From Paris: Its Sites, Monuments and History, compiled from the principal secondary authorities by Maria Hornor Lansdale, With an Introduction by Hilaire Belloc, Illustrated; Philadelphia: The International Press, The John C. Winston Co., 1898; pp. 125-188.
PARIS : ITS SITES, MONUMENTS AND HISTORY
125IT is necessary to deal in this one short chapter with the story of the city during a period as marvellous and as fruitful as has ever changed the civilization of the west. It would be possible — we had almost said it would be necessary — to write a volume on the three hundred years which we must compress into the space of a few pages.
It may be remembered that at the beginning of the last chapter we spoke of the great “valley” that characterized the history of Europe between the days of the Roman Empire and our own. It was remarked that in the declining road on the far side of that depression the civilization of the Empire had fallen and decayed upon every side, and we noted a certain turning-point at or about the first generation of the eleventh century, after which the whole of society leads upwards again towards a kind of perfection. To that first process, with which we have just dealt in the preceding chapter, the name “dark ages” is very properly given; to the second, upon which we are now entering, the name “middle ages” (though it is a term of the vaguest significance, and calls up no particular 126 picture in the mind) must be applied, simply because it is that to which the historical reader is most accustomed.
But the term “early middle ages” seems to connote a set of ideas from which we are very far indeed 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-rising 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 simplicity the fourteenth century is theatrical and the fifteenth simply vicious. It produced characters not only of such an altitude, but such a quality, and those secure in such conspicuous and eminent places; it allowed the true leader his place so readily, and even with 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 perhaps it was the one in which the more oppressed 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 rigorous 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 was 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 power 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 blind, 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 been made a patriot saint, for all the world like Hoche 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 volunteers 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, with very few exceptions, the early Kings are hard fighters; but still, till the great change of the twelfth century, they are only 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. Montlhéry was all but independent, Enghien was a tiny kingdom, and one tower of the one, the hill of the other, are visible from the Mont St. Geneviève to-day. As for their great vassals, 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-making 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.
129So through the eleventh century 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 village 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 torpor. The “Dust of Villages,” already somewhat united by the Hildbrandine 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 varying 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 130 that vast emigration; and when, with the last years of the old century, the code of Roman law is rediscovered, Europe is ready for the changes which the pandects are to produce.
This discovery must certainly be made the starting-point for observing the effects of the new development in European life. As we have said, all Europe was awake. The code alone would never have revolutionized society, but the Roman law falling upon a society already alert, vigorous, attentive, and awaiting new things, had a most prodigious effect.
It gave to what would have been in any case a period of great forces a particular direction to which we owe the character of all the succeeding centuries. At Paris the King of the eleventh century is a great noble; he is conscious, vaguely, that he stands for government, but government is little more than an idea. What would France have been if the Capetians had not had to fight their way forward inch by inch till the destiny of national unity was accomplished? Certainly a very different thing from the highly centralized society that we know.
As it was, the law which handed down to the middle ages, across a gap of many centuries, the spirit of absolute and central authority came with an immense moral force to the help of governments and therefore of civilization. It takes a century to leaven the whole of society, but when this work is done it produces a very marvellous society, for the thirteenth 131 century is a little gem in the story of mankind. It produced this effect because its logic, its sense of order, its basis of government, were combined with those elements of tribal loyalty and of individual action which had emerged in the decline of the Empire, and whose excess had caused many of the harsh and picturesque features of the dark ages. Later on the Roman law becomes all powerful, and in its too great preponderance the localities and the individuals decay — till the crown is too heavy for the nation.
While the first three Crusades are being fought 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. Geneviève; the other, in a semicircle of nearly half a mile in depth, densely fills the surroundings of the Châtelet and the Place de Grève. 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 transformed 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 development of learning and of inquiry. That central 132 twelfth century, shaken and startled by the marching of the second Crusade, is the lifetime of Abelard and of Saint Bernard. Upon every side the human intellect, which had, so to speak, lain fallow for these hundreds of years, arises and begins again the endless task of questions in which it delights. Religion is illuminated with philosophy as the stained glass of a church, unperceived 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 with the east has done this. The pointed arches, the long fine pillars, the high pitched gable roofs, and at last the spires — all that we call “the Gothic,” — appears, and is the mark of the great epoch upon which we are entering. Already the first stones of Notre Dame are laid, and already its sister thing, the University of Paris, is chartered, and the buildings rise with the first years of the thirteenth century, standing in numerous colleges on the hill of Ste. Geneviève.
