandoned by them AA-hen the attack AA'as finally giA-en up, only the Duke d'Alenyon coming back after dark and taking her to St. Denis. But a more likely Aversion tells us that La Hire, Dunois, Xaintrailles, and all the most promi- nent knights of her company fought valiantly to pre- vent her from falling into the hands of the EngHsh. PAEIS OF THE LATER MIDDLE AGES. 233 Whichever is correct, the royal army, utterly dis- couraged by their repulse, raised the siege four days later and withdrew in the direction of St. Denis. Simon JVEohricr, although an ardent supporter of the English to the very end, seems to have by some means made his peace Avith Charles VII., for Ave find him re-established in the house on the Rue Honore after the Constable Richmond had Avon back the capital. Mohrier died probably in 1460, and in the same year the Angennes, Seigneurs of Rambouillet, were given back their hotel, of which they retained peaceable possession for a century and a half. The establishment of the Quinze-Vingts, an insti- tution for the blind, founded by Saint Louis outside the walls of Philip-Augustus, has been spoken of in a preAdous chapter. The new fortifications put up by Etienne Marcel, called the Avail of Charles V., in- cluded not only the LouA^re Avithin the city limits, but the Hotel de la Petite-Bretagne and the Hospice des Quinze-Vingts standing to the Avest. The grounds of the latter (a vast territory which on the modern map Avould reach from the Rue St. Honore on the north to about the middle of the Place du Carrousel, and from the line of the Pont de Solferino and the Rue Castiglione, on the Avest, to the line of the Pont du Carrousel) Avere cut in half by the ncAV Avail. In 1356 the municipality ordered a party of bourgeois to have trenches dug from the old tuileries (or tile- kilns), situated just about where the Pavilion de 234 PARIS. Lesdiguieres is now, to the FiUes-Dieii • beyond these, ■walls were built a little later, strengthened at inter- vals with strong towers, projecting beyond the line of the fortifications, and other devices such as over- hanging balconies of stone and watch-towers, from cover of which projectiles could be showered down upon the enemy, if they had gained the second moat. In addition to these there were small constructions at the foot of the trenches, backing on the slope of the fortifications, manned Avith archers Avho could thus protect the approaches. It was from one of these outposts that Jeanne d'Arc was wounded in the at- tack of September 8, 1429. The wall of Charles V. terminated Avith the Tour du Bois, corresponding to the Tour du Coin of Philip- Augustus' wall. It closely resembled the Tour de Nesle, apparently being built after the same model. It was in three stories, terminating in a machicolated platform. On one side it was flanked by a turret, ending in a Avatch-tower AAdiich rose above the plat- form, reached by a stairway in this turret. The Tour du Bois dates from 1383, the period of the Maillotin riots ; at this time the Avails Avere com- pleted, but it Avas a recognized necessity to finish the Bastille and to build a fortified tower close to the Louvre, so that the two main approaches to Paris might be Avell protected. The name. Tour dii Sois, came from one of those wooden fortresses called "bastides" or " Chateaux de PARIS OF THE LATER MIDDLE AGES. 235 Bois," which, more rapidly constructed and at less ex- pense, usually preceded tlie more lasting one of masonry. It was built at the expense of the city, as much by way of punishment for the revolt as in continuation of the custom of requiring Paris to contribute out of its own pocket towards its own " tuition." Like the walls, the Tour du Bois Avas then muni- cipal })roperty. The third floor was used as a store- room for arms and armor, and the two others were rented out to a private individual, with the under- standing, however, that he was always to allow free access to the sluice, by which the water for the trenches was controlled. This tower, which is not only the best known part of the wall of Charles V., figuring as it does in all the maps and engravings of the period, but acts as a connecting link with the important changes of the succeeding hundred years, is the point at which we will close our survey of the northern bank at that date. We have described its principal buildings, the Louvre, the Hotel de Ville, the Bastille, the Chateletj and its various quarters, the Marais, the Rue St. Honore, and, lastly, the line of the Tuileries ; let us now cross over to the Island of the Cite, beginning with the Palace. When we last saw the Palais de la Cite Parliament was sitting in state to confirm the regency of Philip the Long and arrange for the succession. In 1356, 236 PAKIS. forty years later, we find King John presiding over the first " lit de justice " held there, and giving sen- tence against Charles the Bad, King of Navarre. The King, wearing his crown and royal robes, Avas seated on a sort of bed or couche de hois, covered with a rich stuff embroidered in fleurs de lis, placed on a dais no less magnificent. Although such a short time had elapsed since the Palais had been almost rebuilt, it was now necessary to enlarge it again ; this was done by raising the roof and converting the lofts into habitable rooms. It was there that the Dauphin had his apartments at the time of the revolt under Marcel, February 22, 1358. The Provost at the head of some