CORNELL

UNIVERSITY

LIBRARY

GIFT OF Nixon Griff is

Cornell University Library PR 6003.E47P23

Paris.

3 1924 013 585 843

The original of tliis book is in tine Cornell University Library.

There are no known copyright restrictions in the United States on the use of the text.

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PARIS

PARIS

BY

HILAIRE BELLOC

AUTHOR OF "dANTON"

LONDON

EDWARD ARNOLD

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PREFACE

There comes, I suppose, to every one who has felt keenly the modern impression of a place he loves, a desire to know its changing past, the nature and experience that it draws from the centuries, and the platform upon which there can be constructed some little of that future which he will never see. The more vivid be the contemporary effect of a city, the more urgently does the question of its origins and development press upon one. The sight of one's own time — even if it be stretched to a full lifetime — is but a glance taken rapidly upon a voyage, and leaves an enduring expectation and demand for further knowledge. In the effort to satisfy this a man will read this book and that, look up old prints and catch the chance phrases of memoirs; he will, for his own sake, clear out a rough sketch of the whole past of what he loves, and he will end by making a record that is as incomplete and fragmentary, as incongruous a mixture of the general theory of life and of particular trifles, as are the notes and letters we keep to remind us of absent friends.

This is the way my book was written, and this is the reason of its being written at all; so that the very many people who feel just the same happy curiosity about a living city may have a place in which another

viii PREFACE

person, to whom Paris is as dear and ignorance as tantalizing as to themselves, has roughly quarried a bare sufficiency of knowledge for his own satisfaction and theirs. This book belongs, then, to that kind of history (if it can be called history at all) which is as superficial and as personal as a traveller's drawing or as the notes of a man's diary, but which has its purpose because, like such sketches and memoranda, it serves to give just the necessary framework upon which the memory and imagination may build.

With this there will be evident the excuse that offers for the book's shortcomiags. They are many, but they are also very evidently dependent upon the character of work that I have described. Thus, every term I have used in architecture must show an ignorance of techni- calities : the pointed arch is, baldly, " the Gothic," and the style preceding it simply " the Eomanesque." Again, the few maps were drawn, or rather sketched, by the hand of an amateur, noting down only what would make his descriptions clearer and unable to pretend to the strict accuracy that should mark such work. Thus, there is very much omitted that a modern interest would claim; but here also it is the nature of the book that has interfered. If I have said nothing of the Miller's Bridge, it is because the Pont Notre Dame and the Pont au Change were better pegs on which to hang the story of the river. If the Pont St. Michel is hidden away in a footnote, it is because the Petit Pont, with its innumerable misfortunes, is so much more Parisian; if there is no mention of the new fortifications that kept out Henri IV., it is because the king himself seemed more necessary to the book than they. St. Eustache and

PREFACE ix

St. Etienne du Mont, St. Gervais, St. Jean, St. Sulpice, have had bare allusions where any careful student of Paris would demand full histories; but if these, and so many other separate sites — St. Martin, St. Laurent, the Place Vend6me, the Observatory, the Arsenal, the Culture Ste. Catherine, and a hundred others — have been hardly touched upon or left wholly aside, it is because, with so little space and with so much to say, the Louvre, the Hotel de Ville, Notre Dame — the framework of Paris — seemed more necessary, and absorbed the proper share of the less typical monuments.

There is another matter which the reader may find it harder to pardon, and which is yet, I think, equally a necessity. I have not pursued the description of the old city beyond 1789. And if it be asked what kind of " necessity " there was in this, the answer is that the old Paris, the past which we hardly know and which it concerns us to know, ends there. The hundred years that follow would indeed make a wonderful theme for any man to write on, but it would give him a task fundamentally different from the following of that long, continuous story which centered for so many centuries round the line of the Eues St. Jacques and St. Martin, and that was played upon the stage of the University and the Cathedral and the Louvre.

As for the authorities, it has not seemed necessary to quote them in such manner as to break the text of so slight an essay. Felibien has been the basis of this, as it must be of all similar books — very good reading, but a trifle clerical. ' Abbo has given me, as he gives all who care to read him, the vivid picture of the Norman siege ; Sauval, his seventeenth century and partial but accurate

X PREFACE

view. For the innumerable details of sites, and for its excellent imaginary reproductions of old Paris, I have, of course, used the great popular collection that Fournier edited; and for the rest a great deal of quotations, memories, and accidental reading have taken the place of what might have been a fuller research. On doubtful things I have simply taken of two or more conjectures that which seemed (for I know not what reason, unless it be a preference for the picturesque) the most probable. Did Genevieve die in 509 or 512 ? Did Childeric lay siege to Paris? Does there remain a Merovingian part in St. Germain des Pres ? Was not the Chatelet, in some part, a survival from the Tower of the Siege of 885 ? No one can be quite certain, and it matters little. But I beg the indulgence of those who take a view on any such matter different from that in my text, and I assure them that I have no confidence in my opinion.

One other thing remains. I have given half the book to the origins of Paris, and I have condensed, perhaps to excess, the later part. Why? Because in history we ought not to look down a perspective, but to travel along a road.

My thanks are due to Mr. Eccles and to Mr. Haynes, who have very kindly helped me with the proofs of this book, and in some measure (though I had the misfortune to speak to him for but a few moments on this subject) to the keeper of the Carnavalet, who, as I was writing my book, ended a long, honourable, and laborious life, still bent upon his work, and having earned the respect and almost the affection of every student of the city.

London, 1900.

CONTENTS

I. Introduction 1

II. The Plain op Paris 36

III. LUTETIA 57

IV. Paris m the Daek Ages 100

V. The Eaely Middle Ages 163

VI. The Later Middle Ages . . 225

Vn. The Eenaissanoe 301

VIII. The Kbbuilding 350

IX. The Eighteenth Century 410

Index 468

LIST OF MAPS AND PLANS

PAGE

Statue op Notee Dame de Paris Frontispiece

Sketch-map op Seine Valley . .... ... 38

Map of Eeliep op Plain of Paris ... . To face 42

Sketch-map of Original Group of Islands 48

Roman Paris . To face 98

Paris and Suburbs in Dark Ages .... .... 139

Mediaeval Paris To face 224

Rebuilding op Palais de Justice 434

PARIS

CHAPTEE I

INTRODUCTION

When a man looks eastward from the western heights that dominate the city, especially from that great hiU of Valerian (round which so many memories from Ste. Genevieve to the last war accumulate), a sight presents itself which shall be the modem starting-point of our study.

Let us suppose an autumn day, clear, with wind following rain, and with a grey sky of rapid clouds against which the picture may be set. In such a weather and from such a spot the whole of the vast town lies clearly before you, and the impression is one that you will not match nor approach in any of the views that have grown famous ; for what you see is unique in something that is neither the north nor the south ; something which contains little of scenic interest and nothing of dramatic grandeur ; men have forborne to describe it because when they have known Paris well enough to comprehend that horizon, why then, her people, her history, her life from within, have mastered every other interest and have occupied all their powers. Nevertheless, this sight, caught from the

2 PARIS

hill-top, shall be our first introduction to the city ; for I know of no other which so profoundly stirs the mind of one to whom the story and even the modern nature of the place is unknown.

There lies at your feet — its fortifications some two miles away — a great plain of houses. Its inequalities are lost in the superior height from which you gaze, save where in the north the isolated summit of Montmartre, with the great mass of its half-finished church, looks over the city and answers the hill of Valerian.

This plain of houses fiUs the eye and the mind, yet it is not so vast but that, dimly, on the clearest days the heights beyond it to the east can be just perceived, whiLe to the north the suburbs and the open country appear, and to the south the hills. Whiter than are the northern towns of Europe, yet standing under a northern sky, it strikes with the force of sharp contrast, and half explains in that one feature its Latin origin and destiny. It is veiled by no cloud of smoke, for industry, and more especially the industry of our day, has not been the motive of its growth. The fantastic and even grandiose effects which are the joy of London will never be discovered here. It does not fill by a kiud of gravitation this or that group of arteries ; it forms no line along the water-course, nor does it lose itseK in those vague contours which, in a merely mercantile city, the necessity of exchange frequently determines ; for Paris was not made by commerce, nor will any theory of material conditions and environment read you the riddle of its growth and form. ' It is not the mind of the on- looker that lends it unity, nor the emotions of travel that make it, for those who see it thus, one thing. Paris, as it lies before you beneath those old hiUs -that have watched

INTRODUCTION 3

it for two thousand years, has the effect and character of personal life. Not in a metaphor, nor for the sake of phrasing, but iu fact; as truly as in the case of Eome, though in a manner less familiar, a separate existence with a soul of its own appeals to you. Its voice is no reflection of your own mind ; on the contrary, it is a troubliiig thing, like an insistent demand spoken iu a foreign tongue. Its corporate life is not an abstraction drawn from books or from words one may have heard. There, visibly before you, is the compound of the modem and the middle ages, whose unity conviaces merely by beiug seen.

And, above all, this thing upon which you are looking is alive. It needs no recollection of what has been taught in youth, nor any of those reveries which arise at the identification of things seen with names remembered. The antiq^uarian passion, in its best form pedantic and iu its worst maudlin, finds little room in the first aspect of Paris. Later, it takes its proper rank in all the mass of what we may learn, but the town, as you see it, recalls history only by speaking to you in a living voice. Its past is still alive, because the city itself is still iastinct with a vigorous growth, and you feel with regard to Paris what you would feel with regard to a young man full of adventures : not at all the quiet interest which lies in the recollections of age ; stiU less that happy memory of things dead which is a fortune for so many of the most famous cities of the world.

Whence proceeds this impression, and what is the secret of its origin ? Why, that ia all this immense extent an obvious unity of design appears; not in one quarter alone, but over the whole circumference stand the evidences of this creative spirit. It is not the rich, building

4 PARIS

for themselves in their own quarter, nor the officials, concentrating the common wealth upon their own build- ings ; it is Paris, creating and recreating her own adorn- ment, realizing her own dreams upon every side, insisting on her own vagaries, committing follies which are her own and not that of a section of her people, even here and there chiselling out something as durable as Europe.

Look at the great line before you and note these evidences of a mind at work. Here, on your right, monstrous, grotesque, and dramatic in the extreme, rises that great ladder of iron, the Eiffel, to its thousand feet ; it was meant to be merely engineering, and therefore christened at its birth by all the bad fairies, but it yet contrives (as though the spirit of the city had laughed at its own folly) to assume something of grace, and loses, in a very delicate grey, in a good curve, and in a film of fine lines, the grossness which its builders intended. It stands up, close to our western standpoint, foolishly. It is twice as high as this hUl of Valerian from which we are looking; its top is covered often in hurrying clouds, and it seems to be saying perpetually: "I am the end of the nineteenth century ; I am glad they built me of iron; let me rust." It is far on the outskirts of the town, where aU the rest of the things that Paris has made can look at it and laugh contentedly. It is like a passing fool in a crowd of the University, a buffoon in the hall; for of aU the things that Paris has made, it alone has neither wits nor soul.

But just behind it and somewhat to the left the dome you see gilded is the InvaKdes, the last and, perhaps, the best relic of seventeenth-century taste, and with that you touch ground and have to do with Paris again ; for just

INTRODUCTION 5

beneath it is Napoleon, and in the short roof to the left of it, in the chapel, the flags of all the nations. Behind that, again, almost the last thing the eighteenth century left us, is the other dome of the Pantheon. The great space in ideas that lies between it and the Invalides is the space between Mansard and Soufflot; its dome is in a false proportion ; a great hulking colonnade deforms its middle ; its sides and its decorations are cold and bare. The gulf between these two, compared, is the gulf between Louis XIV. and the last years of decay that made necessary the Eevolution. It stands, grey, ugly, and without mean- ing, the relic of a grey and ugly time. But you note that it caps a little eminence, or what seems, from our height and distance, to be a little eminence. That hUl is the hill of Ste. Genevieve, the "Mons Lucotitius." On its sides and summit the University grew, and at its base the Revolution was born in the club of the Cordeliers.

It will repay one well to look, on this clear day, and to strain the eyes in watching that hummock — a grey and confused mass of houses, with the ugly dome I spoke of on its summit. A lump, a little higher than the rest, halfway up the hill, is the Sorbonne; upon the slopes towards us two unequal square towers mark St. Sulpice — a heap of stones. Yet all this confusion of unlovely things, which the distance turns into a blotch wherein the Pantheon alone can be distinguished, is a very noteworthy square mUe of ground ; for at its foot Julian the Apostate held his little pagan circle; at its summit are the relics of Ste. Genevieve. Here Abelard awoke the "great curiosity " from its long sleep, and here St. Bernard answered him in the name of all the mystics. Here Dante studied, here Innocent III. was formed, and here

6 PARIS

Calvin the Picard preached his Batavian theory. Here is the unique arena where Catholicism and the Eationalists meet, and where a great struggle is never completed. Here, as in symbol of that wrestling, the cross is per- petually rising above and falling from the Pantheon — now torn down, now reinstated. Beneath that ugly dome lie Voltaire and Eousseau ; in one of the gloomy buildings on that hill Eobespierre was taught the .stoicism of the ancients and sat on the bench with Desmoulins; at its flank, in the Cordeliers, Danton forged out the scheme of the EepubUc; it was thence that the fire spread in '92 which overthrew the old regime; here, again, the students met and laughed and plotted against the latest despotism. It was from the steps of that unlovely Pantheon, with "To the great men of France" carved above him, that Gambetta declared the third Eepublic. It was the 4th of September, 1870, and it rained.

There is, however, ia the view before you another spot, almost touching the hill which we have been noting, and of yet more importance in the story of the city, though it may not be so in the story of the world — I mean the Island of the Cite.

From this distance we cannot see the gleam of the water on either side of it ; moreover, the houses hide the river and the bridges. Nevertheless, knowing what lies there, we can make out the group of buildings which is the historic centre of Paris, and from which the town has radiated outwards during the last fourteen centuries.

We are five miles away, and catch only its most evident marks. We see the square mass of the Palais, whence, uniaterruptedly, for eighteen hundred years the government has held its courts and its share in the

INTRODUCTION 7

administration of the town. Perhaps, if it is very clear, the conical roofs of the twin towers of the Concier- gerie can be made out; and, certainly, to the right of them we see the high-pitched roof and the thin spire of the Sainte Chapelle, which St. Louis built to cover the Holy Lance and the Crown of Thorns. But the most striking featui-e of the Island and the true middle of the whole of Paris will be clear always even at this distance — I mean the Cathedral of Notre Dame.

The distance and the larger aspect of nearer things make exiguous the far towers as they stand above the houses. You look, apparently, at a little thing, but even from here it has about it the reverence of the Middle Ages. In that distance all is subdued ; but these towers, which are grey to a man at their very feet, seem to possess to a watcher from Valerian the quality of a thin horizon cloud.

I know not how to describe this model of the Middle Ages — built into the modern town, standing (from which- ever way you look) in its very centre, so small, so distant, and yet so majestic. Amiens and Eheims, Strasburg, Chartres, and Eouen — all the great houses of the Gothic, as they pass before the mind, have something at once less pathetic and less dignified. They are no larger than Notre Dame ; they have not — even Eheims has not — her force of repose, of height, and of design. But they stand in provincial cities. The modem world affects, without transforming, their surroundings. Amiens stands head and shoulders above the town ; Eheims, as you see it coming in from camp, looks like a great sphinx brooding over the Champagne and always gazing out to the west and the hills of the Tourdenoise ; Strasburg is almost

8 PARIS

theatrical in its assertion; Chartres is the largest thing in a rural place, and is the natural mother of the Beauce, the patroness and protectress of endless fields of corn ; and even the Cathedral of Eouen, though it stands in the confusion of machiaery and in the centre of modern things, is so placed that, come from whichever way you will, it is the mistress of the town.

But Notre Dame is always one of many things and not the greatest. It was built for a little Gothic capital, and a huge metropolis has outgrown her. The town was once, so to speak, the fringe of her garment ; now she is but the centre of a circle miles around. There are but three spots in Paris from which the old church alone can fill the eye as do the churches of the provincial towns ; I mean from the Quai de la Tournelle, from the Parvis, and from the Place de Grfeve. And yet it gradually becomes more to the spirit of those who see it than do any of those other churches, for the very anomaly of its position leads to close observance, and it touches the mind at last like a woman who has been continually silent in a strange company. To a man who loves and knows the city, there soon comes a desire to communicate con- stantly with the memories of the Cathedral. And this desire, if he is wise, grows into a habit of coming close against the towers at evening, or of waiting under the great height of the nave for the voices of the Middle Ages.

Notre Dame thus lost in distance, central and remote, is Uke a lady grown old in a great house, about whose age new phrases and strange habits have arisen, who is surrounded with the youth of her own lineage, and yet is content to hear and understand without replying to their speech. She is silent in the midst of energy, and

INTRODUCTION 9

forgotten in the many activities of the household, yet she is the centre of the estate.

There stands, then, in the midst of our view, this little group of the Island of the Cit6, the old Eoman town with which so much of this history wUl deal. As the eye turns to the left, that is to the northern half of the town, it is passing over the place of its great expansion. It is here that Paris has worked and has grown, while Paris of the centre governed and Paris of the south thought and studied. It is in this half of the city that we shall note her greatest theatres, her most famous modern streets, her houses of rich men, her palaces, even her industries.

But this northern half has little to distinguish it in a general panorama ; here and there a spire, or tower, or a column, but as a rule only a mass of high houses, in which the distant Louvre alone seems to possess special prominence, and in which the Palais Eoyal, the Madeleine, the Bourse are so many roofs only, conspicuous in nothing but their surface. The old world makes but little effect from the distance at which we stand, and indeed is less apparent in the northern half of the city even to a spectator who is placed within its streets. Close against the Island you may perhaps catch the fine square tower of St. Jacques, the last of the Gothic ; but with that exception the view of the left side is modern. If we may connect it with any one period or man rather than another, it is the later Eevoliition and Napoleon that it recalls. Between us and the heart of the city is the ridge of Passy ; less than a mile from the fortifications and on the summit of this ridge, the great Triumphal Arch, full of his battles and his generals' names.

You may see beyond it, towards the more central parts

lo PARIS

of the town, a line here and there of those straight streets so many of which he planned, and nearly all of which are due to his influence upon Paris. Thus, opening straight before you, but miles away, running past the Louvre and on to the HStel de VUle, is that Eue de Eivoli, made long after his reign, and yet so characteristically his. Ob- literating, as did his own career, the memories of the Eevolution ; running over the spot where the riding-school stood, and where Mirabeau helped to found a new world ; draining the Eue St. Honore (that Eepublican gulf) of half its traffic, it strikes the note of the new Paris which the nineteenth century has designed.

Just off the line of this street you may catch the bronze column, the Vendome, which again perpetuates Napoleon ; it stands well above the houses, and rivals the other column which the distance almost hides, and which overlooks the site of the Bastille.

But when we have noted these few points, have tried to make out the new Hotel de Ville (as distant and less clear than Notre Dame), and have marked the great mass of the Opera roof, the general aspect of the northern bank is told. There is nothing on which the eye rests as a central point. Only in itself, and without the aid of monuments, the great expanse of wealth and of energy fringing off into the industries of the northern and western roads shows us at once the modern Paris that works and enjoys.

One last feature remains to be spoken of while we are still looking upon this view, and before we go down into the city to notice the closer aspect of its streets and buildings. I mean the hill of Montmartre. It lies on the extreme left of the plain, that is in the northernmost

INTRO D UCTION 1 1

part of the city, just within the fortifications, and rises, isolated and curiously steep, above the whole level of the northern quarter. No city has so admirable a place of vantage, and in no other is the position so unspoiled as here. For centuries, from the time when it was far out- side the mediaeval walls, Montmartre has been the habita- tion of bohemians and chance poor men. Lucidly it has remained undisturbed to this day. And if you climb it, you look right down upon the town from the best and most congenial of surroundings. Nothing there reminds you of a municipality forcing you to acknowledge the site and the view. There is not a park or statue, not even a square. A ramshackle cafe with dirty plaster statues, a half-finished church, a panorama of the True Jerusalem (the same all falling to pieces with old age and neglect), a number of little houses and second-rate villas, a few dusty studios ; this is the furniture of the platform beneath which aU Paris lies rolled out.

Long may it remain so untouched, in spite of many pilgrimages. For the hill is now truly Parisian. The tourist does not hear of it, even the systematic traveller avoids it. But it is dear to the student, and to that type in which Paris is so prolific; I mean the careless and disreputable young men who grow up to be bourgeois and pillars of society. For them the slopes of the hill are almost sacred. Half the minor verse of Paris has been written here, and that other hiU of the Latin quarter has arranged, as it were, for its play-ground in this for- saken and neglected place. Paris inspires you weU as you look down upon it from such surroundings, and for one who understands the race there is a peculiar pleasure in noting that officialism, which is one aspect of the

13 PARIS

national character, has spared Montmartre to the careless- ness and excess which is its paradoxical second half. N"ot so long ago a crazy windmill marked the summit. It has disappeared, but it is characteristic of the hill that it should have lingered to so late a date. Not another square yard of Paris, perhaps, has been so left to chance as this admirable opportunity for the interference of official effect. But even as I write this, the great new church threatens to make it clean and orderly and known.

Such, imperfectly described, is Paris when you see it first from the highest of the western hills. But my in- sistence upon this or that particular point must not mis- represent to my reader the general effect. These domes, arches, towers, spires — even the hills, are but incidents in the vast plain of houses with which my summary began, and which is the note of the whole scene. What is this plain, seen from within ? What is the character of its life, its architecture, its monuments? Above all, what surmise gradually rises in us as we pass through its streets and try to discover the historic foundations upon which all this modern society rests ?

This is what you will notice as you pass through the thoroughfares of Paris — an old and a new thing mingling. Two kinds of streets, and, to match them, two kinds of public buildings; and yet neither clearly defined, but merging into one another in a fashion which, as will be seen later, gives the characteristic of continuity to the modern town.

As an example of the first, take the Eue St. Honore ; as an example of the second, its immediate neighbour, the

INTRODUCTION 13

Boulevard de la Madeleine. The Eue St. Honore is narrow, paved with square stones, sounding like a gorge on the sea-coast. Its houses are high, and with hardly a pretence of decoration. Their stone or plastered walls run grey and have black streaks with age. Commonly an old iron balcony wUl run along one or more of the upper stories. They are covered with green-grey Mansard roofs, high in proportion to the buildings. Prom these look the small windows of attics, where, in the time these houses were bmlt, the apprentices and servants of the bourgeois householders were lodged. The ground floor, as everywhere in Paris, is a line of shops. The street is not only narrow and high, but sombre in effect. Here and there (but rarely) an open court, looking almost like a well, lets in more light. The street is not straight, but follows the curves of the old mediaeval artery upon which it was built. You would look in vain for the Gothic in such streets as these. Even the Eenaissance has hardly remained. Their churches and their public buildings date from much the same time as the houses. They are uniformly of the seventeenth or early eighteenth century. It was in such surroundings that the Grand Siecle moved, and in such Hotels lived the dramatists and the orators of the Augustan age of Prench literature. These streets, all of much the same type, are the old Paris. They are least disturbed, perhaps, in the Latia quarter. They are, of course, not to be found in all that outer ring of the city which has been the creation of our own time, and in fine they still make up a good proportion of the circle within the boulevards, which is the heart of Paris. It is in them that you will note the famous sites of the last two hundred years almost unchanged, and it is under their

14 PARIS

influence that the student can at last reproduce the scenes and the spirit of the Eevolution.

Whole sections of the town— the He St. Louis, for example — show no architecture but this, and the high, sad houses, the narrow, sombre streets, the age-marked grey walls are stUl what most remains in the mind of one who loves and has known Paris.

Through these old quarters, cutting them up, as it were, into isolated sections, the modern streets run like a gigantic web of straight lines. The foundation of the system is the ring of internal boulevards. Here and there, within their limits, great supplementary avenues cut through the heart of the city, and finally the inner and the outer boulevards are similarly connected with a series of broad streets lined with trees. Thus the new Paris holds the old, as a frame-work of timbers may hold an old wall, or as the veins of a leaf hold its substance.

And what is to be said of these new streets, and of the new quarters about the interior of the city ? It is the fashion to belittle their effect, and more especiaily do foreigners, whose foreign pleasures are catered for in the newest of the new streets, compare unfavourably this modern Paris with the old. They are heard to regret the rookeries of the Boucherie. They would not have the tower of St. Jacques stand in a public square, and some, I dare say, have found hard words even for the great space in front of Notre Dame, and for its statue of Charlemagne.

This attitude with regard to the new Paris seems to me a false one. Certainly its architecture suffers from uniformity. Light rather than mystery, comfort rather than beauty, has been the object of its design. They are

INTRODUCTION ij

to be regretted, but they are the characters of our gene- ration. And Paris, being a living and a young city, not a thing for a museum, nor certainly a place for fads and make-believes, it is well that our century should confess itself even in the Haussmanized streets, in the wide, shaded avenues of three, or even five, carriage roads side by side, and in the perpetual repetition of one type of modern house.

Moreover, Paris is here very true to the character she has maintained in each one of her rebuildings. She shows the whole spirit of the time. If she gives us, in a certain monotony and scientific precision and an over-cleanliness, the faults of the new spirit, she certainly has all its virtues. Her taste is excellent. These open spaces and broad streets make vistas or approaches of an admirable balance for the monuments. You will see them lead either to the best that is left of her past, or to the more congruous designs of her modern public buildings, and the effect, never sinking to the secondary, often rises to the magnificent. Take (for example) the present treatment of the Tuileries. The Commune burnt that old palace, leaving the three sides of the Louvre surrounding a gaping space. It has been harmonized with the Tuileries gardens by planting, and the whole great sweep down from the Arc de I'Etoile, though the TuUeries gardens to the court of the Louvre is, as it were, an approach to the palace. The grandeur of that scene has the demerit of being obvious, but it has also the singular value of obtruding nothing that can offend or distract the eye.

Even the Avenue de I'Opera, with the huge building at the end of it, will bear praise. If it lacks meaning, yet it does not lack greatness, and the Opera itself has

1 6 PARIS

something in it of the fantastic which avoids the grotesque. It is a " Palais du Diable," and it is not a little to say for a modem building that it holds the statuary well and harmoniously, especially when there are such groups in that statuary as " La Danse."

Moreover, if you will notice, Paris does not so announce her failures ; no great avenue leads up to and frames, for instance, the Trocadero.

As to the silly reasoning that any rebuilding was an error, it is fit only for a club of antiquarians. Paris has rebuilt herself three separate times, and had she not done so we should have none of those architectural glories which are her pride to-day. The Revolution was not the first profound change of ideas that the city experienced. The great awakening that made the University turned Paris into a Gothic city almost in a generation. The " Grand Siecle " swept away that Gothic city, and re- placed it by the tall houses that yet mark all her older quarters. In this last expansion Paris is but following a well-known road of hers, and the people who will come long after us will find it a good thing that she did so.

This also is to be noted : that if Paris is somewhat negligent of what is curious, yet she is careful of what is monumental. As we shall see in this book, the twelfth and even the sixth centuries — the fourth also in one spot — come against one in the midst of a modern street. Much that has been destroyed was not destroyed by the icono- clasm of the nineteenth, but by the sheer lack of taste of the eighteenth century — a time that could add the horrible false-Eenaissance portico to the exquisite Cathedral of Metz and that was capable of the Pantheon, pulled down without mercy. We suffer from it yet.

INTRODUCTION n

There is one feature which is perhaps not over-obvious in the buildings of Paris, and which it is well to point out in this connection, especially as it is the modern parallel of a spirit which we shall find in all the history of the town. I mean a remarkable historical continuity.

Paris to the stranger is new. Or at least where it evidently dates from the last, or even from the seventeenth century, it yet seems poor in those groups of the Middle Ages which are the characteristic of so many European towns, and one would say at first sight that it was entirely lacking in many relics of still earlier times. This im- pression is erroneous, not only as to the actual buildings of the city, but especially as to its history and spirit. But it is not without an ample excuse. There is nothing in Paris so old but that its surroundings give it a false aspect of modernity, nor is there any monument so venerable but that some part of it (often some part connected with the identity of the main building) dates from our own time.

The reason for this is twofold. Pirst, Paris has never been checked in its development. You find no relics, because it has never felt old age, and that species of forgetfulness which is necessary to the preservation of old things untouched has never fallen upon her. For, if you will consider, it is never the period j%st past which we revere and with which we forbear to meddle ; it is always something separated by a century at least from our own time. It needs, therefore, for the growth of ruins, and even for the preservation of old things absolutely un- changed, a certain period of indifference, in which they are neither repaired nor pulled down, but merely neglected. Thus we owe Eoman ruins to the Dark Ages, much of the

c

i8 PARIS

English Gothic to the indifference of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Such periods of indifference Paris has never experienced. Each age in her history, at least for the last six hundred years, has been " modern," has thought itself excellent, has designed in its own fashion. And on this account the conductor of Cook's tourists can find in the whole place but little matter for that phrase so dear to his flock : " It might have stepped out of the Middle Ages."

Secondly, her buildings are at the present moment, and have been from the time of the Eevolution, kept to a use, repaired, and made to enter into the present Mfe of the city. The modern era in Paris has had no sympathy with that point of view so common in Europe, which would have a church or a palace suffer no sacrilegious hand, but remain a kind of sacred toy, until it positively falls with old age, and has to be rebuilt entirely. The misfortune (for example) which gives us in Oxford the monstrosity of Balliol new buildings in the place of the exc[uisite four- teenth-century architecture, of which one comer yet remains to shame us ; such accidents to the monuments of the past Paris has carefully avoided. She was taught the necessity of this by the eighteenth-century conservatism, and if she is too continually repairing and replacing, it is a reaction from a time when the stones of the capital, like the institutions of the State, had been permitted to rot in decay.

There are one or two points of view in Paris from which this character is especially notable. We shall see it best, of course, where the oldest monuments naturally remain — I mean in the oldest quarter of the city. Stand on the northern quay that faces the Conciergerie and the

INTRODUCTION 19

Palais de Justice, and look at their walls as they rise above the opposite bank of the stream. What part of this is old and what new ? Unacquainted with the nature of the city, it would be impossible to reply. That Gothic arch- way might have been pierced in our century ; the clock- tower, with its fresh paint and the carefully repaired mouldings on its corners, might be fifty years old. Those twin towers of the Conciergerie might be of any age, for all the signs they give of it. Part of that building was destroyed in the Commune, and has been rebuilt. Which part ? There is nothing to tell. It is only when we know that it is against the whole genius of the people to imitate the styles of a dead age — when we are told (for example) that such things as " the Gothic Eevival," under which we groan in England to-day, and which is the curse of Oxford and Hampstead, has not touched Paris — it is only when we appreciate that the French either create or restore, but never copy, that we can see how great a work has been done on this one building.

The wall and the towers before you are not a curiosity or a show ; decay has not been permitted to touch them ; they are in actual service to-day in the working of the law-courts. Yet that corner clock-tower was the delight of Philippe le Bel. It was PliiLippe the Conqueror who built those two towers, with their conical roofs, and from one of their windows he would sit looking at the Seine flowing by, as his biographer describes him ; through that pointed archway St. Louis went daily to hear the pleas in the Palace gardens ; from such and such a window the last defence of Danton was caught by the mob that stretched along the quay and over the Pont Neuf.

Or, again, take a contrasting case — one where a

20 PARIS

spectator would believe all to be old, and yet where the moderns have restored and strengthened. As you stand on the quays that flank the Latin quarter and look north- ward to the Island and the whole southern side of Notre Dame, it is not only the thirteenth century at which you gaze; at point upon point Viollet le Due rebuilt and refaced many of the stones — some, even, of the carvings are his work ; yet you could never distinguish in it all what aid the present time had given to the work of St. Louis.

As for the Sainte Chapelle, it is at this day so exactly what it was when St. Louis first heard Mass in it — and that has been done at the expense of so much blue and gold, just such colour as he used — that the traveller wiU turn from it under the impression that he is suffering at the hands of the third Eepublic. It is only when you note that the stained glass is the gaudiest thing in the place that you begin to feel that here alone, perhaps, in Europe, the men who designed the early Gothic would feel at home.

And if this continuity in her buildings is so striking a mark of modem Paris, and goes so far to explain its newness, you will find something yet more remarkable in the preservation of its sites. To take but three: the place of the administration, of the central worship, and of the markets, are as old as the Eoman occupation. The Louvre has grown steadily from similar use to similar use through nearly a thousand years ; the Hotel de Ville through more than seven hundred. And a man may go over the Petit Pont from the southern bank, cross the Island, and come over to the northern side by the Pont Notre Dame, and be following step by step the road that

INTRODUCTION 21

SO spanned the two branches of the stream centuries and centuries ago — the road of Eoman times, and of years earlier yet — back in the beginning, when the Cite was a group of round Gaulish huts, and when two rough wooden bridges led the traveller across the Seine on his way to the sea-coast.

And this continuity in buildings and in places is matched by one spirit running all through the action of Paris for fifteen hundred years. This is the fixed interest of her history, and it is this which so many men have felt who, in studios, or up on the hill of the Uni- versity, though they had learned nothing of the past of the city, yet feel about them a secular experience and a troubling message difficult to understand — that seems to sum up in a confused sound the long changes of Christendom and of the West.

Well, what is the peculiar spirit, the historical mean- ing, of the town whose outer aspect I have hitherto been describing? No history can have value — it would perhaps be truer to say that no history can exist — unless while it describes it also explains. Here we shall have to deal with a city many of whose actions have been unique, much of whose life has been dismissed in phrases of wonder, of fear, or even of impotent anger. If this is all that a book can do for Paris, it had better not have been written. To stand aghast at her excesses, to lift up the hands at her audacity, or to lose control over one's pen in expressing abhorrence for her success, is to do what any scholar might be proud to accomplish, but it would be to fail as an historian. Why has Paris so acted? The answer to that question, and a sufiScient

22 PARIS

answer, alone can give such a story value. What is her nature ? What is, if we may use a term properly applicable only to human beings, her mind ?

You wiU not perceive the drift towards the true reply by following any of those laborious methods which stultify so much of modern analysis. You will not interpret Paris by any examination of her physical environment, nor comprehend her by one of those cheap racial generalizations that are the bane of popular study. In all the great truths spoken by Michelet, one is perhaps pre-eminent, because it seems to include all the others. He says : " La France a fait la France ; " and if this be true (as it is) of the nation, it is more especially true of the town. There is within the lives of individuals — as we know by experience — a something formative that helps to build up the whole man and that has a share in the result quite as large as the grosser part for which science can account. So it is with states, and so, sometimes, with cities. A destiny runs through their development which is allied in nature to the human soul, and which material circumstances may bound or may modify, but which certainly they cannot originate.

In the first place, Paris is, and has known itself to be, the City-State of modem Europe. What is the im- portance of that character ? Why, that certain habits of thought, certain results in politics which we can observe in the history of the City-State of antiquity, are to be noted repeating themselves in the actions and in the opinions of Paris. It is a phenomenon strange to the industrial nations of to-day, yet one with which society will always have to deal, perhaps at bottom the most durable thing of aU — that men will associate and act by

INTRODUCTION 23

neighbom-hood rather than by political definitions. And this influence of neighbourhood, which (with the single important exception of tribal society) is the greatest factor in social history, has formed the village community and the walled _town, whose contrast and whose co-existence are almost the whole history of Europe. When great Empires arise, a fictitious veil is thrown over these radical things. Men are attached to a wide and general patriotism covering hundreds of leagues, and even in the last stages of decay, and just before the final cataclysm, rhetoricians love to talk of a federation of all peoples, and merchants ardently describe the advent of a universal peace. But even in such exceptional periods in the history of man- kind, the village community and its parallel, the city, are the real facts in political life; and when, in the inevitable fall and the subsequent reconstruction of society, the fictions are destroyed and the phrases lose themselves in realities, these fundamental and original units re-emerge rugged and strong.

Upon the recognition of such units the healthy life of the Middle Ages reposed; in the satisfactory and human conditions of such societies the arts and the enthusiasms of Greece took life. It was in the autono- mous cities of Italy that our civilization reappeared, and the aristocratic conceptions upon which the social order of Europe is still founded sprang from the isolation and local politics of the manor.

In a time when the facility of communication has been so greatly augmented, and when therefore the larger units of political society should be supreme, Paris still proves to the modern world how enduring the primal instincts of our political nature are and must be.

24 PARIS

The unit that can practically see, understand, and act at once and together ; the " city that hears the voice of one herald," is living there in the midst of modem Europe. By a paradox which is but one of many in French politics, the centre which first gave out to other societies the creed of the large self-governing state, the power whence radiated the enthusiasm even for a federal humanity, " the capital of the Eepublic of mankind " from which poor Clootz, the amiable but mad German Baron, dated his correspondence — this very town is itself an example of an intense local patriotism, peculiar, narrow, and exclusive.

Paris acts together ; its citizens think of it perpetually as of a kind of native country, and it has established for itself a definition which makes it the brain of that great sluggish body, the peasantry of France. In that definition the bulk of the nation has for centuries acquiesced, and the birthplace of government by majority is also the spot where distinction of political quality and the right of the head to rule all the members is most imperiously asserted.

It is from this standpoint that so much of her history takes on perspective. By recognizing this feature the chaos of a hundred revolts assumes historical order. You wiU perceive from it the Parisian mob, with all the faults of a mob, yet organizing, creating, and succeeding ; you will learn why an apparently causeless outburst of anger has been fruitful, and why so much violence and so much disturbance should have aided rather than retarded the development of France.

It is as the City-State (and the metropolis at that) that Paris has been the self-appointed guardian of the French idea. Throughout the Middle Ages you will see

INTRODUCTION 2;

her anxious with a kind of prevision to safeguard the unity of the nation. For this she watches the diplomacy of the Capetians and fights upon their side, for this she ceaselessly stands watch with the king over feudalism, and doubles his strength in every blow that is dealt against the nobles. It is this feature that explains her attitude as the ally of Philip the Conqueror, her leaning later on the Burgundian house, her hatred of the southerner in the person of the Armagnac.

You will find it, without interruption, guiding her conduct in the history which links the Middle Ages to our own time. She is the faithful servant of Louis XI. ; she is the bitter fanatic for religious unity in the religious wars. Thus you see her withstanding Henry IV. to the last point of starvation, and thus a population, careless of religion, yet forces a religious formula upon the Hugue- not leader ; and when the first Bourbon accepted the Mass with a jest, it was Paris which had exacted, even from a conqueror, the pledge of keeping the nation one.

In the Eevolution all this character appears in especial relief. She claims to think for and to govern France; she asserts the right by her energy and initiative to defend the whole people and their new institutions from the in- vader, and she ratifies that assertion by success. With this leading thought she first captures, then imprisons, and finally overthrows the king ; lays (on the 2nd of June) violent hands upon the parliament, directs the terror, and then, when her system is no longer needed, permits in Thermidor the overthrow of her own spokesman.

If the condition of the city is considered, the causes of this strong local unity will become apparent. Paris is a microcosm. She contains all the parts proper to a

26 PARIS

little nation, and by the reaction of her own attitude this complete character is intensified; for, since she is the head of a highly organized State, all is to be found there. Here are at once the national and the urban government ; the schools for every branch of technical training. Here is the centre of the arts — not by a kind of accident such as will make the London artists live in Fitz-Johns Avenue, nor by the natural attraction of the great schools of the past, nor through peculiar collections such as cause the congeries at Munich, at Venice, or at Florence, or at Eome, but by a deliberate purpose : by the placing within the walls of the city of all the best teaching that the con- centrated effort of the nation can secure.

Within her walls are all the opposing factors of a vigorous life. She is not wholly student nor wholly in- dustrial nor wholly mercantile, but something of all three. Even the noble is present to add his little different note to the harmonious discord of competing interests; and, alone of the great capitals of the world, she is the seat of the old University of the nation. Here, running wild through a whole quarter of the city, is that vigorous youth, undiscoverable in London or in Berlin ; I mean the follies, the loves, and the generous ideals of the students. They keep it fresh with a laughter that is lacking in the centres of the modern world, and they supply it with a frank criticism bordering on iatellectual revolt, which the self- satisfaction of less fortunate capitals, mere seaports, or military centres, fatally ignores. The young men, from their high attic windows on the Hill, interpret her horizons ; and, as they grow to fill the places of the old, such a youth helps them to keep the city worthy of the impressions with which she delighted their twentieth year.

INTRODUCTION 27

And Paris has also the last necessary quality for the formation of a City-State. I mean that her stories are so many memories of action which she has undertaken unaided, and that her view of the past is one in which she continually stands alone. It is a record of great sieges, in which no outer help availed her, and in which she fell throiigh isolation or succeeded by her own powers. More than one of her monuments is a record of action that she undertook before the nation which depends upon her was willing to move; and she records herself, from the Column of July to the Arsenal of the InvaMes, the successful leader ta movements that the general people applauded but could not design.

Her history has finally produced in her what was in the Middle Ages but a promise or perhaps a thing in germ — the sentiment and the expression of individuality. She has known herself. The story of her growth from the origins of her political position under the early Capetians, through the episode of Etienne Marcel to the definite action of the seventeenth century and finally of the Eevolution, is the story of a personality growing from mere sensation to self-recognition, and from embryonic confusion to functions determinate and understood. It is a transition from instinct to reason ; and at its close you have, as was expressed at the opening of this chapter, a true and living unit, not in metaphor but in fact, with a memory, a will, a voice, and an expression of its own.

Such is the first great mark of Paris, and with that clue alone in one's hand the maze is almost solved.

But, if Paris has these characteristics of continuity and of being the City-State, she has also a third, which,

28 PARIS

while it is less noticeable to her own citizens, is yet more interesting to the foreigner than the other two. She is the typical city of the western civilization — I mean, her history at any moment is always a peculiarly vivid reflec- tion of the spirit which runs through western Europe at the time. She leads and originates where France is con- cerned. To say that she does so for Europe (which is a commonplace with her historians) is not strictly true ; it is more accui-ate to say that she mirrors. It cannot be denied that her action at such and such a crisis has differed from the general action of the European cities ; nor can it be forgotten that her course has more than once pro- duced a sense of intolerable contrast in the minds of her neighbours. Paris has not been typical in the sense of being the average. That character would have produced a history devoid of features, whereas all the world knows that the history of Paris is a series of strong pictures most often overdrawn. If she has been the typical city of the west, it is rather in this sense, that on her have been focussed the various rays of European energy ; that she has been the stage upon which the contemporary emotions of Europe have been given personce through whose lips they could find expression ; that she has time and time again been the laboratory wherein the problems that perplexed our civilization have always been analyzed and sometimes solved.

It may be urged that every city partakes of this character, and that the civilization which has grown up upon the ruins of Eome is so much of a unity that its principal cities have always reflected the spirit of their time. This is true. But Paris has reflected that spirit with a peculiar fidelity. While she has, of course, been

INTRODUCTION 29

filled with her own strong bias of race and of local character, yet her treatment of this or that time has been remarkable for proportion ; you feel, in reading of her past action, that not the north or the south, nor this people or that, but all Europe is (so to speak) being " played " before your eyes. The actors are French and, commonly, Parisian ; the language they speak is strange and the action local, yet the subject-matter is something which concerns the whole of our world, and the place given to each part of the movement is that which, on looking over the surrounding nations, we should assign to it were we charged with drawing up an accurate balance of the time.

Before pointing out the historical examples which show how constantly Paris has been destined to fill this inter- national part, it is well to appreciate the causes of such a position. First among these comes the feature which has been discussed above. The fact that she contains within her walls all the parts of a State fits her for the character of representative, and makes her action more complete than is the case with another European city. The interests of exchange and of commerce, of finance (which in this age may almost be called a separate thing); the struggle between the proletariat and capital; the unsatisfied quarrel between dogmatic authority and the inductive method ; militarism, and the reaction it creates ; even the direction which literature and discussion may give to these energies — all these are found within the city, and the general result is a picture of Europe. But this quality of hers is not the only cause of her typical character. Geographical position explains not a little of its origin. She is of Latin origin and of Latin tradition ; her law and much of her social custom is an inheritance from Piome,

30 PARIS

yet the basis of the race is not Latin, and among those in the studios who almost reproduce the Greek, there is hardly a southern face to be found. Her lawyers and orators will model themselves upon Latin phrases, but you would not match their expression among the Eoman busts ; and it has been truly said that the Italian profile was more often met with in England than in northern France. Even the insular civilization of England, which has had so great an effect upon the politics, if not the society, of the world, is to be found strongly represented in this medley. For England looks south (or, at least, the England which possessed so great a moral influence did so), and Paris is geographically the centre of those northern provinces, and socially of that governing middle class upon whom the British influence has been strong. Though this part of her thought is of less importance than some others, yet it is worth carefully noting, for it has been neglected to a remarkable degree. It is from this that you obtain in Parisian history the attempts at a democracy based upon representation; it is from this, again, that the principal modern changes in her judicial methods are drawn ; and so curiously strong has been the attraction of English systems for a certain kind of miud in Paris, that even the experiment of aristocracy and of its mask — a limited monarchy — has been tried in these uncongenial surround- ings. The greatest of the men of '93 regrets the English alliance. Mirabeau bases half his public action upon his memories of the English Whigs. Lamartine delights in calling England the Marvellous Island.

And, if we go a little deeper than historical facts and examine those subtle influences of climatic condition (which, as they are more mysterious, so also are of greater

INTRODUCTION 31

import than obvious things), we shall find Paris balanced between the two great zones of Europe. It is hard to say whether she is within or without the belt of vineyards ; a little way to the south and to the east you find the grapes ; a little way to the north and west, to drink wine is a luxury, and the peasants think it a mark of the southerner. There are days in Chevreuse, in the summer, when a man might believe himself to be in a Mediterranean valley, and, again, the autumn and the winter in the great forest of Marly are impressions purely of the north. The Seine is a river that has time and again frozen over, and the city itself is continually silent under heavy falls of snow. Yet she has half the custom of the south, her life is in the open air, her houses are designed for warmth and for sunlight ; she has the gesture and the rapidity of a warmer climate.

For one period of its history you might have called Paris a great northern city, when it was all Gothic and deeply carved, suited to long winter nights and to weak daylight. But in the course of time it has seemed partly to regain the traditions of the Mediterranean, so that you have shallow mouldings, white stone and open streets, standing most often under a grey sky, which should rather demand pointed gables and old deep thoroughfares. The truth is that she is neither northern nor southern, but, in either climate (they meet in her latitude) an exile, satisfying neither, and yet containing both of the ends between which Europe swings ; so that, in all that is done within Paris, you are at a loss whether to look for influence coming up from the Mediterranean, or to listen for the steep waves and heavy sweeping tides of the Narrow Seas. Only with one part of Europe — a part which may later

32 PARIS

transform or destroy the west-^ske has no sympathy ; I mean that which lies to the east of the Elbe. She was a town of the Empire, and the darker and newer part of Europe is as much a mystery to her as to the nations which are her neighbours.

If you will notice her iirst prominence, you wUl discover that Paris rises upon Europe just where the modern period begins. It is as a town of the lower Empire, of the decline, of the barbarian invasions, of the advent of Christianity, that Paris first becomes a great city ; just as the civilization to which we belong starts out upon its adventures; and her history at once assumes that character upon which these paragraphs insist. She receives the barbarian ; the mingled language is talked in her streets ; her palace is the centre of a Teutonic satrapy, which has carved its province out of the Empire ; of the two extremes, she seems to combine either experience. She does not lose her language (like the Ehine valley), nor her religion and customs (like Britain) ; but, on the other hand, she is strongly influenced by the Conquest, and knows nothing of that perfect, lingering Eoman civilization, almost untouched by the invader, which left to Nimes, Aries, and the southern cities a municipal organization lasting to our own day. At the outset of her history she includes the experience of the south and of the north.

During the Carlovingian epoch she loses her place for a time; but, with the rise of the nationalities that follows it, and with the invasions, she is not only intimately concerned but again furnishes the example of which I have been speaking. She sustains siege after siege ; like the Europe of which she is the type, she finally,

INTRODUCTION 33

but with great pain, beats off the pirates, and within her walls rises the first, and what is destined to be the most complete type of the national kingships. The Eobertian House was neither purely feudal nor a mere reminiscence of Imperial power ; it was a mixture of both those elements. It was founded by a local leader who had defended his subjects in the " dark century," and in so much it attaches closely to the feudal character; on the other hand, its members are consecrated kings ; they have the aim of a united and centralized power, and in this they hold even more than do the Ottos to the Imperial memory.

Note how, as Europe develops, the experience of Paris sums up that of the surrounding peoples. The Eoman law finds her an eager listener, but it does not produce in her case the rapid effect which you may notice in some of the Italian cities. Custom weighs hard in the northern town, and Philip Augustus, after all his conquests, could never hear the language which the men trained at Bologna used to Barbarossa just before his defeat. On the other hand, the power of the king which that law was such a powerful agent to increase, was not destined to suffer from repeated reaction as it did in England, and the kings of Paris never fell beneath a direct victory of aristocracy such as that which crushed John at Eunnymede, and centuries later destroyed the Stuarts.

The struggle between government and feudalism was destined to last much longer in France than it did in the neighbouring countries, and as it continued Paris witnessed all its principal features, and the crown finally triumphed only in that same generation of the seventeenth century which saw the complete success of the aristocracy in England and in the Empire.

D

34 PARIS

In the matter of religion the experience of Paris has been equally typical. She heard the first changes of the tweKth century ; the schoolmen discussed in her Univer- sity ; Thomas Aquinas sat at table with her king. When the sixteenth century shook and split the unity of Christendom, its treble aspect was vividly reflected in Paris. The Evangelical, the Catholic, and the Humanist are represented distinctly and in profusion there ; for it is in Paris that Calvin indoctrinates, and Eabelais is read, and, finally, that the St. Bartholomew is seen. She does not, like England, change her creed at the word of a dynasty, nor is she swept by the same purely religious zeal for reform that covers Geneva and so much of Holland ; nor does she stamp out the new movement with the ease of the Italian or the Spaniard ; but all the powers of the time seem to concentrate in her, and, as she has always done, she pays heavily for being the centre of European discussion. The appeal with her (as elsewhere) is to arms, and the struggle is still continuing imder Louis XIV., when its importance wanes before the rise of a rationalism around which the future battles of her religious world will be fought.

This is always the lesson of her history and the way we should read it if we wish to understand. We are looking down into a little space where all our society is working out its solutions. Whether we dwell upon the Gothic Paris of Louis XL, fixing nationality and centralized government, or upon the Paris of '93 — cutting once for all the knot of eighteenth-century theories — or the Paris of '48, where the old political and the new economic problems met; or upon the Paris of 1871, where the older social forces and the love of country just managed to defeat the

INTRODUCTION 35

revolt of the new proletariat — in whatever aspect or at whatever time, she is always the picture of Europe ; the figures struggling in the nations around her show in her small, bright mirror, prismatic and with strange colours, but not distorted. It is in this character that her history- will be most easy of comprehension and will leave with us an impression of greatest meaning.

But whenever we think of the city we do well to remember Mirabeau : " Paris is a Sphinx, I will drag her secret from her;" but in this neither he nor any other man has succeeded.

36 PARIS

CHAPTER II

THE PLAIN OF PARIS

To understand the physical history of a city it is necessary to begin with a knowledge of its geography. And to know the geography of a city a certain method must be pursued, which I shall attempt to hold to in this chapter. In the pursuance of that method there will appear, of necessity, a certain amount of description overlapping that already given in the last chapter ; and much that will be contained in this sketch of the plain of Paris will have to be said over again and emphasized when we come to the history of the city, the story of its separate buildings, the development of its area, and the gradual enlargement of its boundaries. It is at the risk, then, of some repetition that I shall present in the present chapter the character of the territory over which Paris has spread.

As one follows the river Seine from its mouth up to the inland provinces, one discovers for the first hundred and forty miles of its course a certain uniform character, almost unknown in England, and not over common even on the western continent. The river winds in a series of vast loops, a simple system undisturbed by minor turns, and broken only by a long straight reach at Vernon, and a shorter one at Mantes. In less than a dozen of these

THE PLAIN OF PARIS 37

great reaches the river covers the space between Paris and the sea. But the loops are for the greater part so sharp and elongated that the distance as the crow flies from the origin of this formation to the estuary is little more than half the number of miles covered by the river. These great loops run in a clearly defined valley bounded on either side by a chalky and usually well-wooded table- land some three to four hundred feet above the stream, and the slopes by which one reaches it are uniform and very steep, sometimes even (as at les Andelys) breaking into white cliffs. This valley, though it narrows near Vernon, is commonly, both above and below that town, from five to ten miles wide ; it is perfectly flat, and has for its surface a very rich alluvial soil, chiefly laid out in pastm'es. The walls of the valley are, as a rule, unbroken, save where some small tributary comes in by a steep ravine, and the conformation remains the same until one reaches the mouth of the Oise.

At this point, though the river still continues to sweep northward and southward in long stretches, the aspect of the landscape is changed by the lack of continuity in the eastern hills : the tableland on this side breaks up, and the last spur takes the form of a sharp, isolated hog-back known as the hills of Enghien.

On the western side, however, the wooded wall of the Seine valley continues unaltered and remains overhanging the river more or less closely till, at a point twenty-five miles above the mouth of the Oise, and over forty by river, we reach the confluence of the Marne. Here the hills give way on the western side as they had previously done on the eastern, a confused plain marks the central water- shed of northern France, and in its upper reaches the

38

PARIS

Seine becomes but one of many similar streams (the Aube, the Yonne, etc.,) which spread out to their sources in the fields of the rolling country like the last tendrils of a vine. The whole scheme of the lower river presents, there- fore, something of the appearance shown in this sketch —

where the shading represents the high land.

As for the geological character of this valley, and of the plain of Paris at its head, I have not sufficient knowledge of the matter to give it in any detail, nor is it of sufficient importance in such a book as this to merit a very special mention. The valley is clearly a valley ;of erosion and cuts through a 'secondary formation which is cretaceous in its lower parts, and merges gradually into the harder Jurassic rocks as one goes up river. These rocks are of importance in the history of the town, for the places where they crop out from the plain or have been laid bare by erosion have furnished since Eoman times the quarries of hard building stone upon which the permanent beauty of the city so largely depends. The rock is peculiarly hard ia the neighbourhood of and beneath Paris itself, so that, as at Eheims, the material

THE PLAIN OF PARIS 39

of the town has been largely drawn from its own founda- tions in the soil.

Before I leave the valley as a whole to speak of the particular site of the city, there is one last aspect upon which I woxild touch. The military position of Paris in history is determined largely by the contour of this valley and the nature of the uplands. The valley of the Seine is a kind of road leading directly up to Paris, and serves in the strategic history of the city these two purposes : it is an avenue of attack for northern enemies, a lane of reinforcement (if it can be kept open) against enemies from the east; but its importance in either case is not appreciated by so general a statement — there must be read in conjunction with it the concomitant geographical conditions which have made the head of the lower Seine valley the scene of so many fights.

First, the basin in which Paris lies is a converging point for all the small rivers of the watershed — the Yonne, the Aube, the upper Seine ; for the great valley of the Marne, which is the road from the Ehine, and practically for the Oise also, which is the road from Picardy and the flats of Holland.

Secondly, these converging lines of river have a character which is not obvious at the first glance to the modern reader of historical geography. These rivers — all navigable for shallow craft, all bordered by rich alluvial fields, aU equable in their supply, and all furnished with neighbouring slopes for terrace cultivation — were the first roads, and supported the first settlements. It was along their courses that the earliest groups of Gaulish huts would gather, and therefore they became in time a kind of skein, upon whose threads the great towns were strung like beads.

40 PARIS

Thirdly, the upper plateaux were — and still largely are — densely wooded, poorly watered, and, comparatively, more thinly populated.

Fourthly, these various converging lines do not meet in some vague and open champaign ; you do not get re- produced here the conditions so commonly seen in military geography, where a number of rivers meet in a wide field, and furnish a huge arena for a hundred battles. On the contrary, the stream of any invasion is broken sharply by a screen of steep hills on the south and west, behind which lie great stretches of woodland. Therefore the head of the lower Seine valley has become a kind of pool, where the iuvasions meet with their final shock, and eddy round the walls of the city, to flood it ia the event of success, or to wash back from it like a tide in the event of failure.

Now, putting all these conditions together, the strategic position of Paris is plain. An army must push on from one advanced base after another ; it needs water, roads, and towns ; sometimes walls. Therefore we see the Norsemen of the ninth century, the Normans of William and Henry I., the English, of Edward III. and Henry V., the Girondin rebels of '93, all attacking by way of the Seine valley; down the Oise or the Marne come the succession of German invasions; from the Yonne the Eomans. For once that Paris has been attacked or relieved from the south and west, it has been so approached ten times from the north- west or the east. And all this is partly true even of modem times. The great bases of supply still lie on the rivers ; the main railroads for the most part follow the valleys.

After this general view of the valley and basin in

THE PLAIN OF PARIS 41

which Paris lies, let me turn to a more particular de- scription of the actual site of the city.

It is just below the confluence of the Marne, at a point where the western wall of the valley is gradually falling, and where the eastern wall has already disappeared in a wide plain, that Paris has grown. It has spread partly over the spurs of the range on the southern bank, but mainly over the flat country that characterises the northern, and has been all through its history essentially a. city built on a plain, though its surface is diversified by one or two sharp hiUs.

If the reader will amplify the sketch which I am about to attempt, by following its details upon the shaded map opposite these words, he will be able to obtain a general impression of features which it is necessary to retain as he follows the history of the town ; but I must add, before beginning my description, that the islands, the marshes, and occasionally the sides of a hill, have been modified by human action as the city has grown. What I have here represented is the original appearance of the country-side over which Paris has been built.

The central feature in the space of somewhat over a hundred square miles which the map covers is the river Seine, whose course for a matter of twenty to twenty-four miles runs through the centre of the plan, and forms, as it were, the base round which the contours of the neighbour- hood can be built up. The river (which runs, of course, along the line of least elevation) enters the map by the lower right-hand corner, a point where, at the normal summer height, the surface is about a hundred feet above sea level ; it leaves the map at the upper edge, just to the left of the middle, and has there fallen to a trifle under

42 PARIS

ninety feet. As for the small section that reappears in the extreme north-west, we ne6d pay no attention to it ; it is an accident necessitated by the shape of the map, and represents a reach very distant from the site with which we are dealing.

The first thiag we notice, then, with regard to the Seiae at this point is its elevation above sea-level, for this gives a base-liae from which to measure the surrounding lulls. I may mention, for the sake of illustration, that, far inland as Paris is, the river is no higher at this point than is the Thames at Henley.

The next poiat to be observed is the slight fall of the Seine in this part of its course. There are seasons, after heavy rains or during the melting of the snow in early spring, when the current is swift enough to impede the traffic up river ; but these seasons are rare, and even before the stream was locked, merchandise could pass up or down with almost eq[ual facility. It is this feature iu the Seine which has given its commercial and military history so different a character to that of the Ehone valley, and made Paris such a contrast to Lyons.

Thirdly, the river is deep.^ No ford is found for many miles up stream. The pirate boats of the ninth century (it is true they were of light draught) could sail right up to the city, as their contemporaries could force the Yare up to Norwich; and even to-day you may see at the northern quay under the Louvre a steamer that comes to Paris weekly from Southampton**.

If, after noting these characters of the river, we glance

' The minimum depth below Paris is now ten feet, but eyen before the modem dredging it was nowhere under six.

[Where olil street'! colnculo with modem it has been practically Irapoasihle to mark both. I have made an attx^mpt at this, however, in the case of the Kue St. Martin. A few moiteni bulldlntrs and squai'cs are refen"e<l to letters, in onler to give some clue t<i the general scope of the map.]

MODERN

A.	Tlie Bom-8c.	Q. Institute and Mazarin Libraiy.
B.	riucc lies Victoiies.	H. Bridge, Place and (juay of the
C.	PalnU Royal.	Hotel de Ville.
DD	. Hnlles.	' K. Place des Vosgea.
E.	I.oiivre.	L. Place do la Ripublique.
FF	Peint Neaf.
	MEDIAEVAL
1.	Ste. Agiii^B (Inter St. Eustnche).	32. Abbey and Church of Ste. Genevieve.f
2.	The 01.1 Holies.	33. St. Etienne du Mont.
3.	Cenieter.v of the Imiocentf*.	34. OolK'ge lie Cholets.
4.	St. Thoinns ilii Louvre.	3.'). College Montnigu.
6.	The Louvre.	30. College des LombanKf
e.	St. Nieholas du Louvre.	37. College de8,Gi-ossins.t
7.	Hfytel Bourbon (nuil Ganlena).	3». CoUSge de Benuvnis.t
K.	St. Geminin l'Auxerroi9.t	39. The Carmelites.
9.	The ChiUcIct.	40. The Bernadins.
10.	The Pont au Change.	41. College Canlinal Lemoine.t
11.	St. Barthamy.	42. Bona Enfnnts.
12.	Palais (le la Citi.f	43. St. Julicn Ic Pau\Te.»
13.	St. Genuain <les Prt-s.!	44. Bishop's Palace.
U.	Tonr anil Hotel de Nesle.	46. Notre Dame.*
1.').	The Augustinians.	46. Catheilral Close.
16.	St. AniW lies Arts.	47. Hotel Dieu.
17.	Colltge Mignon.t	4». St. Symphorien.
IK.	College lie Tonrs.	49. St. Denis de la Chartre.
10.	St. Severin.*	50. Pont Mibray (or Notre Dame).
SO.	Petit Pont.	51. St. MeiTi.
21.	Petit Chiltelet.	52. Maison aux Piliei-s.
SS.	Olil St. Sulpiee.	63. St. Jean.
23.	College lie Bourgogne.	54. St. Gervais,'
24.	0ordelier8.t	55. Convent of Ste. Catherine.
2«.	College d'Hapoourt.	56. Hotel and Pare des Toumelles.
26.	Hatel de Oluuy.o	57. BastiUe.
27.	Colleges de Bayeux and de Rlieini!<.	5S. Church of St. Paul.
28.	Oolltge de Oluny.	69. Hfitel St. Paul.
29.	Sorbonne.t	60. Celestins.
30.	Jacobins (of St. Jacques).	61. Abtey of St. Martin.+
31.	Parloir aux Bourgeois.	62. Temple.

[Tlio wall of Philip Augustus and the northern, outer, wall of Charles V., are Tml marked by any number ; neither are the gates, nor the streets. I have also oudtted many sites (such as St. Laurent, St. Magloire,etc.) for fear of over-burdening the map. Such buildings as remain in their entirety are marked with an asteiisk (•) ; those of which a part remains, with a dagger (f).]

MEDIAEVAL PARIS.

( liarJy Middle Ages. ■■ Laltr Middle Axes. ..

.Modem Work.

[To/ooep. 224.

THE PLAIN OF PARIS 43

at its general direction and note the lie of the hills about it, we get some such impression as follows : —

The river, entering the plain of Paris from the south- east, makes, first of all, a curve like a great bow, roughly- semicircular va. shape, and with a chord running nearly east and west. This bow takes up a matter of eight or niae nules, and when it has come to its extreme southern limit the river turns abruptly round, and runs ia a north- easterly direction till it passes the northern boundary of the map. This is the first of those great loops which, as was said at the head of this chapter, are characteristic of the lower course of the Seine ; and were we to follow the river beyond our present plan, we should find it cover- ing the next forty miles in a succession of long reaches, running thus to the south-west, and turning sharply again to the north-east alternately.

The hills upon either side of the stream present very different systems; on the south and west there runs a more or less continuous range, which is the last of that plateau whose escarpments I have mentioned above as forming the walls of the valley. Their height is from three to four hundred feet above the river, and it is evident that they determine its course, for it is a northern pro- jection of theirs in the middle of the map that forms the central "bow," and their steep sides on the western boundary that deflect the river northwards in its great loop.

With regard to these hills on the left bank of the Seine there are a couple of points which are of special importance.

Pirst, there must be noted very especially that sharp hill, connected with the plateau by a vague and broad ridge, and standing steeply above the river, just south of

44 PARIS

the group of islands that marks the middle of the map. It is not very high — ^less than a hundred and fifty feet above the water — but it has always made a peculiar feature in the landscape of Paris. It is the old " Mons Lncotitius," on whose slopes the Eoman Emperor's palace and the Amphitheatre were built: its summit was the site of the Eoman camp, later, of the great Basilica of the Apostles, and of the tomb of Ste. G-enevieve. Since the twelfth century it has been the hill of the University, and it remains to-day, with its group of schools, the quarter of Paris which is next in order of historical importance to the island of Cite.

Secondly, the reader should pay a particular attention to the belt of plain which runs south and west of this hill, growing narrower till it ends in a mere strip between the steep slopes and the sharp bend of the river. This is the plain of Issy. Though now all but covered with the houses of the town and its suburbs, it was for many centuries the granary of Paris, and notably under the Eoman domination it was an imperial estate, serving as endowment partly to the expenses of Lutetia and partly to the fisc.

It may be well, before leaving the left bank, to mention the little river Bievre, which runs from the middle of the southern edge of our map, and falls into the Seine just above the central group of islands. The Bievre forms one of those ravines of which mention was made above as cutting through the plateaux of the lower Seine, and another smaller valley — that of the rivulet of Sevres — may be seen on the western side of my plan. It has a certain historical importance, because there runs along it the main road to Versailles.

THE PLAIN OF PARIS 45

Turning now to the right bank there wUl be discovered a very different kind of country. There comes first a mass of confused rolling land, none of it very high. It is cut by the valley of the Marne, which may be seen entering the map on the lower eastern side, and falling into the Seine some three or four miles lower down. This river is, of course, very closely connected with the history of the city, but it would only confuse the present descrip- tion to insist upon more than these salient points. First, it was the natural highway by which commerce could reach the fertile plains of northern Champagne; secondly, as we shall see later, its valley formed the route of invasion for any attack leading from the Ehine into northern Gaul.

It is with the country on the right bank immediately below the mouth of the Marne, with that part, in other words, which stands north of the " bow " of the river, that we are more immediately concerned. For it is over this that the living part — the palaces and the main thorough- fares— of mediaeval and modern Paris has grown up.

A feature that will immediately strike one is a kind of ridge or mound running in a half-circle from the con- fluence of the two rivers to a point some seven or eight mQes lower down stream, where it falls abruptly upon the Seine just at the place where the great bow begins to bend southward, and where a long, straight island stands in the middle of the reach.

This rising ground is roughly semicircular in shape, and encloses between itself and the river a crescent-shaped plain. It rises at three points (namely, at its eastern and western extremities and at its most northern outer part) into three well-defined summits. Of these the fiirst and second are of no great height. That on the eastern side

46 PARIS

furnishes the hills of Menilmontant, the Buttes Chaumont and Pere la Chaise. It has been for many hundred years the principal quarry of stone for Paris, and is now the densest industrial quarter in the capital. That on the west is the site of the great new private houses; it is the wealthy quarter marked by the Arc de Triomphe on the one end of its ridge, and by the Trocadero overlooking the river on the other.

The first of these makes some impression on the land- scape, the second very little ; but by far the most striking feature in this haK-circle of rising ground is the central hiU on the north. It is much higher not only than any other summit of the ridge, but than any part of Paris, and it dominates the modern city from within in a way which I believe to be unique among the principal towns of Europe. I shall allude to it so often in the course of this book, and my readers will so often find it a standpoint from which a general view of the plain below may be had at some particular moment in history, that it would be well to fix upon it with especial care. It is the old hill of the Temples of Mercury and Mars, which has during the Christian centuries been a place sacred to St. Denis, and which still keeps his name and the nature of his death in its title of " Montmartre."

We may now summarize this description of the con- figuration of the country, and say that Paris stands in the midst of a river-valley some hundred feet above the sea, and at a spot some hundred miles distant from it ; that this valley is here bounded on the left bank by a plateau of from three to four hundred feet in height, while on its right bank it develops into a wide plain, a portion of which, close to the river, is enclosed by a semicircular ridge, rising

THE PLAIN OF PARIS 47

in its central portion, where it is most distant from the stream, into a conspicuous conical hill.

Let me now turn to the physical features which must be clearly grasped if we are to follow the growth of the town. First of these comes the group of islands which will be found almost in the exact centre of the map, and a little to the right of the northernmost point of that great " bow " in the Seine to which such frequent allusion has been made.

Such islands are a peculiar mark of the northern French rivers : the Oise, the Mame, the Seiue, the Loire are full of them. They are much larger and much more numerous than those of our English streams ; for while the Thames has on the whole but few, and the Severn hardly any, it is difficult to remember a single reach of the navigable Seiae in which they do not appear. Nearly always fiat, very fertile, ringed commonly with willow, and often graced by tall poplars, they form so many little isolated farms, and have been inhabited and tilled from the earliest years.

The particular island from which Paris grew, and on which the first rough bunch of savage huts were built, is one of a group somewhat remarkable among its neighbours. An island in the Seine is ordinarily very long and narrow, and often follows in its shape the course of the river. One succeeds another in a kind of procession, and several examples of this may be found even upon the short stretch of river included in our plan. But the group which was the germ of Lutetia is formed of a cluster of islands, each short and broad, while the river is widened so considerably at the place where they stand that it seems to have stretched its banks in order to admit them.

48

PARIS

If the formation of this group be glanced at in the accompanying sketch, it will be seen that there are three large islands almost overlapping each other. The largest and westernmost of these (the one lying to the left of the

sketch) is the Island of Lutetia. For the first fifteen of its twenty centuries of history it alone of the three was in- habited, and to this day it alone of the three sites possesses any historical importance.

Of the first two there is nothing much to be said in this general description. The easternmost has been joined to the right bank during our own time, and forms the modern Quai Henri IV. and its neighbouring streets. The middle island may or may not have been bisected by a narrow ditch — it is an interesting matter, and one which, for the sake of simplicity, I have omitted to discuss. It is upon the third that one's attention should alone be fixed.

The first point which a modern reader acquainted with Paris will remark is the unfamiliar presence of three small islets surrounding it, one like a long strip on the south, and two side by side at the very end of the Isle de la Cite. They are not to be seen to-day. The former was absorbed long ago in the Quai des Orffevres, the latter in the Place

THE PLAIN OF PARIS 49

Dauphine, aud there has been added in this way about one eighth to the too crowded and exiguous acreage of the larger island. The Isle de la Cite has similarly grown slightly on the northern bank by the building of the quays, and very largely at its eastern extremity ; for the garden of Notre Dame and the point on which the Morgue stands are nearly all new land. As for the measurements of the island, they were, to be exact, 700 yards long by 280 broad, or, say about the same size as the park and spaces between the Horse-guards and Buckingham Palace in London. Another detail worth noting is that the level of the pave- ment upon it has been raised some six or seven feet since medieval, and presumably a little more since Eoman, times.

To return to the general view of our matter ; the growth of the city, proceeding from this nucleus, would naturally be in suburbs upon either bank. It wiU be seen in this book how the Southern Hill became during the Eoman period its principal outlet. The late Mr. Grant Allen has well observed that in a time when civilization came from the south the city of necessity " looked southward " — as for that matter did Lincoln and Lyons, and as Nimes looked along her metropolitan road — so for many centuries this annex was the more important addition to the original town on the island. Here were the palace, the quarries, the camp, the circus, the quay, and later the great suburban church and shrine of the Saint. It is to be remarked that the southern extension was easy and profitable, for the soil was firm, the great Eoman road traversed the suburb, and the whole lay in the neighbourhood of that narrow fertile plain on the left bank which was the granary of the city.

Nevertheless, the main expansion of Paris has been to

E

so PARTS

the north since the revival of civilization, and here very for- midable obstacles seemed to threaten the growth of the city.

Between the river and the semicircular ridge of hills which I have described above, lay, at the eastern end of the plain, a great marsh. We know that a Eoman suburb existed just north of the island, and that villas were scattered about the plain ; we know also that two good Eoman roads branched out over this space, and all this might be used to prove that Eome had partially drained the fen during the many centuries of her rule. Whether she did so or not, it certainly reappeared in the Middle Ages, and it was only finally disposed of in that great expansion of the twelfth century which was like a new birth for Paris.

Another obstacle to the northern growth of the town was the stream that led from this marsh to the river. It will be seen on the map running just north of and almost parallel to the Seine, falling iuto it at last a mile or so below the group of islands. This little stream (whose old name of Menilmontant came from the hill above its source) was insignificant in itself, and would hardly have checked the builders of a suburb, had it not been followed on either side by a belt of treacherous soil similar to that in which it took its rise. It was not till Philip Augustus, in draining the marsh, deepened and canalized this rivulet that the ground about its course became firm enough for building on; and though he succeeded, it was two full centuries before even the upper part of this stream was covered in with houses. To-day it gives, by its slight depression, the central line for the drainage of the modern town.^

' This line runs from the Place de la Republique a little north of

THE PLAIN OF PARIS 51

To these primitive obstacles or defences that surrounded the town we must add the woods. Paris did not grow out to meet them till a quite recent period, and a great part of her outlying forest stUl remains. In the first physical aspect of the place, with which this chapter mainly deals, they were the principal mark of the landscape. The southern and western outlying hills were, of course, covered with forests, as they are at this time ; but even on the site of what is now Paris two great groups of woodland extended. One spread eastward from the marsh over the high ground indefinitely into the valley of the Marne. It would, were it marked on our map, go up to and beyond the right hand border. Its relics are found to-day in the wood and park of Vincennes. The other filled all the narrow loop made by the sharp course of the river on the left of the map, crossed the neighbouring horn of the semicircular ridge, and ended at or about the banks of the little stream of Menilmontant. Its remains to-day in the Bois de Boulogne and in the few remaining trees of the Champ Elysees. These two forests probably failed to meet to the north. Montmartre and the plain at its base were presumably bare even at the outset of our history.

All this, then, is the physical nature of the site upon which Paris lies. It wiU now be possible to carry through the reading of this book a clear impression of the character and locality of the many points with which the history of the town is bound up. We know the Island of the Cite, with its little accompanying islets; the two prin- cipal islands just above it in the stream ; the famous hUl

the main Boulevard. It passes south of the St. Lazaie station, and follows the Bue de la Boetie to the river, which it reaches just below the Pont de I'Alma.

52 PARIS

of the University immediately to the south and connected by its broad ridge with the outlying plateau; the river Bievre upon one side of it, the fertile belt of Issy on the other. On the north we have fixed the great hill of Mont- martre, the ridge spreading on either side of it with its heights on the west of Chaillot ; on the east of the Buttes Chaumont, of Pere la Chaise, and of Menilmontant, the stream which took its name from this last, and which rose in the great marsh whose memory stiU survives in the quarter of the Marais. These names and positions meet one continually throughout the story of Paris ; and, as I said at the opening of this chapter, it is essential to any exact knowledge of this story, that one shoiild plough through the detail of a map whose interest cannot arise until one is further acquainted with the city.

Nevertheless, it may be very justly maintained that an accumulation of names and geographical details, how- ever useful for reference, is of little value as a graphic representation. It is not only the map, it' is the picture which is a necessity to the reader of such a book as this ; I will therefore attempt to give some sketch of the im- pression which all this circle of Mil, plain, and river would have made upon the eye before the landscape was confused with houses.

For this purpose I will imagine a Gaulish boatman, one perhaps of the association which we may presume to have existed even before the Eomans came ; and he shall be rowing down stream with his merchandise in one of those light-draught vessels which later Labienus captured. He shall have started (let us say) from Melun, and for a whole day he has followed the slow stream as it ran, with but few windings, to the north-west. The land about him

THE PLAIN OF PARIS 53

was flat, with here and there a low-terraced rise just be- yond the banks of the river. Forests sometimes came right down to the water, and sometimes — especially as he passed the mouth of the Orge — a wide marsh would merge with the shore and hide the plain with reeds. It would be in the middle of the second day of his journey that he would come upon the Marne, much wider than the little streams he had passed, flowing in from the east, and forming with the upper Seine a new and broader river. Just at the confluence of these two streams, from the point of the little cape where there stood the shrine of the water-god, he would note some change in the landscape. To the left hills of a certain height made a line upon the horizon, and a spur of these ran out and touched the river some three miles below him ; while on the right, and in front of him, he would catch sight, beyond the river banks, of isolated points of high land ; the highest of these would stand flve miles away — a bare conical hill crowned with a grove.

As he fell down stream the river would begin to turn a little to the left from its old direction, and to flow more and more westward, till, just at the point where it ran under the slopes of the southern spur, and after he had passed the marshy mouth of the Bievre, he would come upon a group of three large islands. The two first of these he would leave upon his right. They were reedy and uninhabited, and they had no shore for his boat. But right before him he would notice the third, lying in mid- stream, and would know that he had come to the end of his journey. On the eastern end of the island (the point that he was approaching) was a little altar to the river- god ; behind it he could make out a number of scattered

54 PARIS

huts, and on either side the two branches of the stream were crossed by a high narrow bridge of logs laid on many- trestles.

He had a choice of two places in which to beach his boat — one on either side of the broader northern branch of the river. That on the main shore was larger than the small island landiag-place, and we will suppose that he there drew up his shallow boat and crossed round by the bridge on to the island. The view that he would then have gained from some high point — one of those wooden watch towers, for instance, which the Gauls bxiilt in times of danger — must have been something of this kind.

On the little island immediately at his feet lay the group of huts, and at its western end the rough gardens, while narrow sluggish ditches cut off a little strip of land from its southern side, and two small patches from its western poiat ; a rough track joined its two bridges, and a kind of ill-defined square or trodden green lay just between them — a place for council, and perhaps for market.

To the south and to the west ran a continual range of hills, all covered with deep forests, so that the place was silent and lonely ; and under the shadow of these lay the river in a great bend. That part of it which he had just descended ran off in a nearly straight reach to the mouth of the Marne. He noted the sharp ravine of the Bievre falling into it nearly at his feet; its lower course bent more and more southerly tiU it touched the hills, and then swept northward in a sudden curve whose course he could follow here and there miles away between the trees. Just opposite Mm rose the steep low hill that seemed a spur of the main range, and over it ran from the southern

THE PLAIN OF PARIS 55

bridge the little rough road that bound the village to the richer country far off on the Loire. He could see this little road going straight over the brow of the hill till it passed into the thick woods beyond. To the right of this hill, and still immediately below him, ran the only belt of cultivated land in all the landscape. It broadened out along the bank of the river, and he would follow the fields with his eyes to a point where, much farther down the stream, the forest came down from the heights, and hemmed them in.

On the immediate north of him there lay nothing but a waste of marsh and common, across which the road to the coast picked its way in a long curve ; and beyond this flat, with its vivid green of fen-land on the right, and its bare, chalky common on the left, he saw a low ring of hills running from the mouth of the Marne out to the north, and coming back to the river some two miles below him. Here and there upon this high ground he could distinguish some summit. But the point on which his eye immedi- ately rested was the most distant edge of this half circle, where, some three miles to the north, rose a conspicuous and isolated hill, far higher than anything but the distant ranges. At the summit of its steep and bare sides was the sacred grove, and he knew that there also the Parisii climbed to the sacrifice.

For the rest, to the right and to the left of fen and common there were only endless woods going out to the horizon.

This large hollow of deep woods and marsh and open scrub, with its half-deserted pathway, its broad, slow river, its reeds and willow-banks, its little island village, must have struck a chance traveller from the more populous

56 PARIS

plains of the centre or the Loire with a sense of loneliness. It lay remote from the routes of Gaul, it was but the central refuge of an inferior tribe ; and in all its horizon of forest and common there was but one small strip of harvest. Perhaps the eye could distinguish among the distant trees in the west a rare line of smoke, where some hamlet sheltered itself in the ravine of Sevres, or under the slope of Meudon ; but in general this country-side, which time had set apart for such great work, must have carried on into the beginning of its history an impression of isolation and of silence.

( 57 )

CHAPTEE III

LUTETIA

Now that we have seen on what a site Paris is to stand, the island that will be its root, the hills that wiU bound it, and the marshy northern plain over which it is destined to spread, we can turn to the positive history of the town whose setting and mould we have determined.

In this first division of the story of the city it is the scanty tradition of the Gaulish village and the somewhat fuller details of the Eoman town that must form my subject. As to the period covered, it stretches from the conquest of Csesar to the death of Ste. Genevieve, but in all this long space of over five centuries there is so little written down that it is permissible to give a sketch of it within the limits that a chapter of such a book as this imposes. Paris during the first part of this period re- mained a small and comparatively unimportant provincial town; though it rose in the fourth century to a higher position, and though the emperors had begun to make it their residence, it yet preserved an undecided place, until, during the convulsion of the fifth, a space of time which the life of Ste. Genevieve exactly covers, the Prankish conquest introduced its greater fortunes as the capital of

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northern Gaul. When, partly through the imperial tradition, partly by the accident of a line of march, Clovis entered the city, and when later he buried the great Patroness upon the southern hill, the new character of Paris was fixed. It is therefore to this point in the year 509 that I shall follow in the present chapter what little is certainly known of the origins of the town.

But these five hundred years and more divide them- selves into two very distinct parts. There is first a matter of some three centuries, during which, though Paris is obscure, the details of Eoman life as a whole are as clearly and positively known as those of our own time. They are necessarily less numerous than those upon which we buUd a modern record, but they are well attested and unmixed with legend. As to the remaining time, roughly the fourth century and the fifth, the decay of the whole civilization affects this department of letters, and such accounts as we have tend, especially as the end of the Eoman dominion approaches, to be confused and over- personal, or to be rendered doubtful by an insistence upon the marvellous. To these qualities of the later records another drawback must be admitted : the presence of contemporary authorities is rare. Thus, the life of St. Marcel is written two hundred years after his death ; the chronicle upon which we most depend (that of St. Gregory of Tours) is concerned here with a period of which he was not an eye-witness — Ste. Genevieve died a full generation before he was born. Unfortunately, it is in the nature of our history that these more uncertain writers should be ampler than the earlier authorities. They were writing of a time when Paris first began to fill a great place in Gaul; their predecessors had nothing to say of a little

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island-town that was for so long a mere dependent upon Sens, smaller than Orleans, less of a centre than Chartres.

The first mention in history of the people and the island is in Cassar's description of his Gallic wars. The passage directly concerning them is short. There was no intention to fix the mind of the reader upon a site the mention of which was incidental only to his general policy and the campaigns that followed upon it. But by a comparison with what we know of the semi-civilization to which it belonged, we can fill in something of the outline he gives us, and on the analogy of other centres placed somewhat in the same surroundings we can obtain a fairly accurate impression of what was meant by the group of Gaulish huts from the centre of which he harangued the assembled tribes.

In some matter upon which history is sUent and ethnography in doubt, the line of the Seine and Marne formed a frontier between the two great divisions of northern Gaul. To these Caesar gives the name of Belgic and Celtic Gaul : the former stretching across the northern plains eastward of the rivers, and reaching the marshes of the low countries; the latter running westward into the broken land of what is now upper Normandy, Brittany, and Maine. There has been an attempt to prove that the contrast was between a Celtic and a Teutonic people; but even were these terms capable of a definition, the evidence is insufficient for any such conclusion. It is enough for our purpose to know that some sharp division existed, and that the Marne and Seine formed a political frontier between the great groups of population. Situate upon that frontier, and even (according to one derivation)

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taking their name from the marches of such a border out- post, lay the Parisii;

The Gaul iato which Caesar entered possessed a character which seems inseparable from early or imperfect civilizations, and which may, among other causes, be traced to lack of communications. It was a loose agglomeration of tribes, each singly strong through a bond of half-fictitious consanguinity, but weak as a confederation from the jealousies of the chiefs and from the lack of any central power. There is no evidence that these tribes had in the past been united in one of those transitory empires that occasionally appear in such a society ; their mutual relations consisted in the continual dependence of the smaller and weaker clans upon the stronger, in loose and imperfect alliances, and occasionally, during a moment of common danger, in some vast but unstable combination. Their skill in so many arts, their dependence upon a large half-servile population, their ill-defined but ardent patriotism bring them nearer perhaps to the Welsh tribal system of the early Middle Ages than to any other of which we have historical evidence.

