Paris

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.

http://www.archive.org/details/cu31924013585843

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

58 PARIS

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

LUTETIA 59

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)

6o PARIS

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.

LUTETIA 6 1

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.

63 PARIS

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.

LUTETIA 63

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

64 PARIS

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

LUTETIA 65

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

F

66 PARIS

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.

LUTETIA 67

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

68 PARIS

(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

LUTETIA 69

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

70 PARIS

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

LUTETIA 71

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

72 PARIS

(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.

LUTETIA 73

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

74 PARIS

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.

LUTETIA 75

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

76 PARIS

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.

LUTETIA yy

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

78 PARIS

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

LUTETIA 79

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

8o PARIS

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

LUTETIA 8i

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

82 PARIS

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

LUTETIA 83

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

84 PARIS

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

LUTETIA 85

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

86 PARIS

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

LUTETIA 87

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

88 PARIS

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 :

LUTETIA 89

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

90 PARIS

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.

LUTETIA 91

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

92 PARIS

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

LUTETIA 93

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

94 PARIS

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

LUTETIA 95

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

96 PARIS

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

LUTETIA 97

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.

100 PARIS

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

102 PARIS

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.

104 PARIS

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

Io6 PARIS

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

108 PARIS

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

no PARIS

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

112 PARIS

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

114 PARIS

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

Ii6 PARIS

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,

122 PARIS

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

PARIS IN THE DARK AGES 123

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

124 PARIS

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.

125

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

126 PARIS

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

PARIS IN THE DARK AGES 127

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

132 PARIS

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

136 PARIS

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

PARIS IN THE DARK AGES 137

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

138 PARIS

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

PARIS IN THE DARK AGES

139

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.

ST MERRY

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

140 PARIS

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.

PARIS IN THE DARK AGES 141

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

142 PARIS

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.

PARIS IN THE DARK AGES 143

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.

144 PARIS

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

PARIS IN THE DARK AGES 145

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

146 PARIS

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

PARIS IN THE DARK AGES 147

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

148 PARIS

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.

PARIS IN THE DARK AGES 149

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,

ISO PARIS

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

PARIS IN THE DARK AGES 151.

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."

152 PARIS

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

PARIS IN THE DARK AGES iS3

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

154 PARIS

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

PARIS IN THE DARK AGES 155

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

iS6 PARIS

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

PARIS IN THE DARK AGES 157

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

ijS PARIS

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

PARIS IN THE DARK AGES 159

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

i6o PARIS

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

M

i62 PARIS

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.

1 64 PARIS

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

THE EARLY MIDDLE AGES 165

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.

i66 PARIS

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

THE EARLY MIDDLE AGES 167

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.

1 68 PARIS

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

THE EARLY MIDDLE AGES 169

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

I70 PARIS

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

1/2 PARIS

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,

174 PARIS

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

176 PARIS

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;

N

178 PARIS

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,"

THE EARLY MIDDLE AGES 179

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

i8o PARIS

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

1 82 PARIS

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

THE EARLY MIDDLE AGES 183

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

1 84 PARIS

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,

THE EARLY MIDDLE AGES 185

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,

1 86 PARIS

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

THE EARLY MIDDLE AGES 187

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)

i88 PARIS

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

THE EARLY MIDDLE AGES 189

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,

igo PARIS

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

THE EARLY MIDDLE AGES 191

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

192 PARIS

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.

THE EARLY MIDDLE AGES 193

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

194 PARIS

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

THE EARLY MIDDLE AGES 195

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

196 PARIS

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

THE EARLY MIDDLE AGES 197

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

igS PARIS

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

THE EARLY MIDDLE AGES 199

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

2O0 PARIS

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

THE EARLY MIDDLE AGES 201

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 ;

202 PARIS

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

THE EARLY MIDDLE AGES 203

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

204 PARIS

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.

THE EARLY MIDDLE AGES 205

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

2o6 PARIS

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

THE EARLY MIDDLE AGES 207

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

3o8 PARIS

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

THE EARLY MIDDLE AGES 209

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

2IO PARIS

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.

THE EARLY MIDDLE AGES 211

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

212 PARIS

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

THE EARLY MIDDLE AGES 213

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

214 PARIS

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

THE EARLY MIDDLE AGES 215

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

2i6 PARIS

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

#:t.J-;: ..\

f*0O^_

THE EARLY MIDDLE AGES 217

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

226 PARIS

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

230 PARIS

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

234 PARIS

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

236 PARIS

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

THE LATER MIDDLE AGES 237

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

238 PARIS

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

THE LATER MIDDLE AGES 239

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.

340 PARIS

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.

THE LATER MIDDLE AGES 241

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

242 PARIS

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

244 PARIS

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

THE LATER MIDDLE AGES 245

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

246 PARIS

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.

THE LATER MIDDLE AGES 247

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

248 PARIS

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.

THE LATER MIDDLE AGES 249

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

250 PARIS

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.

THE LATER MIDDLE AGES 251

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.

2S2 PARIS

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

THE LATER MIDDLE AGES 253

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

25 4 PARIS

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

THE LATER MIDDLE AGES 255

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 ;

256 PARIS

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

258 PARIS

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

26o PARIS

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,

262 PARIS

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

THE LATER MIDDLE AGES 263

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

264 PARIS

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.

