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

by Hugo, Victor

  The University was built on hilly ground. To the southeast the Montagne Sainte-Genèvieve formed an immense bulge, and it was a sight to see from the top of Notre-Dame that throng of narrow winding streets (the Latin Quarter of today), those clusters of houses, spread out in all directions from the summit of that eminence, tumbling in disorder, almost vertically, down its slopes to the water’s edge, looking as if some were falling and others climbing back again, all holding on to each other. A continual stream of hundreds of black dots crossing one another on the pavement gave the impression that everything was in motion. This was how the people looked, from high up and at a distance.

  Finally, in the intervals between these roofs, these spires, these uneven contours of the innumerable buildings which bent, twisted, and indented so oddly the outer line of the University, one caught a glimpse here and there of some great section of wall, overgrown with moss, a thick round tower, a crenellated city-gate, representing the fortress; this was Philip-Augustus’s enclosure. Beyond, the green meadows stretched away, beyond, the roads ran off, with a few suburban houses still trailing along them, ever thinner on the ground as the distance increased. Some of these suburbs had a certain importance. First, starting from the Tournelle, came the Bourg Saint-Victor, with its single-arched bridge over the Bièvre, its abbey, where one could read the epitaph of Louis the Fat, epitaphium Ludovici Grossi, and its church with an octagonal steeple, flanked by four eleventh-century turrets (there is one like it to be seen at Étampes; it has not been pulled down yet); then the Bourg Saint-Marceau, which already then had three churches and a convent. Then, leaving on the left the Gobelins mill with its four white walls, you came to the Faubourg Saint-Jacques, with the handsome carved cross at the crossroads, the church of Saint-Jacques, which was then a Gothic one, pointed and charming, Saint-Magloire, with a fine fourteenth-century nave used by Napoleon as a hay barn, Notre-Dame des Champs, with some Byzantine mosaics. Finally, leaving behind in the open fields the Carthusian monastery, a sumptuous building contemporaneous with the Palais de Justice, with its little compartmented gardens and the haunted ruins of Vauvert, the eye fell to the west on the three Romanesque spires of Saint-Germain-des-Prés. The Bourg Saint-Germain, already a substantial commune, extended over some fifteen or twenty streets behind. The pointed steeple of Saint-Sulpice marked one of the corners of the Bourg. Close by you could make out the quadrilateral enclosure of the Saint-Germain fair, where the market is today; then the abbot’s pillory, a pretty little round tower neatly capped with a lead cone. The tile kiln lay further away, and the rue du Four which led to the communal oven [four], and the mill on its mound, and the leper house, an isolated little building shunned by all. But what particularly drew the eye, and held it long fixed on that spot, was the abbey itself. It is certain that this monastery, of imposing appearance both as a church and as a manorial seat, this abbatial palace, where the bishops of Paris counted themselves lucky to spend even one night, this refectory on which the architect had conferred the appearance, the beauty, and the splendid rose-window of a cathedral, this elegant Lady Chapel, this monumental dormitory, vast gardens, portcullis, drawbridge, enveloping battlements, cutting out notches from the view of the green meadows around them, courtyards where men in shining armour mingled with gold copes, all grouped and gathered round the three tall Romanesque spires set firmly on a Gothic apse, made an altogether magnificent figure on the horizon.