The Parisii appear, when Csesar found them, to have been driven within the recent memory of living men from some more eastern station. An advance of the Belgic tribes had pushed them back, and they had taken refuge under that powerful nation the Senones, who counted as one of the chief clans of Gaul. It was to these Senones that history or tradition ascribed the great Italian raid of three centuries before; one of the vague, irresistible marches that flood out and return like tides from the French soil and relieve history with such strange accidents as the Crusades or the Eevolutionary wars.

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The Parisii, holding by a species of tenure from this principal tribe, occupied the plain upon which Paris is built and the western hills. The territory, though vaguely defined, would be limited by the nature of the soil ; fenced in to the east by the great marshes and by the wood of Vincennes, spreading on the western plateau through the contiauous forests that afforded so excellent a retreat, it held a population of some thirty thousand, and furnished a body of eight thousand men to the war levy. This population depended to some extent on unfree labour ; but the number of the servile class cannot have been great in these rough northern boundaries, where the few clearings on the table-land and the firmer parts of the river valleys alone afforded a field for labour. As for their produce, we must believe that they had nothing more than the oats, wheat, and barley that made the wealth of the neighbouring valley of the Loire; and these, as was said in the last chapter, would be found most plentifully between the river and the hills, where the Invalides and the Champ de Mars now stand, on the plain of the left bank that remained for so many centuries the principal granary of the city.

Over this territory, then, was spread the tribe. It covered all the present department of the Seine, a little strip of Seine et Marne, and a wide belt in Seine et Oise ; it gave to the tract the old title of " Parisis," that is found in so many place-names of the neighbourhood, and it became at last that diocese of Paris which, in its hierarchical dependence upon the Archbishopric of Sens, preserved,^ as ecclesiastical institutions must always do, a relic of the original political condition. But throughout Gaul each tribe, though living scattered in its hamlets, possessed also ' That is, up to the great change of 1622.

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a fortified centre, to which the Eoman invaders gave their name of " oppidum." These were not towns or cities, they were villages like the rest, chosen, however, for the strength of their sites. Skilled especially in defensive warfare, the Gauls had it in their military traditions to choose such places upon one of a few simple models ; an escarped plateau, the crest of a sharp isolated hUl, a peninsula, an island in a river, gave the opportunity they required, and it was in these fortified enclosures that the Eomans found a mould ready-made for that municipal civilization which by the previous absorption of so many city-states had become the basis of their empire.

As has been seen in the earlier chapters of this book, it was an island in the Seine that formed the retreat of the Parisii and their fortress in time of war. It has been argued that the site had special advantages, defended as it was in an especial manner by the reedy mouths of the Orge and the Bievre, and situated on some principal track from the south. These conclusions are quite uncertain ; the plain as a whole was an obvious site, but there seems no particular reason why one island more than another in it should have been chosen. The first wandering inhabitants fixed by accident upon a certain group in this part of the river, they might equally well have settled on any of the dozen or so that marked the course of the river throughout their country. But the group once chosen it was evident that what is now the "Isle de la Cite" would of necessity become the principal or only place of settlement, for its nearness to the southern bank, its steep shores, its size and its broad, even shape lent it especially to the purposes of a defensive settlement. It was here that the circle of huts, such as they were described in the last chapter, arose.

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We must imagine them scattered irregularly, but massed especially towards the eastern end of the forty acres or so that formed the whole area of the little kraal, while such gardens as they may have had were grouped on the western part of the island. Down the steep hill in the immediate south would run the first track from the nearest point of the Loire valley, and this track would cross to the island by one of those narrow wooden bridges which the Gauls could build, of which remains may still be found on the AUier, and which furnished the communications of that other island fortress of Melun higher up the river. The track having crossed the narrow left arm of the Seine by this bridge would then continue straight across the island at its broadest part ; one would imagine that it there formed the wide public meeting place of the village. It passed in a straight line over the larger northern arm of the river, and went on northward, curving round the edge of the marsh, leaving the hill of Montmartre on the left, and following finally the direction of Senlis.

All this has been alluded to in the earlier pages of this book, but at the risk of iacluding a little excess of pedantic detail, I would here attempt to determine the exact site of these bridges. It might appear a matter of small moment in so general a history as this, were it not for the great imaginative interest that attaches to the Parisian habit of continuity. I have pointed out in the introductory chapter how symbolic this continuity is of the history of the city ; how, through perpetually changing forms, there endures a spirit and a personality, of which this constantly similar use of certain places — a sacredness of locality as it were — is the outward sign. It is true, as we shall see, of the public worship, of the markets, and of the courts of the

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city ; is it also true of this pre-historic road and its bridges ?

To determine this, it is necessary that I should refer my reader to the sketch map upon p. 98, where the few simple sites of Gallo-Eoman Paris are set down. The point of departure for our inquiry is the road from Genabum (that is, the modern Orleans) and the little southern bridge. With regard to these there is no doubt. There was but one great road from the south ; its known direction, the tombs that (in the Roman fashion) are found to have bordered upon it, the line of the palace which was afterwards built beside it — a continuous tradition, all point to the site of the Petit Pont to-day as being that of the trestle-bridge which was crossed by the assembled tribes as they came in from the Beauce to gather before Caesar, and which in the next year Camulogen burnt to save the town. It is with regard to the northern bridge that doubt has arisen. Its site would be either that of the Pont au Change or of the Pont Notre Dame. Por the former view there are these arguments : that throughout the early Middle Ages the "Grand Pont," that is, the principal bridge, was the Pont au Change ; and we know that at the head of this bridge the great defences of Louis VI. were built. It was, again, the commercial route of the Middle Ages, and even derives its name from this character. A further point that carried some weight with old authorities on Paris was the tradition that the " Chatelet " had its origin in a fort erected by Csesar to defend the northern bridge — and the Chatelet was of course at the head of the Pont au Change. To this tradition, which rises in the very origins of the Middle Ages, a certain reverence should be paid, for though the name of Csesar is so constantly

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misapplied by men of that period, it is almost invariably connected with work that is certainly Eoman.

There are, on the other hand, and in favour of the Pont Notre Dame, the following arguments. It is ia a direct line with the Petit Pont, and with the southern road. To make the track cross to the northern shore by the Pont au Change it would be necessary to give it, without any reason, a bend across the island. Savage tracks bend so when there is some physical reason for divergence, but there was here no such accident of the soil, nor was it in the tradition of Eoman engineering to admit this kind of break in direction ; such an example of a turn within the narrow limits of an island would, I think, be imique in Gaul were it true of Paris. It is certainly not found at Melun, nor at Charleville, nor at Eouen, nor at Mantes, nor in any that I know of the Eoman sites of Gaul with which we can compare it. Again, the Gaulish trail to the north round the marsh corresponds with the Pont Notre Dame, not with the Pont au Change. It is true that the latter, if prolonged, would become the main Eoman road to the northern provinces, but there is no trace that the prolongation was ever actually built ; rather the evidences of such scant discoveries as have been made here tend to show that this great north road turned abruptly out of the older lane to Senlis. For, at the spot marked X upon the map a triangular comer of wall has been discovered which marks the junction of the two ways. Finally, though it is a doubtful matter even for experts to determine the age of such a relic, it is certain that the traces of wooden piles in the bed of the river (which traces correspond with the Pont Notre Dame) are much older than the mediaeval bridge that crossed at the same

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place. No such piles have been found in any other part of the river near the island.

From a comparison of these arguments, I would conclude that, so far as one may assert in such an uncertain matter, the straight way across the island is that of the old road and its bridges. "When one goes down the hill of the Eue St. Jacques, crosses the Petit Pont, skirts the great, windy square of the Cathedral, and goes over the Pont Notre Dame to follow the narrow Eue St. Martin, one is walking in the track of the rare southern merchants, who, before the Eoman legions came, may have passed and found this little village on their way from the Loire to the lonely harbours of the Somme.

For the rest there is nothing certain with regard to the first origins of the place. Even the name is doubtful. Caesar, from whom we have it first, gives it as "Lutetia," and in this form it has passed into history. But it is uncertain whether this spelling most accurately corresponds to the native name which the Eomans adopted. The hill above the city on the south was always " Mons Lucotitius," and the town itself is " Lucotocia " in Strabo, " Louchetia " in Julian's charming praise of his little capital. We must, however, call it by its more usual name of Lutetia, and that may mean anything you will ; there are a hundred guesses, but the most pleasant is that which makes it " the white town." For even if the name first came from the chalky dust of the plain in summer, it fits very well with the temples and the palace that the Eomans built against the dark water of the river and the shining green of the northern marsh and pasture land. Also, since the Eenaissance, it is a white town that they have been trying to rebuUd.

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The village of the Gauls has but two memories attached to it. The first is that of the great meeting which Caesar called in B.o. 53. It is of interest to know that Lutetia was chosen in order to withdraw the assembly from the influence of the centre now called Chartres. He feared this town, which was the natural rallying place of Celtic Gaul, and with which its worship and vague patriotism were connected. He therefore changed the meeting place to the island sixty miles away, where, in what was almost a frontier post for them, lonely and surrounded with woods, he could feel more certain of the influence which his speech would have upon the chiefs. The episode was not peculiar to Lutetia ; it was an accident which might have befallen any of the smaller northern places.

The second incident is far more a part of its individual history, for it is the prototype of what Paris was to be upon a larger field during many centuries. I mean the struggle with Labienus. It was during the great revolt of B.C. 52, whose centre was the defence of Gergovia. It was the spring of the year. Caesar was marching south to the middle of Gaul, that mountain country of the Averni that had become the centre of a quasi-national resistance. He had not yet attempted the assault of the volcanic plateau where he was to come so near to disaster ; the revolt was still but partial, and he found himself between divided bodies of the enemy, the tribes whose active resistance had shown itself south on the Limagne, and northward in the valley of the Seine. He determined on a double blow ; he went himself against the first with the bulk of his army, and detached Labienus for the northern march against the Parisii.

Labienus went up with his two legions to Agedincum

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(which is the modem Sens), and formed his base at that town, where two other legions, the later levies from Italy, were awaiting him ; then, with the combined force of four legions, he marched north along the river valleys. His objective was Lutetia. There the revolted tribes had gathered their great horde under a chief called Camulogen, very old and wise. They waited for the Eomans under the woods, which were their refuge, and behind the marshes, that were then: best defence. It was behind one such marsh, most probably where the Essonne falls into the Seine, seventeen miles above Paris, that the Gauls drew up their line and expected the attack. Labienus had come some sixty to seventy mUes ; he had wisely followed the left bank to avoid the crossing of many streams, and found himself at last in sight of the enemy. But Camu- logen had chosen his position with great knowledge. The Essonne ran for miles through a marsh, which broadened to a mile or more in width where the little river fell into the Seine. AU day long the Eomans were at work attempting to make a causeway, with earth and faggots ; when the evening came they had gained nothing by their labour, and the impassable defence still cut them off from their line of advance.

In the operations that follow one has as good an example as the Gallic wars afford of the discipline that assured the final success of Eome. These operations are a succession of forced marches, of night-work, of sudden attacks made at dawn on insufficient sleep, of success depending upon the exact synchrony of distant manceuvres.

In the first place Labienus broke up his camp at mid- night ; fell back twelve miles up river ; surprised, and took Melodunum, an island village of the Seine, and captured

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fifty of those light barges on which the commerce of the river depended. He rebuilt the bridge that the inhabitants had destroyed, crossed to the right bank, and began after all these fatigues a forced march along the eastern side of the river, accompanied by his boats. So rapid was all this movement of more than fifty miles, that he camped north of the island of Lutetia just as Camulogen, with his great swarm of men, had completed a short retreat of seventeen miles, and reached the southern bank. The Eomans lay somewhere near the present site of the Louvre ; the Gauls where Cluny and the University are now.

The two armies were watching each other thus from either shore — between them the ruins of the village which the Gauls had burnt, and the broken bridges — when the news that was so nearly an end to the Eoman victories, reached them. Caesar had been defeated at Gergovia (long after, in a little mountain temple of Auvergne, they showed a sword taken from him in the battle) ; the j3Edui had risen ; the tribal revolt had become successful and general. Labienus had upon his rear, just beyond the hills of Enghien, the Bellovaci ; they had but to move to envelop his position. There lay between liim and his base more than seventy miles of hostile country, and the stream of a great river. The enemy had received the encouragement of rumours which were based on a definite success, and which had gathered as they passed northward the effect of a decisive victory. In this pass the lieutenant of Csesar " took advice from his own daring." He waited for dark- ness. At ten in the evening he carried out the following plan. The boats he sent down stream in the care of the knights, and told them to wait for him at a point four miles below — that is, nearly where the fortifications reach

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the river to-day, and the great viaduct crosses with its three rows of arches. He left half a legion — the recruits — m care of the camp, and another half legion he sent up stream with a few boats, bidding them show lights, and make a reasonable noise as they moved, so as to deceive the enemy into the belief that the army was retreating by river on to Melun. Then he himself, with the remaining three legions, the biilk of his army, marched silently for- ward and westward along the bank of the river. A storm aided him. In its confusion he surprised a few scattered outposts, and by midnight he had joined his boats ; before dawn he had his forces transferred to the left bank, and Camulogen, confused by all this ruse, found them just as day broke drawn up in the plain of Issy.

The battle closed between that position and the slope of Vaugirard, on what is now the site of Grenelle, just west of the Champ de Mars. On the right, under the hill, the Seventh legion broke the line of the Gauls ; on the left, the Twelfth, after a first success, were pushed back by the main body of the enemy, who were massed here round the person of Camulogen. Two movements decided the victory for Labienus. First, the Seventh legion was free in time to come up in the rear of the main Gaulish body, and to envelop it; secondly, that portion of Camulogen's force which had been put on a false scent by the ruse of the night, came up to reinforce him, but came up too late. The right wing of the enemy, entirely surrounded by the two legions, was cut to pieces, and there fell with them the old chief himself. The reinforce- ment coming up on the hill of Vaugirard at the close of the action was driven before the general advance that followed the victory. Such of the Parisii and their allies

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as could escape fled into the woods above the river ; and Labienus, as he began his march to join hands with Csesar, passed through the whole length of the position of those who, for a few days, had menaced to cut him off and destroy him.

This was the first of the great battles with which the history of Paris is associated. It was the first example in history of how the river valleys, converging upon the plain of Paris, and there finding a barrier of hills, turn all that hollow into the final battlefield of an invasion. It decided more than any other one action the issue of the great doubt of B.C. 52, and it is the introduction of that stable and enduring civilization which followed the Con- quest.

With the final settlement the legions returned; the great roads were planned and paved, the village rose up again as a town in stone upon the embers of the huts, the bridges were rebuilt. Lutetia took a place — one of the smaller tributary towns — in the great list of the new civilization ; and under the pressure of that iron order the city slips out of history for more than two centuries, and merges into the Eoman peace.

So far as the direct record of history goes, there is a blank between the last mention which Csesar makes of Paris (and that is when he computes the Parisian levy at 8000 men in the attempted relief of the siege of Alesia) and the episode of Julian's election four hundred years later.

In all this great space of time we have but half a dozen references to thecity ; and these, with the exception of the dates on a few edicts, are only geographical. Thus Strabo

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(who was a child when Caesar returned from the war) speaks of " Luchotetia," and Ptolemaeus, two hundred years later, does the same ; but there is no definite event to set down in aU that long period save, perhaps, the half-known coming of the first Christian preachers.

Our exact knowledge even of this depends upon the chronicle of Gregory of Tours, and that bishop wrote rather more than three hundred years after the death of the first martyr ; but he so clearly follows an unshaken tradition in the matter, that one can rely on the approxi- mate accuracy of the date which he gives — the middle of the third century — for the arrival of Dionysius the bishop, and Eleutherius and Eusticus with him, the deacon and the priest. We know that this date, 250 a.d., was not surprisingly late, for even in Lyons, which was like a little Eome, and closely in touch both with the capital and with the east, the great martyrdom of the first Christians was only in 170 a.d. We know also that the evangelisation of the Parisii cannot have been undertaken much later, because the Bishop of Paris begins to appear ia the ecclesiastical documents of the first haK and middle of the next century (for instance, Victorinus signs at Cologne in 346). Taking, then, this story of Gregory's to be sound history, it is the one and only relief to four hundred years of silence.

It would be an error, nevertheless, to pass over that period without description ; the civilization of the time — especially of its first three centuries — was complete and full, and it has of necessity left behind it a considerable group of ruins. From these a number of accurate inferences can be drawn, and if we also use the analogy of other cities similarly situated, consider their guilds.

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their system of municipal government, the change to the tribal name, the rise of the defensor civitatis, and so forth, we can reconstruct the life and the appearance of Paris without a fear of any considerable inaccuracy. As all the material side of this reconstruction depends upon architectural remains, it will be my business in what follows to describe, and to estimate the value of, the ruins that still stand in the streets of the town, or that have been discovered beneath its soil ; to show how they help us to a knowledge of the old limits ; and to use them as a foundation for a description of the Eoman city. These, then, I take in their order, so far as the dates can be told.

The earliest and also the most perfect of the fragments that remain to us is the altar that the guild of the Nautse built to Jupiter in the time of Tiberius, when Our Lord was teaching in Galilee. This little broken monument is a very wonderful thing. You may see its six battered stones to-day in the great, cold hall of the Eoman bath, which you get to from the Cluny; and these carvings ought to be the first thing for a traveller to wonder at in the modern city.

For, in the first place, they are the oldest existing witness of the civilization of Paris. Here you have a first example of that French art of sculpture which continues without a break to our own day; and here also you see the local gods, the divinities of the river and the seasons, who were later to take on Christianity and preside at the shrines of the city. Thus there is Keraunos, the horned god whom men prayed to for their cattle ; and Esus, the god of the Gaulish summer — he is reaping with a sickle in his hand. This old altar was found under the choir of Notre Dame in 1711 (luckily just in time for Felibien

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to add a full account of it in his great book), and was deep in a mixture of soil and building-rubbish close to the remaius of a buried wall ; but the stones had fallen apart, and, so far as one can make out from the rough account of the workmen, they may have formed part of the foundations. Therefore a theory has arisen that the altar was standing when ChUdebert, five hundred years later, built that first Church of Our Lady, of which I shall write in the next chapter ; that, of course, was the time of his great edict against the remains of paganism in his kingdom, and they think that the altar was thrown down and used in the foundations of his church. At any rate, we learn not only conjectural things from these stories, but a good many certain things as well; we have the inscription which runs thus : " To Jove the great and the good, we, the Guild of Boatmen, foimded this altar when Tiberius was Csesar " ; and as we may assert that it was the most important shrine of the city, we can infer a great deal from such evidence.

As, for instance, that already the local association was assuming (in all probability) the municipal functions which later it certainly exercised: for in these water- towns of Gaul the guild of water-traders, the "Nautse" became at last the principal organ of city government, and, we may be certain, handed down their organization to the communal revival of the Middle Ages.

Then we can be certain also that the Eoman language and the Eoman gods were mixed and settled with the soil of northern Gaul in that short space of two genera- tions since the Conquest. And, finally, from its position this altar is a proof of the principal example of continuity which the city possesses.

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This character of continuity is one that has been insisted upon before in this book, and that wUl be repeated many times; it is the great historical mark of Paris, and yet it is the feature in the modern town which the traveller least understands or hears about. You have here, within a few feet of the high altar of Notre Dame, a little sacred circle, on which the worship of the city has been held from the time when men first made a ritual: the altar of the Nautse, of the first Christian Basilica, of Childebert's church, of the present Cathedral, all stood here. It is the eastern end of the island, and it is this that explains the position, for it was at such points and promontories facing new-comers that the civic religion centred : this altar on the cape of the old island (the modern quays run somewhat farther into the river) met the commerce of the Seine, as the altars of the Cities and of Eome met the commerce of the Ehone at Lyons, or as the Temple of Mercury met the commerce of the Marne where it fell into the main stream. This altar, then, of the Nautse is the first and most reverend thing among the relics that remain of Lutetia.

Next, both in the matter of their probable date and of the time they were discovered, are the group of ruins and bronzes that were dug up in the centre of the island. It was during the reign of Louis Philippe, when the alterations in the Parvis of the Cathedral (that is, in the space in front of it) were being made, and when the court-yard of the Law Courts, a little to the west, were being relaid, that these walls were found.

They were the plans of certain houses and rooms, and their importance in the history of the city is as follows. The first (those in the Parvis) give us the alignment of at

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least two important streets ; they increase the probability that the main street of Lutetia ran right across from the Petit Pont to the Pont Notre Dame, and that these two bridges give the line of the old road; they prove the existence in the Koman time of a street running east and west, the main artery of the little town, and negatively, by the absence of further ruins between them and the Palace, they seem to point to that space as the Forum of Lutetia ; the public meettag place which should have stood just there, reached by the northern and southern bridges and full in front of the Palace and the Praetor's Court. These houses had no open space or court in the middle, as had the typical Koman house ; the narrow space of the island perhaps, more probably the climate, modified the southern type, and in spite of Julian's talk of stoves in the Palace, these private houses iu the city had certaioly the cellar- furnaces which we find in the Eoman villas of Britain.

As for the second discovery made at that time, it is without question a room or hall in the Palace which was first of all the governor's, and later in history the emperor's, when those wandering soldiers of the defence began to live in their distant provinces. It was foimd in what is now the courtyard of the Ste. Chapelle. It was well preserved and gave a clear plan ; on those fragments of wall that yet remained upright one could see the dead black paint, and the delicate festooned ornament of dull green that relieved it^ on its floor the decorations of the roof had fallen, and in the richness of their carving showed a little what the Palace had been. Here also, or rather just outside, and jutting upon the forum, was (we may presume) that little temple to Mercury which was followed by the small mediaeval Church of St. Michael.

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Both the houses of the Parvis Notre Dame and the hall of the old Eoman palace were covered in again just as they stood ; their bas-reliefs and the broken details went off to the Cluny, and the walls themselves were marked in the paving that was put above them. For this is a very favourite way in Paris of dealing with ruins which they do not wish to destroy, but which they cannot leave standing in the modern streets : they bury them, and mark the place with white stones on the pavement. This they have done with the foundations of the Bastille and the founda- tions of the old Louvre, but they have not done it with the magnificent ruins of the Eoman Amphitheatre, of which I shall speak in a moment.

The wall of Lutetia ran all round the island ; some parts of it have been discovered, and the corner of one of its towers. There is not much to be said of it ; less than twenty-five feet in height, very thick, and flanked with perhaps some thirty towers, square, and of moderate height, we must presume it to have been built of that same white local stone that has given so strong a character to the appearance of the ancient and of the modem city. It has been argued that the wall was necessarily of very late date, because the ruins of the Amphitheatre have been found here and there embedded in it : the argument is imsound. The period that used the old buildings as a quarry was not the period that built entire city walls, it only repaired them. One might as well reason that no walls surrounded Chester till the time when they pulled up the tombs of the legionaries to strengthen the fortifications of the city. Perhaps the most probable guess would make the close of the third century the time when the wall was raised.

With the details just described, and with our knowledge

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of what succeeded the Eoman period, we can get a very fair idea of the plan of the town in the first three centuries of its civilization. The island was a little smaller than it is to-day ; for, first, what is now the Place Dauphine and the middle of the Pont Neuf was then two little islands ; secondly, what is now the Quai des Orfevres was then a detached islet separated from Lutetia by a narrow ditch, and, thirdly, the broad quay round the south and at the back of the cathedral, with the Morgue, was then all water, for it has been artificially built out into the stream, and the island used to end very much where the little Gothic fountain stands to-day in the gardens behind the apse.

To get a clear conception of the Eoman town we must imagine the island divided into three sections, an eastern, a middle, and a western : the eastern going from the point of the island to the line of the bridges (the present Petit Pont and Pont Notre Dame), the middle going from these to the line of the Boulevard du Palais, just in front of the Law Courts ; the western stretching from these to the extremity of the island and the two islets where the Place Dauphine is now. These three divisions are stiU clearly marked in the modem arrangement of the island, and seem to belong to it of necessity throughout its history. Now, the first of these would contain, of course, the principal temple and the altar of the water-guild ; a small space would be clear in front of the temple, but for the rest the quarter would be full of houses, and a little port or dock (the only landing-place on the island) stood with its steps and rings just where, beyond the abutment of the Pont D'Arcole, steps lead down to the water to-day. (It was called later the Port St. Landry, having slipped under

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the protection of that bishop from the tutelage of some unknown Gaulish god.) All this would correspond roughly to the Cathedral and the Parvis and the Hotel Dieu.

In the central section (which corresponds to the modern Barracks of the Guards and the Flower Market) there was a belt of houses along the north shore of the island, and a belt of houses along the south bank, while between them was the Forum and the Temple of Mercury ; the Forum taking much the position that the Eue de Lutece does now.

Finally, facing the Forum, and stretching in a long colonnade right across the island, came the palace and the offices of the Municipal Government. They ran along the modern line of the Law Courts and of the Ste. ChapeUe. Covering as this great buHdiag did the whole width of the town, from one wall to another, the rest of the third or western section was cut off, and most probably laid out in the gardens of the palace. We know that it was all gardens in the centuries immediately suc- ceeding, and then, as during the Eoman time, there could have been no access to them from the town that stood on the eastern shores of the island, save through the archways of the palace itself.

Eound all this went the wall, regularly following the shore, and leaving room for a path and a steep bank outside it against the water. Only in two places does its regular outline seem to have been broken. The first was at the spot where now stands the southern transept of Notre Dame. Here, for some unknown reason, a bastion was thrust out southward from the main line of the wall.

The second was in the midst of the northern wall, where

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stood the prison which we learn of from the chronicles of the iirst Prankish kings, and which was then called " The Prison of Glaucinus," while beyond this to the east there stood at a very late date (probably after Maximus won his victory in the neighbourhood, at the close of the fourth century) a triumphal arch. This arch may have spanned the entrance to the city by the northern bridge, or may have been a little to one side of the main road ; its fragments were found near those steps which I have spoken of above as marking the site of the old landing-place.

If to these details one adds the strong towers at the head of either bridge one has, so far as it can be recon- structed, the plan of the city proper — of the island ; but besides the main town on the island, Eoman Paris possessed important suburbs whose total area must have been almost equal to the central portion within the walls ; and these suburbs we can trace with some accuracy, although we have, with the exception of the great palace on the south, very little left of the actual walls of their houses. If my readers will look at the sketch map which accompanies this description, they will see these suburbs marked, as the houses in the island are marked, by a shading of sloping liues. There are two, the northern and the southern.

The limits of the northern suburb I have given as accu- rately as one can with the small data at one's disposal. We know that there were houses at the junction of the great north road and the road to Augustomagus; and the discovery of a very great number of medals, coins, and what not, in a regular line beyond what is now the Hotel de VUle, as well as the presence of a number of relics of whatever was metallic about the houses, permits us to give with

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some certitude the boundaries of this group of houses. Where the Place de Greve ^ is now in front of the Hotel de Ville there was certainly a landing-place for boats, and therefore I have left this spot bare in the map. Of farther Eoman remains on the north bank the most important is the reservoir which was discovered in the northern part of the gardens of the Palais Eoyal. It is a striking example of the care which the Eomans always showed to provide a plentiful supply of water for their towns, that this little provincial city should have had two principal aqueducts. The one, as we shall see, furnished the palace on the south bank, and probably the city on the island. The other, coming from the heights which are those of the Trocadero and the Arc de Triomphe, drew its water from a spring in what is now Passy, and came in a straight line across the Place de la Concorde to this reservoir of which I have spoken.

With the exception of the works for this supply of water, and of a villa here and there upon the two great northern roads, the north bank does not show any sign of Eoman work beyond the suburb. It was probably in the main a partly drained marsh and a chalky common, flanked at the western extremity of the plain by the fringes of a great forest. Montmartre, however, still shows, and till recently showed to a greater extent, evidences of the Eoman occupation, though they have not been so care- fully examined or described as have the more important Eoman remains of the island and its neighbourhood. When a traveller goes to-day to see the great basilica which has been built upon Montmartre, he notices close to it a little ruined church, which was in the Middle Ages

' They call it now the Place de I'Hotel de Ville.

G

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the parish church of what was then a small suburban village. This church (which was recently condemned to be destroyed, and which the efforts of French historians have luckily preserved) took iato its structure a consider- able amount of old Roman material, and especially some of its pillars are almost certainly taken from the two pagan temples of Mars and of Mercury, which stood at the east and at the west ends of the small plateau that crowns the summit of the hill. In the last century one could also see in the gardens of the Abbey of Montmartre a great wall just at the top of the hill where it overlooks the Plain of St. Denis, and this wall was all that remained of a villa, which some rich man had wisely built on this heirght, so that he might feel enthroned above the wide expanse below. His house was so full of statues, and had such fine great cellars for heating it in winter, that a pedant took it some century and a half ago for a manu- factory of pottery, not understanding that such places rarely stand on the summits of hills, far from the clay they need, nor that they would surely have an excess of ugly rather than of beautiful things. It was in this place that was found the bronze head which has so broad a forehead and such quiet brows, and which arrests you as you pass it in the Cluny.

When we come to the southern side of the river, we are struck by this, that while it was by much the more important of the two suburbs, and while it undoubtedly contains more that is Eoman than any other part of Paris, yet it is impossible to fix with any accuracy the position of its private houses. I have attempted to guess at the probable site of this suburban group, but I must repeat that in this case the greater part of the lines are conjectural

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only. We know that there was a port where I have marked it, just opposite the first of the two uninhabited islands at the head of the present Pont de la Tournelle ; and round this port there must presumably have been a certain number of houses. We know exactly the direction of the great road leading south from the bridge ; it lay to a yard on the site of the present Eue St. Jacques, and we know that the Palace gardens ran along its western side from the river. It seems probable that along the other side there stood a row of private houses. What is less certain is the plan of the city along the two lanes, one of which leads in the map from the Palace to the port, and the other of which branches out from this, and goes on to the Amphitheatre. The principal quarries from which the city was built lay upon the southern side of the first lane, very much where the market is now, off the Boulevard St. Germain and opposite the statue of the un- lucky faddist, Etienne Dolet. The sharp break in the hill, the wall which stands just behind the market sheds, still marks the line of the excavations. Since the same street that passed these quarries led to the port and also to the circus, we may presume, without too much fantasy, that a line of houses would follow so important a thoroughfare. It is possible, and even likely, that a few buildings marked the lane leading to the Amphitheatre ; but as no remains have been discovered on this part of the soil, I have left out any mention of houses there in my map.

When we turn from what is conjectured about the private houses to what is known concerning the public monuments, the suburb presents a very different historical interest. We have here a group of ruins and a number of accurately ascertained sites which are remarkable for

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having survived into the life of the modern city. In the first place there is, of course, that great palace of which one small wing stOl remains in the venerable brickwork next to the Cluny Museum. This, which was the old bath of the Palace, has given its name to the whole ruin, and has caused it for very many centuries to be called " The Palace of the Thermae ; " but very few modem men who know this one hall appreciate the immense size of the original building. It stretched all over the site of the present Hotel de Cluny ; its main central part went over the whole width of the present Eue des Ecoles ; one of its wiags would have covered the present site of the Sorbonne, while another would have gone westward to a point half- way up the Boulevard St. Michel. As to who built this great monument we cannot be certain, but we can make nearly sure that the tradition which ascribes it to Julian is unhistorical. Julian was devoted to Lutetia, but he passed too short a time in that town, and was, during his occupa- tion of it, by far too pre-occupied with his successful campaign, and with the military revolution which he witnessed and enjoyed, to have designed and completed such a building. It is much more likely to have been the work of his father, though it is quite possible that he was hinaself the first emperor to live in it in its finished condition.

Just south of the Palace, on the top of the liill, there has been discovered a group of Koman remains, which are less known than the Thermae, but which are of the highest interest. In the first place, it has been made sure that the great cemetery of the city, the tombs of the principal men, lined the main road in the Eoman fashion, and stood here in a field which, roughly speaking, covered the space

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contained between the Eue St. Jacques and the church of St. Etienne du Mont. Their sites, that is, lie at this day beneath the Library of St. Genevieve, the Eue Soufflot, the Pantheon, and the Law School.

Opposite these, just beyond the southern road, were the barracks of the garrison, corresponding to the centre of the Eue Soufflot, and beyond this again was a great enclosed space, which corresponds to what is now the corner of the Luxembourg Gardens, at the top of the Boulevard St. Michel and the opening of the Eue Soufflot. In this enclosed space the fair and one market of Eoman Paris seem to have been held, especially the market for the garrison ; for on this site have been discovered a very great quantity of small domestic implements, of soldiers' lighter kit, of coins, and what not, upon which the conjecture is based.

The Palace had also a great garden, and, though it had long disappeared, its general position was indicated so late as the twelfth century by the general name given to the whole quarter, the " Clos de Laas," or Palace Close. It is usual to make the wall of this Palace garden (for all trace of it has disappeared) run from a spot close to the southern side of the Pont des St. Peres straight south for a matter of a quarter of a mile, and then turn at right angles to meet the Palace itself. My readers will see that I have varied from this more usual conjecture by bringing the wall in at a re-entrant angle, so that the site of St. Germain de Pres lies outside the gardens ; and my reason for doing this is as follows. From the moment when the Abbaye of St. Germain was founded it is perfectly clear, both in the original charter and in all that the chronicles have to tell us of it for hundreds of years, that it lay outside whatever

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boundaries the city or the southern suburb can have possessed.

Now, that it should have stood outside the later mediaeval walls proves nothing, for by the time that the wall of Philip Augustus was built the old Eoman Palace garden had long ago disappeared, leaving no relic but the name of the quarter. But we must remember that St. Germain de Pres was founded at a time that was still virtually Eoman, within a generation of the death of Clovis, when Paris was still full of the imperial tradition, when the Palace was still intact and employed as a royal residence, and that it was founded, as the monastic institu- tions of that time were always founded, on waste land exterior to the urban district. It therefore seems to me impossible that the estate should have been partly carved out of the Palace grounds, and equally impossible that the church itself should have been built within the walls of the garden.

One last monument, the Amphitheatre, remains to be mentioned. The history of it is very curious, and is one of which we hear, unfortunately, very little ; for the strong "clamped walls were quarried during the Dark Ages, and, long before history and letters revived with the Crusades, they had become a low oval ruin, filled up with rubbish and the mounds and dust heaps of a suburb. Tradition, indeed, kept their memory for many centuries, and even when men had forgotten the meaning of the term, the phrase " Champs des Araines " preserved the sound of their name ; but in the absence of any more substantial proof the historians of Paris grew to neglect the legend, and as the spirit of exact research developed in Europe the name became at first discredited and then forgotten. Felibien

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mentions it, indeed, but timidly, and it was left to our own time to show how, in this, as in so many other instances, positive tradition was a surer guide than the negative evidence of documents.

Eather more than a year before the Franco-Prussian war, when the Eue Monge was being pierced on the flank of the old University quarter, the workmen, in digging the foundations of the new houses, laid bare a full half Of the old walls and of the arena. They could easily have been preserved as a public monument ; the lower courses of the solid Eoman building had remained intact everywhere, and the arena, with its curious passages, was as curious as that of the Colisseum ; but the unfortunate necessities of Court finance, and the speculations of which Haussmann was the centre, caused the petition which the antiquarians sent up to be disregarded. The ruins were covered in again, the Eue Monge was completed, and various speculators were relieved of a momentary anxiety. That is why a noble ruin which should have been guarded in Lutetia as a principal memory of Eome, is now hidden by two cafes, a butcher's shop, half a dozen private houses, and a street.

In goiag south along the Eue Monge one comes to a place close after the crossing of the Eue du Cardinal Lemoine, where the thoroughfare takes a bend southward. The Amphitheatre stood precisely where this bend now is. It may have been built somewhat late during the Eoman occupation, but certainly not so late as modern speculation has imagined. The coins found in it are not earlier than the fourth century; but it is difficult to believe that a town of the importance of Lutetia in the third century would have been without a place for its public games. At any rate, its use continued well into the Dark Ages, and

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there is more than one mention of its being repaired and used, and of games being given in it by the early Frankish kings.

With these monuments of Eoman Paris known, and with these conjectures as to the site of its principal suburbs, we possess what little is known of the plan of the first city.

The political history of the Eoman town whose plan has been thus determined is easUy told, for, tUl the very close of the period, it lacks all detail and even all con- tinuity. There are in these many centuries but two or three incidents upon which even tradition can throw any light, and the few allusions to Lutetia which the general history of the empire contains were made by men whose centre and interest lay quite apart from the provincial town. The first historian who could by any possibility have seen the future importance of Paris was Gregory of Tours, and with his chronicle we are already in the decline of knowledge. I must, then, give in their order such historic facts as we have, and show what conclusions may be based on them; but it is inevitable that they should be presented as rare and disconnected things.

The first of these is the preaching of Saint Dionysius. The whole story of the conversion of northern Gaul is confused and uncertain. Lyons, and below it the Province, were of the Mediterranean : their Christianity came mainly through Eastern missionaries; and though the famous martyrdom of 177 at Lyons concerned the army, yet the presence of so strong a Church at that early time in the Ehone valley was a phenomenon essentially metropolitan and southern. Celtic Gaul had in it something of ithat quality which ran also through Ireland and the Hebrides :

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thoroughly incorporated though it was after this with the Empire, that centre and north to which Paris belonged, had stood out for the old Druidism as late as the revolt of CivUis. The mystic spirit which the hardness of Eome had thrust back into America, returned with the decline of civilization, and not till a space was left for legend to grow, could the new religion come in and mix with the mist of the popular fancy. Then, not so late nor so fan- tastic as the Irish movement, yet late and tending to fantasy, the faith ran into the empty places of affection, and there grew up the Church of Northern France, which in its origin was fertile, almost to rival the islands, in enchantment and suggestion, and which was after many centuries to produce the supreme expression of this spirit in the Gothic which was its peculiar creation.

It is not, therefore, wonderful that the date of Dionysius' mission should be placed so late as the middle of the third century, in the generation that saw the organized missions of Eome supplant the similar individual efforts of the East ; nor is it wonderful that his name should have become associated with so many marvels, and that his little company should be remembered as a mysterious twelve; but it must be remembered that these marvels are of a date later, not only than his martyrdom, but even than its historian. The most tenacious of all the legends concerning it, the story of the saint carrying his head in his hand as you see him on the church doors, and the typical folk-lore that speaks of his three springs of fresh water, we owe to an astonishing abbot of the seventh century, of whom I shall speak in the next chapter. The martyrdom, which most probably took place at a milestone on the northern road, has very properly been placed on

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top of Montmartre, for humanity has always made its altars on hill-tops ; the abbey was founded certainly near his grave, but the detailed account of its building under Dagobert makes the certitude of that site less strong. Indeed, we have no acts of St. Denis, and all we know for certain is that the southerner did come, and then, to Lutetia; that Eleutherius and Eusticus, the priest and deacon, came with him, and that in him originates the See of Paris.

Some few names, each uncertain, each connected with that spirit of Celtic Christianity, succeed his time. Their very names suggest miracle — Yon, the most typical, carries the mind back to Brittany; and, indeed, Brittany has claimed him. As to the first bishops, whose names are the whole history of Lutetia for nearly a hundred years, their list stands for a growing power, for the Church re- placing the Curials and mastering the government of the cities, yet even the names of these men, whose history could tell us so much of the transition, are not fixed ; the sixth only, Victorinus, is a certain figure ; we have seen his signature at Cologne in 346, and it accompanies those of thirty-three other bishops of Gaul, at Sardica in the next year. With his name is connected the only striking passage of true history in the five centuries of Eoman Paris, I mean the episode of Julian's visit to the town.

That reactionary, whose character will always singularly attract historians, and whose literary weakness has dignified him with the title of Apostate, made Lutetia his winter quarters during the two years of his successful campaigns. It was to Lutetia that he brought back the triumph of Strasburg, and he made it the first of the southern cities to feel the new security which his vigour had purchased.

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It was in Lutetia that he summoned the Council of Bishops, and we may, if we like, construct a picture of this young Caesar sitting, as the lay master still sat, at the council, hearing the debate and the affirmation of the Nicsean position, seeing that letter drafted in which the West threw down the gauntlet of its faith against the official rationalism of the capital and proved in its passionate rebuke to Arianism the growing weakness of central control and of the Palace : the soul of Gaul strengthening dogma : the race that was to shelter Athana- sius, and to produce Ambrose to forge the Church. As he sat there he was turning in his head the scheme of his philosophy, and he was dreaming of a past which alone he comprehended, and which his victories might yet have revived. He had served the provinces in their hardest trial: he had given peace after one hundred years of invasion and of servile war. He held the two vicariates that were still the most vital of the provinces, he thought that so much success could transform the energy whose revival he mtnessed, and that his soldiery could remodel a vanished state. He was the general under whom St. Martin had served, but he could only see the world with his own eyes.

Here also in Lutetia, in the Palace of the Thermae, the soldiers called him Augustus, running down from their barracks on the hill to thrust the Empire upon him. Here he kept for a few months his little quasi-pagan court, and from that circle produced the first book ever published in Paris — a shorter edition of Galen, by one Oribasius, a doctor. He left Lutetia before the close of the year 360, and never returned. He had made it his centre of action for nearly four years, whose pleasant memory of success

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and adventure remained with him vividly through the short rest of his life ; for he had there found " the little darling city" of which he writes, so tenderly in the Miso- pogon ; the provincial town where the old virtues remained, and where Casar could still play at being a stoic. He dwells upon its pure river, its simple wooden bridges, its wiae (and that wine of Asnieres — which no one possesses now — was still famous in the Middle Ages), its contented people. He tells the story of his misadventure, how, in the cold of the winter he tried to work as he had in the south, and failed ; of the great blocks of ice, " like marble," that hustled down the Seine ; of the fig-trees, covered with straw to save them from the frost. All that he writes — the affectionate detail and the clear memory of trifles — is in the spirit of a man who preserves a delightful reminiscence. When he went south from this refuge it was to enter ceaseless battle and discussion, to take the definite and fatal step that has spoilt and misread his name, and to die in battle on the sands of that East whose spirit and in- fluence he had so dreaded. All the world knows the story of his lance thrown into the air when he was wounded, and of his cry to the Galilsean who had conquered.

Julian, who had meant to make Lutetia famous for its simplicity, succeeded rather in making it the fashion. His action had turned the provincial town into a capital ; both Valentinian and Gratian followed him in the Palace of the south bank. It was here that the court first heard of Carieto's defeat by the barbarians and of the victory that immediately succeeded it, and here was received from Asia the head of Procopius. It was here that there began and ended that short and fruitless reign, whose brilliance Theodosius avenged but could not recreate ; for it was upon

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the court of Paris that Maximus inarched in his strange adventure from Britain, to defeat it and to raise his triumphal arch in the city.

Then — or little later — at the close, that is, of the fourth century, Marcellus was Bishop of Paris. His life written by a contemporary might have given us with exactitude and power the transition of the time, and we might have learned, in what was still a literature, the language and the decline and change of northern Gaul. But, unfortunately, we possess no record of him save an obscure and ill-proportioned life written by some hagio- grapher in the fuU twilight of the seventh century. A mass of miracles, a paucity of historical detail, cover what might have been a record of the change from municipal government by the curia to the private power of one of&cial, from the rule of the bureaucracy in the palace to that of the bishop, from the old name of " Lutetia " to the new " Civitas Parisiorium."

Such a record would have made us see plainly much that we now seize so imperfectly : the gradual despair of the civil power; the new dream of the Church, which meant to bmld a city of God on the shifting sands of the invasions ; the light in which the provinces saw the final invasion, which perfected and concluded a century of uncertain defence. In the lack of that contemporary record we have but two known things with regard to the bishop. First, that almost alone of the great Parisians he was a native of Paris. Secondly, that he was buried (as now began to be the custom with famous men), not where the tombs were along the high road, but out beyond the houses, in a shrine of his own in the lonely roadside chapel of St. Clement, which stood in the fields to the

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south-east. Upon that shrine the spirit of the time created an immediate worship. A monastery was founded, houses rose about it, and with the opening of the fifth century there had appeared in this fashion the first of that ring of suburbs which were to coalesce and form in time the great mediaeval town. Each rose round some religious house, many of them venerated a bishop of the city, nearly all of them a local saint ; and in every cha- racteristic this " Faubourg St. Marceau " was the prototype. You may find it to-day fast in the heart of the workman's quarter to thesouth-east; and if the name seems to arouse some memory, it is because the Eevolution and the Cordeliers made it a twin to the more famous Faubourg St. Antoine, and armed its people in the decisive struggle against the monarchy.

The next and the last division of the story of Eoman Paris centres round the inexplicable figure of Ste. Gene- vieve. In the ruin of public order it must be imagined that many cities found in some constant and commanding mind a substitute for their lost institutions ; but no city presents the historical example of that necessity and its consequence so clearly as Paris. There is this also to remark in the action of the patroness, that while clerical influence was everywhere replacing the older bureaucracy, it was yet an official and an orderly force, hierarchic and centralized; but the appearance of this peasant woman by chance, her attainment of a position which was prac- tically that of defensor dvifatis, is the beginning of something new in the politics of Europe. I mean the spontaneous, personal, and individual force, which is to run throughout the Dark and Middle Ages, and which is to lend to that long dream of history its inconsistencies

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and its riddles. For a thousand years and more that bond of character was to work side by side with a tenacious conservation of the old universal forms and machinery of government, and to make society a kind of vigorous garden of weeds, held in by crumbling walls, and marked by paths that no man dared to change or to renew:

Of St. Genevieve's life we know little, because what we have of it is written late, and confused with legend. Germanus of Auxerre found her in the little village under the hill of Valerian, as he went along the western road to preach in Brittany (for the Bretons had taken to believing Pelagius when that Celtic individualist maintained that a man's sins were his own and none other's). She was seven years old, and the pleasure that he took in her innocence founded her legend. Later, in Paris, when the people rioted against her orders, her defender said, " Leave Genevieve without hurt, for I have heard Germanus say that God meant her to do great things." She was in the city continuously from, perhaps, her twentieth, to her death in her eighty-fourth year. She controlled it always ; she even governed it in her last years. She calmed the panic during Attila's invasion. She defended the walls against Childeric, and when she built over the neglected tomb of St. Denis its first shrine, she ordered the civic work with the authority of a regular executive. That, apart from legend, is all we know, but the incomplete and fantastic record permits us to see the outline of an extra- ordinary figure.

There must have been, even when Attila was riding with his half-million westward from Metz, the relic of a curial government; taxes of some kind must have been raised and defences repaired, yet the popular memory

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perceives nothing of such action. We hear only, in a later and distorted legend of Genevieve, with her visions of the terrible horseman, and with her prophecy that the city would be spared ; a girl of twenty-five had become, by some vagary of the popular instinct, the oracle of the city. As she grew into middle age she seemed to pass from this to actual government. She was a woman of fifty when Childeric was marching south. In the many years during which all communication was cut off between Paris and the southern civilization, she alone appears to have governed and succoured the people. When the Frankish king laid siege to it, she organized and com- manded the expedition that brought corn down by river from the champagne country, from Arcis and Troyes. If Childeric entered, it was to treat with her as with an imperial officer; and when his son succeeded to a more stable and determined power, the ordering of his new capital stUl lay with this woman, who watched in extreme old age the complete conquest of the Frank, and who seemed concerned only with the conversion of the bar- barians after Tolbiac.

Clovis, triumphant from his victory over the AUemans or from the defeat of Alaric, hardly shows as the prin- cipal figure in the capital ; it is still the old woman, whom eighty years of peculiar service had so endeared, that receives the news, and organizes, with the prevision of the enthusiasm in which she was steeped, the transition to the rule of the Germans. When she died the Eoman city had been handed on intact and unravaged to the new powers ; almost alone of the northern towns (unless we except Eheims, to which Eemigius had done some- thing of the same service), it maintained its old security

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and its old pre-eminence, and through her care in the moment of transition, Paris outlived the decline of centuries and inherited France,

I would close this chapter by an attempt to reproduce the city and the hills at the moment that the Frankish armies entered them. "When some chance horseman of Childeric's in the first siege, or an outpost of Clovis in his last bivouac north of the city, looked down from the flanks of Montmartre southward, what did he see ?

The plain, the roads, and the town, all still in their outer showing strong and orderly ; the governmental part of the great organism of the empire had lost its motive force, but it had retained its forms. The growing twilight of the mind was not yet reflected in the stones of the Gaulish capital, and the taxes, whose misdirection and enormity had helped so general a decay, were still col- lected and could still furnish that constant process of renewal which is the condition of vigour in architecture. The consecjuences of a political disaster which could per- mit the advent of the barbarian, had not yet reached the surface of provincial life; and the city which was to remain Eoman for so many centuries more, bore at this time almost an appearance of youth.

The road that stretched to the capital showed clean, well- paved and even, for the whole length of its dead straight level of three miles, to the point where it turned abruptly, and was lost in the houses of the northern suburb. The few viUas of the plain, with their ordered gardens and formal trees; the haK-drained marsh, with its fringe of market gardens ; the clearly defined edge of the eastern and western woods — all these spoke of a civilization not

H

98 PARIS

yet accustomed to the process of decay. Beyond the city the road ran in the same continuous Kne, straight up the Mons Leucotitius, past the round tombs and the deserted barracks of the summit, to follow its precise direction through the forest and on to Genabum, Everything in the landscape meant rule and long custom and the memory of law, and everything was ennobled and oppressed under the grave accuracy of Eome.

The city itself showed below the suburb stUl perfect and still southern before the eyes of this northerner, who only came out of his hungry forests because so much plenty remained to the Empire. It was white and orderly, show- ing sharply against its fields and the woods of the southern hills, and more clear in colour than it has been in any years of its later history ; for the little capital had not yet exhausted the shining stone of the first quarries, it still burnt clean charcoal fires in stoves and cellars, and the roofs sharpened all this brightness by the frame of red that the small Eoman tiles gave to the palaces and the temples.

The wall rose evenly along the water, with its Arch of Maximus delicate and clear ; the larger mass of the prison and the entry of the colonnade alone broke this northern side, while neilier in towers nor in the flat sky-line of the buildings was there any accident to disturb the im- pression of compact and united design. Upon the hill beyond, the sombre bulk of the great Palace, complicated in plan, full of brickwork and already old, relieved and served as a background to the white mass of the island : to its right ran the gardens along the river, beyond these the careful fields followed the stream in a narrowing band under the hills of Issy and Meudon ; to the left the little suburb went down the lane to the port where the barges

REFERENCES.

A. Administrative Palace.

B. Temi)le i>f Morcury.

C. Forum.

D. Principal Temple and Altar

of the Nautae. K. I'ort of the Nautae.

Between this last and tlie bridge a small black mark shows the site of the Prison.

In this Map the sites of Roman Paris are marked in black continuous lines, the prin- cipal monuments in black, and the conjectured positions of private houses are shaded in with sloping lines. The names are printed in Roman type.

The modern streets and monuments are marked in dotted lines, and their names are printed in Italics.

Aqueduct .•^•

HUMAN PAHIS.

[To face p. 98.

LUTETIA 99

lay, and beyond it in the country-side rose the tiers of the Amphitheatre on the slope of the southern hill. Perhaps there would have been seen also, faintly and a long way off, the high arches of the aqueduct where it crossed the ravine of the Bievre, still furnishing the baths of the Palace and the fountains of the forum on the island, while on the fringes of the forests up the hiU to the south and here and there on the riverside the villas stood, as on the northern plain, the last evidences of the old security.

This was the city which Genevieve had defended ; the furnished capital that Clovis entered for its wealth, the city that Puivis has drawn so admirably in his frescoes of the saint; it remained at this opening of the sixth century very much what Julian had loved; in spite of calamity it reposed safely upon the strong foimdations of its past society, and was ignorant of the end that was coming upon its world ; the age and weakness and decay of the next five hundred years, the ruined fisc, the broken walls, the failing splendours of a barbaric court, the belt of uncouth churches in the outer fields, the great rude gardens of the monasteries on all sides, the new accents of a speech unfamiliar and halting, the rich man turned soldier, and the slave become a peasant — all these fates stood ready for the city. But Lutetia did not know them. Genevieve and Clovis had thought her still the city of the later emperors, and she was for yet a few hesitating generations to play with increasing faultiness at the letters and the manner of her past, nor did even the Jewish merchants, fresh from the east, nor the last of the pagan nobles understand that the new armies were marching alone into the dark, and were taking with them, like an escort, the old majesty of the empire.

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CHAPTER IV

PARIS IN THE DAEK AGES

What kind of city did Paris become when the order and pomp of Eome had grown old, crumbled, and fallen into decay ?

To answer this question it is necessary to form a clear idea of the long dark time that followed the barbarian invasions. That vast period which we often vaguely and erroneously call the "Middle Ages," with which we connect the feudal state of society, and whose interest and tenor of thought appear to us so distinct from those of modern times, is by no means the one continuous era which our imagination too frequently pictures it.

Apart from the innumerable minor changes and develop- ments which make every part of it as diversified in its way as our own or the last century, the great epoch falls into two well-defined divisions, to the first of which the name " Dark Ages " may properly be given ; and to the second only of which can the term " Middle Ages " be applied.

We must remember that these two together deal with the space of a thousand years ; and the marvel is not so much that one revolution and total change in society should have occurred in such a prodigious lapse of time, but rather that only one such complete renewal should

PARIS IN THE DARK AGES loi

have taken place. The short four centuries since their close have given us, in the Eeformation and in the industrial and political revolutions of the last hundred years, at least three such movements and the immediate promise of more.

The two principal epochs of this thousand years are distinguished as follows. The first is that process of continual decline which, having its origin in the break- down of Eome — that is, in the Lower Empire of the fourth and fifth centuries — reaches its nadir or lowest point in the generation which saw the millennium.

These five centuries of the city can have a fascination about them which it is not always easy for a modern reader to catch. We are like men who stand on a high peak and look over many ridges of hills. Our success has hidden from us the bases of society, and we gaze over time from one complex civilization to another, forgetting that in the history of mankind these peaks are rare and narrow ex- ceptions; that beneath the mountains, beneath our own immediate standpoint, lies the great general level of which the bulk of the human story is made. That hidden level, that plain across which so many slow caravans have travelled, we call barbarism ; we study it as a curiosity, or fly from it as a danger, yet out of it we rose, and down to it the further slopes of our success will fall again ; for it is the repose of history.

Paris, between the century of Julian and the stirring of the eleventh century, went down into the valleys. Piece by piece the clear light, the artifice, the order and the monotony of the Empire crumbled ; tendril by tendril there rose up in the hollow of such ruined stones the natural growth of humanity; legend, miracle, the war

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song, the ordeal came in place of dissertation and codes. Less than a lifetime after the victory of Clovis two men disputed for a possession in Paris. The case was tried in the old Eoman Court, Each held his arms out in the form of a cross, and he that endured the position longest was given the verdict. That is but one example. In a hundred one might show how everything barbaric, absurd and native to man came in with the new rulers. The curve (if I may put it so) of natural growth replaced those hard lines of certain plan and arrangement that had distinguished the security and action of Eome, but we, in our modern methods, our certitudes, and our harsh lights, miss this dim and marvellous picture. That will be a study worth doing, the tracing of the slip back into natural things, when (if ever) we have grown humble enough to understand as well as to disbelieve the chronicler.

With the close of these centuries, with the crowning of Hugh Capet in 987, this period may be said to end ; and to the space of time lying between that date and our starting-point of 509, I propose to confine this chapter. For the year 1000, or, to speak more accurately, the generation immediately succeeding it, marks a turning- point. The ninth and tenth centuries may be said to have vied with one another for the evil primacy as to which was the most terrible : the heathen onslaught of the former and the brutal anarchy of the latter appear almost equally worthy to be called a furnace in which our civiliza- tion was tried. The second great epoch is connected, of course, with the first by a transitional period; but that period is comparatively short for the astounding work which it accomplishes. The long life of one man might

PARIS IN THE DARK AGES 103

have covered it, for a person born before the Norman Conquest of Sicily might easily have lived to see the discovery at Amalfi of the Eoman code.^

The whole of Europe awakes. The Normans show first how true a kingdom, with peace and order and unity, may be established. They accomplish this feat at the two extremities of Europe, the islands of Sicily and England. The Capetian House founds in France the origin of that strong, central government without which a state cannot live. The sentiment of nationality slowly emerges from the confusion of feudalism ; then come the forging blows of the Hildebrandine reform and of the Crusades, and the brilliant career of the Middle Ages has definitely begun.

The great kingships, the Eoman law, the universities, the vernacular literature, have appeared, and with them the Gothic architecture, whose survivals can prove to our generation, better than any historical evidence, how intense and how vivid was the new life of Christendom.

From that day, too, our own Europe has never lost its eagerness, its abundant vigour, its power of expansion, and it has held in its mental attitude a spirit of inquiry — the spirit which Eenan so admirably calls " la grande curiosite" — the basis of all our grandeur.

Now, in this chapter we have to trace the story of Paris during the downward half of the valley. What characteristics shall we discover in the five hundred years and more which this degradation covers ? Of the details in its history I shall treat later in the chapter; but before reaching these it is necessary to draw up some kind

' Oritics tell me that the code was not so found. It is a legend, and I prefer to believe it.

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of picture of the time, for without some slight sketch of the general movement of society in Gaul it would be impossible to understand the city. Let me, therefore, admit a digression on this subject.

In the first place, to use a phrase which may appear more than once in this history, Eome did not die ; it was transformed. On all sides, it is true, her civiliza- tion lost ground ; her art was rude, inaccurate, and, at the same time, less idealized ; her production of wealth less great; her architecture had become a matter of routine; her letters had grown crabbed. Only in one department of human energy had a change occurred, which a simple history such as this dares neither praise nor blame — the philosophy of the Empire had been touched with mysticism; the East had convinced the West; the shrine, the miracle, the unseen had replaced the clear and positive attitude, the speculative and cold intelligence, which had distinguished the philosophy of Eome in her time of greatest power. Mediaeval religion, with its legends, its marvels, its passionate abnegations, and its theories of the superhuman had appeared.

Was this advance of mysticism part of the universal decay, or was it, on the contrary, the one good counter- balance that ultimately saved the world from barbarism ? The answer can only be discovered in the attitude of the reader's own mind. It is a problem, the solution of which lies not in the region of historical proof, but in the department of mental habit, of conviction, . and of faith.

Gibbon would hint that it was the natural conse- quence of disaster and of decay working on a civilization that had already dabbled in the mysteries ; that with the

PARIS IN THE DARK AGES lo;

Saxons harrying the Channel, the Hunnish cavalry laying ■waste the central west, fear produced its invariable accom- paniment of superstition ; that Genevieve (if she existed ever) vp^as some leader of strong character, capable of organizing a prosaic resistance ; and that an ignorant and debased populace saw in her mission something of the incomprehensible, and, therefore, of the divine.

But Michelet, who is as great as Gibbon, and has (for his own people at least) a far truer sympathy, would undoubtedly yield to the mystic influence, and would picture to us, almost with devotion, the Church of the fifth and sixth centuries, because for him the people are its authors, and this conception of the people is for him the soul of history.

What were the causes of this beginning of decline? Perhaps the best general answer to so general a question is to say "old age;" but the proximate and immediate cause, or, if you will, the most obvious symptom of the break-down, was economic. It was in the form of a decline of wealth, especially of that method of producing wealth which the Eoman Empire had fostered with such marvellous success, that the pinch began to be felt. It was (roughly speaking) towards the close of the third century that the evil became marked. The system which Eome had spread over the whole of the west was one admirably suited to an inmiense expansion of wealth, and, therefore, of population. At the basis of it lay the con- ception of order. The Pax Eomana was a domestic as well as a political thing, and Eome made this duty of police the most sacred foundation of her power. She was savage in suppressing savagery; and when her task was accomplished, she had so strongly succeeded that, in the

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levels below the action of the civil wars, perfect order and peace had atrophied her powers.

In the second place, the idea of absolute property and of its concomitant, the sanctity of contract, was very prominent in her civilization. The right, "utere et abutere," to use or to destroy wantonly, was her exag- gerated way of asserting this dogma of individualism. It is in this source that we discover arguments for inviolable property in land, and from this source, again, that the extreme and harsh deductions of the common law (which equity came in to rectify on lines more consonant with Christian morals) proceed.

In the third place, excellent communications and practically free exchange completed the edifice.

Such rules of government are obviously calculated to increase productive power; and, indeed, those nations which to-day regard the accumulation of wealth as the end of civihzation have adopted a very similar code. Eome's success was the proof of the soundness of her premises. In places that are now deserts, wheat fields furnished the vast capital with food ; in the now half- barren uplands of Asia Minor she nourished a great population, and easily supported half a hundred cities. In Britain alone, and almost by agriculture alone, she may have found place for ten millions ; ^ in Gaul the forest villages became great and flourishing towns.

How did such a system begin to fall ? The conditions which Eome had established were favourable to — even provocative of — the growth of that disease of which our present civilization stands in such terror. A false system of distribution reacted upon the creation of wealth. A ' I follow Gibbon, and believe him to be right.

PARIS IN THE DARK AGES 107

few accumulated the means of production, and upon some only (but not the same) fell the burden of the State. A system of taxation well suited to a population among which wealth had not been ill-distributed, became onerous and almost intolerable as the conditions changed. What we should now call " the upper middle class " bore the chief share of the public burden. Will it be credited that when Gaul had passed through four hundred years of the Eoman system, many of this class voluntarily sank into a semi-servile status rather than continue to support the fisc ?

This, also, must be remembered, that the fixed charges of a State are like a trap, or like a wheel and ratchet : their action is such that they can advance, but they can hardly retire. It is easy to increase them in times of prosperity ; difficult, or impossible, to reduce them in periods of depression.

The system of production which Eome had introduced gave to the rich man great advantages. With his gangs of slaves, making use of the admirable roads and of a sea protected from piracy, competing with the poorer man under conditions where protection was unknown, he built up, not only in industry but in agriculture, a highly capitalistic system. The smaller men tended indeed to protect themselves more and more by a system of guilds, but those just above them fell more and more into de- pendence, sometimes actually into servitude ; and when the empire was at its height, great prosperity was gained at this price, namely, that but a few were actively con- cerned even with the economic welfare of the State, and that, as must be the case in any time of overstrained competition, the stability of the system depended upon

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the conservation of every iota of its gigantic energies. Were these to fail at any point, nothing could save it from decay.

For the production of wealth is not a mechanical process, governed by abstract and universal laws alone. It is men that produce wealth, and their power of pro- ducing much or of producing well lies all in the mind. It is from this truth that the effect of distribution upon prosperity proceeds ; let the mass of a nation become abject, or apathetic, or over anxious for the morrow; let the organizers of trade become careless through pride, or insolent from success, and no laws can save even the material side of a State. There is no aspect of society in which vices work out their own retribution more surely than in the sphere of economics.

The catastrophe (which was bound sooner or later to fall) was determined more rapidly than one might, in reading the glories of the Antonines, have anticipated. Within a century or a century and a half the great scheme of production was found " not to be paying." Taxation, which had been designed to lie fairly on the moderately rich, now crushed a superior but small and impoverished class, and beyond such an intolerable burden the Gurials had also to bear the entire responsibility of local government. Civil war, the apathy of the general citizen, a little less order, a certain shaking of security, and the decline began. The initiative which might have saved it could only come from the energy of a mass of small owners, and these had disappeared. In their place men in every stage of economic irresponsibility, the great bulk of them actually slaves, cultivated the vast estates or worked in the centralized manufactories ; and it even began to be more profitable to

PARIS IN THE DARK AGES 109

ask of these masses a constant fraction of the produce of their labour than to exploit them directly. Custom, in the decay of public order, was replacing competition, and the first note of mediaeval industry had sounded.

It was upon such a society that the barbarian invasions fell ; and that the reader may form a picture of the iifth- century citizen who endured them, I will ask him to imagine an owner of property living in the neighbourhood of Lutetia, and watching the course of events from the standpoint of that city whose outward aspect I described in my last chapter.

Such a man would have a house, let us say, on the southern road between the Mons Lucotitius and the hills ; before him to the north would stand the city, lying white and still perfect in the broad valley ; he would frequent it for its baths, for its news, and for its merchandise — possibly, also, for its public worship. He would probably be a Christian. That large body of Paganism which yet remained in Gaul was found rather among the people of the outlying districts, among the pedants in the cities, or here and there in the members of some old family still maintaining the tradition of their ancestors of a hundred years before. But his Christianity would be of the of&cial Eoman sort — his bishop of Lutetia virtually an ofScer of the State, his religion the State religion.

About his house a great estate would lie, and this was called a villa. The ancestor of our modern village, it was tenanted by a very different kind from the master — dependants, freedmen, slaves, living presumably as Latins do in a continuous line of houses along the road, the origin of the mediaeval village and cultivating the area of its parish. They would have their priest, their

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regular time and place of meeting, their customs and traditions even as to the method of cultivation, in which their master would less and less interfere; and in their religion much of legend, of local tradition, of national folk-lore was included. They worshipped many saints whose very names their master had never heard, and they reverenced some who were indeed nothing but the old gods under new names ; they kept the feasts with haK-pagan ceremonies which all the world has since loved to observe ; and it is this lower community which forms our link with the prehistoric past. We owe it all.

The master of the villa spoke Latin, not more different from the conversational idiom of the Augustan era than is our English from that of the Elizabethans. His depen- dants spoke the more corrupt speech which they had learned from the Eoman soldiery, and in a hundred matters of ordinary life they used words of which the classics knew nothing. Their accent, in the growing difficulty of com- munications, was taking a strongly local tone, and, the terminations of the cases were already clipped in ordinary speech. StUl more effective, the accusative was being more commonly used in the place of the nominative, and no doubt, where their master would stiU talk of " Mons Luco- titius," they would make some such sound as " mont'm," or even " mont'," serve to describe it.

What would be the attitude of the master of the villa relative to the break-up of the empire going on around him ? In the first place, we must dismiss from our minds the conception of any patriotism. The empire was not a nation to be loved ; it was the whole of civilization — it was the world. That it could fall was inconceivable, and remained inconceivable to the Middle Ages.

PARIS IN THE DARK AGES in

The mind had long grown familiar to the idea of an infiltration of the outer barbarians. They had served, of course, in the armies; as pensions they had received frontier lands, and there was a long and continuous inter- course between the two sides of the border.

Even with invasion there was a considerable familiarity ; invasion was a part of the weakness of the government, but then the government was known to have weakened. The number of the clamourers, and their pressure, in- creased ; the shores of the narrow seas became untenable ; at last even Britain is abandoned ; still the Eoman citizen cannot conceive that his empire — the whole world — is coming to an end. Tribes of barbarians break through the lines on the north-east ; he hears that advantage has been taken of their courage — that they are allied to the Eoman forces. Some of them are given land. What of that ? It is but an exaggeration of an old custom. Anxiety, however, loss of security, the cutting off of the main roads — all these show his civilization to be falling.

In his youth Attila struck the city with a terrible fear ; but (how shall we represent in anything like sober history the story of Genevieve 1) it was spared, and the poorer people, the makers of religion, founded her legend and her sainthood.

Visiting, perhaps, the successor of Marcellus, the Bishop of the city, he learnt, from one event to another, the symptoms of the fall. Before he was a man of middle age the final occupation of the northern Gaulish fens, and the dreadful name of sovereignty given to the barbarian was heard ; in Lutetia, probably, chance warriors wandered unmolested and stared at.

At last this Eoman provincial land-owner would have

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lived to see Cliilderic, might have lived to see Clovis, entering Paris, and to know that his government was separated from the body of Eome.

Now, this catastrophe would have made less impression on him — or, let us say, on his successors, for he would have reached extreme old age — than the modern reader might imagiae. The shell of Eoman Ufe remained: the buildings, the language, the organization, the administrative and domestic arrangements — all these were captured by the barbarian, transformed by his arrival, but by no means destroyed.

The war band of Clovis numbered some 8000 men, and the whole nation of the Burgundians but 40,000. These comparatively small forces came into a Gaul of millions upon millions. They could not do more than affect it ; they could not (as they did in Britain) change its language, nor could they even greatly change the institutions.

Well, as time went on, the domination of these men, mixed with the Eoman soldiery, kneading armies, and by the necessities of their untaught minds demanding sim- plicity, contiaued to drag down the falling civilization. They fought battles between themselves, " over the heads " (as it were) of the tillers of the field. They settled in abandoned villages ; they intermarried with the Eoman nobles and proprietors. They coarsened the stuff without changing the pattern of the empire. In this Lutetia the Eoman palaces were the scenes of their revels ; degraded GaUo-Eoman and new Teutonic chieftain sat together, drinking on ruder benches than the Eomans knew, be- neath the half-barbarian trophies of the Merovingian kings. Even at last the new-comer learnt (though he deformed)

PARIS IN THE DARK ACES 113

the tongue of the conquered ; and beneath them all the huge majority, the people, went on at their servile work, paying the accustomed dues to the owners of the " villse."

The new garrison (for it was httle more) brought with it no arts, no memories, and no attachments. A violent prejudice (brought about by the sharp national differentia- tion of our own day) has tried to give the Teutonic tribes characteristics which all positive history denies. They demanded nothing better than to take Eoman titles, to adopt the Eoman habits, to be absorbed in, not to prey upon, this shining and enduring thing called Eome. Yet, as I have said, they debase it. Their own pecuhar society disappears immediately ; for a short while the meeting of armed men is held. It reappears from time to time with the advent of the Austrasian court, but it never fixes in the soil, nor becomes the root of a national institution. For a yet shorter time they hold to the vague gods of the forests and marshes, and then definitely merge in the vast population about them.

But the effect of their conquest is momentous, though that of their personalities is slight. Order, security, and a united code of laws — all these go down, and with them civilization itself.

In this convulsion the ethnical character of Gaul was hardly changed, the proportion of German blood added to an empire already so diversified and mingled was not sufficient to affect the common race. But three great effects which have been mistaken for racial changes ap- peared as the immediate consequence of the invasion.

First, government by public meeting began to show itself in obscure, local origins destined to grow into the great Parliaments of Europe. Not that such a conception

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was Teutonic — it is common to the whole human race — ■ but that it was barbaric and natural. The Teuton by his invasion weakened bureaucratic order and formal govern- ment ; this immemorial thing, the meeting of the village or the tribe, took its place. You wUl find it among the Bretons, and the Basques, and the Eoman Gauls.

Secondly (and closely aUied to this), the organization of society tended to change from the impersonal to the personal ; the tie of loyalty, of military comradeship, and of a kind of honourable dependence, replaced a hierarchy of wealth and oQicialdom. This idea, slowly mixing with the Eoman inheritance of large estates and of agricultural serfdom, gave rise in the course of centuries to the full system of Feudalism. And here again the thing is not peculiarly Teutonic. This loyalty and personal enthusiasm may be found wherever there are schoolboys, or savages, or anything else that is happy and runs wild.

Thirdly, the wall of the empire being broken down, not only did the barbarians rush in but Eome rushed out. Her idea and her religion (which was the most definite expression of her idea) passed beyond the boundaries, mixed with the forests. One thing the old strict empire absolutely lost — the northern littoral of Africa ; but another thing the new ill-defined empire gained — Ireland and Scotland, the Northern Islands, the Germans of the Elbe, at last the seamen of Scandinavia, and even the Hungarian and the Slav. The German language, indeed, gradually occupied the valley of the Ehine; but even here the eastern branch of the Frankish kingdom was Imperial. Cologne, Treves, Strasburg, were great Eoman cities, and the political centre of Austrasia lay west of the Ehine.

I would say, then, that all these effects of the invasions

PARIS IN THE DARK AGES 115

were not to introduce a race or to impose the ideas of a race, but rather that they were the results of the breaking up of order. The pressure of civilization was lifted, and the original life of humanity, confused and vigorous, rose up to take the place of formalism.

But to the men who had lived in the security and height of the old organization, the change seemed a- be- ginning of ruin, and for three hundred years the ruin continued. In Clovis's time the merchants of Paris still traded with Egypt. Who shall say what distorted and fantastic pictures of the East lay in the brains of those later traffickers who haunted the palace doors where the " mayors " kept prisoners the last descendants of the Mero- vingian liue ?

Paris grows barbarous — her population not less dense, but how lowered in its standard of subsistence ! Her walls, her streets, her churches are stiU Eoman, but those walls are repaired with clumsy masonry, and buttressed here and there with mere rough heaps of stone ; every new church would show an architecture more simple and more squat than the last ; her streets and public squares are filled in and narrowed with the private buildings, which, when government weakens, can encroach upon public lands.

To all this decay of three hundred years a sudden halt is given by the personality of Charlemagne. He becomes almost the saviour of Europe. Nay, he really saves it, insomuch that but for his efforts Christendom would probably never have survived the evil time that followed his death.

Of pure Latin stock on his father's side (though we cannot tell, in these times, how far the Teutonic strain

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entered through the mother), he came of a great family that was the head of the nobles who had left Austrasia to conquer Neustria, and that had later made themselves supreme. The nature of that conquest was political rather than racial. The Austrasian "mayors," the Easterners, became the tutors of the Neustrian kings after a decisive battle, and that was all. Another comparatively small war band of half Eoman, half German nobility came in and inherited another batch of empty villse, but the civiliz- ation was and remained debased Eoman.

By this time interior paganism had disappeared, but, on the other hand, the heathendom without was pressing closely upon the little island of Christendom. A little way beyond the Ehine, a little south of the Pyrenees, the Pagan or the Mussulman limited the Faith.

Charlemagne is heir to that island of Christendom — its necessary defender — and for a little while he re-embodies the ghost of Eome, and stirs to a partly artificial life a thing which has been dead or dying these three hundred years. During his lifetime the old order, the old concep- tion of unity, come back into the now limited territory of the empire, and work in it with a dif&culty only barely surmounted by the superb energy of the leader. It is like the soul coming back to a body long mummied, or even falling to dust.

That attempt left Paris to one side. The city could never have made a good centre for a government which was ever on the march, and whose main quarrel lay far east and south ; and, moreover, with all his southern blood and Eoman conceptions, the Emperor was of German speech and clothing, and was more at home upon those frontier towns of the empire where the German tongue

PARIS IN THE DARK AGES 117

held its own with the low Latin. And thus, though the great bulk of his court held to the civilized language and habits, Aix was his centre, and he was buried there.

Paris, save perhaps for unheard levies of which history- makes no mention, does not enter into his plans ; a passage here or there in the capitularies relating to an abbey or to a local custom is all we can glean of his connection with the town. The Thermae are no longer kingly, and only the local under-leader can hang his trophies on the walls of the Palace when he comes back from Lombardy or Saxony or Eoncesvalles.

Charlemagne's attempt was fore-doomed to failure ; he was fighting against the force of things. He did indeed for his one long life maintain with desperate energy the order of the empire, but even as he marched across them the floors of society shook beneath his feet. The great task was accomplished at the expense of ceaseless wars, a life spent in the saddle; every man that was free to travel became familiar with continual combat, though unable to turn it to the Emperor's majestic ends. Let the head of such an experiment fail and chaos is certain.

They say that as a very old man he saw from a southern seaport palace the distant sails of the pirates, and that he turned to his counts and told them what would follow his death.

What follows it is " the darkness of the ninth century." It is probable that Charlemagne's rule had given Europe just the strength to resist the onslaught ; at any rate, our civilization barely escaped destruction. The Mussulman, the Hungarian, and the Dane poured in like lava streams. Those invasions were ten times worse than the old attacks of the early barbarians four hundred years before. Then

u8 PARIS

there had come small tribes, intent only on being admitted to the pleasures of a higher society, and easily accepting its faith and habits ; but now with the ninth century came whole nations, bitterly hating the wretched, disunited remnants of what had once been Eome, and especially its creed. They burnt and they looted; they killed for the sake of killing ; and in the base Europe of their time they could see nothing worth adopting, but the silver and the gold of its churches, or the rich clothes of the owners of its " villse."

Almost in proportion as they are able to meet the storm, almost in that proportion do the various centres of Europe prosper in the future. We all know how admirably Wessex weathered it under Alfred. Paris, also, just rides through it ; and from the moment of accomplishing this feat she enters on the career which only ends when she has built up, with herself for a centre, the kingdom of France.

In such a time, which seemed almost as though the end of the world had come, no common action of Christen- dom appeared ; it needed a Charlemagne to weld even the elements of his time into„great armies ; no one could hope to do it fifty or sixty years after his death.

Every group, almost every town and village, fought out its own salvation or died in its own agony. In this chaos the last vestige of clear Eoman distinction falls, and every- where it is the good leader who defends the isolated com- munity. True, it would be the owner of the " villa," the professional soldier, or the rich man, who tended to be such a leader ; but it is accurate to say that the extraordiuary hold of the noble upon the mind and purse of Europe came out of that time of despair.

How many families can trace themselves to this mist

PARIS IN THE DARK AGES 1 19

and no further. The Angevin, the Aq^uitanian, the Tolosian houses arise from it ; and so, also, does the house of Paris. The man to whom Lutetia was entrusted (or had fallen a prey) at this moment is the forefather of the stout young fellow who to-day aspires to the throne of France ; but of the ancestry beyond the founder we know nothing; he claimed to be connected with Charlemagne, and that is all we know.

The storm fell on Paris in the shape of the Norman siege, and the family that led the city out of this danger were destined to be kings. The chaos, in breaking up so much that was but a relic and a shadow, had left standing the ultimate political realities of Europe, as rocks remain when a flood destroys the buildings; and from all this turmoil Gaul re-emerges; the Latin people and the German cannot mix again, and Paris becomes the historic centre round which the former very gradually recognizes itseK and grows.

The name takes substance ; and from the moment that a Capet could harass an Otto retreating over the place where Valmy was to be fought, Prance had begun to exist.

Oh, if Eome could have formed in Italy a similar unit round which a Latin nation might through slow centuries have grown !

Now, when one has well fixed in the mind this alembic of confusion, it is necessary to turn to the city itself and fix upon some set of events and some building which may become good centres for one's survey : a kind of stand- points from which we can look at the process of time and at the changing map of the city. For this purpose it is well to take two centres, a siege and an abbey. The siege

I20 PARIS

of 885 I will make the climax of this part of the history of Paris, and the Abbey of St. Germans I will make the building round which you shall watch the change in the outward aspect of the city. Let us see then, first, how — like a retreat ending in a desperate and successful rally — Paris fell back from the standard of her earliest civiliza- tion.

We left the city Eoman. Julian had been dead a hundred and forty years, the horse of Childeric had clattered over the wooden bridge of the northern gate, btit Paris, huddled round Genevieve and ready for portents, was still an ordered Eoman city, stiff with government. Just at this moment, when the new character of northern Gaul takes its origin, Paris had been declared a capital. It had become the political centre; and whether it is frequented by the rough and decadent court — as it was during the first two centuries after Clovis — or whether it is partially abandoned (as it was under the Carlovingians), it is only in the light of its continued metropolitan im- portance that we can appreciate its history after the year 600.

To follow in their detail the political events of the sixth century in Paris, would be not only unsuited to the limits of this book, but would be impossible or useless in one of much larger ambition. It is an anjirchy because it is a barbaric despotism. The grandsons of Clovis are murdered by their uncle Childebert in the palace of the Thermae ; another grandson, a second Childeric, ends his reign assassinated ; Childeric's queen, Fredegond, and his first sister-in-law, Brunhild (the queen of the Ehenish king- dom), by their rivalry make the whole close of the century a long tangle of careful poisonings and stabbings, confused

PARIS IN THE DARK AGES 121

plots and pure anarchy. But so far as the history of the city is concerned, we can keep it clear of so much be- wildered quarrelling by remembering these few main points to guide us : that the kings thought of themselves at first as mere captains enjoying loot and dignified by Eoman titles ; that the interests of families and individuals are supreme in all these changes, not the interests of states; and, finally, that the note of the whole time is ecclesiastical.

The kings regarded themselves as captains enjoying loot, and this, coupled with the purely domestic interest of their actions, leads to those empty revolutions in political geography upon which foolish men draw up fine theories illustrated by maps. Does a great conqueror like Clovis die, it is not a state or a dynasty whose preservation he has in his mind. His children are permitted to divide by a kind of lot the province whose revenues and titles alone he coveted. The boundaries of these arbitrary kingdoms shift with a confusing rapidity. The new divisions of Gaul coalesce continually under a single hand, only to separate again within a dozen years after each reunion. Brothers fight between themselves for the immediate possession of a temporary fiscal income, mothers intrigue for their sons, queens assassinate to advance their husbands or their lovers. But beneath all this wranglLag of barbaric courts the old unity of the Imperial idea remains, and especially the unity of the province. One radical change had indeed been introduced into the political geography of Gaul. The country north of the Loire had been really differentiated from the south ; Neustria was a true unit, and in Paris it had a centre of gravity and a nucleus for further develop- ment. This country, the type of northern civilization,

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tended to make her master assume the Imperial tradition. In spite of themselves, the German conquerors became the supreme Latin magistrates of a centralized administra- tion, and this gravitation towards a true monarchy leads at last to the strong and established position of Dagobert. From his accession in 628 onwards, the Prankish kingdom is a political reality. It passes from his family to the Carlovingians, from them again to the Capets, but, in spite of the gap of Charlemagne and his successors, northern France, ruled from Paris, remains throughout future history the normal of the history of Gaul.

As for the ecclesiastical aspect of the time, I have said that it was the standpoint from which the whole of this period falls into perspective. The older historians — such as Felibien — were wiser than we are accustomed to admit, when they filled their dreary pages with lists of bishops, and with the dates of religious foundations. It is the historical and the just way of looking at the Dark Ages, to regard such things as being of supreme import- ance.