thousands of armed workmen whom he had assembled in St. Eloi, close by, forced the Palace doors, and, making his way to the Dauphin's room, murdered the two marshals of Normandy and Champagne, before his eyes. Etienne Marcel is said to have saved the Dauphin from a similar fate by placing his own red and blue cap, the colors of the city of Paris, on his head and himself taking the Dauphin's. The rebels meanwhile dragged the bleeding bodies of their victims down the stairs, and after passing through the long gallery connecting the Ste. Chapelle and the Grand Salle, the Mercerie da Palais, as it Avas called, flung them on the great marble table, where they stayed for several days, no one having the courage to claim them. PARIS OF THE LATER MIDDLE AGES. 2-37 Two years later, when the revolt was crushed, Charles was obliged, notwithstanding these horrible associations, to again occupy the Palais de la Cite. The Louvre had not yet been altered, nor the Hotel St. Paul built. With a view to greater security, however, he reorganized the office of concierge or bailiff, appointing Philip de Savoisy " bailli royal." All the ke^ s of the Palace were given into his charge, except those of the main entrance, which the door- keeper kept. Among the many perquisites attach- ing to this office that of the right to help one's self to '' coal, logs, and cinders " from the royal kitchen may have given rise to the right claimed by " portiers " to-day to the first log " la premiere buche." The most important function of the haiUi was the exercise of justice " haute et basse " over a territory bounded by the Palace itself, the two arms of the Seine, and the moat running along the eastern fa9ade between it and the Riie Barilleries. He was supplied with all the paraphernalia, irons, scaffolds, prisons, and dungeons, these latter equalling in horror even those of the Chatelet. Some of them were situated under the reservoirs, so that the Avater constantly filtered through, others were deep underground, and almost all were raised above the level of the galleries, so that they could only be entered with ladders. Each one could hold about fifty prisoners. Two wells (brought to light early in the present century under the Tower of Bon-Bee) served as oubliettes, their 238 PARIS. bottoms being on a level with the Seine, and the sides studded with sharp pieces of iron, which caught and tore the flesh of the victim as he was hurled down. When the river was flooded, as for instance in 1326 when Charles TV. was kept prisoner in the palace, the water would flow up the channel high enough to clear it of any bodies lying there. There Avere also great entertainments at the Palace so long as it was a royal residence. Probably the most magnificent one was that given by Charles V. in honor of the Emperor Charles IV. and his son, King of the Romans. On the first evening a mag- nificent supper was served to the various princes and eight hundred attendant knights. On the following day, we are told that the Emperor was suffering so from gout that he had to be carried to hear raa?s in the Ste. Chapelle, and to kiss the Holy Relics pre- served there. The festivities celebrating the marriage of Charles VI. and Isabella, of Bavaria, and her coronation in the Sainte Chapelle, and those held during the visit of the Qiieen of England, and when the Emperor Sigismund passed through Paris, were all given at the Palais de la Cite. On these occasions everything in the Palais had to give way, the courts Avere obliged to suspend their hearings, and Parliament to sit else- where, usually at St. Eloi, or at the Augustins, on the left bank. When Sigismund came, however, in 1416, the times were so hard that very little could be done PAKIS OF THE LATER MIDDLE AGES. 239 in the way of entertainment, and instead of inter- rupting the session of Parliament, the King invited him not only to attend, but, by way of amusement and distraction, to preside, much to the indignation of the Lords of the Grand Chambre, who did not at all enjoy being presided over by a foreigner. Queen Isabella, to whom nothing bringing in reve- nues came amiss, took the office of Concierge du Palais for herself, with all privileges and perquisites attaching thereto. The document recording this fact bears date of 1412, and as late as 1808 the part of the main building adjoining the rooms of La Tour- nelle, on the Quai de FHorloge, was called hotel Isabeau, having without doubt been repaired and occupied — possibly even built — by the Queen-Concierge. There are many allusions to the Sainte Chapelle during this reign of Charles VI. Thus the spire, made of wood and covered with lead, was renewed, gifts were made to the shrine, concessions, privileges, none of which, however, saved it from desecration and pillage under the Burgundian riots. " How many precious objects," exclaims Jerome Moraud, " were stolen, ruined, or burned, in the reign of Charles VI. !" The insurgents, called in a document of that year (1417) Communes, forced an entrance by one of the doors of the Tournelle, on the north side of the Palace, and after murdering the higher officials con- fined in the Tower — the Constable of France, the 240 PARIS. Chancellor, and others — massacred the prisoners in the Conciergerie and a number of lawyers of the Parliament, and then pillaged the Sainte-Chapelle. At the consecration of Henry VI., of England, which took place there, the officiating