  When at last, after lengthy contemplation of the University, you turned towards the right bank, towards the Town, the sight before you suddenly changed in character. The Town, indeed, much larger than the University, was also less unified. At first sight it could be seen to divide into several peculiarly distinct masses. First, to the east, in the part of the Town still named after the marsh, Marais, where Camulogenus bogged down Caesar, there was a dense collection of palaces. This mass came down to the water’s edge. Four mansions almost touching, the Hôtels de Jouy, de Sens, de Barbeau, and the Logis de la Reine were mirrored in the Seine, their slate roofs punctuated by slender turrets. These four buildings filled up the space from the rue des Nonaindières to the abbey of the Celestines, whose graceful spire set off their line of gables and battlements. A few greenish hovels leaning out over the water in front of these superb mansions did not impede the view of the fine angles of their façades, their broad, square windows with stone mullions, their Gothic porches heavily laden with statuary, the sharp groining of their still clean-cut walls, and all those delightful architectural features which make it seem as though Gothic art starts its combinations afresh with each new monument. Behind these palaces, there ran in every direction, now fenced, stockaded, crenellated like a citadel, now veiled with tall trees like a charterhouse, the vast, multi-form enclosure of the marvellous Hôtel de Saint-Pol, where the King of France could provide superb accommodation for twenty-two princes of the rank of the Dauphin or the Duke of Burgundy, with their servants and suites, not to mention great nobles, and the Emperor when he came to look at Paris, and the lions, who had their separate residence within the royal residence. We should say here that at that time a prince’s apartment consisted of no fewer than eleven rooms, from the audience room to the oratory, not to mention the galleries, baths, steam rooms, and other ‘superfluous places’ with which each apartment was provided; not to mention the private gardens of each of the King’s guests; not to mention kitchens, storerooms, pantries, general household refectories; backyards, with twenty-two general workshops, from the bakehouse to the butlery; games of innumerable kinds, mall, tennis, tilting at the ring; aviaries, fishponds, menageries, stables, cattle-sheds; libraries, arsenals, and foundries. Such was a king’s palace at the time, a Louvre, a Hôtel Saint-Pol. A city within a city.

  From the tower where we are standing the Hôtel Saint-Pol, almost half of it hidden by the four large residences we have just mentioned, was still a very considerable and wonderful sight. Clearly distinguishable within it, though skilfully attached to the main building by long galleries with stained-glass windows and rows of pillars, were the three mansions which Charles V had amalgamated with his palace, the Hôtel du Petit-Muce, its roof trimmed with a graceful, lacy balustrade, the Hôtel of the abbot of Saint-Maur, with the lines of a fortress, a massive tower, machicolations, loopholes, iron moineaux [bastions], and over its wide Saxon gateway the abbot’s coat of arms between the two grooves for the drawbridge; the Hôtel of the comte d’Étampes, the top of its round keep in ruins and jagged like a coxcomb; here and there three or four old oaks, clumped together like huge cauliflowers, swans disporting themselves in the clear waters of the fishponds, all striped with light and shade; numerous courtyards revealing picturesque corners; the lion house, with low Gothic arches on short Saxon pillars, its iron portcullises, and continual roaring; cutting across the whole the scaly spire of the Ave-Maria; to the left, the residence of the Provost of Paris flanked by four delicately hollowed-out turrets; in the centre, at the back, the Hôtel Saint-Pol proper, with its multiple façades, its successive enrichments since Charles V’s time, the hybrid excrescences piled on it over two centuries by the fancies of architects, with all the apses of its chapels, the gables of its galleries, hundreds of weathervanes, and two lofty, contiguous towers, whose conical roofs, with crenellations round their base, looked like pointed hats with the brim turned up.

  Continuing up the successive levels of this amphitheatre of palaces unfolding in the distance over the ground, after crossing a deep ravine cut through the roofs of the Town, which marked the line of the rue Saint-Antoine, the eye reached—and we are still confining ourselves to the principal monuments—the Logis d’Angoulême, a vast structure from several different periods, some parts of which were quite new and very white, blending with the whole scarcely better than a red patch on a blue doublet. However, the peculiarly high and steeply pitched roof of the modern palace, bristling with carved gargoyles, covered in lead sheets over which glittering incrustations of gilded copper twisted in a thousand fantastic a
rabesques, this oddly damascened roof sprang gracefully from amid the brown ruins of the ancient building, whose massive old towers, bulging with the years like casks collapsing with age and splitting from top to bottom, looked like fat bellies released from the support of buttons. Behind rose the forest of slender spires of the Tournelles palace. There was no spectacle in the world, not Chambord, nor the Alhambra, more magical, more ethereal, more marvellous than this cluster of spires, turrets, chimneys, weathervanes, spiral staircases, open-work lanterns, looking as though they had been stamped out with a punch, pavilions, spindle-shaped turrets or, as they were then called, tournelles, all of different shapes, height, and altitude. It was like some gigantic stone chessboard.

  To the right of the Tournelles, that enormous bundle of inky-black towers, running one into another, and lashed together, so to speak, by a circular moat, that keep with far more loopholes than windows, that drawbridge kept always raised, that portcullis always lowered, that is the Bastille. Those things projecting like black beaks between the battlements, which you might from a distance take for waterspouts, are cannon.