The main causes of such a state of things are too well known to need much repetition here. It is a common- place that in the break-up of society the clergy alone retained their organization and discipline; that they alone could hand down the Imperial memory, or that they alone were in the tradition of letters. But there is another reason for their political power less remarked, and equally worthy of notice: their principal thesis coincided with something latent in the barbaric mind. The people they had long possessed, for the people had seen in the Church (which they had themselves so largely moulded) the satisfaction of all their dreams, and the

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mirror of all their agonies. But the upper class of the Eoman state had been a neutral, if not an antagonistic influence. The ecclesiastics who were under its influence leant rather to philosophy and letters than to mystic enthu- siasm, were officials rather than priests. So late as the sixth century the secretary of Belisarius writes with a fine pagan contempt of the fables and marvels of the Christians. The aristocracy preserved for many generations the practice, and still longer the memory, of a ritual, whose exact and antique observance had marked them out for honour. With the advent of the Germans to rule, one childhood met another. The simplicity of the populace, its credulity and its passion, met the simplicity, credulity, and passion of the barbarian. These two absorbed the field of society, and on the new comer especially, the Christian story, the pomp of its ritual, the magnificence of its hierarchy exercised an immediate and profound influence. They also react upon their new religion. The military and the nomadic spirit touch it : Judas, from his minor place, becomes as it were the villain of every piece, and is the pro- totype of the traitor in the " Song of Eoland " ; the creed transformed runs through the epics like a soldier's legend. Two great phrases occur to every one who may read this, the famous, " Had I been there with my Franks ! " of Clovis, and the "Dieu et assis dans son sanct heritage, or on verra si nous le secourons," which, centuries later, inspired the crusade. Later, there may have been a more sacerdotal, but it was a less unquestioned power. The early Middle Ages give a false impression of a purely ecclesiastical civilization; but at bottom the great con- structive period of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries was legal. It is not there, but in the early cataclysm that

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you must look for the most vigorous effect of religion upon the body of Europe. In the downfall of order, tribal Celt and tribal German met, and satisfied a united instinct in the Christian Church. To the pedantry of the Fathers they added such things as they had seen in forest- rides, or dreaded in the northern midwinters, and they filled our faith with a free breath that came from the clear enthusiasm of the foray and the charge. There we must seek our evidences of what society was in the sixth, seventh, and eighth centuries; not to codes, or public buildings, or political action, but to councils, the wealth of new churches, and the curious stories of the hagiographs and ecclesiastical chroniclers.

It is easiest to follow this first disturbed period of Prankish Paris, by calling to mind the names of its principal sovereigns. From the decision of Clovis to make the place his capital, to the advent of Dagobert, there is a good deal more than a century, 507-628 ; and so far as Paris is concerned the principal men who ruled it (sometimes as kings of all Gaul, sometimes of Neustria only, and sometimes merely of Paris and the Isle de France) were : first Clovis, who died in 511 ; then his son Childebert, whose long reign lasted out beyond the middle of the century (558) ; then, after a short interval of rule by Cldldebert's brother Clotaire, come Clotaire's two sons, Charibert and Childeric, in succession. This takes us on to 584; a generation of aristocratic anarchy follows, and finally, in 628, Childeric's grandson, Dagobert, settles the strong monarchy in Paris.

To make such a confusion of names more readable, I append this simple table, with the dates of the deaths of the kings.

PARIS	IN	THE	DARK	AGES
	Clovis, 1	511
Childebert, 558.					(Clotalie, 561.)
Chariljert, 567.					Childerio, 584. 1
				(Clotaire, 628, did not rule from Paris.) 1
					Daqobbbt.

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The effect of these five men upon Paris can all be traced through their ecclesiastical action, and through the position of their great bishops.

"With Clovis, who died in 511, two years, that is, after Genevieve, we have but one great building connected ; he founded that Abbey and basilica on the summit of the southern hill which remained for thirteen hundred years the shrine of the patron saint of the city. Of the original church we know little ; it must have kept strictly to the Eoman tradition, and it is not dilBBicult to imagine it upon the model of so many wide halls that preserved the original type of Christian temple; its flat roof distinct with the small red Eoman tiles, its roof supported upon the double row of broad pillars, with the rude foUage of their capitals; its triple portico (of which we have a somewhat fuller description) frescoed with the conven- tional pictures of patriarchs, and its floor in mosaic. This church, rebuilt in succeeding centuries, has left no relics by which to judge of its size or plan, but we know its site, and in connection with this we can describe the most interesting feature of its history.

When Genevifeve was dying the people, especially the poor, surrounded her bed and lifted up her weak arms

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that she might pray. Then, when the great leader of the city was dead, and everything had been done in order, they took her out in a mixed crowd of Gallo-Eoman populace, barbarian chiefs, and officials of the Palace, bore her body slowly up the road that breasted the southern hill, and buried her in the place by the side of the way, where the principal Eoman tombs stood at the summit. In this cemetery (which would cover the square of the Pantheon, the site of the Ecole Normale, and that of the Polytechnique) they chose a spot somewhat to the eastern side for her grave. It was over this that Clovis built his Basilica and dedicated it to the Apostles Peter and Paul — it stood just south of where St. Etienne du Mont stands now. In this church Clovis himself was buried, though at his death it was yet unfinished, and much later, they buried there also his Christian wife, Clotilde.

For many years its official dedication continued to give the church its title, but there appeared in the next generation the first example of that natural action which I have postulated as the principal character of the Dark Ages. The invincible force of popular custom, in a time when the official pressure of the Palace had broken down, began to impose its names upon the sites of the city, and the Basilica of the Apostles became the Church of Ste. Genevieve. So it was later to be with the great abbey of St. Germain, and with a hundred names of streets, churches, and public squares in the city and suburbs ; the dedication of the shrines, the canonization of the dead, even half the ritual lapsed, in the decay of the empire, to the people.

It is not, however, with the latter years of Clovis, but with the long reign of his son Childebert that this new

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epoch of building in Paris is most connected ; and even in his case there is a kind of desert in municipal history for the first thirty or forty years of his reign, while the political history is but the opening of that long monotony of assassination and intrigue which distinguishes the time. He murdered in the Palace two of his brother's three little sons that he might reign over an undivided Neustria. (The youngest boy, Clodoald, was saved, and St. Cloud takes its name from the hermitage he built himself in his manhood.) He took two great armies into Spain, one with a pretext, the second with none, and probably both because the chieftains insisted on some kind of war; with the second of these we shall see later in his reign a great legend connected. He called the second council of Paris to depose a bishop; he had the misfortune to assist at the first of those disasters which the collapse of government was bringing on, the great fire of about 550 ; he emphasizes the character of the time by extinguishing it with prayers of a saint.

But the interest of his reign for this history begins with the appointment of that great man St. Germanus to the see of Paris.

St. Germanus stands in the line of those bishops who form from Eemigius to Arnulf, from Arnulf to Adalberon the true political centres of early Prance. Of his devotion we have but the customary praises in the curious life that Fortunatus has left'; but of his activity and creative organization we have ample evidence. The modern reader will perhaps be exasperated at a zeal which prompted the famous edict of Childebert against the relics of Paganism, an edict which perhaps destroyed the altar of the Nautae and certainly lost to us many statues in the gardens of the

128 PARIS

suburbs. But, to the fault of being a consistent oflcial of the sixth century, St. Germanus joined the quality, so rare in that uncertain time, of lending unity and well- directed energy to government. Until his appearance at court ChHdebert is little more than a German chief ; in the last few years, with this man at his side, he seems almost a Eoman governor.

Two great enterprises belong to that period ; in both Germanus advised and both — in all probability — Clulde- bert saw completed. The first was the new cathedral church on the island, the second that famous abbey on the southern bank round which so much of the history of the city has turned.

As for the cathedral, it was of the plain basilica type, and we know little of its construction. There is, indeed, a poem by Fortunatus which is supposed to give us certain details; but when I discuss it in connection with the Abbey of St. Germanus I shall show why I think it referred to that church, and not to the cathedral at all. To obtain even the vaguest idea of it we can only say to ourselves that it was certainly small, but that it was for its size a long, rather low hall, not cruciform, and that it ended in a semicircular apse. We must imagine it, in fine, a smaller copy of Clevis's great church on the lull to the south ; it had presumably the same three porches and the same round-arched windows upon either side.

What is at once of greater interest and of more im- portance than the monotonous pattern upon which the cathedral was built, is its dedication and its site. It was the first Church of Our Lady in Paris, and handed down this title to the great cathedral which replaced it in the thirteenth century, and which is still the metropolitan

PARIS IN THE DARK AGES 129

church. There had never been any doubt of this so far as tradition — that great guide of history — was concerned. But a certain contempt for tradition, coupled with a curiously inconsistent spirit in modern historians, whereby they drag religious and national laws into every detail, has made even this little matter a thing for controversy. Luckily for those who love the continuance of old custom, Childebert's dedication is fixed certainly by a charter drawn up in the forty-seventh year of his reign — that is, just before his death. In this document certain lands are given to the cathedral, and the title and dedication are those of Our Lady. It is but a detail, yet the pleasure both of accurate knowledge and of dwelling on long traditions attached to a similar spot make it worth recording.

The site of this church of Childebert is of greater importance, for it not only helps us to a clear present- ment of the old sacred end of the island in the Dark Ages, but makes us understand also how the rebuilding under Philip Augustus proceeded, and to determine the positions of the public buildings here under Childebert for the modern reader I will refer it to the present condition of the same spot. There will be noticed on the southern side of Notre Dame to-day two buildings, one quite separate from the cathedral, one attached to it, and both standing between it and the river. That to the west, near the great square, is the presbytery ; that to the east of the south transept, and joined to the apse of the church, is the sacristy. Now, to see the quarter as it was in the time of Childebert, one must imagine the wall of the city running across the whole length of the square in front of Notre Dame ; then, just about where the porch of the cathedral

K

I30 PARIS

is to-day, it turned at right angles towards the river. When it reached a point corresponding more or less to the corner of the garden it turned again abruptly east and west and followed the line of the modern quay, and so round the point of the island. That part of it, then, between the presbytery and the sacristy, including the side of the latter building, was at once the wall of the city and the southern side of the old Church of St. Stephen. Of this church there was mention in the last chapter. It was the longest of the Eoman churches ; but whether it had been the cathedral church of the fourth century or no we cannot tell. It is a curious point that the apse of this church formed part of the defences of this city, and made a kind of bastion in the wall. Now, to get the position of ChUdebert's new church, we must imagine it lying behind this, and a little to the north. Its length (which was but a little over a hundred and thirty feet) would be almost exactly bisected by the porch of Notre Dame ; the apse of the old cathedral would be somewhere in the nave of the modern, and the porch would be well out into the square; the middle would be contained between the northern tower and the southernmost of the three doors, and, finally, we must imagine the first building not quite parallel to the present one, but a little tilted, as it were, with the ' west end more towards the Hotel Dieu, and the east end nearer the river. This is the exact site of the first Church of Notre Dame, and is all that is known about it. The date on which all this was discovered is the year 1847, when they opened and levelled the Parvis or square in front of the Cathedral.

If the antiquarian details of the metropolitan church, however, are few and wretchedly dry, the story of

PARIS IN THE DARK AGES 131

Childebert's second great foundation is very different. Its inception is connected with one of the most striking of romantic stories, its building has been celebrated by a remarkable contemporary, and its whole history is full of heroic accident. It still stands on the fashionable modern street that takes its name, and remains as old, as venerable, and as ugly a thing as any in Paris.

The chiefs filled up the hall of the Palace of Childebert ; still barbaric and still nomad, they demanded continual wars. Once he plunged for their sake into a great adventure, rode through the south, and rescued his sister from the cruelty of the Visigothic king whom she had married ; she died as she drew back home, and they buried her on the hill in the Basilica of the Apostles, next to her father Clovis. But ten or twelve years after this, round about 542, the king and his fighting men remembered the mountains and their feats of arms in Spain ; so, for some unknown reason, on some lost pretext, but really because they felt a need for distant warfare, all the great cavalcade set out again, the king and his barons and his brother Clotaire. They rode down through the passes of the Pyrenees ; they touched the Ebro, and, finding Saragossa a strong great town and wealthy, they laid siege to Saragossa. Then the people of that town made a great procession, which reads legendary and mysterious, like the story of the fiight before Charle- magne in the chronicle of the Monk of St. Gall ; for the bishop and his priests were aU in vestments ; the men fol- lowed them barefoot ; the women unbound their hair ; they chanted supplications to God as they passed round the city ; and in front of them, to work the miracle of their deliverance, they carried the tunic of St. Vincent. Childe- bert sat his horse astonished, as his father before him had

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reined up in the press at Tolbiac when he called on the God of the Christians. He begged only the reUc, and rode back home with that, followed by his army as though it was a triumph. And with the strange scene of the walls of Saragossa hard in his mind, like a persistent dream, CMldebert founded his great abbey to receive the tunic of St. Vincent; but this tunic, though they gave it to Childebert, the people of Saragossa show to this day.

This is the way in which the Abbey of St. Germain was founded. For though it was raised in honour of St. Vincent, and contained his wonderful coat, that could draw an enemy through Gaul and save a whole city, yet, because St. Germanus was at last buried there, not one man in ten thousand who knows the church has so much as heard of its first patron, but every one calls it " St. German's Abbey."

There was living at that time a man so interesting that, were this book to be of great length, or had it the licence to deal with m^.'^v different subjects, I could write on him at an immoderate length. His name was Portunatus. Italian, wandering, full of curiosity, and gay, he may almost be called the last of the Latin poets. The younger contemporary of Childebert, he was the friend and com- panion of all the principal men of his own time, a kind of heir to Sidonius. Gregory of Tours was his friend, and Fortunatus wrote of him a disjointed, anecdotal biography, full of dulness and praise. He was loved in the court of Austrasia, where he wrote an epithalamium for Brune- hilde ; he came to Paris, where he was intimate with, and an ardent admirer of, Germanus, and there this charming vagabond (who, by the way, was a cleric, and died Bishop of Poitiers) wrote his ode on " The New Church ia PariSj

PARIS IN THE DARK AGES 133

dedicated to the Holy Cross ; " it is the fourteenth ode of his second book, and is written in elegiacs, some thirty lines in length. But the church which the belated Horatian describes cannot be the Cathedral, as so many — and even FeHbien himseK — have imagined. He speaks of the dedication " to the Holy Cross," and this, which could not apply to the first Notre Dame, would most certainly apply to the abbey ; for not only did Childebert expressly dedicate :his new foundation to the Holy Cross, as well as to St. Vincent, but he gave it a great cross of gold from Toledo as a sign, and, what was (for the period) still more remarkable, the church was cruciform.

It impressed every contemporary with its size and magnificence. Standing to the little city as West- minster did later to London, right out in the fields to the south and west, it is almost an exact parallel to our famous abbey, save that it was built on the southern instead of the northern bank of the river. There was much about it that was worthy of such Imperial traditions as yet survived in northern Gaul, and it was these features perhaps that so struck Fortunatus, with his own keen ap- preciation of the past. It was a larger and grander church even than Clevis's basiUca on the hill. Its many windows were glazed, and on its wall spread fresco-work, with a wide background of gold. The roof was sheathed in copper-gilt — a reminiscence of something Byzantine ; and it reproduced in aU its mosaics and its capitals the spirit of the more civilized south and east. Four great altars stood in it : the first and principal in the centre, where the transepts met the nave ; two others in the south and north ends of these transepts, and, finally, what was then a peculiar, and later became a unique thiag, they built

134 PARIS

a fourth altar at the western end, close to the porch. It is not only in reading the details of this abbey, it is in thinking of it in connection with what Paris then was that one sees why it became a kind of little town outside the walls, and why so much of history for so many hundred years seems to centre round it. It was by far the highest, richest, and largest building, not excepting the palace on the island. It rivalled the Thermae, probably in extent, and certainly in magnificence, for that old palace fell more and more into decay while St. German's continually increased in wealth and grandeur. Its endowments were beyond those of any abbey in Neustria, save the later estates of St. Denis; and there grew up round it, upon its completion, a whole suburb, fortified, living upon the wealth and dependent upon the protection of the Bene- dictine monks. This was called the "Faubourg St. Ger- main," that is, the "suburb of St. German's," and that name it still retains, embedded as it is in the heart of modern Paris, and sunk to sheltering the old nobility, rich foreigners, democratic politicians and, in general, the wealthy.

As to whether any part, and, if so, what part of the original building remains in the present church, I will deal with the point when I come to speak of the rebuilding in my next chapter ; but for our present purpose the main thing is to see clearly this great building standing up south of the city, dominant, and a mark to which the eye of every traveller turned as he approached Paris by stream or road. It is a kind of seal set upon the compact between barbarians and the Church, a symbol of that monastic power which had already taken such firm roots in the south, which was the light of Ireland and the Hebrides,

PARIS IN THE DARK AGES 135

and which was on the point of evangelizing England and the German tribes. Continuous, a moral centre, endowed, on the failure of the fisc, with estate upon estate, the corporations of which this abbey was so perfect a type caught the generations as they passed and, like the deltas of rivers, increased by their permanence in the flux of humanity; and it is as the representative of so much unconscious organic stability that the uncouth tower and the old southern wall arrest a man to-day.

Besides these churches there is yet another which, whether we put down its foundation to Childebert or to his nephew Childeric, is certainly one of those whose origin dates from the energy of St. Germanus ; this church is St. Germain I'Auxerrois, small and wonderful.

There is somewhere at the back of history a mysterious tradition of the circular temple. It is found in the architecture of all religions, and in all it is treated as a sacred exception to the common style. The Holy Sepulchre was built on such a plan. The Templars (who became the great secret society of the Middle Ages, and who there- fore cherished such things) bmlt two principal churches of this kind in the west. One you may see in the Temple in London, standing there as a kind of vestibule to a later building. The other once showed in Paris (as we shall see later in this book) the curious anomaly of a circular chapel embedded in, and partly jutting out from, the nave of their church. Now, of these round churches two were to be found in old Paris : one was St. Jean le Eond, of which I shall speak in its place, and which stood much where the high altar of Notre Dame stands to-day ; the other was St. Germain I'Auxerrois. Each was buUt in a time when the shape conveyed some meaning ; in the case

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of each that meaning was lost — at least to the general — and in the case of each a new church was built in a very- different manner, having the same name as, and yet utterly losing the plan of, the original. St. Jean le Eond dis- appeared of course in the choir of the great cathedral that Paris still enjoys. It was rebuilt in a very mean, oblong shape, alongside of Notre Dame to the north. As for St. Germain le Eond, which has became St. Germain I'Auxerrois, it concerns our present chapter.

Of this first church so little is known that I should merely waste a reader's time were I to attempt the dis- cussion of all the conjectures that attach to it. It has been called a church dedicated to St. Germanus-of-Paris ; it has been ascribed to Childeric, to Clovis, and even to Clotaire. Let us follow the most probable combination of the various theories, and say that, on a spot which was sacred to the Parisians, because St. Germanus-of-Auxerre had there met the child Genevieve as she came in to market from Nanterre, Childebert and his q^ueen, Ultrogothe (whose statues stood with those of St. Germanus-of-Paris in the principal porch), built a little round church and gave it to their great bishop. Even in saying that much we are saying more than positive history can assert ; for all we know for certain is that a church was built there in the sixth century, that it was called in succeeding centuries " the Church of St. Germanus-of-Auxerre," and a poet said it was round.

Apart, however, from such a meagre set of guesses, there are one or two features about the original church and the quarter it stands in which are of permanent interest; the first of these is the little town or suburb that grew up in this spot ; and in touching upon that it

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will be convenient to describe how the outlying parts of Paris had grown, for their situation, size, and relation to the central island remained much the same from this sixth century on to the great expansion of the twelfth. Let us consider, therefore, the Prankish suburbs of the city.

When a modern man reads of the old suburbs of Paris, or finds their names in the quarters of the city, he is con- fused. Here one place is called "Faubourg St. Germain," which seems right in the heart of the town, and there another is called " Paubourg St. Denis," because it lies to the north of the Boulevards. This first cause of confusion arises from the fact that these places were the " suburbs " of very different walls, built at various periods in the expansion of Paris. This, then, is one cause of confusion, and it may be got rid of, so far as this chapter is concerned, by remembering that we are only dealing with the old inner part of the town, and talking of its earliest expan- sion. But there is another cause of confusion. A traveller of the present day is told of " St. Germans-in-the-Fields," of the "suburb of St. Lawrence," and so forth, and these words convey no meaning, because, in the great size of the modern city, all these places seem bunched up together in the centre ; he forgets, or tends to forget, the exact rela- tions of sites in the middle of the town, because in such great spaces, and with the modern means of communica- tion, a distance of a few hundred yards is easily forgotten. Now, there is a way in which even a modern can realize how these places, of which I am about to speak, were really suburban villages, almost detached from the little town on the island.

Stand at the end of the Eue du Louvre, where it comes out upon the river, and imagine yourself at the outer edge

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of a little group of houses, of which St. Germain I'Auxer- rois would be the centre ; these houses would come down to the river, and stretch a little way to your right, just beyond the colonnade of the Louvre. Now, suppose all the shore opposite you to be fields and trees, but, where you now see the tall tower and little spire of St. Germans- in-the-Fields, imagine a large byzantine building, sur- rounded by another group of houses, whose roofs just appear above the foliage. Look up the river, and re- member that the original island did not come even as far as the Pont Neuf, and that all the end of it near you was taken up with the garden of the palace, so that — although the great wall would be fairly near your stand- point— the buildings of the town would be as far off as the Sainte Chapelle. Finally, see the river without the Pont Neuf, and (originally) with no means of communica- tion nearer than the Pont Notre Dame — a good quarter of a mile away — and you have the materials for reconstructing in imagination the Prankish city. It is virtually the Eoman island-town, with a ring of small suburbs. The town of Genevieve had been contained in the wall of the Cit6, and the fortifications of the bridges upon either bank ; there had been counted as an integral part of it, though outside the walls, the northern suburb, round what is now the Hotel de Ville, and the southern suburb, round the Palace of the Thermae. This was the Eoman city, Now, under the Prankish kings there was added an exterior belt of villages, each of which had grown round a church and shrine. Taking this belt at the opening of the eighth century, when its development was completed, we have first St. Germain I'Auxerrois, then St. Germain des Pres, then the group round Clevis's basilica of St. Genevieve

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on the southern hill, then the far outlying village of St. Marcel, then Eligius's chapel of St. Paul (of which mention will be made in a moment), then the village of St. Laurent, and so round again to St. Germain I'Auxerrois. So the whole of the suburbs round the original Eoman town must have looked somewhat as they do in this little map.

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where the black part is the town of Genevieve, the shaded part the suburbs. As each of these suburbs was built round some church, so each lay along some principal road ; it was the filling in of these villages and their com- plete junction with the town that formed the great circular capital of the early Middle Ages; but for the present chapter the main point to notice is that the residence at

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Paris of a half-civilized court suddenly — within a century of the change — endowed her with these outer churches and their dependent hamlets, but that, curiously enough, the development was arrested after its first beginning, and the plan of the city remained much the same for the next five hundred years.

Having thus obtained a general idea of Prankish Paris, it will be necessary to pass in the most rapid manner over the period that follows its first development ; for the history of the city proper — of its buildings and its own action — becomes singularly slight between this original establish- ment of the Prankish capital and the great defence which the city made against the invasions of the Normans more than two centuries later.

Childebert was buried in his own great Abbey of St. Vincent and the Holy Cross ; Childeric, after a long reign that takes us to within sixteen years of the end of the century — a time that was witness only to increasing dis- order, to the destruction of the old Eoman engineering, to consequent floods and loss of buildings, and pestilence — was assassinated in Chelles, and buried in the same church, in the place where he had graven his own barbaric epitaph, "I, Hilderic, pray that my bones may never be moved hence." He outlived Germanus, and the sixth century closes, the seventh opens, upon a Paris that lacked government and almost lost to history. The complicated struggle between the kings, with their imitations of im- perial rule, and the chieftains, between the Queen of Austrasia and the widow of Clulderic, between the sons who quarrel in the old fashion for a division of Gaul, fills up a generation in which even the ecclesiastical frame- work of the State seems to disappear beneath the anarchy.

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The list of bishops is broken; a wandering Syrian mer- chant, Eusebius, is thrust into the see of Germanus ; we have not even the name of the prelate who baptized the second Clotaire, and the two provincial councils held in the city dealt almost uniquely with the political quarrels of the time, and were summoned in the interests of this or that chance master of the capital.

like a kind of clear interval in so much confusion comes the great name of Dagobert, whose short reign of ten years has left a profound impression upon the legends and folk-lore of the French people.

What he really was, or what consecutive account might be given of his reign, we cannot tell, because the whole of this time — and from it on for a hundred and fifty years — lacks the witness of any sound historian. Gregory of Tours carries his chronicle no further than 591, and we have nothing but the hagiographers and the chance traditions of later writers to guide us until the advent of the Carlovingian monarchy in the eighth century. It is certain, however, that Dagobert resumed that tradition of a central monarchy which had been the political thesis of the Church and of the Gallo-Eomans, which they later founded for a brief and glorious period under the hand of Charlemagne, and which achieved its final form with the Capetians.

It was, as I have said, the mark of such a position that the Court should be supported by the great Church- men of Gallic birth and of Latin inheritance, and this feature, which had been lacking since Germanus, reappears under Dagobert in the persons of Eligius and Dado. The first is the " St. Eloy " whose name is coupled with the kings in so many stories; the second is that St. Ouen

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who founded the great position of the see of Eoueu, and ■whose church in that town is so famous at the present daj^. The lives of these two men take us on to the revolution by which the mayors of the Austrasian Palace found it possible to submit all Gaul to their rule, upon the battle of Testry. Eligius, a worker in metal, as a good Limousin should be, gave an example of a somewhat new spirit in the direction of the Court, for he remained a layman till comparatively late in life, being raised to the see of Noyon only just before Dagobert's death. But in his foundation and repair of the many smaller churches of Paris, in his constant direction of ecclesiastical affairs and his position of adviser to the king, he fulfilled a quasi-clerical function peculiar to the time. In the one great enterprise of Dagobert — the rebuilding of Gene- vieve's Abbey of St. Denis — he plays something of the part that Germanus played to Ohildebert in the founding of St. Vincent's, and it is his name which appears in nearly every minor effort of rebuilding or reparation during the reign. He enlarged the Chapel of St. Martial — the patron of his own city of Limoges — in the island. He directed the reconstruction of that wing of the Palace which had been burnt in the beginning of the reign, and so began what were, perhaps, the first changes in the appearance of that old Eoman colonnade. He built, out- side the walls, the Chapel of St. Paul, which has long disappeared, but which was famous for a thousand years and still gives its name to a quarter of the town, and, in the political sphere, it was he who took that long journey into Brittany to persuade Judicael to call him- self not king but merely duke, which little verbal success accomplished, he returned triumphant to Dagobert.

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When Dagobert was dead, fifty years went by during which the history of the city contains but one incident, the foundation of the Hotel Dieu. That enormous modem building, which bounds the northern side of the square of Notre Dame to-day, has been built to replace the old great hospital which used till quite recently to stand all along the southern side and halfway into the present open space. And this, in its turn, was the accretion of centuries upon the original small house, half hospital, half inn, built up against the wall by St. Landry. The Hotel Dieu, as a refuge for sick travellers, and later as a hospital, runs through the whole of Parisian history as continuously as, though with less prominence than, St. Germain or the Cathedral. It is a principal example of that enduring continuity of site and purpose which is the mark of Paris. St. Landry, whom I have mentioned as its founder, was the Bishop of Paris during the greater part of these fifty years. After his death his shrine was built above the little port or quay to the north of the island, till it became called " the Port St. Landry," and this church, to the regret of all honest men, was pulled down in 1829.

But if the foundation of the Hotel Dieu was the only matter of municipal importance during this time, there yet happened in the general history of France a great deal that was to react most powerfully upon the future fortunes of the city. It was a time during which four miserable men, with whose names I will not detain my reader, occupied, by a kind of inertia, the throne of Prance, and during the nominal government of these, the unhappy son and three grandsons of Dagobert, certain charac- teristics arose in the society of northern Gaul, which I will take in their order.

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In the first place, tlie connection between this part of the continent and our islands, a union which was to produce the later civilization of western Europe, which resulted first in the mission of Alcuin, and finally, in the British influence upon the University, was originated.

The conversion of England had begun in the youth of Dagobert, under a queen of Kent who was his father's first cousin, the niece of Childeric: Dagobert's nephew, having refused him the crown, found Ireland his safest refuge. Erom Ireland, also, came Furfy, the priest, to found the Abbey of Lagny. Bathilde, the daughter-in- law of Dagobert, the wife of the obscure Clovis II., and the mother and guardian of the three young kings that followed him, was an Anglo-Saxon slave. She, when the old hunting-box of Chelles was given her as a dower house, turned it into the famous mmnery, and here, among others, came Hereswith, the Queen of East Anglia. It would be possible to add a host of instances showing how intimate the connection grew between the two sides of the Channel in that seventh century which saw the reunion of England and Christendom.

In the second place — and this was by far the most important development of the period — the nominal power of the monarchy gave way, and the occupier of an office which had originated as a mere palatial dignity rose to be virtually the sole governor of Gaul : the mayors of the Palace replaced the kings.

This revolution has been made the theme of so much historical discussion, and the conclusions based upon it have furnished so many political and ethnological argu- ments, that it will be necessary to describe it clearly, before we proceed to study its effect upon Paris; for if

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the period before us is entered into under a miscon- ception with regard to the Carlovingians, the whole of one's view of mediaeval Paris and France becomes twisted and false.

The society, whose fall has been described at the open- ing of this chapter, needed a moderator in arms — a king. While Eome was yet well-lit and orderly, even in the fifth century, with its anarchy and failing light, the Eoman way of filling that place worked and was accepted. The chief of what still remained a highly organized military force, was also the head of a system necessarily hierarchic. To that head, time and the crystallization of the empire had given an immutable sanctity, attached, like a priest's, to emblems and ritual — to an ofiBce rather than to a person. It was sanctity based on the exact observance of rites, on what may seem to us a puerile excess of titles ; and this character of the monarchy — a character common to the extreme old age of all civilizations — was maiutained at Byzantium for a thousand years ; there, not without dignity, graceful, and with a great conception of its mission, it acted as the bastion of Europe.

But in the west, after the irruption of the barbarians, the nature of this government was modified. The conception of unity remained, but its chief trappings and its excess of ritual passed to the sacerdotal power, whose chief alone was deemed the conservator of imperial tradition; from the Pope was to come the mandate and the unction of whatever unity could be revived ; he was to admit and partly to create the title of Emperor, which on two several occasions was to re-originate at Eome, and in every transfer to find its sanction there. Meanwhile, the disjointed members of the western empire, partly by the inheritance

L

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of an old policy of decentralization, but mainly by the disruptive action of the Teutonic chieftains, tended to autonomy. With all their shifting boundaries, the kingdoms really represented governments: Neustria was northern Gaul, Austrasia was a definite aristocracy, Lombardy was a nation, Aquitaine had a language.

These divisions, that had lost in a very gradual manner the sentiment of pomp and complexity in connection with government, had yet retained the full machinery of the Palace. A hierarchy of of&eials still administered the declining functions of the central power ; and at their head there came to stand, more by the force of circumstances than by any personal ambition, the chief minister, who was known as the Prefect of the Court, or the Mayor of the Palace. Both in Austrasia, which was the more Germanic part of the new Prankish kingdom, and in Neustria, which was wholly Gallo-Eoman, the organization of the Palace, inheriting the Imperial habit, found such a man at its head. Now, add to this the fact that the Eoman Empire had left, and the Teutonic invaders had confirmed, a social state whose surface was a small and immensely wealthy landed class, and the develop- ment of which I am about to speak becomes explicable. Some one family, richer than the rest, was certain to drift towards the head of what had once been a bureaucracy, but was rapidly becoming a nobility.

It so happened that one family of southern Gaul had increased so much in wealth during previous centuries as to make it worth their while to adventure the supreme power. In that medley of Eoman territorial and Teutonic chieftain which had destroyed the idea of race, and which had introduced as a kind of fashion Eoman names to the

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German and German names to the Roman, it is of little purpose to ask what proportion of Germanic blood entered into the descendants of Ferreolus. Pepin of Heristal was, in the latter part of the seventh century, the head official of Austrasia. The richest and principal man among a number of Ehenish nobles, who were most of them of the German speech, he headed them in the confused quarrel that led to the battle of Testry in 687. In that battle the group which may be roughly defined as mainly Neustrian, was conquered, and the spoils for the moment passed to their opponents.

This was a small matter, but the great individual power which it gave to a most remarkable family was of the first importance to history. The factions of a small nobility, in which Gallo-Eoman and German were in- extricably mixed, might continue to wrangle with varying fortunes, but after Testry Pepin of Heristal and his descendants could never be long out of the saddle. He had possessed himself of Paris, and having so defeated the Neustrian mayor of the Palace, he represented alone the headship of the whole administration of a re-united Gaul.

The line of the old kings continued. It is customary to say that the descendants of Dagobert were as feeble as their power was vain. Of that we have no proof. What is certain is that the Eoman machinery for the headship of the State would never work when once decay had introduced personal and hereditary claims to power as sacred things. It needed a succession of extraordinary men to keep it alive for even one century. The continual complaint "that the king did not rule," which was but a criticism on their own official system, marks the documents of the time. The thing culminated when, in 752, Pepin the

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short, Pepin of Heristal's grandson, was crowned king, and consecrated two years later by the Pope in the Ahbey of St. Denis. By the side of the king during that ceremony stood the little boy Charles, who was later to become the great Emperor, and to prove in his descendants the same fatal impossibility of maintaining together the Imperial method and hereditary right.

For that very long period of two hundred years, Paris may almost be said to lose her history. St. Ouen, whom we last saw mentioned as a great personality in the history of the town, and who would continually visit the capital from .his see on the lower Seine, died in 683, almost contemporaneously with the victory of the great Austrasian noble. Prom that date until the Norman siege of 885 there are perhaps but half a dozen historic facts to re- cord in the history of the city. The whole story of the Carlovingians leaves it to one side. For it had been especially the Neustrian capital, and this new vague thing, whose seat was a wandering army, and whose power extended until at last it embraced all Christendom, had no capital, but a kind of military base in the north-east. It is a necessity for this book, then, to pass over what would be in a general history of Prance among the most absorbing of periods.

So long as a strong rule existed, that is, until the generation succeeding Charlemagne, the city was ruled by counts, who were merely ofi&cials revocable at the wiU of authority. Their names are partly known, and are of no interest. It is with the breakdown of the Carlovingian power that we get again a glimpse of Paris in history, when all Europe was passing through that ordeal which I have sufficiently described at the beginning of this chapter.

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Paris, as I then said, accomplished a feat of arms that saved French civilization. Charlemagne had been dead seventy years. His great grandson, with no strong follow- ing, enfeebled and discredited, stood for the head of a Christendom that was nominally the re-united empire, but was in reaKty rapidly lapsing into a disconnected mass of local communities. Letters had fallen to a level which permitted the absurdities of Hilduin in his history of St. Denis ; and save for the great memory of Erigena the tomb of the mind that Charlemagne had opened had shut once more. Chance men were waging private wars over all the territory of Gatd, and for forty years past the Northmen had come raiding at intervals, holding the city for ransom, sacking it, ruining the suburban abbeys, until at last, in this year 885, they fell upon the capital with the determina- tion of forming a permanent barbaric kingdom in the heart of Europe.

The city at that moment was under the dominion, practically in the possession, of the family of Eobert the Strong. A man of unknown origin, possibly a peasant, like that Tertullus by whose side he fought, and who is the ancestor of the Eoyal family of England, Eobert had been placed over Paris, and in the anarchy of the time had made it his own. He had been dead eighteen years when the great siege was laid, but his son Eudes stood in his place as though Paris were a family estate ; and it was he who held the walls for fifteen months in the face of the Danish assault.

Of the full details of that siege I have not space to speak, but I can refer the reader to a chronicle for which I will confess a certain enthusiasm, and in which any one who cares for the living impression of contemporary record,

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and who can read bad Latin or a French translation thereof, will find an excellent romance.

Por, by a happy accident, we have preserved the full account of the trial through which Paris passed ; and of all the shocks which Western Europe felt in the ninth century, there is not one which has been so vividly or minutely recorded as this siege. We know what the ninth century was by the kind of gap which it leaves in the clear records of Europe; we appreciate the danger which our civilization ran, somewhat as a man who has fallen into a trance appreciates his danger afterwards by the blank thrown over some hours of his life. Just as the very nature of such an ordeal and all its terror would stand out the better if he could remember a clear flash of dream in the midst of his paralysis, so this peculiarly strong account of the Norman siege comes like a beam of sharp light across the darkness, and reveals to us as not even the story of Alfred can, the critical moment of the defence of Europe.

That account was written by Abbo, a monk of St. Germain, who was an eye-witness of the whole. He was a friend of Gozlin the bishop ; he had led an attack with Eobert, the brother of the count, and he had a kind of hero worship for Eudes himself. It is customary for historians to speak of this little epic of the Dark Ages as though it were a dull and pedantic thing, whose only interest lay in the fact that it was a contemporary docu- ment written at a time of which contemporary record is rare, but that judgment is so erroneous that one some- times doubts whether all the historians who speak of it have read the poem. Those two short books of verse have in them easily apparent the quality that was immediately

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after that generation to produce the epics of chivalry. The hexameters are, no doubt, full of false classicism, and Abbo, like a schoolboy, loves to end with Virgilian tags. There is also constantly running through the poem an amusing insistence upon mythological metaphors. If any one tries to put out a fire it is " Neptune fighting with Vulcan," and 'if they fail, it is " the lame god that conquers." This very pestiferous habit, more worthy of the seventeenth century than the ninth, has given a false impression of pedantry. The incidents and the life of the poem — if I may so call them — are of a very different kind. You cannot help feeling as you read that here is the writing of a man who saw the thing with his own eyes, and who had a great joy in battle. I could cull fifty extracts to show how much there is in common between Abbo and The Chansons de Geste. The humour is a humour of horse-play such as you have in the Quatre fils D'Aymon. When the Danes have their hair burnt by the fire thrown from the walls, Abbo makes the Parisians cry, " May the Seine water give you new wigs — and better combed." That is barbaric, and to a man who had seen it, laughable. One may make a parallel between Eudes spitting Danes on his lance and crying that they should be taken to the kitchen, and Eoland saying that he blew a horn when he went hunting hares but not when he hunted pagan men.

There is, again, throughout the poem a number of those vivid touches which only the simple epics of a vigorous and fighting time are permitted to attain, thus " when the wall fell down and a breach was made, those within saw the Danes all helmeted, in a great crowd pressing onward ; but as for the Danes, they looked through the breach in the wall and counted our great men, and dared not enter."

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That also is pure epic where he speaks of the old man left alone on his farm, who, though his shield was lost, put on his sword and went out determined to be killed, not know- ing whether his son was in the battle nor whether any one would return home again. So is this other line, " And even during the night we heard the whistling of the arrows." The excellent enthusiasm which illuminates the Middle Ages, and which lends to the CaroUngian cycle such noble passages, is here in Abbo's poem, and you will not find it in earlier work. "But the Almighty looked down and saw His own towers, and His own people, and the cry of Our Lady to save the city."

There is also the peculiarly mediaeval appeal and special praise to the Blessed Virgin set in the midst of the poem. Crabbed in diction, that hymn is vibrating none the less with the strongest and the most sincere emotion. You feel as you read that it came straight out of the intense devotion in which Alcuin had been steeped, and which Alfred was practising to an extreme in the manhood that was contemporary with this siege.

Mediaeval wonder is also over the whole. Perhaps in so long a trial the walls of the mind wore thin, perhaps the body fell sick and produced illusions. But Abbo • thought he saw St. Germanus in the sky, and speaks of unknown young men in armour on the walls of the city at night. Indeed, the poem is not a mere false classicism of the Dark Ages, nor a mere memory of the schools of Charlemagne: it is much more the beginning of that Capetian literature — the literature of the early Middle Ages, in which everything is simplicity, violence, and mystic certitude. " Lutetia, whom God Almighty saved, she that called herself the great town and shone like a

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queen above the others, her walls looked over the rivers and she sung her praises."

The Emperor came in at the close of so much heroism, and bought off the barbarians. The act was not the end of the Carlovingian line, but it was the grave of whatever power or influence remained to them. For the future we shall follow the history of the city from a standpoint taken in its midst. It is no longer to be the provincial town, nor even the capital of a German and uncertain dynasty whose confused memories of the empire forbade the existence of a permanent centre. It is to become the root and origin of France. From it, like a seed, the nation is to grow up dependent upon the lord of the northern city ; for the seventy years after the death of Charlemagne had transformed every condition in Western Europe.

There passed on the coast of the Breton marches in that same ninth century a thing that will illustrate what I now have to tell. The remains of a Eoman plain, its temples turned Christian, its towns and great roads, its superb oak forests, were suddenly overwhelmed by the sea. A great storm broke the dykes, and in the confusion and horror of the disaster there seemed to be no sun, because, between the long night of that winter flying spray and clouds close to the earth took up the few hours of day- light. When it had passed, such men as had saved them- selves from death, looked out from the hill of Avranches and saw in the place of their homes shallow water, in which there floated and jostled the innumerable wreckage of the country-side. There was nothing there to be counted or salvaged, and the view that lost itself in the mists of the new bay caught nothing of humanity; the

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whole shore was impassable with drift. But out in the mid water of a high tide there stood a high hill that had once dominated cities and villages ; its trees still flourished, and at its base the rocks that had marked familiar fields showed above the sea. With that hiU for a centre and a shrine, civilization was to take root again. The sea had done its unalterable work, but on the rock the great Abbey of St. Michael was to be built, and all round the further shore the Norman and the Breton towns were to re-arise.

Paris then stood in Neustria the emblem of such a centre. The Norman invasions left behind them confusion and wreckage. Men wondered in the worst of the siege whether the order of things had not changed for ever; they doubted whether the empire and the Christian name would stand. As the tide of the sea-men ebbed northward again, the city looked around upon desolation only. The mark of the flood was on the ruin of burnt abbeys and on the broken walls ; dead men were still unburied in the fields ; but the town stood. Then there happened to the poor remnants of what had been the Gallo-Eoman State what I have heard soldiers say happens after a great battle : in the shock it is not understood which side had the advan- tage ; at the close exhaustion confused the intelligence of men, but the sight of troops advancing at a distance, the noise of artillery more distant, slackening and heard but from one point, gradually discloses a victory. So it was with Paris. The treaty of Claire-sur-Epte was within reach, the Church was to re -attain her limits, the tenth century in Mercia and at Augsburg was to see the pursuit and rout of the forces that had menaced Europe.

But the straiu and disaster had effected a permanent

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change. The mere soul of the empire remained, the body had died ; and in its place there began to be nations. The chain that had bound each generation to the old bureaucracy of Eome was broken. Something more natural, but less efficient, was to take the place of that tradition, and the endless task of government was taken up again by an institution more consonant to the rude nature of what Gaul had become, but far more slow and painful in its growth than the old monarchy had been. In place of the Imperial name and habits, a personal leader, a mere lord of many retainers began to take the name of king. By an unconscious process, and by one that worked with infinite pains, through an unwilling society, clogged with feudalism, along roads now interrupted, and piercing through official channels long choked, the masters of Paris at last re-united a Eoman province, and, in doing so, forged a kingdom. They were given the name of king, because the mere name seemed a necessity to society. The name produced a thing, because a race was behind it demanding recognition ; but it took more than three hundred years before the descendants of Eobert could ride through a real kingdom and reach the Mediterranean in power, and be obeyed.

For a hundred years the great family of Eobert the Strong played with the monarchy, and during the hundred years Paris stood still. Eudes, indeed, who had so well defended the city, was called king for ten years, but a slow policy, more suited to construction than to capture, ran in the blood of the house. The brother of Eudes (Eobert) was lord of Paris — almost its owner ; but during his twenty-five years of power he held for only a few months (and carelessly) the title of king. The great

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change of the ninth century was nowhere more marked than in this family succession to what had once been but an official place held at the will of a central authority. To be Count of Paris was now a family inheritance, a possession. With such a continuity and with such a power, they were really local kings. But their diplomacy kept them behind the last remnant of the Carlovingian inheritance. Eobert's son, Hugh the Great, disposed of the kiugdom for nearly thirty years, and the son of Hugh the Great, Hugh Capet, waited another thirty, planning out his place among the great nobles, but never touching the crown. We reach the year 986 with a Carlovingian stni nominally on the throne of what is no longer an empire, and is not even France.

So the tenth century is, for the purpose of this book, a blank. I have said that Paris stood still. The Normans passed and re-passed, besieged it aimlessly, and were for ever beaten off with ease, in the first generation of that period ; wandered a little here and there for pillage, then settled back, took their province, and were absorbed into Europe, to form by their slight admixture of Scandinavian blood a race which was to the GaUo-Eoman as steel is to iron. Paris built nothing (if we except the Abbey of Magloire) ; she did not even rebuild. The capital over which the counts kept so tenacious a hold was, like all the west, wounded and convalescent. The stones grew old and broke apart ; the ruins of the suburbs remained, with only greenery to soften the marks of fire. St. Germain preserved for more than a hundred years the stigmata of the siege.

But though the decay and uselessness fastened on to the stones of the city, men were renewed, and the close of the tenth century saw a generation that had forgotten

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the danger and the better arts of their grandfathers. The capital, as it was yet more barbaric, so was fuller of energy and of hope ; laughter returned, and a sharp daring, born partly of ignorance and partly of that necessity for action which is the mark of youth ; a new life, uncouth, innumer- able, creative, swarmed among the old stones of the island. It received baptism in a famous incident.

In 978 Hugh took the empty king Lothair, and urged him into Lorraine and on to Aix. Otto of Germany thrust them both back upon the walls of Paris, and in a manner very touchingly Teutonic sang a Te Deum on the hill of Montmartre because he could not take the city. He retreated, and in the counter-stroke of what was but a huge game to this time of boyhood, Hugh and the French harassed and defeated his rear-guard, and thrust it through the Argonne. Nine more years brought to an end the family of Charlemagne.

The Count of Paris looked around him, and saw a Europe in which new things had taken root and hidden the old traditions, as trees hide crumbling walls. He saw the Germans long established with their king ; he saw the new phantasm of the Germanic empire occupying whatever was mad in the Ottos, and leaving Gaul apart to its own growth ; he saw that Gaul cut up as into vast estates among the peers ; he saw Aquitaine, Normandy, the Vermandois all like the gardens of brothers ; he saw political power now fastened to the soil rather than to the of&ce, and he saw himself founded on real strength, the lordship of a host of towns and villse ; he had a brother over Burgundy, a sister married to Normandy ; he was the natural head of such kinships. And, beyond all this, he saw or felt that a half-conscious tradition, so soon to run

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through the great epics, was working France. The people demanded a nation and a centre. He turned then to the peers, and they admitted a claim which seemed a symbol, but which was to grow into reality and crush the power of their sons. In 987 — in the month of July, ia which France does all her work — Adalberon the bishop crowned him at Noyon, and the peers took the oath that seemed to mean so little. He returned to reign at Paris. The town rose slowly to look over this new France of which it was to be the head; and in my next chapter I will show what kind of road was taken into the brilliancy of the Middle Ages.

But, before ending this, I would try to put before you what the Paris was into which Hugh Capet rode when he had gathered the fruit of thirty years' patience.

It was a city to be seen a little before sunrise in autumn; the greyness of the hour suiting its age and mouldering; the cloudiness and anger of the sky, its doubts and terrors ; the wind of the early hours, its promise of new things. A man coming in by the road from Burgundy, a traveller from the further south and the Ehone valley, might have so seen it. Let him come as a messenger to the new king, to whom his own province had promised a kiud of shadowy allegiance ; and let him come — as the slowness of rumour and travel would have compelled him to come — some months after the great scene which had been acted at Eheims in July; we can see through his eyes what the Paris was which had reached in that year the extreme age of one cycle and was approaching the bkth of another.

Staiting while it was yet dark from his last stage, he would follow the left bank of the Seine, and, losing some

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miles above the town the pavement of the old Eoman road, he would pass, as day broke, through the south- eastern suburb. The way had lost its straight alignment as it approached the city, and passed in a winding lane through the village; it was deep in the autumn mud, narrow, and full of the first noises of the day. On either side old low huts and continuous houses lined the road, their walls grey and irregular, their windows narrow and unglazed, their flat roofs hidden, the whole of them a medley of wood and straw and scaling stone. In their midst the old church, with its round porch and low fajade, recalled the Merovingian builders. Somewhere in the present Quai de la Tourelle the houses on the right came to an end, and the road for some yards followed the river. Halting for a moment at this point, where the shallow barges were moored, along the uncertain shore, he would have seen before him the island-capital which was to be the end of his journey. The shores of this island sloped down to the river, reedy, marked here and there by a little tract leading to the water's edge; and just along the narrow, shelving bank there stood, low, uneven, immensely thick, the wall with its rude square towers. This wall was the central object of his view, for the buildings of that time were lower even than those of the Eoman town had been ; in all that he saw there was no gable or tall tower, only the sHght slope of the church roofs, the long line of the Palace, and, beyond the town, higher than the buildings, the rough stone upper storey of the chatelet caught the cloudy light of the morning. Whatever was of principal importance in the town — the Palace, the Cathedral, the Church of St. Stephen, with its round windows just opposite his standpoint — perhaps

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the Prison of Glaucin — barely showed above this strong, broad wall.

And all that he saw through this uncertain atmosphere of a late dawn was old. The huge, iU-squared stones lacked mortar in some places from age ; in others, green things had sprouted in their crevices. The lower courses bore the dark stain of frequent floods ; and here and there some incongruous material — a stone from the ruins of the Amphitheatre, or a mass of rubble from the crumbling Thermae — filled a gap in the weakening fortification. Great buttresses of disordered fragments banked with earth sup- ported it where it leant outward towards the stream. Beyond its edge the roofs also showed their great antiquity. The tiles of the little low Cathedral were grey, and in places lacking, lichen had stained the deep window-sides of St. Stephen's, and the even Eoman cornice of the Palace had broken into great gaps, which the ignorance of the time did not dare replace. All, therefore, that met his eye in the stones of that century-end, which was in reality the beginning of a new Europe, left an impression of weariness and of age. To a man such as our traveller would be, used to the full Eoman tradition and to the shining climate of the south, this first sight of Paris spoke only of meanness and decay, or, rather, must have weighed upon him with a sense of lethargy and death.

But as the light broadened and the day became perfect, he would have felt about him the energy of a barbaric life. The storm of the Norman invasions, which had wrecked civilization a century before, had also blown a kind of fighting vigour into men, and a century later all that iucreasing energy was to culminate in the Crusade. Ignorance had left the soil of the mind free, and a very

PARIS IN THE DARK AGES i6i

dense growth of fancy made the time luxuriant. The great epics were growing out of chance songs; cities of dream were thought to lie but a little way off from home ; the saints returned and talked with men ; the longing but majestic efforts of unsatisfied builders were to distinguish the coming generations, and in a hundred and fifty years were to give us spontaneously the one architecture that has reflected the idea of northern Europe.

As the traveller passed over the narrow wooden bridge that crossed the southern arm of the Seine, he saw — half a mile down the river — a little forest of scaffolding ; they were rebuilding the Abbey of St. Germain; and, apart from this official vigour of the new reign, an eager human stream poured round him through the dark tunnel that was the gate of the city. The knights came on short, thick-set horses proper to their bearing, for they were themselves heavy and short-limbed men; they had the little conical steel cap on their heads, on their bodies a shirt of iron links, and cross-bands of cloth for leggings ; slung behind them were their great leather shields as long as a man. Serfs, who were almost peasants, passed him ; they were bringing in the food for the market, coming in simple tunics and bare-headed from the upper fields on the hill-top round the old Church of Ste. Genevieve. The armed servants crowded in on foot to the guard-rooms and stables of the Palace; the priests, whom now one could distinguish by their special dress — the longer tunic and sometimes the sandal — completed the mixed crowd. He heard them speaking a new language — no longer the low Latin which the traveller himself knew so well, but some- thing strange and northern. As he passed into the tortuous streets he would reach the place where his

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lodging stood, just under the Chapel of St. Michel. It was a small square before the Palace, the narrow remnant of what had once been the forum : and here the business of a day spent among low, squat houses, and the cold halls where great throngs kept passing through the doorless entries — a day of harsh gutturals, violence, and direct action — would have filled the southerner with doubt and wonder, certain that he had mixed with squalor and the dregs of a decline, but also filled with a growing sense of origins, of birth, and of barbaric rejuvenescence.

When the long evening came he may have heard before the fire of his inn some rude chant and chorus ; the song of Eoland or of Ogier the Dane, or the stories of the kings of Lombardy, and so have listened to the first stammering of what was to be the chief literature of his race.

( i63 )

CHAPTEE V

THE EARLY MIDDLE AGES

I HAVE to deal in tMs chapter with a vision that is unique in our history.

It happens sometimes in the life of a man that his youth is set apart from the rest ; some early and supreme experience, coupled with unusual liberty and framed in unexpected accidents, gives him a memory that seems cut off from childhood and from maturity. Then (he thinks) he was most himself: his inner security was better founded, his senses were more keen, his expectation higher. He felt an energy that he has since lost, and that was not his own, but entered into him from universal nature ; yet in its expression his own voice, his individual gestures, were at their strongest, and the power of control that moulds a man's externals into harmonious unity was given him so largely that it seemed of right and immutable — and he could not know how pain or doubt or mere time at last would weaken it. In history there is no birth or death ; but if we may take an origin and say that our Europe began in the anarchy of the ninth century, then we may speak of its childhood ending in the close of the Carlovingians, and this period of youth, with its cer- titude, its joy, and its high flood of life, is the Middle Ages.

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They decayed. For two hundred years a vain effort that ended in a political and religious terror was made to preserve the old simplicity and the first natural faith. There lay in that decay precisely the quality of bitterness and struggle which lies also in a man's regret for youth. When we left the garden we did not go out into the vast chances of the modern world with hope or with a definite goal ; we rather turned back continually, and as continually tried to produce again or to preserve the delicate and beauti- ful thing from which learning and growing complexity shut us out. How long and desperate that public struggle was, how hard the Middle Ages died, and what a monstrous distortion the effort to prolong them produced, I leave to my next chapter. I have here only to deal with the first three centuries, the time to whose forms we can never return, but whose spirit of economic security, of popular sanction for authority, of unity in social observance and religion will remain the goal to which all our fruitful reactions must tend. For then Europe was most Europe, and then men did most what they thought should be done, and least what formulae or verbal traditions or foreign ideals might hoodwink them into doing.

Of all definite periods in modern history the early Middle Ages fall most naturally into divisions; for the three centuries which they cover form not only in the outward aspect of civilization, but also in its politics, three different things ; and this is especially the case with Paris. For the history of what happened in the city, and the spirit of the times, and at last even the effect of the buildings, change with these three epochs. They are as follows.

The first — when the old society was stirring, when architecture remained what it had been in form but, as it

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were, more eager, and when Paris, though it seemed ia a ferment ready for creation, yet did not increase much nor change its boundaries — ran from the accession of Hugh Capet in 987 to the preaching of the first Crusade in 1095. It was the time when the Normans were sailiug out on their great adventures, hammering kingdoms together, and, themselves half-barbarous, showing a half-barbarous Europe how to tax, survey, and centralize. The idea of a new society, of a strict imity, and of a highly-organized Church ran out from Cluny and took shape in the prophetic mouth of Hildebrand. That idea was given a form and became a living thing when the Crusades had startled civilization into being.

The second division is that of the twelfth century, and it may be said, so far as Paris is concerned, to begin vtith the first Crusade and to end when Philip Augustus started in 1190 for the third. For the twelfth century is, above all, a disordered energy of creation ; it is force shapeless, or rather a medley of new things growing. But with that year, 1190, two things appear which are the beginning of form and order : the great wall of Paris is traced out, the University gathers on the hill. This second division in our chapter is Paris finding a definition and a language.

The third is the thirteenth century. It stretches from the building of the wall to the day in 1271 when they brought home the body of St. Louis from the place in Barbary where he had died under arms. That long, well- ordered time, of which he was the flower and the type, is the climax and best of the Middle Ages. It had perhaps began to lose the air of freedom, but though St. Louis out- lived it a little, this good generation had not yet felt intrigue nor the chains of ofiSce.

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It produced characters not only of such an altitude, but of such a quality, and those secure in such conspicuous and eminent places ; it allowed the true leader his place so readily, and even with such insistence, that it seems, for all its incompleteness, a fit type for our society. It had not conquered brutality nor given good laws the machinery of good communications and of a good police, but its ideals were of the noblest, and, what is more, they were sincerely held. Of all the phases through which our race has passed this was surely the least tainted with hjrpocrisy, and perhaps it was the one in which the more oppressed classes of society were less hopelessly miserable than at any future time.

As to the city, and the king who was its lord, the three hundred years passed in some such stream as this. It entered the Middle Ages a small town, thick in walls and squat in architecture, squalid and rude, barbaric ; but there sat in its Palace of the city, under old, grey, round arches, or drinking at long tables in square, unvaulted halls, the beginners of the great dynasty of the Capetians.

They were called Kings of France, and in that name and idea was the seed of a very vigorous plant, but as yet the seed remained unbroken. It was dead, in dead earth. At his crowning the lords of the great provinces came, as it were, to act as symbols ; in a vague theory he was superior to any in the space from the Saone Valley and the Khone Valley to the Atlantic ; but in fact he was a crowned noble, given, by the symbolism and the Eoman memories of his time, the attributes of central government ; allowed to personify that dim, half-formed but gigantic idea of the nation ; there his power ended. It all lay in a phrase and a conception. But God has so ordered it that

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over the French people a phrase or an idea is destined to be of awful weight; and the force of things, the blind, almost unconscious powers of the national spirit, like some organic law, forced the Capetians on a certain path towards the inevitable Latin nationality. Already the epics were singing of the nation in arms, and Eoland had been made a patriot saint, for all the world like Hoche or Marceau.

The character of the kings corresponded to this power ; and no wonder, for it was a time all of soldiers, when a William of Falaise had only to call for volunteers on the beach of the Caux coimtry and have men from Italy and from Spain coming at his heels. With fate offering such work, it is no wonder that one after the other, with very few exceptions, the early kings are hard fighters; but stUl, till the great change of the twelfth century, they are only the lords of a little territory which, with change of horses, you might cover in a day's hard riding ; here and there a royal town far off, and always the title of King.

At their very gates the castles of their little under-lords defied them. Montlhery was all but independent, Enghien was a tiny kingdom, and the tower of the one, the lull of the other, are visible from the Mont Ste. Genevieve to-day. As for their great vassals, the peers, the Dukes of Nor- mandy and of Aquitaine, the Count of Champagne and the Lords of the Marches beyond the Loire, they were treaty- makiag sovereigns, that waged war at their pleasure upon the King of France. William of Normandy, when he held England, or even before that, was a better man in the field. The Duke of Aquitaiue let no writs run beyond his boundaries. The Lords of Toulouse would have had diffi- culty iu telling you what their relation was to the distant successor of Charlemagne.

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So through the eleventh century the Kings of Paris drag on, always fighting, making little headway. The equals, and at times the inferiors of the provincial over- lords, you might have thought that these would end by making minor kingdoms, or even that the lords of separate manors might in time become the aristocracy of a settled community ; but behind them all was the iafinite aggrega- tion of silent permanent forces, the national traditions, the feeling of unity, the old Eoman memory, and, though it was centuries before the provincial over-lord disappeared for ever, and even centuries more before the lord of the village succumbed, stiU, a future history was making very slowly all the while the central government and the king.

It is with the close of the eleventh century that the flow of the tide begins. The great crusading march shook Europe out of its routine and torpor. The "Dust of Villages," already somewhat united by the Hildebrandine reform, was taught the folly of disintegration as each com- munity watched strange men, with a hundred foreign dialects, and with the habits, the laws, the necessities of a hundred varying places, all passing on with the common purpose of Christendom. Trade was opened between towns that had hardly known each other by name ; the Mediterranean began to reassume its old place in the western civilization; the necessity of interchange, both social and material, grew in the experiences of that vast emigration; and when, with the last years of the old century, the teaching of the law at Bologna began, Europe was ready for the changes which the pandects were to produce.

This discovery must certainly be made the starting- point for observing the effects of the new development in

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European life. As I have said, all Europe was awake. The code alone would never have revolutionized society, but the Eoman law, falling upon a society already alert, vigorous, attentive, and awaiting new things, had a most prodigious effect.

It gave to what would have been in any case a period of great forces a particular direction, to which we owe the character of all the succeeding centuries. At Paris the king of the eleventh century is a great noble; he is conscious, vaguely, that he stands for government, but government is little more than an idea. As it was, the law which handed down to the Middle Ages, across a gap of many centuries, the spirit of absolute and central authority came with an immense moral force to the help of govern- ments, and therefore of civilization. The code took a century to leaven the whole of society, but when this work was done it produced a very marvellous world, for the thirteenth century is a little gem in the story of mankind. It produced this effect because its logic, its sense of order, its basis of government, were combined with those elements of tribal loyalty and of individual action which had emerged in the decline of the Empire, and whose excess had caused many of the harsh and picturesque features of the Dark Ages. Later on, the Eoman law became all powerful, and in its too great preponderance the localities and the individuals decayed — till the crown grew too heavy for the nation.

While the first three Crusades were being fought Paris was growing in numbers as well as in light. The rough suburbs to the north and south of the island became larger than the parent city. The one climbed up and covered the hill of Ste. Genevieve ; the other, in a semicircle of

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nearly half a mile in depth, densely filled the surroundings of the Ohatelet and the Place de Greve. Meanwhile, doubtless, as in other parts of France, the rude and debased architecture was struggling to an improvement. The spirit that made the Abbaye aux Dames in Caen must have been present in Paris ; but nothing remains of its work, for the Gothic came immediately and transformed the city.

This great change (and the greatest change — to the eye — that ever passed over our European cities) marks the middle and end of the twelfth century, and there goes side by side with it a startling development of learning and of inquiry. That central tweKth century, shaken and startled by the marching of the second Crusade, is the lifetime of Abelard and of St. Bernard. Upon every side the human intellect, which had, so to speak, lain fallow for these hundreds of years, arises and begins again the endless task of questions in which it delights. Eeligion is illuminated with philosophy as the stained glass of a church, unperceived in darkness, may shine out when the sun rises. As though in sympathy with this move- ment and stirring of the mind, the houses and the churches change. The low, clear, routiae method of the Eomanesque, the round arch and wide, the fiat roof, the square tower and low walls which had corresponded with an unquestion- ing period, suddenly take on the anxiety and the mystery of the new time. It was the East that did this. The pointed arches ; the long, fine pillars ; the high-pitched gable roofs, and at last the spires — all that we call " the Gothic " — appeared, and was the mark of the great epoch upon which we are entering. Already the first stones of Notre Dame were laid, and already its sister thing, the Univer- sity of Paris, was born. Its earliest buildings were to rise

THE EARLY MIDDLE AGES ill

with the first years of the thirteenth century, in the fourteenth its numerous colleges were to gather on the hill of Ste. Genevieve.

When the full tide of this movement was being felt there arose, to the singular good fortune of the Trench people, the personality of Philip the Conqueror.

It was he who turned the King of Paris truly into the King of France. Not Montlhery nor Enghien were the prizes of his adventures, but Normandy, Poitou, Aquitaine. The centre of what was now a kingdom, the town of Paris, became, with the close of his reign in the early thirteenth century, a changed town. He had paved its streets and surrounded it with a great wall of many towers ; outside this wall to the west stood his own new stronghold of the Louvre, a square castle of stone ; within was the group of new churches, the rising walls of Notre Dame, the rapid growth of the town itseK; so that St. Louis inherited a capital worthy of the perfect chapel which he built at its centre, and almost worthy of his own admirable spirit. He and the century which he fills are the crown and perfection, and also the close of this great epoch in the history of the town.

For with the end of St. Louis' reign the day of the thirteenth century grows clouded. There are, it is true, sixty years more before the outbreak of the English wars, but they are sixty years in which the work is being consolidated rather than increased. The Paris we shall leave at the end of this chapter is the Paris of St. Louis.

As to the government, its final changes followed the social movement of the time. France just before the English wars was a centralized monarchy ; feudalism was

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a shell, the King's jurisdiction was paramount throughout the territory.

That sovereignty resident in the city, will pass through many vicissitudes, the English wars will all but destroy it; the close of the fifteenth century will resuscitate it under Louis XI., and keep it strong for a hundred years, only to be jeopardized again and almost ended in the century of the religious wars. It will reappear with the Bourbons, and be imperilled yet again by the Girondin movement of the Eevolution ; but our own century will once more reassert those primary facts— the unity and centralization of France under Paris.

It is, as I have said, with St. Louis that this great achievement is first clearly recognized. Long the dream of all the common people, heard in their popular songs and reflected in their ecclesiastical attitude, it is made a real thing by the hard blows of Philip the Conq^ueror, it is administered in peace and order by Louis the Saint. Prance henceforward is a one particular thing : with a voice, her vernacular literature ; with a soul, the national character ; to which, in its highest plane, St. Louis himself so admirably conforms ; and Paris is the brain.

But the decay which was to put her vitality to so terrible a test in the century of the wars, that disease had already touched the city and the nation after the death of the saint. The last thirty years of the thirteenth century disclose it, the beginning of the fourteenth makes it terribly plain. It is clearest in the character of Philippe le Bel.

St. Louis' time of greatness and of power had been all simplicity and conviction. You see in Joinville (which is, as it were, a little window opening into the past)

THE EARLY MIDDLE AGES i73

wonderful descriptions of how the various classes of society mingled in amity, of the villein and the noble talking together as they follow the king from Mass, of the per- sonal justice which the king gives, so often with smiles, in the garden of the Palace. It was an age which was simple because of its intense convictions.

There succeeds a period in which these convictions axe lost, and in which the whole of society rings false. Philippe le Bel rules from a strong centre, but as a tyrant ; the Church and the Papacy are using the old terms, but the Pope is afcsAvignon, and Boniface has been condemned.

The Templars were a large secret society, whose riches were a menace to Europe. Their savage extermination showed as an evil even worse than their existence.

The stultification of society, class aloof from class, spread like a wen, and the hierarchy began that fatal alliance with the rich that has been the greatest peril of Christianity in Europe. And we catch in Joinville's old age a kind of unrest, as though the simple attitude of his mind, fuU of the memories of St. Louis, were disturbed and made uncertain by the new society which he saw growing up around him.

To suit and symbolize the period, the palaces grow larger, the streets more narrow, the people poorer; and the next chapter will trace the story of the city during the worst hundred years of its existence.

The eleventh century, with which the Middle Ages open, was in Paris, as all over northern Europe, a civiliza- tion in germ. You will find in its records every mention of the new ideas, but there is little of their material ex- pression. The vernacular was not yet a basis for literature,

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the theory of society was laid down in no system of laws, and, what is most to our purpose, architecture in the north stood almost still. The great expansion of wealth, that was a necessary condition for the building activity of the next period, had not begun ; the population was stationary ; the city grew but little in political importance, and hardly at all in area. That hundred years, therefore, preceding the Crusades makes but a small impression upon the out- ward appearance of the city. It remained during the reigns of the first four Capetians what it had been when that dynasty first took it over from the anarchy of the last Carlovingians — rude, ill-ordered, and small, the Thermae a black ruin, the outer abbeys vast and isolated, the life of the place shrunk back into the irregular, unpaved ways of the old island. There was nothing left of Eome, save perhaps something here and there in the wall, Glaucinus's old prison, an oval heap of rubbish at the Amphitheatre under the hill, and in the Palace a fragment of the cornice or some isolated pillar of the collonade.

For the Palace itself, which had of its nature been most in continuity with the past, was changed now into a rough, low fortress. The necessities of the sieges, the burden also of a continual repair laid upon men who had forgotten all except strength in building, had turned the ofi&cial centre of the town into a mere oblong of huge walls. It differed from the feudal castle of the provinces in nothing save that it was meaner and lower than they. Four great round arches gave entrance on the garden, a defended gate overlooked the town side. In the centre of the courtyard there rose the short round dungeon tower which, much transformed, was to survive almost to the Revolution, and to be called, after the accidental death of

THE EARLY MIDDLE AGES i7S

Henri II., " the Tower of Montgommery." One building, indeed, it contained which has some historical importance, though it had during its existence no dignity of use or plan ; the chapel of the Palace, dedicated to St. Nicholas, which was the ancestor of the splendid shrine that St. Louis built and called the Ste. Chapelle. In the first mention of that Chapel of St. Nicholas under Eobert the Pious, there appears in full light the pettiness of the royal establishment, the purely domestic character of the Crown, the arrangement of its chapter, their hours of work, their wages, the wine that is served to them "from the king's wine-press, and made from the grapes of the trellis in the garden," all mark a kind of private house, suitable to a man who could hardly rule beyond the horizon, and indeed the whole life of the second Capetian, as Helgaud gives it, recalls to us the vague kingship of contemporary England, and shows no promise of that sudden power which the Normans were so soon to forge as an example for the European crowns. We do not even know what king undertook the principal part of the rebuilding that transformed the Eoman building into a feudal castle. It may have been earlier than Hugh Capet, it cannot have been later than his own lifetime, for Eobert was not a building man ; and though Adrien de Valois talks of "the new palace," that phrase and Helgaud's reference to what was probably the small castle in Vauvert, are too vague for us to found any conclusion upon them.

Por the rest there was very little to remark in the town, as the steady succession of the first four kings filled the century; son succeeding father, and each generation carefully husbanding the little strength of the new

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monarchy. At the beginning of the period, in 1015, there was founded a chapel that gives an example of the form that the slight energies of the time might take. It played no great part ia the future history, but it is the one build- ing on the island whose origin can certainly be traced to this eleventh century, and for the sake of its associations it is worth describing.

It will be remembered that the Eomans had a prison on the northern wall, and that this prison, to which I have alluded a few lines above this, was called " the Prison of Glaucinus." Here, according to a very reason- able tradition, St. Denis had been thrown before his martyrdom, and within the same walls, an old legend said that Our Lord had visited him in a vision and given him the Host when he was abandoned by his converts. The old building had therefore become first a place of pilgrimage and then a shrine; it stood just to the west of the main thoroughfare across the island, the street on which the Jewish colony was settled — " La Juiverie," whose narrow lane corresponded to the centre of the modern Eue de la Cite. A certain Ansold, a knight, wishing to do honour to this shrine, got leave to build a chapel just over the way, and he called it " St. Denis de la Chartre," that is, " St. Denis of the Prison." This, as I have said, was in 1015, and for a generation or so men remembered to distinguish between the old prison and the new church ; but there followed a gradual growth of legend which affords a remarkable example of h6w the populace can distort the very history of which they are the chief conservators. Before the century was out the name "de la Chartre" had confused the public. The prison was abandoned, and people began to associate the

THE EARLY MIDDLE AGES 177

prison of St. Denis with the new church. It was in vain that Eudes de Sully, the successor of the great bishop who built Notre Dame, insisted upon the historic rights and interest of the Eoman ruin. Custom was too strong for him. The gaol passed for some centuries under the title of St. Symphorien, and at last became so completely forgotten that no one is certain at this day of the time when it was pulled down. But St. Denis de la Chartre prospered more and more, and (a very wonderful thing) the canons at last dug a crypt below it and fixed therein the paraphernalia of a dungeon : there was the iron staple and the chain of the martyr, the little barred window by which he had been given food, the stone slab on which he lay. The faithful, and perhaps the beadle too, came to accept all this for history, till, in the seventeenth century, it was a famous place in Paris for the antiquarians as well as for the populace. In the eighteenth century it suffered in the common ruin of the churches. At last the Eevolution abandoned it; in 1790 its service was discontinued, and seventy years later it suffered the fate that has overtaken, sooner or later, all the host of little chapels on the island. It was pulled down, and now there is nothing left even to mark its site, for the new Hotel Dieu covers it with its north-western angle.

This foundation which I have signalled out is not the only example of activity in the early eleventh century, though it is the one of which we have the fullest details. A great deal was repaired and perhaps a little rebuilt ; but it is the characteristic of the time that the phrases in which the matters are mentioned leave one in ignorance of the extent of the work done. For instance, King Kobert certainly re-endowed St. Germain I'Auxerrois;

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whether he rebuilt it or not we cannot tell ; we can make fairly sure that the old round tower still standing at the junction of the southern transept and the nave dates from his time — and that is all. On a very much more important matter we are equally in doubt, I mean the rebuilding of St. Germain des Pres. There is a subject which, did the history exist in sufficient detail, would bear indefinite expansion. There could be nothing more important than the lessons to be learnt from this obscure but gigantic task of the transition between a half-barbarism and civilization. We read the conventional phrase that the abbey was rebuilt " from its foundations," but as we know that in some documents the same words are used for a mere restoration, it is difficult to come to a conclu- sion. What ;happened to the famous church, now five centuries old, which " since it had been burnt three times by the Normans was gravely in need of repair" ? Is that venerable tower certainly (as I would believe it to be) a relic of Cluldebert ? Did the old cruciform walls remain as a foundation for the second building ? It would be a delight in the writing of such a book as this to be able to state these things securely. When one enters the church to-day out of the Boulevard, and looks at those curious, savage capitals, with their monstrous heads and their strange beasts out of nature ; when one feels — for it ia almost physical — the mass of those enormous pillars, the impression is irremovable that one is in presence of the origins of France. Is there nothing of all that older than the eleventh century ? I could wish to believe it, but the proof is uncertain. An antiquarian can put his hand on a piece of grotesque and say with certitude, "This is of the late eleventh or early twelfth century,"

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but no one can assure us how much remains in that ugly and wonderful place of the dark vault in which Childe- bert hid the vestment and swung the great cross of Spanish gold, in which Pepin took the oath on the body of St. Germanus, in which little Charlemagne, at eight years old, held his candle in the procession and marvelled at the magnificence of the ritual, and in which Abbo wrote his naive hexameters, or climbed to watch his visions on the city wall from the high windows of the towers.

One thiag especially (though it is but a detail) it would be of a great interest to know. What is the age of the bas-relief of the Last Supper that stands above the main doorway under the later ogive of the porch? It must of course be admitted — though with reluctance — that we have not here an unique example of the subject whose appearance in early northern iconography is so rare. This sculpture dates certainly, at the earliest, from the close of the Dark Ages, but may it not be the parent of all that series of Last Suppers that marked half the church doors of the capital, and may we not have here the intro- duction of a subject that took so great an extension through- out the north during the Middle Ages ? There is a man who has written two large and immensely learned books on St. Germain alone. It is a thousand pities that they do not finally answer these and so many other questions.

With the foundation of Ansold and the rebuilding (whatever it was) of St. Germain the material side of Parisian history in the eleventh century is exhausted. The politics of the time are indeed vividly reflected in its chronicles ; the struggle between the Bishop of Paris and the Abbey of St. Denis ; the visit of Eobert of Canterbury ; the embassy that Geoffrey took to Gregory VII. 's curia

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to plead the cause of the new Bishop of Chartres, and to purge him of simony ; especially the great council of 1050, that condemned Berengarius, and threatened him with " all the arms of the kingdom : " all these mark the pro- found effect of the Cluniac mission, and of the Hilde- brandine revival which is the moral impulse of the time. You feel as you read that Paris also is entering that majestic and novel scheme of discipline and unity which the great Tuscan was laying down for the new civilization of Europe ; the city is in touch with its missionary effort, is submitted to its centralization; it corresponds with Anglo-Saxon and with Norman England ; it multiplies the appeals to Eome. But Paris still stood, in the atmosphere of this increasing vitality, without growth, and almost ignorant of rebuilding. I repeat, the time was a ferment, a preparation of the mind, but not yet a beginning of creation.

We do not even know how the preaching of the Crusade, that investiture of the Middle Ages, came to the capital. Just at the moment when the echoes of Urban's sermons would have reached Paris, we find a bishop whose name must appeal to all Englishmen, for he was the son of a Simon de Montfort, and came from the house that was in a hundred and fifty years to play so decisive a part in our constitutional history. But of how he received the call to arms, of the gathering that the little old Cathedral must have seen, of the levy that must have marched across the northern bridge to join Godfrey de Bouillon in the Ardennes, we have no record. Here, again, as in the determining crisis of the reign of Charlemagne, the history of Paris is silent, and the event that was in its ultimate effect to make a new thing of

THE EARLY MIDDLE AGES i8i

the city and of all its institutions is hardly mentioned by the writers that can be at pains to quote in fuU a letter of Anselm's, or to attack the appointment of the bishop of Paris.

The crusaders came home. They had tasted the immensity of the world ; they had marvelled at Byzantium. As they repassed through Italy they had heard the new spirit of the first schools. They had seen the civilization of the Mediterranean. Such a vast experience, coming on the white heat of their enthusiasm, forged a new con- ception of what Europe should be, and the city which they had left in ignorance and in satisfaction appeared shrunken and mean at their return. That old rude bridge of Charles the Bald's leading to the rough fortress of the Palace was not a worthy entry to the city ; the road they had marched up was not the great Eoman way of the Danube, it was not made for the flow of exchange and of new wealth that they felt in their wake like a tide. The East had asked them a hundred questions, and they returned dissatisfied to the old teachers that told them nothing of the answers. The island was a village to the soldiers that had seen the great city on the Bosphorus ; its little deep port of St. Landry, with the rough tower of Dagobert to light it, could hardly have held one ship ; its Cathedral would not have made a chapel for St. Sophia.

In everything, therefore, an instinct rather than a con- scious process pushed these men at their home-coming towards what the twelfth century was to be. In Paris, as in all the northern towns, an ill-ease that was akin to the appetite of individual genius took the generation that saw that return. The monks were cramped in their halls, the schools confessed their folly and their routine, the poets

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began a language of their own. The place was fiUed with that vigour which is half prophetic, and which you wiU dis- cover in the dawn of every great renascence ; and though they did not yet know what name it was to be given, they knew that something was at the point of birth whose clothing was to be the Gothic, whose expression was to be the University, and whose great maturity was to be the Kingdom of France.

That generation felt that they were the fathers of a much wider day than Europe had known since the Eomans ; they looked forward and expected its great tide of wealth and its masses of population, its endless rebuild- ing, its trebled cities, with a hope and an unquestioning pleasure in creation that not even the sixteenth century nor our own has known. Almost alone of the sudden steps of change this expansion was without reactionaries. Three young men, all boys together, especially felt the pleasing trouble of the new age ; Abelard, Suger, and Louis the king : all three just past the gate of their twenty-first year, all three running out to meet the change and to dig each his own channel for the rising sea. Abelard was to begin the answer to the questions, Suger to show how the new spirit should build, and Louis had the greatest task of all, for he was to leave the feudal smallness of the Palace and to build before he died the foundations of a general kingdom. It was with the iirst year of the century, with the news of the taking of Jerusalem, that he began his work. For eight years his weak father dragged him- self towards death, and at last, in 1108, a man of thirty, the young, short soldier looked out alone over the Isle de France and began his work.

Eound these three names, then, let me group the

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flowering of the tweKth century and make each of them a centre round which to gather the revival.

And first comes Abelard, because his task came first in time and because he was closely knit with the past, looking backward a little, whereas the other two looked only forward. I have said that he first answered the c[uestions and have spoken of him as a voice altogether new ; and this description of him is a true one, for if a modern man could be granted a vision of the growth of our learning, certainly this man would be the first who would stand well in the sunlight; but it must not leave a false im- pression of what the mind was at in the close of the preceding century. That ferment of the eleventh century which it has been my attempt to fix as the character of the first stirring of civilization had its most powerful reaction in philosophy, and the same generation that saw the revolution of the English conquest saw also the main question of metaphysics discussed for the first time since the life of Erigena, or, to be more usual, since the Empire fell and sleep came on men's minds.

The matter is hardly germane to this book, yet I must say one word on it, because this beginning of dis- cussion is what most clearly illustrates the revival. The question that the schools had raised is this: of two things one, either the things that gviide mankind — their sense of justice, their knowledge that this or that is so, their appreciation that the thing they see is of a kind and has a name of its own ; either these things have some- where a reality and are, or all our general words are built up on the anarchy of a thousand details. The scheme of things reposes either upon a base of infinite number and diversity, or depends from some unity whose expression is

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in the creation of real types. By the one view a man, a good deed, a colour, is what it is because a real prototype exists in the mind of God ; by the other the whole scheme is a shifting mass of small realities, infinitely reducible, and united only in this — they all are, they exist. The discussion is not logomachy. It has its roots in the per- petual contradiction that laughs at reason and whose despair is dualism; for if you take the first of the two issues, why, then, you are led into every kind of phantasy and absurdity ; you must take things blindly that men tell you, for, if you have not the key by revelation and dogma, the whole is meaningless. If you take the second there is no issue either, the world resolves itself into a myriad phenomena, knowledge is but the satisfaction of curiosity, thought lapses, at the worst, into observation, or at the best, into feeling. To this discussion the time I deal of gave the names of Nominalist and Eealist. He was a nominalist who thought that all abstractions were mere names and that right or beauty were but a rough average of separate emotions ; he was a realist who believed that such qualities (and for that matter the ideas of the commonest things) were but shadows of a reality living somewhere and being, beyond the stars.

The analysis is imperfect ; I have no space to make it just. The Church, sombre and determined, true to her Platonic tradition, took up the side of the idea ; she pur- sued the nominalists with anathema, and asserted per- petually, what her forerunners had asserted in Alexandria, that all things were in a mind, and that the words were flesh. That attitude has been called by historians the " party of the bishops ; " it was nothing of the kind, it was the soul of the Church speaking ; dumb Christendom,

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that works by gestures, was behind the men who defended it. But it was natural that in an early time that vibrated with youth the obvious should fight a stout battle; the men of the latter eleventh century were like boys, to whom the world about one, with its thousand sights, is the immediate and only thing. They tended to throw away the metaphysio, as men at morning throw off dreams ; they tended to the denial of that ancient doctrine whereby the things we touch are real only because of things we cannot see. The Church condemned them, and the quarrel hung even.

Now it was upon such a discussion that Abelard came as a young man, full of debate. A Breton, as Pelagius had been ; one of that dark race that holds all the capes and islands of the Atlantic, that feels so vividly every passing impression, that is so intense in its physical life ; inclined by every passion, therefore, to the new rationalism, he yet had this greatness, that he was the first to try some reconciliation of either position. He saw that what men held so passionately at variance must have a core of unity ; and in his search for an absolute that should include the two, he passed through the discussions of his time as a fashioned vessel passes through the moving waters of the sea. Every one that heard him found in his speech a new message. It was for this reason that the young men made him their teacher, and for this reason that he quarrelled with all the old, even with his great master, William of Champeaux.

Every one knows his story by heart, and every one has read the quotation where the passion of Heloise found speech in the revival of the classics. There is no better mark of his isolation and grandeur than that romance,

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which he alone of all the philosophers is great enough to bear, and no better commentary upon his story than this : that his romance has been made more of than his learning. He stands at the beginning of the intellectual life of Europe, with the troubled, deep, and fiery eyes that frightened the community at St. Denis, looking down history as he looked down from the Paraclete, like a master silencing his fellows.

But Abelard is something more : he is also the type of all the great revolutionaries that have come up the provincial roads for these six centuries, to burn out their lives in Paris, and to ialay with the history of the city. I can never pass through the narrow streets at the north of Notre Dame without remembering him. He taught in the Close and disputed there ; he met St. Bernard in the cloister ; he was master of the early schools ; he first led a crowd of students to the Hill of Ste. Genevieve, and though the secession returned from it at that time, he may justly be appealed to as the founder of the Uni- versity on the slope beyond the river. The fourteenth century, that gloried in St. Thomas and that knew the colleges, was ungrateful not to remember the death of this man, whom Peter the Venerable sheltered and absolved in the awful shadow of Oluny. For all these reasons it is a good thing that the romantic spirit of the early nine- teenth century brought him and Heloise to lie in the same grave at Pere la Chaise.