Bishop, Win- chester, allowed some of the royal household to carry off the magnificent plate that had been used in the ceremony. When Charles VII. made his entry into Paris, he found the statue of Henry V. of England occupy- ing a niche in the Grand, Salle, in the series of the Kings of France, and allowed it to remain, content- ing himself v/ith merely mutilating the face. It was here that, under the same King, a curious scene took place in 1440. A woman had been going about through the towns and villages of France, pro- claiming that she was Jeanne d'Arc, and the people w^ere beginning to believe her. In order to put an end to the imposture, the King had her arrested and brought to Paris, wdiere, mounted on the marble table, she was made to confess to the crowds assem- bled for the purpose that she was not the Pucelle, but was married, and had two sons. The clerks of the Basoche used the marble table for their stage wdien acting on certain days of the year those farces Avhich got them into trouble under Louis XL This curious institution, the court of the Basoche, had its origin under Philippe le Bel ; the clerks, acting as lawyers and judges themselves, set- PARIS OF THE LATER MIDDLE AGES. 241 tied all questions arising between their own members, or Avitli outsiders. It was modelled exactly after the regular courts of justice, had its attorneys, advocate- general, chancellor, and so on, the presiding officer bearing the title of ^' King of the Basoche," until Henry HI. took it away from him. The name Basoche has been traced to the Latin Avord basilica, originally indicating a seat of justice. This minia- ture court held its sessions in the Salle de St. Louis, and its curious annual " review " in the great court of the Palace, another annual celebration, in which the clerks of the Chatelet took part, was held on the last day of May, when a " May-pole," erected the previous year was taken down and a new one put up. The Coiir de Mai gets its name from this custom. In the beginning of his reign, Louis XL had the Palace Gardens laid out anew (the grape arbors especially having fallen into ruins), apparently with the idea of making it his residence ; but after 1465, when Parliament had had the audacity to disapprove of his revocation of the Pragmatic Sanction, he was too much offended to occupy the building where that body held its sittings, and only went there on certain special occasions, such as the feasts of Saint Louis, or Charlemagne. These two kings he proposed to hold in great veneration, and had their statues re- moved from the series of the Kings of France and placed in the little chapel he had fitted out at the northern end of the Grand' Salle, adjoining the apart- 16 242 PAKIS. ments of Saint Louis. " It is there," says one his- torian, " that they say the Mass for Messieurs." Louis had also a small oratory put up in the lower church of the Sainte-Chapelle, through the little grated window of which he could see the altar, and take part in the services without being seen. Under Charles VIIL both Palais and Sainte-Cha- pelle were largely restored. The west fa(;ade of the latter was almost rebuilt, a new rose-window replaced the original one, and the balustrade above it and the two little spires on the gables were renewed. It is at this time, too, that we find the first mention of organs in the Sainte-Chapelle, and the outer stair, by which it could be entered directly from the court, obviating the necessity — which again exists to-day — of going through the Gallerie Merciere. An addition to the Palace of the same date was the extension of the Chambre des Comptes, at the end of the Sainte- Chapelle court, to the north. The apartments of Saint Louis were still preserved, and the bedchamber occupied by him on his wedding- night was always used by his successors on the night of their formal entry as King into Paris. But as a regular residence, the Palais is unused after the Eng- lish wars. It becomes only the courts of Law, which it still is. When Louis XII. returned from Italy in 1500 he brought with him a monk, a native of Verona, named Fra Giovanni Giocondo, under whose directions the PARIS OF THE LATER MIDDLE AGES. 243 Grcancl' Chambre was magnificently restored, and so lavishly decorated and gilded that it became known henceforth by the name of la chamhre dorce. At the foot of the hall hung the picture of the crucifixion, by Van Eyck, afterwards removed to the first cham- ber of the Court of Appeal. Fra Giovanni also erected by order of Louis the three wings of the Chambre des CNjmptes, the first only having been put up under Charles VIII. The King was represented on the facade, Avith his device, a porcupine, and below the inscription, " Ludovicus hujus nominis duodecim, anno suai setatis XLVI.," showing that the building must have been finished in 1508. Another and still more important work in which the Italian artist had a hand was the reconstruction of the Pont Notre Dame. In 1412, the ancient Grand Pont having entirely disappeared, except for some vestiges of the arch nearest the right bank, the city got permission from the King and the monks of St. Magloire to rebuild it ; and a year later the King, accompanied by his court, baptized it Pont Notre Dame. Although in the description of Guilbert de Metz, written in 1422, the new bridge figures as a model of beaut}- and strength Avith its seventeen roAvs of thirty piles each, by 1440 it had to be ex- tensively repaired, and fifty-nine years later it fell into the river, carrying with it the sixty-odd houses which lined its sides, and a number of their occupants. 