When the full tide of this movement was being felt there arose, to the singular good fortune of the French people, the personality of Philip the Conqueror.
133It was he who turned the King of Paris truly into the King of France. Not Montlhéry 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 admirable 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 brilliant 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 work 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 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 religious wars and of the “Fronde.” It will reappear with Louis XIV., 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 attitude, 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 disease 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 pain. 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 Joinville (which is, as it were, a little window opening 135 into the past) wonderful descriptions of how the various 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 he 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 extermination shows as an evil even worse than their existence.
The stultification of society, class aloof from class, runs apace, and the hierarchy begin that fatal alliance 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 attitude of his mind, full of the memories of Saint Louis, was 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 spirit of the place during the growth with which we are about to deal. Let us 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 perhaps it is best to consider first the meagre details that have come down to us of the origin of the Hôtel de Ville. So, to proceed westward to the Louvre, to consider then the island, the Hill of Ste. Geneviève, 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 Grève as a port, had some common-room there, its earliest association with the Hôtel de Ville is in 1141, when the bourgeois de la marchandise, whose trade had outgrown 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 Grève 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, was 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 marshes. The next 137 allusion to the Place de la Grève 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 circulated 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 which 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 Haudriettes. The Martroy, which was like a continuation of the Place de la Grève, in the direction of St. Gervais, was gradually encroached upon by the neighboring buildings until it came to be nearly a rather narrow street.
The memory of a Church of St. Jean, formerly the baptistery of St. Gervais, was preserved when the Hôtel 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 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 movement, and from that time onward is the focus of Paris.
Making our way along what have become, in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, with the great extension of commerce, the crowded quays of Paris, going westward from the Place de la Grève, we pass close by the Grand Châtelet, standing at the northern 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 “Prévôt de Paris.” Here, we are told, Saint Louis used frequently to come, and, seated under a dais besides his provost, Etienne Boislève (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 Châtelet “to the honor of God and of our Lady Saint Mary,” from which time until the eighteenth century the Châtelet, although in the parish of St. Germain l’Auxerrois continues to have its own chapel. Of its appearance 139 at this date, all that we can say positively is that the great tower with 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 Moulins is now.” Below this we find ourselves in the flourishing suburb which sprang up after the Norman invasions from the ruins of the old Frankish settlement. The spot where Sainte Geneviève 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 Fossés St.-Germain l’Auxerrois. When more peaceful times came for Paris, many people were attracted to the neighborhod 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 l’École from the school attached to St. Germain l’Auxerrois, and, what was still more important, a member of public 140 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 “furnus 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.-Honoré, 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, subject here to frequent inundations, was called from that circumstance 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 foundations clustering about it was the Church of St. Germain l’Auxerrois itself, reconstructed by king Robert in token of gratitude when the year 1000 had passed and the destruction of the world been happily averted by the prayers of the Church. Of this building, 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.-Bartholomew.
When Philip-Augustus determined to join the Crusade of 1190, in order to leave his capital in a better state of defense he began the great wall with which 141 he subsequently surrounded it; it was 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 within its limits not only all the closely populated districts, but those suburbs which had sprung up on both banks of the river, among them the settlement about St. Germain l’Auxerrois. Of the space it enclosed, by far the greater part was on the northern bank, for that is the side on which the development of Paris began. On the southern bank it is marked by the word “fossés,” given to a whole line of streets in the Latin quarter.
On the site of the old camp of the Franks, however, it was evident that something more than a simple wall with towers and trenches was needed. Experience had proved this to be the most vulnerable side of Paris, and consequently the one to be most strongly fortified.
