the closely knit island _Cité_ and its straggling suburbs on either
bank, with all their gardens, vineyards, and fields far out; and
solidly constructed, with nearly thirty feet of squared-stone height,
and nearly ten feet of cemented rubble between the strong side faces.
Its heavy parapet was battlemented, numerous round towers bulged from
its outer side, the frequent gates had stern flanking towers, and the
four ends on both river-banks were guarded by enormous towers, really
small fortresses. The westernmost tower on this southern shore--with
which section of the wall, built slowly from 1208 to 1220, we are now
concerned--was the Tour de Nesle, and its site is shown by a tablet on
the quay-front of the eastern wing of the Institute. Alongside was the
important Porte de Nesle. Thence the wall went southwesterly, behind
the line made by the present Rues Mazarine and Monsieur-le-Prince;
then, by its great curve just north of Rue des Fossés-Saint-Jacques,
it safeguarded the tomb and the abbey of Sainte Geneviève, and so bent
sharply around toward the northeast, within the line of present Rues
Thouin, du Cardinal-Lemoine, and des Fossés-Saint-Bernard, to the
easternmost tower on Quai de la Tournelle, and its river-gate, Porte
Saint-Bernard. That gate, standing until the end of the eighteenth
century, had been titillated into a triumphal arch for Louis XIV., in
whose time this quay was a swell promenade and drive. It still retains
one of its grand mansions, the Hôtel Clermont-Tonnerre, at No. 27 on
the quay, with a well-preserved portal.
Of the stately sweep of this wall we may get suggestive glimpses by
the various tablets, that show the sites of the tennis courts made
later on its outer side, and that mark the places of the gates; such
as the tablet at No. 44 Rue Dauphine. The street and gate of that name
date from 1607, when Henri IV. constructed them as the southern outlet
from his Pont-Neuf, and named them in honor of the first _dauphin_
born to France since Catherine de' Medici's puny sons. This Porte
Dauphine took the place, and very nearly the site, of the original
Porte de Buci, which stood over the western end of our Rue
Saint-André-des-Arts, and was done away with in the cutting of Rue
Dauphine. There was a gate, cut a few years after the completion of
the wall, opening into the present triangular space made by the
meeting of Rue de l'École-de-Médecine and Boulevard Saint-Germain, and
this gate bore this latter name. Of the original gates, that next
beyond Porte de Buci was Porte Saint-Michel, a small postern that
stood almost in the centre of the meeting-place of Boulevard
Saint-Michel and Rues Monsieur-le-Prince and Soufflot. Next came the
important Porte Saint-Jacques, mounting guard over the street now of
that name, nearly where it crosses the southern side of new Rue
Soufflot, named in honor of the architect of the Panthéon. On that
southwest corner is a tablet with a plan of the gate. It was a gate
well watched by friends within, and foes without, coming up by this
easy road. Dunois gained it, more by seduction than force, and entered
with his French troops, driving the English before him, on the
morning of Friday, April 13, 1436; and Henry of Navarre failed to gain
it by force from the League, on the night of September 10, 1590. Stand
in front of Nos. 174 and 176 of widened Rue Saint-Jacques, and you are
on the spot where he tried to scale that gate, again and again.
More than suggestions of the wall itself may be got by actual sight of
sections that survive, despite the assertions of authorities that no
stone is left. At the end of Impasse de Nevers, within a locked gate,
you may see a presumable bit. In the court that lies behind Nos. 27
and 29 Rue Guénégaud is a stable, and deep in the shadow of that
stable lurks a round tower of Philippe-Auguste, massive and unmarred.
At No. 4 Cour du Commerce a locksmith has his shop, and he hangs his
keys and iron scraps on nails driven with difficulty between the
tightly fitted blocks of another round tower. Turn the corner into
Cour de Rohan--a corruption of Rouen, whose archbishop had his
town-house here--and you shall find a narrow iron stairway, that
mounts the end of the sliced-off wall, and that carries you to a tiny
garden, wherein small schoolgirls play on the very top of that wall.
Down at the end of Cour de Rohan is an ancient well, dating from the
day when this court lay within the grounds of the Hôtel de Navarre,
the property of Louis of Orleans before he became Louis XII. In style
it was closely akin to the Hôtel de Cluny, and it is a sorrow that it
is lost to us. Its entrance was at the present Nos. 49 and 51 of Rue
Saint-André-des-Arts, and the very ancient walls in the rear court of
the latter house may have belonged to the Hôtel de Navarre. When Louis
sold this property, one portion was bought by Dr. Coictier, who had
amassed wealth as the physician of Louis XI., and this well was long
known by his name. It has lost its metal-work, which was as fine as
that of the well once owned by Tristan l'Hermite, Coictier's crony,
and now placed in the court of the Cluny Museum.
