antiquity is that of the prow of a boat which one sees sculptured on the
springing of the vault of the Roman palace of the Thermes, built on the
left bank of the Seine; the powerful association of the Nautæ Parisiaci,
which is found at the head of the Parisian Navigation represented by the
prow of a boat, has therefore a direct Celtic or Gallic origin. Living
only in rude cabins the early inhabitants naturally possessed no public
building. Cæsar therefore conceived the idea of convoking the Gaulish
chiefs into one central place or forum, and ordered to be built a
“Suggestum,” a tribune from which he could harangue the assembled
headmen. This is considered by some French architects as the earliest
indication of their _édilité naissánte_. As further evidence of their
building and engineering capability, the inhabitants of Lutetia threw
out bridges to join their island to the main banks of the river. Cæsar
frequently refers to the bridges built by the Gauls, such as the one at
Melun, on the Seine, another across the Allier, near Vichy, of which
ancient foundations and piers have been found, another at Orléans, and
of such slender construction as to have especially attracted his
attention, and, finally, the bridge of Lutetia across the main arm of
the Seine, the predecessor of the present Pont Notre Dame, which has
also left traces of its ancient piers.
In Rome the Nautæ Tiberis were a corporation who enjoyed the privilege
of carrying corn and other produce from Ostia to the capital; similar
associations existed in Gaul in addition to the Nautæ Parisiaci, and on
a wall of the amphitheatre of Nîmes is an inscription in which as many
as forty places are mentioned where corporations enjoying the same
privileges and immunities existed. No wonder the territory of the
Parisii increased in commercial activity. Watered by the Seine, the
Marne and the Oise, its trade routes by land and by water were fully
organised and guarded by powerful associations which existed almost
before the Roman Conquest, and attracted the attention of the writer
Strabo. It soon developed under such advantages into a prosperous and
enlightened city. Roman buildings took the place of the Gallic huts,
Roman laws governed the city, Roman customs and manners prevailed
amongst the inhabitants, and by the time the first messengers of
Christianity had penetrated into Gaul Lutetia had become a city not of
the Gauls, but of the Romans. Curiously enough it was from Rome also
that these early messengers came, to preach their doctrine to a Roman
city. The pioneers were Saint Denis, generally confounded, for the sake
of the antiquity of the Gallican Church, with the convert of Saint Paul,
Dionysius the Areopagite, and two companions, Eleutherius and Rusticus;
and their work was carried on by Martin of Tours, one of the bravest
soldiers of the Emperor Julian, who left the army to preach the faith in
Gaul, and to stamp out the cult of the old pagan gods. Speaking of
Julian, moreover, may serve to remind us that it was at Paris that he
was first proclaimed emperor; here was his palace before his imperial
honours came upon him, and here, he declares in his own writings, were
spent the three happiest winters of his life, showing that even in these
early times Lutetia was a fair and pleasant city, as it is to-day.
In the following centuries Gaul was overrun with tribes from the east,
Goths and Visigoths, Alemnanni and Huns, Burgundians and Franks. The
last-named broke down the Roman defences all over the land and seized
upon Paris. A new era now began for the city. Under Clovis, the first
Frank king, it became the official capital of the State in 508, and from
this time forward takes its place as one of the great cities of France.