Louis VI., who did all that made this early Paris on the material side, has yet no greater place in the history of the capital. His perpetual and successful wars, the campaigns in which he gave room to the crown of France, do not concern this book. It is enough to say that they

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explain what you shall read of in a moment of the new power of the kings. With his name this must especially be noted, the sudden new growth of Paris. He is, among the three whom I chose out as the persons of the revival, that one who most symbolizes the physical strength of this time, its breeding energy, and its violence of action. For he was stout, a soldier, a great eater and drinker, a man who laughed loudly, and who was always for doing. There ran in his character the vein of prudence that was a mark of the Capetians ; but he was almost alone among them m his cordiality and hearty way of making success. Paris under him and under his son (whose reign until the bishopric of Maurice de Sully I would make but. an appendix to that of his father) grew heartily, as the king's own estate and own body grew ; that is the characteristic marking the time.

I have insisted in this chapter and in the last on the petty limits of the town, especially since the Norman siege; under Louis VI. it doubled at least in size. One finds a gate up at St. Merri's (but it was not a gate in a regular wall, for that did not exist), a q[uarter close to where now is St. Eustache, a continuous group of houses out eastward beyond St. Gervais. The life and institu- tions of the place grew with its size. Here first we have the Chatelet rebuilt, and probably given as a home to the rough police of the city; here the old markets are endowed, regulated, chartered; their buildings renovated, their rights defined, and their name-n- the Halles — for the first time fixed in history. The life of the Palace grows larger, the endowment of the churches more frequent and better governed.

The son that succeeded him (when he died in 1137)

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added nothing to all this, but stood by, as it were, while the tide of the city life racreased. Pious, not over-resolute, governed, luckily for France, by the growing power of the lawyers and the excheq^uer system that was growing up in the Palace, he dignified his life by the great adventure of the second Crusade, but he counts little in the history of the capital. It was an accident that the great revolu- tion in architecture, the chief expression of the twelfth century change, should have occurred in his lifetime — unless, indeed, it be argued (as it may very reasonably be) that a second experience of the east, led by the king, spurred on the approach of the Gothic. Till 1161, which is the foundation of Notre Dame, there is very little to be said of his reign in connection with Paris. But one anecdote — though it is hardly connected with such a book as this — is tempting to tell, because it is so bright a mirror of the time. When Pope Eugenius III. came to Paris in 1145, before the Crusade, he went naturally to the Cathedral, and he went in pomp. All that part of the Cit6 was, untO. Philip Augustus, the Jewish quarter, and the Jews came out in great pride and presented to the Pope their roll of the law, veiled according to ritual, for they were very proud of his visit. He blessed them all paternally and drew a parable from the veil over the law to their separation from the Church, after which they went home rejoicing at so fine a pageant; he went off to eat a paschal lamb with the king. There, I think, is a most typical picture of the inconsistency, the simplicity, and the astounding contrasts of the early Middle Ages.

If there is little to say of Paris during the reign of the great soldier-king, and of his son before 1161, there is but little to say either of the third of the three men

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that I take to typify the time. Nevertheless, for the sake of his personality, though so little of actual Parisian history is connected with him, I would wish to dwell on him for a moment. All these three, Abelard, Louis, and Suger, were contemporaries; all three had met, for Suger was the king's most intimate friend and biographer, and again was the abbot of St. Denis when Abelard retired there after his shame. And of the three Suger is essentially this ; where Abelard is the intellect and Louis the body, he, the monk, is the soul of the early twelfth century.

Suger was order. It was in the nature of things that the early twelfth century should produce the nationalities and should gather under the kings; but the action of these kings was more organic than deliberate, more a necessity than a plan. See the wide difference between Louis VI., a soldier full of humour, and Lotus VII., his son, gentle, uncertain, a trifle monkish ; and yet see how, under each, the nation and the capital grew. It was, indeed, a fate of the time that centralized and ordered societies should arise, and whether (as in France) the formative action came soon with an active leader, or (as in England) a period of anarchy interrupted the middle of the century and delayed the development, yet in each country such an end was certain, and kings came of them- selves in the general movement. But a guide to all this — some one who should regulate the expansion of the period and turn its force to exact uses, was a less certain thing. In England and in France alone such a personality was granted, and in France more perfectly than in England ; for Eoger of Salisbury and his family were the servants, rather than the advisers of the Henries, and their energies were narrowed upon the special function of the curia,

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while Suger in his long life was the friend, the vicegerent, the biographer, and the counsellor of the Crown.

He had been Louis VI.'s scout and tactician from the neighbourhood of Le Puiset, his director in the national policy against the anarchy of the barons. He also gave to the king, in the first struggle against Germany, the gathering of 1124, the Oriflamme from the altar of St. Denis, standing sponsor when first that famous banner of the Vexin went out to the wars. He engineered the difficult transition of the king's last months, taking the boy Louis down to Aquitaine for the betrothal; and when the soldier had died upon his cloth of ashes, it was he again who was tutor and guardian to the perils of the monarchy. He stood out against what an historian must welcome, but what a contemporary statesman could only regret, the splendid disaster of the second Crusade ; he, in Louis VII.'s absence, governed the kingdom so wisely that he may be said to have laid the foundations for Philip Augustus, and, from his new house at the St. Merri gate, he put the capital itself under a wise theocracy. From so much fame, success, and wisdom, he retired to the govern- ment of his abbey, and his death made such a halt in the history of his time that the Chapter sent upon it an encyclical to the churches of France, as though his mere passing were a crisis in the religious body of the nation.

The date of his death was 1151, and with that middle of the century we enter a knot of years in which the confused and increasing vigour of the twelfth century, the chaos of creation, began to take on form. For with Suger's death as an origin the next fourteen years give us the crowning of Henry the Angevin in England, and the beginning of his great empire; the presence of Maurice

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de Sully in the bishopric of Paris; the foundation of Notre Dame, and at last, in 1165, the birth of Philip Augustus. And, as was fitting to such a climax, it was there also that the Middle Ages found their natural expression, and that the Gothic came upon Paris. Suger had first received it, and, were his great Abbey of St. Denis within the scope of this book, it is there that I should trace the change that transformed northern Europe. For it was he, the formative genius of his generation, who in rebuilding his church dared the innovation, and you may still see his inscription on the west front — to the left the Eomanesque in full heaviness and traditional convention, to the right the pointed arches. But though he set the example, and though his apse is the first complete piece of Gothic that we know, yet in this story of Paris I can consider only the parallel thing, the Cathedral of Notre Dame, whose plan was the advent of the new building in Paris; and before I turn to that creation let me show what this change in aspect, upon the verge of which the city was trembling, meant to that generation.

We who live now make our pictures of the Middle Ages in terms of the Gothic; we see the great armies passing under gables, we imagine the councils held beneath high vaults, and the passionate appeal of St. Bernard sounds to us through a dim light, coloured and framed in the ogive. Until quite lately an illustration of Charle- magne, of the Capets, or of the Norman kings in England, was made with all the surroundings of that architecture. It would be possible to point out a hundred examples of this in our museums, and I have now in my mind one in particular — a picture of Eichard Cceur de Lion's death, where an English artist has amassed the detail of the

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fourteenth century to decorate a scene wMch, passing before the close of the twelfth in the wilds of Auvergne, cannot have had a hint of the Gothic in its real setting. Even where we do not actually state or draw this historical error, yet we carry a confused conception of many centuries in which the Gothic was developing, and we imagine some note of it everywhere as the accompaniment of early illumination, of the Church in her supremacy, of the Reconquista, the feudal tie, and the Crusade. It is natural that such a fallacy should arise, because wherever something very old remains in Europe, there also is the spire and the high relief, the complexity of omamen,t, the height and the pointed arch that were the characters of that style. There is not a town in northern Europe where some relic of that spirit is not preserved ; in some it remains universal and untouched. While, on the other hand, there is not even the smallest country place where the Eomanesque remains unique and unqualified by a later feeling. And the architects cannot help adding to this misconception, for it is their business to find out the origins of the matter and to describe the transition ; con- cerned (of necessity) in the structural problems of their art, they show at great length how here and there the pointed arch developed, how its mechanical value forced it upon the builders, how it solved the difficulty of the lateral thrust which had disturbed two generations of exaggerated attempt ; how it permitted height — which was the glory of the men who built Winchester (for example) or Beaulieu — yet absolved them from the penalty of thick, unwieldy walls ; how it gave a plastic medium almost, a contrivance whereby any proportion of aisle to nave, any varying width of parallel avenues, could be combined.

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All this is true. The Gothic was certainly a mechanical discovery, and as certainly flourished, because it suddenly answered so many questions upon the practical difficulties of building. But it is impossible for history to make of it what it seems to the architect. It was too well fitted for the time, too abrupt in its success, too exact an expression of the mind of the revival, to be merely an accidental or material thing influencing the plans of builders. The soul made it ; a need that had run through now two generations of northern Europe discovered its satisfaction; and if I may put the matter somewhat fantastically, I would say that the lances appearing with the Crusades, the tall masts of ships, and the deep lanes of the East, were its types. That period had returned to the mountains and the great woods ; it had tasted a belated joy of the old nomadic life. When first the profound instructs of northern Europe — the passion for mystery that comes out of its long darkness, for florescence that belongs to its sudden spring-times, for high relief and multitudinous detail that is necessary to its weak light — when these had first been awakened again by the invasions, the lower Ufe of the empire and the barbarians that conquered it were both too simple, too narrow and too .weary to create a novel and satisfying type in archi- tecture. They could but continue and debase the Eoman tradition ; and when at last their own instinct half pre- vailed, it did but take the shape of those sharp grotesques and monstrous perversions that fill in closely a whole space with innumerable angles, and recall in the capitals of the tenth and eleventh centuries the carvings of modern savages. But now with the new wars all the old spirit came back upon a Europe immensely younger, more

0

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refreshed and yet more learned, and the curiosity and experience of so wide a life of wandering and battle gave itself a triumphant expression.

The building of Notre Dame may be taken as a centre round which to group every characteristic of this renas- cence, which I have called a revolution. I have already insisted'6n the novelty of the Gothic spirit ; I would now insist upon its daring. There was in all Paris nothing larger than buildings of from fifty to sixty yards in length, from thirty to forty feet in height. The Palace occupied a great area, but it was rather a group of buildings than one. Sc[uare towers here and there marked the churches ; they were (with the single exterior exception of St. Ger- man's) of little height. But a man coming in from the countrysides would have seen, when Notre Dame was building, something typical on the material side of what the mind of the twelfth century had been. For the first time in centuries upon centuries that creative passion for vastness, whose exaggeration is the enormous, but whose absence is the sure mark of pettiness and decUne, had found expression. High above the broken line of the little flat grey town, one could see a great phalanx of scaffolding, up and thick like the spears of a company, and filled in with a mist of building and the distant noise of workmen as the yards are where they make huge ships to-day on river sides. Three times, four times the height of the tall things of the town, occupying in its bulk a notable division of the whole island, it would have made such a man think that for the future Paris would not hold a cathedral, but rather that the cathedral would make little Paris its neighbourhood and close. From Meudon, from Valerian, from all the ring of heights whence

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for so many hundred years men had faintly made out the obscure town in the distance, now this mass of scaffolding stood against the sky and marked the capital ; and when the Cathedral was finished, and nothing was left of the buUding but the workmen's yard that clung always to the base of medigeval work, it bulked above the town as its daughters, Eheims and Amiens, do over the provincial cities. The cathedral of the twelfth and thirteenth cen- turies was deliberately intended to overshadow and domi- nate its surroundings ; and so far from failing in this, the metropolitan church, which is now but a central point of Paris, then exaggerated, if anything, the effect of mass and pre-eminence. Beauvais alone perhaps gives a parallel to the original effect of Notre Dame when its roof first over- hung the city, for in Beauvais not only is the town still small but the effect of the Cathedral is heightened by the contrast between the little old Eoman Basilica and the highest nave in France.

The dates in the buHding of Notre Dame furnish, rare as they are, excellent landmarks in the development of contemporary Paris. It was Maurice de Sully (a great man thrown up from the people by the tide of democratic learning that marked the time, and that was so soon to create the University) who first began the demolition of Childebert's church. That was in 1161, and Eobert of Auxerre's phrase, " from the foundations," mediaeval cliche though it is, is here accurate, for the new church did not follow in any way the plan of the old Basilica, in which the eagerness and growth of fifty years had felt so cramped and Ul at ease.

The choir (at which the work began) came far east- ward of the Merovingian altar; the western fapade wag

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laid down to cut right across the nave of the first church. But for a comparison of the two sites I must refer my reader to what I said in the last chapter of Cluldebert's foimdation. For two years the pulling down of the huge rough stones of the Basilica and the digging of the founda- tions in the damp soil of the island continued till, iu 1163, the Pope, Alexander III., laid the first stone. Twenty- two years passed, Louis VII. lapsed into weakness, Philip Augustus was born and grew into manhood ; in 1185 the choir was so far walled and completed that Heraclius, the Bishop of Jerusalem, could say the first Mass at the high altar. Two years later his see was to be destroyed, and Saladin garrisoned his palace, but Notre Dame had the fortune to receive the last union of Eome and Paris and Jerusalem when all three were in the circle of one unity.

The series that marks each stage of the buLldiag con- tinues. In 1186 Geoffrey of Brittany, the father of Prince Arthur and the son of Henry II. of England, was buried before the high altar; but whether or no it was the Crusade that delayed the work, the completion of the choir cannot be fixed before 1196, for in that year the patron and conceiver of the whole matter, Maurice the Bishop, died, and it is one of the provisions of his will that a hundred pounds should be spent on lead for the roof of the choir. It marks the contrast in size between the old Basilica and the new church that Louis VII. had given but a tenth of that sum for the repair of the roof of Childe- bert's cathedral, some years before it was pulled down.

So far it is very dif&cult to say whether any of the Gothic had been admitted into the work. The roof of the new choir was very high pitched outside, and within may

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or may not have shown a pointed vaulting, but the windovrs were certainly round-arched and ran, not in high ogives as they do now, markiag the whole height of the wall, but in three tiers. The first, on the ground, were the lights of chapels ; the second and third divided between them the remaining eighty feet of the walls. There was also this particularity in the appearance of the half-finished church at the opening of the thirteenth century that, had you stood behind it and looked up at the apse, you would have seen the building rising in three great steps, as it were, from the ground. The lowest of these was the ring of chapels round the apse and choir. It was roofed with lead pitched at a slope sufficiently sharp to be clearly seen from the street below. Above this and within rose a similar round wall, whose height was equal to that of the chapels ; higher still, and yet narrower, appeared the main wall of the choir. And this last weighed within upon wide round arches, whose immense pillars still mark the turn of the ambulatory, while it was supported from without by very massive and heavy buttresses which rose in two arches, the first reposing on the middle roof, " the step," which I have just described ; the second, springing from the great square pinnacles that divided the span, reached up to the top of the walls and received the thrust of the main vault. The first and oldest part of Notre Dame had then a character of the Eomanesque, and might have remained the last and most audacious example of that style at the moment when its efforts at height and majesty were producing the Gothic.

For the rest of the Cathedral it was, by the first fifteen years of the new century, at perhaps half its height from the ground so far as the nave was concerned, and possibly

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the transepts were already roofed in. In these later parts the new pointed style had complete play. The pillars of the nave seem indeed to have been designed for the Eomanesque ; they are heavy and short and their capitals have not, for the most part, the conventional foliage that marks the thirteenth century, but on these beginnings the pointed arch was placed as the building grew under the hands of a generation that had adopted the new manner of building as a part of the transformation of their society. On the west front — ^whose porches were already begun — the same richness of detail and the same display of symbolism appeared as was in a few years to produce the marvel of Amiens. There was the Door of our Lady, with the zodiac and the works of the months, the picture of human life. The central door, with the scheme of the Eedemption, Our Lord on the middle pier teaching the Apostles upon either side; and above on the tympanum, the innumerable figures of a Last Judgment. There also are the virtues and the vices which men may choose between, all very quaint and pleasant, especially Cowardice, who is running at speed from a great hare. The southern door, the Door of St. Anne, is perhaps the most interesting of all, for it was all but finished as a round-arch, Eomanesque door when the Gothic was introduced into the building; and that is why the figures in the ogival tympanum have had to be finished incongruously, and why the relief of Our Lady with the Holy Child does not crown the whole as once it was meant to do. For this reason also the sculptor filled in his space a little awkwardly and mechanically with a couple of stiff angels, standing awk- wardly on scrolls. But this group has one figure very characteristic of the Middle Ages, for Louis VII. is there

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giving his charter to the new cathedral, and it is an excellent example of how in that time of slow bmlding an original plan with all its details could be carried out even thirty or forty years after it was drawn. In all this first exultation of the thirteenth century there is a dignity and nobleness that shone over Europe for too short a time ; the fourteenth century lost it in prettiness ; the fifteenth forgot it in a cruel extravagance of beauty.

I cannot close this description of the origins of the Cathedral — already over long — without telling the modern reader that the iron work of these fine hinges which he admires so much were not made by men but by a two- horned she-devil of the name of Biscornette, to whom the smith had sold his soul. But whether he redeemed it at last, like the young men whose story is carved over the Porte Eouge, there is no record to tell us.

Notre Dame, as I have said, was destined by the accident of its generation to be a mixed building of the transition : the choir mainly Eomanesque, the nave Gothic, and the western fa9ade (already as high as the open gallery between the towers) a perfect model of the new style, when in 1218 a happy accident gave us the incomparable imity which the Cathedral alone possesses among mediaeval monuments ; for in that year, on the eve of the Assumption, four inspired thieves climbed into the roof-tree and warily let down ropes with slip-knots to lasso the silver candlesticks on the altar. These they snared, but as they pulled them up the lights set fire to the hangings that were stretched for the feast, and the fire spread to the whole choir. The damage was not irre- parable. The woodwork was burnt and a portion of the stonework (especially in the windows) was damaged, but

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the place might easily have been rebuilt on the old plan. It is good proof of the enthusiasm which had been lit for the new kind of building that this misfortune was made a pretext for bringing the choir and apse into harmony with the rest of the church. The flying buttresses were rebuilt in one light and prodigious span, the three " steps " of the outer roofs were cut down and the sheer wall showed its full height above the street ; the two upper tiers of windows were united in one series of deep pointed lights full of colour, of which Eouen was already giving an example, and which do so much for the interior effect of the Cathedral, All this was done so rapidly — as build- ing was then counted — that by 1235, when St. Louis was a boy of twenty, just married to the chUd from Provence, and beginning to rule his country with a smile, the whole church was ready. They looked at its perfect harmony and forbore to add the spires that had been drawn in the first plan.

With the mass of Notre Dame thus completed, the rest of the century saw the completion of the last details, the new chapels all round the apse, which filled in the space between the buttresses, and whose building lasted on for close on seventy years ; the southern facade that Jean de Chelles raised in 1257 ; the piercing of the Porte Eouge. But that date of 1235 marks, so far as it is ever marked in a mediseval building, the end of the great task which Maurice de Sully had imdertaken before the old men of that time were bom, and which yet looks as though one man and one decade had created its unique simplicity.

The old Church of St. Stephen, which had served during the building as a pro-cathedral, was pulled down after its thoixsand years of service and in spite of its Eoman

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memories, and within four years the king, in the freshness of the new stone and the recent colours of the mouldings, brought the Crown of Thorns to the Cathedral and dreamt of his eastern adventure.

I have been compelled for the sake of clearness to follow the story of Notre Dame consecutively, but, begun as the church was in the very origins of the revival, and ended in the full light of the thirteenth century, its seventy odd years cover the turning-point to which I must now return, and which is called in French history the reign of Philip Augustus. That reign, which stretches from 1180 to 1223, closes the second period of the early Middle Ages and opens the third, and to mark the transition three things dignify the time of which I must now speak : the Louvre, the Wall, and the University.

It is imagined — though upon very slender evidence — that the first invaders had established a camp to the west of the northern suburbs, and some historians will have it that from a block-house or " Louver," which he perma- nently garrisoned, Childeric (or Clovis, for even that elementary point is doubtful) maintained the first siege against Lutetia, when that key of northern Gaul was holding out as an advanced post of the American league. I say the evidence is slight, and the connection of the names rather fantastic, for there is no mention of any- thing remotely resembling the word " Louvre " in this quarter until the twelfth century. But when Philip Augustus determined to build his wall, it was a very evident site for a kind of outer bastion which should have this double purpose : first, to stand down river below Paris (as the Tower stood with respect to London) and intercept all invasion from the great valley road ;

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secondly, to be a refuge for the new strong monarchy as against its own capital and its own dependent nobles. The first of these designs is especially evident in the high tower built over the river (" the corner tower," as they call it in the Middle Ages), with a chain stretched right across the stream to the Tour de Nesle on the far side ; the second in the fact that the Louvre was set on the edge of a suburb, outside the new wall that was just rising round the city, and, lastly, that it was built altogether at the king's expense — an important thing to notice, for in the jealous distinctions of the early Middle Ages it afforded the contrast which Philip needed. The Louvre became absolutely his own ; the wall, built with burgher money and largely by burgher labour, was always more or less claimed by the city. The time, as I shall show a little below this, was especially marked by the growth of the towns, by their rapidly increasing wealth, and by that curious communal movement in which the corporations regained in law their political position, the autonomy and the weight in national affairs which they had inherited from the Empire, and which — though never wholly lost — had been obscured in the simplicity and barbarism of the Dark Ages.

There is nothing very precisely known as to the date of the foundation of the Louvre. It was certainly not earlier than 1190, the origin of the wall and the year of Philip's departure on the Crusade. It equally certainly was not later than 1192, when, just after his return, when he was making such intense preparation for the attack on the Angevin power; but within these two years it is difficult to make out the exact moment of the first works. It rose, however, rapidly, a new thing in a small

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new suburb of the main town ; built of the hard stone of the quarries on the Mont Ste. Genevieve, that were even then nearly exhausted, and whose quality so often deter- mines the age of a mediaeval bidlding, it must have shown, even in the freshness of the recent buildings about it, a peculiar brilliancy of surface. Its four plain corner towers, its huge round central keep, were framed in gardens and had for neighbours the unspoilt fields of riverside. In these also rose the new chapel that the Dowager of Cherry had built to St. Honore, and a few scattered houses stood along the country road that was the continuation of the main artery of northern Paris, and that was soon to take its name from the dedication of the church. There, a little to the west of the king's castle, the little church had been built and dedicated to the memory of that recent martyrdom at Canterbury which had so startled Europe ; it was the Church of St. Thomas, standing a little south of where the statue of Gambetta is now, and famous for many hundred years, especially for its small oratory of St. Nicholas which outlived it, and was (I believe) destroyed only as late as the reign of Louis XV. There, still farther out in the country, stood the new College des Bons Enfants, and so one might cite perhaps half a dozen other buildings in the surrounding lanes ; but in general the impression of the Louvre and its skirt of houses was that of a quarter out of the town and attached rather to the fields about the city than to the municipal Hfe.

This also must be said to complete the picture of what was to become so famous a centre of national activity. It was simple and small, meant rather for a prison than for a living-place. The king for a century or more still

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held to the Palace in the Cite. It was in the building in the island that the peers gathered to the court of 1203 in which John of England was condemned for the murder of Arthur, and from which the war on the Angevin territories set out. It was in the Palace, again, that St. Louis always lived, that he held his justice, and that he gratified his delight in lovely buildiag. But it was the Louvre that served as a prison for the greatest of the peers when "Ferrand tout enferre," the fat and mournful Count of Flanders, came back a prisoner after Bouvines, sitting sQently in his 'cart and hearing the populace make puns about his name and the grey horses drawing him ; and it was in the Louvre that Euguerrand de Coucy lay, wonder- ing whether St. Louis would spare his life, and longing to be back in his own fine tower, so much taUer and stronger than his prison was. For St. Louis had determined to stop his tyrannies, and for hanging three students that had killed rabbits in his warren the king had condemned him to death ; but later he took a fine from him instead. To a part of that fine we owe the Cordeliers.

I have said that this first Louvre was very small and simple. How small it was any one can see to-day, by noting the plan of its walls marked in white stones on the common grey of the paving. It held in one quarter of the inner courtyard of what is now called " the old Louvre ; '' the south-western corner of the Medicean palace corre- sponds exactly to the south-western tower of Philip Augustus, but the north-eastern corner of the twelfth- century Louvre would barely come to the middle of the courtyard. It was simple also — a square moat ; four towers which, I presume, were not even crenellated; a plain wall north, south, east, and west ; and in the middle.

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very large for so small a place, the keep, a round tower almost without windows and twice as high as the wall.

I have mentioned the Louvre first because, though it was probably begun at the same time as, or a few months later than, the city wall, yet it was finished much earlier. The Louvre took some ten years in building — the wall, after a first haste in construction when the treasury was full^ lingered afterwards and was not finished for a full twenty- one years. To appreciate the importance of that enter- prise two things are necessary. One must remember that, almost alone of the cities of northern Europe, Paris had had no defensive wall for centuries, and one must also remember that by its building a kind of seal and termina- tion was put upon the first stage in the development of the city.

And both these matters hang together. If Paris had never siace the Eomans given herself a new defence, it was because a kind of doubt hung over the nature of the city. The first expansion which comes with the eai-ly Prankish kings, the extension of the northern and southern suburbs, the ring of great monasteries, might have coalesced into one town, to which a later century, the eighth perhaps, might have given what was in all the Dark and Middle Ages a symbol of unity. But just when this success promised to reach the new capital, there fell upon it the negKgence of the Carlovingian period. Paris shrank ; the great siege of the Normans reduced it to the original island, the defensive works of Eudes and Gozlin were but the old Eoman rampart and the towers at the heads of the bridges. Then with the new vigour of the Capetians the town grew out again, the northern suburb grew dense, the southern hill was filled, for all its large gardens and

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enclosures, with a half circle of houses ; but it was fitting that no definite limit should be set to the vague energy of the new growth until Philip the Conqueror should have welded the kingdom, and could make his capital a strict and definite thing with a corporation and set rights and an individuality of its own. The wall baptized Paris, as it were, gave it a name, or if the metaphor be preferred, confirmed its majority.

Philip Augustus may have foreseen that the expansion after his death would be as rapid as it had been during his youth : or he may have imagined that the startling expansion of wealth and energy which his reign saw had reached finality, and that his grandson would inherit a capital in which the organization of the new economic development, not its further fostering, would be the chief task of the king. He allowed for some space between the main bulk of the houses and his fortification, but it almost seems as though even that open belt of market gardens was designed for food in time of siege rather than for future growth. How the wall stood to the city in its completion, this rough description will show. Paris in the years 1200-1223 was longer than it was broad ; the con- tinuous houses would stretch from the western line of St. Germain de I'Auxerrois and the Institute to the eastern limit of St. Gervais and the Quai de la Toumelle, but southward it did not reach much beyond the modern Place de la Sorbonne, nor northward beyond St. Eustache and the Halles — if so far. It was then very oval and long in plan. But the wall was more nearly circular ; it touched the town on the east and west, passed somewhat outside of it on the south, and left a large unoccupied belt on the north. The sketch-map upon page 300 will show the line

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it took much better than any words can do, yet I would indicate it roughly for the modern reader as follows.

Starting from the river, just where the Eue du Louvre joins the quay, it went northward to the site of the Oratoire ; thence a long curve east and north took it in a slant across what are now the streets north of St, Eustache ; it ran east and west for a little way, about on the line of the Eue de I'Ours, then curved down southward to the river, just within the site of the present Eue St. Paul and excluding the church of that name. It thus reached the river about opposite the middle of the Isle St. Louis. Across that island (which was of course unhabited and remained so for centuries) the wall stood over a deep ditch that cut the island in two, and here, as at the Louvre, a chain was thrown across the river to where it started again on the southern bank, at the Quai de la Tournelle (which takes its name from the comer tower) ; the wall then ran southward up the hill behind Ste. Genevieve, and so as to include the site of the Pantheon, and from this summit turned northward again by the line of what is still the " Eue des Fosses St. Germain," " the Street of the Moat," to reach the south bank of the Seine where the Institute is, opposite its starting point.

It will be seen from this how great a town Paris had become. Eoughly speaking, this nearly circular oval had a diameter of a mile, and this was more than filled up before the date which I have made the end of this chapter. By the time St. Louis died, even that wide circumference was hidden here and there between the inner town and the suburbs grown to meet it, and Paris had once again taken on that irregular form of spokes thrown outward from a centre which is the mark of a period of growth

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in cities, and which, by the middle of the next century, necessitated the new wall of Etienne Marcel.

If a modern man wishes to get some exact picture of what this new cloak for Paris seemed like, I would put it thus. From without, as one came from the fields the wall gave the whole a very clear and finished look that the town had never before possessed. For, like all the new building in that revival of civilization, it was of well-dressed stone, exact and calculated, and everything was finished with neatness and small detail. It was not very high — perhaps less than thirty feet — and the towers, that marked it at intervals of some eighty yards, were of the same size and conical roofing as you may note to-day in the towers of the Conciergerie that were built at the same time. It was simple also ; fortunately with- out crenellations ; beneath it everywhere there went an even moat, and at all the main streets of the city, St. Honore, St. Denis, St. Martin, St. Antoine, St. Bernard, St. Jacq^ues, and so forth, was a gate with double towers and drawbridges. Here and there an odd accident broke the symmetry of the plan. Thus, what had for so long been a kind of exchange for the merchants, the " Parloir aux Bourgeois," jutted out from the wall into the moat just where the Cafe Harcourt is now on the Eue Souf&ot, and near the St. Denis gate a house was buUt overhanging the battlements. For an Englishman that knows London perhaps the best way to recall the work of Philip Augustus is to stand opposite Westminster Hall and look over the depression where the Cromwell statue stands, towards the new work of the recent restoration. There you have the moat, the white, clean stone, the moderate height, the small chamber jutting out from the main building, all of which

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reproduce, with some exactness, the effect of the first wall of Paris.

Of very much that Philip Augustus did in the city, of how he began the re-building of the Palace on the island that St. Louis continued ; of how he would sit at a window there, and oyerlook, for his pleasure, the flowing of the Seine — as Julian had done eight hundred years before ; of how he paved the main streets for the first time since the Eomans (thus bequeathing to Paris a legacy of noise which she has never lost) ; of how he took in the Halles and chartered them for a market and enclosed the Cemetery of the Innocents, which will take so large a place in my next chapter — of all this I can only make the passing mention that is afforded by these lines, since it is necessary to show in its own proportion the rise of the University.

I propose to deal with the buildings themselves and with the many colleges in my next chapter, because the thirteenth century, which saw all over Europe this new part of civilization affirmed, yet tells us very little of what its schools were like, or of how its collegiate system arose. All we know is that the fourteenth suddenly presents us all over Europe with a similar arrangement and discipline of the schools, and produces upon every side the great organ of knowledge peculiar to western Europe, the climax of national activity, whose spirit alone remains to Paris or Edinburgh, and whose corpse is so carefully preserved in the Gothic foundations, the vast expenses, the luxury, and the isolation of Cambridge and Oxford. But if the fourteenth century gives us the full form of the thing, its origin and even its greatest vigour date from a hundred years before, and Paris, as it was one of the first, is also by

p

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far the most interesting of the corporations that were till so lately the voices of Europe.

The schools in which Abelard had taught were but the old monastic halls in the Close, to the north of Notre Dame. He did, indeed, upon one occasion lead a body of students into a kind of secession on to the hill of Ste. Genevieve, but until the end of the tweKth century the very rapid growth of teaching and discussion seems to have gathered in what had been for centuries the half- empty benches of the monks, clustered always (as at St. Germain I'Auxerrois ^) near their churches, and founded originally perhaps for the instruction of catechumens. Perhaps the Church of Ste. Genevieve had some claims to distinction, more probably the larger spaces of the hill attracted the thousands of students who had accumulated in the city; at any rate, by the year 1200 it was on the Mons Lucotitius that all that swarm of debate and eager- ness for learning was fixed, and from that group of years to our own day the south bank has been the Latin quarter, and has been — if ever that commonplace metaphor has had a meaning — the heart of Paris. For it has been youth continually renewed through seven hundred years.

During these seventy years, that were merely formative, the University seems to have had no home and but a chang- ing organization. Its anarchy reflected the confusion of the crowds of young men, who ran almost as they chose from one popular teacher to another ; and if at last this turbulence settled down into the strict order of the collegiate system, the praise must be to the monasteries, which here, as in England, became the nuclei of the future purely academic

' The Qua! des Eooles, whicli recalls this old custom to-day, is one of the oldest place-names in Paris.

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houses. The twin saints whose influence — the vision of the one, the other's energy — is shed over all that generation were, in the activity of their successors, the first to set this example. In 1221 the Dominicans appeared and founded their convent just within the wall on the extreme south, in 1225 the Franciscans made a similar settlement within the gate of St. German's on the east. The middle of the century that had seen the crusade of St. Louis, saw also the first small beginnings of the colleges. I will not speak of then in detail, for their history belongs rather to the next hundred years, but I must mention among the half dozen little humble foundations — little more than endowed inns for scholars — one in particular that rose to great fame, and for some time balanced, with a local spirit and a provincial authority, the excessive centraliza- tion of the Eoman Curia. In 1253 Peter de Cerbon endowed a small hall for theological students. From that seed there grew with extreme rapidity the great roof of the Sorbonne, that perpetuates his name. Even before St. Louis died it was the chief place on the hill ; within a hundred years it had a kind of final authority in theology, so that the wretched Picard village that gave its name to the founder, and for whose neighbourhood the scholarships were founded, discovered itself immortalized in one of the most famous titles in Europe. Even to-day, in a University that the Eevolution has so profoundly changed, the building grows and absorbs like a centre the energy of the schools around it ; the new Observatory Tower, huge, vain, and modern as it is, yet marks the pre-eminence of the site.

With this note, then, on the University I must pass to the close of my description ; and as the mention of the first colleges and the building of Notre Dame have taken me

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well into his reign, I must end this part of my book with the action of St. Louis.

I wish it were possible for me to present the man himself to the modern reader, and to spend upon the picture of the king, who gave a meaning to the whole time, the space that must be given to but one part, though that a large one, of his effect upon the city. To speak of his person, to show you his irony, his valour, his vast simplicity (that seems as one reads Joinville to be like the sea or some good air), to tell the stories of his crusade, of his escape from shipwreck, of his judgments in the garden, and of his wonder at and delight in the East and all new things, would be, I think, the most pleasant work that could be given to the writer of a history ; nor is it possible to come across his name by chance in one's writing without wishing that the only work of the kind were the biography and example of good men. But for the purpose of this book I must find St. Louis only in one place, and try to show the man in the building ; for St. Louis is the Ste. Chapelle.

It is not only a great good fortune, but also a kind of symbol, necessary to French history, that the Ste. Chapelle has remained perfect for all these htmdreds.of years, has escaped four great fires, a dozen sieges, and, what was most dangerous of all, the good taste of our great-grandfathers. For the survival of this casket in Paris, and especially the modern restoration that is so pitilessly vivid, is as it were St. Louis himself, kept in treasure for the nation, and returned to a society whose vigour and conviction — but especially whose national enthusiasms and whose passion for arms — call him again.

The story of the building is well known. It was in

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1245, when the peace that pennitted the Crusade had fallen upon him, when Henry Til. had fled at Taillebourg, and when the feudal danger was finally crushed, that St. Louis gave to Pierre de Montereau the task of building his shrine. For the Crown of Thorns had come from Con- stantinople already six years before, and Baldwin, eager for the money that should relieve him from the Venetian debt, and still more eager for a crusade, had sent after it the little piece of rusty steel which Eaymond of Agilles had found long before in Antioch, on whose authenticity no authority would speak, but which St. Louis heartily believed to be the Holy Lance. Pierre de Montereau was one of those rare architects in whom a style seems to express itself without the addition of a personal trick, or of any eccentric detail that might suggest a special theory or a trace of pride. A balance of character, an appetite for harmony, and perhaps also an unconscious humility helped this man to the perfection of his art. "We know so little of his life that habits and adventures which might illus- trate such a character escape us, but we see in his design something of the same quality that distinguishes Bramante — the man has become the style as it were, and the pure Gothic, without searching and without deflection, shone out of him, just as the classical proportions of the Kenaissance sprang like a creation from the brain of the great Italian ; so that you may compare the miud of this unknown man to one of those gems through which white light passes pure and single, and yet in some way glorified, for the spirit of his time, the ardent force that was throwing out the parliaments, the universities, the communes, the chartered guilds, the nationalities, and all the new con- ditions of the thirteenth century, passed through him also

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in a shaft, and cast themselves in the Ste. Chapelle, in the hall of St. Martin, and in that refectory of St. G-ermain des Pres which, they say, was the greatest marvel of all.

He took barely three years to build his chapel. VioUet- le Due has well said that we with all our engines could hardly do such thorough work in a less time. It was begun in the summer of 1245 ; by the spring of 1248 it was finished, and the Palace, which was by that time so strange a medley of the old fortress and the delicate new style, had, fixed to and jutting from it, this building in hard white stone, shining with painted glass, and showing very tall with its high roof above the low towers of the castle and wall.

What did the chapel mean to the crusaders, ready for the march, who first saw it completed, and who heard Mass with St. Louis on the April day when the Legate pro- nounced the consecration? Perhaps of all the biuldings in Paris it is the one most true to its historical tradition. What you see to-day — though it stands iu the surroundings of the modern Palace — is even less different from its origins than is Notre Dame ; for the cathedral has been given a wide open space before and behind it, and has been bared of much of its ornament. It is also allowed to take on the transformation of age, and at the same time it is forbidden by the archbishop and the prefect at once to act as the living centre of the popular worship ; the State has made it cold. But the Ste. Chapelle, still standing enclosed, still clearly a private adjunct of the Palais, has also been restored to the inch as St. Louis left it. The west front is as late as the very end of the Middle Ages, and in its rebuilding certain carvings — notably the bas-relief on the tympanum of the lower door — were destroyed ; the

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Treasury, which was a Ste. Ohapelle in miniature, stand- ing just against the north of the eastern end, was pulled down by the folly of Gabriel m the last century; but, short of these two changes, what you see to-day is what St. Louis saw. The wonderful stained glass was missing here and there; it has been replaced with such careful mimicry that no one can distiuguish the new colours. The statue of St. Michael had fallen from the ridge, and the spire had been twice destroyed ; both have been faith- fully remodelled — the statue with minute accuracy, the spire on the conjecture of what should have stood there before Louis XIII. rebuilt it so faultily.

One thing indeed the chapel lacks — it is no longer a shriae; its purpose is missing. As one stands within it and sees what is to modern eyes the excess of colour, the high walls all windows, the filagree of the narrow shafts between them, the light perfection of the high vault harmonious with an exact proportion of subtle nervures, the mystery and yet the completeness of the whole, one is certain that so much fancy was spent ia order to raise a veO. between the mind at worship and the coldness of outer things. These walls were meant to work for the man who should come into them that transformation which poets feel when they are impelled to writing, or that music carries with it and casts over the mind of every one ; so that whatever the spirit is that exalts and glorifies common things — a spirit usually rare and capricious, coming as an accident to men — should here be perma- nently fixed, working, as it were, the miracle perpetually for any random man that cared to enter. This purpose is ill fulfilled ia the modern use of the place. One Mass a year is said in it, the " Eed Mass " at the opening of the

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Courts after the Long Vacation, but there is no shrine and no sense of public worship./ You feel that foreigners coming to stare at the marvel are more in place than the heirs of St. Louis himself, who built it, and that is a deplorable thing, whose remedy a little patience will probably succeed in finding ; for modern France is going back to the origins to find a new life since the war, and these origins are not merely Eoman, they are also mediaeval.

With this rare buiLding I must leave the early Middle Ages in Paris. It marks their climax and perfection. For twenty years after its completion St. Louis lived on, doing good always, and govemiag the mind of Europe by example. For him they were his years of greatest fruit- fulness and power, but beneath him, especially at their close, the society he controlled was drifting down to an inevitable barrenness ; the lawyers were ia power. The freedom that had also been the anarchy of the twelfth century had a very brief and glorious result iu the central thirteenth. The Ste. Chapelle is the mark of the high tide, but of its nature so sharp an ideal of perfected life could not endure, and it was perhaps the attempt to prolong its custom when its spirit had passed that made the down- fall of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries so perilous and wicked.

Many things that are the mark of this new Paris I have omitted, either because their detail would have confused the whole picture, or because they should be treated of in connection with their principal action on the town. Thus, the great tower and palace of the Templars I would describe in the story of their dissolution — though the building was certainly a thing of St. Louis's time, and

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was then at its chief glory, for Henry III. of England spent seven of his eight days' visit there when he came to Paris. Again, the many churches on the hOl of the Univer- sity, and the colleges that were beginning, the new Ste. Genevieve, St. Stephen, St. Julien le Pauvre, the Treasurer's College, the older Cluny— all these it seems better to leave to the next chapter, where (since the fourteenth century had more to do with the quarter) all the University can be laid out in order. This is true also of the Halles and the famous church and cemetery of the Innocents, for though the beginning and development of these was between Louis VII. and Louis IX., yet their principal interest lies later in the history of the town. Then there are little accidents and stories innumerable that it is a thousand pities to leave out — such as that forerunner of the University, Adam of the Petit Pont, whose house was on the bridge, who " found Aristotle a great consola- tion," who taught a very broad scepticism, and was thoroughly a twelfth-century man, lecturing on philo- sophy in the back room of a hovel and greatly interrupted by cocks and hens ; but one cannot write the history of Paris in a little book, and I must be content to leave aside many delightful things.

It remains, then, only to show what Paris was like as a whole when the first period of this renewal had come to an end.

If one had looked down upon Paris from the new towers of Notre Dame on the day of the funeral pageant, when they brought home St. Louis dead, the city below one would have presented a certain character which it is well to give with some accuracy before we leave these early Middle Ages to follow in the next chapter the corruption

2i8 PARIS

and decline of that civilization. We are apt in thinking of the Middle Ages to consider only their close. We get a picture in the mind of complexity and ill-ease, of the grotesc[ue and the exaggerated, which is true only of that unhappy fifteenth century in which so many of our modem troubles rise. The noble over rich, intriguing, and tyrannical; the king despotic, the clergy at issue with the populace, the lawyers cruel, the town itself full of poverty and misery, set in a background of strong colours and of arms — all that belongs to the false age that ran from the great wars to the Eeformation. To dispel such a picture and to present what should be a true scene of Paris at the close of the thirteenth century must be the object of the end of this chapter.

First, then, what you would have seen from that height was a town not unlike some of those provincial towns that have in our day kept their prosperity without growing beyond the , bounds of unity or of a clear air. The spot from which you would be looking down was the centre of what was still, by our standards, a small place. At some half mile from you every way ran the circle of PhUip the Conqueror's wall, still white and cleanly built after its fifty years of completion. That circle was well filled with houses, but had also what our modern towns have but rarely, very large enclosures, gardens, and vine- yards attached to the convents, each surrounded by its wall and making, as it were, islands in the town. All this was marked by the network of narrow streets that was a characteristic of the time ; yet it was well governed and decent, its four main roads fairly wide, its traffic not yet overburdened or tumultuous, though loud and rattling up from the new stone sets of the streets. You would

THE EARLY MIDDLE AGES 219

have had also (it is a point often omitted in the historical descriptions of the thirteenth century) a great impression of newness and sharpness of outline. The very building on which you stood, the paving of the Parvis below you, the main part of the Palace, the Church of Ste. Genevieve on the hill, the freshly founded colleges below it, the Jacobins of the University, the Cordeliers, the Ste. Chapelle, a great wing of the Hotel Dieu — all were new. They all showed clean-cut stones, and fresh lead on the roofs ; the wood- work of the timbered houses on the Grfeve was new, so were the markets to the north, the suburbs just outside the gates, and out in the fields beyond the St. Denis gate the fine great tower of the Templars, with its surrounding garden and its red-tiled wall. The bridge of Charles le Chauve, the Pont au Change, was grey and mouldering ; the old original bridge, that of Notre Dame, had disappeared ; the Chatelet counted as an inheritance from the Dark Ages ; but short of these and of the black ruin of the Thermae, no great bulk of building in your view would be a century old. The Louvre itself counted but sixty years, and the greater part of all you would see had been built, or refaced, or changed, within the generation of the young king, St. Louis' heir. Even the dominating group of the Abbey of St. Germain, more than half a mile to the west, the only roof that could compare for size and height with your own standpoint, had been so cased in with Monte- reau's additions and turned towards you so modern a lady chapel, that it almost seemed a foundation of the later thirteenth century. The Petit Chatelet, that (even in its later form) stood for so many hundred years as a type of antiquity, was stUl new; the many chapels on the island below might, for the most part, have been raised

220 PARIS

in the lifetime of a man watching from the towers. It is to be remembered that wherever we see the early Gothic there we have an evidence of the energy of that time. It is to be remembered also how little of the Eomanesque that great movement permitted to survive, and if we remember this we shall see how truly it was a period of complete renewal. The effect of this, the impression of modernness and of fresh stone, is the main feature that I would insist upon in the appearance of the city in 1271.

Secondly, the whole had about it an air of unity and completion which the old barbaric town could never boast, and which the developments of the later Middle Ages soon destroyed. Its wall encircled it exactly, the suburbs were still small outer villages laid neatly upon the main roads and grouped about the abbeys. The river was not em- banked at all, but the town had grown everywhere to even limits from the water's edge ; the shore was well defined. For the greater part of the circuit of the city the fields began where the wall ended, and Paris stood separate in the midst of the plain, set in a ring of nourishing fields. It was no longer the huddled village that the Capetians had first inherited, nor was it yet the growing and Hi-defined town to which Etienne Marcel was to give his irregular and unfinished wall. It was not yet disfigured by the outer yards of brick and carpenters' sheds — the work was done within the city. The Gothic had not yet felt — as it felt in a hundred years — its one great drawback, the necessity for constant repair ; the sheds that were so soon to disfigure the surroundings of the Cathedral and of all the larger buildings had not yet risen.

The note, then, of that Paris which had reached the

THE EARLY MIDDLE AGES 221

climax of her second civilization, was one of order, of unity, and of simplicity, Tha)t dear quality which is like humility in stone, the restraint and dignity that yet linger in our older towns marked the city upon which St. Louis had set in some way the seal of his admirable spirit.

But it is not enough to speak of the serenity and measure that marked the view upon which I have been dwelling. Paris at that moment spoke also of her politics and of the creative change proceeding from those three centuries in which Europe had attained majority, and as she spoke of these her accent was the intimation of her new philosophy, of her inspiration, and of her religion.

We left Paris at the end of the last chapter the city of a local king claiming, but not exercising, sovereignty over the great vassals ; we find it at the opening of the next the capital of a centralized kingdom.

We left it at that period a small borough, the Island a northern suburb, and scattered groups of houses round the churches of the southern bank; we leave it now a well-filled circumference of three miles, with large suburbs out along the main roads.

It entered this transformation with but isolated forts : the Chatelets, the Palace like a prison of thick walls, the stockade on the north-east. Now it is surrounded by a great wall on every side, flanked with close upon a hundred towers. The eastern stockade has been replaced by the strong, square fortress of the Louvre.

But, above all, the soul and the body of the place have changed. The soul, because the University has arisen. The body, because the Gothic has appeared and is trans- forming northern Europe.

In the eleventh century we might have noted routine

222 PARIS

teaching, ancient unquestioned things droned out in the monastic and parish schools; but in the twelfth the Crusaders have marched out and have returned, the East has inflamed the imagination of the West, the cloisters of Notre Dame have heard Abelard and St. Bernard, and now the great exodus to the hill of Ste. Genevieve has taken place, and the colleges of the University are beginning on the sides of the hill.

As one looked down from the towers of the new Cathedral upon Paris before the wars, it would have been to see her old squalor and barbarism swept away by a creation ; the mediaeval city to which our modern dreams perpetually return. Everywhere high gables, everywhere spires, towers, innumerable carvings, her great wall shining here _ and there at the ends of streets, high above the houses her equal towers, Before you would be the chief mark of the new building, the Ste. Chapelle, to its right the great square of the Palace, with its round-pointed towers and its delicate inner court. To the left the slope of the hill was a platform for the new churches, the Cor- deliers, the Carmelites, the Jacobins of Ste. Genevieve, and the colleges.

To the right, on the north, was an expanse of steep gables, broken only by the square of the Greve ; but the dull roofing would here and there be contrasted with gleaming lead on the high-pitched naves of the churches, St. Jean, St. Gervais, or St. Merri, standing, as they always did in a mediaeval city, eminent and alone above the town.

To the west, beyond the wall of St. Honore, you would see, higher than anything in the city, the square, gloomy dungeon of the Louvre, with its great central tower and its four corner turrets, from the south-eastern one of which

THE EARLY MIDDLE AGES 223

ran the chain that stretched to the Tour de Nesle on the southern bank.

Finally, like messengers leaving the new city, along the St. Honore, the St. Denis, the St. Marcel, the Orleans roads, and especially thick beside the great oblong of St. Germain des Pres, ran the suburbs, which were later to build up the outer city.

And of all this the characteristic would have been the height, the narrowness, the points. The windows of the Palace, of the churches, and of many of the rich men's houses stood upon the thin, exquisite pillars, and were shaped in the mystical arch of which the Ste. Chapelle is the great example ; the ridges of the roofs ran in the same assemblage : points innumerable, ends always tapering upward. It was as though the city had adopted an attitude of prayer, and as though the buildings looked above them and joined their hands together.

This spirit of the Gothic took the north, and Paris with it, in one great movement. Almost a single gene- ration of men saw the change complete. A man born in the time of St. Bernard's old age would have lived his youth in a city of the Eomanesque ; he would, had he lived to seventy or eighty years of age, have died in a city of the pointed arch, of the high, steep roof, and of the spire. Men worshipped in the Ste. Chapelle or in N"otre Dame, still using the words and the habit of that rough youth of Europe, during which the first Crusaders stood for the blessing under the round arches and beside the thick pillars of Childebert's church ; but, whether as a cause or an effect, the Gothic went with a profoxmd mental change, and for the three centuries of its rule this architecture is the environment of a profound

224 PARIS

mysticism, of a kind of dreaming attitude of the mind — subtle disquisition upon the metaphysic — gorgeous pageantry and highly-coloured clothing — keen and silent forces, such as we find in the front of Eheims and Amiens — poetry of short themes and of amazing verbal aptitude — a desire everywhere for the unknown in the things of the soul, for the marvellous in the stories of far countries. In the flesh that generation tended to the majesty and even to the tinsel of arms, in the spirit it nourished delicate twUight and silence, and in everything an appetite for the hidden and for the strange.

This is the idea that holds Europe for three hundred years, and that makes, as it slowly changes from the manhood of St. Louis and JoinvUle to the madness of Louis XI. and Villon, what we call Paris of the Middle Ages. The Eenaissance was to wither it with a flood of warmth and light, and its last ruins fell down at the noise of Rabelais laughing.

EXPLANATION.

This Ma /J iiiidilili/ irjiri-fiiits thf jilntiinil fnitiiris iif Ihe Phi in of I'll, is. Th,- J'hiii, is iiiiirkiil ill II /ii//i^ niiifiinn slimli- tn flu- liiiiiht (./ //i(r(i/ ffii iihin-i- tin- Seine ; till' lerels siiprrinr to iliis im miiikeil In/ slntdes irliusc ihjitli inrriiisus witli t)ivir hiiijlif, till tlie full hliii-k s)iiii(e rvprtsiuts ii rDiitiinr if tlirii' li iimliiil fii't mill mine iiliuce the streiiiii. In twii jiliires small hroken liini- ziintal lines ajijiear, ivliieh imlieate iiuushe.i. The islamls, miirslies, unel eertaiii streams are ijiveii. )ii)t as the]! noiv arc, hut as theij presiimalilii icere liefnre the Iniilil- ■iini of the eitij. The sharji, linrh line wliieh funns an oral in the iniilille if tlie map, rej)re.sents the jiresent mnnieijial hininilarij iiml /iirtifieations.

THK ri.AlN ciK TAKIS.

I Vt 'k

0 I

Scale oF miles

[To /ace p. 42.

( 225 )

CHAPTEE VI

THE LATER MIDDLE AGES

From the death of St. Louis to the first Italian expedition of Charles VIII. lies a period of somewhat over two centuries, a period which is the decline of the Middle Ages. The story I have to teU in this chapter is the story of a Paris passing through an experience peculiar to the character of the civilization whose rise and grandeur I have just described. That civilization had been, as it were, a perfection for the men that enjoyed it : the freedom of the mind coupled with the achievement of a full system of thought, the creation of such great organs as the Uni- versity for the satisfaction of the thirst for learning, as the Parliament for the expression of ordered and united law, gave a kind of finality to the society which had produced them. Feudalism had been made a system ; the hierarchy of the Christian Church had expressed itself in a con- sistent theory; the economic relations of men seemed settled and secure, for industry had been founded justly upon the basis of co-operation, and that part of wealth which was not directly produced by the receiver of it was treated (in theory at least) as a tax paid in salaries to those who fought, governed, or judged for the good of the State. And this was not all. There was room also to

Q

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live, and the commodious order that accompanies suf- ficiency ruled a society in which the rich were not yet grown separate from the nation, and in which the poor could stni diffuse in politics the vague but just influence of popular intuition. There was in all a large air of freedom and of humour.

The very buildings seemed to share in the sense of simple harmony that pervaded the social theory of the time; the same plan, the same proportions repeat them- selves continually; the arch and the pillar are designed upon few formulae drawn from the first principles of geometry and arithmetic. To these assertions a thousand exceptions could be foimd, but they express, I think, in general the main part of the spirit of the early Middle Ages: from the experiment of St. Denis to the comple- tion of the Ste. ChapeUe you may perceive that note of regularity and repetition which is the mark of whatever epochs in history are impressed with the seal of security.

But the mediaeval theory in the State and its effect in architecture, suited as they were to our blood, and giving us, as they did, the only language in which we have ever found an exact expression of our instincts, ruled in security for a very little while ; it began — almost in the hour of its perfection — to decay ; St. Louis outlived it a little, kept it vigorous, perhaps, in his own immediate surroundings when it was already weakened in the rest of Europe, and long before the thirteenth century was out the system to which it has given its name was drying up at the roots.

Why was this ? Why did not we in western Europe do what so many other examples in the East, in Greece, prove to be possible, and found a scheme of society which

THE LATER MIDDLE AGES 227

should be enduring because it corresponded to all our needs ? Koughly the answer is this : the very simplicity that was the virtue of the system caused it to fail at the first advent of new things. It came so early and so suddenly upon such a jumble of barbarism that it seemed divinely perfect as an early spring seems perfect after the chaos of winter; but it lacked maturity. When any one of the special social conditions upon which it relied was trans- formed, it had no strength to deal with the new aspect of the questions that arose The great increase of popula- tion in the cities, the growing alienability of land, the narrowing of the guild monopolies — all these, had the mediaeval theory developed more slowly and thought out its answers in the presence of larger problems, it might have dealt with ; as things were, every increasing evil for two hundred years was met by mere repression. Even the great monastic orders seemed unable to recapture the spirit of their founders, and as Europe wandered farther and farther from its high moment of success, it wandered farther also from the springs where alone it could recover vigour. The principle which is surely the only source of continuity, that things must return to their origins if they would avoid decay, seemed lost to the later Middle Ages, and for a couple of centuries our history was marked by a longing to maintain, in spite of fate, traditions — often mere words — which it first misread and at last wholly failed to comprehend.

There are also in this period two very prominent accidents that lend it its peculiar colour over and above its general character of decay. First, the astounding series of catastrophes, which (if history were written truly) would make up nearly the whole of its history,

228 PARIS

especially in the earlier part ; secondly, its loss of creative power. As for the first of these, the black death, the famines, the hundred years' war, the free companies, the abasement of the Church, the great schism — these things were misfortunes to which our modern experience can find no parallel. They came suddenly upon western Europe and defiled it like a blight ; they did more — they left, as locusts leave over the harvests of Africa, a barren track in which the mind can find no food between the generation of St. Louis and that of Francis I. They have made the mediaeval idea odious to every half-instructed man, and have stamped even its beauty with associations of evil. I could wonder whether, at any time from the middle of the fourteenth century to the first third of the fifteenth, it was possible to walk in Paris without finding such sights as would have made St. Louis fast his forty days to appease God, or would make one of us leave at once and seek a place pleasanter to the senses. The battles were ceaseless, so were the famines. Men lay dead openly in the city streets, the courts of law reposed upon torture. Perhaps an interval in Charles V.'s reign relieved that chain of misery, but it is certain that a man born in the year of Crecy and dying at ninety, when Eichemont entered the city, would have had such a fill of inhuman experience as not even the ninth century could have given him. For the heathen invasions were at least relieved by a hearty spirit in the fighting and by the apathy of barbarism, but this unfortunate time fell upon a generation whose nerves were quickening, and whose knowledge grew as the evils increased : it was marked by the most evil of all symptoms, by the spirit of cruelty in government.

Consider also the sterility of this decline. There

THE LATER MIDDLE AGES 229

was no new idea ; there came no breath like that which St. Francis or St. Dominic blew into the Church, or like that with which Abelard had inspired the Uni- versity nearly a century before them. The fourteenth and early fifteenth centuries discovered nothing essen- tially new in the conventions of society, grievously as their society grew to need re-arrangements ; they did not even produce a fresh development in architecture. There- fore there happened to them what you may see happening to the spirit of a man in whom some one great experience runs, unfed by new matter, turning with time into a fixed memory or obsession : they worked up the material of their past ; they made the Gothic more and more delicate, more and more fantastic; they elaborated the rudeness of faulty drawing, but they got farther from things as they are ; in the schools they refined upon the vigour of St. Thomas till they had spun out philosophy into an ex- quisitely thin and useless logomachy. Their development had in it nothing of growth; it was but a division and finer redivision of the old elements. The whole worked up to a bubble-climax — and they failed, just as the human character to which I have compared them will fail, sud- denly falling into impotence and cessation.

When we consider these two attributes of the later Middle Ages, their misfortune and their sterility, it is not wonderful that every indication of their life should argue disease ; it is not wonderful that the faces, as they grew more skilful in the drawing, grew also more pinched and ill at ease, that literature should fall into eccentricies and pettiness — to which the wild name of Villon is the sole relief — and that all our impression of the time should be unclean. It is wonderful rather that there was energy

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found somewhere in Europe to wake up that corpse, and to fill the sixteenth century with laughter. For by the time of Charles VIII., Paris and Prance — so far as the soul went — were so spent that the shock of the Eenaissance fell upon a body already near to death. Yet such an energy appeared, and the Eenaissance, coming upon the moribund society of the latter fifteenth century, had this effect — that the modem world (there being no hindrance in the way) was developed suddenly in France ; so that the date I hav^ chosen as an ending place for this chapter marks not so much a boundary as a gulf, on the hither side of which lie the times to which we belong, and whose divisions, violent discussions, be- wilderment, and hopes, are our own.

You will discover that during these two hundred years Paris suffers and changes in a manner very typical of the time. Her adventures are, as it were, the epitome of what Europe is passing through. The theatrical apparatus which feudalism puts on in its dotage, the useless plumes, the fantastic heraldry, the cumbersome trappings of the charger, the foolish embroidered bridle — all these para- phernalia of the fourteenth and fifteenth century chivalry are the life of her palaces and the gaiety of her streets.

The tom'uament had taken the place of private war, and the whole appearance of the soldiery — ia such times an excellent test of what society in general was feeling — was transformed. During these many earlier centuries, in which the knight had been simply bent upon his trade of fighting and upon its object, armour had been light and useful. The outward appearance of the knight reflected the simplicity of heroic times. That spirit died with St. Louis on the Tunisian sand ; the child-like nature

THE LATER MIDDLE AGES 231

which looked outward and was brave, was replaced by something that always heard and looked at and admired itself. It is getting dark, the footlights are lit, and in a kind of false glare the sham heroes of Froissart come on to the stage. They fight one hardly knows for what, unless it is to have the opportunity of making fine phrases and of achieving the picturesque. Later it is the licence of the Armagnac quarrel or the mystic cruelty of Henry V. Later still, the beginning of diplomacy enters to make things worse, and a thousand dynastic conspiracies fill up the time, till at last a double figure, mad enough for any play, and yet the full representative of national feeling, appears in Louis XI.

If the spirit which we should find in the upper classes of Paris was of this nature, and if such figures are to lend colour to her movement, we may naturally expect some similar phase in the buildings, whose aspect and whose changes are the chief theme of this book. This expecta- tion is not disappointed, but the background which archi- tecture furnished to this fantastic time is nobler than the figures that it frames. The Gothic stoops, of course, to a certain littleness, but it increases in charm and gains in beauty what it loses in majesty. The simple spire, the strong, sufficient pillars, the just proportion of the thirteenth century building, have something about them as certain as the Creed and as full of satisfaction as a completed love. These qualities the later architects failed to attain, but they were desirous of putting grace and charm and subtlety into their work, and they succeeded. The pillars are too thin for what they support, but this very insufficiency gives them the characteristic of fantasy. They spring up to immoderate heights, but it is in such

232 PARIS

deep roof-trees that one can best feel the spirit that haunted their builders. The carving is more delicate, the allegory deeper than what the earlier period could design, and they grow so perfect in the art of expression that there is produced in this false time a pair of statues which — the one for beauty, the other for its interest — cannot, I think, be matched in the whole world. I mean the Madonna over the southern portal at Eheims, and the statue of Our Lady of Paris which stands in Notre Dame. With the first a history of Paris is not concerned, and this is just as well, for it would be impossible to describe it in moderate terms. As to the second, I will deal of it when I come to the battles that gave rise to its dedication, and that made it henceforward a kind of centre for the city.

As the period closes architecture goes farther and farther along this road. The carvings jostle one another. Every church front is a kind of foliage of detail. The windows especially display this luxuriance. They attempt every manner of re-entrant curve, the lines pass one into the other, and there finally appears that effect of a fire burning which has given the last style of mediaeval archi- tecture its French name, and that has inspired the phrase of Michelet with its violent metaphor : " The Gothic caught fire, leapt up in the tongues of the Flamboyant, and disappeared."

But while I have described this development of four- teenth and fifteenth century art as being less vain than the men for whom it was built, yet it must not be forgotten that the kind of building upon which all this lavish imagination was poured out indicates very well the social change. Such masses of detail are luxuries. Expense is the first character of these gems, and the

THE LATER MIDDLE AGES 233

flamboyant, exquisite as it is, could not have existed but for the growing evil of social conditions. Property was concentrating in great masses, and though (luckily) the means of production, especially the land, did not get into fewer hands, yet the rich became richer, the poor poorer, during that period. The classes divide. The writing of romances and of histories, the admirable illuminations which we cherish so carefully, the growing power of art — all these thiags fell to the disposition of what had definitely become a luxurious upper class. The old idea of a man in high position having a definite duty as the price of his dignity, the hierarchical conception of the thirteenth century, still existed in the letter, but the spirit was fast disappearing. The fatal line between the upper and the lower clergy had been drawn. These churches that delight us were the playthings of rich dignitaries, and the closing energy of Gothic architecture was expended upon the chapels or upon the palaces of men who were merely rich. In the religious and civil tumult of the sixteenth century the people took their revenge. But that revenge did not settle matters, and we suffer to-day from evils which the fifteenth century prepared.

It is then with such a society, growing in social dif- ferences, in luxury, in misery, ia the power of expression, that the Paris I am about to describe is peopled. What was the history of the city as this ruin proceeded ?

With St. Louis the monarchy had reached the first goal in its development. It had become conscious and self-defined, acting up to its full theory and governing a nation which, though stiU feudal, was united. The Cape- tian house had worked steadily towards this one end for the better part of four hundred yeai's, or rather it had

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during all that time been at the helm directing the natural course of the nation. The succession during all that period had been perfect. The task of guiding the national develop- ment was regularly handed down from father to son. The son had been crowned in his father's lifetime, and all this long line of kings is a continuous chain whose links are periods of increasing power. Philip the Conqueror fought its last battles. St. Louis ioherited its perfection. Philippe le Bel will push it to the point of despotism.

Though the society of the time was tarnished, yet that tradition was maintained for nearly sixty years after St. Louis' death, during the reigns of his son, his grandson, and his three great-grandsons. It is not only maintained, it is developed ; but in the first generation of the fourteenth century, when the work was thoroughly accomplished, the direct line ended, and, as though a kind of spell were connected with the Capetian succession, upon the failure of a direct heii", this great and successful effort of the dynasty went through a century of trial. The hundred years' war comes directly upon the heels of the success, and we may compare it to the furnace in which a work of art is either perfected or destroyed, but which is neces- sary for it to reach its final purpose.

Charles le Bel died in 1328. He was the last of the direct line. It was necessary to cast about for a successor, and three claimants presented themselves : Philip of Valois, Charles of Navarre, and Edward III. of England. It would not come within the scope of this book to trace at any length the various values of these claims, or how lightly the English king may have treated his legal rights. It is enough that it is made the pretext for the beginning of those wars which nearly ended in the coalescence of

THE LATER MIDDLE AGES 235

Prance and England. The motive of the English attack will be clear when we consider the spirit of the time. There was a memory, loose in the matter of legal right, but strong in tradition and sentiment, of the Angevin house. The kings of England had not been technically sovereigns of their French iiefs, but virtually these formed part of a united empire. Those times were not far removed. Henry III., the son of the man who had lost the French possessions and who had himself fought to recover them, had been dead for only seventy years or so. French was still the language of the Court and upper classes, though the new-found English tongue was rapidly superseding it. And, above all, there was a desire to " Faire Chevalerie." That spirit of which I spoke above, the theatrical knighthood of the fourteenth century, was strong on both sides of the Channel. It is this last feature which lends so indetermiaate a character to the first part of the hundred years' war : rapid raids going deep into the heart of France, followed by equally rapid retreats heavy with booty ; a lack of permanent garrisons, and, finally, as everybody knows, the clearing out of the foreigner from French soil. This earlier period of the wars, covering, roughly speaking, the latter half of the fourteenth century, might have passed with little effect upon either country, save only for this. France was greatly impoverished and the nobility were hard hit in the great defeats.

Nothing formative appears. Paris, vaguely conscious of its mission, passes indeed through the strange episode of Etienne Marcel's rule. It is the first note of that civic attitude which will later make Paris lead France ; but it was out of due season and it failed, because even those

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who took part in it doubted the moral right of their action. StUl it was a memory to look back to and to strengthen further developments in the idea of the city. One may say that the Hotel de Ville arose in these famous riots, and that the House of the Pillars was the direct ancestor of the place where they plotted in the night of the ninth of Thermidor and of the walls which the Commune destroyed.

There foUows — in a kind of lull — the reign of Charles V. It was he who used that interval in the wars — a bare sixteen years of security — for the great enter- prises that win fill so large a part of this chapter, the Bastille, the additions to the Louvre, the H6tel St. Paul, the new wall. His son, a boy of twelve, already suspected of an uncertain balance, succeeded him, and in his long reign of over forty years a very different prospect opened on the renewal of the war. England was ruled by English- speaking nobles, the House of Lancaster, and they would prove their right to usurpation by adding to the national power, while the attempt was peculiarly suited to a famUy whose genius was for diplomacy and intrigue, and who had in their blood the instinct which tells a conqueror the moment at which to strike. The old king spent his reign in affirming a very unstable throne, surrounded by nobles who were his equals. The task of the French invasion was left to Henry V.

Of all the circumstances favouring his attempt, none was more powerful than the condition of Paris and of the French Court. These I will describe; for, in order to follow the strange story of how the French crown fell into foreign hands, and of how, almost by a miracle, it was recaptured, it is necessary to appreciate what

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the Burgundian party meant and why Paris adhered to it.

Ever since the time of St. Louis, that is, ever since the unity of France under the crown had been achieved, the fatal custom had obtained of granting "appanage." The "appanage" was a great fief, lapsed from its old feudal lord, fallen to the king, and regranted by him to a brother or a son. This policy was imagined to be wise. It was thought that the immediate relation of the royal family would help it upon all occasions, and that this relegation of power was far more practical than any system of governors — which, in the conditions of the Middle Ages, would have meant so many potential rebels. But as a fact the " appanage " turned out more dangerous than the feudal family. It had all the vices of an inde- pendent fief, and, moreover, its ruler would remember the pride of the royal blood, but not his duty to the family of which he was a member. In a few generations his house would grow into a distinct and almost foreign menace to the throne, and so to the unity of the nation.

When John the Loyal was taken prisoner at Poictiers his little son had defended him in the battle, and in memory of this his father gave him the province of Burgundy in fee. In less than fifty years Burgundy was almost like another kingdom — not its people, but its policy — and the Duke of Burgundy was the overshadowing protector of the throne.

Now, when Henry V. was about to invade France, the king, Charles VI., was mad — he had periods of sanity, but his personal hold on the government was gone. From the Tower of the Louvre, and from the new palace of St, Paul, not the old familiar, if sometimes terrible, face

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of the king awed and controlled Paris, but rather there sounded the voices of two factions, each claiming to rule in the Mad King's name, and between these Paris had to choose. They were the family of Armagnacs — southerners and favourites — and the Duke of Burgundy's people. Into the treachery, the murders, and the bitter personal enmity between these two I cannot enter here, but, in brief, Paris, upon whose decision at this stage of French history the whole nation already depended, declared for Burgundy. The southerner has always meant for Paris the danger of national disunion, and again the Duke of Burgundy was at least a Capet. The choice was not ill-considered, and yet events proved it unwise. Charles the Dauphin, who was a boy, resolute, hated, and leagued with the southerners, made a false reconciliation with the Duke on the Bridge of Montereau ; there the Duke was murdered. That crime broke into a simple division the confused meshes of the time — on the one side the heir to the throne in the power of these Gascon men and criminals, on the other Henry V. fresh from the campaign in Normandy, claiming to marry the daughter of France, and to succeed, himself by the marriage, his son by right of the blood royal. The new Duke of Burgundy, young and determined, saw nothing in the southern faction but a gang of murderers, and since it continued to hold the Dauphin, he declared for the English invader. Paris followed him even in this extreme step, and Henry V. was welcomed as he entered the city.

Lest this grave misjudgment should appear inexplicable, it must be understood that the city saw in the advent of the Lancastrian the only opportunity for national unity and for the end of a disastrous struggle. It was only as

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a means of affirming the dynasty through the female line and being rid of the Armagnac that Henry was admitted. He was to marry the daughter of the Mad King, and his son was to inherit the crowns of England and France. These terms Paris applauded, and after his father's death the poor little child of less than a year old, doomed with tainted blood, and heir to all the misery of the Wars of the Eoses, was cried King of France and England in St. Denis.

All the world knows how this false step on the part of the capital was redeemed by the peasantry. The social differentiation which had cursed France with a clique of professional lawyers and diplomats had not destroyed the people nor lessened their hold on the soil. And while the upper class was achieving the ruin of the nation, Joan of Arc comes out of the new class of peasants who own the land, the direct ancestors of the proprietors of to-day, and saves it. Her story does not directly affect the city, save that she fell wounded in attacking its Gate of St. Honore (close to where her statue now stands in the Place des Pyramides), and that her success convinced Paris and turned the war. Kichemont re-entered the city, and the English capitulated in the Bastille.

Louis XI. at last inherited the peace that succeeded these victories ; not as a fighter, nor merely as a patriot, but as an upholder of the dynasty, as a true heir of the Capetians, this king, who was so deeply touched with his grandfather's madness, reconsolidated the nation under the royal power. In the brief period between his death and the Italian wars, the Eenaissance is already upon us, and the chapter of mediaeval France and Paris is closed.

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The first great episode in the history of Paris after St. Louis' burial is the destruction of the Templars. But the generation between the two, though it is politically but the development of his reign, has one feature peculiar to it, and that is the growth of the colleges. This transforma- tion of the University in its organization and in the look of its crowded hill is (with the additions made to the Palace) the principal domestic matter in the end of the thirteenth and the first years of the fourteenth century, for it was about that time that the greater part of these famous foundations rose which endured almost into our own century, and which were for at least three hundred years the centre of the intellectual life of Europe. I shall, then, begin by describing as well as may be the situation of these colleges, though that is not easy, for nearly the whole of them have disappeared, and the lanes that marked them are merged in, or effaced by, the scheme of the Boulevards and of the new broad streets such as the Eue des Ecoles.

First, then, to get the plan ^ of the whole place there must be imagined one main street that was the artery of the southern quarter during a thousand years and more, and that only lost its use to be replaced in our own time by just such another broader but similar one, the Boule- vard St. Michel. This street was the Eue St. Jacques, running north and south. It still exists, and is of course the old Eoman road. It was a radius running from the Petit Pont as a centre to the half circle formed by the wall of Philip Augustus, and this wall cut it at the spot where, at the present day, the Eue St. Jacques crosses the Eue

' I have put the early colleges, as many as I could clearly indicate of them, into the map on p. 300.

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Soufflot. I take this street as the division, and group the colleges upon either side into the two quarter circles ; one, the eastern, is bounded by the Eue .St. Jacques, by the river and by the south-eastern wall running from where the Pantheon is now to the place where the Boulevard St. Germain falls into the quay ; the other, the western, is bounded also by the Eue St. Jacques and the river, and by the south-western wall, whose line would run from near the comer of the Luxembourg gardens, leaving St. Sulpice outside, including the Ecole de Medecine, and reaching the river at the Institute, just east of the Pont des Arts.

I will take first the eastern and then the western side of the Eue St. Jacques, and map out the University in what must, I fear, be a very dull catalogue of names and sites ; and yet it is one worth making, because there is no part of Paris with which foreigners who study the city are more intimate than the Latin quarter, and at the same time there is none in which the old and the new contrast so strangely, in which the chance relics of the mediaeval buildings fascinate so much or suggest so many historical memories, while, oddly enough, the University has been more changed in its main plan by the re-building of this century than any other of the older sections of the city except the Island. It is necessary then, in such a book as this, to admit a list of its principal houses and to give theu' sites as clearly as may be in correspondence to the modern plan of the southern hill.

On the shore of the river, just east of the Petit Pont, there stUl remain a number of the old streets that run much upon the lines of the mediseval lanes. One of them at least (the Eue de Fouaare) has kept its name, and the little quarter as a whole represents the plan of that

E

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maze which the University still remained until the reign of Napoleon III. In that place three sites should be remembered, St. JuUen le Pauvre, the College of Picardy, and the College of Constantinople.

St. Julian le Pauvre, rebuilt in the thirteenth century and altered again in the next two hundred years, is curiously desolate. It should, if age and tradition could lend reverence to everything, be among the most revered of the city shrines ; but the people of Paris, careful as they are of old customs, are capricious in their choice of idols, and the little church is so much abandoned that foreign lovers of Paris pass it a hundred times without remem- bering it. This is a little due to the contrast between those old neglected streets and the new boulevards. St. Julien lies in a dark passage off the Eue du Petit Pont, and though the demolition of some old houses lets you now see the curious triple apse from the Eue de Fouarre, it has been for centuries, and will be, I think, again covered iu altogether from its neighbourhood. Yet here, in 580 (that is, in the monastery attached to the church), Gregory of Tours lodged when he visited the town, and here, throughout the Middle Ages — from the Charter of Philip the Conqueror to 1534 — the Eector of the University was elected. Hence, as one may guess, it witnessed many riots and was an active place, for the University of Paris held to a democratic constitution, and preserved later than any other institution of the capital, the rough, free organs of government that belong to the time of its creation.

The College of Picardy in the Eue de Touarre (a college of which — as of nearly all the old foundations — there is nothing remaining), is remarkable for this, that

THE LATER MIDDLE AGES 243

it sprang from the school in which Suger taught, and in which — if a vague allusion may be turned into history — Dante studied. That is why the Kue Suger has been given its name, and why the good bronze statue of Dante stands a little to the south in the Eue des Ecoles, in front of the College de France.

As for the CoUege of Constantinople, I mention it only because the name and the certainty of its existence bring into what I fear can be but a written map and a mass of dry detail — a touch of the mediaeval colour. It was, while the Latins stUl held the Greek empire, while St. Louis was stUl king, that the East founded this place which — with the Sorbonne — is almost the earliest example of a regular endowment in the University. That little group of scholars from a far country, sent perhaps by the same Baldwin who gave St. Louis the crown of thorns, carry with them the mistiness and the universality of the crusading power. They are evidence in Paris of the babel, the commixture of peoples, the fruitful chaos of the period at whose very close they entered the city. Uncertain of their religious allegiance, sprung from what was destined to become a civilization so antagonistic to Eome, yet studying in the midst of Latin and Western culture, they and the name of their hall recall I know not what of the vague but magnificent dreams that still hung over Europe in the middle of the thirteenth century, and that colour Villehardouin, and, later, the stories of Joinville; for they bring the East right on to the Mons Lucotitius,' reviving, in a thin and fantastic manner, the unity of the dead Empire, and characterizing by their presence the imaginative century that hardly knew its home counties, and that could yet talk familiarly of

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Egypt, and call it Babylon. This college stood in that curious, uneven street called the Eue Pavee, that runs out of the Place Maubert ; and by the middle of the next century (in 1350) its name was lost, and its endowment was given to the College de la Marche, higher up the hill.

Of the old Ecole de Medecine I can hardly speak here at length, because, at whatever time it may have originated, it did not finally settle in the Eue de I'Hotel Colbert (which was then called the Eue des Eats, or Eat Street) till 1472 ; and probably so early as the time of which I am dealing, it existed only in the shape of rough gatherings of students without a certain home, and sometimes driven to meeting in the cloisters of a convent, or (as one curious account tells us) "round the holy-water stoups of Notre Dame." Still, as I have mentioned it, it is worth while adding these facts : that the medical school, which has since become so famous, bad to put up with its narrow lodging (of which a part still stands) for three hundred years. The famous building in the Eue de I'Ecole de Medecine was bmlt indeed under Louis XVI., but that king handed it over, not to the physicians (as they had petitioned), but to the surgeons, and it was the Eevolution which first gave the faculty a home worthy of its importance. How much that school has since grown, you can judge by seeing the new buildings on the north side of Eue de I'Ecole de Medecine ; they take up all the grounds of what used to be the Cordeliers, they use the old refectory of the convent for a museum, and they threaten to extend to the angle of Boulevard St. Michel. That extension would be regretable, for it would not only destroy the School of

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Drawing, but also, on the boulevard itself, one of the most delightful patisseries in Paris.

Goiag eastward along the river there were no more colleges (save the little College of Chanao, on which I have no space to dwell), nor, indeed, anything of import- ance tm one came to the St. Bernard Gate on the Quai de la Tournelle : but, if one goes a few steps south, and gets on to the Boulevard St. Michel, one is on a whole line of famous sites running eastward from the Cluny.

Thus the narrow Eue Domat (which used to be called the Eue de Platre), on the south of the boulevard, between Cluny and the market, stiU has in one of its private houses the remains of the College de Cornouailles, which was founded by a Breton for Bretons in 1325. On the other side of the boulevard the street called "de Beauvais " still recalls a great college, of which nearly all the later buildings stand embedded between that street and the Carmes Market. The College de Beauvais was not for scholars of that town — it took its name from its founder — ^but for a few students from Dormans, which is in the Marne Valley, under the pleasant and hidden plateau called the country of Tourdenoise. It was built in 1365, but there was an older, smaller college next to it, the CoUege de Presle, that was founded in 1313. Next to these colleges, on the site of the market under the quarry, was the convent of the Carmelites, " the Carmes," which still gives its name to the market and to the neighbouring street, while just south of this (where now there is a high belt of houses between the market and the Eue des Ecoles) were the old Law Schools, that did not migrate to their present site by the Pantheon till the eighteenth century. Then, as one goes still farther

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eastward, one comes to a mass of houses that occupies the site of three famous foundations, the Bernadins, the Bons Enfants, and the College du Cardinal Lemoine, all lying north of the boulevard, between it and the Eue des Ecoles, and all just within the old wall ; so that now they would be contained between the Eue Cardinal Lemoine and the Eue des Bernadins. Of these three the Bernadins and the Bons Enfants were both foundations of the thirteenth century, and though the jSrst developed into a great monastic establishment, and the second decayed till it became a kind of adjunct to the Cardinal Lemoine, each maintained that early character which clung to the first endowments of the University, and remaiaed on the academic side a school rather than a college. This was especially the case with the Bernadias, which kept up for centuries the discipline of a seminary. It trained the boys and young men who intended to enter Clairvaux, just as the College de Cluny (which stood just north of the present Place de la Sorbonne^ and must not be confounded with the H6tel de Cluny) trained the novices of the more famous mother house of the Order.

The College Cardinal Lemoine lay between the Bons Enfants and the Bernadins. It was one of those great establishments that grew at last (by what seems a fate inherent to the collegiate system) to overshadow the rest of the University; and in the decay of the smaller coUeges it absorbed, with the College of Navarre, of Har- court, and half a dozen others, the life of the last two centuries of the place. This college was so especially

' It was built in 1269, and stood till 1834 at a spot where now is (if I remember rightly) a clothier's shop and two cafes, one of which used to be the Hungarian Gafd but is now some Alsatian kind of a place.

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famous uader the Eenaissance that its early origin is sometimes forgotten; yet the name alone should recall it, for Lemoine's career was, for the most part, iu the close of the thirteenth century: he received his cardinal's hat in 1302, and died within ten years of that date, leaving all his property to the house which we know by the terms of his will to have been already founded.

Up on the top of the hill was a third belt of colleges : at least, it is easiest to group them in this way, though as a fact the whole plan of the University was very scattered and irregular. This thii'd belt would stretch from the Jacobins, by the Gate of St. Jacques and along the southern wall, to the College of Navarre.

The Jacobins — that is the Dominicans — had two priucipal establishments in Paris, this one on the extreme south, and another outside the walls on the north-west, off the Eue St. Honore. The latter has become famous in recent history because the hall and chapel gave their names to the Eevolutionary Club, but it was the Jacobins of the University that counted as by far the first of the two houses throughout the Middle Ages. They had a very great estate for an intermural convent, covering practically the whole block of houses between the Eue Soufflot, the Eue St. Jacques, the Place de la Sorbonne, and the western side of the Boulevard St. Michel, and they owed this privilege to a cause very similar to that which enriches our modern urban landlords; they had come early in St. Louis' reign, when the town was still sur- rounded by a large ring of waste spaces between it and the wall, and they had been welcomed (as the new preachers were everywhere) by the people of the city, and, in spite of the University, this large plot was carved out for them

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in empty land and market-gardens by the southern gate. As the town grew and enclosed them they were compelled to part, at one time or another, with nearly half the property, but they retained the rest till the Eeyolution. Like the other monasteries of the hill, it could hardly be called a college, yet it entered vigorously into the life of the University, and can boast the greatest of its names — that of St. Thomas, who, in his active life of constant travel, found time to lecture here both in St. Louis' life- time and in the ten years after his death, and who wrote here the earlier portion of his Summa.

Just east of the Jacobins— in what is now the square of the Pantheon — was the College of Lisieux, founded, as was so much of the University, by a Harcourt, and east of this again, on the site of the Bibliotheque, Ste. Genevieve, the renowned, dirty, and austere College of Montaigu.^ I wish I had the space to write, if it were only for a little, of this excellent place, which furnished for three centuries half the jokes of the Latin quarter. Why it was so prodigiously iU-kept, and at the same time so uniformly successful, has never been told us ; we have only a string of abusive epithets levelled at it throughout the Middle Ages and the Eenaissance, so that it seems the necessary butt of the University ; and of all the attacks upon it none is more famous than that in which Grandgousier, imagining Gargantua to have stayed in the dark little rooms of the college, laments graphically with all the large words Eabelais can lend him. Never was a butt less moved by ribaldry. It went on placidly keeping a good rank in the schools ; the decay and final dissolution of the colleges found it still praised for an ' Here Calvin came after his first years at the Collfege de la Marche.