Continuing along the course of the great wall, we find a longer
section, whereon houses have been built, and another garden. At the
end of the hallway of No. 47 Rue Descartes is a narrow stairway, by
which we mount to the row of cottages on top of the wall, and beyond
them is a small domain containing trees and bushes and flower-beds,
and all alive with fowls. Still farther, in a vacant lot in Rue
Clovis, which has cut deep through the hill, a broken end of the wall
hangs high above us on the crest, showing both solid faces and the
rubble between. Its outer face forms the rear of the court at No. 62
Rue du Cardinal-Lemoine. Still another section can be seen in the
inner court of No. 9 Rue d'Arras, its great square stones serving as
foundation for high houses. And this is the last we shall see of this
southern half of the wall of Philippe-Auguste.
When that monarch lay dying at Mantes, he found comfort in the thought
that he was leaving his Paris safe in the competent hands of his
daughter-in-law--whose beauty, sense, and spirit had won him
early--rather than in the gentle hold of his son, misnamed "_le_
_Lion_." He lived, as Louis VIII., only three years, and "_la reine
blanche_" (the widowed queens of France wore white for mourning, until
Anne of Brittany put on black for her first husband, Charles VIII.)
became the sole protector of her twelve-year-old son, on whom she so
doted as to be jealous of the wife she had herself found for him. She
ruled him and his hitherto unruly nobles, and cemented his kingdom,
fractured by local jealousies. He is known to history as Saint Louis,
fit to sit alongside Marcus Aurelius, in the equal conscience they put
into their kingly duties. Voltaire himself ceases to sneer in the
presence of this monarch's unselfish devotion to his people, and gives
him praise as unstinted as any on record.
His Paris, the Paris of his mother and his grandfather, was made up of
_la Cité_ on the island, under the jurisdiction of the bishop; the
northern suburb, _outre-Grand-Pont_ or _la Ville_, governed by the
_Prévôt des Marchands_; the southern suburb, _outre-Petit-Pont_ or
_l'Université_, appertaining to the "_Recteur_"; all ruled by the
_Prévôt_ of Paris, appointed by and accountable to the King alone.
Hugo's "little old lady between her two promising daughters" holds
good to-day, when the daughters are strapping wenches, and have not
yet got their growth. In all three sections, the priest and the
soldier--twin foes of light and life in all times and in all
lands--had their own way. They cumbered the ground with their
fortresses and their monasteries, all bestowed within spacious
enclosures; so walling-in for their favored dwellers, and walling-out
from the common herd outside, the air and sun, green sights, and
pleasant scents. There were no open spaces for the people of mediæval
days. Indeed, there were no "people," in our meaning of that word. The
stage direction, "Enter Populace," expresses their state. There were
peasants in the fields, toilers in the towns, vassals, all of
them--villains, legally--allowed to live by the soldier, that they
might pay for his fighting, and serve as food for his steel; sheep let
graze by the priest, to be sheared for the Church and to be burned at
the stake. This populace looked on at these burnings, at the cutting
out of tongues and slicing off of ears and hacking away of hands by
their lords, in dumb terror and docile submission. More than death or
mutilation, did they dread the ban of the Church and the lash of its
menacing bell. Their only diversion was made by royal processions, by
church festivals, by public executions. So went on the dreary round of
centuries, in a dull colorless terror, until it was time for the
coming of the short, sharp Terror dyed red. Then the White Terror,
that came with the Restoration, benumbed the land for awhile, and the
tricolored effrontery of the Second Empire held it in grip. Against
all royalist and imperial reaction, the lesser revolutions of the
nineteenth century have kept alive the essential spirit of the great
Revolution of 1789, inherited by them, and handed down to the present
Republic, that the assured ultimate issue may be fought out under its
Tricolor. France, the splendid creature, once more almost throttled by
priest and soldier, has saved herself by the courage of a national
conscience, such as has not been matched by any land in any crisis.