After the conversion of Clovis, abbeys and churches were built, great
bishops and great saints preached and wrote their message, and indeed
the ecclesiastical fabric of the city seems to have grown up more
quickly than the civil fabric, until the time of Charlemagne, when
craftsmen’s guilds were established, Jewish capitalists admitted within
the walls, and a mercantile reputation founded. Then a second time the
work of the conquerors seemed to be undone. The Northmen, more terrible
invaders than Goths or Franks, plundered the coast-lands and presently
swept up the Seine past Rouen to Paris, where they worked such havoc as
the town had never before known. The streets were set in flames, the
monasteries were sacked and burnt, the priests and monks were massacred
without mercy; yet all this evil was to end in better things. The very
persistency of the Normans in besieging and pillaging a town four and
five times, argued that the town itself must be worth the trouble, and
the “lords” of Paris speedily began to look to its safety. Weak, foolish
Charles the Fat could devise no better plan than the cowardly one of
bribing the invaders to retreat; but Eudes, Count of Paris, knew that
this would only be an inducement to them to come again, and determined
once and for all to rid his city, at least, of this scourge. This he did
with such effect that the crown of France was given to him and the
inefficient Charles deposed. It was his nephew, Hugh the Great, who
ruled at Paris in Rolf’s day, and waged constant war with Neustria and
Charles the Simple, the last of the Carlovingian kings, on the
hill-crest at Lâon. Then, at the end of the tenth century, began the
feudal monarchy under the Capetian dynasty. The first of the line was
the eldest son of Hugh the Great, and the connections which he brought
with him promised well for the prestige of his new kingdom. On the one
side, he was brother-in-law to the Norman Duke, Richard the Fearless; on
the other, his own brother Odo was Duke of Burgundy; in his own right
he was lord of Picardy, of Maine, of Chartres, of Tours, of Blois, and
of Orléans; and his bond with the Church was further strengthened by the
fact that he held the lay abbacies of Saint Martin, near Tours, and
Saint Denis, near Paris. Thus the kingdom with which Hugh Capet began
his reign was a fairly compact strip of land, having as boundaries
Flanders to the north, Aquitaine to the south, Champagne to the east,
and Normandy to the west. Of this kingdom Paris was nearly the actual
geographical centre, and soon became the political centre also.
The early importance of Paris in the tenth century is very different to
that of London. Paris at this time was a military position of growing
importance, both from its central situation and its place on the island
in the Seine. London on her Thames had an almost similar position, but
she derived her power not merely from her Teutonic conquerors, but also
from her early connection with Roman and Celtic Britain; while as a
military stronghold she was no less to be desired.
The eastern point of the city, where the only bridge then existed,
traversing the Seine in the exact place where now stands the Pont Notre
Dame, a point where the roads through the province converged, was
already a place sacred to the Gauls. Here were performed rites and
sacrifices to their mysterious divinities in an underground church which
existed in the third century. Probably the tradition of dark deeds of
persecution of the early Christians, human sacrifices, and missionaries
suffering death in the cages of lions which were kept for the purpose of
exhibitions, prevented the Parisian boatmen, when they heard of the
wonderful tidings of Galilee, from using this Gaulish building, so full
of terrible reminiscences, as their first church. The site of the Temple
of Jupiter was chosen for the establishment of a church which should
stamp out the heathen religion, crush with its heel the serpent’s head
and build upon its ruins a temple of the Holy Cross. About 375, on the
site of the Temple of Jupiter, was built a church dedicated to Saint
Etienne, which may be considered as the first Cathedral of Paris.
To the splendour of this early basilica, built by Childebert in the
early Latin style, with its marble columns, some of which are now in the
Musée de Cluny, the monk Fortunatus bears witness, and his description
of the edifice is thus given in M. Hoffbauer’s book on Paris: “Le
vaisseau de cette église repose sur des colonnes de marbre, et le soin
avec lequel on l’entretient en augment la beauté. Le premier il fut
éclairé de fenêtres ornées de verres transparents par lesquels on reçoit
la lumière. On dirait que la main d’un ouvrier habile a emprisonné le
jour dans le sanctuaire. Les feux tremblants de l’aurore naissante
semblant se jouer jusque dans les lambris, et le temple est éclairé par
la charté du jour même, quand le soliel ne se montre pas. Le roi
Childebert, animé d’un zèle particulier pour cette église destinèe à son
peuple, l’a dotée de richesses qui ne doivent jaimais s’épuiser;
toujours passioné pour les intèrêts de la religion, il s’est empressé
d’augmenter ses ressources. Nouveau Melchisédech, notre roi est en même
temps un pontife qui remplit exactement ses devoirs de fidèle comme ses
devoirs de pasteur. Bien qu’occupé dans le palais qu’il habite du soin
de rendre la justice, son plus grand désir est d’imiter l’example des
saints évêques. Il quitte la première charge pour en remplir une autre
avec plus d’honneur, et le souvenir de ses grandes actions lui assure
l’immortalité.”
