Notre-Dame de Paris (Oxford World's Classics)

by Hugo, Victor

  Since then Paris has been further transformed, unfortunately for our eyes; but it has burst out of only one more enclosure, that of Louis XV, that wretched wall of mud and spittle, worthy of the king who built it, worthy of the poet who sang of it:

  Le mur murant Paris rend Paris murmurant.*

  In the fifteenth century Paris was still divided into three quite distinct and separate towns, each with its own physiognomy, specialities, way of life, customs, privileges, history: the City, the University, the Town. The City, which occupied the island of that name, was the oldest, the smallest, and mother of the other two, squeezed between them, if we may be allowed the comparison, like a little old woman between her two tall beautiful daughters. The University covered the left bank of the Seine, from the Tournelle to the Tour de Nesle, corresponding in the Paris of today respectively to the Halle-aux-Vins [Wine Market] and the Monnaie [Mint]. Its boundary scooped a large piece out of the countryside where Julian had built his Baths. The mount of Sainte-Geneviève was enclosed by it. The highest point of this arc of walls was the Porte Papale, more or less the present site of the Panthéon. The Town, the largest of the three portions of Paris, had the right bank. Its quayside, though broken or interrupted in several places, ran along the Seine, from the Tour de Billy to the Tour du Bois, that is from the place where the Grenier d’Abondance stands today to where the Tuileries are. These four points at which the Seine cut the capital’s ring-wall, the Tournelle and the Tour de Nesle on the left, the Tour de Billy and the Tour du Bois on the right, were called par excellence ‘the four towers of Paris’. The Town penetrated even further into the countryside than the University. The extreme point of the Town’s enclosure (that of Charles V) was at the Porte Saint-Denis and the Porte Saint-Martin, whose site has not changed.

  As we have just said, each of these three great divisions of Paris was a town, but too special a town to be complete, a town which could not do without the other two. Whence three absolutely different aspects. In the City churches abounded, in the Town palaces, in the University colleges. Leaving aside here the less important peculiarities of old Paris, and the caprices of right of way, we may say in general, taking only the overall pattern and major features in the chaos of communal jurisdiction, that the island belonged to the bishop, the right bank to the Provost of merchants, the left bank to the rector of the University. The Provost of Paris, a royal, not a municipal official, had jurisdiction over the whole. The City had Notre-Dame, the Town the Louvre and the Hôtel de Ville, the University the Sorbonne. The Town had the Halles, the City the Hôtel-Dieu, the University the Pré-aux-Clercs. Offences committed by students on the left bank, in their own Pré-aux-Clercs, were tried on the island, in the Palais de Justice, and punished on the right bank, at Montfaucon. Unless the rector, sensing that the University was strong and the king weak, intervened; for it was the students’ privilege to be hanged in their own part of Paris.

  (Most of these privileges, be it noted in passing, and there were better ones than that, had been wrung out of the King by revolts and mutinies. That is the immemorial way things go. The King only loosens his hold when the people snatch. There is an old charter which expresses it artlessly, on the subject of loyalty: fidelitas in reges, quae tamen aliquoties seditionibus interrupta, multa peperit privilegia [Loyalty to kings, although interrupted by a certain number of insurrections, has won many privileges].)

  In the fifteenth century the Seine washed five islands within the walls of Paris: the Îie Louviers, where there were then trees and now only timber; the Île-aux-Vaches and the Îie Notre-Dame, both deserted, apart from one hovel, both fiefs of the bishop (in the seventeenth century these two islands were made into one, which was then built upon and is now called the Îie Saint-Louis); finally the Îie de la Cité, the City, with at its tip the cow-ferryman’s islet, since buried beneath the esplanade of the Pont-Neuf. The City then had five bridges: three on the right, the Pont Notre-Dame and the Pont-au-Change of stone, the Pont-aux-Meuniers of wood; two on the left, the stone Petit-Pont and the wooden Pont Saint-Michel; all with houses on them. The University had six gates built by Philip-Augustus; namely, starting from the Tournelle, the Porte Saint-Victor, the Porte Bordelle, the Porte Papale, the Porte Saint-Jacques, the Porte Saint-Michel, the Porte Saint-Germain. The Town had six gates built by Charles V; namely, starting from the Tour de Billy, the Porte Saint-Antoine, the Porte du Temple, the Porte Saint-Martin, the Porte Saint-Denis, the Porte Montmartre, the Porte Saint-Honoré. All these gates were strong and beautiful too, for beauty does not detract from strength. A broad, deep moat, fast-flowing during the winter floods, washed the foot of the walls all round Paris; the Seine provided the water. At night the gates were closed, the river at each end of the town was barred with great iron chains, and Paris slept peacefully.