Following the example of William the Conqueror, who had no sooner gotten possession of London than he erected a strong tower of defense close to the Thames, Philip-Augustus built a massive tower, directly on the river and but a few feet from the wall, which soon took the name of the place where it stood. Thus the Louvre was to Paris for a long time just what the Tower was to London, a sort of dungeon fortress. In form it was an elongated square, 142 an enlarged and strengthened reproduction of the lower of the Franks, but it would hardly have covered 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 l’Auxerrois 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 Pavillon Sully — a part of the original building 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 façades. 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 Cœur-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 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 employed 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 confided the care of his treasure to six prominent bourgeois; and now we find him in 1202, when the consequences of that excursion to Normandy might be looked for at any time, again giving proof of his reliance 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 Radepont. The Sire de Montferrand is allowed to preserve his on condition that it shall be garrisoned by the King! And Matthew de Montmorency 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 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 effect his great fortress might be expected 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, when 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 will directing that his treasure should be deposited in “our Tower 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 property onto their own. The King, having caused Enguerrand to be brought before him, was so moved out of his ordinary mildness that it was only on the 145 insistence of his nobles that he substituted an enormous 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 constantly 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 having been spent on works connected with the Louvre, Châtelet, 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 installed, 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, henceforth a captain, had not only all the privileges belonging to that rank, but was obliged to stand only in the presence of the King, and to take orders from no one else.
146During this reign the royal treasure 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 still standing.
The central tower now combined its former function 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 Clémence there under guard; but the Constable Gaucher de Châtillon, by right of a law (enforced up to the reign of Louis XIII.) which forbade 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 Clémence gave birth there to a son, who was baptized Jean 147 in the Church of St. Germain l’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 with 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 the that of a dungeon or fortress, gradually becoming 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 Cité permanently, gives its Palace over to the lawyers, and settles definitely in the Louvre.
Having followed the northern bank from the Place de Grève 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 Cité, where the Palace stands.
Mention has been made in the last chapter of the 148 vigorous measures taken by Count Eudes to protect Paris from fresh attacks of the Normans. Chief among these was the conversion of the Royal Palace of la Cité into a strong, square fortification, provided with lofty towers, which Hugh Capet, Robert, Henry I., and Philip I., 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. Nicholas, 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 wine from the royal vineyards — a privilege confirmed by Louis le Jeune, who also built an oratory in the Palace dedicated to Our Lady of the Star. It disappeared when Saint Louis erected the Sainte Chapelle.
Philip-Augustus usually lived in the Palais de la Cité when he was in Paris. The Louvre was his fortress, but at the Palace he held his court and administered justice. Here he summoned John of England to appear and answer for his crimes in seizing 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 149 very bad smells that came from the city mud constantly ploughed up by the heavy wagons passing to and fro. At last these became so intolerable, penetrating 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 undertaking as difficult as it was necessary, the obstacles to which, and its enormous expense, had always frightened off his predecessors; but now calling the bourgeois and the Prévôt de la Ville together, he commanded, 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 apartments 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; it covered nearly the whole site of the present Préfecture 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 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 sittings in the garden, where Joinville describes him seated on a carpet with the officers of his court, giving audiences to all who chose to come. Simplicity yet lingered, the hollowness 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 Conciergerie, where some large stones, near Marie Antoinette’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 probable 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 César, which we have referred to as flanking the doorway on the north, then the principal entrance to the Palais, are of precisely 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. 151 The labyrinth of constructions which reach, on the ground floor, almost from the Conciergerie to the Sainte Chapelle, correspond so exactly with the character and details of the latter that there can be no doubt of their having been built at the same time.
The circumstances which led to the building of the Sainte Chapelle are well known. Baldwin, the son-in-law of Jean de Brienne, Emperor of Constantinople, had promised the crown of thorns, which was preserved in the treasury of the Byzantine Emperors, 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, who 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, became its possessor. It was in August, 1239, that the crown of thorns reached Paris; it was first deposited 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 provided 152 a suitable place for the precious relics. M. Edouard Fournier states that Michelet is mistaken when he says of the Sainte Chapelle that the King “had it built on his return from the Crusade by Eudes de Montreuil, whom he brought with him,” as it was built 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 blessing with the right hand and holding a globe in the other, and curious figures of two angels, one thrusting 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 Trésor des chartes, property of the crown. All that now remains of this annex is 153 the little gallery that connected it with the Sainte Chapelle; the remainder was 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 Saint Louis used to mount to the great golden tabernacle studded with 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 service, the Bishop of Tusculum, Papal Legate, dedicating 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 was 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 entertained the King of England (Henry III.) in the Palais de la Cité, receiving his allegiance for the fief of Aquitaine in the Palace garden; but the building was hardly large enough to accommodate such guests comfortably, and Saint Louis’ grandson, Philip le Bel, determined to enlarge it, with the result that Enguerrand de Marigny, who had charge of the work, added 154 one apartment after another until the original palace was completely overshadowed by the new and magnificent 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 Boulevard du Palais) were demolished, just as would be done to-day, by “dispossession for public purposes.” The little Church of St.-Michel de la Place, standing about where the offices of the Juges d’Instruction do now, was spared, however, and enclosed within the precincts of the Palais. The eastern façade 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 with the Grand Châtelet, and was lined on either side with goldsmiths, jewellers and money-coiners’ establishments, from the last of whom it got its name. On this side of the Palace was a deep trench or moat, across which drawbridges were thrown from each of the two entrances flanked by towers. The northern façade of the Palace had only to be carried on a littler further in order to join it to the new wall on the east. To do this a bit of marshy bank had to be filled in, and a windmill, called the Chante-Reine from the mud-bank into which its piles were driven, pulled down. The square tower erected on this site is still standing, and goes by its original name, the 155 Tour d l’Horloge. 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 was 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 échiquier 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 directed 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 156 position, since he had been accused of hiring out the stalls of this gallery (supposed to be given free to the trades people) and keeping the proceeds. The memory of these stalls or booths, where all sorts of merchandise, and especially gold ornaments and jewelry, were sold, is still preserved, for in the same gallery, called to-day Marchande, caps and gowns are exposed for hire.