By the twelfth century the basilica has disappeared, and its place has
been taken, not by a single church, but by two churches side by
side--Sainte Marie on the north, Saint Etienne on the south. At the
beginning of the century Saint Etienne was the more important of the
two, having escaped plunder at the hands of the Normans, who wrought
considerable destruction in the sister church; but a twelfth-century
archdeacon, Etienne de Garlande, took upon himself the task of
restoring Sainte Marie, which became known as the _nova ecclesia_, and
formed the foundation of the great basilica planned by Maurice de Sully.
This church, begun in 1163, was to unite Saint Etienne and Sainte Marie;
the foundation stone was laid by Pope Alexander III., and in 1218 the
remains of the old church of Saint Etienne were destroyed to make way
for the south aisle of Notre Dame. The work went on into the thirteenth
century; the great west portal was probably finished about 1223, and
those of the transepts some forty years later.
“There are absolutely only these two churches (Notre Dame and the Sainte
Chapelle) left standing in the island of the city, and there is nothing
in the history of Paris which more clearly exhibits the modern
disposition to make a _tabula rasa_ of the past.” In the Middle Ages the
great Cathedral of Paris--“cathedral” since the twelfth century--stood
in its island of La Cité amidst a perfect cluster of lesser churches, of
which only the chapel of Saint Louis remains. Mr. Hamerton, whose words
are quoted above, gives quite a considerable list of them in his “Paris
in Old and Present Times,” Sainte Genèviève, Saint Jean le Rond, Saint
Denis du Pas, and its brother church of La Chartre--these are but a few
of their names, and yet these names are all that now remain of churches
where mediæval knights and burghers and artificers worshipped, and into
whose building mediæval architects, unknown and forgotten, put their
best work and their highest service; even their sites are, in most
cases, undiscoverable amongst the great mass of buildings, and bright
wide streets, and green gardens of Paris as we know it. Some of these
churches, like Saint Aignan and Saint Germain-le-Vieux, have left a few
isolated columns and stones, but to find these, as one writer observes,
“il faudrait pénétrer dans les maisons et se livrer à des recherches.”
Another, the old Madeleine, has suffered an even worse fate, its last
remaining chapel being now transformed into a wine-shop at the corner of
the Rue des Marmousets; a private house now stands upon the site of
Saint-Pierre aux Bœufs, built, says an inscription on the façade, in
the middle of the twelfth century, and demolished as late as 1837; and
as for Saint Michel du Palais, within whose walls Archibishop Maurice de
Sully baptised Philip Augustus in 1165, nothing remains to the memory of
the Archangel but the bridge over the Seine. “‘There is my bridge
still,’ Saint Michael may think, ‘but as for my church I seek for it in
vain.’” These vanished churches are too many all to be numbered here,
since in La Cité alone there were, up to the eighteenth century, no less
than seventeen of them, and outside the walls of the city there were
many more.
[Illustration: NÔTRE DAME, PARIS]
Happily Notre Dame has better withstood the attacks of time and all the
accidents of fire, plunder, and desecration. Five years or so after the
completion of the western façade a fire broke out, and in the
restoration the double-arched buttresses of the former apse disappeared,
and the windows were enlarged in accordance with the growing love of
light which was being manifested in other cathedrals all through France.
In more modern times--towards the middle of the eighteenth century--the
extraordinary taste of the late Renaissance period ordered the removal
of all the stained glass both of nave and choir--leaving, however, the
western rose window and the two in the transepts--and this is, of
course, a loss that can never be repaired, although the restorations of
Viollet-le-Duc have probably, as Mr. Hamerton says, gone some way
towards bringing back the original effect of light in the interior of
the church. The exterior of the nave likewise suffered not a little from
the doubtless well-meaning zeal of an unarchitectural age, which had
literally stripped it bare of all ornament: “One after another the
architects had suppressed the advancing parts of the buttresses between
the chapels, the gables, the friezes, the balustrades--in one word, the
entire ornamentation of these same chapels, the pinnacles which
decorated the tops of the buttresses, with the statues which accompanied
them and their flowering spires, the picturesque gargoyles which
rendered the services of throwing the rain-water to a distance from the
walls.”