244 PAEIS. The blame of the catastrophe belonged to the Prevot des Marchands and the Sheriffs, for they had Ijeen told a year before, by some master-carpenters, that a great many of the piles were rotten and Avould soon give Avay if not rencAved, to which warning the mu- nicipality paid no attention. Arrested and tried, they were condemned to pay such* enormous damages that they are said to have died bankrupt, and still in prison. A commission was appointed to consider the reconstruction at once of the bridge, which the King- wished this time to be of stone. This commission met on several occasions, and discussed plans for raising the money. It was suggested that they should ask the Pope to give them indulgences to sell ; that a special tax should be levied ; a public subscription be opened, and so on ; but nothing was decided. The question was settled by the King, who issued letters-royal the following month, imposing an extra duty on all fish and cloven-footed animals sold at the Halles, and on every boat-load of salt brought up the Seine beyond the limits of the Grenier de Verron. All the leading architects and master-work- men of the day were called on to furnish plans, and a commission was appointed to overlook the work. Fra Giovanni Giocondo must have been an important member of this body, for it is to him that the mag- nificent results are commonly attributed, though the register of the Hotel de Ville shows that the plans were by no means entirely his. The first stone was PAKIS OF THE LATER MIDDLE AGES. 245 laid in 1500. Seven years later the bridge was fin- ished, and four years after that the last of its houses. The new bridge, according to all contemporaneous accounts, was the most magnificent thing of the kind in Europe. It was built in six great arches, the piers resting on massive piles, and protected on each side by great triangidar blocks of stone, whose points were designed to split up floating masses of ice. On the bridge were sixty-eight houses of stone and brick, each containing a cellar, a shop, a balcony, a kitchen, two chambers, and a loft ; and on each one was writ- ten its number, in gold characters. Here we have the first attempt to number houses in Paris, and what seems quite remarkable, it was done by the most ap- proved method of our day, i. e., with the even num- bers on one side and the odd on the other. In the middle of the bridge were statues of Our Lady and Saint Denis, and it was paved just like the streets, " so that strangers thought themselves still on solid ground." As to the centre of the island, most of the changes which took place in this part of the cite during the period of which we treat, were in the nature of addi- tions to, or restorations of, old bu.ildings. The Made- leine is rebuilt, the ancient Halle de Beance, on the right as you go toward the Petit-Pont, has become a storehouse for grain, and for the leather buckets and ladders to be used in case of fire in the city — the first record, this, of an organized defense against fire 246 PARIS. in Paris. The existence of this grain depot had at- tracted a great many bakers to the neighborhood. One document shows twenty-four of them established close by ; they scattered, however, when, in the six- teenth century, the building was rented to the well- knowm printer, Geoffrey Tory, who moved his work- rooms 'there, from the house on the Petit-Pont, together with that sign, so dear to the heart of the bibliophile, of the Fot casse. The cathedral church of Notre Dame, meantime, remains much as we saw it last. During periods of prosperity it is enriched by gifts, statues are erected, votive offerings placed on its altars. Jean de Montaigu presents the great bell in 1400, and names it Jacqueline, after his wife, and on May 1, 1472, we find it ringing the Angelus. After the defeat of Poictiers the bourgeois of Paris vow a taper the length of the cite to the Virgin, in the hope of bringing the evil times to an end. Here on the day after the tragedy of the Ballet des Ardents, at the Hotel St. Paul, when the King so nearly lost his life, we see the Dukes of Berry, Burgundy, and Orleans, coming in procession, bare- foot, all the way from the Porte Montmartre, to hear Mass and return thanks for the King's escape. The little Enghsh Prince Henry is crowned King of France in 1431, and six years later Charles VII. presents himself before the altar of Notre Dame to return solemn thanks to God for the recovery of his PARIS OF THE LATER MIDDLE AGES. 247 Kingdom. It became the fixed custom of his suc- cessors, on their state entry into Paris, to withdraw from the brilliant cortege at the Pont Notre Dame, with only a few members of the suite, and in the quiet and solitude of the great Cathedral to spend a short time in prayer to God. The Petit-Pont has been twice carried away and twice rebuilt since we saw it last, and the Petit Chatelet has been the scene of a brutal massacre of its prisoners by the Burgundian rioters in 1418, Avhen no less than four bishops were among the victims. We will now pass in rapid review the changes and improvements that took place in the domain of the University between the early part of the fourteenth and the beginning of the sixteenth centuries. The School of Medicine, which we left wandering about