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excellent discipline, for hard work, and blamed a little (in a generation that had forgotten humour) for its con- tinued excessive squalor.

The College Montaigu laj^ just south-west of St. Etienne du Mont, so that I must in passing mention this church and its neighbour, the Abbey of Ste. Genevieve. St. Etienne was rebuilt during the Eenaissance, and it is difficult to define the character of this earlier church. It was presumably designed — as Ste. Genevieve had been — during the thirteenth century, and both replaced the primi- tive Merovingian Basilica that had suffered or perhaps been destroyed in the sieges of the ninth. It oiight, one would imagine, to have been rendered insignificant by the presence of so great a neighbour as the shrine of the Patron Saint of Paris, but for some reason or other, though the two churches actually touched, the less known one maintained a certain importance of its own. At present, of course, since the destruction of Ste. Genevieve and the secularization of the Pantheon, it takes a special place in Paris, and serves a kind of combination of its old purpose and that of the Metropolitan Abbey. Ste. Genevieve I will not here describe, for I propose to do so in the chapter upon the eighteenth century, when the church was pulled down.

South-east of St. Etienne du Mont, and just against the line on which Philip Augustus' wall ran, is the school called the Polytechnique, where the artillery and engi- neers are trained. It stands on the site of what was in the origins of the University the College de Navarre, and continues to use some of the buildings of that foundation. For six hundred years that spot has had an association with arms. It was founded by the wife of Philippe le Bel

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in 1304 in commemoration of the victory of Mons en Puelle ; it educated in the seventeenth century more than one of the French generals ; it was made by the Eirst Empire (in 1805) the miUtary school, which it still remains. This College of Navarre was one of that group of large colleges (the Lemoine, the Harcourt, etc.) of which I have already spoken, but in spite of its prominence it never took the lead of the University in the schools till the eve of the Eevolution. Then, just as the old establishments were breaking down, it headed the list in the examinations in 1788, in 1791, and again in the wild summer of 1793. Perhaps it was this last expression of energy, in a time when all its contemporaries were dying, that preserved its memory, and left to its site the best example of continuity (with the single exception of the College d' Harcourt) that the Latin quarter affords.

With this college ends the list of the principal early foundations on the east of the Eue St. Jacques. One or two of the smaller ones (such as the Cholets) I have omitted for the sake of brevity, and those of later origin (such as Ste. Barbe,^ whose name survives, and which dates from the fifteenth century, or Louis le Grand, still prosperous and rich, and founded in the seventeenth), do not, I think, come into the scope of this. But I cannot leave this side of the hill without quoting two examples of foreign settlements. The first is that Lombard College, which Ghini of Florence founded in 1333, which Louis XIV. gave over to the Irish emigrant priests, and whose last remains (No. 23 of the Eue des Carmes) belongs stUl,

' It was at Ste. Barbe that St. Francis Xavier entered as an under- graduate in 1524. Four years later he was given a Lectureship in Philosophy at the College de Beauyais.

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I believe, to the Irish seminary. The other is the ciirious nomadic endowment which David, the Bishop of Moray, created for Scotch students in 1313. It had no home. The handful of Scotchmen wandered from one coUege to another, sometimes even lodging in a private house, and it was only long after the Eeformation, when the founda- tion had lost its original quality and become a seminary for such rare missionary priests as the Scotch Catholics could send to it, that Eobert Barclay, in 1665, buUt them a house in the Eue des Fosses St. Victor, outside the wall. There it is still, now turned into a private school, but keeping in what was once the chapel the little monument commemorative of James II., whose brain was buried there.^

To the west of the Eue St. Jacques there is far less to mention. Near the river, a neighbour to St. Julien le Pauvre, stood and stands now the old Church of St. Severin, which takes its name from a hermit of the sixth century. A little farther west the Church of St. Andre des Arcs has disappeared, leaving its name to a square, and I know not what fate to half a score of famous skeletons, including the first wife of Danton. The little Chatelet at the end of the Petit Pont, destroyed in the flood of 1296, rebuilt, standing with its ugly bare walls and gloomy tunnel for five hundred years, escaping the fire of 1718, only to be destroyed seven years before the Eevolution, has not even left its name (as its elder brother over the river has done) to the site it occupied. Lower

' It used to be said (with about as good authority as half a hundred similar statements) that the lead coffin containing it was " stolen during the Eevolution." Nothing of the kind happened. It was built into the wall, and was found there a few years ago.

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down the river the Augustinians, great and wealthy con- vent though they were, and serving as their great hall did for a dozen public uses, I cannot do more than name. Entering into the public life of the city, but hardly at all into that of the University, they fell in the common decay of the corporations in the last century, were suppressed like any other convent in 1790, and since 1809 have left only a quay and certain of their books in the Mazaria Library to perpetuate their memory.

The little colleges, also, on this side of the central street, I must only mention for the sake of recording their names here in the roll-call of the early University. The College d'Autun, just south of the Place St. Andr^ ; the College de Boissy (of which a wall remains on the Rue Suger) ; the College Mignon (whose founder's name was very appropriate, for it was a mignon little college, and had a pretty chapel — as the poor last of it in the Paie Serpente still shows); the tiny College of Tours, which would stand in the middle of the Boulevard St. Michel, just where the Eue Serpente comes iato it ; even the larger College of Cambrai, which was pulled down to make room for the College de France — all these founda- tions of the early fourteenth century I may only put down thus in a list. The Cluny (though the ground was bought as early as 1340 and some early Town House for the Order was then built on it) must be dealt with in connection with that new set of buildings that came at the close of the Middle Ages and that introduce the Eenaissance, for the hotel, as it stands now, dates from Charles VIII. The College of Treguier (for Bretons of Narbonne and Bayeux), of Justice (for Eouen — another example to show how the northern provinces were over

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represented in the University), the later College of Maitre Gervais (also for Normans, of Bayeux), had not an import- ance that would warrant any description of them; but three great houses remain to be mentioned, all neighbours, each property following the other along the line of the south-western wall : the College of Burgundy, the Cor- deliers, the College d'Harcourt.

The College of Burgundy was founded by Philip the Tail's wife (or rather, widow), in 1328. Its chief interest lies in this : that it was cautioned to eschew the meta- physic and to stick to science, which was, for the four- teenth century, a sufficiently wonderful thing, and a kind of balance to the Sorbonne and the Cholets up the lull, who had to leave aside all obvious matters, and concern themselves solely with theology. (This one of them did to some purpose, growing to rival the Eoman curia, while the other died of it.) The College of Burgundy, devoted as it was to natural philosophy, decayed as physics pro- gressed. By a coincidence, or what you will, this earliest site of experimental science in Paris became the Ecole de Medecine, and is, at this moment, the stronghold of all that side of learning in the University. But the humour of all this will be the more apparent when one comes to read of the Tour de Nesle.

The Cordeliers — the French name for Franciscans — lay just opposite these last, across the narrow street that took their name, but that is now called " Eue de I'Ecole de Medecine." Their coming, growth, and power corre- sponded with the long reign of St. Louis. Like their brother Order, the Jacobins, they were opposed by the University. Like them they took up waste land within the wall, and they became, as their endowment increased

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with the fourteenth century, a counterpart at the St. Germain Gate of what the Dominicans were at the Porte St. Jacques. One buildiag of their's still stands — the Mus^e Dupuytren, that was once their Hall ; and it carries a weight of history from Etienne Marcel to the Revolu- tion. For the rest of their ground, it is covered with the new buildings of the Medical School.

The College d'Harcourt took its name from the great family that built so much in the University of Paris, and that has shown so singular a vitality, both in France and England, for half a dozen centuries. It was one of the earliest, as it was the greatest, of the colleges, for it was regularly endowed and organized as early as 1280, and it bears in the history of Paris this special interest : that it is the unique survival of the old collegiate system. Not that its discipline is that of a college ; it is a lycee, like the rest ; but its site and many of its buildings, its traditions and the uses of its classes, have been carried over the revolutionary chasm into which the institutions surrounding it fell. Indeed, but for an accident it would even have kept its old name ; under the Restora- tion the Harcourts did what they could to have that title restored, but the vanity of the Court stamped it with the name it still bears — that of " Lyc^e St, Louis."

With this vigorous relic of the mediaeval University the long list of its colleges and monasteries may be closed. I could wish, for the reader's sake, that it had been less tedious. But I cannot leave the south bank at this period without mentioning the H6tel de Nesle. The Tour de Nesle, standing at the point where Philip Augustus' wall reached the river, supporting the chain that stretched over the town and domiaating the western

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water-gate of the University, was a mark for centuries of the entry to Paris as one came up-river from the ports ; for centuries more, as the town grew and changed, it re- mained a persistent ruin, recalling, with its battlements and crenellations, its origins under Philippe le Bel, when the family of Nesle had bought the corner of land from the kiag " for five thousand good little pounds of Paris " and built their castle upon it; it stood even through half the changes of the seventeenth century, and was only finally destroyed in order to make room, in 1662, for Mazarin's College, that is now the Institute. In these first years of the fourteenth century, however, the prin- cipal memory of the tower was the residence of Philip the Tali's widow. She was that woman about whom the legends of the next generation arose — legends so true as to be almost history. It was she who would lure in the students by night into the freshly built tower, and then, before it was light, have them thrown out into the Seine.

It is she also that takes so large a place in Villon's Ballad of Dead Ladies, which — were not this book per- petually recalling me to my subject — I would quote at length for the delectation of all who love high verse. She is in that roll-call of " Echo parlant quand bruit on mene, de par riviere, dessus etang," of Thais, of Jeanne d'Arc ; and it is of her that he asks —

" Semblablement oil est la reine Qui oommanda que Buridan Fust ject^ dans un sac en Seine ; Mais oA sont les neiges d'Antan ? "

In an admirable spirit of irony, she drew up a will on her deathbed, whereby her money was to go to the founding of a college to house and comfort poor students ;

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and that college was the College of Burgundy, in which, as is written a page or two above, the metaphysic was forbidden and natural sciences pursued; for the queen hated the metaphysic.

I have said that the period before the English wars was one whose main political event was the suppression of the Order of Templars ; and that stroke, which is at once such a proof of the new character of the Crown, and the principal cause of the increase of its power, calls for a mention of the Close and Fortress whose name alone remains to-day, and is preserved in the square and market of the Temple. The origins of the Order are, and will remain, obscure. There were, long before the Crusade, small bands of men, half-military, half-monastic, who joined to defend the pUgrims to the Holy Sepulchre. The twelfth century had given them, as it gave every- thing else, organization and form. French from their first foundation, the Council of Troyes confirmed their constitu- tion in 1148, and they grew, half-monks, half-soldiers, into a body overshadowing the Church and the Government. By the thirteenth century they had acquired great part of the territorial wealth . of Europe, risen to be a secret society present in every country, whose policy was directed mainly to its own aggrandisement, and whose spirit was more and more coloured by the Eastern character which Europe had at first welcomed in the discoveries of the Crusades, but had learnt at last to dread instinctively as a thing alien and poisonous to Western civilization.

How it happened that the centre of this powerful Order came to be fixed in Paris it woidd be difficiilt to trace. Already, in 1105, the will of Malchon, Philip

THE LATER MIDDLE AGES 257

Augustus' chamberlain, proves them to have had a house in Paris ; perhaps by 1222 they had built their castle; and presumably it was the great and growing position of the city, especially the height to which the University and the strong reign of St. Louis had lifted it, in a time when all the rest of Europe was riven by warfare, that unconsciously compelled the Templars to establish this great foundation north of the city.

It was an irregular trapezium, far outside the walls of Philip Augustus and a little east of their central axis, and it remained in the same irregular shape, and with the same strict enclosure, like a kind of island in the midst of the capital, till the end of the last century. It stood just south of what is now the Place de la Eepublique, along the present Eue du Temple, and occupying a space eastward of that street. It had, of course, the charac- teristics of all the great autonomous properties of that time. Just as the Jacobins, the Cordeliers, the Augus- tinians, and the rest, so the Templars were little kings over their own estate. But they became, before the year 1300, by far the most powerful of all the corporations. The two qualities which (if they are permitted) give the greatest strength to a State within the State were present in their Order. Por they were on the border between common civilian and ecclesiastical life, and they were bound by a secret and cosmopolitan bond of association. They were able, four years before the end of the thirteenth century, to resist the imposition of the general tax that was laid upon Paris by Philippe le Bel ; and they, perhaps, began in that act their own ruin. But I would not insist too much upon the harshness or the spirit of vengeance of the king. There must have been something behind it

s

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all which we do not accurately perceive, but which most certainly the public opinion of that time appreciated when it leant such weight to the action of the Crown. It was partly the general mediaeval theory that whatever was corporate might be despoiled or suppressed when its growth menaced the security of the State, partly the dread of Eastern influence, partly the determination that no secret association should offend the clear hierarchy of the administration of that time : these elements com- bined in the demand for their extinction. The small but immensely powerful body of knights in Prance (there were but 546 in aU) were condemned by the Parliament, by the mobs, by the local Church Councils ; and without waiting for the Pope's Bull Philippe le Bel proceeded to their dissolution, and, in the case of those who had con- fessed to crime, to their execution. That execution was carried out with a barbarity and an extreme of virulence that seems inexplicable save in the light of some common knowledge, difficult to prove in the courts of law but easily appreciated by popular instinct, that the whole method and organization of this Order were inimical to the Christian Church. The tragedy found its climax in the burning of a group of the chief knights just outside the Gate of St. Anthony, and, finally, in a similar execu- tion of the grand master and the commanders of the lodges of Normandy and Aquitaine, in the little island at the end of the Isle de la Cit6.^

The inheritance which by this act lapsed to the

Crown was never lost to it, although the king . had

promised that the whole site and buildings belonging to

the Order should be passed over to the Knights of St.

» On the 12th of March, 1314.

THE LATER MIDDLE AGES 359

John of Jerusalem. For centuries the Temple remained a kind of appanage of the French Crown, and for the last two hundred years of its existence the natural sons of the Bourbons enjoyed, as of right, its enormous revenues and governed its special enclosure in the city. Nor was this anomaly of its character suppressed until the Kevolution, which found it under the mastery of a child legitimate indeed but a little fitted to receive, at his age, a salary of fifteen or twenty thousand pounds.

The centre of the whole group was a church, contain- ing in its nave the Temple of circular plan which existed also over the Holy Sepulchre at Jerusalem, and which you may see in the church of the same Order in London. Just south of this, at the east end of the present square, where the Eue des Archives stands now, was a very high square tower, strong and without any kind of ornament, covered with a pyramidical slate roof; this tower, after lasting three centuries as an annex to the palace of the commander, fulfilled its last purpose in serving as the prison of Louis XVI., and was finally destroyed under the Empire. It could be seen -from all over Paris, and was the one conspicuous mark that relieved the flat northern boundary of the city. Surrounding it were not only the great halls of the monastery, but a host of private houses and a market, which had taken refuge within the walls of the enclosure to benefit by what we should call " the Liberties " (the absence of taxation and so forth), whose only drawback was the absolute jurisdiction that the governor held over the whole place.

It is remarkable that during the time in which the Temple counted for most in the history of the city it was so distant from it as to be more than suburban, and almost

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a country castle. It was a good half-mile from the limits of St. Louis' town ; and though the great wall of defence which Etienne Marcel, and after him Charles V., threw round the city just managed to include it, yet the space of land east and west of the Temple, and even to the south, remained until the seventeenth century unoccupied and waste. In this it was a remarkable contrast to the site which the same Order had chosen in London, and which at the moment of their suppression the English Crown had found itself unable to retain, until at last it lapsed to the Legal Corporation. The reason of the difference was in this, that London was not,' as Paris was, the centre of the king's power ; he did not defend a military position within, nor had he built a great fortress without it. The Templars of Paris seem to have withdrawn purposely from the neighbourhood of a turbulent city and of the great military power of the Crown; those of London to have built their foundation just outside the walls and in a spot that was later included within the city, both because they were themselves of less importance here, and because there was less to be dreaded in the character of the English Crown and of its capital.

The years between the suppression of the Templars and the outbreak of the hundred years' war were curiously full of building. It was as though the far greater energy of the middle of the thirteenth century had found a kind of aftermath in the generation which was young in the year 1320, and which lasted on in its last examples into the reign of Charles V. Many things that one can imagine Philip Augustus or St. Louis doing were reserved for this period, and this was especially the case with the Palace. The general buildings of the Palace in the Cite

THE LATER MIDDLE AGES 261

were too strong and well built in St. Louis' time for any complete renewal to be necessary. He had indeed added the vaulted foundations, retouched the conciergerie, and set a model in the Ste. Chapelle of what the future should do, but when he died there is no doubt that the greater part of the Palace was still the relic of the Eomanesque which Philip Augustus had left it. Not so much age as the growing luxury, expenses, and wealth of the Court, coupled with the growing importance of lawyers, who used the place as their centre, compelled a rebuilding in the first generation of the fourteenth century.

In the year 1296 rose the greatest flood of which history makes any record in Paris. "Men went in boats over the wall of the king's garden." All the Island was covered, and from the foot of the hill of the University to the rising ground beyond the Marais the upper stories of the houses rose out of a lake a mile wide. In that flood was swept away the old stone bridge that Charles the Bald had built centuries earlier — before even the Normans besieged the town ; and in that flood the Petit Chatelet was destroyed. The Petit Pont fell into the river also, but that was nothing wonderful, for it was the most unfortunate of bridges, and neyer stood firmly for fifty years at a stretch, but was for ever being destroyed and as regularly rebuilt. The waste of this flood was the signal for Philippe le Bel's rebuilding. He began, the year after, by making a new bridge, start- ing from the Chatelet, as the old one had done, but coming more eastward, and reaching the Island much where the present Pont au Change, its successor, does to-day. Then, in 1299, he gave to Enguerrand de Marigny, his minister,

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the task of doubliug the Palace, and there was built the "Tour de rHorloge," which looked as it does now, save that the clock has been renewed three times since then. Troni that, as an origin, was built the mediaeval Palais de Justice, the example of architecture which was quoted all over Europe and which remaiaed a boast of Paris tiU the fires of the eighteenth century. The little old separate palace of St. Louis was left, but it became insignificant, and in the neighbourhood of the new plans, they called it " St. Louis's Hall," while all the space between it and the town on the Island was taken up with the building of his grandson. Ptoughly speaking, the whole area that is marked as the mediaeval palace in the map of page 434 was covered, and the Cour du Mai (where the maypole used to be raised) was the only large space left open in the enlargement ; but since it is not possible to give all the detail of these changes, I will take the two principal additions — the buildings that gave the new Palace its especial character. These were the Grande Salle and the Galerie Merciere. They stood where their namesakes and descendants stand to-day, the first parallel to the Ste. Chapelle and forming the other side of the Cour du Mai, the second joining it to the Ste. Chapelle and closing the court on the west, and both were so designed that on entering the Palace from the gate on the Eue de BarUlerie (which is now much widened into the Boulevard du Palais) you saw at once a harmony, a complete picture of the Gothic as homogeneous and perfect as though the spirit of Montereau had survived to guide the pencil of Jean de Luce. This was possible, because the style had not yet changed to the extent that was to mark the latter fourteenth century ; the outside of the Galerie Merciere

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and of tlie Grande Salle were decorated and elaborate, but the Ste. Chapelle, simple as it was, was not severe. Upon that also there had been spent a fancy — especially upon the little treasury at its side — that made it suit the ornament of a later time, and therefore these three sides of the Cour du Mai answered one another and preserved, even into the centuries that ignored or despised their kind of architecture, a tradition of mediaeval beauty. The lawyers would have preserved that treasure to our own time and to the revival of VioUet le Due. It is a tragedy that the fires of 1618 and 1772 should have destroyed its unity for ever.

The Galerie Merciere was not famous in history, nor had it any special function to make it remembered. It was full of little stalls where trinkets were sold; and rich and delicate as it was, it had nothing especial to mark it beyond the fine flight of steps, at the head of which the king's Serjeants sat to issue their writs at a marble table; but the Grande Salle was in its way the most wonderful, as its contemporaries thought it the most beautiful, of the royal halls. Buttressed as a church would be, and with walls that were all made of painted windows like those of the Ste. Chapelle, pinnacled, and high-roofed, it had that quality which wiU be noticed later in the Hotel St. Paul — the quality of carrying the ecclesiastical character into secular architecture. Perhaps, of the buildings that remain to us, Westminster Hall gives the best parallel by which to judge it. But West- minster Hall has always been, and is especially to-day, more bare and cheerless, or (if you prefer it) more grand and severe. The same excellent roofing of great beams distinguished the Grande Salle in Paris, but there the roof

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was double-arched, and met down the middle on a row of columns, while on these colurons, and between the stained-glass windows at the sides, were a series of statues that stood for the kings of France. There they all were, from Pharamond to St. Louis, much as the row stood on the west front of Notre Dame ; and places were left for the rest of that line of kings down which Frenchmen looked for centuries as down the central avenue of their history. It was continued. Even Henry VI. of England had his place there, and the Eenaissance kings as late, I think, as Charles IX. ; but long before the list could be ended with the last Capetian the fire lost us what had been meant for the whole future of France, and the ponderous tunnel of Salomon de Brosse replaced the " casket of the lawyers," where the judges had sat round their great marble table (the " table that never shook," much larger than its copy in the Galerie Merciere), or passed over its checkered floor of black and white when the Courts rose. As for the date of all this, the work was ended in 1313, so that the fire of the Templars lit the new walls of the master that had destroyed them. But though all this magnificence was intended for the new luxury of the Crown, the Crown did not long enjoy it alone : the courts developed, the lawyers encroached upon the Palace. With the next century the main use of the official building was given over to the Courts, and the kiugs had ceased to treat their visit to it as more than an elaborate symbol of their power.

Between Philippe le Bel and the break in the succes- sion to the crown there was little done in the public building of Paris. It was certaioly a time of considerable expansion, and the city had left the wall at every point

THE LATER MIDDLE AGES 265

of its circumference. There were built also at that time some part of the many churches, or rather the additions to the old churches, that mark the fourteenth century; St. Julien le Pauvre, St. Merri — perhaps the old St. Germain I'Auxerrois could show the remodelling of that time. Yet, as a whole, the public action was stagnant ; it was as though the vital part of Paris were drawing breath for resistance, resting before the onslaught of the English armies and of the pestilence.

It is strange that to find the origins of a new activity one has to seek the wars themselves, the disasters of Crecy and Poictiers, and the reaction in municipal politics which the necessity of defence provoked. For when the free companies were destroying the country-sides, when the king was a prisoner in London, when Paris was broken by plague and menaced by the foreign armies, and the whole kingdom endangered by the regency of the Dauphin, it was that perplexing figure of Etienne Marcel, as enigmatic and silent in history as his modern bronze outside the Hotel de ViUe, that started the new life of the city. It was not only or chiefly that he gave the town its first Hotel de Vnie. It is true, indeed, that he founded on the Gr^ve, in the " House of the Pillars " ^ — a low set of gables standing above wooden " rows," like our galleries at Chester — the first town hall of Paris, and so fixed a site that has become the most central in the history of

' The " House of the Pillars '' occupied the site of the main hall of the present Hotel de Ville, in the middle of the west front. It is first mentioned in 1212, when it is Crown property. It reappears (after passing into private hands) in 1309, in a gift of Philippe le Bel ; becomes the Hotel de Ville under Etienne Marcel and— after a short lapse from that office— continues to be so used till the new building of the sixteenth century under Francis I. replaced it.

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the city; but his action on the buildings of the capital is much wider than that, for it is his energy, and especially the impress that he set upon the municipal movement, the path he showed, that his enemy the Dauphin was compelled to follow when he became king.

Though, therefore, I may not have the space to deal in any thorough way with the story of Etienne Marcel, it is possible even here to insist upon the principal characteristic in the Eevolution which he headed, and which failed so signally ; a characteristic not sufficiently developed in the greater part of the descriptions that we read of him, and yet one to which we owe the whole scheme of Charles V.'s work. It was essentially a revolt of the communal spirit. It was not democratic; demo- cracy was so necessary and native a part of the mediaeval system of local government that there was no kind of necessity for insisting upon it, nor did the nature of Marcel's government show anything but a reaction from the popular power of an earlier generation. It was not the struggle between the commercial classes and feudalism. To conceive it as such is to read some poor quarrels of our own time into a crisis whose importance was, above all, military. Etienne Marcel represents the power of the new corporate feeling in the town, Paris beginning to know itself. That spirit had been newly re-learnt from Flanders, it had been carried on as legal tradition in the south of France, and it had been developed, as it were of necessity, by the increase of municipal wealth and of commerce which had [marked the past hundred and fifty years. The collective action of the merchants in the great borough was able at this moment to fill the vacant place of government, to correct the Hi-management

THE LATER MIDDLE AGES 267

of the Crown, and to undertake the salvation of the country. Throughout the Middle Ages, on account of the spontaneity and freedom of popular action, misrule produced of itself eccentric but sufficient remedies. A hundred years before, it would have been the revolt of a great noble; a hundred years later, the subtle action of a capable minister, or of a king who was his own diplomat. In the middle of the fourteenth century it was the middle class of the town, wealthy, organized, and close to the centre of government, which was able to undertake the task.

And to emphasize the nature of Marcel's movement, it need only be pointed out how completely the order and success of Charles V.'s reign continued what the revolt had begun. The wall which the great Provost had begun to throw round the city was continued exactly upon his lines until its completion in 1368. At the Gate of St. Anthony, where he had already seen a point of defensive importance, and at whose " bastide " he fell as he attempted to seize the keys, the very king who had achieved success over his body was himself compelled to raise the Bastille. The Louvre, which the new wall had been specially designed to enclose, so that it should no longer threaten the citizens from without, was kept in that subject position after the king's success and by his especial order, though it would have been possible even at that date to have brought round the wall a Kttle north of the Castle. Apart from the Louvre, which Charles V. — as a result of the rebellion, and of its being now within the city — turned into a living place, from the dungeon that it had been, the two buildings I have mentioned show in an especial manner the effect upon the king of Marcel's plans. The wall

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(to take the first of these) was, as was said above, but a completion of the original fortification that Marcel had thrown up with such energy and skill, and it played so great a part in the history of the city up to the siege of 1594 that it must be briefly described. It differed largely from that which Philip Augustus had built a hundred and fifty years before. It was less of a sweeping curve in its outline, and consisted rather, as the map on p. 300 wUl show, of five or six straight lines, one of which, that from the Eue St. Honore to the Porte St. Denis, was of over a mile in length. It was not continued upon the southern side of the river, and therefore it had to come in along the bank at both the western and the eastern ends up to the two towers (that near the Louvre, and that near the Church of St. Paul), from which the old chains stretched across to defend the river. Its towers were more distant than those of Philip Augustus, and were square instead of round. It was defended by a more ample and complex system of earthworks, having a double moat, and a small rampart throughout its whole length ; and, finally, it was not built with the same consideration for the general mass of the town, but much more with the idea of enclosing all the principal self-governing properties that menaced the homogeneity of the municipal rule. Por this reason it stood outside the Louvre, and for this reason lay straight to the Porte St. Denis, because there was nothing in that neighbourhood which was worth the while of enclosing. It ran thence eastward (along what are now the boule- vards) in order to catch the Temple in its net, and then went straight to the site of the future Bastille, because of the great monastery and the foundations of the new Palace which lay in this quarter outside the wall of Philip

THE LATER MIDDLE AGES 269

Augustus. Had it been similarly developed upon the southern side, it would have had logically to include St. Germain des Pres, St. Marcel, and the other suburbs; but as it was never begun upon this shore of the river, Paris remained until the eighteenth century very irregular in plan, with the northern part of the city much larger than the southern. It is to be remarked also that the wall was a little too large for the defence of the city. It was never really properly garrisoned, and whether the builders imagined that the city would soon grow out to its limits, or whether they had purposely left the wide belt of land to provide food in time of siege, it is at any rate the case that, so far from being filled up as the earlier circle was by the expansion of the town, the new wall remained with large uninhabited spaces within it for some- thing like three centuries. Its ruins existed to a very late period, it formed part of the defence of Paris during the wars of religion, and the corner tower near the Louvre stood on until well into the seventeenth century, nor was it till the reign of Louis XIV. that it was finally destroyed, and replaced by the boulevards ; but it is worth remarking that, although we still have some remains of Philip Augustus' wall, there is now nothing left of this later fortification.!

The Bastille, which represented in later centuries nothing but the despotism of the kings, had its origin in the defence of the city. It grew out of one of the fortified gates, " bastidiae," which Etienne Marcel had put up at

■ A point of some interest in the site of this ■wall is the old " Porte St. Honors." It stood as nearly as possible in front of the "H6tel de Normandie," iu the modern Eue de I'Eohelle. It was here that Joan of 4.ro was wonjided in the nnsncoessful assault upon Paris.

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every exit of his first enclosure. This, and that which overlooked the St. Denis road, were especially strong. When the EebeUion was crushed, and when Charles V. had entered into his kingdom, he appointed a " provost of Paris," as distinguished from the " Provost of the Merchants," who had just done him such a hurt ; and this man, Hugh d' Aubriot, was the minister who advised the building of the great castle to shelter the H6tel St. Paul and to defend the city. Let me describe its site exactly, because, since it has disappeared, and since it plays so great a part in the later history of the town, there is nothing that should be more accurately known in the historical topography of Paris. Its eight towers, each just under a himdred feet above the moat, stood in two parallel rows of four each, running north and south, and were joined by a continuous wall. The oblong thus formed would exactly block the end of the present Eue St. Antoine, having the northern pair of towers on the site of the shop at the northern side of the street where it ends in the Place de la Bastille, and the southern pair over the cafe opposite that makes the corner of the Boulevard Henri IV. j and the width of the whole would be about a third, or perhaps a little less than half of its length. All that part of the site which is not covered by houses is now marked on the street paving in a line of white stones.

There is, by the way, an anecdote of the Bastille that should be told in connection with the story of its building. The first man to be imprisoned in it was the builder him- self, its first governor. For just when the fortress was completed — in 1380 — Charles V. died. The feeling of the bourgeois against Hugh d' Aubriot was so strong (for he had taxed heavily to build his towers) that they put him

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at once into one of his own dungeons on hearing of the king's death. He was released from prison on the revolt of the Maillotins, who imagined for some reason that he would make a good leader of their rebellion. He promised to be their leader, and gave them an appointment later in the day, but when they reached the house Aubriot was well on his way to Dijon, in which town he had been bom, and where, after so many adventures, he peacefully died, meditating on the folly of mobs and the advantages of strong government.

After Charles V. the ruin of the monarchy, the worst phase of the trial of the Capetian house, begins, and a link can be found between his reign and the downfall that succeeded him, for there is one quarter of Paris that sums up as it were every character of the declining Middle Ages, I mean the palace and gardens called the Hotel St. Paul. I say it sums them up ; 'and how thoroughly it does so in its own architecture, its domestic adventures, its furniture, its situation, the dates of its rise and fall, and its political role, a sketch of its history will show. But even more strongly than in its living history the site and surroundings of the palace illustrate the close of the Middle Ages in this — they have utterly disappeared. That a series of narrow streets, seventeenth century porticoes and tall grey houses should stand on the spot that had nourished the kingship of the decadence — that is the most characteristic thing of all, the feature that emphasizes beyond all others the end of a civilization. For Paris has destroyed the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. Some part indeed of that high Gothic which stood on the threshold of the Eenalssance, some relics of the work which was mediaeval in form but in energy attached to the

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new spirit of the sixteenth century, remain. The Cluny, the Tour St. Jacq^ues, the west front of the Ste. Chapelle are there to prove it ; but that which was peculiar to the corruption of the English wars and to the decay of the second civilization has gone. The noble simplicity of the thirteenth century, even the strength of the twelfth, are very evident throughout the older part of the city. Notre Dame is the chief monument of Paris, the Hall of the Cordeliers still stands, here and there you can dis- cover a fragment of Philip Augustus' wall, a corner of his Louvre, or the towers of his palace on the Island ; but the wall of Charles V., the Bastille, the crowd of colleges on the hill, half a hundred of the flamboyant churches, the turrets of the ToumeUes, are nothing but names, and lastly, this great Palace of St. Paul, in spite of the abandonment and poverty of that quarter, and in spite of the wide space it covered, have hardly left a vestige.

Its origin marks at once the expansion of the city and the new perils that had fallen upon the over-toppling crown of France ; for it was designed by Charles V. just in those years when Marcel had insulted his rule as dauphin, when his father was away prisoner in England, and when he got back his capital so hardly ; in the year that John the Loyal, after his short return, had gone back to Edward's court as a prisoner, Charles during his regency bought the land from the Count of Etampes and the Archbishop of Sens, and in the spring that his father died in London — that is in April, 1364 — ^he began the building and declared the site a royal demesne inalienable from the Crown. So all the dates of its inception mark the Palace as peculiar to the new time, to France desolated by the first disastrous period of the hundred years' war, scored, broken — as indeed

THE LATER MIDDLE AGES 273

all Europe was — by the generation of the black death. It was the agony of feudalism; John the Loyal observing every punctilio of its ritual marked by such a pedantry the death of that social creed. It was the moment when an economic arrangement of society so admirably suited to our race broke down under the plague and the increasing tangle of classes, when the rich and the poor snapped the bond between them, and when the repression that was to end in tyranny began first to weigh upon the religion and the social theory of Europe.

The site also that was chosen for the Palace was a sign of the new time. It marked, as I have said, the general expansion of the city, it marked also by its size the greater fiscal position of the Crown. The wall of Philip Augustus came down to the river (as the map on page 300 gives it) just opposite the Isle St. Louis, down the lane that is now called the " Street of St. Paul." It left the old Church of St. Paul just outside the city, and in the neighbourhood of this church some scattered houses stood, making the suburb of St. Paul. Their grouping was such that they ran down in one liae to the river, in another along the Eue St. Antoine, and left in the angle of these two liaes a great open square which would now be bounded by the quay, by the Eue St. Antoine, by the Eue du Petit Muse, and by the Eue St. Paul. This space (about as large as that taken up in London by St. James's Palace, Stafford House, Bridgewater House, and their gardens) belonged, as I have said, to two men, the Count of Etampes and the Archbishop of Sens. The last was bought out in 1363, a year before the building began, and in the united gardens of these two great houses the king raised his new Palace.

T

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We have (oddly enougli for so late a period) no draw- ing, and not even one good general description of this place ; but the allusions made to it so constantly in the time of Charles VI. leave us with an impression which, if it is confused as a whole, yet in its details illustrates the period very well. We know that it was — as so much else in the close of the Middle Ages — an irregular mass of separate buildings joined by chance galleries and additions; we hear also of its formal gardens, of a type that half the miniatures of the time delight ia showing us ; there may indeed be a picture of these somewhere in an niumiaation, but I have not heard of it. There is another matter of especial interest to those who wish to understand the phases of European history by making a picture of them in the mind — I mean the furnishing and look of the rooms. It was a time of luxury for the very rich, a time whose spirit, reflected ia the over-refinement that was overtaking the shapes of architecture, repeated itself with expense and a wealth of detail. Panelling was the form that this lavishness took, and the Palace had whole rooms walled, roofed, and parc[ueted with the dark polished woods that went with the spirit of the time. Something of what the late fourteenth and the fifteenth century could do in the way of lavishness with its woodwork every one can see for himself in the later stall carvings, and nowhere will you get a better impression of the end of such mediaeval design than in the Cathedral of Chester in England, while in Paris a glimpse of it is stUl seen in the two exc[uisite small rooms on either side of the porch of St. Germain I'Auxerrois. Much, then, that we are now accustomed to associate with ecclesiastical decoration entered into the ordinary living rooms of this pleasure

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palace ; and there you must also imagine the sharp colours of escutcheons used for an ornament, the painted balustrades of the music galleries, the toned light of narrow windows (for the square lights were pierced a full century later both here and in the Louvre). Tapestries, though they hung more rarely than in the previous century, yet covered bare spaces in the corridors and at the ends of the principal halls : there also you must imagine heavy hangings about the state chairs of Charles or of Isabella, and doors thickly curtained, so that the whole decoration of this huge, tortuous place was not unlike that which men intent on luxury give them- selves to-day, but more complete and more inspired by the spirit of one consistent style. The civUization of the rich and their isolation had so developed that their learning also was a kind of soft necessity ; the Palace had its great ordered library, its carved reading-desks, its carefully painted books, and the perfumed silence that turn reading iuto a feast of all the senses. Within, then, all the Palace was made for a time in which arms had passed from a game to a kind of cruel pageantry, and in which the search for beauty had ended in excess, and had made the decoration of life no longer ancillary to the main purpose of living, but an unconnected and insufficient end of itself. Without, you must see the Palace a crowd of high, leaden and slated roofs set in great and pleasing disorder, broken into many turrets and finished with a tracery of delicate metal workings, lifting here and there into rare spires and set in one of those exquisitely ordered gardens which an art of increasing precision and of minute accuracy loved to paiat in the little squares of its illuminated manuscripts.

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In the corner of that estate stood the old church which Eligius had founded eight hundred years before, and which had given its name to the whole suburb, and to its recent palace. It became with the building of the Palace a kind of third Chapel-Koyal, as St. Nicholas and the Ste. Chapelle had once been for the Palace on the Island, as Ste. Germain I'Auxerrois had become for the Louvre. It saw the royal marriages of a century, and in its curious black font ^ three kings of France were baptized. But though the new presence of the Crown caused it to be rebuilt, it retained, as though the severe spirit of the Dark Ages preserved it, a certain dignity in the neighbourhood of so much pretti- ness and exaggeration. Late as was the completion of the new St. Paul (the Joan of Arc window proves that it can- not have been much earlier than the middle of the fifteenth century), the simplicity of the Early Gothic remained to it; it had not, indeed, the unity of design that was in other and earlier churches due to the strength of the thirteenth century ; its aisles were of uneq^ual height, and followed downward like steps from the eminence of its bare northern tower ; its ground plan showed an irregular and confused development, but it retained the pure ogive. The mullions of its windows bore no trace of the flam- boyant, and close as it was to the Palace, whose fantastic doors had " the richness of a cathedral's," its porches pre- served the sufficient and noble decoration of the first Gothic, erring in no excess of depth, and escaping the new passion for a crowd of detail in ornament. Even the flying buttresses, where the desire for height and lightness might have found expression, seemed bare and heavy, built for mere use, and reproving by this fault the opposite ' Now, I believe, at Poissy.

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extreme of contemporaries. The cemetery of that church became, of course, the place for the nobles to be buried in ; its chamel-gaUeries were for the Court what those of the Innocents were for the bourgeoise and the populace ; and I cannot leave this famous plot of ground without speaking here also of, what should be mentioned in another part of this book, two famous graves. Here Eabelais was buried under his quiet fig-tree in the full Eenaissance ; here, at the beginning of the eighteenth century, the grave of the Man in the Iron Mask covered the insoluble mystery of his origiu ; here, also, the people buried those poor skeletons which they had found chained in the warrens of the Bastille when it fell in 1789. On all these bodies, and many others, the town has built a curious monument, for there stand over their graves three lodging houses — Nos. 30, 32, and 34 of the Eue St. Paul; a matter for philosophers. As for the church, the ruin of the eighteenth century left it empty and deserted till, in 1796, they pulled it down.

This Palace, then (with the exception of the parish church, which it had annexed and rebuilt), stood as the best example ia Paris of the change that had come upon the spirit of the Middle Ages ; but in its material aspect that change was only an excess of beauty and a kind of strain imposed upon the sensibility of the mind, as though one should be condemned to the sole hearing of subtle melodies, or to the only sight of iridescent colours. On the mere evidence of so much fantasy and exaggerated complexity of line, it might be guessed that a rottenness had eaten into the State ; how far the disease had gone, the history of the men that lived in those over-exquisite walls sufficiently illustrates. It is in this, even more

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than in its design, that the Palace of St. Paul is typical of the later Middle Ages in Paris. For it was here that Charles V. died, who had bmlt it, and who had also so nearly reconstructed the commonwealth that he found ruined by Edward. It was in a chamber of the inner palace that he commended to Burgundy and to Bourbon the care of the handsome and uncertain child who was to bring France up to the edge of fate : to Burgundy, who was thinking only of his separate design of empire; to Bourbon, whose range of sight missed altogether the vast- ness of the new France.

It was in this palace that the young Charles VI. grew up, amiable, ill-balanced, into his unhappy manhood ; here that he brought home Isabella, and here that she bore him the child for whom Joan of Arc was to recover the kingdom. Here, in the same year, the recurrent curse of the Valois fell upon him, and he came home mad from the armed ride. All the tragedy of the long reign passed in that palace. Its walls kept the echo of the poor king calling out to be saved from himself, looking with blank eyes at his children, and giving them the names of strangers. The memory of that horror hung around the Palace for a century, and doomed it ; it seemed to the men that lived round watching the king like a great mausoleum, built with all the art of the time, to receive the dead body of the monarchy. It became a centre for the whirlpool of the faction. The Armagnacs made their attempt to smuggle the heir from its windows ; Burgundy from the Louvre attacked it in arms, as though it had been a foreign fortress. Upon it, as upon the kernel of Paris, the parallel armies of Henry V. converged ; to it he went side by side with the Mad King when he entered Paris conquering,

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and kissed the relics at one church door after another in the long ride from the St. Denis Gate to Notre Dame. Here the estates were summoned that disinherited the Dauphin, and here his answer was received, " I appeal to the sharp end of my sword." Here, rather than at the Louvre, one must place Henry V.'s wooing of Catherine, and in this same palace, to which they had just brought back Henry's son, the baby from "Windsor, the old king died.

Bedford, the regent, left it in a little while for the Tournelles, on the other side of the way, but it remained the of&cial palace, and Isabella, who had helped so much to bring about the ruin of France, died in an empty room of it, ill-attended and despairing, in the autumn of 1435. Six months later — on the thirteenth of April, 1436 — Eichemont came in by the St. Jacques gate, and his lieutenant put up the Fleur-de-Lis on the wall, and shouted " Ville-Gagnee," while Willoughby tried to fight his way out northward, and was beaten back to the capitulation of the Bastille. The next year Charles VII. entered his capital, and the Hotel St. Paul takes its last place in history ; there he received his addresses from the Parliament and the University, and as he passed out of its gates it fell from royalty. The rare days when he re-visited the capital he spent in the TourneUes, of which Bedford had made the most habitable place in Paris. Louis XI., attached also to the Tournelles, would have nothing to do with the older palace. The last fifty years of this period leave it to one side; it fell into disuse and ruin, the Eenaissance found it empty, and Catherine de Medicis threatened to destroy it ; and at last, in the later reigns of the sixteenth century, it was sold bit by bit, re-built or

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pulled down iu sections, and turned into the great town houses of which one still stands on the Qua! de Celestins, but the greater part have been replaced by the tall, gloomy houses that have filled up the old gardens and courts of the nobles.

See, then, how good a standpoint this palace was from which to watch the breakdown of the feudal monarchy and the recreation of the French state. Its beginniug so follows on Crecy and Poictiers and Etienne Marcel ; its principal days are so bound up with Agincourt and Henry V., its decline so recalls the successes of Eichemont and Charles VII. Its abandonment is so associated with the new tyranny of Louis XI. that one might almost have watched from its rooms, without leaving its enclosure, the whole drama of the hundred years' war. It is a kind of pier, or platform, where one can stand and see the tide of that disaster rise and destroy mediaeval France, and ebb away again to leave the way free for the Eenaissance.

In contrast to the Palace, which thus exemplifies the morbid luxury of that evU time, there is a site where the effect of decay can be watched from the standpoint of the people : that site is the Cemetery of the Innocents. The Halles and their quarter have always been the centre of populace in Paris ; they still remain the place where, in spite of modern surroundings, new straight streets and vast roofs of iron and glass, you can most usually find the types that make up the lower tradition of the capital. There the random sellers of ballads, the street artists, the homeless singers gather at night, and there I have seen sometimes, just before morning, such men as Villon knew ; there also the man of our time who was the heir of Villon, Paul Verlaine, would find his friends. In the Middle Ages the

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peculiar character of that quarter was strongest in the Cemetery of the Innocents ; and just as a man could show the high politics of the time without leaving the Hotel St. Paul, so one could give the whole life and movement of the poor without leaving the walls of this great square, whose site is now marked only by a public garden.^

It was squalid, as their lives were, rank, trodden, and piled with rubbish. A lonely mortuary chapel tolled a cracked bell at the eastern end ; in the midst of it a piUory, a moulderiug cross, an open-air pulpit stood irregularly. From the time when Louis le Gros, far back in the early twelfth century, had dedicated it and named it after his " Saints of Bethlehem," the poor and the vagrants had made it more and more their own, and in the two centuries that increased the bitterness of their lives and built up a whole population of outcasts, they gathered there at night for their grotesque and dangerous festivals, or issued from it in mobs on the days of rebellion. Its uses, its legends, the character of its decorations, all spoke of the perverted spirit that had fallen upon Europe, yet there was in them, I know not what of vigour, springing perhaps from the hard work that the poor must always do, and very different from the mere indolence and failure of the palaces. The place was all dedicated to Death, and the thought of Death ruled it ; but a contempt for Death — not noble nor severe, yet still a contempt — was found here during the time

' The oblong between tbe Eue St. Denis, the Bue Berger, the Eue de la Ferronneiie, and the Bue de la Lingerie exactly contains the site of the Cemetery of the Innocents, so that the Bue Lescot cuts right through what used to be the middle of it. The " Fontaine des Innocents," which now stands in the middle of the garden, used to be at the outer corner, on the Eue Berger and the Eue St. Denis. Lesoot built it, and four of the statues are Goujons, the rest Sojat's modern imitations.

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when the same thought oppressed the nobles and the Court to no purpose. It is here that one sees how the people just maintained an energy that carried them on to the salvation of the Eenaissance ; here that the friars preached their interminable moralities.^ The bones which in an earlier time had lain undisturbed — whose quiet sepulture indeed all antiquity had thought of such great moment — were dug up in the new spirit of the fourteenth century,^ and piled together in the charnel-galleries that surrounded the square till burial became a kind of transitory thing, a rite maintained because it was a rite, but having lost all its old meaning of perpetual repose. It was as though Death had come conquering humanity, charging too fast to be met by the decent resistance of religion. Beneath these charnel-galleries, where the bones of centuries lay heaped together in disorder, there was a kind of cloister round the inside of the wall, and within two sides, the northern and the western side, of this cloister, those that could afford it began in the fifteenth century to put up monuments to their dead. These monuments, scattered and lost, seem all to have borne the same character of beauty in decay that marked the whole of that period. That of Simon le Turc is an example, with its grave and lovely Madonna, whose memory is preserved to us still in the print at the archives. Some of these tablets dated even from the Eenaissance, and chief among them was that

' Notably that Frjincisoan of the fifteenth century who preached daily in Lent (so they eay), from five in the morning till the middle of the afternoon, convincing the people of sin.

' The first mention of this custom in Paris is in 1327. It became universal, and was found even in the cemeteries of the rich, especially in that of St. Paul, which, as the peculiar burying-place of the Court, might (one would think) have escaped it.

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which Goujon raised to his little daughter, the exquisite child's face that Droz preserved, but that is now lost or hidden in some private collection. But more characteristic of the place than any other feature was the "Danse Macabre," the Dance of Death, that lined with its frescoes the whole southern cloister along the Eue de la Perronnerie.

There is reason to believe that the Danse Macabre of the Innocents was the earliest of the series which closed (until some one shall have the sense to make us another) with the famous example at Lucerne. It dated from 1424, so that Bale is fifteen years later, and Lydgate's copy at St. Paul's in London, as well as that at Salisbury, must have been later stiU.^ Holbein, with whom the idea is most commonly associated, was, of course, but one in a long tradition, and came towards the close of it. What is the spirit of this fancy ? What in especial was the spirit of this original in Paris? A mixture of irony, of the old moralities, and of despair. It retained indeed the simple Christian doctrine, but it had lost that easy faith which heartens and invigorates the epics of the twelfth centm-y and which makes so quiet the passing of the knights in the Crusades. I wish I could print here at length the whole series of the verses that ran beneath it to explain the emblems, and ending each in one of those popular proverbs which later became the refrains of ballads. Then you would see how certainly Villon had read them, and where the inspiration came for the couplets in which, like Shakespeare, he has caught up and transformed the folk- sayings of his people. The opening of the whole —

" O creature raisonable Qui desirez vie eternelle ..."

■ Perhaps 1440 and 1460 respectiyely.

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has something of hife rhythm. " Peu rault honneur c[ui si tot passe/' at the end of the Pope's answer to Death, is one of those sayings out of which he also made the repeti- tious of his verse. I wish, also, I could print here the pictures (which luckUy one of the earliest of wood en- gravings, preserved, I think, at Grenoble, recalls to us) in which the bitter humour of the men that had suffered Agincourt and the civil war revealed itseK; the opening figure of a master in his chair pointing out the long gallery, the Pope, the Cardinal, the King, each answering Death on the vanity of their greatness, but with a misery that was not present in the older and happier times of St. Louis ; the lawyer dreading a court where "Dieu rendra tout a juste prix ; " the Franciscan to whom this grinning Death cries out —

" Souvent avez preoli^ la mort, Si vous devez moins merveiller.''

— of all these there is not one in which Death opens a good gate on to a pleasant garden, or takes up honest fighters to the city of God, as Eoland was taken by St. Michael of the Pern. There are but two in which He is at all a con- solation : to the labourer, who remembers that " Au monde n'a point de repos," and to the little child —

" Fol est qui ne a connaissance Qui plus Tit plua a a souffrir."

Indeed, the people who drew this thing must have had a strange way of smiling and must have looked always to the ground. So the pictures stood, feeding the sadness of the fifteenth century, lingering on through the Eenaissance, only glanced at now and then by some curious spirit older than its time. The seventeenth century left them stained and forgotten till at last, under Louis XIV., in 1669, they

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were quietly pulled down, with their whole cloister, and Europe lost a marvel without knowing it ; Paris certainly without regret.

In all the places of the city where they worshipped the people introduced with the close of the mediteval Life their fantasies and their grotesque imaginings. They turned the churches — which had had in the thirteenth and twelfth centuries something of the empty grandeur that they have to-day — into museums, as it were, of their legends and of the mass of folk-lore and special worship that had grown to overlie the cardinal lines of the faith. They most effected this in the smaller churches of Paris; the Cathedral, where a vigorous control, the size of the building, and a certain dignity in its traditions, somewhat modified their action, yet became fuller and warmer from the customs of the time. Here were new statues at random up and down the aisles ; the great painted figure of Philippe le Bel on his horse, the gigantic St. Christopher that stood by the door looking up the nave, the square sculptured stone close by with the inscription, " This is the picture of that noble man, Master Anthony of Essarts . . . who had this great image of my lord St. Christopher made in the year 1413— Pray for his soul."

But of aU the additions to the interior of Notre Dame which popular fancy or the traditions of some crisis gave it, none is; more worthy of being known than that which alone survives of them, and which I have made the frontis- piece of this book. It is not that the statue has— as so much of the fourteenth century can boast — a peculiar beauty; it is indeed (when seen from below, as it was meant to be) full of a delicacy that the time was adding to the severity of the thirteenth century ; it has from that

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standpoint a very graceful gesture: the exaggeration of the forehead disappears, the features show the delicate and elusive smile that the fourteenth century always gave to its Madonnas, and there appears also in its general attitude the gentle inclination of courtesy and attention that was also a peculiar mark of a statuary which was just escaping the rigidity of the Early Gothic. But its beauty, slight and Hi-defined, is not, I repeat, the interest of the statue. It is because this image dates from the awakening of the capital to its position ia France, because it is the symbol of Paris, that it rises up alone as you may see it now on the right of the choir, where the southern transept comes into the nave, all lit with candles and standing out against the blue and the lilies. It is a kind of core and centre to the city, and is, as it were, the genius, catching up the spirit of the wars, and giving the generation of the last siege and reconstruction, as it will give on in the future to others in newer trials, a figure in which all the personality of the place is stored up and remembered. It was made just at the outbreak of the hundred years' war, it received the devotion of Etienne Marcel, it heard the outcry that followed the defeat of Poictiers and the captivity of the king; before it was burnt that great candle, coUed as sailors coil ropes, and " as long as the walls of the city," which the corporation vowed on the news of that battle. It has been for these five hundred years and more the middle thing, carrying with full mean- ing the name " Our Lady of Paris," which seems to spread out from it to the church and to overhang like an influence the whole city, so that one might wonder sometimes as one looked at it whether it was not the figure of Paris itself that one saw. It is the emblem of all that Paris

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has been, of its religion, of its civic ideals, of all that varied message vrhich fails unceasingly and seems continually lost, as a ship — and a ship is also the symbol of Paris — seems to be lost in the trough of a high sea, and is hidden for a time but in the end is saved. On account of all these things they should put beneath it, if anywhere within the walls, the motto of the city in great letters of gold —

"FlUCTUAT NEC MEEGITUE."

And it is on accoimt of all these things also that it makes the best frontispiece for my book.

After the close of the long struggle which is ty3)ified ia the Hotel St. Paul and the Cemetery of the Innocents, at the end of the hundred years' war and after the entry of Eichemont into Paris, there is little built upon a scale or of an importance that can call for mention at this place. In many of the churches indeed there were chapels built or redecorated, and the Palace in the Cite — now wholly occupied by the lawyers — one or two colleges, the Hotel de Nesle, and the Louvre showed the effect of the peace in a number of details and additions. They must not occupy any space in a division of my subject that has already exceeded its limits.

There is even but one bmlding of note iu connection with a period so intensely interesting in general French history as that covered by the life of Louis XI. It is the Hotel des Tournelles. For the last dozen years of his life he practically abandoned the Palace, and the Hotel des Tournelles, in which he lived during the first dozen years of his government (though it was built before his time), is chiefly associated with his name. It occupied the

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space up against tlie wall on the north of the Eue St. Antoine and just west of the Bastille. It was not very large, and its architecture (of which, as I believe, no draw- ing remains) was distinguished by a mass of little turrets, which gave the Palace its name. It had belonged at first, in the end of the fourteenth century, to a noble family, that of Orgemont, and had become Crown property just before the English invasion and the occupation of the city. The Duke of Bedford lived in it even before his brother's death ; and at a time when the Hotel St. Paul seemed more suitable for ofBcial residence, he persisted in keeping up the Toumelles as his own palace. He brought there the great library from the Louvre, and it was there that his wife died, whom he buried in the neighbouriag convent of the Celestins. It is very difi&cult to trace the exact site of the house itself and of the large gardens behind it. The street to which it has left its name runs up very close to where the hotel stood, and the Place des Vosges occupies the site of a large part of its garden. After the vogue that Louis XI. had given it, it still remained the principal town house of the kings, and it was there that Louis XII. died just after the new year of 1515 ; from its doors the criers went out during the night with bells, calling, " The father of the people is dead." The Eenais- sance kings came there from time to time, but already, about 1565, Catherine de Medici was planning its destruc- tion. That destruction never took place as she had in- tended, nor was the site filled for a century by any example of the new architecture. The old Palace dragged on for a hundred years, just as St. Paul did to the south of it, sold in lots, piecemeal, and leaving, I believe, some vestiges as late as the reign of Louis XIV.

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The C^lestins, whose name has occurred in these few notes upon the Palace of the Touraelles, was the great convent in the extreme east of the city between the Hotel St. Paul and the wall. They date, as does so much in Paris,^ from the quiet period just after the worst of the defeats that Paris suffered at the hands of Edward III. Their actual foundation is a little earlier than this. The land was given them by one of the family of Marcel four years before the battle of Poictiers, but the building of their famous church and the rise of the monastery date from the more prosperous time that closed the reign of Charles V.

Their history (if my limits permitted me to deal with it) would be more concerned with the Eenaissance than with the Middle Ages. For nowhere in Paris did the Eenaissance work with more complete effect. The chapel, which had been for so long an aristocratic and a royal burying-place, was crowded with those tombs in which the Italian spirit showed its greatest luxuriance of art, compar- able to the Medicean tombs at St. Denis, or the mausoleum of Cardinal du Prat at Eouen. Their cloisters were round arched and of marble, and it was said by those who could remember the place and who lived on iuto our century, that in no quarter of Paris did the effect of the sixteenth century strike one more powerfully. The destruction of so much splendour was not the work of the Eevolution. The convent was suppressed as early as 1779, and the dispersing of its goods, and, I think, also of its library, had begun before the States General met at Versailles. The Eevolution had the effect, however, of breaking the

' For instance, the Pont St. Michel, of whose origin I have had no space to speak.

U

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tradition of respect which surrounded the site, and it fell into complete decay. To-day the Boulevard Henry IV. goes over the site of the main part of the buildings. The barracks, called by the name of the convent, contain, if I am not mistaken, some part of the old structure, but with this exception, and that of the quay, which is still called the Quai des Celestins, there is nothing to recall them now.

Two examples remaiu to be mentioned of a spirit peculiar to the close of the Middle Ages in Paris. Of that spirit I shall have more occasion to speak in my next chapter when I describe the abundant energy that came upon France at the time of the Italian expeditions, and that at first developed rather than destroyed the last efforts of the Gothic ; but it would not be germane to a chapter on the Eenaissance to include in it (though they both were built after the death of Louis XI.) works so mediaeval as the Cluny and the west front of the Ste. Chapelle. These two remain indeed at the present day at once the best and the most complete examples that could be chosen in Paris of the later fifteenth century work. In the west front of the Ste. Chapelle there is to be noticed, especially in the great rose window, the full development of the flamboyant style; and yet, I cannot tell by what accident, though an architect would be able to explain it, the addition does not clash with the pure thirteenth-century Gothic of the rest of the church. For the most part, even men learned in such matters would take the Ste. Chapelle to be one creation, springing from one time, and this is perhaps due to the fact that the detail and decoration of Peter de Montereau were very rich for the time in which he lived, so that the

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developments wliich the two hundred years since his time had given to the first severity of Gothic architecture, clashed less than they would have done with Ste. Gene- vieve, for example, or with the Cordeliers.

In the case of the Hotel de Cluny there is no welding of the earlier with the later Middle Ages. It is a pure piece of fifteenth century work, carried even over the date of 1500 ; and the care of one of those rare men who have spent their private fortunes in the preservation of national treasure — M. du Sommerard — has left it at the present day a place where you can reproduce for yourself exactly, a great household of the new rich class upon which the experience of Italy was to work till they turned their wealth to the building of the Eenaissance palaces. And the Cluny is characteristic also of its time in this, that to build in such detail, and with such an accumulation of rare carving, can only have been possible with that same small class which, as I said at the beginning of this chapter, had absorbed the vitality of the nation. It may be compared to the house of Jacques Coeur at Bourges, or to the Hotel de Ville at Eouen. It is, by the way, a curious accident that when so many provincial towns in France were spending the wealth of the great merchant bodies in the building of new Town Halls, and when the Flemish example was so strong, Paris should have remained contented with the dowdy row of houses, the Maison aux Fillers, which represented the municipal authority in the Place de Greve on to the middle of the Eenaissance period. But for whatever reason, the action of the municipality, which in Paris possessed perhaps the wealthiest of all the merchant guilds, was checked, while it was left to the Crown, to produce something of the same result in the

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Cluny as the provinces had produced in their Town Halls, and that is why it is so difficult to-day to understand how the Museum could have been suited to the uses of a royal palace. So it was used, however, standing in its narrow street of the Mathurins, backed against the ruin of the Eoman Palace and right in that quarter of the University with which the Court had nothing to do, and the journey to which from the Louvre or from the Hotel des Tour- nelles was, until quite modern times, so tedious.

There is one further matter that requires some descrip- tion in connection with mediaeval Paris, a matter in which the modern city has changed so much that one tends to forget the effect it must have had in past centuries. I mean the shape and tenure of the holdings in the town. This, in a limited space and in a fashion necessarily imperfect, I will attempt to give.

Of what nature were the houses in this Paris upon which the Eenaissance was about to strike, but whose general look stood on beyond the end of the sixteenth century ? The type of Gothic architecture as it appeared from the street has, of course, been very thoroughly drawn by many writers ; it remains to-day in so many tomes that we can easily remake it. What is less often done is to give an idea of the arrangement of the city tenures.

In the first place, it is important to see the mediaeval town full, as it were, of great islands. That is the first great contrast between their aspect and that of a modern city. Enclosed properties so large as to be nearly estates stood in the midst of the houses. So I showed them in the last chapter, and so they remained even long after the Middle Ages had closed; and though of course the

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increasing value of central sites led, as it must always do, to division, that effect was far less prominent in the con- servative and customary society of the fifteenth century than it is in the competitive society of our own day. From the Eoman time onward, these great enclosures, walled and often moated, always enjoying a particular jurisdiction of their own, continued to occupy something like a fifth of the inhabited area.

They were almost like little cities in the midst of the great one. Their life looked inwards, and I can best describe them to an English reader by comparing them to the Cathedral closes. They had not, of course, been planted down in a thickly-populated area. Every one of them owed their origin to a grant of land out of some space which had been, when the donation was made, exterior to the urban territory; but they owed their curiously persistent life to the strongly conservative quali- ties of the monastic system, to the dogmatic observation of individual rights, to the lack of any powerful or centralized municipality, and, in the case of those that belonged to the king, to the superfluity of resources which until a comparatively late epoch prevented the Crown from selling.

It must not be imagined that these enclosures lay empty, though they were naturally less crowded than the swarming quarters of the city proper ; gables showed above the walls, and each great institution nourished. a large population of dependents ; yet they produced in the general effect an impression of space and leisure very valuable to the society of which they were a part.

Now, outside these isolated exceptions the town was a confused mass of tenements, held on a quasi-feudal

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tenure, on which it is important to have accurate know- ledge, and which may roughly be defined as follows : a large number of small lordships divided the bulk of the city, received dues rather than rents from their tenants, and attempted to preserve something of jurisdiction as well. But these were overlapped and confused by other rights and customs, the anarchy of which can only be compared to the present extraordinary confusion of local authorities in England, A very large number of houses (and that number an increasing one) was held upon a tenure which had once been practically servile, which had become what we should call copyhold, and which became in a few more generations something closely approaching to independent ownership. This, indeed, finally became the normal type of Parisian property, and is the origin of the large number of freeholds that divide the city to-day. There was also (though it was but small) a number of scattered properties belonging to the municipality, and there was a considerable body of houses belonging to and dependent upon corporations, such as the houses to the north of Notre Dame, which depended upon the canons of that cathedral; many of the houses near the Hotel Dieu, whose rents were paid to that institution; houses once clerical, now let to private people in the neighbour- hood of principal churches, such as St. Germain I'Auxer- rois, and a considerable body in the hands of the guilds.

But with such a classification one has not arrived at anythrag like a complete skeleton of the complexity of the mediaeval town. We must imagiae its industry on a system of the strictest Protection — a system which arose from the iusistence which the Middle Ages laid upon the idea of security. Men worked at the same trade as far

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as possible in the same quarter, governed in their prices for labour and for material by the rules of a co-operative association which was chartered and self-governing. They pursued an industry with the object of providing the com- munity on the one hand with no more than what it needed, and the workers on the other with continual and regular employment ; and this they thought proper to obtain, not by the intricate methods of seeing how the market lay, and trusting to the chance of innumerable private bargains, but by the direct method of continual inquiry into the conditions of the trade, and by the byelaws that the State permitted their councils to enforce.

All this mass of inhabitants, besides the feudal dues (which were, of course, far less than our modern com- petitive rents), besides, that is, irregular sums paid to their lords whether individuals or corporations, paid a quantity of irregular and changeable taxation to the king, to local bodies, to their own private associations, and so forth, in a manner which we to-day can best compare to the various necessary and fluctuating charges which a professional man pays to his clubs, to the rates, to the ministers of his religion and what not, and which are just as real a tax to-day as were the formal dues of the Middle Ages to the population of that time ; though we see fit to let evil men avoid them if they will.

As to the shape of the holdings in mediaeval Paris, it showed a common though not a universal type, and that type, while it would not have affected the general outer view of the city as one passed along the streets, must be understood if we are to appreciate the domestic life of the inhabitants. The house itself, until very late in the history of Paris, was square in its ground

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plan; but the general shape of a holding was very- deep and oblong, so that every house had its large court or garden. The houses were large, as the social con- dition of the Middle Ages demanded, for the poor man was commonly connected in a domestic capacity with the men of the middle and upper artisan classes; he would live in the house usually as a kind of servant, and this was especially true in the case of those industries which to-day employ so many men under one master, but which then took the form of a small employer with a few apprentices and a handful of workmen. If one glances at the lists of taxation at any time between the thirteenth and the sixteenth centuries, one finds each separate holding in the name of one man taxed as a separate unit, and each stands for a family governed by one head, and surrounded by all the privacy which was so dear to the time. High walls separated one court or garden from the other, and where, as was often the case, a common well existed for several houses, the approaches to it were kept with locked doors, to secure the freedom and isolation of each partner in the commodity.

Pinally, we must add to such a picture two important exceptions which mark out the aspect of the mediaeval town from that of the modern. First, there was a large class of noble houses built in a different style from the rest — not only larger, but also set in a different fashion as regarded the street, protected by a small exterior wall, isolated upon either side, and built usually in a hollow parallelogram with an interior court or quadrangle. These noble houses (to which must be added the houses of the wealthier merchants) were always, so to speak, ahead of the time in architecture. They would have shown

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examples of the Gothic when everything else biit the churches were still in the Ml Eomanesque. They were decorated with the flamboyant beauty and extravagance, while the rest of Paris was still the gable of the early Middle Ages ; and in the period just after that of which I am treating, they began to show the effect of the Eenais- sance contemporaneously with the great public buildings.

Secondly, one must remember the ring of market gardens which has, without exception, marked the outer belt of the city since the Eoman time, and which, even with modern means of communication, is a distinctive feature of Paris. But whereas in a modern city this ring commonly lies outside the urban area, it was in the Middle Ages an important point to include it, if possible, within the walls, because the victualling of the city had to be defended. Philip Augustus built his first wall well outside this agricultural ring. When the new wall was made under Charles V. this policy was still more marked ; and though the town continually grew up to the boundaries, the gardens as continually kept pace outwards with this growth. Even to-day it may be roughly said that the exterior forts built since the war protect the fields that feed the capital.

Here, at the end of what is but a very incomplete succession of names, I must close a chapter which might of itself fill much more than such a book as this. Paris of the later Middle Ages, in its decay, its terrors, its occasional visions, its scenes of the hundred years' war, is the theme that has attracted the pens of those who have been struck by the personal nature of the city, more than any part of its history save the episode

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of the Eevolution. And, in one way, the period is worth more to the historian than the Eevolutionary period, because the Eevolution was entirely in the mind and worked in an old Paris unsuited to itseK, whereas the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries had a Paris of their own very suited to them; an environment which they had made for themselves out of their own passions, disasters, and illusions.

The town was dressed, as its inhabitants were, in whatever could most satisfy a passion for the various and for the strange. It was a morbid trance in which the love of beauty remained, but not of general beauty, nor of beauty connected with the whole good of the State. It was a time in which the aesthetic part of man had been wrought to a kind of unnatural pitch because faith was in decay and because beauty was the only refuge from despair. It was a time, also, when even the beauty which we thus admire, and which a haunting instinct sometimes makes us put above the virile conceptions of an earlier time, was the consolation or the excitant of the individual, was grasped at by the rich, became a necessity for the luxurious, but did nothing to save the souls of men. I can never "see the flamboyant, even in Normandy (where it is most luxuriant, and where it stands surrounded by such happy countrysides), without remembering that its flames were the flames of tortures, and that there worshipped or despaired under its lovely influence a generation whose greater part had been cut off from all that had been meant in the early Middle Ages to be the nutrition of the populace. And its singular attraction still recalls, when it is compared with the noble strength of the first masters of the Gothic, a contrast between

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dreams and reality. In the one exception of the buildings we do not see that those dreams were evil ; but in every other aspect of the ruin of mediaeval civilization, in its puerile legends, in its gross cruelty, in its abandonment of duty by the rulers and by the priests, it seems, as we read the treaties of Louis XI. or the superb "Will of Villon, to be a dream still, but a dream so sinister that there is no chance nor safety save in waking. The waking was the Eenaissance; but Paris until the Eenaissance slipped farther into the dark.

In that dark the idea which precedes the thing was stirring ; artists were thinking in the terms of antiquity ; already they knew that in Italy the colonnades were rising and the domes were multiplying from the imique example at Florence. Paris, whose mind was changing, yet kept her form. Had you passed through Paris in the night of one of those winters you would have had everywhere about you the narrow mystery of Gothic streets. The houses, overhanging and timbered, would have hidden the sky, and the spirit in which Europe had attempted to reach heaven would still be with you mournfully in its decay. You would have seen spires beyond the roofs, and here and there the despairing beauty of the flamboyant in its last effort, the jutting carved windows of the rich, or the special accretion of porches at St. Jacques or at the Auxerrois.

But even if you had been (in that midnight ramble) of the populace ; had Italy been unknown to you, and for you the classics imdiscovered ; had the new discontent and hopes of Europe been with you nothing but a sullen irritation against the monks, even then you would have felt that the Paris around you belonged to a past ; that it

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was out of place, in danger of possessing relics ; and with the light of day your eyes would have welcomed change. It was this spirit in the people that permitted the Eenais- sance to work its century of revolution all over Europe ; the beautiful mystery which had fed the soul of the "West for three hundred years had lost its meaning, and empty symbols disturbed the curiosity of the young century.

It is for this reason that all those who have well described the end of the Paris of St. Louis have made their descriptions fall in with the spirit of night. Victor Hugo shows you Paris moonlit in the snow from the towers of Notre Dame ; its little winding streets like streams of black water in breaking ice, its infinite variety of orna- ment catching the flakes that had fallen. Stevenson shows you Paris moonlit in the snow from the eyes of poor Villon wandering after the murder, and afraid of wolves and of the power of the king.

The whole spirit is that of the night. Its fears ; its holding to repose ; its blundering — at last its readiness for the rising sun. The armies are going into Italy, we are to have Bayard and Francis, a Medici will rule in Paris, and the long troubling dawn of quite a new day is coming upon the city : the Eeformation, the period of the buccaneers, the stories of western treasure, the sixteenth century, "a robber dressed in crimson and in cloth of gold."

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CHAPTER VII

THE EENAISSANCE

Between what I have told and what I have to tell there is placed a gulf so profound that the approach compels a kind of hesitation. Where can one find a bridge to link the fantastic with the real ? There lies upon the one side the period that we have just crossed; it is something old and worn out, but consistent with itself, the natural if tardy age and decline of an individual thing — Paris of the Middle Ages.

As it decayed there came upon it the terrors and phantoms of death. Always prone to dream, closely allied to darkness and to unseen things, the soul of the Middle Ages, when it felt the end coming, gave itself up entirely to the unreal and to visions. Here was no transition nor any possibility of a new birth.

There ran between Ste. Genevieve and Jeanne d'Arc a great river of a thousand years. It had ilowed through wild but fertile marshes at its source, it had found strong banks and a clear stream during the vigorous centuries of the Crusades, it had seemed for a very great space of time to be the high road of human progress, but it reached no sea. The delta of the fifteenth century absorbed it; it went more sluggishly, tarnished and

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befouled with the false Court of Charles VII., divided and faltering through the maze of shoals in which Louis XI. delighted, and now, like the river of Damascus, it was lost in the sands.

There is indeed a space of time in which the new and the old overlap, but there is no place where they join. The last great effort of the Gothic is loud, definite, clear, like the cry of a man on the point of death. It falls well within that sixteenth century which is the Janus of our history. This cry has been, preserved in stone, and you may note in the Tour St. Jacques the supreme effort of the Middle Ages. But before the first of its stones was laid, the workmen on the scaffolding about it could see on the Chatelet over the way an entablature so new, so Eoman, that a man might have thought it part of the spoils of Italy.

There is not a parallel in histoiy for that contrast. The past of its nature produces and develops, there is a fihal link between the generations of the fathers and of the sons. St. Etienne on the Island was a barbaric basilica : the walls that defended Paris against the Normans held the stones of the Eoman circus. Later, wherr the pointed arch came so suddenly upon the city, there yet was continuity. The Gothic may, on the material side, be called a flower unfolding from the Eomanesque. But here the universal rule broke down, and the two worlds in stone looked at each other for a hundred years ; the old world of the north, Paris of the snows and of mystery, ascetic, haggard, fervent, dressed up in the beauty of a long past, stood side by side with a new Paris full of the south, stately, speaking of rhythm and of order, and standing upon the pride of life. And as

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the new Paris slowly grew, in this spot and in that, like statues placed at random in a forest, the old Paris watched silently, unchanging for a hundred years, and then sud- denly, in the youth of a man, the timbered houses, the tender gables, the delicate ruins disappeared, and the city, like a ship launched, took securely with a deep keel to the ocean of the modern world.

It is this contrast, this building in of the chance examples of the Eenaissance, with which the present chapter has to deal. You will see the shock of the old and the new Louvre standing together, part and parcel of one building — part of the same wall — a mixture as violent as that of a knight errant and a Borgia. You will see also the beginning of the Tuileries, that graceful Italian thing, standing out alone among the rubbish beyond the wall. You will see its gardens, strict and grand, running into the free landscape of the He de France as a human pier runs into the formless sea. The Car- navalet, the Fontaine des Innocents, the Hotel de Ville — all the new outposts of the south will stand hemmed in by an old barbarous town aghast at the advance of such an army, but powerless to resist. For the spirit that had created the Gothic was dead. The stones copied them- selves, they were no longer created. The superb youth of the Crusades, laughing under its pointed cap of steel and resting on a two-handed sword, the irony and the strength of the grotesque in the cathedrals, the virile energy of the faith, the attempt of all those endless high arches, the strange, indefinite hopes that led upward and outward without ceasing — a hand had passed over all these things, and they had become quite old and withered. The Gothic went in silence, carted away at each new time

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of building. The treasury of the Ste. Chapelle like a child, the Palais Stairs, the innumerable colleges, the Hotel de Nesle, the Jacobins, the Tournelles — all these have gone. And at the thought of their passing I seem to be watching an old king whose name I never knew, defeated but all in armour, riding down a road. For no man can call it back again to hfe. We see their modem ogives ; they teU us that the measurements are exact, but the whole thing is a waxwork image and does not live at all.

In what way did the Eenaissance fall upon Paris ? To introduce it, it is necessary that I should speak of an accident by which two civilizations met, and iu their encounter made modern Europe. I mean the crossing of the Alps by the French and that great land-fall the discovery of Italy.

It was a king with the divine gifts attending on ignorance that made the venture.

"When Louis XI. died he had, with a cunning that touched at once upon madness and genius, accumulated the greatest treasure that Europe had known since the Eomans. That treasure was France. There were forms of the national energy that sought homogeneity and union ; every particle of such energy had been saved. There were other forces that would have led once more, as they had led in the fourteenth century, to disruption ; they were canalised, directed, used, until they also had helped to build up this great vault — the Kingdom. The framing of so solid and peculiar a masterpiece was the one creative act of the close of the Middle Ages. But the masterpiece was Gothic. We who know what followed read into the reign of Louis XI. a modernity that it never possessed. The more perfect, the more welded the political fabric

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was, the more certainly it became conservative and hard : a kind of tank in virhich lay stagnant the grotesque and failing society of the fifteenth century. It could not have saved itself for future action; the Gothic had ceased to move. Certainly the only care of Louis XI., had he lived, would have been to preserve his work intact. He would have continued in his dark cavern of the Tournelles, to the east of his pointed capital, watching in a wise, evil way the corners and the lanes. It was with him as it necessarily is with all statesmen ; he saw clearly, but only from close by. His plans were far-reaching; his vision was not. He understood a thousand characters separately, but he could not see the general movement of the world.

He left a son, a child of thirteen years. Ugly, intract- able, iU-made, despised even by his father, the boy Charles VIII. passed under the government of his sister Anne; she, the " Grande Madame," in her twenty-second year, undertook to continue her father's work, and she suc- ceeded. Little as she is known, her work of itself describes her ; she was, in the matter of policy, a Louis XI., working on for eight years from his tomb. How long this might have continued, to what it might have led the nation, she herself could not have told you, but seen from where we stand to-day, the future that such a policy would have moulded is clear. France would have dragged on, a lost dotard of the Middle Ages tUl, perhaps in some convulsion, her unity would have perished, or her national life would have become corrupted and her people debased beneath the modern parody of feudal aristocracy. The policy of this woman and of her father had been wise, but there was something wiser; I mean

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the great plan laid down in the origins of history for the development of Europe. It was her brother, the foolish and uncertain boy, that was its instrument when he had come to be king. Grown half a man, he broke control, thought of war as a tournament, risked an adventure to no purpose, crossed the Alps, and, in breaking down that barrier, let in from Italy the flood that drowned the Middle Ages.

And here, if one is to catch the full meaning of the hundred years that follow in Paris, it is necessary to see what no contemporary saw. You must stand on the crest of the mountains and watch the contrast of Italy and the barbarians in their separate stations, as sometimes on a ridge at dawn one has night on the one side and on the other day.

For to the north of the Alps all society reeked of the commonplace and of routine. The Middle Ages developed their tracery, multiplied the intricacy of their armour, but they could not create; they were very old. In the rut that held their world, one rule of thumb and another took the place of living morals, and the one thing remaining active (though its activity was inform and anarchic) was the new Bourgeoisie. In religion it was a terror exercised by the indifferent rich over fanatics, epileptic and frenzied ; in politics it was the rush down to despotism ; in social organization it was the agony and death of the old nobility, the old chivalry, the old monastic cement of Europe. The guilds were an oppression rather than a scheme of protection ; the faith was tangled. All that had been the sap of the thirteenth century was dried up in the fifteenth; and with infinite friction and creaking, the last momentum of long-past ideals pushed Europe on

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an impossible road, haviag for the motive force of its unnatural progress only cruelty and the obstinate formulae of lawyers.

But on the south of the mountains, with a suddenness that was partly caused and partly symbolized by their terrible escarpment, it was spring. Italy, that had missed the renewal of the early Middle Ages, now, when all Europe was old, discovered her own fountains again, and dug for them in her own soil ; Leonardo, the love-child, who was the Eenaissance in person, was a man perfected, back from his mysterious travels in the East, and teaching to Milan and Ludovico his mature memories of that brilliant youth in Florence. The human figure, of which he was the iii'st master, came back to decorate the lives of normal men ; the value of light and shadow, the true perspective, that art whose perfection is that it makes a picture of the ordinary in the divine mirror of the human soul, that subtlety which is the more fine because it abjures extrava- gance or fantasy — these things came up quickly from paganism rediscovered. The growth had been at work for a hundred and thirty years ; by the time the French king crossed the Alps it had come to a kind of finality, and the palaces marked its climax like terminals ; they were classical walls set to mark the limits of grandeur; so that, to the troops that were about to pour on Italy, whatever was newest and most praised, or belonged to the first men, was also to seem at once the most magnificent and the most utterly unknown. The old Middle Ages of the north were in doubt and without a gxiide when they came in this march upon the statuary and the arches that preached a pagan gospel of splendour. Their conversion was immediate, and the soldiers found that France in Italy

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was an Artaeus : relatinized, and therefore on the high way to new vigour.

Now the phenomenon upon which I desire to insist, and which I think explains the character of the French Eenaissance, is this : that while the French as individuals had a great intercourse with Italy, yet as a nation they did not, until this war of Charles "V^l, appreciate what her revival meant nor take in her spirit as a whole— a nation finding a nation. It may not be true of the Mediterranean coast hemmed in between the Provenpal mountains and the sea, but it was true of all save that in France, that it still belonged to an older time.

So long as he was in France, Charles at the head of his cavalcade clattered through the cities of the past. All up the white and barren valley of the Durance he saw the ruinous castles, that seemed like a part of the blazing rocks in the late summer sun. Even Brianpon on its impregnable frontier slope — lying so like an Italian city, built for defence, and touching the further Italian valleys of the Alps — yet remained purely mediseval. As the mounted men and the drivers of the gims led their horses up the precipitous streets, only the ghost of the Middle Ages saw them go by : they passed no porticoes, the narrow windows, the pignons and the steep northern roofs overlooked those thirty thousand, as they had for centuries overlooked the rough bands of the Dauphine. Brianpon, after eight generations, was still the town through which the mountaineers had ridden home from the fall of the Hohenstaufen to give themselves to France.

But the army of Charles was modern. Its three arms were orderly, separated, and combined ; its artillery was superb and well horsed, unlimbering for action as our

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pieces do to-day : and this army, as though anxious for a world of its own kind, pushed up the steep wall of the Mont Genfevre, and saw from the summit of the pass a horizon that was not only Italy, but the prospect of centuries to come.

It is not my business to follow the rapid march, and the amazement of the two worlds meeting. It swept Italy like a charge from end to end ; it returned, as do cavalry charges in battles, with some empty saddles ; it had, as have cavalry charges, but one short, desperate melee — Fomovo. Of the inconsistencies and follies of this war I cannot treat either ; Pisa betrayed, Savonarola's embassy, the entry into Eome, Naples, the purposeless retreat, are so far as the matter of this book is concerned, a preface only to the change in Paris. There returned by the thousand men who had seen Italy; the king had seen it ; and the strange column, " led by God, not man," had brought back no loot but the Eenaissance.

So, within five years of the close of the century, the real history of the change in the aspect of Paris begins. But the Eenaissance did not come straight upon the capital, and begin its work at once. In every town between the Ehone and the Seine, Charles's army had left some guest from Italy : in nearly every town the South had begun its work. At Amboise the new spirit came in its full force. The woods beyond Paris to the south and west held castles that had already felt Italy before her spirit entered Paris; and the Eenaissance hesitated, as it were, like a skirmisher before the city, unwilling to attack so great a stronghold of the Gothic. Charles VIII. had died before it passed the gates.

It was in the very centre of the town, on the Ghatelet,

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that the first sign of change appeared. I have spoken in an earlier chapter of this ugly, powerful buUding. Half a fortress, half a government of&ce, part law-court and part gaol, there was not anything within the capital so typical of the past. Some of its stones were Eoman ; part of its huge walls had stood since that great siege of the Normans, and were older then the monarchy. No ornament disguised its meaning. Two short, strong towers flanked its pointed gateway, beneath which there ran like a tunnel the Eue St. Leufroy. All about it went a mass of winding lanes and the labyrinth of the houcherie. Its windows — such rare windows as it had — were mere slits for archers. It was, if one may use the phrase, the most necessarily mediaeval thing in Paris; for its purpose of defence, its character of a great rock blocking the bridge to the Cite, its vast mass, left it for a thousand years a perfect symbol of the old perpetual wars. When it was to disappear there was nothing that could replace it ; it was incapable of change, and the Empire having broken it laboriously down, could only first leave an open place where it had stood.

Well, it was precisely on this sullen nucleus of the old town that the Eenaissance first came ; with the open- ing of the new century and the new reign a little classical entablature was fixed between the two rude towers and the dark gateway of this place.

I have described the Chatelet at some length, and I would describe in equal detail this Little vanguard of the sixteenth century. It had an importance beyond the intention of the builders, and out of proportion to its effect, because it was an origin.

The several matters to be noted with regard to the

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small ornament are these. First, the contrast which it made with its surroundings. To this I have already alluded, but it should be insisted on and remembered, because in this contrast is found the full shock of the two societies that met, the new one not proceeding from the old. There was nothing else in Paris of the kind, and the South looked out from this lonely classical window northwards over a sheaf of spires and gables.

