Volume 7 — II THE BEGINNINGS AND EXPANSIONS OF PARIS[58]
Reading edition
The Paris of three hundred and fifty years ago, the Paris of the fifteenth century, was already a gigantic city. We modern Parisians in general are much mistaken in regard to the ground which we imagine it has gained. Since the time of Louis XI Paris has not increased above one-third; and certes it has lost much more in beauty than it has acquired in magnitude.
The infant Paris was born, as everybody knows, in that ancient island in the shape of a cradle, which is now called the City. The banks of that island were its first enclosure; the Seine was its first ditch. For several centuries Paris was confined to the island, having two bridges, the one on the north, the other on the south, the two têtes-de-ponts, which were at once its gates and its fortresses—the Grand Chatelet on the right bank and the Petit Chatelet on the left. In process of time, under the kings of the first dynasty, finding herself straitened in her island and unable to turn herself about, she crossed the water. A first enclosure of walls and towers then began to encroach upon either bank of the Seine beyond the two Chatelets. Of this ancient enclosure some vestiges were still remaining in the past century; nothing is now left of it but the memory and here and there a tradition. By degrees the flood of houses, always propelled from the heart to the extremities, wore away and overflowed this enclosure.
Philip Augustus surrounded Paris with new ramparts. He imprisoned the city within a circular chain of large, lofty, and massive towers. For more than a century the houses, crowding closer and closer, raised their level in this basin, like water in a reservoir. They began to grow higher; story was piled upon story; they shot up like any comprest liquid, and each tried to lift its head above its neighbors in order to obtain a little fresh air. The streets became deeper and deeper, and narrower and narrower; every vacant place was covered and disappeared. The houses at length overleapt the wall of Philip Augustus, and merrily scattered themselves at random over the plain, like prisoners who had made their escape. There they sat themselves down at their ease and carved themselves gardens out of the fields. So early as 1367 the suburbs of the city had spread so far as to need a fresh enclosure, especially on the right bank; this was built for it by Charles V. But a place like Paris is perpetually increasing. It is such cities alone that become capitals of countries. They are reservoirs into which all the geographical, political, moral, and intellectual channels of a country, all the natural inclined planes of its population discharge themselves; wells of civilization, if we may be allowed the expression, and drains also, where all that constitutes the sap, the life, the soul of the nation, is incessantly collecting and filtering, drop by drop, age by age.
The enclosure of Charles V consequently shared the same fate as that of Philip Augustus. So early as the conclusion of the fifteenth century it was overtaken, passed, and the suburbs kept traveling onward. In the sixteenth it seemed very visibly receding more and more into the ancient city, so rapidly did the new town thicken on the other side of it. Thus, so far back as the fifteenth century, to come down no further, Paris had already worn out the three concentric circles of walls which, from the time of Julian the Apostate, lay in embryo, if I may be allowed the expression, in the Grand and Petit Chatelets. The mighty city had successively burst its four mural belts, like a growing boy bursting the garments made for him a year ago. Under Louis XI there were still to be seen ruined towers of the ancient enclosures, rising at intervals above the sea of houses, like the tops of hills from amid an inundation, like the archipelagos of old Paris submerged beneath the new....
Each of these great divisions of Paris was, as we have observed, a city, but a city too special to be complete, a city which could not do without the two others. Thus they had three totally different aspects. The City, properly so called, abounded in churches; the Ville contained the palaces; and the University, the colleges. Setting aside secondary jurisdictions, we may assume generally that the island was under the bishop, the right bank under the provost of the merchants, the left under the rector of the University, and the whole under the provost of Paris, a royal and not a municipal officer. The City had the Cathedral of Notre Dame, the Ville the Louvre and the Hotel de Ville, and the University the Sorbonne. The Ville contained the Halles, the City the Hotel Dieu, and the University the Pré aux Clercs. For offenses committed by the students on the left bank, in their Pré aux Clercs, they were tried at the Palace of Justice in the island, and punished on the right bank at Montfaucon, unless the rector, finding the University strong and the king weak, chose to interfere; for it was a privilege of the scholars to be hung in their own quarter.
Most of these privileges, be it remarked by the way, and some of them were more valuable than that just mentioned, had been extorted from different sovereigns by riots and insurrections. This is the invariable course—the king never grants any boon but what is wrung from him by the people.
In the fifteenth century that part of the Seine comprehended within the enclosure of Paris contained five islands: the Ile Louviers, then covered with trees and now with timber, the Ile aux Vaches, and the Ile Notre Dame, both uninhabited and belonging to the bishop [in the seventeenth century these two islands were converted into one, which has been built upon and is now called the Isle of St. Louis]; lastly the City, and at its point the islet of the Passeur aux Vaches, since buried under the platform of the Pont Neuf. The City had at that time five bridges: three on the right—the bridge of Notre Dame and the Pont au Change of stone, and the Pont aux Meuniers of wood; two on the left—the Petit Pont of stone, and the Pont St. Michel of wood; all of them covered with houses. The university had six gates, built by Philip Augustus; these were, setting out from the Tournelle, the Gate of St. Victor, the Gate of Bordelle, the Papal Gate, and the gates of St. Jacques, St. Michel, and St. Germain. The Ville had six gates, built by Charles V, that is to say, beginning from the Tower of Billy, the gates of St. Antoine, the Temple, St. Martin, St. Denis, Montmartre, and St. Honoré. All these gates were strong, and handsome, too, a circumstance which does not detract from strength. A wide, deep ditch, supplied by the Seine with water, which was swollen by the floods of winter to a running stream, encircled the foot of the wall all round Paris. At night the gates were closed, the river was barred at the two extremities of the city by stout iron chains, and Paris slept in quiet.
A bird's-eye view of these three towns, the City, the University, and the Ville, exhibited to the eye an inextricable knot of streets strangely jumbled together. It was apparent, however, at first sight that these three fragments of a city formed but a single body. The spectator perceived immediately two long parallel streets, without break or interruption, crossing the three cities, nearly in a right line, from one end to the other, from south to north, perpendicularly to the Seine, incessantly pouring the people of the one into the other, connecting, blending them together and converting the three into one. The first of these streets ran from the Gate of St. Jacques to the Gate of St. Martin; it was called in the University the street of St. Jacques, in the City Rue de la Juiverie, and in the Ville, the street of St. Martin; it crossed the river twice by the name of Petit Pont and Pont Notre Dame. The second, named Rue de la Harpe on the left bank, Rue de la Barillerie in the island, Rue St. Denis on the right bank, Pont St. Michel over one arm of the Seine, and Pont au Change over the other, Gate of St. Martin; it was called in the University to the Gate of St. Denis in the Ville. Still, tho they bore so many different names, they formed in reality only two streets, but the two mother-streets, the two great arteries of Paris. All the other veins of the triple city were fed by or discharged themselves into these....
What, then, was the aspect of this whole, viewed from the summit of the towers of Notre Dame in 1482? That is what we shall now attempt to describe. The spectator, on arriving breathless at that elevation, was dazzled by the chaos of roofs, chimneys, streets, bridges, belfries, towers and steeples. All burst at once upon the eye—the carved gable, the sharp roof, the turret perched upon the angles of the walls, the stone pyramids of the eleventh century, the slated obelisk of the fifteenth, the round and naked keep of the castle, the square and embroidered tower of the church, the great and the small, the massive and the light. The eye was long bewildered amid this labyrinth of heights and depths in which there was nothing but had its originality, its reason, its genius, its beauty, nothing, but issued from the hand of art, from the humblest dwelling with its painted and carved wooden front, elliptical doorway, and overhanging stories, to the royal Louvre, which then had a colonnade of towers.