They who by the grace of God and the stupidity of man owned and
ordered these human cattle of the darkest ages, had their homes within
this new, strong town-wall; in fat monasteries, secluded behind garden
and vineyard; in grim citadels, whose central keep and lesser towers
and staircase turrets, stables and outer structures, were grouped
about a great court, that swarmed with men-at-arms, grooms, and
hangers-on. And so, endless walls scowled on the wayfarer through the
town's lanes, narrow, winding, unpaved, filthy. On a hot summer day,
Philippe-Auguste stood at his open window in the old Palace, and the
odor of mud came offensively to the royal nostrils; soon the main City
streets were paved. When a king's son happened to be unhorsed by a
peripatetic pig nosing for garbage, a royal edict forbade the presence
of swine in the streets; the only exceptions being the precious dozen
of the abbey of Petit-Saint-Antoine. There were no side-paths, and
they who went afoot were pushed to the wall and splashed with mud, by
the mules and palfreys of those who could ride. They rode, the man in
front, his lady behind, _en croupe_. Open trenches, in the middle of
the roadway, served for drainage, naked and shameless; the graveyards
were unfenced amid huddled hovels; and the constant disease and
frequent epidemics that came from all this foulness were fathered on a
convenient Providence! This solution of the illiterate and imbecile
could not be accepted by the shining lights of science, who showed
that the plague of the middle of the sixteenth century came from
maleficent comets, their tails toward the Orient, or from malign
conjunctions of Mars, Saturn, and Jupiter. Ambroise Paré, the most
enlightened man of his day, had the courage to suggest that there were
human and natural causes at work, in addition to the divine will. And
the common-sense Faculty of Medicine, toward the close of the
sixteenth century, indicted the drains and cesspools as the principal
origin of all maladies then prevalent.
The only street-lighting was that given fitfully by the forlorn
lanterns of the patrol, or by the torches of varlets escorting their
masters, on foot or on horse. Now and then, a hole was burned in the
mediæval night by a cresset on a church tower or porch, or shot out
from a _cabaret's_ fire through an opened door. When tallow candles
got cheaper, they were put into horn lanterns, and swung, at wide
intervals, high above the traffic. There, wind or rain put an untimely
end to their infrequent flicker, or a "thief in the candle" guttered
and killed it, or a thief in the street stoned it dead, for the snug
plying of his trade. The town, none too safe in daylight, was not at
all safe by night, and the darkness was long and dreary, and every
honest man and woman went to bed early after the sunset angelus.
Country roads were risky, too, and those who were unable to travel in
force, or in the train of a noble, travelled not at all; so that the
common citizen passed his entire existence within the confines of his
compact parish. Nor could he see much of his Paris or of his Seine;
he looked along the streets on stone walls on either side, and along
the quays at timbered buildings on the banks. These rose sheer from
the river-brink, and from both sides of every bridge, barring all
outlook from the roadway between; their gables gave on the river, and
from their windows could be seen only a little square of water,
enclosed between the buildings on both banks and on the neighboring
bridge. So that the wistful burgher could get glimpses of his river
only from the beach by the Hôtel de Ville, or from the occasional
ports crowded with boats discharging cargo.
These cargoes were sold in shops on ground floors, and the tenants
were thick on the upper floors, of dwellings mostly made of timber and
plaster, their high-fronted gables looking on the street. This was the
custom in all towns in the Middle Ages, and it is a striking change
that has, in our day, turned all buildings so that their former side
has come to the front. The old Paris streets, in which shops and
houses shouldered together compactly, already dark and narrow enough,
were further narrowed and darkened by projecting upper floors, and by
encroaching shop-signs, swinging, in all shapes and sizes, from over
the doorways. Each shop sold its specialty, and the wares of all of
them slopped over on the roadway. Their owners bawled the merits and
prices of these wares in a way to shock a certain irritable Guillaume
de Villeneuve, who complains in querulous verse, "They do not cease to
bray from morning until night." With all its growth in coming years,
the city's squalor grew apace with its splendor, and when Voltaire's
Candide came in, by way of Porte Saint-Marcel here on the southern
side, in the time of Louis XV., he imagined himself in the dirtiest
and ugliest of Westphalian villages. For all its filth and all its
discomfort, this mediæval Paris--portrayed, as it appeared three
hundred years later, in the painful detail and inaccurate erudition of
Hugo's "Notre-Dame de Paris"--was a picturesque town, its buildings
giving those varied and unexpected groupings that make an
architectural picture; their roofs were tiled in many colors, their
sky-lines were wanton in their irregularity, and were punctuated by
pointed turrets and by cone-shaped tower-tops; and over beyond the
tall town walls, broken by battlements and sentry-boxes, whirled a
grotesque coronet of windmill sails.