The second point is allied to this first. The entabla- ture was astonishingly Italian. Later, as you will see, the Eenaissance became a French Eenaissance. When once the movement had gathered strength it mixed of itself with the national spirit and took its feeling from the soil. Lescot and Goujon were as French as Bayard. But this forerunner of theirs was an exotic; we do not know who drew the lines, but I would guess at that Italian Giocondo, the laughing monk, a real man though he has grown into a legend; we do not know the date to a year, but I would make fairly certain that it was built on the return of Louis XII. from his first Italian war. It was made up of two stages or stories, each of which was a pediment with its pilasters ; their capitals were Corinthian, and by the outer side of each of the pillars stood one of those scrolls, the involutes which are so typical of the Italian revival. The pediment of the upper story was broken, and held in its middle an escutcheon with the arms of France and Brittany ; below it there was carved the Porcupine that Louis XII. used everywhere as his emblem. The whole was held in an arch, and above the group of ornaments there rose the light campanile, or, if you prefer it, a lantern (for it was very short).

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Next, after its contrast and after its Italian character, there should be noted this curious matter about the entablature of the Chatelet : that it came out of its time. There is a gap of thirty years between this experiment and the beginning of the great Eenaissance buildings in the town. During those thirty years you would have looked in vain for a forerunner of the Eenaissance ; per- haps something of the kiud may have appeared in St. Etienne, or one might point doubtfully to certain orna- ments on the new bridge, of which I am about to treat. But there was no true Eenaissance work between this toy and the great pavilion of Duprat.

As for our knowledge of Louis XII.'s entablature it is mainly due to Sylvestre's seventeenth century etching (1650) ; for just after his time the taste of Louis XIV. destroyed this little eldest child of Italy, built a vast Mansard where it had been, and so lost us one more direct witness to history.

These then — before we leave it — were the characters of an ornament which was of such supreme iuterest and which has been so curiously neglected by historians. It gave, by its position and its isolation, the strangest contrast of its time. It was, unlike the great bulk of what followed, purely Italian; and, iinally, there comes after this first effort, and before the full beginning of the Eenaissance in Paris, a gap of thirty years.

It is to the buildings of these thirty years, the first generation of the sixteenth century, that I would now turn ; and with regard to them, as a preface to their description, this should be noted, that the Gothic made a last and superb effort. The spirit of the time gave an energy to architecture and made men build lavishly, but

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that energy seemed for the moment to fear the southern models. And we may even note a certain , reaction, so that, as each building is taken in its historical order the last great building of the time, the Tour St. Jacques, is the most Gothic of them all. I take, then, one after the other, the three principal works of the period, the Bridge of Notre Dame, the Cour des Comptes, the Tour St. Jacques.

There had been, before history was written, a bridge from the middle of the Island to the north bank. Before the Eomans came, throughout the Eoman occupation, throughout the Middle Ages, destroyed in the earliest and in the latest sieges, rebuilt and changed in a thousand ways, for many generations forgotten, the site had yet the power to retain a definite character.-^ It had always remained on the ancient site. It still remains so to this day ; and in this it forms (with the " Petit Pont," which runs in a line with it over the southern braanch of the river) an exception to the Pont au Change, the Pont St. Michel, and the other bridges of Paris, all of which have been more or less altered in direction by the rebuilding. The bridge had always been made of wood. Large piles driven into the bed of the river supported a level roadway of cross planks. This immemorial way of building had three disadvantages. Like everything mediseval, it needed

' The bridge seems to have disappeared in the Dark Ages. Cer- tainly in the time of Charles the Bald and the Norman siege the Pont au Change was the only bridge over the northern arm of the Seine. Early in the Middle Ages — ^perhaps under Philip Augustus — a trestle bridge called the " Mibraye," that is, " Middle of the Mud," ran as the Pont Notre Dame does now, and in 1412-13 it was replaced by a new bridge with houses on it, called for the first time the Pont Notre Dame. It was this bridge that fell in 1499.

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continual repair ; secondly, it could, and did burn ; finally, it was weak. This weakness had certain effects which we should remember when we try to reconstruct the Middle Ages. The traffic would be slow in its movement and limited ; and when, later, houses came to be built on the bridge, the experiment of such building was full of danger.

The last and greatest of the catastrophes that marked the history of the wooden bridge took place on the 25th of October, 1499, being the Friday before All Hallow- e'en, and the Feast of St. Crispin, patron of cobblers. Already there had been rumours that the bridge was not safe. Some laid this danger to a parricide of the year before ; others, again, to the rottenness of the piles. This latter view was bom in so strongly upon the mind of a certain carpenter that he set off before daylight and warned the head of the city-archers. This of&cer, for some reason of his own, imprisoned the carpenter, stationed armed men at either end of the bridge, and, when day broke, bade those who lived on the bridge save themselves and such of their chattels as they could. They were busying about this important matter when, at or about nine o'clock in the morning of the aforesaid day, the whole seventeen spans and sixty-eight houses slipped down into the river together.

It would be delightful, did my space admit of it, to tell the simple story of what followed: of how a child floating in a cradle was saved ; of how the provost of the merchants (one James Ironfoot) was, with his four sheriffs, thrust at once into prison, and fined a vast sum for the necessities of the survivors and the souls of the dead (for men were still mediseval enough to be thorough in the details

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of what they did) ; of how they devised many taxes to buUd a new bridge, and of how the king laid a tax of a penny on the beasts in the market that clove the hoof, and also on salt-water fish. But what more directly concerns us is the rebuilding — the first effort of that vast energy which continued unceasingly for two hundred yeai's, and which has finally given us the modern city.

Here, again, we must remember Giocondo, " Jean Joconde," that monk from Verona, of whom we know so little, and who yet is at the fountain-head of the great change in Paris. The modern fashion of writing history from of&cial documents might belittle his part in the re- building of the bridge. His name appears at the end of a list of some half-dozen French of&cials, and he is men- tioned only as "giving his advice to them." But it is precisely this advice that gave its novel character to the work, for there are a number of features in its construction that point out the Italian, and with regard to some of the most important we know that Giocondo himself insisted upon their presence. It was not its general aspect alone, nor the great scale upon which the matter was under- taken, that marked the Eenaissance feeling. This spirit of magnificence did, as I have already pointed out, take hold of Paris during the Italian wars, but it was a force still vague in quality, and expressing itself in the old Gothic forms. The bridge was superb ; all of dressed stone, vTide, well paved, lined with its high double row of houses, it had, before it was completed, cost more than half a million of our modern money and had taken the first twelve years of the century to build.

But all this largeness would not have betrayed the archi- tect had it not been for special features, the appreciation

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of which will make us remember the Pont Notre Dame as a mark of the transitional.

The first of these points is the character of the arches. They were only seven in number, that is, they ventured upon a span greater than any other of the bridges of northern France. And, secondly, with so wide a span, they were necessarily flatter than the northern French axch would have been, for with the old semicircular arch the bridge would, with such broad spans, have run high above the neighbouring streets ; moreover, the flatten- ing of the arches gave them something of an elliptical section, and to produce this it needed the skill of the southerner.

Again, the bridge ran in a level from bank to bank, cheating the eye to an appearance of dry land. From the north end one looked between the two high rows of hoiises down a well-paved and even street, and it appeared to run without a break on to the Eue St. Jacques in the University quarter. Thus the Pont Notre Dame itself, the Rues de la Lanterne, de la Juiverie, du Marche Palu, and so across the Island to the Petit Pont, gave the impression of one long street, and there was a kind of childish boast at the time that " one could not tell whether one was on dry land or over the river," in any part of this line.

Finally, after the elliptical arch and the straight level of the bridge, the details of its ornament undoubtedly betray Giocondo, for who else was there on the list of the committee to add so much original work and such a new spirit ? Not that these details were of a true Eenaissance type — far from it ; but they showed a coming back to the real (or at least to the classical), which Paris could never

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have developed out of her own old models. As the eye followed the narrow perspective between the houses, it would indeed have noticed the heavy overhanging gables of the houses, and especially the two great turrets that divided the bridge midway; jutting out over the street and crowned with high conical roofs, they impressed the whole with a Gothic character; but a man of that time, used as he would have been to the old style of building, must have been more especially struck with the row of caryatides that marked the line of houses, and with the arcade of semicircular windows upon the ground floor. These, the fronts of the new shops upon the bridge, were borrowed straight from Italy; such an arcade, and such statues, made of the Pont Notre Dame an absolutely new thing in Paris.

This great and successful experiment, of which the early sixteenth century was so proud, lasted for close upon three hundred years. It was not tiU close upon the Eevo- lution — in 1786 — that the houses were taken down, and that, for the first time in so many centuries, the view of the river lay open.

I have said that the three great buildings of the transi- tion in Paris do not, as might have been expected, follow an ascending scale ; they do not approach more and more nearly to the Eenaissance ideal. On the contrary, they recede from it as they follow each other in the order of time. For if the first of these efforts, the Pont Notre Dame, showed unmistakably the Italian character of its architect, the second, the Cour des Comptes, is a very singular example of how a designer steeped in the Eenaissance could find sympathy with the Gothic, and of what necessity compelled him.

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In tlie case of this building we do not conjecture, but we know, that Giovanni Giocondo was the master of the works, for a great tablet stood in the wall, giving his name and praising him. It is indeed probable that he returned to Verona in 1506, two years before the completion of the building, but all the draughtsmanship was his, and Louis XII., his master, took delight in imagining that this graceful mediaeval thing was an example of the spirit that he had brought from Italy.

Giocondo did well. There was already standing the glorious quadrangle of the Palace, which was described in the last chapter, the Cour du Mai. It was as complete and perfect an achievement as the fifteenth century could boast ; and this eastern wing, fronting as it did right on the Ste. Chapelle, already begun as it was by the purely Parisian workmen of the preceding reign, could not have struck the note of the Eenaissance without jarring upon so much tracery and Gothic detail. The whole of that marvel was destined to be destroyed by the fires and the innovations of the eighteenth century ; but Giocondo, by the sacrifice of what was his peculiar power, and by his careful copy of the old French style, at least preserved a full Gothic unity in the Palais for close upon three centuries.

There is not space in this short book for a full descrip- tion of the lovely work that made a frame for the Chapel of St. Louis. Those who may wish to reconstruct its detail for themselves will find it drawn with care, and with an appreciation rare at that epoch, in Martin's picture at Versailles.^ It must be enough here to repeat that it was a worthy addition to the buildings of ' The date of this picture is 1705.

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Charles VII., and gave to the Law Courts of Paris a character which was so uncommon in Gothic work; I mean that of completion and finality. Its numerous pinnacles, its high steep roof, its overhanging turrets, its weather vanes and pignons, enriched, if that were possible, the innumerable fecundity of detail that was the special character of the Palais, and gave the whole of that great group of buildings the appearance which we can partly recall in the little yard of the Cluny, or in the Hotel de Ville of Eouen to-day, but which we find nowhere worthily remembered and preserved, unless it be here and there in the towns of Brabant.

But the Cour des Comptes, Gothic, detailed, and fantastic, yet showed here and there that the South was at work, and that the king whose emblem was carved so often upon the walls was a king who had ridden through Italy. The four great statues in which Louis XII. ordered his virtues to be shown were carved on the model of antiquity, the round arches of the stairway were a recollection of Amboise ; the new building, in a word, admitted the seal of Eenaissance work, and seemed in these two points to advertise designedly its creator and its generation. In the third of the examples of the time that admission was entirely lacking. I mean in the Tour St. Jacques.

The Tour St. Jacques, as I have said above, was by far the last of the works that fill the first period of the sixteenth century. The Pont Notre Dame was begun in 1500 ; the Cour des Comptes was completed in 1508 ; but the Toiir St. Jacques had not even its first stone laid at the time when Louis XII. fixed his memorial tablet in that building; and though it had reached its first story before the " father of the people " was dead, yet this purely

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Gothic thing is in the major part of its building con- temporary with Francis I.

It is this character in the tower which now stands so finely isolated in the centre of modern Paris that gives it its peculiar interest. It was not only the last effort of the mediseval builders, and not only perhaps their most powerful expression, it was also a resurrection. It came on a pilgrimage quite out of its own time, and rose above a city where the fears and longings which that flamboyant puts down in stone had gone away and been forgotten as dreams are at morning. And, just as do dreams that run on and confuse themselves with waking, so this posthumous child of the mediaeval fancy confuses and deceives. For the poet and for the novelist it is a type of the fifteenth century. Victor Hugo will have it standing over the Paris of Villon ; but it was not ViUon, it was Eabelais in youth and Calvin that saw it finally dominant over lanes of the houcherie. The scaffolding was still about when Luther stood before the legate at Augsburg, and those workmen (Parisian, acting in the oldest of traditions) who carved its stones had learnt to read the pamphlets of the Eefor- mation.

The general effect of the tower is on the face of it that of a century before its date ; it might be a companion to the Muette at Metz ; it is cousin to all that delicate work which is the glory of Normandy, the work in which the old Province seems to have raised so many votive offerings for her deliverance. But it is when one looks into the detail, scattered or still remaining, that the contrast of its style with its time is most striking. The altitude, pathetic and half-grotesque, of the later mediaeval statues — you will find no truer example of the humour that we love in them

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than in those four relics of the old evangelical symbols which stand now in the garden of the Cluny. The great height and majesty that the open work of a belfry can attain by an understanding of proportion are — with the possible exception of Notre Dame — nowhere more em- phasized than here.

Of the old church to which the tower was added as a belfry, mention has been made in a former chapter ; with the extreme neglect through which it passed after the Revolution, its curious accidents, how it was bought and sold by auction, debased, rifled, and finally destroyed under the Second Empire, this book has not the scope to deal. The tower as we see it now has been added to and refaced in a hundred places ; its gargoyles are corpses, its statues modern replicas, even its colossal St. Jacques is but a reproduction of that which was destroyed in 1793. The open ogival base has been, by a curious feat of engineering, rebuilt beneath it, and in the place of the old Chapel of St. Quentia the wind blows on the statue of Blaise Pascal. Nevertheless, the thing standing now isolated in its great square remains, as to its main lines and the body of build- ing, the exceptional contrast upon which this passage of the present chapter has insisted. It is the last word of the Middle Ages in Paris, and from the day when it was finished till our own century, there was no one who knew or who cared to know the great architectural inheritance of the Middle Ages.

The Tour St. Jacques was free of its scaffolding in 1522. For ten years there is a kind of lull, and Paris waits without moving; no new building is begun, no old one destroyed or altered. For close on thirty years the new spirit had been working in men throughout the capital ; it

Y

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had changed the University, it had shaken the Church, it had transformed the national policy, but the outward shell in which this change was seething remained the same. With the exception of that little ornament on the Chatelet, Paris had seemed not to have dared the Eenais- sance work. A shock was to make all that expectation fruitful, and the shock was Pavia. It is round the central date of that lost battle and of the king's imprisonment, on either side of its gulf of silence, that the new building and the old meet.

Francis I. has always been called " The Prince of the Eenaissance ; " his name recalls at once all that Italian spirit which had already borne such fruit in Touraine, and it is difficult to imagine him in a Gothic Paris. Never- theless, it was in a Paris absolutely untouched that his first adventurous ten years had taken counsel, and (what is more remarkable) the whole remainder of his reign on his return from captivity saw but two or three realizations here and there of the new plan with which those twenty years were full. It is true to say of him, therefore, that while he conceived the new palaces in Paris and made them possible, he himself saw but two such buildings of any importance begun — the Hotel de Ville, and the Salle du Legat ; and this last was the only one he lived to see completed. Nevertheless, the date 1525-27 is of capital importance in the architectural history of the city, for, as I have just shown, the first quarter of the sixteenth century, full as it was of energy in rebiulding, developed if anything a reaction towards the mediaeval manner, whereas the latter part of the life of Francis has no single example of the Gothic. It was in this generation that the masons and architects seemed to forget the pointed arch.

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and every new thing was attempted in the style of the new magnificence. And the period is more than this: it may be said with accuracy that the whole tradition that succeeded Francis sprang from the influence of his Court, and that if Goujon and Lescot are Henry II.'s men, yet the founder of their school was an artistic reinvention of the preceding reign.

The large designs of Francis struck first at what one would suppose to be the most natural spot in Paris for his Italian artists to attack. I mean the Louvre. It was by this time for a full century the only great palace of the kings in the capital. Partially abandoned under Louis XI.,1t had yet remained the symbol of the residence of the kings at the heart of the kingdom, and with Francis' own reign its importance in this character had very greatly increased. He should, by every tradition of the Italian movement which he was following, have converted his castle into a Eenaissance palace before he undertook any other similar work in the town. Yet — by the kind of fatality that seems to hang over the Louvre, and leave its execution always dragging behind its plans, the same fatality that delayed Perrault's colonnade by a century, and that has given us the modern bare north wing — this house of his own, that he meant to make the first example of his resolve, remained till he died the purely mediaeval thing he had inherited. He attacked it indeed, but the demolition was never completed, and as for reconstruc- tion, in spite of the tradition that surrounds his name, it is practically certain that he never laid a single stone. Benvenuto Cellini, whom he brought and lodged in the Tour de Nesle, just over the river, a man who would have burnt with eagerness to tell us anything of such a doing.

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is silent upon it, and yet he is full enough of the very Serlio who is sometimes made out to be Francis' architect in the matter. Eight months before he died the king com- missioned Lescot to begin the reconstruction of the west wing, but in those eight months there was too little time for anything but the first works of demolition, and the whole of that perfect front, which is the best relic of the Eenaissance in Paris, falls to the succeeding reign.

One thing Francis the First did achieve, and one thing only : that was the pulling down of the great central tower or keep. He put himself to that task before anything else of the new plan was undertaken in the city, and doubtless he meant the clearing the courtyard to be only the first step towards the renewal of the whole Louvre. JBut in the five months that a swarm of builders took to destroy the prodigious relic of Philip Augustus, the sums set aside for the rest of the work were exhausted, and he did nothing more ia all the succeeding years but tinker at the inner rooms of the Palace and remodel the detail of its ornaments. The great tower went down regretted by all honest Parisians. It had stood huge and very strong for over three hundred years, menacing not them but the nobles, so that there is a pathos in the sentence of the " Bourgeois," who says in his diary, " It was a pity to pull it down, for it was a fine large tower, and good for shutting up great men." Also there arose in connection with it the legend or prophecy that the hole left by the foundation would never be properly filled ; nor was it for many generations, for one subsi- dence after another left the place hollow till in our own time men of a positivist turn paved the place for good.

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and even gave it a little rise, if anything, to discourage superstition.

Though Francis was unsuccessful in his plan for the Louvre, he originated and pursued with some vigour the new Hotel de Ville, and this he could do more easily, because the Louvre was strictly his own, and had to be built out of his private revenue, whereas for the Hotel de Ville he could tax the citizens. It is doubtful whether the corporation would have seen the necessity for a new palace to replace the old " Maison aux Piliers." For many hundred years before the Eeformation, and for a good two hundred years and more after it, the town was wonderfully careless of the dignity of this site, and the king is there- fore the more to be praised for forcing upon it the grandeur proper to its office, and for making of what has always been the centre of Parisian history a starting-point for the rebuilding of the Palace. With the first months of his return from Spain the plan was drawn up ; in 1529 the houses adjacent to the old Maison aux Piliers were bought Tip, and four years later, on July 13, 1533, the first stone of the old building, that so many of my readers must remember, was laid: a date in that July group which seems to contain half the history of France. As Giocondo under Louis XII. in the case of the bridge and the Cour des Comptes, so now another Italian, Domenico of Oortona, was made the architect of the new building ; and though it was completed long after his death and that of Francis also, the delicate design — especially the two pavilions with the wide arches and roadways beneath them — were of his designing. For seven years the work went rapidly enough ; all the central part was finished to the roof, and a gallery of full Eenaissance work lay contained

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between the old and ruinous timbered houses at either end. Domenico had also time to complete the iuner courtyard, to begin the roofing, and to fix a date above the attic windows when, by one of these fiscal accidents of which the reign is full, the work suddenly stopped short. The new fortifications of the city demanded all the money that the Treasury could spare, and in 1541 an unfinished central portion of the Italian's work was handed on, as the Louvre was to be handed on, to the activity of the next generation.

I have spoken first of Francis's action on the Louvre (which was purely negative), and of his rebuilding of the Hotel de VUle (which remained incomplete), because both these efforts were the first results of his new plan ; their inception and design followed immediately upon his re- turn. Nevertheless, if one asks one's self which was the first true Eenaissance building seen by Paris, it would lie in another quarter. When I spoke at the beginning of this chapter of the coming of this new architecture upon Paris, I mentioned a little ornament that Louis XII. had fixed on the Chatelet, and I said that the most remar^.£able thing about it was the fact that for thirty years it remained the imique, complete example of his style in the city. That gap was ended, not by the Hotel de Ville, which dates, as we have seen, from 1533, but by the wing that Cardinal Duprat, the counsellor of the king and his chief statesman, added to the H6tel Dieu, more than a year earlier, in 1532.

Of the Cardinal's passion for the new way of building, and of his love for pomp in the designs he authorised, his famous tomb at Eouen still stands as a sufficient example. This other creation of his in Paris, the " Salle dii Legat "

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(for he was papal legate), has disappeared ; it was burnt in the great fire of 1772. The late date of its destruction, however, has luckUy permitted a large number of eighteenth century engravings of it to remain, by which we can easily see the vigorous contrast it made with the old Gothic hall of the hospital, to which it was exactly parallel, and with whose height it ran even. Nowhere is this contrast more striking than in a plate drawn just after the catas- trophe, ia which one sees side by side, blackened and un- roofed by the fire, yet made also more startlingly distinct against the open space behind them, the two contiguous fapades of the Middle Ages and of the sixteenth century.

The one is a full example of the later Gothic, the other an equally full example of the Eenaissance, yet the later imitates the earlier work in a similar height, order, number, and size for its porches, niches, and windows ; and in the imitation succeeds only, of course, in maktag the contrast more violent. You turn from a niche with some curious and unreal statue bent to the quaint curve of the fourteenth century, and find in another niche, exactly correspondiag, but in the neighbouring wall, a forerunner of Jean Goujon's masterpieces. It is as though the details of Hatfield should be placed on one wall with those of the Abbey.

This piece of the new building, which, as it was the most striking by its position, so was also one of the finest in the city, was the only complete thing of its kind that belonged entirely to the reign.^ Very much was changed under Francis ; St. Eustache and St. Etienne, which are by far the most striking examples of the transition in

' I exclude the " Maison de Francois Premier," because that was not originally in Paris at all, but at Vincennes.

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the town, were begun, but they were continued so tardily that they do not belong to this division of my subject. Many details were renewed in the Eenaissance manner ; here and there a part of a private house was rebuilt. It would have been easy to see as one passed through the city in those first months of 1547 that a new kind of building had come into the atmosphere of the town. Nevertheless, nothing further or of importance marked the revolution in taste save the few examples I have noted, and the principal material effect of the Eenaissance comes with the Medicis, with the religious wars, and with the generation not of Eabelais, but of Montaigne ; with that second half of the sixteenth century which rather enjoyed than produced the change, and which is the theme of the remainder of this chapter.

Francis died on the last day of March, 1547, ten days after the magnificent requiem had been sung for Henry VIII. in Notre Dame. His son's short reign of twelve years brought into being what had been, during all the years since Pavia, a dream, or at best a sketch, and the space between 1547 and 1559 laid here and there the foundations of a new Paris.

Let me here — though it is somewhat out of place and belated to give it at this point — suggest a series of divisions in the Eenaissance work of the capital. To appreciate these divisions is, I think, of importance to us to-day, as there is no century more confused in its artistic history than the sixteenth; for the facts that France was copying Italy, that the intention came so much earlier than the action of rebuilding, and that the wars introduced so many gaps into the financial powers of the Crown and city, have given rise to a hundred errors on the matter.

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You have as an origin the expeditions of Charles VIII. and Louis XII. beyond the Alps ; they bring back Italian artists and the first taste of the Eenaissance, but the new building begins outside Paris, and, but for the little orna- ment on the Chatelet, there is practically no immediate result from their experience. Giocondo (as we have seen) rebuilds in the Gothic much more than in the Italian way, and there is even a reaction towards the older style, of which reaction the Tour St. Jacques is the latest and best example. This period covers, roughly, the iirst generation of the sixteenth century ; it was marked by much magnifi- cence and by a singular vigour in rebuilding, but it was almost ignorant of true Eenaissance work. The next period begins with the return of Francis I. from his captivity in Madrid after the battle of Pavia, and stretches from the year following his return — from 1527 that is — to his death in 1547. These twenty years were occupied in the laying out (somewhat vaguely) of a great plan for rebuilding the monuments of Paris and for creating a Eenaissance city ; but all that was actually done in the matter was to raise the fine new " Salle du Legat " with which Duprat enriched the Hotel Dieu, to begin the Hotel de Ville on the plans of Domenico of Cortona, and to pull down the central tower of the Louvre. Very much detail was remodelled, here and there the rebuildiag of a church was begun, but Francis died without having left, as he had intended to leave, a Paris studded with models of the new style. The real importance of that period is that under its spirit the last of the men who could build the Gothic died, and a whole school of younger architects grew up who were ready in their maturity to prepare a new thing, not wholly classic or wholly Italian ;

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a French style having it roots in these, but taking its air and sun from the country in which it grew.

The period in which these men did all the first of their work, the period also in which the Eenaissance for the first time made some show in Paris and set its mark on nearly aU the monuments, was the reign of Henry II., of which I am about to treat. These twelve years, that just cover the middle of the century, were able, with a Treasury fairly full and a great social activity moving them, to do the greater part of the whole work which we recall as Medicean. There follow some eleven years which, so far as architecture is concerned, are wholly under the iafluence of Catherine, are marked principally by her new palace of the Tuileries ; and this fourth division (which may be said to end in 1570) is succeeded by a fifth and last, ia which the whole of the Eenaissance goes bankrupt. The Massacre of St. Bartholomew, the increasing violence of the religious wars, anarchy in the city, extreme poverty throughout the countrysides, make the movement dwindle and fail. So, for the last twenty odd years before the entry of Henry IV. into Paris only small efforts here and there — the beginning of the Grande Galerie, the faciag of the Tour de I'Horloge, and so forth — remain to tell us that we are still ia the century of Goujon, and that Du Cerceau might be design- ing as well as Lescot.

To return to the reign of Henry II., which I have called the full vigour of the Eenaissance ; from its very beginniag it showed its new intention. The two character- istic plans of Francis had been the rebuilding of the Louvre and of the Hotel de Ville ; the first he had never seen begun, the second he had raised but partially when the threat of war in 1540 had suddenly emptied his coffers ;

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his son took to the one and the other with energy. In the matter of the Hotel de VOle it is worthy of note that all the effect of the fapade, which was its principal character- istic, dates from this moment. Domenico de Cortona was dead. He had completed the centre of the buUdiag and the inner courtyard, but what he may have intended for the general result we cannot tell. It is most probable that he would have made something of an Italian palace with an even sky-line, and that the additions peculiar to the French Eenaissance would not have entered it. At least that is the conclusion to be drawn from the style of what had been already finished, especially of the great central door. As it was, the enterprise of the new reign continued Domenico's work in such a fashion that the Hotel de ViUe became at last the best example — after the west wing of the Louvre — of the way in which France had transformed the Eenaissance.

We do not know the name of the architect. The two high pavilions, the steep pitch of the roof and its belfry, the mass of ornament, and without the lightness of so much detail, mark it as certainly contemporary iu design. We know that the plans which were re-drawn ia 1549 remained the model for all the long, interrupted process of building that did not produce a complete result till the beginning of the next century, but the author of them remains unknown. Felibien guesses at Du Cerceau ; an author not commonly given to humour replies that the supposition is " plusqu' invraisemblable,'' for Du Cerceau was then but ten years old. Be that as it may, the tower or paviKon above the arch of the Eue St. Jean was finished, the king's monogram was hidden away under the edge of the cornice (to reappear in the demolition that

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followed the crime of the Commune), the corporation fixed its muniment room in the height of the attic roof, and everything was ready for the raising of the corresponding pavilion at the end of the northern wing, when another of those interruptions that are peculiar to the period left the work half finished. It was the second and last check upon the building of the Hotel de Vnie, but it was serious and promised to be final. From that year of 1556, right through the religious wars, through the bankruptcy of the municipality, through the great sieg6 under Henry IV., and on tUl the first Bourbon king was firmly on the throne, the Hotel de Ville remained more like a fragment or ruin than the chief mark of the Eenaissance. It stood with but one completed pavUion ; with its great central hall covered in grotesquely with temporary gable roofs ; on either side of it the ruinous old houses of the Greve, an excellent symbol of the arrest that the close of the century, with its mad kings and anarchy of parties, could put upon the national life.

The Louvre would perhaps have followed some parallel fate had not there been attached to it still the pride of the Crown. Even here the economic breakdown of the later Valois made everything sluggish, but it was not com- pletely abandoned, and so far as there is any continuity in the actions of the Treasury it is to be found in this palace. Henry II. took on at once the inheritance which his father had left in the appointment of Lescot. That cleric, who was also the first of the modern French in building, had by his side for the details of sculpture and ornament the genius of Goujon ; between them they made what was to become for centuries the origin and the revival of the national style. Built round with imitation and with the

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similar but lesser work of later men, making but a small part of the huge bulk of the Palace, this effort, which is as complete a creation as an individual statue or poem, seems to miss its purpose. To know what it meant in the middle of the sixteenth century, and to see how powerful must have been the effect in that Paris of the fbst French work, I must ask a modern reader to recall the surroundings under which it rose.

Here was the old Gothic Louvre, a Kttle castle of ancient stone, turreted, battlemented, and dark ; its central courtyard still encumbered with the ruined founda- tions of the keep, its moat stagnant, its every appurtenance in decay. It was almost a ruin, typical of the tragedy of the Middle Ages, and emphasizing in its desolation how absolutely they were past and dead. No one now could build or could restore that thing; and all about it was a Paris in which a hundred churches and great houses gaped in a similar ruin. The town demanded some mind that should be national and strike the note of the new time ; it had been granted only an average of alien talent. One Italian after another, from Lenardo to Benvenuto Cellini, from Giocondo to Domenico de Cortona, had come with the influence of a foreign genius, or with the skill to copy minutely the details of the classic. The last of these teachers was dead, and his fine work stood at the foot of the scaffolding that was just rising round the new pavilion of the Hotel de VUle. In this town, then, where the streets still lived but where the palaces had fallen into decay, Lescot and Goujon came with the revelation of a new style ; something that should be drawn from the general southern spring and yet have in it the quality which is the great necessity of any people ; I mean, the air of home.

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Therefore people passing saw that here was something greater than they could do, but made evidently by men of their own blood; knowing this, and finding it the supreme satisfaction of that time of hope and recon- struction, in time the French rebuilt all France to suit their own spirit.

To see, therefore, this great work as it was when it rose on the old town, we must stand in the circle of white stone that marks the site of the keep ; one must turn one's back upon the eastern and northern wings and look only at the south-western corner that belongs to Lescot — at the southern half of the western wing. Imagine, then, the little courtyard but a fourth of the present square, over- looked on every side but this by the stones of Charles VI. 's and Philip Augustus' castle, ruinous and dark. To the three sides of such a ruin there was added this fourth, with its splendid arches, its living reliefs, its height and substance, as though the noble face of a living man should come down to redeem the shades. In the startling contrast that remained for over two generations between this wing of Lescot's and the rest of the mediaeval walls there was no stronger element than the serenity and self-possession of the new grandeur standing right up against the faulty decay of the old palace; for the Middle Ages that had once been so perfect were now suffering the humiliation that comes upon living things when the soul passes from them.

There are many details of interest in this first and most successful of the effects of the new reign. Thus, it is a pleasant piece of history to know that the old wall of Philip Augustus was retained for the first courses of the outer side of the new wing, so solid was it and of such

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good stone. And it is also delightful to be told that the fame that blows her trumpet in the spandril of the main porch is in honour of Eonsard, the poet, who was Lescot's friend ; that the central winding stair of the ancient turret at the south-eastern corner was kept at the end of the Salle des Caryatides and still remains there, though it is not used ; it led from the ground iloor up to Henry II.'s own room, which was in the south-western pavilion, that was known as the " Pavilion du Eoi." But more im- portant than the knowledge of such accidents is the appreciation of the effect that the Louvre must have made and upon which so much insistence has been laid above. It was Eenaissance in one spot only, the wing which would correspond to the southern half of the present west wing of the old Louvre ; it was very small. The Grande Galerie was not begun ; what is now the Place du Carrousel was a mass of private houses, gardens, and tile-works, while the southern wing was still being built when Henry II. died.

This fruitful reign, then, left only an incomplete — though it was an excellently successful — portion of the general plan. It was not Henry's fault that his widow wasted the public money on the TuUeries, or that his sons could do no more than begin the Grande Galerie. He had intended a complete rebuilding; whether that was to mean the whole of what we now call " The Old Louvre " — four times the size of his original palace — we cannot tell, but he certainly had designed a complete Eenaissance work when Montgommery, most unhappily for himself and Prance, killed him in the lists of St. Antoine, leaving so many splendid schemes to be spoilt by the false energy of Catherine, and to lose themselves

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in the civil wars. Tliose twelve years of peace and of comparative prosperity had seen very much more than the two efforts upon which I have dwelt. The Carnavalet, that excellent survival which is the purest example of the Eenaissance in domestic architecture, belongs almost certainly to the activity of Lescot and Goujon ; the Hotel of the Provost of Paris, which is now in the Passage Charlemagne near the Eue St. Paul, the old house on the Quai des Celestins, and many other corners that yet survive, date from Henry II. Therefore, though there is no space to deal with them severally, I would wish to give a general impression of Paris entering the troubled time of the Medicean woman with a great deal of the rebuilding done, with the scheme of Francis I. on the road to completion. And one other thing Henry II. did which, though it has nothing to do with this book, I cannot bear to leave out, for it is of such universal importance : he gave to the Society of Jesus their first permission to have a house in Paris. It was the Paris of Francis I. that had seen the first little group of friends surround St. Ignatius in the crypt of the old church of Montmartre, and it was this Paris of the Eenaissance in its first successes that admitted the most powerful of the armies that fought for the counter-Eeformation. Intimately as their history — the struggle with the Sorbonne, the growth of their political influence, their victory over the Jansenists, their suppression, their return — concerns the city, it is not within the scope of this book to do more than mention this original charter ; and if I do so at all, it is rather for the purpose of emphasizing the importance of a short reign which was, in this as in its architectural work, the beginning of a new epoch.

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The effort of Henry II. failed on account of his early- death, and Paris, that might have become a Eenaissance city, has — in so far as its older parts have any one cha- racter— become rather a city of the seventeenth century. The whole generation that succeeds his death, in proportion as it is of interest to the general historian, is meagre and empty from the point of view of this book ; for the same causes that lit the civil wars and that lend so eager a spirit to intrigue, ruin the public purse and put a sudden end to the large schemes of the earlier period. It is with some difficulty, then, that one approaches that time, for there is so much that might be told as a story — and must here be left out — so astonishingly little done in the way of building and in the matters that more immediately concern us.

Only one great building marks the thirteen years before the St. Bartholomew ; the seventeen between that tragedy and the death of Henry III. produce hardly anything; the acute crisis between 1589 and the entry of Henry IV. left the people starving, let alone the public Treasury. There is therefore, I repeat, hardly any enter- prise of moment wherewith to close this chapter, save the building of the Tuileries and the beginning of the Pont Neuf.

The space west of the Louvre — what is now the great open square of the Carrousel, with the statue of Gam- betta — had been for centuries a close mass of the houses and gardens of the nobles, of religious foundations, and of smaU open spaces and intersecting lanes, while in one corner it concealed a nasty little sheep-market. At least, it had borne that character in all the eastern part, between the old Palace itself and the wall of Charles V. This wall, that ran very much in the line

z

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the omnibuses take now across the open square, and in front of the little triumphal arch of the Carrousel,^ fornie^ the limit (at this point) of the city ; just to the north, along the Eue St. Honore, was a suburb outside the gate, but immediately along the river there were but open fields, waste ground, and a group of pottery and tile works that gave the site its name of the " Tuileries." Here, Just outside the wall, Francis I. had bought a little villa for his wife from a private owner, and here Catherine de Medicis, a generation later (for it remained Crown land) determined to build herself a pleasure palace. She had, as custom demanded, given up her suite in the Louvre to the new queen on her son's marriage, and she was cramped in the old northern wing that was set apart for the dowager ; therefore, in 1564 she instructed Peter de rOrme, yet another cleric, and an excellent architect, to begin the palace that was to be so closely bound up with the future history of the city ; that was to be remodelled by the false magnificence of the next century, to shelter Louis XV. in childhood, to see the apotheosis of Voltaire, to house the Convention and the Empire, and to disappear in the disaster of the Commune.

It had been intended to build the TuUeries on what one might call the common plan of the Parisian palaces, a great quadrilateral, with an inner courtyard — a copy of the Louvre. This plan was never carried out, but it sufficiently explains what is otherwise a puzzle. I mean the great connecting galleries that turn the modern

' To be minutely accurate, it started from about the westernmost of the three arches of the Pavilion Lesdiguieres, the present river-gate, where its corner tower was called the " Tour du Bois." Thence it ran straight north to a point some ten yards east of the opposite gate, the Pavilion de Kohan. There was a moat outside it.

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building iato a vast trapezium, and that were intended, of course before the burning of the Tuileries, to connect that palace with the Louvre. Had the original plan been adhered to, one great palace, the Louvre, would have answered and balanced another great and similar palace, the Tuileries ; and the first would have been sufficiently near the second to need but a slight connecting arcade, or perhaps to do without any link but an open avenue. As it was, Peter de I'Orme was at work on but one side of his vast plan when he died in 1568, and Ballant, who succeeded him (and tells us with glee how he altered the drawings to suit his own) did no more than finish this one side. Therefore the project was laid of connecting the isolated palace of the queen dowager with the of&cial palace of the king by that long, disproportionate gallery which lines the quay for over five hundred yards. The design of connecting the Tuileries with the Louvre in this manner was something of a demand for unity, but much more a necessity for communication in time of danger. It was an attempt of the king's castle, shut in by the civic wall, to stretch an arm out to the open country, and also it was built so as to be able to concentrate the various guards upon any one menaced point. By an irony always present in the history of Paris, it served, on the contrary, to destroy the house ; for it was by the Grande Galerie that the Tuileries were forced on the 10th of August, 1792, when Louis XVI. lost the throne.

This Grande Galerie, to which I have had to make allusion here, was not built in the Medicean time that planned it. Charles IX. may have begun some part of it — probably he did so ; but the main work of its buUding belongs to the seventeenth century, and I mention it

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here only because the reason it exists is to be found in Catherine's desire for her palace in the fields.

That Palace, reduced to a quarter of her first ambition, she left practically finished, when — just two years before the St. Bartholomew — she left it to begin another similar plaything near the Halles; but the Tuileries, made for and inhabited by her, was not the stately and somewhat cold thing that Paris knew for two hundred years, and that is still so familiar a memory to the older generation to-day. The original line of building, the design of de rOrme and Bullant, was graceful, feminine, and bordered even upon the theatrical in its details. It did not cover a greater length than would be represented by a little more than half the present space between the Pavilion de Flore and the opposite Pavilion. It was but two stories in height, a mass of Corinthian pilasters, its skyline broken into low pavilion roofs, and in the centre a light and somewhat fantastic dome. De I'Orme tells us that he desired to produce something of this kind, delicate and fantastic, to suit the character of the queen- mother ; but I cannot help contrasting with this appreci- ation of her the epigram of Michelet, " C'etait un ver sorti du Tombeau de I'ltalie."

In connection with the building of this palace more than one accident helped to prepare the future map of Paris. It needed gardens, and therefore not only was a litttle plot laid out between the main gate and the moat of the city, but also a vast sUce was cut from the outer fields, between the Eue St. Honore and the river ; and this remains of course as the Gardens of the Tuileries. At the time its formal avenues, its grottoes, and statues laid down the model for all that mass of artificial work

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that ruled the taste of the next two centuries. In con- nection with this park there should also be remembered the famous name of Palissy, for that Huguenot had his ovens in the offices of the Palace, and built his fancies among the trees to please the queen. Again, it is to the Tuileries that we owe the Eue du Bac. The old and excellent quarries of the University were exhausted, and (for that matter) too much built over to be used, even had they been available; those of Chaillot had been worked down to the soft stone, and de I'Orme was forced to use the new workings by what is now called the Mont Parnasse, upon the top of the Southern Hill. To bring the stone from these to old Paris, the route would have run down the Eue St. Jacques and across the bridges, but the delay and expense of doing this for a building lying out beyond the wall made it impossible. He there- fore got leave from the Abbey of St. Germain to drive a cart-road through their fields, vineyards, and part of their dependent hamlet. This road led down to the river opposite the Tuileries, and then a ferry, a " bac," was rigged up to bring the rough blocks across the stream to the work- shops. It ran a few yards below the present Pont Eoyal, and gave its name of " du Bac " — so famous in the literary history of Paris — to the rough new lane, which, in the next century became lined with the houses of the courtiers.

I have said that besides the Tuileries one other work marked the terrible generation of the civU wars — the beginning of the Pont Neuf. Now, it is a curious thing with regard to that great undertaking, and a proof, I think, of how full a period of construction and peace was the reign of Henry IV., that popular legend has always given him the praise for the whole business. He continued it,

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indeed, but he neither began it nor ended it. The first mention of such a project is in 1379, the next is the memorial of the University and the St. German's quarter to Henry II. in 1556 ; the first attempt to realize it, the commission of 1577-78, that took advantage of a drought in the winter to drive the first piles in the low water of the narrow arm of the stream. It was a time not only of drought but of extreme penury. Only the year before the exchecLuer had been so low that four great rubies of the reliquary in the Ste. ChapeUe were sold by the Crown, and it is no wonder that the work — abeady refused by Henry II. on the ground of expense — went slowly in the reign of his imfortunate son and namesake. Henry III., his eyes red with weeping for his favourite, came with the queen-mother to lay the first stone when the pier next the southern bank was at the level of the water ; but during all these last eighteen years of the Valois nothing was done but to bridge the narrower of the two arms of the Seine, and to fill in and unite with the Cite the little islets that supported the centre of the Pont N"euf and became the Place Dauphine. Montaigne complains that he will die without seeing it finished; Pigafetta in his history of the siege in 1591 gives a picture of the southern arm, " the Pont des Augustins," as they called it, completed and in use,^ while the northern is still but a row of piers

' The Ligue used it as a passage for their soldiery. It was not here (as some say) but on the Pont Notre Dame that a monk, armed, like the rest, for the defence of religion, presented his musket to salute the legate, and then (by an excess of zeal) fired it off and killed a bishop. It can, however, claim the honour of the Irishmen, whom the Elizabethan policy had driven to France, and who would form bands at night to pillage passers-by, casting them over into the river "by one leg," as a con- temporary complains.

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a few feet above the water. Such a fragment Henry IV. found it, and it will appear as one of the proofs of his energy in Paris that he set himself with such devotion to its achievement. For the Pont Neuf happens to be one of the idols of Paris. Why, it would be difficult to say ; but it is the fact that with the Cathedral, the hill of the University, the Hotel de Ville, and the Louvre, it is one of the half-dozen sites upon which the affection of the people centre. It was more written about and marked as it was building than any contemporary thing. It became the popular fair, the Forum for the " Traiteau de Tabarin," the place to buy all the odd knick-knacks, books, and prints, that the true Parisian stiU finds along its neighbouring quays. It filled the Eevolution with the pictures of its mobs ; the audience of Danton, the cortege of Desmoulins going to his death, the apotheosis of Marat acquitted by the Eevolutionary tribunal; and only the other year I remember the gossip and movement when one of its piers was found to be shaky. It was as though an old and popular actor had been taken with the influenza. With this work I must close the chapter of the six- teenth century in Paris. Compelled to treat in a short space of the chief examples of the period, I have omitted a thousand details that marked the change in the city, as the beginning of spring marks a heath here and there with its new colours. I have also left to one side what my readers may hardly forgive. I mean a description of the religious wars; but had I included even a part of these, or a mere sketch of their social history, it would, in the narrow limits of these pages, have crowded out what was of first interest in the stones of the city. I could not teU the story of Coligny, reading slowly to

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himself below St. Germain I'Auxerrois, and shot in the hand at the beginning of the Massacre, nor discuss in however slight a fashion the evidence of the night of St. Bartholomew, nor tell even the beginning of the story of the great siege, for such a method would have led me into the wide field — never yet thoroughly traversed nor mapped — of the end of the Valois. Only this we should mention for the sake of its curiosity ; that if Charles IX. fired from the south-eastern tower on the night of St. Bartholomew, he must have fired through many yards of thick walls and rooms in the Hotel Bourbon ; while as to the window in the Petite Galerie (which the Convention marked with a placard to perpetuate the memory of his crime) it was not then built.

Perhaps it is less excusable to have omitted from this picture of the Eenaissance in Paris its innumerable details, its activity, its sporadic energy; the streets filled with noise of sawn stone and with the chisels of the builders ; every open space marked with the shed in which was working a Palissy or a Goujon, every coterie discussing Lescot or de I'Orme, or du Cerceau's plans for the new bridge. Yet such an omission had to be made if the Louvre, the Tuileries, the Hotel de Ville, and the Salle du Legat were to take their legitimate place. I passed over, with little mention or none, the Fontaine des Innocents, the Carnavalet, the Hotel Pieubert, the Pavilion of the Arsenal, the fine rood-screen of St. Germain I'Auxerrois, the Hotel de Guise, the Hotel d'Angouleme, and all the rest of new work in the Marais; the Hotel de Nevers on the left bank, the new Abbey of St. Victor, the new Cordeliers — a hundred proofs of the Italian spirit become French, and marking the starting points of a

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modern city. And it is, perhaps, as well that such an

array of the Eenaissance has not been drawn out in this

chapter, because the long list would have disturbed an

impression with which I desire to close my description,

and which is as follows: Paris, in spite of the Medicis

and in spite of the Italian wars, remained essentially a

Gothic city till the very close of the sisteenth century,

and till the advent of Henry IV. It is an accident of

the first importance in the material history of the town.

For there can be no doubt that Francis I. and Henry II.

introduced this new thing, the exquisite and national style

of these reigns, to become the model of a new Paris ; they

desired — as later Napoleon desired — to rebuild the city.

As in his case, political accident, military failure, or repeated

civil strife, forbade their successors to complete the scheme,

and hence we have to-day but separate standing examples

of the sixteenth century, while the great mass of the

older quarters dates from, or inherits the spirit of, the

seventeenth. The luxuriance, the fancy, and the laugh of

Lescot are the exception. The severity, the grandeur,

and the coldness of Mansard are the rule.

Many anecdotes would show how mediasval Paris still

was at the close of the sixteenth century. The watchmen

still cried at night in the streets near the Innocents —

" Eeveillez vous, gens qui dormez ; Priez Dieu pour lea tr^pass^s,"

and Pigafetta could stUl see the curious procession of the children starting from the same place on the Feast of the Innocents. But, so far as the buildings were concerned, I know of no better proof of how partial and accidental was the effect upon Paris of the Eenaissance in its best and most worthy period than the aspect of the Island.

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The Cite, which was the heart and centre of Paris, reflected always whatever movement seemed to take the capital as a whole : thus, the first rebuilding, between 1160 and 1250, had covered it with the Gothic ; the new foundations of an earlier generation had given it in St. Denis de la Chartre, and in the endowment of St. Nicholas of the Palace, in the philosopher of the Petit Pont, and in the schools of the Cathedral Close, all the character of their time. But the sixteenth century left it singularly free from change. With the exception of that " Salle du Legat " which I have already described at some length, and which made so great a mark upon the old Hotel Dieu, there was hardly any- thing that would catch the eye as peculiar to the new spirit in architecture. There were indeed some porticoes added to the smaller churches. The Madeleine under the Cathedral was partly finished, perhaps St. Bartholomew's in the Eue de la Barillerie was taking on its new look.

Henry III. had carved upon the clock tower of the Palace — the Tour de I'Horloge — his famous dial that Gustave Pilon made for him so well, and that survived the maltreatment of the eighteenth century, to be restored to its present magnificence under the reign of Napoleon III. Henry II. had cast across the Ste. Chapelle his curious rood screen, or rather open stairway of marble, which has luckily disappeared ; against it stood two altars that bore his own medallion and his father's, and these you may see at the Louvre to-day, and make certain how thoroughly out of place they would have been in the shrine of St. Louis. In 1576 the old stalls and miseres of the chapel were taken down, and in their place some high reliefs, carved in the manner of the time, jarred against the walls. Across the narrow Eue de' Nazareth outside the Palace

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a bridge or gallery had been thrown, supported upon carvings that were purely Italian. Within the Palace itself certain rooms had felt the new movement, notably the hall next the Galerie Merciere and the decorations of the Grande Salle. But all these were exceptions — the general impression of the Island was stiU entirely Gothic — the same picture that Giocondo had not dared to disturb, and that his Cour des Comptes served only to heighten and emphasize. It was in a Gothic room that Francis had received the challenge of Charles V., in the purely Gothic Church of St. Barthehny that he had held the basket of bread at the Mass as First Parishioner in 1521, in the Gothic Salle de St. Louis that he had entertained the ambassadors of Henry VIII. of England. Though some of the details about him were of the new time, though Van Eyck's Crucifixion (for example) hung above him, and from the roof of the Grande Salle the pendants of the transition, yet neither he nor his son nor grandsons made a Eenaissance shell for the Island. The decorations and the fetes, Palissy's triumphal arches and what not, draped it for a moment in the clothes of the century ; they fell off with the end of each pageant and left the Cite unchanged. And if all this was true of the Cite, it was still more true of the left bank and the main town on the north. The University possessed a number of buildings which the new spirit was remodelling or had partially changed ; it had very few which were purely of the sixteenth century. St. Etienne du Mont was still uniinished, and the only complete example of Eenaissance work was the little Church of the Cordeliers that had been rebuilt by Henry III. ; while, outside the University and in the way of great private houses there was but the great Hotel of

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the Prince de Nevers to illustrate the scheme of Francis I. and Henry II. In a word, it was stOl in the main a Gothic Paris that Henry IV. entered, when the " poussee nationale," the resultant of so many clashiag forces, lifted him towards the throne. As he came into his capital through the new gate he saw indeed the splendid regularity of the great Medicean garden, and beyond it the purely Eenaissance fancy of Catherine's Tuileries, but the rest of his triumph, passiag though it did through the heart of the new quarter, met with but little of the classical spirit. It took him along a Eue St. Honore that was stOl full of timbered, over-hanging houses and of steep gables ; past the old nave and haU of the Jacobins ; past the narrow lane that gave him a glimpse of the unfinished Louvre, and on to the tower of the corner by the HaUes, where the mediaeval desolation of the Innocents hid the one new thing of that quarter, the delicate fountain of Lescot and Goujon, standing in the corner of the market. But with such few examples here and there of the new build- ings almost all his surroundings still belonged to the dead centuries. The narrow Eue de la Tabletterie was as mediaeval as a street could be. As he turned to the river he could see, above the old tiles of the roofs, and up the lanes of the Boucherie, the pure Gothic pf the Tour St. Jacques. He passed under the vast cavern of the Chatelet — where the little ornament now a century old still showed its striking contrast against the walls of Louis VI. ; went through the tunnel of the Eue St. Leufroy; crossed the river by that bridge of Notre Dame in which so little had changed since Giocondo, to hear his famous Mass in what was then, and remains now, the type of mediaeval work — the Cathedral.

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Here was his whole cavalcade coming into Paris at the close of that sixteenth century which had for ever changed the society of Europe. He was entering, after years of warfare, a city which had seen the fiercest struggles of the Eenaissance spirit and of its developments against the relics of the Middle Ages, yet at the close of his success and of that debate, the outward aspect of Paris was still rather that of Louis XI. than of the time in which he lived. The wars and their consequent poverty had reduced the anomaly of an incomplete Eenaissance standing in a number of scattered and isolated examples buried in what was still a Gothic town. But the peace which he gave to France was sufficient to destroy the poor shell of a forgotten society ; the mass of Paris remained mediaeval, not because the spirit of the Middle Ages survived, but because there was no private wealth or energy to rebuild the streets and to give the new palaces a congruous framework. That wealth and energy were to come from the despotic, popular, and civilizing policy that is bound up in Henry IV.'s title of Bourbon. His reign and that of his son's, the beginning and middle of the seventeenth century, changed the whole city, buUt its streets of stone, gave us the familiar type of high and monotonous houses that still hold the greater part of Paris, completed the bridges, and left a homogeneous capital for Louis XIV. to inherit and abandon. The process of that revolution, which created the modem town, will be the matter of the next chapter.

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CHAPTEE VIII

THE KEBUILDING

Theee are moments in history when the tendencies and habits of a whole past seem to gather themselves into a single point or focus, and from that same single meeting- place there branches out again into the future a sheaf of new customs and a changed society. Such moments, whether they be accompanied by violence or no, are the revolutions ; they are the points of flexion ia the curve. They come but very rarely in the centuries even of our changing Europe, and when they come — whether caused by a sudden weariness of the old ideas or by some exterior shock and revelation such as the Crusades — they are invariably accompanied by this mark: a generation of famous men pass in a troop together off the stage of civilization, a group of new spirits enters the world together in a band. Surrounding these greater names we can distinguish whole categories of the older society that must of necessity have disappeared in one short list of years, and whole categories of the new whose first ex- periences must begin at the same time. So that one may see in this general death and birth falling by chance in one narrow time, the rare accident that determines the great changes.

THE REBUILDING 35 1

The years set round the central date 1600 form such a period ; to the one side lie the confusion and magnificence of the Eenaissance, the anarchy of traditions not dead and still battling with the new forces that hardly any man understands ; to the other the order and self-confidence of the modern world. Consider the ends and the beginnings that fill up the short twenty years. Elizabeth, Burleigh, Catherine de Medicis, Henry III,, Philip II., Montaigne, and (at the close) Shakespeare died ; Cromwell, Hobbes, Mazarin, Turenne, Descartes, Mansard, Corneille were born. Wallenstein and Eichelieu may be just counted with this new group of names, though they were some- what older. Henry IV. himself, stabbed at the close of the period I take, is the type of the transition, and seems, by his ioldiag to the religious wars and the philo- sophers, a link such as Bacon, his contemporary, was in England.

See also how round these separate names come whole classes of society that fell and rose at that same time. Before Elizabeth died in England there had died also all those Catholic gentlemen who could remember the monasteries. In the generation immediately succeeding her no man had been trained in any religious experience but that of the new establishment. When Henry IV. entered Paris the last of the -workmen who had carved stone for the Gothic — even as a boy — was dead ; before he was stabbed there were building and teaching in the schools a whole group of architects to whom the second period of the Eenaissance was the only known style. The old men who rode to Tilbury, who followed Henry through the Porte Neuve, who formed the wretched train of Cardinal Bourbon, or who died in the extremities of the

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siege, thought of the Reformation mainly as a humanist) revival; saw Europe divided not into national religions, but into factions everywhere, one oecumenical movement ; put Spain first in the picture of their politics ; considered warfare as the game of sovereigns who still claimed feudal inheritance; remembered France impoverished and deso- late, and the whole continent ringed round by the Austrian house. The young men who crowded to the first chances of Louis XIII.'s court, who framed the legal theory of taxation ia England, who attacked the central power in Germany, saw in the religious quarrel a permanent schism determined by political boundaries, thought of Spain as a threat no longer universal, of France as a rising, united, and highly centralized power. The counter-reformation, organized, repressive, mechanical, was familiar to one whole section of European society ; to the other the Catholic ideas, even those of the Middle Ages, were unknown or grievously distorted. The State was based upon a strong executive, standing armies were growing to be its natural and continuous support, diplomacy was uninterrupted and systematized, in a word, the principles which are those of our modern Europe had come into being.

Paris, as I said at the close of the last chapter, marks this entry into the seventeenth century by rebuilding. From the date of Henry's entrance onward for close on a century the town of which so much still remains, and of which our Paris is but the development, rose rapidly, destroying and replacing the mediaeval houses ; the incon- gruous background against which the Eenaissance palaces had shown was transformed into a homogeneous mass suited to the style of the first experiments, though (as the century passed on to the coldness and formality of the

THE REBUILDING 353

" grand siecle ") it lost the richness and fancy that Lescot and even Du Cercean had given their creations.

Now, to give a just impression of the rapid process whereby the new Paris was made, I must recapitulate the political nature of the century whose main buildings I treated of in the last chapter ; I must pass in review the period we have just left, and show why a capital that promised in the early sixteenth century to be quite rebuilt in the spirit of the Eenaissance yet remained so largely Gothic for a hundred years, and I must explain the vast and successful plans of Henry IV. and Eichelieu by giving as an introduction to them the causes that made those of Francis, of Henry II., and of Catheriue de Medici fall ; for it is the failure of the first conception that prevented Paris from being what so many of the southern cities of Europe became, while the presence of that unfinished plan explains a majesty and proportion in the new city which the seven- teenth century was of itself unable to produce, and which it achieved only from the few examples that the earKer Eenaissance bequeathed to it.

The sixteenth century was, then, all over Europe, the conflict between two principles that crossed and inter- mixed, had a hundred ramifications and reactions, but remained, if one goes to the origins of the discussion, distinct and opposite. They were the principle of an international moraKty involving international control and the principle of local autonomy. Why had they come into conflict just at this epoch? Mainly because, after centuries of development, the European nations had now finally differentiated and recognized themselves. The Middle Ages were cosmopolitan — all their theory and their every institution. A thousand dialects had one common

2 a

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tongue, Latin. A hundred thousand villages had their common linV of feudalism, a hierarchy leading (in theory at least) to a common head, the Empire. The symbol and centre of this unity was Eome.

But three hundred years had brought about the nationalities. Which of the two forces was about to win the battle ? Neither, luckily for Europe. They were to fight fiercely for a hundred years and to calum- niate each other without mercy. They were to take religions, later, social differences, as their banners; but in the end the centrifugal and the centripetal forces balanced each other, and (to borrow a metaphor from astronomy) no nation "fell into the sun," nor did any " fly off into space ; " their intense forces of attraction and repulsion resulted in a rapid movement, but a move- ment of rotation, a closed orbit; and civilization (thanks to that result) remains to-day a "system" and not an anarchy of iafinitely distant parts.

In the quarrel England and Italy suffered most. England, for more than a hundred years a definite nation, possessing an intense local patriotism, well-to- do, content, and lying to the outer side of Europe, flew out with violence. She yet remains the Neptune of Europe, and seeks some of her light from the further parts of the world. The Eeformation (which was the one great effect of this iatense national feeling) took her with power, as it did, in a different manner, the princi- palities of North Germany ; she gathered herself into her- self, and, like the outer planets, established a certain minor system of her own. Italy, divided in a hundred ways, the latest of all the nationalities to confirm her unity, hardly knowing any bond between her various

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divisions save the feeling that the rest of Europe were "the barbarians" — Italy, again, the seat of the papacy and the province of Eome the old Sun, became the type and rallying-point of the centripetal force. Thus the desire for national churches and national isolation ex- presses itself for two hundred years by an imitation of the English experiment, the desire for an international system — the imperial memories of Europe — fall back upon somethiug equally vigorous, equally new; I mean the Italian Eenaissance.

But the plan of battle was not so simple as a mere opposition of these two forces. For if the nation wished to remain Catholic, by so much the more it tended to remain mediaeval. The Eenaissance meant international unity, but it meant humanism, and humanism was for a century mixed up with the attack upon Eome. The bewilderment of such conditions is perhaps best tested by asking oneself this question : Had I lived in the generation of Eabelais what leader would I have followed ?

France was, as she always is, the battle-field of these confused parties. She grew to be a nation most intensely individual, and yet one most intensely determined to rely upon the cosmopolitan method. For three centuries she has kept this double character ; the revolution which she personifies, with its basis of furious patriotism and its purely abstract conceptions, is an example.

On the other hand, the very spirit that made her recollect the mediaeval unity made her cling also to her oldest customs in society and in the arts. The Italian influence, politically a friend, seemed artistically an enemy of her ideas.

France learnt the Eenaissance through the Italian

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waxs, she finally brought to Paris an Italian queen, and in that one character of Catherine de Medicis you may see summed up the Eoman influence upon France during the great struggle of the religious wars. Paris on her material side (as France in the moral order) divided the new forces. Paris, northern and local as she was, yet gave in the St. Bartholomew the most signal example of a passionate — an almost delirious — determination to maintain xmity. But it was a passion and a deUrium closely connected with the opposite desire ; I mean with sentiment of national integrity. It was not only the Protestant, it was also the Southerner and the noble who were massacred in that moment of madness.

Paris, which saw the Italian architecture of the Louvre, had also (almost alone of the great cities of Europe) made a desperate effort to continue the Gothic. Catherine de Medicis buUt her Tuileries — but from their cupola you would have seen eastward a forest of spires. The Eenais- sance worked hardly in Paris, and pierced through a highly- resisting medium.

It was a struggle which descended to the very houses and streets themselves, a struggle between Paris Catholic and Paris sceptical; a warfare between that part of her which was (and remains) iatensely conserva- tive, and that part which looks to the south and accepts new things : the whole summed up in a persistent desire to remain the head and rallying centre of the French nation.

This, in general, very difficult to put clearly, because the whole matter is as complex as the eddies in a stream, is the character of the confused and critical time. A time whose religious aspect is only the most important out of very many, and whose troubling effect upon the city

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was traced in the mixture of the pointed arch and of the colonnade, of the flamboyant and the Italian facade. The streets alternated between the narrow, winding lane of the Boucherie and the great piazza of the Carrousel. The uncertain destinies of Paris fluctuated at the same time between the new and the old, and the whole period was one of an unsettled quarrel, reflected in the architecture and in the plan of the town.

It was not only the conflict of a mob of separate ideas that retarded the progress of the Eenaissance, it was also the periodical lack of money, that was partly a recurrent result of the confusion, and partly the effect of another cause, which has been but little noticed. It is this. The Italian cities (which the Eenaissance set itself to imitate) were small compact states, having (in proportion to their size) a very large revenue ; the citizens and despots who were at the cost of their new magnificence had fortunes that formed an appreciable part of the whole wealth of the community, but in France the Crown depended already upon the taxes : Paris, a city of perhaps three hundred thousand or a quarter of a million, could be transformed by no one private effort, not even the king's. To this you must add two things : iirst, the over-vastness of the plans, which were designed for Paris so as to bear to that great city the proportion that the Italian palaces bore to their smaller capitals; secondly, the drain of the foreign expeditions, and, later, of the religious wars.

These causes, then, left the work of the sixteenth century halting and incomplete ; but with the final success of Henry of Navarre all the things that had been impeding at once the fiscal power of the monarchy and the rebuild- iag of the capital broke down of themselves. For when

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Henry entered Paris the various elements seemed — mainly through lapse of time — to be resolving themselves; we have with this first of the Bourbons the characters which are to follow the house for exactly two hundred years (I mean from 1589 to 1789), and which are to be the causes of its grandeur and of its decay. These may be enumerated as follows : (1) The governing, and ultimately the absolute power of the Crown, due to (2) the demand for national unity, which is the dumb yet controlling force of the two centuries, and in its turn is led by (3) Paris, which has been growing more and more conscious of its hegemony and of its separate life ; these strong national currents, destined to survive and to be (though unseen) the basis of the Eevolution, are combated by (4) the remain- ing pretensions of the nobles, and their insistence (as their political power declines) upon oppressive and useless privilege, and (5) the Prench Protestants, grown to be a body definitely religious in character, and separatist now from their ideas rather than from their former ground of material interest.

All these five points came into action with especial vigour when the generation of the Medicean time was dead ; but even with 1589 they were strongly accentuated, and one feels that one has entered into a new world.

Following this sudden success comes the beginning of what must be the theme of this chapter — the first hearty attempt to transform Paris.

The sites upon which Henry's own peaceful and suc- cessful reign had time to work were not many, but they were representative, and they sufficed to change the aspect of the city. In architecture, as in every other mode, France and Paris find the idea before they execute the

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thing. The nation and its capital are a standing menace to the " historic method ; " like human beings, they think before they realize their thought in action. Upon that basis we may say, with a little stretching of the metaphor, that Henry of Navarre began to malm the city which the Italian woman and her contemporaries had imagined. Thus France to-day is profoundly building up (and how few can see it !) the solid building whose architects died all in germinal of the year II.

It will be necessary here, as it was earlier in this book when I was describrog the rebuilding of the tweKth and thirteenth centuries, to give some sketch of how the century went between the death of Catherine's last son and that of Louis XIV. For here also there is a necessity to give the political frame upon which the rebuilding of Paris depended. First, then, let me show what was meant by the advent of the Bourbons.

When Henry III. had ended his peripatetics in death, and when the knife of Clement had completed the failure which the king's own character had prepared, then Henry of Navarre was left the only conceivable heir to the throne. It was not that Henry III. had so named him before he died, nor even the legitimacy of his claim, so much as the attitude of the opposing party, which made this certain. Paris, his principal opponent, was in a kind of angry " impasse," the city was all for unity, for centra- lized government, for the nation — as opposed to faction. It was this which had made it support Guise, and when the last of the Valois made his volte-face it was left in a confusion of principles. A few years before, all the forces to which the city had been devoted were in the

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same person or cause, now they were disunited. If they looked to the king, to the central government, the Hugue- not appeared ; if they turned to attack feudalism, why, legitimacy itself was leading the nobles. Paris might talk and argue about a king-cardinal, or the claims of the Infanta, but she knew in her heart that she could not desert the male Une and the eldest representative. Neither could she accept the Huguenot supremacy, which was simply another name for the victory of the provinces and of aristocracy.

As might be expected in such a dilemma, actual cir- cumstances rather than theories carried the day. Paris was under siege when Henry III. died, and she decided to continue the war. It was more than three and a half years, from August, 1589, to March, 1594, that the struggle went on. On Henry's side were the growing adhesion of the provinces, . the conquest of Normandy, the great battle of Ivry. On the side of Paris was (at first) the genius of the Duke of Parma, the national desire to see the capital at its head, and, most important of all, the desperate valour of the citizens.

Paris at that moment was like a man who knows that his quarrel has been just, knows that he should make terms, but, led on by the momentum of his anger, is but the more determined to fight to the end. Ivry, great and decisive victory though it was, failed to accomplish Henry's purpose.

The story of Henry's abjuration is well known. In the summer of 1593 he accepted the Eoman faith, and with that act the end was ta sight, though the Duke of Mayenne fought hard at the head of his garrison. De Mayenne was away at Soissons when, at four in the

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morning of March 22, 1594, Henry entered by the Porte Neuve, and the next day the people acclaimed him. The Spanish left the city, and Henry was definitely established in the Louvre. From that date begins a united and happy reign, memorable in the affections of the French people.

Once firmly established in his palace, Henry begins that policy towards the continent which has become the foundation of modern international relations. He feels that what was esteemed a crime in Louis XI. will be mere patriotism in the future. The Middle Ages are not only over, they are even forgotten, and the same spirit which made Henry IV. destroy the Gothic leads him also to replace the relics of feudalism in foreign politics by the doctrine of the balance of power. The nations of Europe were formed before 1500, spent the sixteenth century in turmoil, each to assert its independence, and now with the seventeenth century they are beginning to appear in a group with definite federal rules. Thus Henry fights the preponderance of Spain and retakes the French town of Amiens. The signal result of that act was the treaty of Vervins.

But to hold France thus as a watch-dog in Europe was but one side of Henry's policy. If he desired her inde- pendence and her power it was, in his practical mind, but one aspect of a general well-being which was his chief object, and which he attained, or nearly attained, by a careful attention to the economic condition of the people, a wise dependence upon Sully's judgment, and the chival- rous attempt of the Edict of Nantes. He thought it possible for the two religious bodies to live side by side, and saw the supreme importance of recognizing the unity

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of the country in the equality of its citizens. The policy was doomed to fail, and that unity was not achieved by a compromise, but by the fierce armies of the ideal nearly two hundred years after Henry's time. It was this common sense, and this practical but patriotic policy which made Henry so dear to the people. The peasants understood him and he them ; so that in the Eevolution his name survived and his grave was spared.

For the last twelve years of his life SuUy is at his side, and as the reign progresses things go from better to better. The death of Gabrielle d'Estrees removed the danger of a quixotic alliance, and in the autumn of the next year (1600) Henry met Marie de Medicis, the queen, at Lyons. In September, 1601, Louis XIII. was bom, and in July, 1602, Henry cowed the faction of the nobles (for the moment at least) in the execution of de Biron.

The next few years were a preparation for what seemed the inevitable struggle between this new, strong, centra- lized kingship of France and the house of Austria ; but just as the armies were collected, and even a regent (the queen) appointed for the king's absence, the blow of Ea- vaiUac fell. Henry was to have joined the army on the 19th of May ; it was on the 14th that he was on his way to visit Sully at the arsenal ; he was ill-attended by but a few gentlemen, when during a block in the traf&c of the Eue de la Ferronnerie the carriage stopped, and the assassin thrust in his arm and stabbed the king. Eavaillac was executed with tortures, horrible but not undeserved ; for if Henry had lived there might have followed a peaceful and contented development in the early seventeenth century; the Fronde and the reaction which produced the system of Louis XIV. might surely have been avoided.

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As it is, this little space stands out quite distiact, and, in the history of Paris, is the preparation of the great recon- struction under Eichelieu.

That reconstruction is rightly looked upon as the origin of modem France. Eichelieu, already known in the capital, already half-feared in discussion, entered the council in 1624. A man of that very nobility which was to be so jealous of its dead prerogatives, with a little of that military experience which was to be the last glory of the aristocracy, a member of that higher clergy which, alienated and unnational as it ultimately became, was yet to remain for a hundred and fifty years the most vital part of a moribund system, he might have been, had he lacked any peculiar strength, the very type of the men who were the symbol of the breakdown in the French upper class. His power of concentration, his unique devotion to his country, his theory of central government as a necessity for the French people, has given him, on the contrary, something of the character that attaches to new men. One knows by a mere echo of history that this man was the founder of absolutism, one has to read and remember the facts, in his life that show his territorial inheritance. So much does he break the nobles that one half forgets he is a noble, so much does he fulfil the legal theory of peaceful monarchy that one half forgets his slight experience and his continual reminiscences of arms. There was more of the soldier in him than we have been willing to admit, more of the feudal master than the results of his action in a non-feudal time can illustrate.

The eighteen years of his power correspond with the active power of his nominal master, the king. Louis XIII. died- in the early summer after the December of 1642 that

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saw Eichelieu's death, and more than is commonly the case in such coincidences, the king and his minister can stand together for one period with no violation of their true dates. The son of Henry IV. had inherited (in spite of scandal) this much of his father's temper, that he was accurate and wUful. To the Parliament, who protest against his star-chamber at the arsenal, he answers, " You are here to judge between Tom, Dick, and Harry, but if you interfere with me I will cut your long nails to the quick ; " to his favourites who protested against a youthful excess of vigour in sport he answered by standing in freezing weather by the warrens till they went home forswearing all ferreting. But these outbursts of self- will were spasmodical. He had none of the great Henry's tact, still less of that gaiety which is the main proof of it ; he grew less and less of a king as his reign wore on, but he had this beyond any of the Bourbons, the power of seeing where advice lay. Henry, by a Httle too much passion, would overleap it ; Louis XIV. missed it because his power had grown so great ; Louis XV. because ministers were lacking, and it feU to women ; but Louis XIII. saw at once where the master was in politics and intrigue, so that, by an exaggeration common to tradition, Eichelieu appears in that reign to be even more of the king than he really was.

The cardinal did one thing of supreme importance to Prance. He first made the foreign policy national. That is, he cut it off in its foreign relations from any general logic of sympathy. At home he saw that the Huguenots were a political faction, he crushed them ; but abroad he cared not a farthing who was the Catholio, he asked only who was the dominant power — and that power

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was the Austrian house. He did not hesitate to attack it by the menace of those very enemies whom he had defeated at home. The spirit of inquiry, the tendency to local independence, the revolt of the nobles — all that was fatal to the kingly power — this he destroyed in France and helped abroad ; and with such success, that when he died the French alone in Europe were centralized and homogeneous. For he saw, as a statesman must, but one plain theory — that power neatly handled and without loss by friction was at its highest. He did not see (as a poet, or a saint, or a plain man would have seen) that these easy solutions carry terrible revenges, for he atrophied the minor functions of the nation and left her with but one centre of direction which, should it fail (as it did fail) from the lack of nutrition, would cause the nation to despair of any safety and drive it into a catastrophe. Eichelieu gave the French the singleness that is their strength in the political sphere ; he gave them also, though he never designed it, an inheritance of ideal revolt. For if there was ever a nation designed to protest and struggle against bureaucracy it is the people to whom he bequeathed a system of which bureaucracy is the necessary adjunct.

It is possible to exaggerate the power of the man that followed him. Mazarin, detestably skilful and winning, knowing his trade but hardly knowing his material, was in the list of those Italians whom the Latin tradition thrusts forward into power. Did he do more than guide a vessel on the stream that Eichelieu and his silent monk had turned with such brave engineering? It may be doubted. Mazarin is the man of the Fronde. The civil war without meaning, the rising of nobles with no purpose, following what was perhaps an outbreak

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of the instincts of the capital against despotism, the "comic interlude," are things one would not associate with the Frenchman, easier to find in the character of the Italian. His burlesque exile, his serious return, are in their nature something like those contemporary engravings of Sylvestre's, in which there is much of the artistic and a great deal of the grotesque, but nothing of the grand or determined. One thing he has done in history, and that is to prepare Louis XIV. for its stage. That man, whom all would admire had he not been so powerful, and whom, in some less burdensome place, many might have loved, was seen and understood by the cardinal. He prophesied of him, gave some maxims of little value (for Louis had them in his blood without teaching), and died in 1661, leaving the boy of twenty-two to inherit as wonderful and yet as limited a period as the French have known. That period lasted for more than half a century, till 1715 ; and during all that time France, at the head of a stable ambition, reflected the character of the king.

It was full of everything that can make a lifetime great. The nation was powerful beyond what even EicheHeu had designed — it claimed an hegemony of civilization. The Government was strict and well- ordered ; as for art, it had all the rules and even all the creative power that are needed for perfection — yet some- thing spoUed the whole. There are those who say it was formality. It was hardly formality. Formality was a symptom of its limitation, not a cause nor an ingredient. Look now at the superb remainder of that fifty years in which France seemed, for once in her series of fruitful fevers, to be at rest. See the Invalides, or the Place

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Vendome — anything that can boast the great name of Mansard. Is there not in it a kind of perfection ? Forget what has come since; think yourself cut off from the mediasval tradition: is there not, in all that vast pro- portion, something that satisfies the mind? I think there is no one who has read Bossuet, and felt his periods, and then walked in the old hall that was once the upper chapel at Versailles, but feels that here a formula was found in which the human mind reposed. This, then, is the fault of it all — that the mind cannot be still. The greatest writers do not wish to break through rules and canons, nor do they, but in times that cramp them with stone walls. Yet here, in the midst of Louis XIV., you have MoUere ; and there is a comedy of his that is thought the masterpiece, because it combines with stately and exact method I know not what of the very freest protest that the heart of man can frame against order. It is the " Misanthrope." So, any one desiring to know what it was exactly that failed in the grandeur of this climax, would do well to read the " Misanthrope," first in Paris to himself, and then to wander in Versailles for a day, thinking the matter over. Certainly there was never a time when civilization was so sure of itself. The arts, the manner of conversation, the rules of breeding — all things down to the particulars of the art of war were minutely certain, and, perhaps, the secret of the ultimate failure is to be found in pride; so that the time is like one of those faces in which we find perfection of feature, but, after a little time, no power of expression, nor any just response to exterior things. They were proud to have forgotten the Gothic, proud to be more sober than the early Eenaissance, proud to build larger and better than their fathers of

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Sully's time. When they thought of the future, it was a future always like themselves ; they were maturity, the rest had been growth only. Therefore they were cursed with sterility; the eighteenth century waned into the absurdities of the immense or the pretentious, and the Eevolution had to come from the very core of men with violence and without sponsors, or that society would have failed for ever. Nevertheless, its memory is a good guide and lamp for Europe.

I have wandered from what began as a political description of Henry lY.'s settlement to what threatens to be an essay on the Grand Siecle. It is time to return to the matter of this book, and to describe how the re- building of the seventeenth century began when all this renewal of the mind of France opened with the peace and good order of Henry IV. and of Sully.

Henry IV. set out upon vast plans, as his predecessors had done ; it is wonderful that he succeeded so well. Not one of his enterprises was completely finished when he died, but each was so far advanced, and one at least so near completion, that he might justly have counted upon seeing his own Paris in old age; no man could have dreamt of EavaUlac's dagger.

If one omits the lesser details of the reign, four principal works were undertaken by Henry. Three of them remain to show how thoroughly the new aspect of the city was founded in his time. They are the completion of the Hotel de Ville and of the Pont Neuf , the laying out of the Place des Vosges, and the building of the Grande Galerie of the Louvre. The H6tel de Ville has gone, but in the Place des Vosges and all its streets you can still

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see to-day how a whole quarter was renewed at that moment ; in the Pont Neuf and the Place Dauphine how the river was to be treated from that time till our own ; in the Great Gallery of the Louvre, the first successful achievement in that style of magnificence and immensity which the first Eenaissance had attempted in so many places and had everywhere found beyond its power. I say, then, that these three results of Henry's activity are — if one is thinking of how the city has risen and re-risen upon itself — as remarkable as the great developments of the Early Gothic. The much greater work that EicheUeu performed, the numberless minor additions of Louis XIV, are, in a way, less striking, for they built easily, in a rich and active society ; but Henry IV., who had made possible their ambitions in building, was, at the beginning of it all, working in a ruined Paris, on the memories of the incomplete and spoilt effort of the Eenaissance, surrounded by a generation that might, but for his energy, have lapsed into the indolence that marked the early seventeenth century in so many European cities, and nowhere more than in our own towns.

The completion of the Hotel de Ville I will do no more than mention, since it was nothing but an heirloom of the Eenaissance, following the old plans. I use the word " completion " somewhat ill, for, as a fact, the very last of the work dragged on far into Louis XIII.'s reign. But the whole fapade — all but the little belfry and the roof of the northern pavilion — was finished by 1610, and it is only La Vallee's abominable laziness that leaves a gap of eighteen years between what was prac- tically the end of the building and the finishing off of the last details ; indeed, had not the town come down

2b

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upon him with a special order he might have let his unfinished attic trail into the minority of Louis XIV.

The Place Eoyale (which is now the Place des Vosges) is far more characteristic of the reign, and there still clings to it, deserted as it has been since Victor Hugo and the Eomanticists gave it its last vogue, a flavour of the seventeenth century Court. It has all the qualities that marked the rebuilding of the town. Thus its site is an example of the successful prosecution of the original plans of the Kenaissance, for it stands with the streets about it where was once the park of the Tournelles Palace, the place that Catherine de Medici had designed to destroy. It was part of that large unoccupied belt that lay within the wall between the Temple and the Bastille, the waste brickfields, gardens and allotments that the sixteenth century should have filled, but that remained empty through the public ruin, the anarchy, and the mortality of the religious wars and the siege. Another such place was planned in the fields north of the Place des Vosges, but it was never completed, and even so much of it as stood in the middle of the century was soon built over by the naiTOw streets of the Marais. The Place des Vosges thus remains the unique example of a large area left un- changed from the seventeenth century ; and as one passes through it now, coming from the Archives or the Carna- valet, it seems, in the grace of its architecture, in the openness of its arcades, a breath of the healthy air that came m with the compromise of Henry IV. — a happy contrast to the heavy monuments or narrow streets from which one has come into it, and which are the inheritance of the pomp of Louis XIV. or the cramped negligence of the eighteenth century. Here is the lively brickwork and

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the stone facings that we call in England, in contemporary work, Jacobean; the decent height of the houses having in them nothing of the tall oppression that was forced upon the streets of Paris fifty years later, the large roofs — a feature that always speaks of something settled and domestic in building, and these going up on one good slope simply, not yet broken in the invention of the younger Mansard, nor weighted with ornament. The faults of the time are here also — faults due to the rapidity of the new expansion : the strict uniformity of the design, the plaster of the galleries (they were meant to have been bunt of stone, but haste and economy had substituted the worse material) ; the necessity of constant repair and of wealthy tenants under which such houses laboured, for when the Court abandoned them they did not stand.

The Place Eoyale may be said, roughly, to have remained seemly as long as the Court was held in Paris. It lay far east of the new parts of the city at the close of the seven- teenth century, but the force of the king's favour still made it the centre of the society for which Turenne fought and MoHere wrote. The "Precieuses" lived in that square; Marion de I'Orme died in one of the corner houses. Old Mansard, who had built it, and whose life is a calendar of the time (he was born with the century and died with Mazarin), lived close by ; his neighbour, Ninon de I'Enclos, continued to hold her little court in the Eue Ste. Catherine for nearly fifty years after his death. The importance of the square in the society of the time was symbolized by the statue of Louis XIII. on horseback that stood in the midst of its garden ; and in connection with that statue there is a set of little histories worth knowing. Michael Angelo had lived to be ninety, and had died full

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of piety in 1564. In his old age he had trained a pupil, Eicciarelli, who Lived on into the end of the century and cast, among other things, a great bronze horse for some statue or other in Paris. The bronze horse was forgotten for a generation, when Mansard, finishing his decoration of the Place Eoyale, bethought himself of it and used it to plant Louis XIIL, in bronze also, astride of it. There, then, it stood serenely through the best and the worst times of the Place Eoyale, looking down on many duels (for the duels were fought openly there and applauded from the wiadows), seeing a Coligny and a Guise fighting to the death ia 1649, as their grandfathers had fought eighty years before, watching the decay of the square in the early eighteenth century, and as Prance went down into ruin under Louis XV., covering itself with green neglect, to match the grass of the pavement and the deserted houses. At last, in 1793, they took it down and made a fine cannon of it wherewith to fight the kings, so that one's natural regret for the loss of any Eenaissance statuary is tempered a little by its last uses.

The Pont Neuf, associated as it is with Henry IV. and recalling him as it always will by its statue and by the style of the Place Dauphine, is yet the least his of all the work that he did. As I said in the last chapter, he did not design it, and he cannot be fairly said even to have completed it; but the energy of his government, the treasury that Sully's excellent administration filled, per- mitted so much to be done in Paris during the sixteen years, that the population had to make a symbol of it somewhere, and they have made it here. Henry IV. found it, as the Ligue had left it, in use over the southern arm of the Seine, but on the northern side a row of piles only,

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just showing above the water. He made it (by 1603) passable from one shore to the other, and proved it by- crossing himself, though at great risk. He built at the second arch from the northern quay the pump that brought water to the Louvre and that, with its great roofing and fountaiii, did not disappear till this century. The pump sent its water to a little building of some beauty called the "Chateau d'Eau," just in front of the Palais Eoyal, which was used as a fortress in more than one civil war, and was pulled down under E'apoleon III. As for the rest of the designs, Henry did not live to see them completed. The houses of the Place Dauphine were but just begun, and his statue,^ that had been designed in Paris by the court sculptor, had yet to be sent to Italy to be cast, where John of Bologna, and after his death his pupil Tacca, so delayed in the matter that nearly three years after Henry's death it was still in hand. They shipped it from Leghorn late in 1612 and (after shipwreck and what not) it got to Paris by way of Havre a year later, but the final decora- tions of the pedestal and the last touches of the Place Dauphine were only completed at the command of Eiche- lieu in 1635.