“We may take it for granted,” Mr. Lonergan says in his “Historic
Churches of Paris,” “that those who dedicated the church to the Virgin
were not influenced alone by the fact that a previous temple in her
honour had stood on the banks of the river, but by the impetus given to
what Protestants call her ‘worship’ and Catholics her ‘cult’ or devotion
in the twelfth century.” From the earliest times there existed,
especially among sailors and fishermen, the feeling of devotion to the
Virgin Mary. They prayed to her who held the Divine Infant on her knees
to intercede for the lives of men who sailed across the waters on dark
and starless nights. This worship of the Virgin steadily grew all over
France, and the founders of the great monastic orders--Saint Augustin,
Saint Benedict, and Saint Francis, and the famous Saint Bernard of
Clairvaulx--are all included by Dante as paying special devotion to the
Virgin; and history has furnished us with many other names, amongst
which are those of Hildebert, the bishop of Le Mans, Yves and Pierre,
bishops of Chartres, and the scholar of St. Denis, Pierre Abélard. At
no time was this more noticeable than in the centuries following the
completion of Notre Dame. In consequence of this great growth of
Mary-worship, the Virgin came to be regarded as the protectress of the
people--as, indeed, she is to this day--and the Church of Notre Dame
began to be the people’s church, a kind of centre, civil as well as
ecclesiastical, of the city life. For instance, Notre Dame in Paris
became not only the house of worship and prayer, but “the house both of
God and man,” and this through no irreverent feeling. The _parvis_ or
garden in front of the Cathedral became a gathering-ground for the
townsfolk--a remnant of this feeling, it would seem, still exists in the
markets which in lesser towns are nearly always held round the
church--fairs took place there, the buyers bringing their purchases to
be blessed by the priest as they passed the church steps; and the
various festivals of the Church gave rise to secular feasts and sports
of all kinds, as well as to the performance of the miracle plays which
were attended by the people with such simple wonder and reverence, and
which in England laid the foundation of the secular comedies.
The monks of Saint Germain originally came from Autun, and at first
acknowledged the rule of Saint Basil, which was afterwards exchanged for
that of Saint Benedict. After its restoration in the eleventh century
the foundations became very powerful, and round its walls grew up the
_bourg_ of Saint Germain; later it became the Faubourg of that name, the
“intellectual quarter” of Paris, the haunt of all the most brilliant
spirits of the day; whose streets were trodden by great men, and marked
by the footsteps of genius.
The Abbey Church of Saint-Germain-des-Prés likewise owes its existence
to the Merovingian Childebert. In the sixth century Childebert went on
an expedition against the Visigoths in Spain, and returned triumphant
with a number of sainted relics, among them the tunic of Saint Vincent
and a magnificent gold cross; and in honour of these trophies and for
their safe keeping he built in the fields outside Paris a monastery,
which was consecrated by Saint Germain, so the legend says, the very day
of its royal founder’s death. The abbey was originally dedicated, in
memory of the relics which it guarded, to Saint Vincent and the Holy
Cross; but after the death of its first abbot, Saint Germain, in 576, it
became known by his name. Before the building of the Abbey of Saint
Denis, Saint-Germain-des-Prés was the burial place of the royal house,
and a long line of Childeberts, Chilperics, and Chlothars lie at rest
beneath its stones. It was pillaged and burnt by the Normans no less
than five times, and therefore, when the Abbot Morard set about
rebuilding it in the eleventh century, very little was left of
Childebert’s old foundation. Part of Morard’s work may still be seen in
the present nave of the church; the choir and apse were built later, and
date from the second half of the twelfth century, the church being
finally consecrated by Pope Alexander III. in 1163.
[Illustration: ST. GERMAIN DES PRÉS, PARIS]
The wealth of the monastery even so late as the eighteenth century may
be gauged by the indignation of Arthur Young, who in his travels through
France in 1786-7 of course visited the capital and its many churches,
but looked upon everything with the eye of an agriculturist, and only
saw in the rich meadows of the Benedictines so much wasted material for
a prosperous farm. “It is the richest abbey in France; the abbot has
300,000 liv. a year. I lose my patience at seeing such revenues thus
bestowed, consistent with the spirit of the tenth century, but not with
that of the eighteenth. What a noble farm would a fourth of this income
establish! What turnips, what cabbages, what potatoes, what clover, what
sheep, what wool! Are not these things better than a fat ecclesiastic?”