  Within their range, at the foot of the formidable building, lies the Porte Saint-Antoine, hidden between its two towers.

  Beyond the Tournelles, and up as far as Charles V’s wall, stretched a velvety carpet of gardens and royal parks, with rich compartments of greenery and flowers, in the midst of which could be identified, from its labyrinth of trees and paths, the famous Daedalus garden which Louis XI had given to Coictier. The doctor’s observatory rose above the maze like a massive isolated column with a little house in place of a capital. Some terrible astrological predictions had originated in that laboratory.

  The Place Royale* is there today.

  As we have just said, the palace quarter, of which we have tried to give the reader some idea, while pointing out only the highlights, filled the angle formed by Charles V’s wall meeting the Seine to the east. The centre of the Town was occupied by a heap of houses for ordinary folk. That indeed is where the three bridges from the City discharged on the right bank, and bridges produce houses before palaces. This pile of ordinary dwellings, packed together like cells in a beehive, had a beauty of its own. The roofs of a capital city, like the waves of the sea, have a certain grandeur. In the first place, the streets, intersecting and tangled, formed numerous diverting patterns in the mass. Around the Halles it was like a many-pointed star. The rues Saint-Denis and Saint-Martin, with their countless ramifications, rose side by side like two great trees mingling their branches. Then tortuous lines, the rues de la Plâtrerie, de la Verrerie, de la Tixanderie, coiled over the whole. There were, too, some fine buildings breaking through the petrified waves of this sea of gables. At the head of the Pont-aux-Changeurs, behind which one could see the Seine foaming beneath the mill-wheels of the Pont-aux-Meuniers, stood the Châtelet, no longer a Roman tower as it was under Julian the Apostate, but a thirteenth-century feudal tower, of stone so hard that in three hours with a pickaxe you could not chip away a hand’s thickness. There was the sumptuous square steeple of Saint-Jacques-de-la-Boucherie, its angles all rounded with sculptures, already admirable in the fifteenth century though still unfinished.* In particular it lacked the four monsters which still today, perched at the corners of its roof, look like four sphinxes inviting new Paris to solve the riddle of the old; the sculptor Rault did not put them there till 1526, and was paid 20 francs for his trouble. There was the Maison-aux-Piliers, opening on to the Place de Grève, of which we have already given the reader some idea. There was Saint-Gervais, since spoiled by a doorway ‘in good taste’; Saint-Méry, whose old Gothic arches were still almost round Romanesque ones; Saint-Jean, whose magnificent spire was a byword; there were a score of other monuments which did not disdain to bury their marvels amid this chaos of dark, narrow, cavernous streets. Add the carved stone crosses even more generously distributed at crossroads than the gibbet; the cemetery of the Innocents, whose architectural enclosure was visible in the distance above the roofs; the pillory of the Halles, whose top showed between two chimneys in the rue de la Cossonière; the gallows of the Croix-du-Trahoir at the crossroads there, always black with people; the circular shacks of the Halle-au-Blé [Corn Market]; fragments of the old enclosure of Philip-Augustus to be seen here and there, submerged among the houses, the towers eaten away by ivy, gateways in ruins, crumbling and shapeless sections of wall; the quay with its hundreds of shops and bloody skinners’ yards; the Seine crammed with boats from the Pont-au-Foin to For-l’Évêque; with that you will have a rough picture of how the central trapezium of the Town looked in 1482.

  With these two quarters, one of mansions, the other of dwelling houses, the third feature of the Town’s appearance was a long belt of abbeys which ran almost right round it, from east to west, forming behind the ring of fortifications enclosing Paris a second inner ring of convents and chapels. Thus, directly beside the park of the Tournelles, between the rue Saint-Antoine and the rue vieille du Temple, lay Sainte-Catherine, with its vast area of cultivation, bounded only by the city wall of Paris. Between the rue vieille and the rue neuve du Temple lay the Temple, a sinister cluster of towers, tall, upright, and isolated amid a huge crenellated enclosing wall. Between the rue neuve du Temple and the rue Saint-Martin lay the abbey of Saint-Martin, amid its gardens, a superb fortified church, with a girdle of towers and a triple crown of steeples, surpassed in strength and splendour only by Saint-Germain-des-Prés. Between the rues Saint-Martin and Saint-Denis extended the enclosure of the Trinité. Finally, between the rue Saint-Denis and the rue Montorgueil, the Filles-Dieu. Beside it could be made out the decaying roofs and unpaved precinct of the Court of Miracles. It was the only profane link to combine with this pious chain of monastic establishments.

