Beadle's New York Dime Library, No. 144 — page 14: what you’re looking at

Machine-transcribed from the original scan — historical spelling and the odd misread are preserved.

a4 THE HUNCHBACK OF NOTRE-DAME. Ww ms €4 a "Se : selves; wells of civilization, if we may be allowed the expression, and drains also, where all that con- stitutes the sap, the life, the soul, of a nation is in- cessantly collecting and flittering, drop by drop, age by ave. The.inclosure of Charies V. eonsequently shared the same fate as that of Philip Augustus. So early as the conclusion of the fifteenth century it was overtaken, passed, and the suburbs kept traveling on- ward. Im the sixteenth, it seemed to be visibly re- ceding more and more into the ancient city, so rapidly did the new town thicken on the other side of it. Thus, year ruin intervals above this sea of houses, like the tops of from amidst an inundation, like the archipelagoes of old Paris submerged beneath the new. , Since that time Paris has, uwnluckily one more inclosuse, that: ot Louis XV.,° a miserable wall of mud and dirt, worthy of the. king who | mother streets, the two great arteries of Paris. All the constructed. it and the poet by whom it-was celebra- | Le mur murant Paris rend Paris murmurant. In the fifteenth eentury Paris was still divided into three totally distinct and separate cities, each having itaonhD ysiognomy; individuality, manners, customs, privileges, 2 § biatory: the City, the University, and the Ville. e City, which occupied the island, was the mother of the two others, and cooped up between them,, 1 yi pt og forgive the comparison—like a little old woman between two handsome, strapping daughters. The University covered the left bank of the Seine from the Tournelle to the Tower of Nesle, points corresponding the one with the Halls aux Vins, and the other with the Mint, of modern Paris. Its in- closure encroached considerably upon the plain where Julian had built his baths. Genevieve. The highest point of this curve of walls was the Papal Gate, which stood nearly upon the site of the present Pantheon. The Ville, the most exten- sive of the divisions, ‘stretched along the right bank. Its quay ran, with several interruptions, indeed, along the Seine, from the Tower of Billy to the Tower Du Bois, that is to say, from the spot where the Gre- nierd’Abondance now stands to that occupied by the Tuileries. ‘hese four points, at which the Seine inter- sected the inclosure of the capital, the Tournelle and the Tower of 6 on the left, and the Tower of Billy and. the Tower du Bois on the right, were called by netrated still further into the fields than the pep em The culminating point of the inclosure of the Ville was at the gates of Denis and St. Mar- tin, the sites of which remain unchanged to this day, Each of these great divisions of Paris was, as we have observed, a city, but a city too special to be com- plete, a city which could not do without the two others. Thus they had three totally different aspects. The City, properly so called, abounded in churches ; the Ville contained the Palaces; and the University, the Colleges. Setting aside secondary jurisdictions, we may assume generally that the island» was under the bishop, the right bank under the provost ot the merchants, the left under the rector of University and the whole under the provost of Paris, a royal and not a miunicipal officer. The City had the cathedral of Notre-Dame ; the Ville, the Louvre. and the Hotel de Ville; and the University, the Sorbonne. The Ville con- tained the Halles ; the City, the Hotel-Dieu; and the Univ , the Pre aux Clercs. For offenses com- mitted by the students on the left bank in their Pre aux ae me § were tried at the Palace of Justice in the island, punished on the right bank at Mont- vr of eminence ‘‘the four towers of Paris.’’ The Ville pe ftaucon; unless the rector, finding the University strong and the king weak, chose to interfere; for it was 4 privilege of the scholars to be hung in their own quarter. . ; , Most of these privileges, be it remarked, by-the-way, and some of them were more valuable than that just mentioned, had been extorted from different sovereigns by riots and insurrections. This is the invariable course—the king never grants any boon but what is wrung from by the people. In the fifteenth century that part of the Seine com- prehended within the inclosure of Paris contained five islands: the Ne Loaviers, then covered with trees, aud now with timber, the Ile aux Vaches,and the lle Notre- Dame, both uninhabited and belonging to the bishop (in the seventeenth century these two islands were converted into one, which has been built upon and is now called the Isle