The magnificent new Palace was opened with great rejoicings in 1313, the King making it a double féte 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 “accommodate 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 different 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 de Long, the functions of this Parliament, the real foundation of the French courts 157 of to-day, became more clearly defined, and a chamber of inquiry and a chamber for pleading were established.
When Philippe V. 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 succession. 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 magnificence within.
The part of the Island of la Cité lying between the Palais and the Church of Notre Dame was a tangle 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. Bartholomew, 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 importance in 1140; from being the chapel Royal it now becomes the parish church of the Palace, its out-buildings and dependencies. Even the founding of the Sainte Chapelle itself is not allowed to interfere with its peculiar rights; rights which the clergy 158 proclaim yearly by walking in solemn procession around the palace, and through the court, the galleries, and into the great hall, where, moreover, they preach on all the Sundays of Lent, Good Friday, and on Easter day.
To the Curé of St. Bartholomew are given the offerings made at the red Mass, celebrated when Parliament meets, in the Chapel of St. Nicolas.
North and east of the church was the Jewish quarter, 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 Cité of to-day),was given to the Bishop of Paris to be turned into a church — La Madeleine de la Cité — 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 would have reached, on our right, the Rue de la Calandre, and, the fifth house on the right, la maison du Paradis, called later the house of the images of St. Marcel and Ste. Geneviève. 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 possession of it in 1230, while the Chapter of Notre Dame visited it in solemn procession every year on the feast 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 Martial, 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 grow 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 Fossés in their place.
Between the Rue Calandre and the southern branch of the Seine were the Marché-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 Marché 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. Germain 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 included in the open Place du Parvis Notre Dame. 160 St. Germain le Vieux stood where the eastern side of the Barrack of the Republican Guard is now, near the southern corner.
When we last spoke of Notre Dame, the building erected by Childebert, seriously damaged by the Norman invasions, was in constant need of repairs. Charles the Simple, Eudes, Louis le Gros, Etienne de Garlande, Archdeacon of Paris, who died in 1142, Suger, the Abbot of Saint-Denis, all contributed towards its restoration. Thus, for nearly three hundred years, the church which had served as a place of worship for the Merovingian Kings was the Cathedral of Paris. In 1161, however, it became necessary to rebuild it from the foundations, and Maurice de Sully, Bishop of Paris, began the work. Pope 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, celebrated mass at the newly-finished altar, in front of 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, showing how 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 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 were done away with, the upper windows cut down as far as the archivolt 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 windows. According to Guilhermy and Viollet-le-Duc, these alterations destroyed the majestic effect of the original plan. The western façade was erected about the beginning of the thirteenth century, and it was then that the old Cathedral Church, St. Etienne, which 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 finished in the reign of Saint Louis. The Porte-Rouge and chapels immediately beyond the transept probably date from the early part of the thirteenth century, while an inscription on the base of the statue 162 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 outlines 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 magnificent ceremonies have been witnessed in the six hundred years of its existence! Of the old building, probably the last great function was when Alix of Champagne, third wife of Luis VII., was married, 163 consecrated and crowned on the 13th of November, 1160, by the Archbishop of Sens. In 1229 Raymond VII., Count of Toulouse, knelt barefoot before the Papal Legate in the newly-finished cathedral to receive absolution; 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 victory 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 thirteenth 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 164 was, in all probability from very early times, some sort of hospital for the sick and needy; it is not, however, until 829 that we find any distinct mention of it under the name of St. Christopher. This Carlovingian building was pulled down in 1184, when the Rue Notre Dame was opened. Philip-Augustus then began the new one, the Hôtel-Dieu; it was carried 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 Hôtel-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 Hôtel-Dieu now stands, which had been the chapel of St. Nicolas; St. Agnan, east of the Rue de la Colombe, 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 whose western end the Rue d’Arcole 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 Bœufs, partly where the eastern façade of the Hôtel-Dieu now stands and 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 de