Turning from this attractive "_Maison de la Reine Blanche_," from this
quarter where her son Louis learned to ride and to tilt, and glancing
behind at the famous tapestry works, the Gobelins, of whose founder
and director we shall have a word to say later, we follow the avenue
of that name to Rue du Fer-à-Moulin. This little street, named for a
sign that swung there in the twelfth century, is most commonplace
until it opens out into a small, shabby square, that holds a few
discouraged trees, and is faced by a stolid building whose wide,
low-browed archway gives access to the court of the _Boulangerie
générale des Hôpitaux et Hospices_. This was the courtyard of the
villa of Scipio Sardini, whose name alone is kept alive by this Place
Scipion--all that is left of his gardens and vineyards. Yet his was a
notable name, in the days when this wily Tuscan was "_écuyer du Roi
Henri II._," and in those roaring days of swift fortunes for sharp
Italian financiers, under the queen-mother, Catherine de' Medici. This
man amassed scandalous riches, and built his villa, mentioned by
Sauval as one of the richest of that time, here amid the country
mansions that dotted this southern declivity. Of this villa only one
wing still stands, and it is with unlooked-for delight that we find
this admirable specimen of sixteenth-century architecture, of a style
distinct from that of any other specimen in Paris. The façade, that is
left in the court of the _Boulangerie_, is made up of an arcade of six
semi-circular arches on heavy stone pillars, a story above of
plum-colored brick cut into panels by gray stone, its square-headed
windows encased with the same squared stone, and an attic holding two
dormers with pointed hoods. Set in the broad band between the two
lower floors, were six medallions, one over the centre of each arch;
of these six, only four remain. These contain the heads of warriors
and of women, boldly or delicately carved, and wonderfully preserved;
yet time has eaten away the terra-cotta, wind and wet have dulled the
enamel that brightened them. The buildings about this court and behind
this unique façade are commonplace and need not detain us. It was in
1614 that the General Hospital took the villa and enlarged it; in
1636, to escape the plague, the prisoners of the Conciergerie were
installed here; and it has served as the bakery for the civil
hospitals of Paris for many years.
We go our way toward our third staircase, not by the stupidly straight
line of Rue Monge, but by vagrant curves that bring us to the prison
of Sainte-Pélagie, soon to disappear, and to the Roman amphitheatre
just below, happily rescued forever. Here, in Rue Cardinal-Lemoine, we
slip under the stupid frontage of No. 49 to the court within, where we
are faced by the _hôtel_ of Charles Lebrun. We mount the stone steps
that lead up to a wide hall, and so go through to a farther court, now
unfortunately roofed over. This court was his garden, and this is the
stately garden-front that was the true façade, rather than that toward
the street; for this noble mansion--the work of the architect Germain
Boffrand, pupil and friend of Hardouin Mansart--was built after the
fashion of that time, which shut out, by high walls, all that was
within from sight of the man in the street, and kept the best for
those who had entry to the stiff, formal gardens of that day.
Pupil of Poussin, _protégé_ of Fouquet, friend of Colbert, Lebrun was
the favorite court painter and decorator, and the most characteristic
exponent of the art of his day; his sumptuous style suiting equally
François I.'s Fontainebleau, and Louis XIV.'s Versailles. He aided
Colbert in the founding of the Royal Academy of Painting and
Sculpture, and in the purchase by the State of the Gobelins. This
factory took its name from the famous dyer who came from Rheims, and
tinted the clear Bièvre with his splendid scarlet, says Rabelais; so
that it took the name of _la Rivière des Gobelins_, of which Ronsard
sings. The statesman and the artist in concert built up the great
factory of tapestries and of furniture, such as were suitable for
royal use. Made Director of the Gobelins and Chancellor of the
Academy, and making himself the approved painter of the time to his
fellow-painters and to the buying public, Lebrun's fortune grew to the
possession of this costly estate, which extended far away beyond
modern Rue Monge. The death of Colbert--whose superb tomb in
Saint-Eustache is the work of his surviving friend--left him to the
hatred of Louvois, who pushed Mignard, Molière's friend, into
preferment. And Lebrun, genuine and honest artist, died of sheer
despondency, in his official apartment on the first floor of the
factory, facing the chapel. His rooms have been cut up and given over
to various usages, and no trace can be found in the Gobelins of its
first director.