of St. Louis); lastly, the City, at its int the islet of the Passeur aux Vaches, and since aried under the platform of the Pont Neuf. The City had at that time five bridges; three on the right, the bridge of Notre-Dame and the Pont aux Change of stone, and the Pont aux Meuniers of wood; two on the left, the Petit Pont of stone, and the Pont St. Michel of wood; allof them covered with houses. The Uni- versity had six gates, built by Philip Augustus ; these were, setting out from the Tournelle, the Gate of St. Victor, the Gate of Bordelle, the Papal Gate, and the Gates of St. Jacques, St. Michel, and St. Germain. The Ville had six gates, built by Charles V., that is to say, beginning from the ‘Tower of Billy, the Gates of St. Antoine, the Temple, St. Martin, St. Denis, Montmartre, and St. Honore, All these gates were strong and hand- some, too, a circumstance which does not detract from strenuth.. A wide, deep ditch, suppliéd by the Seine with water, which was swollen by the floods of winter to a running stream, encircled the foot of the wall all round Paris, At night the gates were closed, the river ‘spectator perceived immediately two _ three cities, nearly iu a right line, from one end to the other, from south to north, perpendicularly to the so far back as the fifteenth century, to come down no | Sejne, incessantly pouring the people of the one into further, Paris had already worn out the three concen- | th tric circles of walls which, from the time of Julian the | converting the three into one, Apostate, lay in embryo, ifI may be allowed the ex-. pression, in the Grand and Petit Chatelet. The mighty | city had successively burst its four mural belts, like a) growing boy bursting the garments made for him a, o., Unler Lowis XI..there were still .to be seen | towers of the ancient inclosures, wising at | Pont Notre- ills | Harpe on the left bank, Rue de la Barillerie in the island, Rue St. Denis on the right bank, Pont St. Mi-, . ha | chel over one arm of the Seine, and Pont au Change for us, under- | gone further transformation, but it has overleaped only | Ville. Still, though they bore so many different names, It included the hill of St. | was barred at the two extremities of the city by stout iron chains, and Paris slept in quiet. _. A bird's eye view of these three towns, the City, the University, and the Ville, exhibited to the eye an inex- tricable knot of streets strangely jumbled together. It was apparent, however, at first sight, that these three fragments of a city formed but a single body. The ong parallel streets, without break or interruption, crossing the other, connecting, blending them together and The first of these streets ran from the gate of St. Jacques to the gate. of St. Martin,; it was called in the University. the Street of St. Jacques, in the City Rue de la Juiverie, and in the Ville, the Street of St. Martin ; it crossed the river fylce by the. name of, Petit Pont and ame. ‘The second, named Rue de la over the other, ran from the gate of St. Denis in the they formed in reality only two streets, but the two other veius of the triple city were led by or discharged themselves into these. ' Besides these two principal diametrical streets cross- ing Paris breadthwise and common to the entire capital, the Ville and the University had. each its chief street. runping longitudinally. parallel with the Seine, and in its course intersecting the two arterial streets ut. righbtangles, Thus in the Ville you might go ina di- rect poston the Gate of St. Antoine to the Gate of St. Honore, and in the University from. the Gate of St. Victor to the Gate of St. Germain, thoronghfares, crossed by the two former, con tituted the frame n which rested the mazy web of the streets, of Paris, knotted and jumbled together in every possible way. In the unintelligible plan of this labyrinth might moreover be distinguished, on closer examination, two clusters of wide streets, which ran, expanding like sheaves of corn, from the bridges to the gates, Some- what.of this geometrical plan subsists tu this day. , What then was the aspect of this whole, viewed from the summit of the towers of Notre-Dame in 1482? That is what we shall now attempt to describe, The spec- tator, on arriving breathless at that elevation, was daz- zled by the chaos of roofs, chimneys, streets, bridyes, belfries, towers, and steeples. All burst at once upon the eye—the carved gable, the sharp roof, the. turret perched upon the angles of the walls, the stone pyramid of the eleventh century, the slated obelisk of the fif- teenth, the round and naked keep of the castle, the square and embroidered tower of e church, the great and the small, the massive and the