from place to place, and sometimes even hold- ing its meetings in Notre Dame, has at last acquired a building on the rue de la Blicherie through the generosity of one of its own faculty. It was opened in 1483, and in the course of the next twenty years or so lecture halls, an amphitheatre for anatomical clinics, and a small garden fur medicinal plants Avere added, after which the medical college remained in pretty much the same state for more than two hun- dred years. A little to the north a new college has been founded in the fourteenth century for the benefit of poor students from Cornwall to the number of ten. Its 248 PARIS. walls are still standing at No. 20 Rue Domat, which, however, in the days of the college Avas called Rue du Platre ; following this street to the Rue St. Jacques, a few steps to the left will bring us to the site of the Chapel of St. Yves, dedicated at about the same time by a few pious natives of Brittany to the patron saint of lawyers. The walls of the interior used to be hung, it is said, with brief-bags, placed there in token of gratitude by litigants who had won their suits, thanks to the good offices of the Saint. The Rue de St. Jean de Beauvais, which still re- tains its ancient name, and at present. runs from the Boulevard St. Germain to the Rue des Ecoliers, is called from the college founded there in 1372 by a Bishop of Beauvais, Jean de Dormans, who became Chancellor of France and a Cardinal. Saint Francis Xavier (before Ignatius Loyola induced him to join the Order of Jesuits) taught in the College of Beau- vais. For many generations most of the jurisconsults, magistrates, advocates, and others learned in the law in Paris, received their training in the law schools Avhich stood in this street from an early period. At first only ecclesiastical law was taught, for a bull of Honorius (confirmed in 1580 by the "Ordonnance de Blois ") forbade instruction in civil law to be given anywhere but at Orleans or Poictiers. For the many ItaHans attracted to Paris the Col- lege des Lombards was founded on the Rue des PARIS OF THE LATER MIDDLE AGES. 249 Carmes, iu the fourteenth century, by a Florentine bislioj) named Ghini. In the reign of Louis XII. its principal was the great Hellenist, Jerome Aleandre. The old Church of 8t. Etienne du Mont was pulled down to make way for the existing beautiful build- ing, whicli, Ix'gun iu 1517, took a hundred years to complete. During a t('rril)le thunder-storm in June, 1489, the neighboring bell-toAver of " JMadame Sainte Genevieve an Mont de Paris" caught fire; the wood- work was all consumed, and the lead witli which it was overspread, as well as the bells, were melted "qui estoit pitie a voir." Contributions for the repairs were asked for throughout not only all Paris, but all France, and Pope Sixtus IV. proclaimed plenary indulgence to every one visiting the church on cer- tain days and giving something to the fund. The College de Lisieux stood to the west ; it Avas founded in 1356 by Guy d'Harcourt, Bishop of Lisieux, and enlarged a hundred years later by the d'Estouteville family. Still further west, across the Rue St. Jacques, yve find the Convent of the Jacobins flourishing greatly, and by Etienne Marcel's time reaching out in every direction, some of its buildings being actually in the fields ; the renowned Provost, however, made sad havoc in it. In order to carry on his city wall, some chapels, a part of the cloister and the infirmary were demolished and the cemetery suppressed. Charles V. bought the Hotel de Bourg- moyen in 1362 for the Jacobins, who pulled it down 250 PARIS. and built an infirmary, paid for by Jeanne de Bour- bon, and in the reign of Louis XII. the order suc- ceeded, much against the will of the municipality, in getting the King to cede to them the Parloir aux Bourgeois. In the Quartier de St. Andre des Arts the Church of the Augustins was rebuilt by Charles V., and the Church of St. Andre des Arcs (or Arts), ceded in 1345 by the Brothers of St. Germain des Pres to the University, is frequently made the starting-point for those stately processions by which the faculty sought to impress upon the bourgeois and people of Paris an idea of the strength and importance of the University. Directly opposite the church a Bishop of Autun had established a college named after his diocese, for fifteen students — five to study theology, five philos- ophy, and five the canon law. A curious inventory of the furnishings of this college in 1462 tells us that the library contained about two hundred volumes, some on theology, an equal number on jui'isprudence, and the rest philosophical works, notably commen- taries on some of Aristotle's treatises, but not a single history, no woi'k of the heathen poets, nor any of those epics of the Middle Ages so popular at the time. The act of donation of the College de Boissi, dat- ing from the period of Etienne Marcel and the Jacquerie, states that it is intended only for poor boys of humble birth, " as we and our fathers were." The first printing-presses of Paris were set up in PARIS OF THE LATER MIDDLE AGES. 251 the Sorbonne by Ulric Gering, Martin Krantz, and Michel de Colmar, and from these issued the first books printed in the capitaL The Convent of the Mathurins was rebuilt by Robert Gaguin, Minister-General of the Order, in the fifteenth century, and author of a history of France still consulted by students. In 1340 the Order of Cluny acquired