His body rests in his parish church, a few steps farther on, through
ancient Rue Saint-Victor, now curtailed and mutilated. Along its line,
before we come to the square tower of Saint-Nicolas-du-Chardonnet, we
skirt the dirty yellow and drab wall of the famous seminary alongside
the church, and bearing its name. Its entrance is at No. 30 Rue de
Pontoise, and among the many famous pupils who have gone in and out
since Calvin was a student here, we may mention only Ernest Renan. In
1838, the director of the school being the accomplished Dupanloup,
this boy of fifteen came fresh from Brittany to his studies here. We
shall follow him to his later and larger schools, in other pages.
When Jean "le Moine," the son of a Picardy peasant, came to sit in a
cardinal's chair, and was sent to Paris as legate by Pope Boniface
VIII., he established a great college in the year 1303. For it he
bought the chapel, the dwellings, and the cemetery of the Augustins
that were all in fields of thistles. So came the name "_du
Chardonnet_" to the church now built on the ruins of Lemoine's chapel,
in the later years of the seventeenth century. Lebrun decorated one of
its chapels for the burial of his mother, and his own tomb is there
near hers. Some of his work still shows on the ceiling; and in an
adjacent chapel, in odd proximity, once hung a canvas from the brush
of Mignard. In striking contrast, the busts of the two men face each
other in the Louvre; that of Mignard is alert with intelligence in
face and poise of head, while Lebrun's suggests a somewhat slow-witted
earnestness.
From this short stay in the realm of Louis the Unreal, we go to the
island that bears the name of the Louis who was called a saint, but
who was a very real man. All the streets along here that take us to
the river, as far easterly as the one that bears the name of Cardinal
Lemoine, were cut through the grounds of his college and of the
Bernadins, an ancient foundation alongside. Of the buildings of this
vast monastery, the refectory remains, behind the wall on the western
side of Rue de Poissy. This characteristic specimen of thirteenth-century
architecture, but little spoiled by modern additions, is used for the
_caserne_ of the Sapeurs-Pompiers. Here, at the foot of the street on
the river-bank on our right, is the great space where Boulevard
Saint-Germain comes down to the quay, and where the old wall came down
to its great tower on the shore. On our left, as we cross broad Pont
de la Tournelle, we get an impressive view of Notre-Dame. And now we
find ourselves in a provincial town, seemingly far removed from our
Paris in miles and in years, by its isolation and tranquillity and
old-world atmosphere. Its long, lazy main street is named after the
royal saint, and its quays keep the titles of royal princes, Bourbon,
Orléans, Anjou. A great royal minister, Maximilien de Béthune, gives
his name to another quay, and his great master gives his to the new
boulevard crossing it. Henry often crossed his faithful Sully, but
they were at one in the orders issued, in the year before the King's
murder, for the sweeping away of the woodyards, that made this island
the storehouse of the town's timber, and for the construction of these
streets and buildings. The works planned by Henri IV. were carried out
by Marie de' Medici and Louis XIII. A concession was given for the
laying out of streets and for the buildings on this island, and for
the construction of a new stone bridge to the Marais, to the three
associates, Marie, Le Regrettier, Poultier, who gave their names to
the bridge and to two of the streets. There was already a small chapel
in the centre, the scene of the first preaching of the First Crusade,
and this chapel has been enlarged to the present old-time parish
church. Just within its entrance is the _bénitier_, filled with water
from the mouth of a marble cherub who wears a pretty marble "bang."
It came from the Carmelites of Chaillot, in souvenir of "Sister
Louise."
The sites on the island's banks, newly opened in the early years of
Louis XIII.'s reign, were in demand at once for the mansions of the
wealthy, and a precocious city started up. Corneille's _Menteur_, new
to Paris and the island, rhapsodizes in one of his captivating
flights, this time without lying:
"_J'y croyais ce matin voir une île enchantée,
Je la laissai déserte et la trouve habitée;
Quelque Amphion nouveau, sans l'aide des maçons,
En superbes palais à changé ses buissons._"
We shall come hither again, in company with Voltaire to one of these
palaces, with Balzac to another. In these high old houses in these old
streets dwelt old families, served by old retainers devoted to their
mistresses, who hugged their firesides like contented tabby-cats. They
had no welcome for intruders into their "Ville-Saint-Louis" from the
swell quarters on the other side of the river, and it used to be said
that "_l'habitant du Marais est étranger dans l'Île_."
[Illustration: Balcony of Hôtel de Lauzan-Pimodan on Île de
Saint-Louis.]