Clôtre Notre Dame opens into the Place, and originally the Baptistery of the church; St. Christopher, which the line of the southern wall of the Hôtel-Dieu would divide in half, and of whose early history nothing definite is known; Ste. Geneviève des Ardents, near the north-west corner of the present Place, of which we have nothing trustworthy at this period; and St. Denis du Pas, directly behind the church, its east end extending 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 unlike 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 de Jeune declared he had passed the happiest months of his life, and here Saint Dominic 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 Geneviève 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 single room in the Hôtel-Dieu. Let us walk down the Rue du Marché Palu, and crossing the Petit-Pont, where, by the way, 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-Châtelet, rebuilt after the Norman siege. Both it and the Petit-Pont were carried away by an inundation in 1296, and neither of them reconstructed 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 Bûcherie and then the Rue Galarde, running 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 frequently held its meetings there, and there came the Provost of Paris every two years, in obedience to a decree of Philippe le Bel, to make solemn oath that he would see the rights of the masters and students respected, and would himself respect them. 167 Behind St. Julien le Pauvre (that is, east of it) was and still is the Rue Fouarre. Here, in the thirteenth ccentury, were the earliest schools des Quatre nations, the Faculty of the Arts; the four nations were France, 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 Il Paradiso, that Dante was one of the scholars who here thronged to the lectures of the learned Sigar de Brabant.‡
Near by, in the Rue Bûcherie, was the School of Medicine, the first record of which 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.-Geneviève des Ardents and sometimes in Notre Dame itself, where masters and 168 scholars gather about the great stone Holy Water basins placed under the towers.
Just in the line of the modern Rue des Écoles stood the Commandery of the Knights Hospitallers, St. Jean de Jérusalem, a Hôtel, a church, and a square, four-storied tower; and a little higher up the hill, which had now come to be called Mont Ste.-Geneviève, the Church of St. Etienne du Mont, the abbey of Ste.-Geneviève, whose earlier history we have already given, standing close by. Notwithstanding the miracles worked at the Saint’s tomb, and her growing popularity with 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 whose hands it became one of the most flourishing abbeys in France. The modest wooden 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 Virgin, and the Twelve Apostles; this the canons carried 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 fulfil the duties of their offices, and, 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 Lycée Louis-le-Grand stood the Collège 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 Grès, which existed, at least as an oratory, as far back as the seventh century. Here came Saint Francis de Sales, when he was a student, to pray before the statue of Our Lady of Good Deliverance. The church was 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 Sèvres.
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 convent was at first nothing but a chapel dedicated to Saint Jacques, and under the patronage of the University, 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 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 celebrated 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 described by M. de Ghuilhermy as having been a masterpiece of architecture, worthy to be compared with the Ste. Chapelle itself. Here the painter David had his studio for some years, but it was pulled down in the present century, and a few fragments of stone carving in the Musée 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 Collège du Trésorier, 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 earlier a professor of theology, a native of Cerbon (Sorbon, Sorbonne), had purchased a number of houses standing a little further north, to establish a college 171 for poor theological students. Saint Louis added another house nearer the Palais des Thermes, 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 Bibliothèque 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 Collège d’Harcourt covered a part of the site of the present Lycée St.-Louis. It was founded in 1280 by Raoul d’Harcourt with forty scholarships; opposite stood the less important colleges of Narbonne and Bayeux, and, where the Rue de l’École de Médecine begins, the church of St.-Côme and St.-Damien, then belonging to St.-Germain des Prés. 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.-Germain des Prés, but they later acquired it for themselves. 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, 172 Danton 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 Augustins, dating from the end of the thirteenth century; the quarter was called after the Church of St. Andrè 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 Prés of the twelfth century, one Monsignor Aubert, as this was a part of the vast possessions of the abbey at that time. The Collège 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 was the college founded in 1302 by Cardinal Lemoine, and the Collège des Bons Enfants St.-Victor, 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.-Bernard, built at the same time, and beyond it on the bank, the Tournelle, erected as a defense to the approach to the south arm of the river, and connecting at will, by means of a chain, with the tower of Loriaux on l’Isle St. Louis.