light. The eye was dong ewildered amidst this Jabyrinth of heights and depths in which there was nothing but issued from the hand of art, from the humblest dwell- ing, with its ted and carved wooden front, elliptical doorway, and overhanging stories, to the royal Louvré, which then had acolonnade of towers. _ But when the ny began to reduce this tumult ot edifices to some nd of order, the principal masses that stood out from amony them were these: To begin with the city. ° ‘* The island of the City,” says Souval, who amidst his frivolous gossip, has oc- casionally some good ideas, ‘‘ the island of the City is shaped like a great ship which hath taken the ground. and is stuck fast in the mud, nearly in the middle of the channel of the Seine.’ We have already stated that in the fifteenth century this ship was moored to the two banks of the river by five bridges. © This re- semblance toa vessel had struck the heralds.of those times; for itis to this circumstance, and not to ‘he seige of the Normans, that, according to Favyn and Pasquier, the ship blazoned in the ancient arms of Paris owes its origin. To those whocan decipher it heraldry is an algebra, alanguage. The entire history of the second half of the Middle Aves is written in her- aldry ; as the history of the first half in, the ip ery of the Roman churches; ‘tis but the hieroglyphics of the feudal system succeeding thos@ot theocracy. . The City, then, claimed the first notice, with its stern to the east and its head to the west. ‘Turning the latter, you had before you a countless multitude of old roofs, above which rose the widely swellin lead-covered cupola of the Holy ti like the bae ofan elephant supporting its tower. this case, in- deed, the place of the tower was occupied by, the lightest, the boldest, the most elegant steeple that ever owed the sky to be seen through its cone of lace- work. Just in frontof Notre-Dame, three streets dis- gorged themselves into Paris,a handsome square of oldhouses. On the southside of this square was the Hotel Dieu, with its grim, wrinkled, overhanging front, and its roof which seemed to be covered with warts and pimples. Then, to the right and to the left, to the east and to the west, within the narrow compass of the city, rose the steeples of its twenty-one churches of all dates, of all forms, of all dimensions, from the low, crazy Roman campanile of St. Denis du Pas to the slender spires of St. Pierre aux Bceufs and St. Landry. Behind Notre-Dame, to the north, the cloisters unfolded themselves with their Gothic galleries ; to the south the semi-Roman palace of the bishop ; to the east the open area called the Terrain. Amidst this mass of buildings, the eye might still distinguish, by the lofty mitres of stone which crowned the topmost windows, then placed in the roofs even of paldces themselves, the hotel given by the city inthe time of Charles VI., de Suvenal des Ursins ; alittle further on, the tarred sheds of the market of Palus; beyond that the new choir of St. Germain le Vieux, lengthened in 1458 at the expénse of one end of the Rue aux Feves; and then, at intervals, an open space thronged with people; a pillory erected at the corner of a street ; afine piece of ese two great, toward it ‘Rificent slabs, chan laidin the middle of the way ; a vacant back court wit! “some spacious stone _of the same art as the sim the pavement of Phiip Augustus, composed of mag: nelad roy the sake of the horses and one of those transparent staircase ‘turrets which wer constructed in the fifteenth century, and a specimen : which may still be seen in the Rue de Bo Lastly, on the right of the Holy Chapel, to ti. Oonni. the west, the, Palace of Justice was séated, with its roup of towers, on the bank of the river. The planta- ons of the king’s gardens, which covered the westerm pest of the city, intercepted the view of the islet of asseur. As for the water, it was ely to be seen at either end of the city from the towers of Notre-Dame; the Seine being concealed by bridges, and the bridges: by the houses, . ' When the eye passed these bridges; whose roofs were reen with moss, the effect not so much of age as of damp from thé water, ifit turned to the left, toward the University, the first building, which struck it was a clump of towers, the Petit Chatelet, the yawning gateway of which swallowed up the end of the Petit Pont ; then, if it followed the, dix of the river from east to west, from the Tourne to the Tower of Nesle, it perceived a a San of houses with carved beums projecting, story beyond story, over the pave- ment, an interminable zigzag of tradesmen’s houses, frequently broken by the end of a street, and from time to time also by the front or perhaps