266 PARIS

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

268 PARIS

(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.

270 PARIS

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

THE LATER MIDDLE AGES 271

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

272 PARIS

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

274 PARIS

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

THE LATER MIDDLE AGES 275

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.

276 PARIS

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.

THE LATER MIDDLE AGES 277

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

278 PARIS

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,

THE LATER MIDDLE AGES 279

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

zSo PARIS

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

THE LATER MIDDLE AGES 281

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.

282 PARIS

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.

THE LATER MIDDLE AGES 283

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.

284 PARIS

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

THE LATER MIDDLE AGES 285

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

286 PARIS

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

THE LATER MIDDLE AGES 287

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

28g PARIS

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.

THE LATER MIDDLE AGES 289

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

290 PARIS

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

THE LATER MIDDLE AGES 291

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

2g5 PARIS

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

THE LATER MIDDLE AGES 293

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

294 PARIS

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

THE LATER MIDDLE AGES 295

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

296 PARIS

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

THE LATER MIDDLE AGES 297

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

298 PARIS

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

THE LATER MIDDLE AGES 299

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

300 PARIS

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."

( 301 )

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

302 PARIS

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

THE RENAISSANCE 303

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

304 PARIS

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

THE RENAISSANCE 305

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

X

3o6 PARIS

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

THE RENAISSANCE 307

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

3o8 PARIS

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

THE RENAISSANCE 309

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,

3IO PARIS

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

THE RENAISSANCE 3"

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).

312 PARTS

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.

314 PARIS

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

THE RENAISSANCE 3'5

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

3i6 PARIS

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

THE RENAISSANCE 317

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.

3i8 PARIS

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.

THE RENAISSANCE 319

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

320 PARIS

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

THE RENAISSANCE 321

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

322 PARIS

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.

THE RENAISSANCE 323

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.

324 PARIS

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.

THE RENAISSANCE 3^5

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

326 PARIS

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 "

THE RENAISSANCE 327

(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.

328 PARIS

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.

THE RENAISSANCE 329

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 ;

330 PARIS

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 ;

THE RENAISSANCE 331

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

332 PARIS

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

THE RENAISSANCE 333

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.

334 PARIS

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

THE RENAISSANCE 335

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

336 PARIS

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.

THE RENAISSANCE 337

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

338 PARIS

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.

THE RENAISSANCE 339

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

340 PARIS

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

THE RENAISSANCE 341

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,

342 PARIS

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.

THE RENAISSANCE 343

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

344 PARIS

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

THE RENAISSANCE 345

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.

346 PARIS

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

THE RENAISSANCE 347

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

348 PARIS

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.

THE RENAISSANCE 349

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.

3S0 PARIS

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

352 PARIS

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

3S4 PARIS

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

THE REBUILDING 355

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

356 PARIS

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

THE REBUILDING 357

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

358 PARIS

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

THE REBUILDING 359

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

36o PARIS

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

THE REBUILDING 361

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

362 PARIS

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.

THE REBUILDING 363

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

364 PARIS

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

THE REBUILDING 365

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

366 PARIS

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

THE REBUILDING 367

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

368 PARIS

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

THE REBUILDING 369

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

370 PARIS

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

THE REBUILDING 371

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

372 PARIS

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,

THE REBUILDING 373

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.

374 PARIS

(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

THE REBUILDING 375

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

376 PARIS

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.

THE REBUILDING 377

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

378 PARIS

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

THE REBUILDING 379

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.

38o PARIS

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

THE REBUILDING 381

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.

382 PARIS

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

THE REBUILDING 383

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

384 PARIS

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

THE REBUILDING 385

" 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

386 PARIS

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

THE REBUILDING 387

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

388 PARIS

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

THE REBUILDING 389

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

390 PARIS

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

THE REBUILDING 391

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

392 PARIS

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

THE REBUILDING 393

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.

394 PARIS

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

THE REBUILDING 395

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.

396 PARIS

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

THE REBUILDING 397

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

398 PAJi/S

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

THE REBUILDING 399

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

400 PARIS

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

THE REBUILDING 401

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

402 PARIS

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

THE REBUILDING 403

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

404 PARIS

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

THE REBUILDING 405

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

4p6 PARIS

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.

THE REBUILDING 407

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

4o8 PARIS

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

THE REBUILDING 409

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.

4IO PARIS

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

THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY 411

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.

412 PARIS

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

414 PARIS

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.

THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY 415

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

2e

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

420 PARIS

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

422 PARIS

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

424 PARIS

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

426 PARIS

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

428 PARIS

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

430 PARIS

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

THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY 431

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

432 PARIS

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,

2f

434

PARIS

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 ;

THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY 435

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

436 PARTS

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

THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY i,yj

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

438 PARIS

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.

THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY 439

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

440 PARIS

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.

THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY 441

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

442 PARIS

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

THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY 443

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

444 PARIS

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

THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY 445

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.

446 PARIS

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

THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY 447

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,

448 PARIS

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

THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY 449

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

4SO PARIS

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

THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY 451

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.

452 PARIS

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.

THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY 453

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

THE END

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