  Seen from a bird’s-eye view, then, these three townships of City, University, and Town each appeared as an inextricable web of weirdly tangled streets. However, it was apparent from the first glance that these three fragments of city formed a single body. You saw at once two long, parallel streets, running without a break, without disturbance, almost in a straight line, crossing each of the townships from end to end, from south to north, at right angles to the Seine, connecting and mingling, then, constantly infusing, pouring, and decanting the people from one into the walls of another, and making the three into one. The first of these two streets ran from the Porte Saint-Jacques to the Porte Saint-Martin, and was called rue Saint-Jacques in the University, rue de la Juiverie in the City, rue Saint-Martin in the Town; it crossed the river twice under the name of Petit-Pont and Pont Notre-Dame. The second, called rue de la Harpe on the left bank, rue de la Barillerie on the island, rue Saint-Denis on the right bank, Pont Saint-Michel over one arm of the Seine, Pont-au-Change over the other, ran from the Porte Saint-Michel in the University to the Porte Saint-Denis in the Town. However, under so many different names, they were still only two streets, but two parent streets, the two generators and arteries of Paris. All the other veins of the triple town were fed from them or emptied into them.

  Independently of these two main streets, diametrically cutting across the width of Paris from side to side, common to the whole capital, Town and University each had their own particular main street, running lengthways across them, parallel with the Seine, intersecting the two arterial streets at right angles. Thus in the Town you could go in a straight line from the Porte Saint-Antoine to the Porte Saint-Honoré; in the University from the Porte Saint-Victor to the Porte Saint-Germain. These two great thoroughfares, intersecting with the first two, formed the canvas backing on which lay the labyrinthine street network of Paris, knotted and pulled in every direction. With careful scrutiny one might further discern within the unintelligible pattern of this network what looked like two outspread wheatsheaves, one in the University, the other in the Town, two bundles of broad streets fanning out as they led from the bridges to the gates.

  Something of this ground plan still remains today.

  Now, what did the whole view look like from the top of the towers of Notre-Dame in 1482? That is what we shall try to say.

  The spectator arriving breathless at this summit was met first by a dizzy confusion of roofs, chimneys, streets, bridges, squares, spires, steeples. Everything caught the eye at once, the carved gable, the steep roof, the turret suspended at the corner of the walls, the stone pyramid of the eleventh century, the slate obelisk of the fifteenth, the bare, round tower of the castle keep, the square decorated tower of the church, the big, the small, the massive, the airy. The eye lingered at every level of this labyrinth, where there was nothing without its originality, its reason, its genius, its beauty, nothing which did not derive from art, from the humblest house with carved and painted front, external timbers, low doorway, overhanging storeys, to the royal Louvre, which at that time had a colonnade of towers. But the principal masses discernible to the eye, once it began to adjust to this jumble of buildings, are as follows.

  First
the City. The Îie de la Cité, in the words of Sauval, whose muddled writing contains the occasional felicity of style, ‘the Îie de la Cité is made like a great ship stuck in the mud and stranded with the current near the middle of the Seine.’ We have just explained that in the fifteenth century this ship was moored to the two riverbanks by five bridges. This outline of a vessel had also struck the heraldic scribes; for that, and not the siege of the Normans, according to Favyn and Pasquier, is the origin of the ship emblazoned on the old arms of Paris. For anyone who knows how to read it, heraldry is an algebra, a language. The entire history of the second half of the Middle Ages is written in heraldry, just as the history of the first half is written in the symbolism of the Romanesque churches. They are the hieroglyphs of feudalism, following those of theocracy.

  The City, then, first struck the eye with its stern to the east and its prow to the west. Turning towards the prow you had before you an innumerable flock of old roofs with the leaded apse of the Sainte-Chapelle rising broad and round above them, like an elephant carrying its tower on its hindquarters. Only here the tower was the boldest, the most finely worked and carved, the most skilfully fretted spire which ever showed the sky through its lacy cone. Directly in front of Notre-Dame three streets debouched on to the Parvis, a fine square of old houses. On the south side of this square leaned the wrinkled, scowling façade of the Hôtel-Dieu, its roof covered seemingly with boils and warts. Then, to right, to left, to east, to west, within the bounds of the City, narrow though they were, rose the steeples of its twenty-one churches, of every date, shape and size, from the low, decaying Romanesque campanile of Saint-Denys-du-Pas, career Glaucini [prison of Glaucinus], to the delicate spires of Saint-Pierre-aux-Bœufs and Saint-Landry. Behind Notre-Dame extended, to the north, its cloister with its Gothic galleries; to the south the semi-Romanesque Bishop’s Palace; to the east, the island’s empty tip, known as the Terrain. Amid this pile of houses one could also make out, by the tall, open-work stone mitres on the roof itself which then crowned the topmost windows of palaces, the Hôtel given by the Town, under Charles VI, to Juvénal des Ursins; a little further on the tarred sheds of the Marché-Palus; elsewhere again the new apse of Saint-Germain-le-Vieux, extended in 1458 by taking in a bit from the rue-aux-Febves; and then, here and there, a crossroads thronged with people, a pillory standing at a street corner, a fine section of Philip-Augustus pavement, magnificent flagstones scored in the middle to stop horses’ hooves slipping, and so poorly replaced in the sixteenth century by those wretched cobbles known as ‘League paving’, a deserted backyard with one of those transparent staircases they used to build in the fifteenth century, one of which can still be seen in the rue des Bourdonnais. Finally, to the right of the Sainte-Chapelle, towards the west, the Palais de Justice sat at the water’s edge with its group of towers. The groves of the king’s garden, which covered the western tip of the City, concealed the cowferryman’s islet. As for the water, from the top of the towers of Notre-Dame it was scarcely visible on either side of the City. The Seine was lost to sight under the bridges, the bridges under their houses.