the ancient Palais des Thermos, and about a hundred years later Jean de Bourbon, natural son of King John and Abbot of the Order, began to build on a part of the ruins the Hotel de Cluny, which, when completed about the end of the fifteenth century, was consid- ered one of the most magnificent establishments in Paris. It forms to-day the best example of the period. Opposite it stood the old Hotel d'Harcourt, with its ample gardens, Avhich the people ignorantly called the Palace of Julian the Apostate. North-west of the Hotel Cluny, on a site that is now in the middle of the Boulevard St. Germain, directly opposite the opening of the Rue Boutebrie, stood the ancestor of the Observatory of Paris. In 1371 Maitre Gervais, canon of Bayeux and of Paris, and physician to the King, Charles le Sage, founded a college for natives of the diocese of Bayeux, some- times called the College de Maitre Gervais, and some- times College de Notre Dame de Bayeux. Here Charles endowed two scholarships for the study of mathematics, the holders to go by the name of 252 PAEIS. " King's scholars/' the only conditions laid down be- ing that they were to study such works on astronomy as were not forbidden by the University, the King himself providing the necessary instruments and charts. South of the Rue Saint Victor was the college of Cardinal Lemoine, where the students celebrated every 13th of January the generosity of the founder and his brother. One of them personated the Cardinal and wore his robes at the Vesper service ; a supper followed in the evening, to Avhich all the old scholars were invited, and the fete was carried on the next day with speeches, recitations, distributions of sugar- plums, and so forth. Outside tlie walls, a little east of the spot Avhere the present Rue Clovis opens into the Rue du Car- dinal Lemoine, David, Bishop of Murray in Scot- land, founded a college in the fourteenth century for students of his own country. On the south-west, the site of a part of the present Ecole Polytechnique, was the wealthy College de Navarre, whose origins were described in the last chapter. In 1354 the University deposited its treasure and archives there, lately removed from the Abbey of Ste. Genevieve. During the English wars this college was rifled, and its masters and scholars dispersed. Charles VII. and his successors rebuilt it. As the College de Constantinople, probably insti- tuted for the benefit of poor natives of Asia and PARIS OF THE LATER MIDDLE AGES. 253 Greece come to Paris in search of a Christian edu- cation, had but one scholar in 1362, it was ceded to Jean de la Marche and his nephew, who repaired the buildings and founded the establishment which hence- forth Avent by their name. The Order of the Carmelites, which Ave last saw es- tablished in tAA^o modest houses on the Rue Montague Ste. Genevie\'e, built in the middle of the fourteenth century, through the liberality of the AvidoAv of Charles le Bel, a great church and cloister. The Queen gave for this purpose not only a large sum of money, but her " croAA^i, the fleur-de-lis she Avore when she AA-as married, her girdle, her jewels — pearls, diamonds, and other precious stones." With this we will close our notice of some of the colleges of this period. We have seen in the last chapter how a Seigneur de Nesle had built himself a palace on the left river- bank adjoining the Abbey of Saint Germain, and close to the great tOAver of Philip Hamelin (soon called by his name), and Iioaa^ it subsequently became the prop- erty of Philippe le Bel. King John made the Hotel de Nesle his residence for a time, and it Avas there that Raoul, Count of Eii and of Guines, and Constable of France, Avas be- headed by his orders. In 1380 it passed into the hands of the Duke de Berri, uncle of Charles VI., who transformed it into a magiiiHccnt palace, and added a number of acres of land lying outside the 254 PAEIS. city walls, for the stables and other out-buildings. This enclosure was called the Sejour de Nesle. It was probably at the same time that a stone bridge replaced the wooden one thrown across the moat be- longing to the wall of Philip-Augustus, and that the great stone gateway was built close to the tower that went by the name of Porte de Nesle. The Sejour of Nesle was destroyed by the Cabochiens in 1411. In 1422, the year of her husband's death, we find Isa- bella of Bavaria holding her court in the Hotel de Nesle, and giving fetes in honor of the King of Eng- land in his character of heir to the throne of France, and all the Avorld knows Villon's rhyme. There re- mains nothing more to chronicle of the southern bank save that the Fair of St. Germain des Pres was established in the latter part of the fifteenth century, by the brothers of the order, who erected a hundred and forty stalls or booths on a part of the grounds of the Hotel de Nesle ; and the building of the Pont Saint Michel by Charles V. between the years 1378 and 1387. The point at which we leave Paris with the close of this chapter is the end of the Middle Ages. The idea which precedes the thing is stirring in her, some artists are thinking in the terms of antiquity ; already they knew that in Italy the colonnades were rising and the domes were multiplying from the unique ex- ample at Florence. But Paris, whose mind was changing, yet kept her form. Had you passed PARIS OF THE LATER MIDDLE AGES. 255 through Paris on the night when the " father of the