The Grande Galerie, which, if one had no other way of judging than the guess of the eye, seems so little to belong to the period, is in reality the one great building that should be associated with the name of Henry IV., and if it carries a suggestion of the earlier Eenaissance it is for these two reasons, that the first plans, and probably a few yards of the eastern end, date from Charles IX., and that it thus harmonizes with the whole Palace, whose initiation

' The present statue is, of course, not this original; that was pulled down in 1792, two days after the storming of the Tuileries.

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(though so curiously little of its actual bmldings) springs from the first and best period of the French Eenais- sance. There is something in the Grande Galerie that suits Henry's temper and the character of his plans. Its great length, its opportunities for mere repetition, the effecting of so much change in the appearance of Paris by one act of buildiag, all called upon the combined faults and energies of his scheme of reconstruction.

It recalls him also in its details. Gabrielle d' Estree's initials were interlaced with his own upon the stones, and though Marie de Medicis carefully effaced them there remained one of them to show what the original decoration had been ; it was hidden and forgotten under the northern cornice and only discovered during the reconstructions of this century.

The present aspect of the Grande Galerie is more like what Henry IV. left it than any other building of a similar age and magnitude in Paris is like its first design. When one thinks it over one finds it true to say that this great work, of which not one traveller in a hundred could tell you so much as the approximate date, is, with the Cathedral, the unique example of a building remaining almost untouched and similar for many cen- turies in the midst of Paris. It is true, indeed, that many minor buildings or parts of buildings retain their ancient appearance in the same fashion, but no one great body of building, if I am not mistaken, so retains it except Notre Dame and this huge wing of the Louvre. One change must be specially noted, and that is, of course, the splendid new gate which leads into the Square of the Carrousel. That belongs to Napoleon III., but it cannot be said to spoil the general effect of Henry IV.'s work, which carried

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on a certain monotony into this century, and which needs this relief in the centre of the endless line of windows, a relief afforded in the original plan by nothing but a little spire or lantern.

Henry IV. also began joimng the Tuileries to the Great Gallery. How far he completed this design it is difficult to say; the general lengthening of that palace belongs rather to his son's reign, and is one of the great enterprises which are connected with the name of Eichelieu. But the whole plan of the Louvre as we see it now was none the less Henry's, and he had intended also to clear the square of the Carrousel of its houses. He never lived to do this ; his successor faUed to undertake it, and the scheme dragged on into the middle of this century before it was carried into effect ; but it is an interesting example of what nonsense can be talked with regard to the destruction of Old Paris. It was not Napoleon III.'s vandalism, it was simply the belated completion of a seventeenth century scheme that gave us the fine open space which is now half the value of the Louvre.

When Henry died, then, (stabbed just opposite that No. 6 of the Eue de la Ferronnerie which still remains, I believe, marked with a placard,) he had left the Grande Galerie alone in a complete state ; his statue on the bridge and much of the Place Dauphiue still wanted finishing, the Place Eoyale was not filled, even the Hotel de Ville was still being worked at. There is much more that belongs to his reign, but cannot be included here. The great buildings and gallery of the Arsenal, of which Sully was commander, and which was at that moment in reality (as it continued for another couple of centuries to be in name) the depot of arms for the garrison, is very characteristic of

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Henry at this time. Its main pavilion (destroyed in the Eevolution), dating from the Eenaissance, called him to continue the work, and his room, still called " the Eoom of Henry IV.," remains to this day. It was on his going to the Arsenal at what was to be the outbreak of a great war, that he was stabbed in that narrow street, and it was from the Arsenal, as governor, that Sully, after his master's death, indignantly ordered the treasure to be paid over to the Queen.^ The memories that centre round that building are, curiously enough, rather literary than military, and this on account of the great library that grew up there and that became, after the Eestoration in this century, a meeting place for the Eomanticists as the guests of Nodier ; for it had become, long before the Eevolution (and the Eestoration of course copied the old custom), a perquisite of the Crown, and the princes, or their favourites, were given the large revenues and the residence of its Govern- ment. Again, Henry IV.'s reign was remarkable for the development of a number of small hotels, especially in the Temple, and for the beginning, all over Paris, of those private houses in the new manner of the seventeenth century architecture that was so soon to set the style for all the rest of the city. It was in his time, also, that the open space between the wall and the old town, just within the modem boulevard of the Temple, was fiUed in with new streets, though here, as in the case of his more important monuments, the work was also left unfinished, and the Place de France was only opened by Louis XIII. in 1636.

AH these half-finished things (for there was not one that Henry IV. lived to see really completed) can hardly ' It was kept in the Bastille close by.

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have their ending counted to the reign of Louis XIII. ; by an accident they stretched iato his time, but its spirit and the architecture m which it was represented have little to do with them ; the Grande Galerie, the Place des Vosges, and the Pont Neuf remain essentially transitional, holding to the time which was that of Shakespeare's last years, of Cecil's statesmanship ; which rather looked back to the sixteenth century, and had not yet designed in architecture the cold uniformity, in literature the marble classicism of the age of Louis XIV. But there are two buildings that attach to the new reign and yet are too early to belong to the rule and influence of Eiche- lieu — they are the Luxembourg and the Grande Salle of the Palais de Justice. One of them Louis Philippe dis- figured, the other the Commune destroyed, so that we have little left to-day to recall the few years of Marie de Medicis and of Louis' minority before Eichelieu joined the council.

What is most remarkable in these two buildings is the fact that, though they were contemporary in design and execution (the Luxembourg was actuallylleft untouched for some months in 1662 in order that all the work available might be turned iato the reconstruction of the Grande Salle), and though they had the same architect, Salomon de Brosse, yet the one held entirely to the Eenaissance tradition, the other to the bare magnificence and large spaces that are commonly associated with the work of men who were children when de Brosse was old. The Luxembourg has been very much altered and changed in the three hundred years of its existence : a modem wing hides the original work from the garden, and the greater part has been heightened as well ; the fagade on the Eue

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Toumon has been made plainer, the inner courts have lost much of their ornament ; but there is a comer where the effect of the original remains, and that is the little wing between the picture gallery and the main buUdiug. You see that delicate pavilion as you pass along the Eue de Vau- girard and look across a small and pretty courtyard at the medallion of Marie de Medicis, set in the wall above the Eenaissance windows ; that pavilion is, I believe, a relic of the original design, and is very beautiful, worthy almost of Lescot. It may have been the fact that he was working for a queen who was also an Italian, or it may have been the character of the old town house of the Luxembourgs (which Marie de Medicis had bought and which gave the palace its name), but whatever influence it was that turned de Brosse's fancy, it is certain that he made some- thing beyond himself and worthy of a better period in the palace on the hill.

With the Grande Salle one has exactly the opposite impression. The old Grande Salle of the Palais de Justice, the hall of Philippe le Bel, whose peculiar beauty had made it famous throughout Europe, was destroyed in the first of those disastrous fires that ultimately transformed the whole aspect of the Law Courts. It was in 1618, in the night of the 7th of March (to be accurate), that the flames were first seen by a sentinel stationed on the quay. Lit in some way that will never be discovered, but that — unlike the two later catastrophes — was probably acci- dental, the fire had caught the complex woodwork of the glorious great roof, and before the day broke the mulUons of the windows were crumbling, the marble table was in fragments, the stained glass was run and lost, the statues of the kings were defaced and ruined, only a few could

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be recognized afterwards in the embers ; ^ with the morn- ing the roof fell in and completed the ruin. All Paris had turned out to see the fire. A strong gale was blowing from the south and carried the sparks so far that even St. Eustache was in danger ; the Tour de I'Horloge, in which a bird's nest in the eaves caught fire, was only just saved, and by the organized effort of the next day all the Palace, save the Grande SaUe and the roofing of one of the Conciergerie towers, remained sound.

Four years after the fire de Brosse had built the new Grande Salle, and so introduced into the mediaeval Palais de Justice the first note of a change which was destined very slowly to rebuild it, until at last, by the time of the Eevolution, there should be nothing left of the Gothic but the same relics that we see to-day. The habit of the lawyers would most certainly have preserved the appear- ance of the Law Courts intact as far as might have been possible. The most conservative and the most power- ful of the French professions, the lawyers retain to this day a number of forms peculiar to them, and such as every other calling has lost or has had weakened by the Eevolution, and never in their history have the Law Courts been changed in appearance save under the condi- tions of absolute necessity. It is none the less remarkable that de Brosse, though he could not do anything in the old manner, should have seen fit to introduce, at this early date, a kind of " style of Louis XIV.," twenty years before that prince was born and fifty years before the

' Then for the first time, as they searched in the burnt wreckage, they found the statute of Henry VI. of England, which Bedford had slipped in among the rest of the French kings, and which had for two hundred years remained unnoticed.

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architecture which we commonly associate with his name had been developed. The Gothic had been destroyed ; de Brosse did not even replace it with the Eenaissance. He built upon the site of the Grande Salle, covering exactly the same area, and even with much of the same ground- plan, something colder, less ornamental, and more solid than had yet been seen in Paris. It was like two great tunnels, so perfect in their round outlines and so lacking in ornament were the parallel vaults. The numerous doors that led from it to the Courts which, as in the case of Westminster Hall here, stood ranged alongside the Grande Salle, had a touch of scroll work upon either side and small pediments above them, but there was nothing that could recall to the eye any of that luxuriance which had been in the Middle Ages and during the Eenaissance, and was destined to be again in our own day, a special character of French art ia buildiiig. The place was lit by two great semicircular windows at the end of the hall, that were insufficient in spite of their size to relieve its gloom, and in that empty and bare place the lawyers paced in the hours of their waiting, and so made it in truth, like its fellow at Versailles, a Salle des Pas Perdus.

The present hall, rebuilt after the fire of the Commune, gives some idea perhaps of what de Brosse's heavy and substantial work was like, but it does not reproduce, simple as it is, the effect of undecorated spaces which the absence of detail gave to the first work, upon which it is modelled.

These two buildings, then, the Luxembourg and the new Grande Salle, are, as I have said above, all that properly belongs to the period of Louis XIII. before the time of Eichelieu. The next effort that made for the

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reconstruction of the city came with the entrance of the cardinal into the council of 1624, and I shall there- fore treat of the work of the next eighteen years as being especially his rather than the king's, for if, when he died, Paris had reached the end of the first period of rebuilding, it is due much more to his control of the public purse and to his ideas of magnificence than to any lingering pride on the part of the Crown, and certainly much more than to any effort on the part of Marie de Medieis.

Eichelieu entered the Council in April, 1624. By June the work upon the main square of the Louvre (the work that Henry had meant to do, and that his death had interrupted) was begun. It would not be accurate to imagine Eichelieu as coming upon the society of the seventeenth century with a creative influence. There was little that he did which can be said to proceed directly from a new initiative due to him; but he pos- sessed, in the highest degree, the quality which distin- guishes a great administrator. He could realize, at the least cost and in the most practical fashion, what greater and less useful men only dream of. Kings had wished for, planned, and described a certain France — Eichelieu made it for them. So, on a smaller scale, they had wished for and planned a particular kind of Louvre — EicheUeu saw that it was done. Concentration, attention to detail, an impatience with visionary pleasure, and a determination to make — all these things go with the cha- racter of the men who scarcely ever possess a philosophy, of whom no one yet has been an artist, of whom very few have even been orators, but who seem, as one looks down the fabric-rolls of history, to be the carpenters of society, and whom we call the statesmen.

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See, for example, what the Louvre had been. The Middle Ages had made it a little, gloomy, turretted castle, taking up about a quarter of the present courtyard. The Eenaissance had come, and the very first thought of its princes was the reconstruction of their palace. Francis I. drew up its plans the moment he returned from Madrid — and died, having done nothing. Henri II. set Lescot to work, and rebuilt a wing — and died, leaving the whole incomplete. Catherine de Medicis and her three sons meant to make something unique in Europe — a huge quadrilateral joined by a great gallery to the further palace of the Tuileries. When they were all dead, the little joining gallery (where the SaUe Carree is now) had been built, and a few stones of the great gallery laid, for the rest there was nothing done. Henry IV. had intended to finish the old Louvre, turning it into the great square it now is ; his facile energy and the temptation of a task in which repetition and monotony would economize time, led him on to complete the Grande Galerie, but when he died the Louvre itself was still half-Eenaissance and half- Gothic, and the whole of it remained within its old, small, moated square. At last Louis XIII. came with still vaster plans. The Louvre was to be extended to four great quadrangles. It was to reach the Eue St. Honore, and to stretch east right up to St. Germain I'Auxerrois ; but, of so much drawing, not a stone was laid to build up reality till Eichelieu came. Then, during the eighteen years of his administration, he so destroyed the old Louvre, so laid out the lines of the new, so boimded the great, wild scheme of Louis XIII. within the limits of order, that when he died, though the eastern wing was not even begun, and though the northern was but a line

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of building a few feet above the ground, yet the future courtyard was laid out, and the work of those that came after him could do no more than fulfil this design.

Le Mercier, the architect who was building the Palais Cardinal for Eichelieu at the same date, was given the work, and he showed in his execution of it precisely the same practical regard for what could be done that his master followed in the larger affairs of the State. Since he had to prolong Lescot's wing to double the old length, he copied, and denied himself the boast of any new creation. One may go now into the square of the old Louvre and look at the west wing, and see how exactly he followed his model. There is hardly a detail to show that the southern half is pure Eenaissance work, the northern half seventy years later. Le Mercier completed no other part of his square (though he laid out the whole) beyond this west wrug. He lived on to see the energy that Eichelieu had thrown into the government pass through the halt of the Fronde and through the lesser period of Mazarin, and died (with the Louvre thus founded but wholly incomplete) in the group of years that is so fruitful a climax iu the seventeenth century; in the same twelvemonth with Mansard, a year before Mazarin, in the last months before Louis XIV. achieved full power, in the time of Charles II.'s restoration. He had succeeded in impressiag upon the future designs of the Palace the character to which we owe all its present magnificence. By an admirable self-restraint, by continuing where he might have created, he handed on the pure Renais- sance tradition to the future, and compelled Le Vau (and later Gabriel) to a certain harmony in the whole plan, so that the Louvre still retains the majesty of the

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sixteenth century, in which so very small a part of it was raised.

Eichelieu's activity, and the note that I have shown to characterize it (I mean to the achievement of what his predecessors had designed), was apparent in other quarters of the city. Thus, the plan to build over the hitherto waste space of the Isle St. Louis dated from a few years before 1624 — to be accurate, from 1614; but the adjudgment of the contract fell imder his administration. Again, the "Pont Eouge," the bridge that connected the Isle de la Cite with the Isle St. Louis, was projected as early as 1615, but the construction of it was only as late as 1627. And in connection with that bridge there is a story to be told.

It was meant origiaally to cross the narrowest place between the two islands, very much where the modern stone bridge goes now in its one great span; but that would, of course, have brought it right into the Cathedral Close, and the Canons were not going to allow a street to be driven through their gardens. On the other hand, it was impossible to take the bridge in a straight line anywhere from one island to the other without interfering with the comfort of these ecclesiastics, so a curious way out of the difficulty was found ; they brought the bridge from the island of St. Louis up to the end of the Canons' gardens, and then caused it to turn in the stream and run parallel to the bank for some distance, till at last it came ia just where the steps are to-day, a little above the bridge leading to the Hotel de ViUe : in other words, to what was then the Port St. Landry. It was built of wood, very much like a trestle bridge, and was painted with red lead to preserve it from rot: that is why it was called the

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" Red Bridge." It had to be partially rebuilt on account of an accident in the first years of the Eegenoy, and at last, at the beginning of the Eevolution, this curious monument of privilege and of the incongruity of old Paris was swept away by a flood.

While the island of St. Louis was thus being built over under Eichelieu, and connected with the island of the Cite, the influence of the Cardinal was also apparent in the quarter of the University ; and here there is apparent, I think for the only time in Eichelieu's public action, a domestic, an affectionate character, a note of personal loyalty towards an institution with which he was con- nected, and which could lend additional pride even to the man who felt that he was making a nation with every day that his policy developed. He had been elected a member of the Sorbonne in 1622, and had become the master of that great institution. Three years after the date of his entry into the council, three years, therefore, after he had put Le Mercier to work upon the Louvre, he asked the same architect to begin the rebuilding of the college. It was in 1627 that the first stone was laid, and eight years afterwards the great domed church that dominates all the old part of the Sorbonne was begun. The fapade of that church has suffered many renewals, and was altered especially in the eighteenth century; but although no building in the University has been so much increased and overcased with modem work, the heart of the Sorbonne, that portion of it which will always remain the centre of University life, is to this day an example of the munificence of the Cardinal.

The mention of the Sorbonne in connection with

2c

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Eichelieu leads me to a little digression upon the con- dition of the University during that century.

It is a commonplace that all France benefited, especi- ally economically, by the compromise of Henry IV., by the government of Eichelieu, and it is sometimes said, though falsely, by the admiaistration of Mazarin. There was probably in all this time, during which Europe as a whole was developing its wealth so rapidly, no country in which the economic results of modern civilization were more striking than in France, and it has therefore been imagined that the added activity which was to be found in every department of the national life necessarily affected the University. That impression, commonly repeated and the more believed because the University did at that date produce so many famous men, is nevertheless untrue if we consider the general fortunes of the corporation. It was a period during which it was impossible to preserve the continuity of the mediaeval system. The admission of the upper classes into the colleges (to the final exclusion of the mass of the nation) saved the old foundations and destroyed the old spirit of our Universities in England. In France no such transformation was possible ; and the colleges that had depended for their fame upon a cosmo- politan system of education and upon a United Europe, were broken by the Eeformation. Certain colleges began to absorb others ; the common people, who could alone supply a mediseval University, fell separate from the national system of education, and there can be no doubt that, as a result, the colleges were in full decay. The Cordeliers were emptying as they increased in wealth ; even the great ecclesiastical foundation of the Bernardins fell into obscurity. The small Scotch college in Paris

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had been destroyed, of course, so far as local fame or utility went, on the final severance of Scotland from the Eoman Church. The College of Bayeux was fallen to half its former number; the College of Cornouailles had lost so many of its scholars that within another generation a complaint was raised against it because it continued to waste its old revenues upon a couple of solitary students. The Jacobins also fell steadily throughout that period. There had been, just after the death of Henry IV., a desperate attempt to revive their old position ; later, Pascal spoke of them with respect, but nothing could save them. The great College of the Lombards had become entirely neglected ; the College of Beauvais, famous as it was for a discipline somewhat more exact than that of the others, had had its finances undermined by the civil wars. The complaint of the College of Lisieux against their Principal, of the College of Eheims against the Master (for this man was living with his mother upon the whole revenues of the college, from which every Chaplain, Pellow, and Scholar had departed) are typical of the ruin that had fallen upon the University. And so one might cite case after case to show how these smaller colleges fell into disuse or disappeared under the first three Bourbons.

The exceptions to this general character are numerous ; the Grassins College kept at a high level; it received the compliments of the king, and of his minister, in the last years of the reign of Louis XIII. It took the first prize in the University competition in several successive years, upon the last of which this honour was carried off by a person of the strange name of Wilkinson. The great College of Cardinal Lemoine, though it had fallen from the fame it had possessed during the Kenaissance, yet kept a

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certain place. The College of Harcourt was still fairly prosperous; but chief above the others, and very typical of the time, was the new Jesuit College founded under Louis XIV., and called that of " Louis the Great." It is sometimes forgotten that the religious peace of Henry IV. worked both ways. It not only gave security to the Huguenots, it also permitted the return of the Jesuits; they came back in 1604 to a University which had always been somewhat opposed to them, and before the close of the century they had taken over the College de Clermont, and turned it, in 1683, into something not unlike a modem Lycee for discipline and organization. The king patronised it, and so did the Court ; it absorbed quite a crowd of minor institutions, and, among others, the College of Arras. The inclusion, at least, of this foundation in that of the great Jesuit college had this interesting result, that it caused both Desmoulins and Eobespierre to be educated there, whereas, under the old order, they would have presumably gone to the institution founded for the benefit of their native town.

While certain colleges, then, maintained and concen- trated the failing vitality of the University, the exceptions which I have mentioned as occurring in the general decay were to be discovered also in a number of striking inci- dents, and in the completion or increase of some of the monuments of the hiU. Thus, St. Etienne du Mont had its fine portal completed in the year of Henry IV.'s death, and was consecrated just before the new Sorbonne was founded. It saw the burial of Pascal and of Racine, and the neighbouring Church of St. Genevieve received the bones of Descartes in 1667, when they had been brought back from Stockholm. The Church of St. Andr6 des

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Arcs had a new front built for it, St. Severin was in part remodelled ; but with these exceptions, and taken as a whole, the quarter of the University, old, narrow, tortuous, and cramped, benefited but little during the period that saw the creation of so much of the rest of the capital.

I cannot leave the name of Eichelieu, even after so long an interruption in the description of his work, with- out returning to his career for the purpose of describing a work with which he was perhaps more nearly connected than with any other.

In the Sorbonne you have Eichelieu kindly, a loyal and generous member of a foundation whose greatness could give even him an addition of circumstance. He showed in that great work a kind of patriotism for his society that was reflected also in the help he gave to the general rebuilding ; but Eichelieu, working outwardly and for the public good, in so much that he did in Paris, transformed one quarter for his own pleasure alone ; and there he presents a face as evil and despotic as that turned on the Sorbonne had been worthy. He made for his magnificence, and called by his own title, the " Palais Cardinal," the main building of that which, after much addition and change, became the " Palais Eoyal."

The site of that palace — as will be evident if one looks for a moment at the line of Charles V.'s wall on page 300 — is such that the old fortification just enclosed it, for it is close upon the gate of St. Honore ; and the wall running north-east from that gate to the Porte St. Denis would cut the gardens at the back of any building close to the gate. It would have seemed, therefore, on the face of it, a bad place to choose for a new palace in the first years of the seventeenth century, for not only was the

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Town Wall still standing, but it had been strengthened at a little distance outside by the new bastioned earthworks which had been made during the religious wars, and which had kept out Henry IV. during his siege of the city. That Eichelieu should in this private matter have brpken the conditions of the town to his will rather than have surrendered himself to them is typical of the nature of his public ministry and of the wideness of his action ; but the difficulties he had to overcome, and his way of meeting them, illustrate a regime which, as it was the first, was also perhaps the most tyrannical in the history of French centralization.

Eichelieu's work on the Palace coincides exactly with his political activity. It was in 1624, the year in which he entered the council, that he bought from the widow of de Fresne the large town house called " The Hotel Eam- bouillet." That house stood very much where the front court of the Palais Eoyal is now, but it was of no great size, save for its garden,, which spread out behind the houses on either side and reached right up to the wall. Again, the year that marks the beginning of his power-in- chief, 1629, is also the year in which Eichelieu began turning the old town house into a palace. From that date tm 1634 he was occupied in buying up, sometimes from willing owners (as in the case of the House of the Great Bear), sometimes by threats (as in the sign of the Three Virgins), but always at a high price, the shops on either side, whose great painted signboards were among the most curious relics of the previous century. The building (of which, as was mentioned above, Le Mercier again was the architect) grew and changed with the Cardinal's life, and seems, in its extension and incompletion, to remain

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what it had been from the beginning — a reflection of his ambitions and success. He left it — under certain conditions of name and tenure — to the Crown ; but though so much of Louis XIV.'s boyhood was passed there, though it was the refuge of the Court before and after the Fronde, the purely political role, which it played cannot concern this chapter, for (so far as its buildings went) it remained much the same to the close of the seventeenth century, and the additions and changes that now characterize it were the work of the next hundred years.

In the case of these buildings, which yet remain in some part to show how much the great minister had done for his master's capital, the public reconstruction of Paris is apparent. But there is another feature of the time, the feature which has given its title to this chapter, and one which is, from the point of view of general history, of more importance than the monuments with which we have been dealing. The streets also, the private houses, and the whole aspect of the city, were changed at this moment. All this mass of private rebuilding is a matter obviously impossible to write about with any detail save at the expense of undertaking a work of far greater size than this book can pretend to. And it is one, moreover, which, even upon the vastest scale would be unsatisfactory, because the documents upon which any such description would have to be based are necessarily few and disjointed. Nevertheless, one can say in a general fashion that the seventeenth century saw within a lifetime the disappearance of mediaeval Paris ; and in order to appreciate the fashion in which this recon- struction took place — a reconstruction which is made

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especially clear to us by the numerous prints which have survived from that period — it is necessary to see the process going on in two principal divisions of time. The first of these divisions would begin with the work of Henry IV. in 1594, and may be said roughly to continue until the death of Eichelieu, some fifty years later. The second was all in the minority or youth of Louis XIV. ; while the end of that great reign saw a Paris completely renewed, and the capital which the king abandoned was between 1680 and 1715 very much what we see to-day in the older quarters of the city. MoUere and the younger Mansard cannot have known the effect of mediaeval Paris ; even the Dance of Death in the Ceme- tery of the Innocents — ^last and stubborn relic of the fifteenth century — was destroyed in 1669.

With regard to the first of these periods the rebuilding may be said to have started from several centres, and to have proceeded upon a definite and pre-arranged plan^ of which, of course, the principal example is to be dis- covered in the successful scheme of the Place Eoyale. These bases, as it were, once formed, it is not difficult to see how the private owners, who were stUl occupying each his own house all over Paris, would join up the portions upon which the king's hand had already achieved the change. Such a body of building was begun, for instance, with deliberate intention upon the Island of St. Louis, yet another was undertaken in the close of the Cathedral, a third was to be found in the private hotels which sprang up in the enclosure of the Temple, a fourth in a group of noble houses north of the Eue St. Honore, and it may be said that by the time of the great cardinal's death you could not have passed from any one part of

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Paris to another with the hope of seeing any considerable remains of the old timbered houses, unless, indeed, you had chosen to go out of the main thoroughfares, through such quarters as that of the Innocents, of the Boucherie near the Chatelet, or the group of narrow streets just north of the Place de Greve.

Nevertheless, the work was not done by the middle of the century. There was a space of some ten or eleven years, corresponding roughly with the close of our civil wars and the beginning of Cromwell's protectorate, when Paris had a character which it had never shown before, and has rarely shown since — a character which has been preserved for us in the great portfolio of engravings which we owe to the contemporary work of Sylvestre. It had the appearance that a workshop has, when some job is nearly finished, but before the materials are cleared away. Great spaces were still encumbered (as the Court of the Louvre remained encumbered for a century) with heaps of rubbish, and with the sheds of masons. Whole streets, already driven and made ready, were not yet paved ; the quays formed a broken line, part finished and part unfinished ; the mediaeval tower of the Nesle still stood overlooking the southern shore of the Seine, and had attached to it a great length of the mediaeval wall, as well as the old gate of the time of Charles VI. " The Tower of the Wood " ^ stood in the middle of the quay

' This "Tonr du Bois" was the comer tower of Charles V.'s wall, and stood on a site juat outside the westernmoBt of the three arches that form the entry to the Carrousel, on the river. It was partly in mine, and during the greater part of the seventeenth century made a grotesque and violent contrast with the Grande Galerie. It was finally destroyed, not so much to save the appearance of this last as because it interfered with the growing trafiic on the quay.

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that runs along the Grande Galerie of the Louvre. The gate of St. Anthony, and the corresponding gate of St. Bernard on the other shore had their Eenaissance portals pierced in what yet remained a crumbling ruin of the walls of Etienne Marcel, and there was about it all the appearance of makeshift which one always finds in the middle of some piece of work. Buildings that had once been palaces, old portions of the Hotel of St. Paul, and so forth, were used for the most various purposes ; thus, the offices of the Eoyal Mail were established in buildings that had once been the outhouses of the Palace on the quay of the Celestins, and in some half dozen other places of the city you would have found portions of the Eoyal Library, off-shoots of the Courts of Law (one of which, for example, was lodged in the Arsenal) and what not, scattered up and down upon incon- gruous sites. It is true that Sylvestre, in his desire for the picturesque, has exaggerated this extraordinary aspect of the city during his time ; there must, nevertheless, have been some basis for those imfinished streets, those corners of ruins, and those bits of old wall through which one sees the trees breaking, and which are lined so often with the stagnant moats of old defences.

This disorder disappeared for the most part just before and after the years of 1655-1660, and the town closed up, as it were, leaving no evidences of its recent reconstruction save upon the outer line of its circumference. It must not be imagined that when the work was finished Paris, thus rebuilt for the third time, could show, as it had shown in the earlier examples of the thirteenth century, an aspect of newness and of fresh stone. There were several reasons which made the Paris of Louis XIV. seem

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old even in the time of its birth. The stone used was no longer the old white stone upon which the Middle Ages had depended — it was grey ; the houses were very- tall, and the streets narrow ; the tiles that had for so long given a note of sharp colour to the city were no longer used ; the roofing was everywhere of slate or of lead, and the fashion of decoration had brought in ornaments of wrought iron which added to the effect of sobriety and age. There was, moreover, in the style which that gene- ration had produced, something that could never give the impression of youth. It was sombre and grand ; it took a ponderous delight in great bare spaces, relieved by severe ornament, and there is no doubt that an architect of the time, who should have found that he had by acci- dent added something which made Paris seem lighter and refreshed at the expense of imposing dignity, would have thought that he had failed. It was rather the desire of those artists to give an impression of imperial and enduring things which should cheat the eye, not only into the belief that they would last throughout succeeding ages, but even that they had already existed throughout past generations. There was at that time something in the buildings of what you may see in contemporary pictures, especially in the engravings, where there is nothing that is not full of circumstance and weight, and nothing that we can imagine without, even at the moment of its creation, a flavour of antiquity.

It was in such a Paris that the great buildings with which the latter part of this seventeenth century is con- nected— the Invalides, the later Tuileries, the extension of the Louvre, the Institute — arose ; and in the description 4;hat follows of their building and of their architecture.

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it is necessary to imagine them always, not what the great monuments had usually been, pioneers of a style, but rather the complements that iilled up the few remaining gaps and replaced whatever was left of old fashions and of decay in the capital.

Now, with the end of the Fronde, with the return of the Court and the origins of the great reign that has become a pivot upon which French institutions turn, there opens upon the social history of Paris so great a chapter that the slight way in which I must deal with it here needs some apology. The very name of Louis XIV., the mention even of the lesser titles in that splendid circle brings upon a reader the expectation of detail, of some full historical analysis, or, at least, of a part of the wealth of personality, anecdote, comedy, and arms which the period possesses beyond any other of modern times. It was inaugurated by an advance guard of famous men that passed into its earliest years ; it was escorted by a crowd of names as great almost as these their predecessors ; there lingered, even to its close, enough survivors from the most brilliant period to make the sunset memorable. Poussin, exiled and content, lived to hear of the king's new power and did not die till four years after his advent to sole rule; Corneille, in old age and lost to his first powers, survived to see Versailles. MoU^re, Bossuet, BoUeau, La Bruyere, La Fontaine, Vauban, Col- bert— one might continue with an indefinite list of names, whose common familiarity would weary one as do the hackneyed quotations of some masterpiece of literature, and yet whose consonance in one life and reign serve to prove, as is proved by a similar consonance

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in such a masterpiece, what kind of time it was, and how necessarily it is elevated above and distinct from the single energy of the early seventeenth century, with its high, few masters on the one hand, and the confused decline of the eighteenth century on the other.

Well, these fifty years and more that play such a part in the history of France are, in that of the capital, far less than they should be. Were I engaged in showing how Paris lived, what men ruled its development, and what political history it followed, then this reign would fill, perhaps, a third of my book ; yet I can give it but a very slight space in such a book as this, because that life was not reflected in any great architectural effect of the reign upon Paris. A mere growth might be described — the Place Vendome is the principal example of it — but, in the special types that are the matter of this book, in the monuments that distinguish a period and recall it to future generations, it is astonishing how poor was the splendour of Louis XIV., so far as his capital is concerned. A crowd of additions and new frontings, the partial rebuilding of half a dozen colleges, the extension of a hundred streets distinguish it ; but of the palaces and separate creations that should re- main— as they remain, for instance, to prove the activity of Napoleon III., or of the present EepubUc, or of the middle thirteenth century — there is but a short list, and even that is partly made up of things that were left for the next century to complete. There are two principal reasons for this : First, that Eichelieu's plans had been so thorough as to leave but little absolutely new for his successors to accomplish ; secondly, that the most vigorous part of the reign was drained in its resources for building

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by the vast experiment of Versailles. The effect of the former was to give to the period of Louis XIV. a task of completion and extension rather than of creation. The unfinished look of which I have spoken disappeared from the streets and groups, the squares received their statues, and the new ways were paved. The effect of the latter (an effect that shows clearly in the published accounts of the Treasury) was to starve even those great works to which the settlement of the civil war had given a new impulse. By how much the grants fell in the first years that Louis was working in Versailles, wiU be seen in the case of the Louvre.

Any survey of the buildings at this time must begin, of course, with the action of Mazarin. It is he that introduces the period, and it is, therefore, with the monument which is peculiarly his own that I must show how the reign affected Paris. For though the new work on the Louvre was earlier in point of time, yet the college that the cardinal founded was at once more complete and more characteristic of him than the extensions of the royal palace that dated from the time of his great pre- decessor, and that were never finished till the present century.

Mazarin's name, curiously magnified by the circum- stances over which his finesse rather than his wisdom had triumphed, seemed to him as he approached death to be in some danger of falUng into obUvion. It was February, 1661. The king had grown to manhood, the ship of the monarchy, which he has been credited with building, but which he may more truly be said to have watched in its last fittings, was launched ; he was within a month of his own dissolution, while his vast fortune, which rivalled the

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Treasury, stood unapportioned, and seemed an insult to the people at the end of so much public ruin and of a long and terrible war. He determined to use it in the per- petuation of that Italian name of his for which — in spite of eighteen years of power — he seemed still so anxious. Millions to his niece, millions more to the State (and yet further millions lapsing to the Crown, by an omission in the will that his conscience had perhaps dictated), left further millions yet for the principal object of his vanity. That object was the founding of a college that should make him live throughout succeeding generations among the Parisians. To the Crown he left eighteen great diamonds, to be called after him, " The Mazarin Diamonds " ; to the college two millions for the foundation itself, and for the library, on the condition that it should be called after his name. He established also other conditions, showing with what minuteness and anxiety he had planned this shadow and emblem of what might have been a more robust and enduring fame. Among these conditions none is more remarkable than that in which he urges the governing body to select especially the sons of the nobUity; and having prepared all this scheme for his own glory, securing certainty that his title would be at least attached to the greatest foundation of the University, he had himself carried to Vincennes in March, and died.

With the next year, 1662, Le Vau, who was working at the Louvre opposite, drew up the plans of the new college. Colbert, who, for the good of France, had replaced the dead cardinal, saw to their execution. In twelve years the whole was ready ; in yet another ten (by 1684) the body of the founder was brought in pomp to the chapel in the midst of his foundation, and laid below the mausoleum

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which, after many adventures, is now a show in the Louvre. In 1688 the college which he had designed for his renown was opened and the classes filled; but here again an irony, the character which you will observe appear- ing so constantly in the institutions of Paris intervened to spoil the original scheme of Mazarin. Only the poorest of the nobility would consent to send their sons to " The College of the Four Nations ; " what was meant to be the chief glory of the University became an adjunct, distant and ill-placed. At last, under the Empire, even the name disappeared; it was no longer known by the cardinal's title, nor as the more familiar " Quatre Nations." It was given over to the Institute, and has remained with it ever since. One portion of Mazarin's work has, however, con- tinued, and has done a little to preserve the memory to which he was himself so devoted. His library, which he, in memory of Eichelieu's plan, had been the first of all the great proprietors to throw open, stUl recalls him and is still a part of the public wealth of the city.

Mazarin, personal and ambitious in the case of the Institute, had in another place a more public effect upon the city. Studious in everything to copy his master, Eichelieu, he turned, as Eichelieu had turned, to the Louvre; and here one sees how much he fell below the standard that the first of the great cardinals had set. To compare his general work in Paris with that of Eichelieu would be ridiculous— we owe to him no great rebuilding, nor any wide scheme ; but it is remarkable how, even in the one case which left him free to develop his activity and to mark the capital with some memory of his ministry, he failed. Le Mercier had been Eichelieu's man ; he had laid out the great quadrilateral of the Palace, and had

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marked the ground-plan, which his successors would be bound to follow, but his spirit, the spirit which had copied with such due humility the details of Lescot and the character of the Early Eenaissance, was not continued. The work upon the Louvre was resumed (after the inter- ruption of the ten years that followed EicheHeu's death) in 1652. At that time the western side of the square was the only part that was really finished. The eastern half of the southern wing, the whole of the northern, yet remained but half a story above the ground ; the eastern wing was but traced. For nine years Le Mercier was able to continue them with ample funds, but he has left nothing of all that work for us to admire, save his western fagade and part of the decorations of the southern wing. He did, indeed, raise all four sides of the Palace, but the intrigues of which I am about to speak, the impatient despotism of Louis (whose true reign began at the moment of Le Mercier's death) and the nature of a Court to which flattery could always appeal, handed over the legacy of his unfinished work to lesser men. The body of the Louvre is his, but it is hidden by the outer fronts which, on the southern, eastern, and northern sides of the Palace, mask or replace his elevations.

Le Vau succeeded him. If he had not Le Mercier's talent of copying and continuing the Early Eenaissance, he had at least ability and honesty. He completed a good river-front for the southern wing ; he was about to finish the eastern side — ^which was to be the principal entry — in the same style as the west (with the domes and attic roofs that Lescot had originated), when the fate common to so many of those who worked for Louis XIV. over- took him. He was a man by nature little used to

2d

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self-advertisement, eager at his work, absorbed, and having (in common with more than one of the leading men of that time) something of the disgust at courts that inspired Moliere's greatest comedy. The defeat of his harmonious scheme came precisely upon the matter of the eastern front, which was to have been its masterpiece and the key to the whole. There had already arisen that appetite for foreign ideals which is so ordinary a disease of luxury, it was hinted that the French architects — the men who, for all their inferiority, stood in the tradition of the national style of the Eenaissance — were not great enough to suit the majesty of Louis. Poussin had indeed been appealed to. Perhaps his residence at Eome and his evident distaste for the new society of his countrymen qualified him, but he had excused himself after a half-promise, and was dead before the competition for the design was concluded. Bernini drew a fantastic thing of his own, which was begun, but luckily never finished (though it is to him we owe the monstrous proportion of the eastern halls of the Louvre), when a man, as French, after all, as any of the older architects, and certainly inferior to them, was chosen by a caprice to complete the fapade. It was Perrault. Worked into the business through his brother, suited by character to the tastes of the Court, he submitted his design of the colonnade which (though it was finished so long after his day) still goes by his name, and it is here that one sees better than in any other spot in Paris the mind of the king. For it was Louis that chose this drawing out of all the others. Its perspective, its sombre repetition, its immensity, all pleased the fancy of a man whose fault lay in the exaggeration of measurement and who had found nothing more suitable for his Versailles

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than an endless line of building that seems limited only by the capacities of the Treasury. Le Vau died of a broken heart, and the same year, 1670, saw the beginning of Perrault's columns. That his design was longer than the old line of the front mattered nothing to the whim of the king. The new southern front was built out to meet the extension, and Perrault's exaggerated scheme remained intact.

But the time in which that long vista first rose was also a moment fatal to the beauty of Paris — it was the inception of the Country Palace in which Louis XIV. took the full measure of his ambition and drained what had seemed at one time to be the inexhaustible resources of his people. In 1670 the grant for the Louvre had been as high as seventy thousand pounds, in 1672 it was but fifteen thousand, in 1676 it had fallen to ten, and there is a melancholy boast in Mansard's note of 1679 (when he was in full work upon Versailles, the rival) saying that nothing more was doing at the Louvre. The whole work stood still. There remained, indeed, a well-paid architect, a salaried and dignified master of the works, and the encumbrances and disorder that go with a long pretence at building ; but practically the Louvre was left to one side for two generations, and I shall show in my next chapter how Paris had to wait for the decline of Louis XV. before even the colonnade of Perrault could be completed. It was for those eighty years a type of what Paris had become — the king absent, the grants to the city falling, a mass of private interests overriding what should have been the present vigilance and good order of the Crown.

It remains only to appreciate as far as possible the

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character which the close of the rebuilding had impressed upon the town. In its origin the rebuilding, as we have seen in the Place des Vosges and in the first plans of the Palais Eoyal, was of a nature whose pleasant moderation and lightness suited the tradition inherited from the sixteenth century. Henry IV., and Eichelieu after him, had meant to make a Paris open, clear and (one may almost use the word) dainty. They had seen the beauty of uncovered bridges; the use of the great sweep of the river; the importance of a system of regular streets ; and to these they would have added, like ornaments, the red brick and stone facings of the smaller works, while they continued the traditionary beauty of the palaces. An excellent example of what the early century had intended was the first elevation of the College de France, the building that was designed especially for the modem and speculative studies of the new civilization and that it has taken over two centuries to complete. In that design one sees at its best all the combination of loveliness, lightness, and dignity which we associate with the more successful plans of the time; but just as this particular foundation was not completed by the generation of the great cardinal, nor continued in the manner he would have chosen, so in the rest of the city the first intentions of the seventeenth century failed. Everything took on either an exaggerated height or a false addition of detail. Not that the time loved detail — on the contrary, it began that perverted taste for meaningless bare spaces which the French have excellently baptized " le faux bon gout,'' but it would not rest till it had remodelled and changed whatever the Eenaissance or the generation of the elder Mansard had left it. In its own creations it aimed especially at the

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effect of grandeur — an aim which it reached, though it was at the expense of a certain heaviness; in its re- modellings of ornament it failed completely, because, like all that is infected with pride, it overlooked the value of small things. Of this last error the deplorable changes in the gates of St. Bernard and St. Antoine, the hideous pyramids and affected statues, were excellent examples, plastered as they were upon the carvings of the sixteenth century; of the first, more successful when it worked alone, the massive arches of the Porte St. Denis action, and the Porte St. Martin are admirable types.

But there is a plea to be offered for this gloomy and overstrained manner and an excuse to be made for archi- tects who, if they exceeded in their efforts at majesty, yet preserved, I thiak, something of that iaforming gaiety which is at the base of the French spirit and which is the moderator of the tendencies to exaggeration that are the necessary concomitants of the national energy and imagina- tive power. The plea lies in this, that from the Eenais- sance onward this new Paris had been planned on a scale too vast for the style of the rebuilding ; the excuse of the architects is that they were dominated, as was the whole time, by the personality of Louis XIV. — a man who has been treated too much as the production of his age, who was in reality, far more than modems will admit, its part- creator.

In the advancing of this I will take two examples that shall complete these notes: the Tuileries as a proof of the first, the Invalides as a proof of the second.

The changes in the Tuileries could not but make them drear and over grand. Catherine de Medici had built that

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palace with the intention, of making it into a quadri- lateral, of which there was standing at the beginning of this period but one side. When Henry IV. brought out the Grande Galerie it was evidently necessary, if one was to join the Tmleries to it, to make them far longer than they had been in the original plan of Delorme. Louis XIIL, who joined them to the Pavilion de Flore, was compelled also to lengthen the other wing at the northern end in order to secure symmetry for the whole, and as a very natural result one had a great long line of buildiag, in the middle of which Catharine's original palace could not but have the appearance of a toy. Its low roofs, its jaunty little cupola standing in the centre of the whole buildiag, its excess of Corinthian capitals, had an effect almost ridiculous when these two new great wings were added upon either side. It is easy, then, to understand how Louis XIV., when he set to work on them in 1669, could not but complete the plans of Louis XIII.'s addition. The Medicean facade was destroyed, and the whole front was given that appearance of severe gravity which it retained until its destruction thirty years ago.

In the case of the Invalides the period of Louis XIV. retained, for all its straining after majesty, a certain tradi- tion of earlier harmony and grace. Mansard the younger, with whose name will always be associated the triumph of that period, can be seen to hold to the Italian traditions of the uncle who adopted him.^ There was something in his mind which remembered proportion and stopped him just short of the largest efforts. Versailles, which was his

' His name of Mansard was not inherited. He was connected with the elder architect thi'ough his mother, who was Mansard's sister. His real name was Hardouin.

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principal work, cannot be denied to be an exaggeration of size. It sometimes seems like several similar buildings joined in one line, and special portions of it alone, such as the Chapel and the Orangery, are really successful. The faults of repetition apparent in the Palace are, however, a vindication of Mansard ; they were precisely the kind of faults that would be committed under the circumstances by a mind in which taste was inherited; he could plan a reasonable part of Versailles well : when he was asked to produce so enormous a result he could do no more than reiterate his first design, nor was it he that insisted upon the exaggeration of size ; it was the king that forced such dimensions upon his architect. In the Invalides he is very much more himself. The dome of that church is, as will, I think, be always admitted, the most perfectly harmonious thing of its kind in Paris. And it is the more remarkable that such a success should have been obtained when one con- siders how full the latter seventeenth century was of this pattern in architecture. The reign of the domes continued throughout the eighteenth century and ended in the Pantheon, and you may say in general that out of so many the Invalides alone in Paris produces an effect of success. The others all seem made because it was the fashion to make them, their curves drawn after some one common pattern and without regard to any special desire or vision in the artist's mind. This also may be insisted upon while one is talking of the Invalides : that, graceful as it is and successful as it is, it is yet one of the last of the great buildings that characterize the seventeenth century in Paris. Begun in 1670, not yet completed at the death of Louis XIV., one may draw from it the lesson that the Grande Siecle had underlying it, in spite of its cosmopolitan

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pomp, a current of French tradition, a desire for grace stronger than the obvious passion for grandeur of that time would permit us at first to admit.

With these two examples the period of the rebuilding closes. The Tuileries till very recently presented, the InvaUdes still present, its special features. Its fault is apparent not so much in itself, for it was stiU in the last years of Louis, in the years of the defeats, great and dignified, but it handed on a tradition of self-satisfaction and finality that was to produce the troubles of the city in the eighteenth century. It lacked sympathy, even with the past of its own blood ; it was " the classic," powerful and triumphant in its day, sterile in its imme- diate followers. And one mark especially points out the evil of that spirit. The king abandoned his capital. The great maxims — and they are not without dignity — ^that had proceeded fronl the sincerity of his despotism, the large determination to guide France easily from one centre, and the clear, if exaggerated patriotism of a brain that thought itself the kernel of European civilization, was bereft of any counterweight. There was no organic pressure, no reflex action from outer and half-inde- pendent things to keep the central power sane. There- fore, in spite of the finest of diplomatic traditions, of the best modelled and best advised of contemporary armies, and of an administration on the whole just and sound, it fell into the gravest errors. How much that Govern- ment lost the moral support of Europe has been suffi- ciently described in a hundred histories : treaties were violated, arbitrary claims imposed upon weaker societies, and at last the strange and ruinous theory arose that one nation could be in some way entrusted with a

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mission that absolved it from common right. But, wMle the international side of this fault is so commonly known, its domestic side is less insisted upon, and nowhere is it more prominent than in the action of the Crown towards the capital. The abandonment of Paris for Versailles, which seemed at the moment a caprice, the excusable whim of an all-powerful monarch, grew up into the vast misfortune of Louis XV.'s reign — the ruined Treasury and the alienated people — till at last the ill-balance was redressed in the crash of 1789. For it was an abandonment, not only of the capital, but of duty; a thing which those who did it may not have recognized for a folly, but that, had not a hypertrophy of power, wealth, and a false security spoilt their sense of national tradition, the Court would have felt by instinct to be a fatal blunder. On account of it the whole history of France was unchannelled for a hundred years, the natural life of its art driven under, the centre of its appeal and the place to which it looked for guidance, left empty. Of what that did for the nation every history of the French eighteenth century teUs ; of its particular effect upon the capital I will deal in my next chapter.

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CHAPTEE IX

THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY

When the great king was dead, there followed a period during which France passed through a certain phase whose character the capital seemed to reflect and accentuate. It was not the death of a world, for there came out of it, by a rapid, a conscious, and an almost mechanical action, the society of modem Europe ; no State in true decay could have developed the energies of .the Eevolution. It was not lethargy, for there ran through it a very clear energy of expression, a vigorous literature, an uniuterrupted pro- gress of science. Yet it was essentially morbid. There had fallen upon the country a trance rather than a disease, and for that trance we have, I think, no exact parallel ia history.

It is with this period that my story of Paris must end. Eor reasons written elsewhere in this book, it seems impossible to include between the same covers Paris before, and Paris after the Eevolution ; for since the Eevolution the city, rebuilt, grown to new boundaries, with a different aim and a different place in Europe, has gone through a kind of resurrection, and begun for itself in a separate chronicle the actions of its new body. If, after many generations, a man should sit down to tell the adventures

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of the city, he would have to say, " Up to a certain date Paris was so and so, its great streets were here, and here. They changed gradually, and the monuments of the town changed with them in such and such a fashion. Then, after that date, comes a gulf. A new Paris grew in a century ; it kept its great monuments, but looked at them quite differently ; it became half southern, and returned to its origin." The central date of which such a man would speak is 1789, and because to pass it would create in my subject a necessity for a new method, I propose to make that date the end of this book.

Louis XIV. died on the 1st of September, 1715 ; the mob which took the Bastille rose on the 12th, and in- augurated the new government of Paris on the 13th of July, 1789. We have, therefore, to deal with a period of all but seventy-four years. The long life of a man is what it means in history ; indeed, the actual lives of many famous men do measure this stretch of years. Frederick of Prussia its commander, Voltaire its wit, Eousseau its apostle, Boucher its painter, Gabriel and Soufflot its architects, Louis XV. its monarch, all more or less corre- spond to it, though all dying before its close. One man, Kaunitz, runs through the whole of the time, and during the greater part of it moulds the dynasties with his diplomacy. French is the tongue, arms the entertainment, dynasties the theme of all that period ; its one liberal spirit and one Deist philosophy give it a unity peculiar among the conventional divisions of European history. It is a time of astonishing order in the conceptions of men, of unique lucidity in definition and expression ; and this, like clear water in a lake above old ruins, rests on a mere anarchy of institutions and a rough heap of social wreckage.

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What was the character of France and of the capital during these seventy-four years 1

So far as the general society of Prance is concerned, it would need far more than the compass of a book like this to detail the various phenomena that make up our fuU impression of that generation. It must suf&ce for my purpose to sketch only its main characteristics in order to see ia what fashion these are exaggerated in the case of the capital. .

Perhaps of all the periods in French history this is the one where we need the widest view ; because (to mention at the outset the key of the whole difficulty) France was never more divided. For example, you have side by side, and yet haxdly influencing one another, two classes so closely allied as the upper professional middle class and the nobility. Beading the same books, repeating the same catch words, they yet managed to get two very different views of what those books and what those catch words might mean. The highest class of all, with whom, of course, we must associate many, like Voltaire himself, who were not born into it, seemed to regard the liberal political theories of the century as an intellectual amuse- ment. I do not mean that it was something in which they did not believe, I mean that their deep affections and all that makes the primary motive of action were very far removed from it. They treated it somewhat as our money- loving and feverishly productive time treats the theories of social amelioration or the practice of organized charity. When the test came, and men had in the first two years of the Eevolution to make a definite choice, to sacrifice much for these phrases which they had so often accepted, there were but very few who threw in their lot with the

THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY 413

true defenders of their formal creed ; the whole generation that applauded Franklin abandoned Condorcet.

The bourgeois, highly educated, familiar with the idea of competition, energetic and somewhat limited, took these phrases, on the contrary, for irresistible truths. He saw no difficulty at all in abolishing the internal restrictions on trade, in establishing a free hierarchy for the liberal professions, or in arriving at a system of equal taxation. The upper class, who would for the most part have admitted his premises, found the practical conclusion and the application of such doctrines to mean the loss of friends, an interference with their way of receiving income, an injury to their love for curious customs and local traditions, and they feared that the results of practical reform would disturb that atmosphere of protection and codified refinement, the preservation of which was perhaps their strongest instinct.

It is not true to say that the bourgeois, the noble or the professional, acted from economic motives when the climax of all this discussion was reached in the Eevolu- tion. But it is true to say that the bourgeois found natural and easy, even when it was in violent action, a reform which the noble could only approve when he granted the mere words of a formula.

Take, again, the class immediately below the pro- fessional bourgeois, the shopkeepers and the skilled artisans. Their main interest was dissociated from that of what we should call the gentlemen to an extent which had never been known before in French history. Taught to rely for the most part upon the society afforded by confederations and chartered privilege, they were torn by two motives which hardly appear in the usual social

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history of the time, but which must have been the principal springs of their political action during the eighteenth century. First (the invariable result of Protection), they dared not abandon the old economic methods. The butchers that surrounded the Chatelet, the goldsmiths of the Quai des Orfevres, the saddlers who made a group in the maze of streets north of the Hotel de Ville, regarded the Eoyal restrictions on trade as a necessity. And this fatal anchorage to an outworn system, which could only oppress the class below them and strangle the energies of the whole State, made them morbidly inert and con- servative. On the other hand, continual intercourse with the upper class had ceased. The human tie which reduces all political dogmas to such a vain position, was lacking ; and these men were for the most part eager for an Egali- tarian system, which will always seem the most natural and the most just to men who have no personal experience of admired superiors.

Below these three classes, who could not have formed between them all a quarter of the nation, lay an immense mass of peasantry on the one hand and proletariat on the other. With those Hves we are, in spite of all our modem research, almost entirely unacquainted; but we know certain things about them which enable us to judge of what lay beneath their obscure and indirect action upon the State. They were subject to very violent fluctuations of fortune, they suffered from the reaction of that protective system which fenced in the lives of their superiors. Famine and plenty, high and low wages, rising and falling prices, threw their lives upon a perpetual tempest of unrest. Partly as an effect, and partly as a cause of such fluctuations, the statistics of population run through startling phases.

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la the latter years of Louis XIV., and in the beginning of our period, the numbers run down hill, almost as though we were dealing with Spain; in the latter part of the period of which we are treating, the population increases as though we were dealing with England. This feature, gleaned with difficulty from a time in which the census was lacking, was a most significant symptom of the trouble that had fallen upon the State ; for of all the signs of disturbance in society, a rapidly increasing or decreasing population is perhaps the most ruinous. And in the case of Prance in the eighteenth century, it was the more to be dreaded from the fact that it only affected the obscure majority, whose increase might at any moment produce the disruption, or whose decrease, the collapse, of the governing and stationary classes above them.

If the division of classes is significant, the contradiction between the different aspects of the whole State is perhaps more so. Class may be separated from class, and yet, under a strong central government, society may thrive; this it cannot do if the minds of individual men are at war with themselves. Ask what France thought and practised in the matter of religion, and the answer will be that never in the whole course of her history had the supernatural so passed from the philosophy of all her citizens. The most normal and the most persistent forms of symbolism had become quite meaningless; the gods were dead. Yet ask what was written in the official documents, done on occasions of State, or paid for with official money, and you wUl find that what had once been the living religion of the French people seemed to need half the energies of government now that it was a corpse.

Ask the man who paid his taxes how the State was

4i6 PARIS

ruled, and he would have answered you that it was a Monarchy in the hands of the best beloved of an almost immemorial line; yet turn to look at who it is that governs, and you will find an immense, obscure, expensive bureaucracy.

Men professed that they were living in the settled culmination of the glories of Louis XIV., but they felt that they were living in continual and increasing decay. As ceremony became more punctilious in the Court and in the Church, that Court was finding it more and more difl&cult to meet the expenses of a wearisome and detailed etic[uette, and that Church, in which the secular clergy could ridicule their faith, was still further dragged down by the scandal of the empty monasteries and of a useless though immense revenue.

To sum up this anarchy of contradictions, one may say that the State was losing its identity, because it was losing its unity of purpose ; and that since the spontaneous action of a genuine national Hfe had disappeared, there had come to replace it a mass of mechanical methods, of blind routine, and of exasperated tradition which, from having been inefficient, was becoming unworkable. The machine worked under an increasing friction, which had long been wasting, and was threatening to absorb, its energy, when the Eevolution came to break it and to substitute the model under which we live.

Now consider Paris as the centre of this State. Con- sider, above all, the fact that the old Eoyal city, which had had first the Palace, then the Louvre, and always the dynasty for its heart, had been abandoned by the king, and the reason of the capital's becoming an accentuated ty-pe of all that was destroying France will be apparent ;

THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY 417

and to so much evil must be added this further evil, that Paris had become industrial.

These seventy-four years, between the death of Louis XIV. and the outbreak of the Eevolution, are marked (but to a more intense degree) vidth all that was mentioned as the new character of Paris in the last chapter. The work done is more official, and yet the governmental interest in it is less and less ; the buildings, and especially the churches, though straining at effect, became less than ever an outcome of national or civic feeling. Great suburbs grow up, to add to her discomfort and to her lack of security. In Paris of the seventeenth century the bourgeois owned his own house; he does so in the " Tartuffe " of Moliere ; and you may perceive in that admirable play how those great buildings were filled all by one family — the shop or office on the ground floor, the servants in the Mansard roof. The next hundred years saw this changed for the worse. A growing proletariat, a growing capitalism, a growing salaried class have (so to speak) "cut "these great houses transversely. Men live in flats — apartments ; the unity of the household has disappeared. It is an evil from which the great French cities suffer to-day.

As Paris becomes industrial she increases largely in population ; she is overburdened with it, the town over- flows. In the Eevolutionary turmoil we are always hear- ing of the " faubourgs," the " suburbs " of St. Antoine or St. Marceau. These are the irregular, scattered, thickly- populated groups of houses to the east. When the Revolu- tion was on the point of breaking out Paris had certainly more than six hundred thousand, perhaps in the winter nearer a million souls in all. And this increase was of

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41 8 PARIS

the character that so gravely threatens our modern civiliza- tion. I mean it was a new horde of families, without capital, dependiag upon centralized wealth, and destined to suffer, in any economic crisis, the most acute misery, or perhaps to die. Such was the populace which the Eevolu- tion worked upon, and upon which it often depended for its arms. Paris and France, wherein to-day the proletariat form a smaller proportion than in any large modern city or state, was given over, a hundred years ago, to a population more proletarian than that of any other place. Wo contrast more striking than this is to be discovered in Europe — England and London, once the centre of the " bourgeoisie " and of small capital, becoming the highly capitalistic; France and Paris, once the chief centre of opposed wealth and poverty, becoming the Egalitarian type.

In this Paris, also, the old institutions were practically dead. The University flourished after a fashion, but the convents were empty (that is, compared with the genera- tions before). The churches I will not say were empty too, but no such sight as the modern Christmas or Easter could be seen in them.

Side by side with this proletariat stood all that mass which we call the " old regime," guilds which excluded the people, nobles no longer nobles but poverty-stricken (the rich were at court), a priesthood that did not seek the poor, and a thousand rules, customs, and laws designed for all, applied to a few, and finally rusted out of all knowledge and ceasing to affect any citizen at all, save for hindrance.

We shall see in the following pages an architecture which has forgotten not how to build, but why buildings

THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY 419

should be beautiful ; a topography which attempts large spaces and straight streets without understanding their necessity, without the courage to be thorough, and there- fore destroying with criminal blunders so much of the past without achieving any good or general result. We shall see some of the most beautiful monuments of the city destroyed, others mutilated, and things of a frank ugliness substituted without reason; the Louvre treated as a stable, the roof falling in above the palaces, the porch of Notre Dame cut into quaint patterns, the stained glass sold, the old tombs defaced. The Pantheon will be a monument of what age mistook for grandeur, and SoufSot will be the type of the official architect. We shall be permitted, as an epitome of so much degradation, to hear a Capetian debating the destruction of the Louvre.

The external side of the time was brilliantly living ; beneath it the essentials starved. By a phenomenon which is common and natural to all decay, the clothes of society remained sound, though they were carried by a dying man ; and by an accident which is as common, though far less easy to explain, the arts that are the outside of a state, architecture, engineering, public design put on with the last moments of the decline an affected and deceptive grandeur.

To trace the action of this most unfortunate century upon the physical aspect of Paris, I will pursue in this chapter a method that I have avoided in others ; and as it is with the buildings alone that I deal and with the outward impression of Paris, I will take each monument separately and detail its adventures rather than attempt a history of contemporaneous changes.

The general picture, at any one particular time, I must

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ask the reader to construct for himself, save in the case of that Paris which saw the Eevolution break out, and of which I shall attempt, at the close of this chapter, to give a general view.

Now, as a type of what the reign was, let me begin with the misfortunes of Notre Dame.

It was natural that the eighteenth century should have seen little in the Gothic glories of the thirteenth. There lay between the opening of our period and the last of the Gothic two hundred years — the space between the Tour St. Jacques and the Invalides — and these two hundred years were completely ignorant of the spirit which had built Notre Dame. The first of these centuries had indeed retained the old gables and deep lanes of mediaeval Paris, studding them here and there with the vast palaces of the Medicean Valois ; but the second, as we saw in the last chapter, rebuilt Paris so completely that it destroyed even the outward example of a thing whose idea had long disappeared. Therefore the reign of Louis XIV. had treated the Cathedral carelessly ; had put in, just before the king's death, that huge, ugly high altar, and had destroyed the reverend flooring of tombs to make way for the chess-board pattern of black and white that stUl displeases us. But throughout its action it left the shell and mass of Notre Dame the same. With the reign of Louis XV. a very much worse spirit came upon the architects, for they were no longer content to neglect the old work, they were bent upon improving it ; and of their many deplorable ventures I will choose three especially to illustrate their spirit.

In the first place, they destroyed the old windows. It is written somewhere that the destruction began with the

THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY 421

desire to let a shaft of white light come down upon the new high altar ; even this insufficient excuse will hardly hold, for all the glass seems to have been taken away bodily and at one time, in 1741. We lost in that act the fulness and the spirit of Notre Dame, and the loss can never be made good. This is so true that men who all their lives have known the great cathedral, yet, when they first see Eheims or Amiens find for the first time some- thing whose absence in Paris had left an ill-ease. The stained glass gives to the Gothic a sense of completion that is like clothing, and by an accident that has never been made clear it is a thing which cannot be restored. There needs in Notre Dame only one thing, and that is a quality of light which shall be to the common light of the outer city what music is to speech. That thing was given it by the builders, who knew their own harmony so thoroughly, and was taken away quite wantonly by men who lacked the humility of their ignorance. To see how enormous was their folly one has but to go to Chartres, where the blessings of poverty and of a provincial isolation preserved all the Middle Ages decaying but untouched.

The canons replaced the old windows by white glass, excellently arranged in symmetrical lozenges, and in every lozenge a yellow fleur-de-lis, and what they did with the thousand escutcheons of so many donors, no one knows. They left intact — perhaps in fear of the great expense of changing such spaces — the three rose windows of the two transepts and the West front. But one cannot reconstruct the old effect by their example ; on the con- trary, they jar upon the modern Lorraine work which has replaced the inept glazing of 1741. But one can learn from them, if not the general value, at least the symbolism

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in design of the old windows ; and for such a purpose the principal one, that of the West front, is the best ; for, with Our Lady and the Child Jesus in the midst of the prophets, with the two circles of the zodiac and of the works of the year, it is like a book in which the dedication of the church and all that it was meant to do is written.

This, then, was the first great error of the time in its treatment of Notre Dame ; the second was in the destruc- tion of the interior monuments. Whether the crowding of so much grotesque or incongruous matter in our cathedrals would have pleased their architects is a very doubtful matter, but time, which has handed down these churches to us, has also filled them with all the changing tastes of their six centuries. So long as this did not encroach upon the body of the building, and so long as the Gothic spirit remained in the whole, no harm was done; and in a Catholic country the habit of such accumulation had this further advantage, that every corner and addition had its use in custom; each statue had attached to it some story or some popular habit, like Our Lady of the Candle or the Children's Basket ; so that, when this or that was taken away from the floor of the Cathedral, there went with it the regret and the affection of many ; and the loss of so much detail must have been a consternation to the humble and small people who carried even into the eighteenth century the virtues of an earlier time. Of all this the canons knew nothing ; for them the Philippe le Bel was an ugly mediaeval thing, the Virgin of the Candle a mere distortion, the great St. Christopher a grotesque. To their passion for emptiness they sacrificed all these pleasant incongruities. Not only within but without the church they followed the same policy, and

THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY 423

any sign of weakness or age in a thing they made a reason, not for its restoration, but for its removal. Thus (among many examples that one might give) there is the statue that marked the northern of the three porches, the door of the Virgin. Here, on the pier of the doorway, was a iigure that was as necessarily the centre of all that carving as the miniature in the great wheel above was, of necessity, the centre of its pictures; for there was carved on the door, as there was painted in the window, the life of a man in the different seasons of the year and also the signs of the zodiac. But there was this about the signs — that only eleven were carved, and for the sign "Virgo," Our Lady stood in the centre, holding the Child Jesus, who was blessing the world of men and the months. The figure had not the peculiar merits of the statue which I have made the frontispiece of this book; it was earlier, more severe, and, indeed, more dignified. It stood upon a little symbolical tree, carved in stone, which tree was the tree of the Garden of Eden, and had two apples on it, and Our Lady's foot was on the head of the serpent. It is clear that such a thing had no meaning save as the necessary centre of its surroundings, and that, without it, these sur- roundings also were empty. Nevertheless, when a flaw came in it, they destroyed it. And with all this destruc- tion of excellent things — the statues and dedications within, the old carvings without — they could not see that the stories of Notre Dame were ill suited to fine oil- paintings in great gilt frames, and these hung round the nave piteously till our own time.

The third example of the evil done to Notre Dame was the action of Souf&ot. I do not mean that heavy, great sacristy that he built, and that many men can still

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remember ; I mean his curious restoration of the central door. Here was the chief glory of the West front. I will not describe it at any length, for this I have done in the fifth chapter. It must suf&ce to recall the short list I then gave of its carvings ; they were designed to symbolize the kernel of Christianity, and to make, as it were, a con- tinual Credo for the people who passed beneath. It was very worthy of the first detail that would appear to a man as he came into the great church, and worthy also of a position which has always been the chief place of orna- ment. Now, it wUl be remembered that this door espe- cially laid stress upon the end of man (which it showed in the Last Judgment carefully carved on the tympanum), and it had, . on either side of the doorway, the twelve apostles listening to the teaching of Our Lord, whose statue stood in the central pier, as we have just seen Our Lady's did in the northern door. So, if the door was to have any meaning at all, the statue of Our Lord was its natural centre, the apostles whom He was teaching made the bulk of the design ; and then, as a result and pendant to this, came the ogival tympanum above, with that subject of the Last Judgment which is the favourite theme of mediaeval Paris. The canopy carried over ihe Sacrament during processions was, in the Middle Ages in France (and is stiU in most countries), a flexible cloth, with four poles to support it. This, when a procession passed through a door, could be partly folded together if it was too wide to go through at its full stretch. Now it so happened that the canopy in the Church of France had been, of late times, made with a stiff framework; there was therefore a certain inconvenience and difficulty in passing through the main door on feast days, because the

THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY 425

central pier divided it into two narrow portions. With this little pretext, the canons did not hesitate to ruin the principal door of their church. It was in 1771, thirty years after the misfortune of the stained glass, that this was done. Soufflot, who was then the chief architect of the Government, whom we shall see building the Pan- theon, and from whom a miracle preserved the Louvre, set about this folly.

Since the main object was to widen the door, his first act was to throw down the central pier, and to destroy the teaching Christ, for which, we may say, the whole porch existed. But even with this he was not content ; for, looking at the heavy, triangular tympanum over- hanging this broadened space, he thought to himself that it looked top-heavy, and might even fall, now that it lacked its old support. He therefore, very quietly and without comment, cut through the relief and the carving, brought his chisel just where a fine sweeping curve might be traced, dividing kings in the middle, cutting saints slantwise and removing angels, till he had opened a small ogive of his own within the greater one. Then he finished off the whole with a neat moulding. It was as though he had said, " Mind you, I do not like the Gothic ; but since the whole place is Gothic, we may as well keep to it, and (incidentally) I will show you how the men of the thirteenth century should have designed this door." For it seemed to him as natural that a great ogive should have a little one inside, as it did that a dome should have a colonnade ; and as for the sjonbolical carvings of the Middle Ages, he thought they were like the flutings of his false Eenaissance pillars.

This hideous thing remained throughout the first part

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of our centiuy, till Montalembert, in a fine speech, opened the reform, and saw the restoration of the Cathedral begun ; and though, in that restoration, most of what was done was in reparation of what the Kevolution destroyed, yet it is well to remember that the energy and the great schemes of the generation to which Montalembert and Viollet le Due belonged were due to the Eevolutionary movement, and that the sack and ruin of 1793 had been long prepared by the apathy and ignorance and forget- fulness of the generation preceding it. If Soufflot and the canons could see no beauty in, and could destroy the statuary of Notre Dame, it is not wonderful that the popu- lace should deliberately throw down the memorials of- a spirit of which they knew nothing, save that its heirs were then fighting the nation.

All this was the action of the century upon the most perfect of mediaeval buildings. We see in this spoiling of Notre Dame how the eighteenth century understood restoration in Paris ; we shall be able to see what it did when it had to build something; in the example of the new Church of Ste. Genevieve, how it understood creation.

The Patron Saiut of Paris still had her little neglected church upon the hill; it had lasted on through genera- tions of increasing neglect, and now stood mournfully in the midst of deep narrow streets, and attached to the great new convent.

That church — the popular, as Notre Dame was the official, centre of devotion — a modem reader can best restore for himself by recalling the front of a provincial village church in France. It had the dignity of those old walls, it had also their simplicity ; but it seemed singularly bare of ornament for a monument which was so richly endowed,

THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY 427

and which had for so many centuries formed a treasury for continual gifts. The triple Gothic porch was there, the central door of some size, its two companions small and mean. They lacked decoration. Some few sculptures in the shallow ogive, a statue in the jamb of the principal entrance, were all. The tympanum in each case was left bare stone, not even smoothly joined.

Above the central door, a small wheel window; on either side and above this window, narrow lancets — such was the only break in a great uneven surface, whose rough joins and wide gable seemed almost to suggest the road-end of some country barn.

And within, the building to which so many millions had brought their offerings was left equally cold. Even the modern interior of St. Gervais (where we have, perhaps, the nearest approach to what Ste. Genevieve looked like) is richer; in the case of this existing church the noble great height of the nave redeems, as it emphasizes, the simplicity of the walls. But Ste. Genevieve was not high ; and if anything beyond tradition and antiquity could be found to save it, that would be discovered in the great thickness of its walls — a proportion that lent a false but an impressive character of strength to the old aisles.

One ornament indeed struck the pilgrims, and touched them perhaps the more powerfully from its loneliness in such surroundings. The golden shrine with the relics of the saint towered up nearly thirty feet above the high altar, and stood on its four slender pillars, delicate and free from the broad stone spaces around it. There are very few Frenchmen who can quite regret the loss of all that gold which went to furnish the armies of the Eevolutionary defence: there are fewer still, perhaps, who do not feel

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despoiled of the relics which the memory of twelve hundred years should have rendered sacred to Paris.

This old church had fallen into decay, and the clergy of a time that could say, " Dire gothique c'est dire mauvais gout," saw nothing for it but to pull it down as quickly as possible, and to rebuild it with all the dulness, pomp, and exaggeration that their taste required. Their desire was not accomplished ta its entirety. The new church was indeed built, but the old church kept its cracked walls, and for half a century its gloom continued to furnish the great shadow of Descartes with the solitude that he had loved. It was not finally destroyed till 1807. But its complete neglect, the haste of its heirs to abandon it, and the contempt with which it meets in their letters and petitions, sufficiently illustrate a spirit, of whose action the new church gave so striking an example in stone.

It was on the occasion of the king's return from Metz, the year of his great illness, that the Chapter of Ste. Genevieve pushed home their demand for the enormous. They could not have been poor ; but they were bent upon something even larger than their endowment might supply, and by the very congenial machinery of a tax on public lotteries, the generation that was in its old age to starve for revenue, to find its fleet all valueless, and its army broken from lack of funds, raised half a million on the gambling of a ruined society to pay for their monstrous experiment.

History is a play : there move in it actors who do not know the plot ; we who have read the book, follow them on their march towards known conclusions, marvel at their ignorance, and watch their irredeemable errors. The dramatic irony of history does not shine out in many

THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY 429

details as it does in the pompous letters and long phrases of these unhappy canons on the hill. A rich, a privileged, a moribund body, they roll out the formulae of an old piety, which a good half of them ridicule, and the rest misunderstand. A new church must be built to accom- modate the " crowds of the faithful " in a time when the shrine was deserted. It must " give a testimony to your Majesty's devotion and largess." His Majesty really believed Ste. Genevieve had cured him; he was almost the only man who did so in a generation that could raise no one champion to meet the thin, sharp blade of Voltaire, and that burned the Emile as a reply to the Contrat Social. His Majesty's largess came from the pockets of despairing men ; his Majesty's devotion shall pass ; for the son of St. Louis by way of Louis Treize, a man in a great wig, powdered, bent, and with a cough, was in 1754 beginning to be devout. But just as that new dome of theirs was completed the Chapter was to hear the breaking of the Eevolutionary storm. The younger men, who urged the building most strenuously, lived to see their pretence break down; the crowds of the faithful, who had never existed, and of whom they were so profoundly careless, came up and completed the work of their cloister. Their great new church was barely dry before it became a kind of pagan temple. Its dome was made a roof for Voltaire, and for Eousseau, for Mirabeau — even for Marat: their " shriae, worthy of the popular piety," was to be called by all the populace, " Pantheon " ; and in their place — when the wind of the Eevolution had blown away such self- deceit and pretension — there was left a great road open for Montalembert and for Lacordaire.

It was to Soufilot, of course, the of&cial architect, who

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was sixteen years later to disfigure Notre Dame, that was given the design of this reconstruction. I will not deny that this man achieved such success as a false and empty time could give him. He certainly felt the advent of a master- piece ; he felt, so far as his age could feel it, the enthusiasm of creation. He believed that this, the priacipal work of his life, would lend his name a lasting dignity : this it has failed to do, but it has given him a permanent renown. The building attempted distinction, and only contrived to be large ; it called by its nature for comparison with the domes of the previous century, and in such a comparison it was worth nothing ; yet, because Soufflot did his best, was honest, overcame many mechanical difficulties, and as he drew near death became more and more absorbed in his endeavour, on that account he has earned com- memoration. The street bears his name ; he remains the principal builder of his unhappy generation.

In much of that period one can see, struggling and faint, the old Imperial conception of the city. The latter eighteenth century desired broad streets and great vistas ; it had the sentiment of great monuments, and it was pos- sessed, in a weak and muddled way, with an appetite for the majestic. Nevertheless, it should not be judged as the precursor of the purely classical movement. These men had indeed one great artistic quality, but it was not in the tradition of sublimity, it was rather in the apprecia- tion of courtliness. Greuze and poor Fragonard were its best exponents, and when, as was the case with the architects, it attempted the grand it failed from lack of sincerity. Soufflot could not have put his hand upon this or that curve for his dome and have told you, " This is harmony." He only knew that this or that had been

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praised for its grace. Those great blank spaces of his he left bare, not for the purpose of heightening some effect or of framing some successful unit of decoration, but merely because he had heard that ornament should be restrained. It was a fashion to repeat formulae and to accept a neighbour's phrases. Strong passion, which alone can produce beauty, was despised and avoided, because it also leads to the incongruous and the grotesque, therefore the men of that time suffered the penalty of false convic- tion, and the Pantheon, which is their greatest achievement, is also the most efficient criticism upon their philosophy. I repeat, that generation was not a precursor of the Eevo- lutionary feeling ; the art, like the politics of the rejuve- nescence, had to proceed from younger men, and David was almost self-made.

In two points Soufflot succeeded. He was right in his choice of a site, and a just instinct made him plant so great a building and prepare so wide an open space to surround it upon the summit of the hill. It is to him we owe the clearing away of the College de Lisieux, the open square of the Pantheon, and incidentally the design of the Law School at the corner, which he drew without asking for payment, and so earned the scholarship which his de- scendants still enjoy. That spot had been the shrine of Clovis, the outlook of the Eoman soldiers. He did well to re-introduce it to the city and to give it height and air. He saw what a pedestal the hill should be, and he crowned it with a landmark. It was a worthy beginning for what was later to be the reconstruction of the capital upon its modern lines. He was successful, again, in the portico of the west front, for here he had but to copy the antique exactly; and, following precise rules in this matter, he

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built something that still greets us with a sense of pro- portion as we come up from the main street of the University ; but he never dreamt how those bronze words would ennoble it, " To all her great men, the country in gratitude."

There was something symbolical even in the founda- tions of the building. The first stroke of the pickaxe was given in the fatal year that saw the opening of the Seven Years' War. When the first stone was laid by Louis XV. the treaty of Aix la Chapelle had been signed. As the builders burrowed into the old Eoman tombs, lost their calculations in the subterranean corridors, and fought with unexpected streams, the nation was caught iu the bewUder- iag trap that Chatham had laid; when the walls began to rise, bare and ill-fumished, France was attempting a recovery from the loss of Canada and the ruin of her commerce. Upon those uncertaia foundations the church rose precariously. Here and there the walls seemed to give way, and when Soufflot died, with his work unfinished, in 1780, there was a doubt whether his pupil Eondelet could add the dome above the slight and high colonnade. By what mechanical device such difficulties were overcome, I have neither the space nor the abHity to describe ; but a building balanced upon such slender chances and threatened by so many accidents will certainly last on ; the double dome with its curious pierced roof was covered, the cross was raised above the lantern, and the canons took posses- sion of their great hollow. It was 1786, and within five years the Chapter was dissolved, the shrine was hurried to the neighbouring Church of St. Stephen. Soufflot's dome became a tomb for many whom destiny, and some whom the populace only, marked as great, and his would-be

THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY 433

pagan walls took on the name of Pantheon. They be- came a symbol of the state creed, to be wrestled for between the Church and the Philosophers in a struggle that a century has not determined.

I have shown in the case of Notre Dame how the eighteenth century improved, in that of the Church of Ste. Genevieve how it replaced, an old building. In each of these the actions were deliberate and unnecessary, but there is a third example in the Paris of that time of what the century did when it was compelled to create and was given no choice : I mean the example of the Law Courts ; and since for all that follows it is necessary to have some single map, I therefore append these few lines of a plan that will make clearer my description of what the eighteenth century did to that palace.

The old Palais de la Citd I have described in the fifth and sixth chapters of this book, and the Cour des Comptes attached to it I dealt with in the chapter on the Eenaissance. The whole had formed as wonderful a group of the Gothic as could be seen, perhaps, in all Europe. Prom the Tour de I'Horloge to the southern shore it formed an uninterrupted front of whatever was best in building, from the time of St. Louis to that of Prancis I., and summed up in stone the whole spirit of the Middle Ages. Of that marvel, the Ste. Chapelle alone remains, but, as might be expected in the most conservative spot of Paris, the continuous seat of the law, and the centre from which proceeded the only efficient remonstrance against the folly of Louis XV., it was neither ignorance nor vanity that brought on the changes in this building ; not even the growing necessity for space forced the lawyers to rebuild the palace to whose memories they were so strongly attached. The building,

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as we now see it, is the result of necessary reconstruction following on four great fires : that of 1618, that of 1737,

tn

JiEFERENCE;

Mediaeval Palace: .farts 1WW dtstroyed.

I Mcdiaaial Palais I parii still stattding.

Renaissance Coimdcs

I Cam^tei: bjintt in 1

Bifikeath Century.

I Rehuilding of Eke / I. iBiglUeeiitli Ceaitay-!

Modem outlines

\

REBUILniNG OP THE LAW-COURTS.

that of 1772, and lastly, the wanton destruction of the Commune in 1871. The first fire, and the reconstruction of the Grande Salle, we have already seen in the last chapter ;

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the ruins of the Commune are beyond the scope of this book, and it is only with the two fires of the eighteenth century that it is now our business to deal.

On the death of Louis XIV., the date, that is, at which this period opens, the Palace still presented the same picture that we saw when de Brosse had finished his work half a century before. The half Italian detail of the Cour des Comptes, the pure Gothic of the Galerie Merciere, the shrine of the Ste. Chapelle, the gem of the Treasury, the severity and simplicity of the Tour de THorloge, the turrets of the Conciergerie, and the great interior tower of Montgommery — all this Gothic enclosed the Island; and with the exception of the Grande Salle, with its gloomy and majestic lines saving that piece of the seventeenth century, all the rest was stiU the Middle Ages, and so it remained for twenty-two years more, though the Galerie Merciere was crowded to excess, and though the Treasury Courts, cramped in the first story of the Cour des Comptes, offered continual complaints. De Brosse's great room somewhat relieved the pressure, and the strict conservatism of the profession refused a remedy.

But in the last days of October of the year 1737, there occurred a disaster that not only brought about the first considerable change in the Law Courts since 1618, but also threw into relief for a few days several curious cha- racters of the time. Arouet, the father of Voltaire, had been a clerk in the Cour des Comptes, and had lived in a little suite of rooms just at the back of the building ; it was here that the Deist and Satirist had been born, and it was here that his elder brother still worked in the position which he had inherited. Next door to his lodging was the great house of the chief of the Treasury judges. From this

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corner of the Palace the flames broke out, and for a couple of days they gutted the charming building that had formed for more than two centuries one of the architectural glories of Paris.

During these days (the 27th to the 29th of October), a great nuxed crowd roared round the Palace, lendiag aid and confusion. Soldiers, the Garde Franpaise, the beggars of the streets, and a number of monks (whom, in accordance with their rule, we find present at a number of fires in Paris at this period), surrounded the Cour des Comptes. In the waning light of the iire, one sees grotesquely the passions of the time ; Arouet was accused of the deed because he was a Jansenist, and with him the Jansenists in general. The mob roared for him and for them, ia. the intervals of a yery real and determined labour, which saved the documents, though it could not preserve the beauties of the buUding.

When this quarrel — which at an earlier date might have led to religious riot — had subsided, and when it was found that the fire had most probably arisen from some negligence in the house of the judge himself, the anger and accusations of the moment subsided, the populace lost their immediate anxiety for a victim, and the bench and bar of Paris turned to the more permanent business of replacing what had been lost.

It must not be imagined that the old architecture was in this case hopelessly despised. These men, the most highly educated and the most tenacious in the capital, may not have seen all its beauty, but they were devoted to it as a tradition in their courts, and they had connected with the various parts of the old building professional habits which they were reluctant to change. There was, therefore, a

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careful examination to see if some part of it could not be preserved, but it appeared, after the survey of a few days, that this would be impossible. The delicate repeated fleur-de-lis, the elaborate escutcheon of the portal, the circular arches of the staircase, that hinted at the Eenais- sance and recalled Joconde, remained indeed in outline, but remained only as a crumbling and blackened shell. It was determined to rebuild, and the designing was given to Gabriel.