  And when you looked past the bridges, on which the roofs were plainly turning green, mouldering before their time in the vapours from the water, and turned your gaze to the left, towards the University, the first building to strike the eye was a large, low bunch of towers, the Petit Châtelet, whose yawning gateway swallowed up the end of the Petit-Pont. Then, if you looked along the bank from east to west, from the Tournelle to the Tour de Nesle, there ran a long string of houses with carved beams, coloured windows, overhanging the pavement with one storey projecting above another, an endless zigzag of comfortable citizens’ gables, cut frequently by the end of some street, and also now and then by the front or angle of some great stone mansion, ensconced comfortably with its courtyards and gardens, its wings and main buildings, amid this rabble of cramped, narrow houses like some great lord amid a mob of yokels. There were five or six of these mansions on the quay, from the Logis de Lorraine, which shared with the Bernardins* the great enclosure adjacent to the Tournelle, to the Hôtel de Nesle, whose main tower marked the boundary of Paris, and whose pointed roofs were privileged for three months in the year to interpose their black triangles upon the scarlet disc of the setting sun.

  That side of the Seine was, for the rest, the less commercial of the two; noise and crowds came from the students rather than the artisans, and the quay, strictly speaking, ran only from the Pont Saint-Michel to the Tour de Nesle. Otherwise along the bank of the Seine ran either a bare strand, as it was beyond the Bernardins, or a clutter of houses with their feet in the water, as between the two bridges. The washerwomen made a lot of noise there, shouting, talking, singing from morning to night along the water’s edge, and banging away at their washing as they do today. They offer by no means the least of Paris entertainments.

  The University looked like one single block. From one end to the other it formed a homogeneous and compact whole. Those hundreds of roofs, dense, angular, tightly packed together, almost all consisting of the same geometric element seen from above, looked like a crystallization of the same one substance. The capricious cracks formed by the ravine of the streets divided this mass of houses into slices that were not too disproportionate. The forty-two colleges were distributed fairly evenly, and were to be found everywhere; the varied and amusing summits of these fine buildings were products of the same art as the simple roofs they dominated, and amounted to no more than the same geometrical figure multiplied by its square or its cube. They thus added complexity to the whole without disrupting it, completed it without overloading it. Geometry is a matter of harmony. Some fine mansions also projected magnificently over the picturesque attics of the left bank, the Logis de Nevers, the Logis de Rome, the Logis de Reims which have since disappeared; the Hôtel de Cluny, which still remains for the artist’s consolation, and whose tower was so stupidly pollarded a few years ago. Near Cluny, that Roman palace, with lovely round arches, were Julian’s Baths. There were also a goodly number of abbeys whose beauty was more religious and grandeur more solemn than the mansions, but no less beautiful nor less grand for that. Those which first excited notice were the Bernardins, with its three steeples; Sainte-Geneviève, whose square tower, still existing, makes one grieve for the loss of the rest; the Sorbonne, half college, half monastery, of which such an admirable nave survives; the beautiful quadrilateral cloister of the Mathurins; its neighbour, the cloister of Saint-Benoît, within whose walls they have had time to botch together a theatre between the seventh and eighth editions of this book; the Cordeliers, with three enormous gables side by side; the Augustins, whose graceful spire was, after the Tour de Nesle, the second sharp projection on that side of Paris, counting from the west. The colleges, which were in fact the intermediate link between the cloister and the world, stood midway in the series of monuments between the mansions and the abbeys, with a severity full of elegance, less frivolous sculptures than the palaces, less earnest architecture than the convents. Unfortunately hardly anything remains of these monuments in which Gothic art drew the line so precisely between riches and economy. The churches—which were numerous and splendid in the University and ranged too through every period of architecture from the round arches of Saint-Julien to the pointed ones of Saint-Séverin—the churches dominated the whole, and, as one more harmony among this mass of harmonies, constantly punctuated the jagged outline of these countless gables with slashed spires, open-work steeples, delicate spires whose line was just one more magnificent exaggeration of the steep angle of the roofs.