  Last, the fourth compartment which stood out from the agglomeration of roofs on the right bank and occupied the western corner of the enclosure and the riverbank downstream was a new knot of palaces and mansions packed together at the feet of the Louvre. The old Louvre of Philip-Augustus, that building out of all proportion whose massive tower grouped around it twenty-three major towers, not counting turrets, seemed from a distance to be inset into the Gothic rooftops of the Hôtel d’Alençon and the Petit-Bourbon. That hydra of towers, a giant keeping guard over Paris, with its two dozen heads always alert, its monstrous hindquarters sheathed in lead or scales of slate, glistening with metallic reflections, came as a surprising conclusion to the Town’s western configuration.

  Thus an immense mass, what the Romans called insula, an island, of private dwellings, flanked to right and left by two blocks of palaces, one crowned by the Louvre, the other by the Tournelles, bordered on the north by a long belt of abbeys and cultivated enclosures, the whole amalgamated and fused as one watched; above these hundreds of buildings whose roofs of tiles and slates stood out against one another to form so many strange ridges and chains, the tattooed, embossed, guilloched* steeples of the forty-four churches on the right bank; innumerable streets crisscrossing; bounded on one side by an enclosure of high walls with square towers (that of the University had round towers); on the other by the Seine, which was intersected by bridges and bore a heavy traffic of boats: such was the Town in the fifteenth century.

  Beyond the walls a few suburbs pressed around the gates, but they were fewer and more scattered than those of the University. Behind the Bastille a score of poor cottages huddled round the curious sculptures of the Croix-Faubin and the flying buttresses of the abbey of Saint-Antoine-des-Champs; then came Popincourt, lost among the cornfields; then la Courtille, a merry village full of taverns; the Bourg Saint-Laurent, with its church, the steeple from a distance looking like an addition to the pointed towers of the Porte Saint-Martin; the Faubourg Saint-Denis, with the vast enclosure of Saint-Ladre;* outside the Porte Montmartre, the Grange-Batelière girdled with white walls; behind, with its chalky slopes, Montmartre, which at that time had as many churches as windmills, but has kept only the windmills, for all that socie
ty now demands is bread for the body. Finally, beyond the Louvre, one could see the already quite considerable Faubourg Saint-Honoré running out into the meadows, la Petite-Bretagne in all its greenery, the Marché-aux-Pourceaux spreading out, with, at its centre, the horrible round furnace in which counterfeiters were boiled alive. Between la Courtille and Saint-Laurent, on the summit of some high ground squatting above the empty plains, your eye had already noticed a structure of some sort, looking from a distance like a ruined colonnade standing on an exposed base. This was no Parthenon, nor Temple of Olympian Jupiter. It was Montfaucon.*

  Now, if this enumeration of so many buildings, succinct as we have tried to make it, has not shattered as fast as we put it together the general picture of old Paris in the reader’s mind, we shall resume it in a few words. In the centre the Île de la Cité, looking like a huge tortoise in shape and thrusting out its bridges, scaled with tiles, like paws from beneath its grey carapace of roofs. To the left the monolithic, firm, dense, compacted, bristling trapezium of the University. To the right the vast semicircle of the Town, much more of a mixture with its gardens and monuments. The three blocks, City, University, Town, veined with countless streets. Running through it all the Seine, ‘the nutritive Seine’ as Father Du Breul puts it, obstructed by islands, bridges, and boats. All around an immense plain, a patchwork of innumerable kinds of cultivation, sprinkled with attractive villages; to the left Issy, Vanves, Vaugirard, Montrouge, Gentilly, with its round tower and its square tower, etc.; to the right a score of others from Conflans to Ville-l’Évêque. On the horizon a circular fringe of hills like the rim of the basin. Finally, far off to the east, Vincennes and its seven quadrangular towers; to the south, Bicêtre and its pointed turrets; to the north Saint-Denis and its slim spire; to the west Saint-Cloud and its keep. Such was the Paris which crows living in 1482 could see from the top of the towers of Notre-Dame.