people was dead " you would have had everywhere about you the narrow mystery of Gothic streets. The houses overhanging and timbered would have hidden the sky, and that spirit in which Europe had attempted to reach heaven would still be with you mournfully in its decay. You would have seen spires beyond the roof, and here and there the despairing beauty of the Flamboyant at its last effort, the jut- ting carved windows of the rich, or the special addi- tions of porches at St. Jacques or at the Auxerrois. But even if you had been in that midnight ram- ble, of the popidace; had Italy been unknown to you, and for you the new classics undiscovered ; had the new discontent and fantastic hopes of Europe been with you nothing but a sidlen irritation against the priests and monks, even then you woidd have felt that the Paris around you belonged to a past ; that it was out of place, in danger of possessing relics, and in the light of day your eyes would have wel- comed change. It was this spirit in all the people that permitted the Renaissance to work its century of change all over Europe; the beautiful mystery which had fed the soul of the west for three hundred years had lost its meaning, and empty symbols disturbed the curiosity of the young century. It is for this reason that all men who have Avell described the end of the Paris of St. Louis have made their descriptions fall in with the spirit of 256 PARIS. night. Victor Hugo shows you Paris moonlit in the snow from the towers of Notre Dame ; its little wind- ing streets like streams of black water in breaking ice, its infinite variety of ornament catching the flakes that had fallen. Stevenson shows you Paris moonlit in the snow from the point of view of poor Villon wandering after the murder, and afraid of wolves and of the power of the King. The whole spirit is that of the night. But the armies are going into Italy, we are to have Bayard and Francis, a Medici will rule in Paris, and the long troubling dawn of quite a new day is coming upon the city. The Keformation, the period of the buc- caneers, the stories of western treasure, the sixteenth century, which Voltaire has so admirably called " a robber clothed in crimson and in cloth of gold." THE MEDICEAN PERIOD. 257 CHAPTER VI. THE MEDICEAN PERIOD. The sixteenth century is, all over Europe, the con- flict between two principles that cross and intermix, have a hundred ramifications and reactions, but re- main, if one goes to the origins of the discussion, distinct and opposite. They are the international principle and the principle of local autonomy. Why had they come into conflict just at this epoch ? Mainly because, after centuries of development, the European nations had now finally difl'erentiated and recognized themselves. The Middle Ages were cos- mopolitan — all their theory and their every institu- tion. A thousand dialects had one common tongue, Latin. A hundred thousand villages had their com- mon link of feudalism, a hierarchy leading (in theory at least) to a common head, the empire. The symbol and centre of this unity was Rome. But three hundred years had brought about the nationalities. Which of the two forces is about to win the battle ? Neither, luckily for Europe. They are to fight fiercely for a hundred years and to calum- niate each other without mercy. They are to take religions, later social diff"erences, as their banners; but in the end the centrifugal and the centripetal forces balanced each other, and (to borrow a metaphor from 17 258 PARIS. astronomy) no nation " fell into the sun," nor did any " fly off into space ;" their intense forces of at- traction and repulsion resulted in a rapid movement, but a movement of rotation, a closed orbit, and civil- ization (thanks to that result) remains to-day a " sys- tem " and not an anarchy of infinitely distant parts. In the quarrel England and Italy suffered most. England, for more than a hundred years a definite nation, possessing an intense local patriotism, well- to-do, content, and lying to the outer side of Europe, flew out with violence. She yet remains the Nep- tune of Europe, and seeks some of her light from the outer parts of the world. The Reformation (which was the one great effect of the intense national feeling) takes her with power, as it does, in a differ- ent manner, the principalities of North Germany; she gathers herself into herself, and, like the outer planets, establishes a certain microsmic system of her own. Italy, divided in a hundred ways, the latest of all the nationalities to confirm her unity, hardly knowing any bond between her various divisions save the feel- ing that the rest of Europe were " the barbarians" — Italy, again, the seat of the papacy and the province of Rome the old Sun, becomes the type and rallying- point of the centripetal force. Thus the desire for national churches and national isolation expresses itself for two hundred years by an imitation of the English experiment, the desire for an international system — the imperial memories of Europe — fall back THE MEDICEAN PERIOD. 