If we follow the river bank for a short distance we 173 will reach, where the Halle aux Vins now stands, the Abbey of St. Victor, founded in the early part of the twelfth century by William of Champeaux, 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 Bibliothèque Nationale. We will pass by the Collèges d’Arras and des Ecossais, and pause before the Collège 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 students of the kingdom of France.” The executors of her will sold the house, however, and built the college on the northern slope of the Montagne Ste. Geneviève.
We will close the enumeration of the colleges of this period with the Carmelite Convent. Saint Louis brought six Carmelites back with him from Palestine and established them on the Quai des Célestins, but Philip IV. and Philip V. gave them property on the Montagne Ste. Geneviève, where in the middle of the 174 fourteenth century 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-Augustus 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. Germain to the Counsellor of that name in 1250 — or the gate they built themselves a little further south, about where the streets of l’École de Médecine 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 square 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 Barbarian Paris, and to be watched with awe standing above that highly modern Boulevard. During the thirteenth century the Abbey was 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, within a boundary-wall erected in 1239, which Philip-Augustus made the monks replace by a real wall of defense 175 at the time that he was enclosing the rest of the city. The Abbey was proprietor of an immense district, reaching almost as far as the present Champ de Mars, and planted out in orchards and vineyards. It was first called the Pré St. Germain and later Pré aux Clercs. On the east it was bounded by a canal, la Noue or la petite Seine, on the other side of which lay the petit Pré 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 University 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 who well deserved. For instance, in 1278 the students pulled down a building that had been erected on the Pré aux Clercs by the Abbot. The tocsin was promptly sounded, and the whole population of the bourg St. Germain poured out and overpowered the students, some of whom were killed and others imprisoned 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
The great Clos de Laas, stretching from the Petit-Pont to the Noue (the canal following the line of the present Rue Bonaparte), was also at one time the property of the monks of St. Germain, and Childebert had granted them the fishing rights of the Seine all the way to Sèvres. Some time in the thirteenth century, probably about the middle, one Seigneur de Nesle bought a part of the Clos de Laas, west 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 wall. 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 Hôtel of Nesle, he had the willows cut down and replaced by solid blocks of stone, with a view to confining 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 Hôtel 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. 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 Ile de la Cité and the Ile 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 Barrés, on the modern map, to the Quai des Celestins. At either end stood a low, strong, round tower, les Tours de Barrés and Billy respectively, from which chains could be stretched across to others placed the one on the Ile aux Vaches and the other on the south bank of the Seine, thus shutting 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 Grève; 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 unhealthy, was occupied almost exclusively by buildings connected in some way with the traffic of the port. Even up to the middle of the thirteenth century the only religious establishment was the Church of St. Paul, built by Dagobert.
This Church of St. Paul was originally merely a 178 mortuary chapel standing in the cemetery founded by Saint Eloy for a burying-place for the sisters of his great Convent of St. Martial in the city. It was not customary yet to bury in churches, and the Roman 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 neighborhood, 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 irregularities in the discipline of the convent, 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 accompanied him. They settled first in a small building belonging to the Hôtel Barbeaux, and went by the name of less Barrés, from their long cloaks with alternate divisions of black and white. As the order increased they were obliged to move into larger quarters, but to this day the street where they first lived continues to be called the Rue des Barrés. The 179 name of this whole suburb was St. Paul; later it became 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 document of 1211 speaks of the Commandery of the Temple, and before 1222 Hubert, treasures of the order, had built the great tower — “one of the most powerful buildings in the kingdom,” writes Félibien in his History 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 probable 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 walls, and planted it out in orchards and vineyards, converting a dreary waste into a beautiful and fertile suburb. In 1254, when Henry III. 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 most magnificent 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 was 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, where 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 on hundred and forty knights of the order, who had come to take part in an assembly of the Temple. Grave charges of heresy and disorderly living had already been brought against them, which were confirmed by admissions made while under torture, but Clement V. reserved the right to give sentence and they were sent back to 181 prison. Other trials were 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 Cité, just where the Place Dauphine is now.