Gabriel was the " king's chief architect," which, in the eighteenth century, meant practically the head of a group of architects employed in government work. To recon- struct in the style of that which has perished is an idea still somewhat foreign to the French, who have always thought that imitation savours somewhat of impotence. In France of the eighteenth century such a thing was un- known. Gabriel began laboriously and conscientiously to make something new in the way he had been taught to build. There was not present in this case the attempt to impress and to exceed, which made the eighteenth century such a curse to the rest of Paris; nevertheless, Gabriel's work was a failure, its best feature (the only part of the original building that remains from the wreck of the Commune) was the portion which still stands in the court- yard of the Ste. Chapelle, with its figures of Justice and Prudence. It was not even a mechanical success, for ten years after its building they had to prop it from beneath to prevent it giving way.

This, then, is all that replaced the old Cour des Comptes. A building that no one has remarked and no one has regretted, filled for some 140 years the site of what had once been — if that were possible — a worthy

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background for the Ste. Chapelle, and on the same site to-day stands the bare and monotonous west wing of the modern enclosed courtyard. Of the very many things that a man regrets when he reads of old Paris, there is nothing, I think, whose loss strikes him more poignantly than this delight of Joconde and of Louis XII., which might have remained, as the Ste. Chapelle remains, a permanent education to the passer-by.

Of whatever history surrounds the Palace at this time, even that of the Pont Neuf (which is slight), or that of the enlargement of the Quai de I'Horloge, I have not space to treat. It must be enough to say that for forty years the Law Com-ts continued to show that curious medley of pseudo-classic and Gothic of which the Tour de I'Horloge and the towers of the Conciergerie embedded in modern buildings, represent the last remnants to-day. Within it was a maze of little courts and alleys; the great Montgommery Tower still dominated the centre of the group ; the front fa9ade showed the exquisite Gothic gallery, and the Ste. Chapelle stretched like an in- congruous bridge between the bad classicism of the Grande Salle and the much worse classicism of the new Cour des Comptes. This relic of beauty and much of that interior labyrinth of mediaeval walls disappeared in the second great fire of the century, that of 1776.

Of all people who set fire to prisons, prisoners are the most natural culprits, and seem to have the best right to the performance. And since the fire broke out at the corner where the Conciergerie prison touched on the back of the Galerie Merciere, it is pardonable to believe that one of the inhabitants of the former originated it. In any case, a score or so of prisoners escaped in the confusion.

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But against such a good we must balance the loss of what was, after Notre Dame and the Ste. Chapelle, best worth having on the Island. All the Galerie Merciere was burnt, with much of the Conciergerie behind it. The Montgommery Tower was attacked, though not destroyed, by the fire ; the lodgings of the chief justice were barely saved.

It was upon the ruins of this disaster that the new palace was begun by Desmaisons, and before his work was completed the old Gothic building remained only in rare exceptions and corners. ^

The main result, for the eye, of this reconstruction was the fa9ade. I have shown, a few lines above, how in the preceding forty years this fa9ade had shown a kind of bridge of old Gothic — the Galerie Merciere — uniting two pseudo- classical buildings, the Grande Salle of de Brosse and the new Cour des Comptes of Gabriel. Now that this " bridge " was burnt down, Desmaisons made the whole harmonious, stately, and cold, much as you may see it to-day. In place of the narrow, delicate stairway of the Gothic palace, he built that great flight of steps which covered with its ample base the spot where Eousseau's "Emile" was burnt, twenty years before. He also built the two great doors that you may see on either side of the stairway, sunk a little below the level of the Cour du Mai, and he began, for the sake of right angles and with a damnable fanaticism for balance, the policy of hiding the Ste. Chapelle; for it was he who first designed a great wing to jut out from the Galerie Mercifere to face the Grande Salle, and so close in on three sides of the Cour du Mai. That manifest error still disfigures the modern Palace, and though perhaps the larger task of a

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quiet time may rid us eventually of such a screen, in the making of it one quite irreparable fault was committed — the little sacristy of the Ste. Chapelle was destroyed. My readers will rememher that perfect thing, the quaint fancy of the Middle Ages, when men were like children. It had stood for five centuries, a little replica of the main chapel, reproducing not only its scheme, but its details : the treasury and sacristy of the shrine. It had produced that effect so rare in architecture, the combination of the tender and the humorous, like a plaything or like a daughter, with all the impression that surrounds a model or a diminutive. It was sacrificed for the building of Desmaisons' wing, and this is a thing very difficult to forgive, though, of all that was done in an insufficient period, his works were, on the whole, among the most dignified and worthy.

One thing Desmaisons did, for which, I think, every one must thank him. For if the last of the Gothic had disappeared from the fapade in the great tower, then it was foolish to retain the Gothic curtain which the old wall of the Palace still made. For you must know that all along the front of the Cour du Mai (where now is the pavement of the Boulevard du Palais, and was then the western gutter of the narrow Eue de la Barillerie) there stretched a thick irregular wall, pierced by but two pointed gates, the wall of the mediaeval Palace. Here and there little towers stood upon it, and up against it was a row of slouching houses and huts. All this Desmaisons pulled down, and put up in its place the very fine iron grille which you may admire to-day much in its primal state ; for the Eepublic has carefully set up and gilded again the globe, the crown, and the fleur-de-lis.

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As for the back of the Palace, Desmaisons thought himself bound to pull down even that which the fire had only touched, and in this way he destroyed the great old Montgommery Tower of the inner courtyard. Much of the Gothic Conciergerie yet remains, but it is towards the river ; the inner part, which the modern Law Courts have all absorbed, was first interfered with in this rebuilding.

As for the time it took for all this work of Desmaisons, there was at first a great delay, but it was more owing to lack of funds than to anything else. In a time when the difl&culty of raising revenue was the mortal symptom of the State, the King's Council could think of nothing more original than clapping some 30 per cent, on to the low rates of the city. This was done nearly five years after the fire — in 1781. Two years later the outer walls of Desmaisons' work were completed, and ten years later yet — in 1785 — the great iron gate was finished, and the Cour du Mai showed much as it does to-day.

By 1787-88 the interior decoration and the paintings were thoroughly finished, and the monarchy of the eighteenth century left its last great building, the strong- hold of its traditions and institutions, to be the stage of the Eevolution. For in this, perhaps the best of the recon- structions which a deplorable time had scattered about the city, the justice, the vengeance, and the madness of the Eevo- lution worked. Here Marie Antoinette, the Herbertists, Danton, St. Just, the generals, were condemned ; Marat acquitted. Here Eobespierre lay the night before his death ; in the chief justice's lodgings they made the first Mairie of Paris ; from the gate on the right of the great stair all the victims issued; in that new open court- yard the tumbrils stood in lines, and the high walls

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sent back on a famous October day the death-song of the Girondins.

I cannot here do what must be left to my last chapter, nor attempt to show what in the present building is new, what the Commune destroyed, and what Napoleon built. I must only add in this place that the open court, the gallery, the Grande SaUe, and all you see to-day from the Boulevard gives— even where it has been restored — ^much the same impression as when Desmaisons left it. You see in it, as you saw in the Pantheon, but with a better face, the action of the eighteenth century in Paris.

So far, then, we have seen three main buildings, each of which has in its own way illustrated the coldness and failure of the eighteenth century when it was concerned with some form of change. Notre Dame has shown it tasteless in its interference with detail; the Pantheon, unsuccessful in a large attempt at creation ; the Palais de la Cite, less faulty, but ec[ually jejune and spiritless where it was compelled to the task of rebuilding. There is a fourth principal example of its action upon Paris ; and this will show us how the age went to work when it had neither to renew nor to create, but merely to fulfil the plans of an ampler time. This fourth example is the Louvre.

I have said that the death of Louis XIV., following on so much national disaster, and a strain so close to bankruptcy, makes a sharp division in municipal history. It is not wonderful that the great schemes of the seven- teenth century should have come to a kind of halt, and should have left the city (especially the old palace of the kings) marked by gigantic but unfinished enterprise. But it is wonderful that in a very short time after the death

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of the king so curious an inertia and so complete a care- lessness should have succeeded.

The king had abandoned Paris. This, I may repeat, was at once the sign and the cause of the degradation of the capital ; and if a man should wish to prove by the fortunes of one building the heavy effect of that abandon- ment, he could not do better than take the Louvre for his example. For the Louvre had been, since Philip the Conqueror, the house of the French monarchy : a square keep for the crusaders, a mass of pinnacles for the English wars, abandoned when the king was feeble, noisy with armies when he was great. The tower had given a type of the sixteenth century when it contrasted its turrets with the high pavilions of Lescot, and had, in the completion of its great courtyard and in the design of Perrault, reflected the sombre magnificence of Louis XIV. The migration to Versailles had left it indeed unfinished, but all the outer shell and all the plans were there. It was as though the king had left to his grandson a task strictly limited and exact, foreseeing the coming weakness, and asking nothing but a faithful execution of what remained to be done.

Now, we might have expected that the period with which we are dealing should have done little, but hardly that it should have permitted so entire a breakdown. The Eegency, indeed, following a policy of retrenchment that was partly due to the liberalism of Orleans, partly to the sheer necessity of poverty, hinted at what was to come ; for in 1717 the letters patent to which allusion was made in the last chapter were revoked, and the houses where the Eue de Eivoli now stands — the houses whose proprietors were forbidden to build or change, and which it was

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proposed to destroy for the extension of tlie Palace — were left free again in the abandonment of such great designs ; the old gigantic plan of four quadrangles was abandoned, and after the Eegent's death this halt was followed by a rapid decline. The little kiag had indeed for a time been lodged in the TuUeries, and for twelve years his boyhood was passed there. He entered the Palace at the close of the year of his grandfather's death, on December 30, 1715 ; he left it in 1729. There may have been some design of keeping him in Paris to reverse somewhat the disastrous effect of Versailles upon the capital, but of the old Louvre itself he and his governors were negligent. They lodged in the southern wing, over the river, the little infanta of Spain when that royal marriage was proposed, and she has left her memory in the Infanta's Garden, as the lawn on the quay is called. She lingered there three years, from a spring to spring, and during that time the Grande Galerie, which was her communication with the Court, must often have seen the boy and the girl together, but after she left, in 1725, the whole of the wide suites were left deserted, and four years later the Court itself broke up, and returned to that town, twelve miles away, which was to be the grave of the royal power.

One cannot do better, to appreciate the desolation that followed, than make a picture of what the Palace and its quarter became in the generation that saw the decline of Louis XV. The Louvre, that had always been a kind of vortex for Paris, was invaded by the active poverty of the city. The Carrousel had always been a mass of houses — it remained so indeed till our own time; but now the courtyards between them and the narrow alleys were blocked with chance huts and barrows. As on a kind of

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no-man's-land, the payers of no rent, the squatters, put up their hovels. The old Church of St. Nicholas, thrust away in its corner, useless and in ruins, became a shelter for beggars. Where now the splendid western fapade looks out on the open square, a group of old houses left a dark, irregular hollow, and down to this (for so much rubbish had altered the level of the soil) steps led from a moss-grown bridge that crossed the old moat. Within the courtyard itself great mounds of brick and earth and uncut stone lay irregularly, and in the midst, to the huge indignation of Voltaire, the master of the works that were no works, the sinecurist royal architect, built himself a kind of house.

Perhaps to a modern man the most striking feature in so much decay would be the fact that the Louvre was not isolated — you could not see it from without. Leading to the northern wing, where the far end of the big shop is to-day, there was indeed a narrow, evil-smelling lane — the Eue du Cocq — but on the east, where Perrault's vast colonnade still stood unfinished and ruinous, a crowd of old noble houses, each one in full decay, shut in the Louvre. The north-eastern corner was surrounded by the garden of the Hotel de Crequi and the Hotel de Couty, the northern half of the eastern face by Hotel de Couray, the southern half by such high walls and turrets as yet remained of the Hotel de Bourbon. Where now the ample Eue du Louvre gives a foreground for the colonnade, all these ruinous and deserted houses of the nobles stood and hid a work which could have no meaning unless it was to be seen in connection with good distances and a sense of space.

The building itself, the centre of such a confusion.

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corresponded to its surroundings. All the south and all the east wings were roofless, covered only with lingering hoarding, that soon fell rotten. You may still see, in de Baudan's " Bird's-eye View of Paris in 1714," these flat, incomplete spaces, contrasting with the high pavilions to the west and north of the quadrangle. Of the ground- floor, stables had been made. The Queen and M. de Nevers put their horses in the vaulted galleries where Anne of Austria had walked, and the little garden of the Infanta became a yard for the grooms. On the east, under the colonnade, the Post-office housed its waggons and their teams ; even the northern portico (the one that now looks on the Oratoire) was blocked with the carriages of Champlot, which it served to shelter. Perrault's columns remained, many of them unfluted, all of them with unfinished capitals ; the stones of the coping were here and there fallen apart, the iron clamps had rusted, the frost had cracked open more than one piece of the cornice. To complete this picture of neglect one must imagine the colonnade itself full of rude wooden huts, black with their smoke, and even in the great gallery along the Seine any wandering Bohemian who could claim the protection of an Academician might fix his lodgings. These corridors, in which we now see a perspective of the Masters, and sometimes imagine a pageant, were crowded with every kind of rough picture, screen, and boarding, behind which hid the squalor of half a hundred families. The windows were broken, and the pipes of stoves were thrust out along the magnificent line of the quay.

This was the Louvre of the first half of the eighteenth century; and the popular ferment of such an ant-heap met a kind of nobler echo in the uses to which the

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Tuileries were put; for that old Medicean place, now grander and more gloomy with the hand of Louis XIV., continued after his grandson had left it to maintain a certain life of its own. Here the fetes were given, and here for some years the ComMie Pranpaise could be seen ; here also — the last of the great popular shows — they played the apotheosis of Voltaire. It was in 1778, and the old man, sitting in that Salle des Seances, where so soon the Convention was to change the world, received from a people whom he had not seen for twenty years, the adulation that had become his usual meat; full of the emotion of that evening he died and lay in ScalHeres.

That so much neglect did not lead to a catastrophe we owe to the Pompadour. It was she who, ia 1754, stepped in to save the Louvre ; inspired, perhaps, by a sense of the royal dignity which the king lacked, she proposed the con- tinuation of the old plans, and had her brother appointed to the post of governor of the works. Under him worked Gabriel, the same whom we saw making the new Cour des Comptes with such painful labour. He also here did his duty, but here he luckily attempted nothing new ; he confined himself to continuing the unfinished work of nearly a century before. Por the Louvre has a kind of good fate attaching to it throughout history, whereby it seems impossible for those who continue the work to abandon the original idea of the French Eenaissance. It is always unfinished, but always continuous. It may be said of this architect that his claim to greatness lay, not in what he raised up, but in what he pulled down. He had a great eye for the useless, and he destroyed the old houses that masked the Louvre on the eastern side; he first, since the Middle Ages, showed the Palace disengaged,

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and gave an architecture that needed it far more than

the early Gothic, a thing which the early Gothic had

always claimed, a space to be seen in. But Gabriel was

hampered by lack of funds. The work to which he gave

such conscientious attention went on spasmodically. An

epigram of 1758 was able to make the King of Denmark

say when he visited the Louvre —

" I saw Two workmen, lounging in that pile sublime : They probably were paid from time to time."

Even after five years' work the windows of the south- western pavilion were unglazed. Perhaps it was this lack of funds which forbade Gabriel to add an attic roof to his work as Blondel demanded in the manner that dis- tinguished the western wing; if so, we are immensely fortunate in Louis XV.'s poverty. For we may be certain that no eighteenth architects would have merely imitated Lescot. They would have said, " We must add an attic to keep in symmetry; but poor Lescot, living in the full Kenaissance, had a riotous kind of taste; we will be seK-restrained," and they would have given us some horrible lycee-like roof, something on the model of the Cour des Comptes. As it was, Gabriel kept to Perrault's plans, and to this accident we owe the cornice and balus- trade that surround the old Louvre on every side but the west.

Much more good Gabriel did. He cleared the court- yard, he planted lawns both there and on the eastern side. He cleared away the squalid huts within the piUars of the colonnade ; he made all clean, symmetrical, and suitable to his time. Soufflot, by a great good fortune, was afraid to touch it, and when our period closes the old Palace, the

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Carrousel, and the Tuileries remain much as Gabriel left them, to become the battle-ground of the Kevolution.

Before leaving the eighteenth-century Louvre, there are two matters which should, I think, present themselves to the modern reader : first, the great risks it ran during this century of decay; secondly, the wide gulf between its present appearance and that which it bore under Louis XV.

As to the fii'st point, there does not seem to have been, until Gabriel completed Perrault's design, anything to save the Palace from ruin. Had it fallen but a little further into disuse, the expenses of refitting, which in- crease very rapidly as a building crumbles, would have made it impossible to begin the restoration. Imagine the Louvre, unroofed, unglazed, and gaping for another thirty years, carrying all that neglect on to the depleted Treasury and anarchy of Louis XVI., and it is not unlikely that in the sweeping changes of our century the Medicaean Louvre would have disappeared. The people loved it, and the corporation offered to repair it long before the Pompadour took a hand in it. Their offer was conditional on being allowed to inhabit one of its wings, and shows (incidentally) the insane mania which the town had at that time for getting rid of the old Hotel de Ville.^ This offer was rejected, but the spirit that permitted the king so to neglect the Palace, makes credible that story of St. Yenne, how, in an early councU of the reign (under Pleury), it was gravely proposed to pull the Louvre down and sell

' It ia interesting to know that, among other follies, it was also pro- posed to give up the H5tel de Ville and lodge the corporation in the Hotel de Oonti, over the river. Luckily, the town was too poor to pay for the exchange.

2g

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the site. Certainly the laziness of the eighteenth century saved us from many disasters.

As to the difference in appearance between the eighteenth-century Louvre and the modern, the great point to seize is, that the present appearance of a complete plan — the old quadrangle throwing out two long arms, one along the Seine, and one along the Eue de Eivoli — was entirely lacking.

With a Carrousel full of houses, a great mass like the TuUeries joined to the Louvre by the very long, thin line of the great gallery, the modern effect of symmetry was wanting. The only symmetry then apparent was in the square of the original palace ; for the rest, the group must have seemed, to an eighteenth-century traveller, a some- what random arrangement : one great square of building, the Louvre ; another broad line of building, the Tuileries, not even parallel to the first, and the two joined together by a gallery of exaggerated length along the river. Even this last seemed somewhat a chance affair, for, instead of coming up in line with the Louvre, it missed it by a few yards, and had to be joined to it by another small branch of building. The picture left in the mind, even of a Parisian, must have been rather of two palaces casually joined and imbedded in a wilderness of houses.

I have no space for a description of the hundred things that marked these seventy-four years in the other quarters ^ of Paris. The burning and rebuilding of the Petit Pont, the destruction of the Little Chatelet on the left bank of

' The bridge was burnt by a candle set on a piece of floating ■wood and Bent down stream by an old woman, who had been told by a sooth- sayer that it would stop over the body of her drowned son : a curious legend to find in the midst of the Regency 1

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the Seine ; the finishing (after ninety-five years) of that great ugly mass of St. Sulpice, with the faulty splendour of its immense nave, and its unequal towers, like crippled giants ; the famous arcades of the Mint ; the clearing of the Place de Greve ; the building of the Halle aux Bles ; the construction of the quays — all these details I must leave aside, since the plan of this chapter has been rather to give typical instances of what the eighteenth century did, than to recount all its rebuilding in full.

I must even omit anything more ample than a passing reference to the change in the Palais Eoyal, though all the characteristic plan that we know to-day was the work of the years before the Eevolution. It was some eight years before the opening of the States General, that the man who was afterwards to be called Philippe Egalite laid out round the diminished garden of the Palace those arcades whose shops and cafes, though they are now half-deserted, formed, for nearly a hundred years, a babbling agora for the city. In that same year of 1781 the old Opera House was burnt down, and nearly on its site there was opened, in 1790, one of the first successes of the Eeform, the theatre which has come to be called the " Comedie Franpaise." ^ If I give here a passing mention of a thing that deserves so much more thorough a history, it is because that garden of the Palais Eoyal is still so typical a relic of the eighteenth century, and in order that my readers may see in it a principal witness of the time whose general characteristics I have described. Por the open garden was to be for years a kind of popular club.

' And, as I write, that too is burnt down ; the third of the theatres of the Palace to be destroyed by Are. In it was lost a ceiling of Fragonard, the most characteristic public decoration in Paris.

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where debate and action could be determined. Upon its revolutionary council the insufficient, repetitive, and meagre architecture of a dying society looked down, as it looks down to-day, upon the empty square ; the shops and eatiag-houses around it are a memorial, even in their present abandonment, of the two principal factors in the early development of the Eevolution — first, Orleans' poverty, which forced him to letting out his palace ; and, secondly, the open popular gatherings of the spot where the Cafe Foy issued its informal edicts, where Mirabeau, in a kind of bravado, walked once with Danton, and where, in the gloomy day that followed Louis' condemnation, a man stabbed Lepelletier in vengeance for his vote against the king.

Siuce, then, I have no space to describe the many details of eighteenth-century Paris, I must ask my reader to depend for a general impression of it upon the picture of the town as it seemed just before the Eevolution broke out, and with this picture I must end the long story through which I have followed its changes and its growth.

What is the conception of the city which we must possess in order to frame the story of the Eevolution ? In what kind of Paris did they walk — Desmoulins, the Southerner Vergniaud, Fabre d'Eglantiue — the young men whose vision of a new society came dangerously, like a fire, and consumed the city ? The answer to that question is necessary to any understanding of how the Eevolution worked ; and that can best be reached by a recollection of what was said at the opening of this chapter — Paris had become industrial. The immense size of the city, even at that time, is a feature historians forget.

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Its size shows not only in the numbers of a population that would rival modern Glasgow or Birmingham, it is also apparent iu the great space that the town covered. With the exception of the new quarters by the Champs Elysdes, the Etoile, and the Pare Monceau, all that part of Paris with which travellers are best acquainted would lie well within the Kevolutionary area. All the space between the line of the old fortifications and the river was dense and full ; even on the southern shore the city had filled in the ring of the Boulevards, and on all sides it threw out great suburbs, where the mass of the new pro- letariat lived. The immense girdle of the new Customs barrier which Louis XVI. had thrown round the city, enclosed indeed on the north far more than the inhabited and continuous city, for it sprang as far west as the Etoile, ran just beneath Montmartre, and stretched on the east to the Place du Trone. It is evident that such a ring left a wide belt of half-occupied land within it, but, even in 1789, one quarter, that of the Faubourg St. Antoine, almost reached the barrier ; on the south, where the line of the new Octroi was but little exterior to the Boulevards, the town filled it exactly, and even had some suburbs outside ; while, within it, only the great quarter round the Champ de Mars — what was later to become the " section of the Invalides " — could strictly be called suburban.

But this great city, vast as was its extent, and changed as it was in its economic character from the capital of the seventeenth century, with its great mass of artisans, which the Constitution of 1791 disfranchised and turned into disorderly mobs, was yet still controlled by the old historic centre, the nucleus which may be compared even now to the coming tower of Paris in action. As though that

454 PARIS

narrow interior round were an arena at which the outer quarters gazed, the dramatic sequence of the Eevolution takes place nearly all (and especially as the action becomes more intense) in the square mQe of Philip Augustus. You must conceive the city as a great whirlpool. Huge outlying suburbs, full of the hungry poor, send in by a kind of centripetal force the mobs which whirl around the brains of the leaders at the centre. This is not only a metaphor, it is a topographical truth. The heat of the Eevolution, its focus, is within a quarter of an hour of the island. The Eevolutionary Tribunal on the Island of the Cite, the Mairie in the same place, also the police, are the centre. Then in an outer ring come the Jacobins, the Tuileries, the CordeHers, the Hotel de Ville ; and, without being too fantastic, we may imagine this great maelstrom throwing from its outer circumference like irresistible currents the armies, the commissioners, the orders to the provinces, and, finally, the propaganda of democracy which has transformed Europe.

The outer part of that great circle was already beginning to be modernized with its white houses, great spaces, straight roads, and boulevards. The centre was old, tortuous, dark and high, and pressed around Notre Dame, whose towers were embedded in houses. The faubourgs send in their streams by easy great roads, and the central streets, as narrow as lanes, condense the flood into violent eddies and torrents. Thus you have the tumultuous waves of the Place de Greve on the 5th of October and the 9th Thermidor. Thus also you have the mill-stream of that Eevolutionary gorge, the Eue St. Honord, pouring its victims into the grinding of the guillotine on the Place de la Edvolution, which was its outlet and its pool.

THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY 455

It was as though the older Paris was yet the most vital part, and absorbed by organization and energy the amorphous material of the suburbs.

Yet the place was unfitted for the work. The strong contrast between the political spirit and its physical surroundings is perhaps the chief mark of Paris during the first five years of the Eevolution. In that singularly old and tortuous centre, which seemed all the more an anachronism from the half-hearted and ill-completed attempts at a rebuildiag, there worked the gigantic youth of the Eeform. The politics that foresaw and have at last created the modern town, over ordered, strict, wide, and hating anomalies, developed their first action in the web of narrow lanes, and in the sombre rooms that Paris had inherited from the Middle Ages and from the Grand Siecle.

And this aspect of Eevolutionary Paris, by which it seems a great worn husk through which the green shoot is shining, provides us also with the historical irony of the uses to which its buildings were put. Had you walked in Paris in the year 1788 you might have noticed to your left as you went down the Eue St. Honore the shabby hall of an old convent standing in a haK-deserted square. That hall was to hold the Jacobins. Had you passed through the gardens of the Tuileries you would have seen on the north of the park a large, dull, oval building, evidently connected with the stables of the Palace ; it was a ridiug-school and place of exercise for the horses, full of sawdust, and with loud echoes in its empty hollow ; a groom might pass through from time to time, or a horse be led round its ring ; but it was very desolate, bare, and dirty. In that incongruous place the Assembly was to

456 PARIS

sit, and the thousand changes of the first two years to be illumined by the oratory of Mirabeau.

In the Palace itself some guide might have shown you the theatre. It had but few memoirs ; perhaps the chief was the apotheosis of Voltaire. It saw from time to time a Parisian play, and received a popular audience. That hall was yet to receive the Convention, and to hear the storm in which Eobespierre fell from power. And so in fifty places the strange accidents of the Eevolutionary use would meet us, till the history of the buildings seems like the story of a town conquered by a foreign army that occupies and puts to some fantastic use buildings whose natural purpose had been fixed for a thousand years.

One thing remains to be said : the sites of the Eevolu- tion have disappeared, and by a curious irony the Commune of 1871 destroyed the central landmarks that yet remaiued. The theatre of the Tuileries, in which all the great debates were heard; the prefecture of the police; the hall of the Eevolutionary Tribunal, whence Danton's loud voice was heard beyond the river; the H6tel de Ville, where Eobespierre made his last stand, have all perished. It is almost true to say that but one single historic room remains — the hall in which the CordeKers debated is now the Musee Dupuytren, full of skeletons and physiological anomalies.

There is a walk that many must have taken after July, 1789, and in the course of which the sites of the Eevolution in Paris pass before one in order. I mean the line of the Eue St. Honore, of the Place de Greve, of the Palais de Justice, and so over the river. Let us imagine a man who is soon to become a citizen, and let us suppose his business to take him, in the autumn of 1788, before the States

THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY 457

General met or the Eeform began, from the west of Paris to the centre and over the river to his home. Had he started from what is now the Place de la Concorde, what would he have seen ? The open space from -which he would set out, called the " Place Louis XV.," and soon to be the " Place de la Eevolution," was unfinished, vague, and lonely. There was no such centre as the obelisk now forms, no ring of statues. The bridge was unfinished, and it is remarkable that all through 1793-1794 the workmen were quietly completing it, with the guillotine not fifty yards off before their eyes. Dusty and but partly paved, the square was a fitting vestibule for the Une of boulevards that ran from it, and were equally unfrequented and incomplete. Here the guillotine was to stand, and here for day after day of the last months of the terror a great crowd was to gather, drawn westward out of their homes by the violence of the nation armed or by the fascination of death. To the west the Champs Elysees showed a fairly thick mass of trees, broken here and there by new walls of some great house, such as that Palace of the Elysee which had been buUt but a generation before. Thrown across the river he saw the walls of the unfinished bridge. The two strong buildings to the north of the square, the Garde Meuble and its fellow had much the look they have to-day ; between them ran the new, wide, empty, half-built thoroughfare which we now call the Eue Eoyale ; he would look past its heap of builder's rubbish, past the garden of the convent, and see its end closed by the unfinished and unroofed columns of a new church. These columns, rising but half their height, and making a broken line against the sky, were not to find their ending for a generation, and were to form at last the classical front of the Madeleine.

458 PARIS

To-day a man going eastward from the square would enter the Eue de Eivoli ; in that time no such main artery- existed. All along the north of the TuUeries gardens there stretched a row of old private houses, and in their midst — much where the Continental is now — ran the Convent of the Feuillants, with a fine great terrace over- looking the park. He woiild therefore go up the Eue Eoyale for a few steps, and turn into the Eue St. Honore. The Eue St. Honore was much as we see it to-day, but with this difference, that it was the main great road of whatever was wealthy in Paris. Its narrow chasm was sounding with traffic, its sloping pavements crowded with the world of the city ; and as he passed along it he saw in review, as we see to-day on the Boulevard at evening, the writers and the speakers. Here, if anywhere at all in the unconscious town, some prescience of the Eevolution might have touched him as he passed.

But in one principal matter the Eue St. Honore did differ from what we see to-day. It gave no impression of peculiar age, it was relieved by no accident of modernity ; at one place iadeed a wider street opened into the Place Vendome, grand and silent, with the gate of the Capucins at its head, while just beyond that crossing a little alley led to the squalor of the Dominican Convent, where later the terrible club and machine of the extremists was to hold its sittings. One alley of this kiud after another would be crossed by him unheeded ; down each he caught a glimpse of the Assumptionists or the Feuillants, of the Palace stables, or perhaps the open sky above the Tuileries gardens. But they led to no centre of activity ; they suggested nothing. The little lane that gave on the Eiding School meant nothing to such a one, who could

THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY 459

not foresee the crowds of deputies that were so soon to pass and repass, making France.

He crossed the very narrow and sonorous Eue St. Eoch, and left the new church on his left as he went on eastward ; that heavy front was in seven years to see the mob of Vendemiaire retake and lose the single cannon of Buonaparte ; it was, in 1788, wholly unsuggestive of arms. The medley of shops and rich private houses only announced an approach to the social centre of the town, and a moment brought him to the open space in front of the Palace of Orleans. The square was full of people; the sauntering crowd that continually filled the gardens of the Palace was passing in and out through the archways, the stream of east and west crossed here a certain lesser traf&c that went north by way of the Eue Eichelieu, and the impression of activity was heightened here, as every- where ia old Paris, by the little public space afforded to the movement of the city. Not a quarter of the present square lay open ; one whole side of it, that towards the Louvre, was blocked by the old pumping station of the Palace, the Chateau d'Eau, while the western side, that is now an open approach to the Opera, was then an intricate mass of old houses, between which narrow courts rather than streets edged their way iato the medley that filled the Carrousel.

At this point he might pause, thiaking whether he should work south through the Grande Galerie to the quay, or go on past the Louvre before striking for the river. He would most probably decide for the last direc- tion, because the streets across the Carrousel, the avenues by which in 1792 the mob was to attack the Tuileries, were then but little used. The Palace was empty, no

46o PARIS

bridge led across the Seine in all the reach between the Tmleries and the Pont Neuf ; ^ men had indeed occasion to pass in and out of the Carrousel continually, but they crossed it rarely. He continued his way then along the Eue St. Honore, passed the little straight streets of Champ Fleuri and Du Cocq, at the end of which appeared a few yards of the unfinished northern wing of the old Louvre, and then turned to his right along the Eue des Poulies, that gave, though in a less sufficient manner, something of the effect of the modern Eue du Louvre that runs on the same site. Here the first wind from the river met him. The street was fairly wide, and all along the right of it lay the open lawns and the high colonnade in which Gabriel had just completed Perrault's design. This per- spective was the first sign of what kind of modern city was to replace that through which he walked.

He reached the quays. Less even and less wide than they are to-day, they yet gave also a promise of the future ; but as he passed along the riverside towards the Hotel de ViLle he saw something which made the riverside quite different from that of modem Paris : the roadway lifted to and fell from the bridges (for the level of the quays was lower), and the foreshore lacked paving and ran out, a beach of mud and gravel, irregularly into the stream. The Chatelet also stood there, at the head of the Pont-au- Change, a strange, crumbling, uncouth relic, that owed its continuance merely to the poverty and neglect of the Crown.

The Hotel de Ville itseK, his goal for the moment, was

' There had been for a hundred years the design to build a bridge that should correspond with the College of Mazarin, but it was left to our own century to fulfil this design in the foot-bridge of the Saints Peres.

THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY 461

still the fine Eenaissance building that many perhaps of my readers remember. But the Place de Greve was ill- shaped, ill-paved, and restricted. It narrowed northward almost to a point, and into it there debouched half a dozen crooked streets, whose inextricable tangle turned the whole quarter from the Chatelet westward into an almost im- passable maze. He could see the summit of the high, neglected Tower of St. Jacques, half in ruin, but no street was straight enough to show whether it led to the church or no, and here, if anywhere in Paris, a man felt what we still feel in some of our old country towns, that they must be known as familiarly as his own house if he is not to lose his way.

In the Hotel de Ville he would have found the same neglect, the same disorder and lethargy that everywhere marked the of&cial side of the capital, and that contrasted so strangely with the vigorous life of the streets. Had his business taken him into the bare room on the first floor from which in Thermidor the Eobespierreans were to watch for the Sections, he would have found it, as the first municipality of 1789 found it, with dusty, broken ornaments, and with a mouldy splendour that marked its occasional use upon the rare chances of a royal visit.

If we suppose his business there accomplished, and imagine his home to lie somewhere on the hill of the University, the end of his day would lead him past the remainiug sites of the coming Kevolution. He would cross the Pont Notre Dame, from which the houses had disappeared two years before, and would see clinging to its right side the huge ramshackle shed that hid the pump- ing station and that remained to the middle of this century for the joy of the artists and students. He would note

462 PARIS

the old Pont Eouge coming slantwise between the two islands ; its piles were eaten away at the water line, and the first flood was to sweep them away. He would see the whole northern side of the island, like a wall of high dingy houses, holding the gardens of the Close, and above them, with its Gothic detail in ruins, but the old spire still standing, rose Notre Dame. There were a dozen little streets cutting up the island into irregular sections. Following any one of these that led westward, he would enter the Eue du la Barillerie, which, though it was, of course, much narrower, corresponded to the modern Boulevard du Palais, and as he followed this street down to the southern arm of the river, he passed before the whole fapade of the Palace, which differed from the same sight to-day mainly in this : that Antoine's iron gates, the walls of the Law Courts, and the details of the Ste. Chapelle (spireless and neglected) were out of repair and were growing squalid. He crossed the Pont St. Michel, "on which, alone now of the bridges of Paris, some houses still stood and hid the river ; he entered the small, irregular Place St. Michel that has been replaced by the wide space we know to-day ; he went vip the hill by way of that Eue de la Harpe, very narrow, high, dark, and evil-smelling, in which the new politics were so fervent, and in which Mormoro was already setting up the presses that were to issue the first Eepublican pamphlets of the Eevolution. Prom this street (whose broad successor, the Boulevard St. Michel, still keeps some of the Eadical tradition), a still narrower lane branched off to the right, just where the old Church of St. Come made an angle. It was the Eue des Cordeliers. He followed it, noting carelessly the damp wall of the

THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY 463

convent, looking, perhaps, through a battered wooden gate to the unfrequented hall of what had once been a flourish- ing college ; nothing in its aspect could tell him that the young lawyer, Danton, was to come from his offices over the river and make the vault of the Franciscans famous by the birth of the Eepublic. The quarter was still in- deed the University, but it was the University in the last of old age ; the young men whom it trained, and of whom he met some few in the streets of the quarter, looked away from it ; found nothing in it to treasure or to remember. The tradition of what had been, from the Middle Ages, the first school of Europe had failed. So, surrounded by the colleges whose extreme antiquity was like a death, but whose nameless students were waiting at the doors for the Eevolution, his day's journey ended.

What impression remained after all these things seen ? Nothing of the Eevolution, nor of the time upon which he was about to enter. Only a vivid interest and clamour in the streets ; a certain ill-ease and expectation had surrounded him. But, forgetting, perhaps, what seemed a chance illusion, the traveller would find his lodging in one of the narrow streets of the University, and there would return to his mind, at evening, a picture of a city fast in age. Everything he had seen that was good or native to the place was old ; the new things jarred upon Paris. And that old age pleased him ; it promised a routine and peace. Perhaps as he crossed the river he had looked at the walls of the archbishop's palace — venerable and ruinous — and settled his mind into the groove of the immemorial history it suggested. But a fever of creation was immediately beneath all this content and lethargy. More truly than had been the case with the first Capetians

464 PARIS

Paris had touched decay. It was now the third time that the city had reached the limit, as it were, of life, and stood between ruins and a fresh energy of reconstruction. More rapidly, and with a more astounding vigour even than that which had opened the Middle Ages, Paris was about to renew herself, and to begin her life again at the roots. As unknown as the new streets or the new millions, the men who were to change Europe were drawing up on the Hill of St. Genevieve, and upon those doors which he had passed unnoticed. Fate had set the marks of a new work.

The town was all grey. In spite of the press and eagerness of the streets, there was a trance over it which was expectation, but which seemed Kke a quiet death. He might have thought the stones asleep. Within a winter a speedy anarchy broke. By a virtue that is peculiar to the city, the passions of the fight took on form and beauty, and appeared as creative things.

With this, the end of my book, I must present to the reader an apology, reiterated, I think, in these pages, but never sufficiently elaborated. For what should a history of Paris do ? It should, to have any value, show the changing but united life of a city that is sacred to Europe ; it should give a constant though moving picture of that come and go of the living people in whose anxieties and in whose certitudes, in whose enthusiasms and in whose vagaries are reflected and intensified the fortunes of our civilization. In this, I am sure, the book is wanting. It had for its task, not only to paint such a

THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY 465

general scene, but also to follow details, and to give, in each particular instance, the scaffolding upon which Paris rose. Such detail and such excursion must of necessity break the continuity of what would be — were it treated in a single spirit — a kind of pageant wherein could be seen the Eomans and their barbarian imitators, the Crusaders, the early builders, the lawyers, the Churchmen, and the glancing metal of the wars, the defeated crowds of the invasion, the pride of the Eenaissance, the large security of the modern world, passing in order through the succession of years. There you would have the sure foundations of the Empire, the high struggle of the niath century, the dream of the Middle Ages, the exultation of the new learning set out before you; and you would perceive, in the harmony of so vast a complexity, what Europe means, and how, because it has had such and such a sequence, it is what we know to-day.

This fulfilment has been denied to the book, or to put it more truly, of this it has been incapable. Yet I would not leave upon the mind of any one who read a book, whatever it might be, that was concerned with Paris, a confused or uncertain conception of what the past is upon which the city reposes ; nor would there be a thorough meaning in the mass of special description if there did not arise from it, or if there could not at least be added to it, something of that vision which rises before the eyes of lonely men who know the life of the town as though it were their own, who walk across the Seine at night with Villon, and, as they pass by Notre Da,me, feel the pressure of the fighting men in the train of St. Louis.

All the streets are noisy with an infinite past; the

2h

466 PARIS

unexpected turnings of old streets, the reveries that hang round the last of the colleges arid that haunt the won- derful hiU, are but a little, obvious increment to that inspiring crowd of the dead ; the men of our blood and of our experience who built us up, and of whom we are but the last and momentary heirs, handing on to others a tradition to which- we have added very little indeed. Paris rises around any man who knows her; her streets are changing things, her stones are like the clothes of a man ; more real than any present aspect she may carry, the illimitable company of history peoples her, and it is in their ready speech and communion that the city takes on its dignity. This is the reading of that per- plexity which all have felt, of that unquiet suggestion which hangs about the autumn trees and follows the fresh winds along the Seine ; the riddle of her winter evenings and of the faces that come on one out of the dark in the lanes of the Latin quarter. She is ourselves ; and we are only the film and edge of an unnumbered past. There is nothing modern in those fresh streets. The common square of the Innocents is a dust of graves and a meeting-place for the dead; the Danse Macabre was too much of a creation to pass at the mere falling of the wall. The most recent of the ornaments make a kind of tabernacle for the memories of the town — Etienne Marcel before his Hotel de Ville ; Charlemagne before the Cathedral. The Place de la Concorde is not a crossing of roads for the rich, it is the death scene of the Girondins ; the vague space about the Madeleine is not only a foreground for the church, it is also the tomb of the Capetians. Wherever the town has kept a part of her older garment — in the Cathedral, in the

THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY 467

Palais, in the Ste. Chapelle, you may mix with all the centuries; where she has changed her aspect alto- gether, the past seems, to me at least, only the more persistent. The Place du Chatelet has, on its eastern side, a theatre (the Opera Comique, I think), a few trees, and a modern street, but the meaning of that place is, and will always be, the great charge of the Norsemen, and Eudes and Gozlin the bishop holding the Defence of Christendom in the breach of the wall. The corner of the Luxembourg Gardens is a yard or two in the boulevard, but it has ringing about it the shout of Eichemont when he passed through the southern gate and entered the capital conquering, after nearly twenty years of war. The pavement of the space in front of the Palais Eoyal is a very worthless corner, notable for foreigners and glare; where (to be very accurate) the money-changer, with a Polish name, has his counter, there the garrison of the Gate of St. Honore repelled and wounded Joan of Arc, and she lay beyond the moat in a place from which not all this vulgarity can drive so great a presence.

It is of no purpose to heap up such instances. It must be enough to repeat the apology with which I opened this concluding passage. The things that one can see, like pictures in the run of time, must come of themselves from a story told ; but of the many ways in which this flowing of men can be made vivid, common telling is the least sufficient ; and of all kinds of history, of songs, or spoken words, or visions, surely the least sufficient of all is a little book.

INDEX

Abbey, St. Germain, Westminster, etc.

See under their names Abbo, his poem on siege of 885, 150-152 Abelard opens twelfth century, 182 ; his

career and philosophy, 183-186 Adam, of the Petit Pont, 217 Agedincum. See " Sena " Alexander III. lays first stone of Notre

Dame, X96 Altar of Naute, TJ-76 ; possibly destroyed

by Childebert, 127 ; high, of Notre

Dame, 420 Amphitheatre of Lutetia, 86-?8 Andre des Arcs, Church of, 251 Anne, " La Grande Madame," 305 Ansold founds St, Denis de la Chartre, 176 Autoine, St., Gate of. Templars burnt

outside, 258 ; spoilt under Louis XIV .,

405 Appanage, policy of, 237 Aqueduct, Roman, of Palais Eoyal, 81 ;

of Thermae, 99 Aquinas, St. Thomas. See " Thomas " Architecture : Gothic, Renaissance, etc.

See vmder names Armagnac and Bourgignon quarrel, 238 Arouet in fire of Palais, 435, 436 Arras, College of, absorbed by Louis le

Grand, 288 Arsenal, 376

Artisans before Revolution, 414 Asnieres, wine of, in Roman times, 92 Attila leaves Paris aside, 95, 96 Aubriot. See " Hugh " Au Change, Pont, Charles the Bald's, 181 ;

destroyed, new bridge built, 261 Augustinians, 252 Austrasia, Pepin head of, 147 Autun, College of, 252

B

Bac, Rue du, origin of, 341

Baldwin of Constantinople sends relics to

St. Louis, 213 Barbarian invasions, familiar to Roman

Gaul, HI; effect of, 112-U5; of ninth

century, 117 ; effect of, in Paris, 153,

154 Barbarians attracted by Christianity, 123.

Slee also previous heading Barbe, Ste, College of, 250; St. Francis

Xavier at, 250, -note Barracks, Roman, site of, ia Lutetia, 85 Bartholomew, St., Massacre of, false legend

of Charles IX. in, 344 ; Paris' action in,

356 Bastille, building of, and description, 269-

271 ; English capitulate in, 239 Bathilde, Prankish queen, Anglo-Saxon

slave, Abbess of Chelles, 144 Battles of Lutetia, Testry, etc. See under

their names Bayeux, College of, decay of, in soven-

tenth century, 387 Beauvais, College of, 245 ; in seventeenth

century, 387 Bellovaci, danger to, Labienus from, 69 Benvenuto Cellini, in Paris, 323, 324 Bernard, St., and Abelard, 186 Bernard, St., Gate of, spoilt by Louis XIV.,

405 Bemadins, 246 Bievre, river of, position in Plain of Paris,

44 Bishopric. See " See " Bois de Boulogne, relic of early forest, 51 Bois, Tour du, 269, 393, note Boissy, College of, 252 Bons Enfants, College of, 246 Boulevard St. Michel, etc. See under

separate names Bourbon dynasty, character of, 358 Bourgeois, before Revolution, 413 *' Bourgeois," diary of, 324; Parloir aux.

5ee" Parloir" Bridge. See " Pont " Bridges, pre-historic and Roman, site of,

64-66 Brosse, Salomon de, builds Grande Salle,

etc., 377-380 Bullant succeeds de I'Orme on Tuileries

339 Burgundy, granted in appanage, 237.

Duke of, and Armagnac, 238 Burgundy, College of, 253, 266

INDEX

469

Cajsar, Julius, first to mention Paris, 59 ; Chatelet ascribecl to him, 64 ; calls meet- ing at Lutetia, 67 ; his last mention of Paris, 71

Calvin in university, 6 ; at College Mon- taigu, 248, Tiofe

Cambrai, College of, 252

Camulogen, leads Parisii against Labienus, 68 ; killed in action, 70

Capet, Hugh, 156 ; crowning of, 157, 158

Capetians rise from Robert Strong, 149, 155, 156 ; take crown, 157, 158 ; increase of power of, in Early Middle Ages, 166, 167 \ break in succession, 234

Cardinal, Lemoine, Palais, du Prat, Riche- lieu, etc. iS'ee MTider the.iT namts

Carmelites, 245

Camavalet, Hotel de, example of Renais- sance, 336

Carolingians, Latin origin of, 146, 147

Catherine de Medicis, plans destruction of Hotel St. Paul, 288; builds Tuileries, 338 ; Michelet upon, 341

CelestinB, 289, 290 ; quay of, has old house upon, 336

Cellini. Stt '* Benvenuto "

Cemetery of Innocents, of St. Paul, etc. 5tee under their names

Cerbon, Peter of, founds Sorbonne, 211

Cerceau, du, did not continue Hotel de Ville, 331

Change, Pont au. See "Au Change"

Chapelle, Sainte. See " Sainte "

Charlemagne, character and rule, 116-118 ; his descent, 147 ; present at Pepin's coro- nation, 148 ; effect of his death, 149

Charles the Bald, his Bridge of Pont au Change, 181 ; destroyed, 261

Charles the Fat buys off Normans, 153

Charles le Bel, 234

Charles V., security under, 236 ; his wall, 268 (see also " Wall ") ; builds Bastille, 529'; Hotel St. Paul, 27l

Charles VI., madness of, and quarrels at Court, 237, 238 ; in Hotel St. Paul, 278, 279

Charles VII., re-conquest of Paris by, 279

Charles VIII., reign of, 306 ; invades Italy, 306-309

Charles IX., legend of, in St. Bartholomew, 344

Charniers, "charnel galleries," Parisian use of, 282, 283

Chateau d'Eau, 373

Chatelet, Grand, tradition ascribes it to Csesar, 64; Louis VI. rebuilds, 187 ; first Renaissance ornament upon, 309-312

Chatelet, Petit, 251 ; rebuilt, 261 ; pulled down in eighteenth century, 450

Chelles, hunting-box of Prankish kings, Childeric killed at, 140 ; made a convent, 144

Childebert, character of, edict of against

idols, 127 ; builds first church of Notre Dame, 129, 130 ; besieges Saragossa, and builds Abbey of St. Vincent (St. Germain), 131 ; probably built St. Germain 1' Auxer- rois, 135, 136 ; buried in St. Vincent, 140

Childeric I. probably besieged Paris, 96

Childeric II. buried in St. Germain (St. Vincent), 140

Christianity first reaches Paris, 72, 88-90 ; character of Celtic, 88, 89 ; how affected by serfs of villa, 110 ; attraction for barbarians, 123 ; unites Britain and Gaul, 144

Christopher, St., colossal statue of, in Notre Dame, 281 ; destroyed, 422

Church, effect of, on barbarians, 124 ; sup- ports Realists, 184, 185 ; councils of, in Paris (see " Councils ") ; hostility of Templars to, 258 ; decay of, in eighteenth century, 415

Churches, circular, in early Gaul, 135. See each churdt imder its name

Citfi, island of, original shape of, 48 ; level raised, 49 ; under Franks, 138, 139 ; little affected by Renaissance, 346, 347 ; centre of Revolution, 454 ; appearance of, in 1788, 462

City state, Paris a modern example of, 22, 23

" Civitas Parisiorum," Lutetia becomes, 93

Classes, separation of in eighteenth century, 412-416

Clement, St., St. Marcellus buried in Chapel of, 93, 94

Clermont, College of, taken by Jesuits, 388

Clodoald, St., saved from murderers of bis brothers, bis hermitage at St. Cloud, 127

Clos de Laas, 85

Close of Notre Dame. See ' ' Notre Dame ' '

Cloud, St. See " Clodoald "

Clovis, 96; builds Basilica of Peter and Paul, 126 ; grandsons of, murdered, 127

Cluny, College of, 246

Cluny, Hotel de, 291, 292

College de France, on site of old College de Cambrai, 252; example of seventeenth century, 404

Colleges. See under their separate names

Conciergerie, towers of, in view of Paris, 7 ; continuity of, 19 ; same plan as wall of Philip Augustus, 208 ; in fire of 1618, 379; of 1772, 438,439

Concorde, Place de la, Roman aqueduct across, 81 ; in eighteenth century, 457

Constantmople, College of, 243, 244

Cordeliers (Franciscans), foundation of, 211; place of, in University, 263, 254; church rebuilt by Henry III., 347

Cornouailles, College of, 245 ; decay of, in seventeenth century, 387

Cortona, Domenico de. See *' Domenico "

Council of Lutetia, presided over by Julian, 91 ; of Paris, second, 125 ; of Troyes confirms Templars, 256 Counts of Paris, Robert the Strong, 149 ;

2h3

470

INDEX

Eudes in siege of 886, 150-152 ; poBition of, in tenth century, 1B6

Coiir des Comptes, RenaiBsance, Giocondo'a, 317-319 ; rebuilt by Gabriel, 33Y, 338 ■

Cour du Mai, in Pbilippe le Bel's rebuild- ing of Palais, 262 ; Demaison's arrange- ment of, after 17Y2, 440

Crown of Thorns, relic of, 213

Crusades, effect of, on Europe, 168 ; effect on Paris of return from, 181

D

Dado (St. Ouen), 141

Dagobert settles monarchy in Paris, 124 ; genealogy of, 125; reign and position, 141-143; refounds St. Denis, 142

Danse Macabre, 283, 284 ; destroyed, 392

Dante, bis allusion to University of Paris, statue of, 243

Dark Ages, distinguished from Middle, 100 ; nature of, lOl, 102 ; advance of Chris- tianity in, 104 ; causes of decline into, 105-108 ; power of Church in, 122-124

Daupbiiie, Place, 3Y3

De BroBse. 5fee " Brosse "

De rOrme. jSee " L'Orme "

Denis, St., first Bishop of Paris, Y2; preaches gospel, 88-90 ; his prison, 176 ; shrine in Paris, ITY

Benis, St., de la Chartre, founded, becomes St. Symphorien, iV6, 177

Denis, St., Abbey of, founded by Ste. Gene- vieve, 95 ; rebuilt by Dagobert, 142 ; Suger abbot of, 190; first Gothic in, 191 ; Henry VI. proclaimed in, 239

Descartes buried in Ste. Genevieve, 388 ; tomb of, remains there till this century, 428

Desmaisons rebuilds Palais de la Cite in

1772, 439-442

D'Estrees, Gabrielle. fi'ce "Estrees"

Domat, Hue, 245

Domenico de Cortona, Architect of Renais- sance Hotel de Ville, 325

Dominicans. Sa& " Jacobins "

Du Cerceau. iJee * ' Cerceau "

Du Prat, Cardinal, adds Renaissance wing to Hotel Dieu, 326

Dupuytren, Mus^e, a relic of Cordeliers, 254

E

Ecclesiastical power in Dark Ages, nature

of, 123, 124 Ecole de Medecine, and Rue de. Set

"M^decine" Ecole?, Rue des, site of Roman palace on,

84 ; type of new street, 240 ; statue of

Dante in, 243 ; colleges near site of, 245 Ecoles, Qua! des, 210, nofe Edict of Nantes, 361 Edward III., his claim to French throne,

character of his ware, 234, 235

Eighteenth century, character of, 410-420 ; picture of Paris at close of, 450-464

Eleventh century, character of, 164, 165; 173, 174

Eligius (St. Eloy), position of, under Dago- bert, 142

Eloy, St. See preceding

Enclosures of medleeval Paris, 293

England, influence of on Paris, 30; connec- tion of, with Frankish Gaul, 144

Enguerrand de Marigny rebuilds Palais for Philippe le Bel, 262

EsBonne, marshes of, retreat of Labienus from, 68

Estrees, Gabrielle de, death of, 362; her initials in Louvre, 374

Etienne du Mont, St., Church of, 249 ; completed, burials in, 388

Eudes, son of Robert the Strong, 149 ; nominal kingship of, 155

Eugenius III. and Jewish deputation, 188

EusebiuB, Bishop of Paris, 141

F

Fauxbourgs, See " Suburbs " Ferrand of Flanders, taken to Louvre, 204 Ferreolus, Carolingian descent from, 147 Ferronnerie, Rue de la, bounded Cemetery

of Innocents, 281, Twte i site of Danse

Macabre, 283 ; Henri IV. stabbed in, 362,

375 Fifteenth century, architecture of, 232 ;

picture of Paris in, 297-300 Fires, of 550, 127 ; of Notre Dame, 199,

200 ; of Salle du Legat in 1772, 327 ; of

Palais in 1618, 378, 379 ; of Palais in

1737, 435, 436 ; of 1776, 439 ; of Petit

Pont, 450 Flamboyant, architecture, 232, 298 Flood of 1296, 261 Fortuuatus, does not describe Notre Dame,

128; his character and work, 132; his

ode on St. Germain des Pres, 133 Forum of Lutetia, where, 76, 79 Fouarre, Rue de, 241 Fourteenth century, character of, 228, 230,

231 France, hegemony of Paris over, 25, 171,

172 Francis I., work on Louvre, 323, 324;

rebuilds HQtel de Ville, 325 ; dies, 328 ;

Jesuits originate under, 336; buys site

of Tuilerjea, 338 Franciscans. See *' Cordeliers" Frankish conquest, character of, 111-115 Frankish kingship, early, character of, 121

G

Gabriel, rebuilds Cour des Comptes, 437,

438 ; restores Louvre, 447-450 Gabrielle d'EstrSes. See " Estrees " Galeries, Grande. See " Louvre ; " Merciere.

See •' Palais"

INDEX

471

Gaul, Celtic and Belgio, 59 ; civilization of, 60 ; nature of fortrcBsea in, 62 ; for in- vasion of, see *• Barbarians "

Genabum. .See "Orleans '*

Genevieve, Ste., rules Paris, 94-9Y ; death and burial of, 125, 126

Genevieve, Ste., Church and Abbey of, first, (see " Peter and Paul '*) ; second, 426-428 ; third (Pantheon), 428-433

Genevieve, Ste., Mont. Slee " Mont "

Geoffrey of Brittany, buried iu Notre Dame, 196

Germain, St., dee Prea, Abbey of (St. Vin- cent), Cbildebert builds, 131 ; described by Fortunatus, 133 ; description of, 133, 134; Abbo a monlc of, 150; rebuilt in eleventh centmy, i78 ; refectory of by Montereau, 214 j thirteenth century Lady Chapel of, 219

Germain, St., I'Auxerrois, Church of, built by Cbildebert, 135, 136; rebuilt by Bobert, 1782-1789, Eenaissance rood- screen of, 344

Germanus, St., character of, 127

Germanus, St. (of Auxerie), finds Ste. Genevieve, 95

Gervais, Maitre, College du, 253

Ghini, 250

Giocondo, and ornament in Chatclet, 311; and bridge of Notre Dame, 315; builds Cour des Comptes, 318

GlaucinuB, Prison of, 80 ; St. Denis im- prisoned in, 176; becomes St. Sjmpho- lien, 177

Gothic, advent of pointed arch in Paris, 170 ; Suger introduces, 191 ; revolution of twelfth century in, 192-194 ; character of decline of, 232-298 ; disappearance of, 303

Goujon, his daughter's tomb in Innocents, 283 ; associated with Lescot on Louvre, 332 ; on Carnavalet, 336 ; his Fountain of the Innocents, 281, not&

Gozlin, Bishop of Paris, 150

Grande Salle. £'ee "Palais "

Grassins, College of, exception to decay of seventeenth century, 387

Gregory of Tours, St., mentions St. Denis, 72; friend of Fortunatus, 132; stops at St. Julien, 242

Greve, Place de, origin of, 64, 181 ; in Revo- lution, 454 ; before Revolution, 461

H

Halles, first chartered by Louis VI., 18? ;

Tinder St. Louia, 217 Harcourt, family of, found College of

Lisieux, 248; of Harcourt, 254 Harcourt, College of, 254 ; in seventeenth

century, 388 Heloise and Abelard, 185, 186 Henri II., best period of Renaissance, 330 ;

continues Renaissance Louvre, 332-334 ;

killed by Montgommery, 335 ; charters

Jesuits, 336 Henri III. dedicates Pont Neuf, 342 ; his

clock on Tour de I'Horloge, 346 ; rebuilds

Church of Cordeliers, 347 ; death of,

names Henry IV. his heir, 369 Henri I V., entry into Paris, 348, 349 ; Ideas

accompanying his accession, 357, 358;

his policy, 368-360 ; murder of, 362 ; his

rebuilding, 368, 369 ; completes H6tel de

Ville, 369 ; Place Royale, 390-392 ; Pont

Neuf, 372, 373 ; Grande Galerie, 373-3V5 ;

statue of, on Pont Neuf, 373 Henry V. (of England), welcomed in Paris,

238, 239 ; entry into Paris, 278, 279 Henry VI. (of England), proclaimed in

St. Denis, 239 ; his statue in Grande

Salle, 264, 379, noie Hilduin, his absurd history of St. Denis,

149 Hill of Montmartre, of University, etc.

5fee under tlioir naracz Hills in Valley of Seine, 37 ; in Plain of

Paris, 43 ; northern semicircular ridge

of, 45 Holy Lance, relic of, 213 Honore, St., Church of, 203 Honore, St., street of, typical of old

Paris, 12, 13 ; Heniy IV. in, 348 ; in

eighteenth century, 458, 459 Honors, St., Gate of, in Charles V.'s wall,

Joan of Arc wounded at, 239, 269, noie Horloge, Tour de 1', built, 262; Henry

in.'s clock on, 346 ; saved in fire of 1618,

379 Hotel Dieu founded by St. Landry, 143 ;

Renaissance wing of, 325 Hotel de Ville, origins of, 265 ; rebuilt by

Francis I., 325 ; continued in later six-

ttenth century. 331, 332 ; finished under

Louis XIII., 369, 370 Hotel de Ville, Place of the. Stee " Greve." Hotel, Carnavalet, etc. Sq& v/nder their

names House of the Pillars. See " Maison aux

Piliers " Houses in media3val Paris, 295-297 Hugh d'Aubriot builds Bastille, im- prisoned, 270, 271 Hugh Capet. .See " Capet " Hundred Years' War, 234-239 ; close of, 287

Industrial character of Paris in eighteenth

century, 417, 418 Innocents, Cemetery of, enclosed by Philip

Augustus, 209 ; description of, 280-285 ;

destruction of Danse Macabre in, 392 Innocents, Fountain of, 280, Tiote Institute. See "Mazarin" Invalides, effect of in view of Paris, 4 ;

building of, 406-408 Ireland, College of, 250

472

INDEX

Isabella of Bavaria marries Charles VI.,

278 ; dies in Hotel St. Paul, 279 Island, of St. Louis, of Cite, of Louviers.

Sise vmMr their Tiames Islands, common in Seine, 47; original

group of, in Paris, 47-50 Islets, originally near Cite, now absorbed,

48,49 Italy, invasion of by Charles VIII. and

condition of at Kenaissance, 306-309 Ivry, battle of, 360

Jacobins (Dominicans) of St. Jacques, founded, 211 ; description of in Uni- versity, 248 ; decay of in seventeenth century, 387

Jacobins of St. Honore, in eighteenth century, 455, 458

Jacques, Rue St., site of Boman road, 66 ; centre of mediteval University, 240

Jacquep, St. Porte, 208 ; Richemont enters by, 279

Jacques, St., Tower'of, building of, 319-321

James II., his brain buried in Scotch col- lege, 251

Jean de Luce, architect of media3val Palace. 262

Jeanne d'Arc falls at Gate St. Honore, 239, 269, note

Jesuits, originate under Francis I., char- tered by Henry II., 336 ; return to Uni- versity, found College of Louis le Grand, 338

Jews, their deputation to Eugenius III., 188

John the Loyal, grants Burgundy in ap- panage, 237 ; his feudal pedantry, 273

John, of England, judged in Hall of Palais, 204

Joinville, his life of St. Louis, 212 ; unrest of his old age, 173

Julian the Apostate in Lutetia, 90-92 ; probably did not build Thermae, 84

Julien, St., le Pauvre, 242

K

Kaunitz measures eighteenth century, 411 Keraunos, Gaulish god on altar of Nautae, 73 Kings, Frankish, character of, 121; gene- alogy of, 125 ; how supplanted by mayors of Palace, 144-146 ; early Cape- tlan, 168 Kingship, character of Frankish, 145 ; early Capetian, 168; under Philip Augustus, 171 ; under Bourbons, 358 ; of eighteenth century, 416, 416

Labienus, his conquest of Lutetia, 67-71 La Marche, College of, absorbs College of Constantinople, 244 ; Calvin at, 248

Lancastrians, character of, 236 ; accepted by Paris, 238, 239

Lance, Holy, 213

Landry, St., Bishop of Paris, founds Hotel Dieu, 143

Landry, Port St., 78 ; origin of name, 143 ; end of Pont Rouge at, 384

Last Judgment on Notre Dame, 198 ; Souf- flot disfigures, 424

Last Supper on St. Germain des Pres, 179

Law school, mediaeval, 245 ; new one built near Pantheon, 431

La Vallee, completes Hotel de Ville, 369, 370

Legat, Salle du, added to Hotel Dieu by Cardinal Duprat, 326

Le Mercier continues Louvre, 382 ; builds Sorbonne, 385 ; Palais Royal, 390, 391 ; dies, 401

Lemoine, Cardinal, College of, 246, 247; position of in seventeenth century, 387

Leonardo da Vinci, 307

Lescot builds Renaissance Louvre, 332 ; Carnavalet, 336 ; copied by Le Mercier, 383

Leufroy, Rue St., 310 ; Henri IV. in, 408

Le Vau builds College Mazarin, 399 ; con- tinues Louvre, dies, 401, 402

Lisleux, College of, 248 ; complaint against principal, 387 ; destroyed, 431

Lombards, College of, 250 ; decay of, in seventeenth century, 387

L'Orme, de, Pierre, architect of Tuileries, 338, 339

Louis le Grand, College of, 388

Louis VI. (Louis le Gros), opens twelfth century, 182 ; reign of, 187

Louis VII., reign of, 188 ; statue in Notre Dame, 198

Louis, St. (Louis IX.), character of, 212; close of his reign, 216

Louis XI. in Tournelles, 279, 288; effect of his reign, 304, 305

Louis SII. dies in Tournelles, 288 ; his cour des Comptes, 319

Louis XIII., character of, 364; completes Hotel de Ville, 369 ; his statue in Place Royale, 371,372 ; his vast design of four Louvres, 382 ; dies, 363

Louis XIV. introduced to history by Mazarin, 366 ; period of, described, 366- 368 ; college named after, 388 ; com- pletes rebuilding of Paris, 394-396 ; effect of on Paris, 396-398 ; chooses Perrault's colonnade, 402 ; his personality affects style, 405 ; his work on Tuileries, 406 ; abandons Paris, 408, 409

Louis XV., persuaded to build new Ste. Genevieve, 429; in Louvre as a boy, 444

Louis XVL, gives Ecole de M^decine to surgeons, 244 ; imprisoned in Temple, 269

Louis, St., island of, built over by Riche- lieu, 384

INDEX

473

Louviera, island of, position of, now joined to shore, 48

Louvre, built by Philip Augustus, 201- 206 ; enclosed by Marcel's Wall, 267 ; Renaissance designed by Francis I., 323 ; great tower pulled down, 324; Henri II. rebuilds, 332-334 ; origin of Grande Galerie, 339; Henri IV. builds Grande Galerie, 373-375 ; Richelieu continues, 382, 383; Le Meroier's building, 383, 384; continued by Mazarin, 400; Le Mercier dies working on, 401; Le Van on, 401 ; Perrault's fa9ade, 402, 403 ; work ceases on, 403 ; completed in eighteenth century, 442-450 ; abandoned, 445, 446; saved by Pompadour, 447; epigram on, 448; proposal to sell, 449, 450

Louvre, St. Thomas du, 203

Louvre, St. Nicholas du, 203, 445

Luce. iSfefi"Jean"

Lucotitius, Mons. 5fee " Mont Ste. Gene- vi&ve "

Lutetia, Cfflsar used word, 66 ; various spellings of, 66 ; calls assembly at, 67 ; Labienus' conquest, 67-71 ; burnt by Gauls, 69 ; site of battle of, 70 ; streets and ruins of, 75, 76 ; wall of, 77 ; prison of, 80 ; suburbs of, 80-88 ; reservoir of, 81 ; site of palace in, 84; of tombs, 85; amphitheatre, 86-88 ; Julian, 90-92; St. Marcellus, Bishop of, 93 ; Ste. Genevieve in, 94-97 ; besieged by Childeric, 96 ; pictme of at close of Roman rule, 97-99 ; citizen of, 109-112

Luxembourg, 377, 378

M

Maison aux Piliers, " House of the Pillars,"

origin of, 265, and tmt& Man in the Iron Mask, buried in St. Paul,

277 Mansard the Elder designs Place Royale,

371 Mansard the Younger, his note on Louvre,

403 ; builds Invalides, 406-408 Marche, College of " La." Be& "La Marche " Marceau, St., suburb of, origin of, 94 Marcel, Etienne, character of his revolt,

265-268 Marcellus, St., Bishop of Paris, his shrines,

94 Marie de Medicis marries Henri IV., 362;

demands treasury at his death, 376 ; builds

LuxemboDrg, 377, 378 Mame, position of in Plain of Paris, 45 Marsh of the Esaonne, 68 ; of Plain of Paris,

*' Marais," 50 Martin, Rue St., corresponds to Roman

Road, 66 Mass, Red, said in Ste. Chapelle, 215, 216 Maurice de Sully. Slse " Sully " Maximns, his conquest, 93 ; his arch, 93, 93 Mayors of Palace, ri^e of, 144-148

Mazai-in, his power exaggerated, 366, 366 ;

effect of, on Paris, 398, 399 ; builds College

Mazarin, 399,400 ; continues Louvre, 400,

401 Mazarin, College of ("Institute," "Quatre

Nations "), 399, 400 M6decine, Ecole de, mediteval and modern,

244, 245 ; College of Burgundy becomes,

253

Medecine, Ecole de, Rue de 1', old Rue des

Cordeliers, 253 Medicis, Catherine de. Slse "Catherine" Medicis, Marie de. 8^ '* Marie " Melodunum. S&q " Melun " Melun, Labienus' retreat on, 68, 69 Menilmontant, old stream of, 60 Merciere, Galerie, first Gothic, built,

262, 263; burnt and rebuilt, 438, 439 Mercury, temple of, in Lutetia, becomes

St. Michel, 76 ; on Montmartre, 82 Merri, St., limit of town under Louis VI.,

House of Suger near, 190 Michel, St., Pont, 289, note; in eighteenth

century, 462 Michel, St., Boulevard, on site of Rue de la

Harpe, 462 Michel, St., du Palais, site of Temple of

Mercm-y, 76 Michel, St., Mont, in Normandy, a type of

Paris after invasion, 153, 154 Middle Ages, Early, as distinguished from

Dark Ages, 100 ; character of, 102, 103 ;

described, 163-173; three divisions of,

164, 165; Paris at close of, 217-224;

transition to later, 225. 226 Middle Ages, Later, causes of decline into,

226, 227 ; catastrophes of, 228 ; sterility

of, 229 ; general character of, 230-233 ;

picture of Paris at close of, 297-300 ;

death of, 301 ; stagnation at close of, 305 Mignon College, 252 Military position of Paris, 39, 40 Mirabeau influenced by England, 30; his

epigram on Paris, 35 Misanthrope, evidence of revolt of French

against Urand Siecle, 369 Moliere, his " Misanthrope," 359 Monge, Rue, on site of an Amphitheatre, 87 Montaigu, College of, 248 ; Calvin at, 248,

7io(e Montalembert, his speech on restoration of

Notre Dame, 426 Montereau, Pierre de, character of, 213 ;

builds Salute Chapelle, 214 Montfort, Simon de. Bishop of Paris, 180 Montgommery kills Henri II., 335 Montgommery, Tower of, 175 ; burnt, 439 ;

pulled down, 441 Montmartre, in view of Paris, 10-12;

position of in Plain of Paris, 46 ; pro- bably never wooded, 51 ; Roman ruins

on, 81, 82; Otto's Te Beutfi on, 157;

Jesuits founded in crypt of Church of,

336. Mont Ste, Genevieve, "Mons Lucotitius,"

474

INDEX

" Hill of University," in view of Paris, 6, 6 ; position of, in Plain of Paris, 43, 44 ; first extension of town upon, 49, 50 ; exodus of University to, 210 \ utilized by Soufflot, 431

N

NautEE, altar of, 73-75

Navarre, College of, 250

Nesle. hotel and tower of, 254,255; Philip

the Tail's widow in, 255, 256 NeuBtria, created by Frankish conquest,

121

Nicholas, St. fltee " Louvre "

Ninth century, "darkness of," 117; cha- racter of, 117-119 ; effect of invasions of, 153-155

Nominalists and Realists, 183, 184

Normans besiege Paris, 149-153; further attacks repelled, 154; their example to Europe, 165

Notre Dame, distant view of, 7, 8 ; example of continuity, 20 ; Childebert's first Church of, 129, 130 ; building of present cathe- dral, 194-201; Maurice de Sully begins, 195 ; burning of Romanesque Choir, 199, 200 ; finishing of shell of, 200 ; statues inside, 285 ; statue of Notre Dame de Paris (frontispiece), 286, 287 ; Henri IV. at, 348 ; effect of eighteenth century upon, 420-426; pavement removed, 420; glass destroyed, 421; statues removed, 422, 423; main door disfigured by Soufflot, 423-426 ; Moutalembert's speech on and Viollet la Due's restoration of, 426

Notre Dame, Bridge of, in history, 313 ; old bridge destroyed, 314; Renaissance Bridge of, 315-317 ; in eighteenth century, 461, 462

Notre Dame, canons of, interfere with Pont Rouge, 384

Opera typical of modem Paris, 16

Ordeal of the Cross, 102

Orfevres, Quay of, site of southern islet,

48,49 Oribasius publishes first book in Paris, 41 Orifiamme, origin of, 190 Orleans (Genabum), Roman road to, on

site of Rue St. Jacques, 83, 98 Orme, Peter de 1'. See " L'Orme " Otto II. attacks Paris, 157 Ouen, St. See •' Dado "

Palace. Sfee" Palais"; Mayors of the. Sise

"Mayors" Palais Royal, Roman reservoir in, 81 ;

built by Le Mercier for Richelieu, 388-391 Palais de Justice (Palais de la Cit6), con-

tinuity of, 19 ; Roman origins of, 76-79 ; under early Capetians, 174-176 ; rebuild- ing of, by Philippe le Bel. 261-264 ; Grande Salle (first), 261 ; Galerie Mer- ciere (first), 261 ; absorbed by lawyers, 261 ; Renaissance Cour des Comptes in, 317-319; still Gothic under Renaissance, 347 ; fire of 1618 in, 378 ; Grand Salle (second) rebuilt by de Brosse, 378-380 ; at opening of eighteenth century, 433 ; map of, 434 ; fire of 1737, 435, 436 ; Gabriel rebuilds Cour des Comptes, 437, 438; fire of 1776 in, 439; rebuilt by Desmaisons, 439-442

'Palais, Cardinal (aee " Palais Royal ") ; Mazarin (see "Mazarin"); Tuileries, Louvre, St. Paul, Tournelles, etc. See wjKJer fhcir names

Pallssy, his kilns at Tuileries, 341 ; his decorations of Pont Notre Dame, 346

Pantheon. See " Ste. Genevieve "

Paris, personality of, 1-3 ; view of, 4-12 ; character of streets, 12-15; continuity of, 17-21; a city state, 21-35; head of France, 25-27; mirrors Europe, 27-35; military position of, 39, 40; Gaulish, 62-56 ; first mentioned by Cassar, 59 ; Roman (see " Lutetia ") ; abandoned under Charlemagne, 117,148 ; siege of, by Normans, 149-153 ; picture of, at close of Dark Ages, 158-16!i ; in eleventh century, 174 ; effect of Crusades upon, 181 ; walled and paved by Philip Augustus, 205-209 ; picture of, at death of St. Louis, 2l7- 224 ; political history of, in Later Middle Ages, 233-240 ; accepts Henry V., 238, 239 ; expansion under Philippe le Bel, 244, 245 ; self-recognition under Marcel, 266 ; medifflval tenures in, 293-295 ; houses in mediaval, 295-297 ; picture of, at close of Middle Ages, 297-300 ; Gothic, at close of sixteenth century, 345-349 ; politics of, at close of sixteenth century, 355-357; rebuilding by Richelieu, 391, 392; incomplete appearance of, in seven- teenth century, 393 ; rebuilding ended under Louis XIV., 394-396 ; appearance of at death of Louis XIV., 403-409; political condition in eighteenth century, 416-420 ; picture of at eve of Revolution, 452-464

Parisii, origin and territory of, 60, 61 ; LabienuB conquera, 67-71

Parloir aux Bourgeois, 208

Pascal buried in at. Etienne du Mont, 388

Paul, St., Chapel of, founded by St. Blvy, 140 ; rebuilding of,.276, 277

Paul, St., Cemetery of, Rabelais'grave, etc., 277

Paul, St., H6tel or Palace, described, 281- 290 ; typical of Later Middle Ages, 271, 272 ; site and origin of, 272, 273 ; interior of, 275 ; Charles VI. in, 278 ; Isabella dies in, 279

Paul, St., Rue, corresponds to wall of

INDEX

475

Philip Augustus, 207 ; famous sites in,

Pavee, Rue, 244

Pavia, battle of, introduces full Kenais- sauce, 422

PelagiuB, 95 1l9

Pepin of Heristal, 147

Pepin the Short, 147, 148

Peres, Pont des St., 460, note,

Perrault, his colonnade on Louvve, 402, 403

Peter and Paul, basilica of, built by Clovis, 125 ; Ste. Genevieve buried in, 126

Petit Chatelet. 5ee " Chatelet "

Petit Pont, site of Roman bridge, 64 ; de- strayed in flood of 1296, 261 ; burnt, 450, •note.

Philip the Tall, his widow founds College of Burgundy, 253; in Tour de Nesle, 255, 256

Philippe Augustus, development of king- ship by, 171 ; builds Louvre, 201-205 ; and wall, 205 -2 j9

Philippe le Bel destroys Templars, 257- 259 ; builds medlajval palace, 261-265 ; statue of, in Notre Dame, 285

Picardy, College of, 242, 243

Pilon, his clock for Henri in., 346

Places des Vosges, de la Concorde, etc. See MwdAr tlwir Tiames

Polytechnique, College of, 249

Pompadour, Madame de, saves Louvre, 447

Pont, Notre Dame, etc. 5ee wTWfer thtir jiames

Pont Nenf, origin of, 341 ; Henri III. dedi- cates, 342 ; character of, 343 ; completed, 372, 373

Pont St. Landry. See " Landry "

Population, fluctuations of, in eighteenth century, 415

Presle, Collage of, 245

Prison of Glaucinia. See " Glauciuus "

Quatre Nations, College of the. See

"Mazarin" Quays, Orfevres, Celestins, etc. See under

thsir names

R

Rabelais, his grave, 277

Ramhouillet, H6tel de, forerunner of Palais

Royal, 390 Racine buried in St. Etienne du Mont, 388 Rate (Rue des), 244 Ravaillac assassinates Henri IV., 362 Realists and Nominalists, 183, 184 Rebuilding of seventeenth century, politics

explaining it, 350-368 Reformation, effect of, on France and

Paris, 351-356 Renaissance, contrast with Middle Ages,

303 ; slow to enter Paris, 309 ; ornament

on Chatelet, 310 ; Pavia originates full,

322 ; becomes French with Lescot, 333 ; domestic examples of, 336 ; imperfect in Paris at close of sixteenth century, 345- 349 Reservoir, Roman, 81 Revolution cramped in old Paris, 453-456 ;

Paris at eve of, 456-464 Rheims, College of, abandoned in seven- teenth century, 387 Ricciarelli, his statue, 371, 372 Richemont, his entry into Paris, 279 Richelieu, Cardinal de, character and policy of, 363-365 ; efifect of, on city, 381 ; con- tinues Louvre, 382, 383; builds Isles St. Louie, 384, 385 ; Sorbonne, 385 ; Palais Royal, 388-391 Robert the Strong, 149 ; family of, 155 Robert of Paris (son), momentary king- ship of, 155 Robert (King) re-endows St. Germain

I'Auxerrois, 128, 129 Roman civilization, character of, 105, 106 ; transformed in dark ages, 104 ; extension by Barbaricus, 114 Roman conquest of Lutetia. See " Labi-

enuB " Roman Paris. See " Lutetia " Rondelet, pupil of Soufftot, 432 Ronsard commemorated in Louvre, 355 Rouge, Pont, 384, 385 ; falling in 1788, 462 Royale, Place, built by elder Mansard for

Henri IV., 370-372 Rues St. Martin, St. Jacques, etc. See under their names

S

Sainte Chapelle, building of, 212-216; treasury of, 215 ; treasury of, destroyed, 437; west front of, 290; Henri III.'s rood-screen in, 346

Sainte 7 Persons, ohurches, etc. See under

St. I fJieir Tiames

Salle, Grande. See " Palais "

Salle du Legat. -Sfee " H6tel Dieu "

Saragossa, siege of, by Childebert, 131

Scotch College, 251

See of Paris, same as territory of Parisii, 61 ; founded by St. Denis, 72 ; past occu- pants of, 90 ; St. Germanus in, 127 ; Euse- bius, 141 ; St. Landry, 143 ; Simon de Montfort, 180 ; Sully, Maurice de, 195

Seine, valley of, 36-39 ; a military road, 40 ; commercial value of. 42 ; height and course of, in Plain of Paris, 43

Sens-sur-Yonne, head town of Seuones, hence metropolitan to Paris, 61 ; ad- vanced base of Labienus, 68

Serpente. Rue, 252

Seven Years' War, contemporary with foundations of Pantheon, 432

Seventeenth century, nature of, 360-353, 359-368 ; university during, 386-389 ; Paris in middle of, 393; College de France in, 404

476

INDEX

Severin, St., 251

Siege of Paris, probable, by Childeric, 96 j

by ]SormanB, 149-153 ; by Henri IV.,

360 Siger. Sfee •' Dante " Simon de Montfort. Ste " Montfort " Sixteenth century, nature of, 353-358 Solomon, or Brosse. St^ " Brosse." Sorbonne, origin of, 211 ; rebuilt by Riche- lieu, 385 SouflBot spoils door of Notre Dame, 423-

426 ; builds Pantheon, 428-433 ; dies, 432 Statues, edict of Childehert against, 12V ;

of Henri IV., etc. <Siee wnder thAir names Stephen, St., first Eoman basilica, 130;

destroyed ou completion of Notre Dame,

200, 201 Stephen, St., on the hill. See " Etienne du

Mont, St." Suburbs, Eoman, 80-88 ; of Frankish Paris,

13V-139 ; map of. 139 Suger opens twelfth century, 182 ; position.

and work of, 189, 190 ; introduces Gothic,

191 Sully (Maurice de) builds Notre Dame, 195 Sully, minister of Henri IV. at arsenal,

376 Sulpice, St., completed in eighteenth cen- tury, 451 Sylvestre, Isaac, his etching of ornament on

cbatelet, 312 ; engravings of seventeenth

century, 393, 394 Symphorien, St., shrine of prison of Glau-

cinus, 111

T

Table, marble, of Grande Salle, 264 ; de- stroyed, 3T8 Templars, 256-261 Temple, site of, 257 ; circular church of,

259 ; tower used as a prison, 259 Tenures m medieval Paris, 293-295 TertuUus, 149 Testry, battle of, 147 Thermae, Palace of, 84 ; gardens of, 85 Thirteenth century, character of, 165, 166 Thomas, St., in University, 248 Thomas, St., du Louvre. See " Louvre " Tiberius, altar of Nauts raised under, 73 Touraelles, HCtel or Palace of, Bedford in, 279 ; Louis XI. in, 279, 288 ; Catherine de Medict'a designs to destroy, 288 ; Place Koyale built on site of park of, 370 Tour de V Horloge. See " Horloge " Tour Montgommery, De Nesle, etc. See

UTider thMr names Tours, College of, 252

Treasury of Sainte Chapelle. See " Sainte

Chapelle " Treguier, College of, 252 Tuileri^s, Palace of, origin of, 337 ; building ■

of, 338, 339 ; original style of, 340; Rue

du Bac due 1o, 341 ; garden of, 341 ;

additions to, an example of seventeenth

century, 406

U

University, colleges of. See wider their names

University completes Paris, 26 ; origin of, 209-211; mediasval, general description of and enumeration of colleges in, 240-256 ; cosmopolitan quality of spoilt by Reformation, 386 ; state of In seven- teenth century, 387-389 ; - at eve of Revo- lution, 463

University, Hill of. See "Mont Ste. Genevieve "

Valley of Seine. See " Seine " Versailles strangles Louvre, 403 Vexin, oriflamme banner of, 190 Victorinus, Bishop of Paris, 72, 90 Villa, nature of Roman, 109, 110 Villon , similarity of verses in Danse

Macabre to, 283 Vincent, St., Abbey of. See "St. Germain

des Pres " VioUet le Due restores Notre Dame, 426 Vosges, Place des, modern name of Place

Royale {q.v.)

W

Wall, Roman, 77 ; of Philip Augustus, 205-209 ; of Etienne Marcel and Charles v., 267-269 ; interferes with Palais Royale, 389

Westminster Abbey, site of, compared to St. Germain des Pr6s, 133

Westminster Hall compared to Grande Salle, 380

Wilkinson takes first prize of University, 387

Willoughby capitulates in Bastille, 239

Xavier, St, Francis, at Colleges of Ste. Barbe and Beauvais, 260, note

Yenne, de St., his story of proposed sale of Louvre, 449, 450

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