Like Saint-Germain-des-Prés, the Sainte Chapelle originated in a
sanctuary where precious relics might be safely deposited, though its
foundation does not date back to the early zeal of the fresh-converted
Merovingian kings, but only to the crusades of Louis the Saint, who
brought from the East the Crown of Thorns and some fragments of the True
Cross. Legend describes the king as walking bare-foot through the
streets of Sens and Paris, displaying his treasure-trove to an adoring
multitude; but it soon became necessary to place the relics in
sanctuary, and accordingly, in 1245, the celebrated architect, Pierre de
Montereau, began to work out his plans under the direction of the king,
and completed his chapel three years later. Its form was a curious one,
consisting of two stages; the upper one, dedicated to the Sainte
Couronne and the Sainte Croix, was reserved for the king and his court;
the lower, bearing the name of the Virgin, was given over to servants,
retainers, and the general multitude.
This upper chapel, which was then and still is to-day the chief glory of
the building, was on a level with the royal apartments in the adjoining
palace, and could thus be reached without descending into the court and
re-ascending by the staircase. This chapel was the joy of Saint Louis’
life, and during his reign no cost was spared in order to make it a
fitting receptacle for the relics which he venerated and believed in as
simply as a child, and for which he is said to have paid to the
Byzantine emperor the enormous sum of two million _livres_. As it now
stands, the Sainte Chapelle has been almost completely restored, and
this restoration, which was carried out in the last century, was
embarked upon none to soon, judging from the accounts given of the state
of the church after the Revolution. To begin with, it had been
desecrated under the rule of the Goddess of Reason, and used for storing
legal documents and papers; the beautiful glass of its windows, with its
marvellous minuteness of design, was either destroyed or irregularly
patched up; the spire was gone, and so was much of the sculpture and
ornament, both outside and inside. There it stood, this monument of the
piety of St. Louis, its founder forgotten, its glory departed, and its
actual structure in danger of being swept away. Even its ancient
surroundings, the Great Hall, the _Cour de Mai_, and the _Cour des
Comptes_ of Louis XII., had vanished; their place was occupied by modern
law-courts, and the half-ruined church seemed hopelessly out of date and
out of place. By a great stroke of good fortune the balance turned in
its favour; it was decided not to pull it down, but to restore it as a
chapel attached to the courts, where the lawyer might hear Mass; and,
thanks to the care and skill of the restoring architect, it stands
to-day in all essentials much as it did when Louis IX. worshipped there
with his courtiers, when the light from the tall windows streamed in
upon the bright armour and rich garments of hundreds of noble figures,
staining them with new and wonderful colours, and when the courts below
were alive with a motley crowd, townsfolk of Paris, pressing to get a
sight of the king’s majesty, servants and retainers thronging round the
doors or filing into Mass in the Chapel of the Virgin below, whose low
roof and vaulting really gave it the appearance of a crypt to the
soaring chapel of the Crown and Cross above it.
Until the time of Henri II. the kings of France lived in the great
“Salle des Pas Perdus” as their royal palace; then the Parlement of
Paris--a purely legal body--took possession of it, and the easy-going
canons of the Sainte Chapelle ministered not to princes and nobles, but
to the brisk, alert _gens de la robe_, who were quick to note and to
laugh at their comfortable ecclesiastical placidity and ridiculous petty
quarrels. Boileau, the famous satirist, was the son of a registrar, and
grew up under the shadow of the law-courts, and it was he who in his
“Lutrin” victimised the poor, ease-loving prebends and canons more than
any of his fellows, though one of these canons was his own brother, and
after Boileau’s death heaped coals of fire upon the head, or rather,
upon the memory, of the poet, by allowing his bones to rest within the
building at whose servants he had so mercilessly mocked. The lawyers
still have the possession of the Sainte Chapelle; but all stalls and
seats have been removed and its doors are opened once a year only, when
the autumn session begins, being inaugurated by the “Messe Rouge,”
celebrated by the Archbishop of Paris himself.
[Illustration: PONT ST. MICHEL AND STE. CHAPELLE, PARIS]