259 upon something equally vigorous, equally new ; I mean the Italian Renaissance. France Avas, as she always is, the battle-field of either party. She grew to be a nation most intensely individual, and yet one most intensely determined to rely upon the cosmopolitan method. For three cen- turies she has kept this double character ; the revo- lution which she personifies, with its basis of furious patriotism and its purely abstract conceptions, is an example. France learnt the Renaissance through the Italian wars, she finally brought to Paris an Italian queen, and in that one character of Catherine de Medicis you may see summed up the Roman influence upon France during the great struggle of the religious wars. Paris on her material side (like France in the moral order) divided the new forces. Paris, north- ern and local as she was yet, gave in the St. Barthol- omew the most signal example of a passionate — an almost delirious — determination to maintain unity. But it was a passion and a delirium closely connected with the opposite desire, I mean with sentiment of national integrity. It Avas not only the Protestant, it was also the Southerner and the noble who were massacred in that moment of madness. Paris saw the Italian architecture of the Louvre, she also (almost alone of the great cities of Europe) made a desperate effort to continue the Gothic. Catherine de Medicis built her Tuileries — but from 260 PARIS. their cupolas you ■would have seen a forest of spires. The Renaissance worked hardly in Paris, and pierced through a highly resisting medium. What we are about to follow then, in this chapter, is a struggle which descends to the very houses and streets themselves, a struggle between Paris Catholic and Paris skeptical, a warfare betAveen that part of her which was (and remains) intensely conservative, with that part Avhich looks to the south and accepts new things. The whole summed up in a persistent desire to remain the head and the rallying centre of the French nation. Such is the character of this confused and critical time. A time whose reUgious aspect is only the most important out of very many, and whose troubling effect upon the city we shall trace in the confused mixture of the pointed arch and of the colonnade, of the flamboyant and the Italian fagade. The streets alternate between the narrow winding lane of the Boucherie and the great Italian plaza of the Car- rousel. The uncertain destinies of Paris fluctuate at the same time between the new and the old, and the whole period is one of an unsettled quarrel, re- flected in the architecture and in the plan of the town. Let us first consider its eff'ect upon the Hotel de Ville. Mention has been made in the last chapter of the great banquet held there on the 26th of November, 1514, in honor of the new Queen Mary of England. Two of the guests were Louise of Savoy and her THE MEDICEAN PEEIOD. 261 son, the young Duke of Valois, son-in-law of the King. It was the last event of the reign in con- nection Avith the Hotel. In January Louis XII. died, and on the 15th of February Francis I. made his state entry into Paris. A few days later the city presented its customary " gift " to the new King, who in this instance had indicated very plainly just what form it was to take " le roi I'avait pie9a, advise, et ordonne lui-meme," and had, moreover, asked for a very handsome addition in the way of plate for his mother. In return for these tokens of esteem from his " bons bourgeois " the King issued letters confirming the Prevot des Marchands and " Sheriffs " of Paris in their jurisdiction over the com- merce of the Seine, and in their right to render de- cisions ; he also gave them permission to establish a prison in the Hotel-de-Ville, as they complained of the inconvenience of having to send persons arrested within their jurisdiction to the prisons of the Con- ciergerie, " qui sont grands frais." During the first fourteen years of this reign the Hotel-de-ViUe is alluded to constantly in connection with the King's incessant demands for money, which, as in contemporary England, was necessary to the government of a rapidly-developing society. Again and again are the officers of the municipal body sum- moned to discuss there the granting of a fresh sub- sidy ; now for the entertainment of some royal guest, now for the King's personal expenditures, now for the 202 PARIS. cjueen-mother, and especially for the army. These (hTihoratioiis always emled in the same way. The King got what hf wanted. It was probably in the reign of Louis XI. that the Parloir an Bourgeois, aft* r being transferred fn>m its old (juarters on the left bank and established for a tim*- near the ('hat<'let, had finally join«'«I the other municipal body of Paris in the Hotel-de-\'ille, a circumstance that no doubt made the alttrations of 1470 a matter i»f urgent ne- cessity. \\\ ir>*JJ> the ancient Maison aux I'iliirs had, however, not only fallen utmost into ruin, but was again far t<»o small for its various functions. ( hi tlic I. '{til of |)ecember, ncconlingly, tin- magistrates a>k till- King to i.ssue "letters of ex|)ropriation." af- fntiiig a numbt'r of the adjoining housrs. In the following year eleven of these are pidled down, and in 153.'^ letters-patent authorize the seizure of the "saillyi' lb' rKgli>e du St. Hsprit." which interfered with the plans for the jiew fa<;ade. This fa<;a«le was to terminate on the south or right in a s«piarc j)avilion one story higher than tin* main building, and span- ning the Hue du Martroy by an arch so as to leave a free passage through to St. .lean. A similar pavilion and archway on the h-ft or north siile was to give access to the chajtel of St. Ksprit. This plan was tlie basis of that picturesque seventeenth-century front which is so famili.ir to the student. As the King an