the angle of ion, seated at its ease, with d this populace of narrow its courts and gardens, closely ¢rowded or bem like a man of consequence among his dependents. e were five or six of these mansions on the quay, from the 1 de Lorraine, which divided with the Bernardines the exteusive in- closure contiguous to the Totirnelle, to the Hotel de Nesle, whose principal tower was the boundary of Paris, and whose pointed roofs for three months of the year eclipsed with their triangles corresponding por- tions of the scarlet disk of the setting sun. On this side of the Seine there was much less traffic than on the other; the students made more noise and bustle there than the artizans, and thére was no quay, properly speaking, except from the bridge of St. Michel to the Tower of Nesle. The rest of the bank of the Seine was in some places a neken strand, as be- yond the Bernardines; in others a mass of houses: Yess ing on the brink of the water, as between the two ridges, — , Great was the din here kept up by the washerwomen ; they gabbled, shouted, sang, from morning till night, along the bank, and soundly beat their linen, mucti the same.as they do at present. Among the sights of Paris this is By no means the dullest. . ' he University brought the eye toa full stop. From one enfl to the other it was a homogeneous, compact ; whole. Those thousand roofs, close, angular, adhering toyether, almost all composed of the same geometrical elements, scen from above, presented the appearanc« of a crystallization of one and the same substance. The capricious ravines of the streeta did not out this pile of houses into two disproportionate slices. The forty- two colleges were distributed among them in a suffi- ciently equal manner. The curigns and varied suim- mits of these beautiful buildings were the production ofs which they over- topped; in fact, they were but a multiplication by the square or the cube of the same geometrical figure. They diversified the whole, therefore, without con!us- ing it; the alt without overloadingit. Geom- etry is hatmnon , Some superb mansious, too, made here and there magnificent in among the pictnr- esque garrets of the left bank; the logis de Nevers, the lovis de Romé, the logis de Reims which have been swept away; the Hotel de Cluny, which still subsists for the consolation of the artist, and the tower of which was so stupidly uncrowned some years ago. That Ro- man palace with bedutiful circular a near Cluny, was tlie baths of Julian. There were likewise many abbeys, of amore severe beauty than the hotels, but: neither less handsome nor less spacious. Those which first struck the eye were the Bernardines with their three steeples; St. Genevieve, the squaré tower: of which, still extant, excites such regret for the loss: of the rest; the Sorbonne, half college, ‘half mc nas- tery, an admirable nave of which still survives; the beautiful fe pas faery cloister of the Mathurins; eighbor, the cloister of St. Benedict; the Corde- li with their three enormous gables, side by side: and the Augustines, the graceful steeple of which made the second indentation (the Tower of Nesle being the first ), on this side of Paris, setting out trom the West. The colleges, which are, in fact, the intermedi- ate link between cloister and the world, formed the mean, in the series of buildings, between the mansions: and the abbeys, with an austerity full of elegance, a scpip sate less gaudy than that of the palaces, an archi- tecture less serious than that of the convents. Untor- tunately, searcely any vestiges are lest of these edifices, in which Gothic art steered with such precision a middle course between luxury and economy. The churches—and they were both numerous and splendid in the University, and of every age of architecture, from the circular arches of St. Julian to the pointed ones of St. Severin—the churches overtopped all and like an additiond) harmony in this mass of harmoniés, they shot up every instant above the slashed gables, the open-work pinnacles and belfries, and the airy spires, the line of which also was but a magnificent exaggera- tion of the acute angle of the roofs. The site of the University was hilly. To the south- east the hill of St, Genevieve formed an enormous wen ; and it was a curious. sight to see from the top of Notre-Dame that multitude of narrow, winding streets, now called Le Pays Latin, those clusters of houses, which, scattered in all directions from the summit of that eminence, confusedly covered its sides down to the water's edge, seeming some of them to be falling, others to be climbing up again, and al) to be holding fast by one another. An incessant stream of thousands of COUMICC OOO) (E@)