Two other buildings near by, belonging to this period, were, first, the Hôtel of the King of Sicily, the property later of the Count of Anjou, Saint Louis’ brother; it was rebuilt in 1621, and its only important history belongs to the time of the Revolution, when it became the prison of La Force; and secondly, the Hôtel Barbette, erected by the Prévôt of Paris under Philippe le Bel, Etienne Barbette, it became 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 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 veneration for the Holy Innocents, his favorite oath according to one historian being, per sanctos de Bethlehem; 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 l’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 markets 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 “Champeaux,” 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 l’Auxerrois, to be added to the cemetery.
At an early day charnel-houses 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 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 were were scattered along the roads leading from Paris to Chaillot and Clichy, the first the present Rue St.-Honoré, 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-Honoré, Bishop of Amiens, near the gate of the new wall, close to where 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 neighborhood were poor, many of them pork merchants, whose market-place close by was called St.-Honoré-aux-Porcians; but the bakers from the Louvre Bakery (furnus 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.-Honoré 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 Clichy, were a certain body of poor clerks or students who lived in Paris on public charity, and 184 had been celebrated ever since the days of King Robert for their deeds of mercy. In 1208 a “college” was erected for them near St.-Honoré, 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.-Honoré 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 requiring 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 symphoniaci pueri, and it is said that one of 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 hundred and fifty years of it, a period of extraordinary growth and change; like our own time, it has ruthlessly destroyed the past, it has altered its institutions, changed its streets and private 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.
185We 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 surrounded by a great wall on every side, flanked with more than a hundred towers. The eastern stockade has been replaced by the strong, square towers of the Louvre.
But, above all, the soul and the body of the place have changed. The soul, because the University has arisen. The body, because the Gothic has appeared and is transforming northern Europe.
In the eleventh century we might have noted routine teaching, ancient unquestioned things droned out in the monastic and parish schools; but in the twelfth the Crusaders have marched out and have 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 Ste. Geneviève has taken place, and the colleges of the University are planted thick on the sides of the hill.
Did one lookdown from the towers of the new great Cathedral upon Paris before the wars, it would 186 have been to see in the place of her old squalor and barbarism something fantastic; the mediæval city to which our modern dreams perpetually return. Everywhere high gables, everywhere spires, towers, innumerable carvings, her great wall shining here and there at the ends of streets, high above the houses her equal towers. Before you would be that little permanent miracle, the Ste. Chapelle, to its right the great square of the palace, with its round-pointed towers and its delicate inner court. To the left the slope of the hill would stand thick with the new churches, with the Cordeliers, the Carmelites, the Jacobins of Ste. Geneviève, and the colleges.
To the right, on the north, an expanse of steep gables, broken only by the square of the Grève; 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 mediæval city, head and shoulders above the town.
To the west, beyond the wall of St. Honoré, you would see, higher than anything in the town, the square, gloomy dungeon of the Louvre, with 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 Nésle on the southern bank.
Finally, like messengers leaving the new city, along the St. Honoré, the St. Denis, the St. Marcel, the Orleans roads, and especially thick beside the 187 great oblong of St. Germain des Prés, 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 windows 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 Ste. 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 Gothic took the north, and Paris with it, in one great movement. Almost a single generation 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 went 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 18 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 desire everywhere for the unknown in the things of the soul, for the marvellous in the stories of far countries, of delicate twilight and of silence, and in everything an appetite for the hidden and for the strange.
This is the spirit that holds Europe for three hundred years, and that makes, as it slowly changes from the manhood of Saint Louis and Joinville to the madness of Louis XI. 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.
Footnotes
* This provost is described as living in the Châtelet, and even sleeping, all dressed, in the great hall, so as to be always in readiness to perform his judicial functions.
† But this custom, again, may be traced to the earlier one of a similar pattern on the King’s money table to facilitate counting.
Essa la luce eterna de Sigeri,
Che leggendo nel vico degli strami.
Sillogizzo inficiosi veri.
— PARADISO, Canto X.