construction maison contemporaine haute savoie

book third.chapter i. notre-dame. the church of notre-dame de paris is stillno doubt, a majestic and sublime edifice. but, beautiful as it has been preserved ingrowing old, it is difficult not to sigh, not to wax indignant, before the numberlessdegradations and mutilations which time and men have both caused the venerable monument to suffer, without respect for charlemagne,who laid its first stone, or for philip augustus, who laid the last. on the face of this aged queen of ourcathedrals, by the side of a wrinkle, one

always finds a scar. tempus edax, homo edacior; which i shouldbe glad to translate thus: time is blind, man is stupid. if we had leisure to examine with thereader, one by one, the diverse traces of destruction imprinted upon the old church,time's share would be the least, the share of men the most, especially the men of art, since there have been individuals whoassumed the title of architects during the last two centuries. and, in the first place, to cite only a fewleading examples, there certainly are few

finer architectural pages than this facade,where, successively and at once, the three portals hollowed out in an arch; the broidered and dentated cordon of the eightand twenty royal niches; the immense central rose window, flanked by its twolateral windows, like a priest by his deacon and subdeacon; the frail and lofty gallery of trefoil arcades, which supportsa heavy platform above its fine, slender columns; and lastly, the two black andmassive towers with their slate penthouses, harmonious parts of a magnificent whole, superposed in five gigantic stories;--develop themselves before the eye, in a

mass and without confusion, with theirinnumerable details of statuary, carving, and sculpture, joined powerfully to the tranquil grandeur of the whole; a vastsymphony in stone, so to speak; the colossal work of one man and one people,all together one and complex, like the iliads and the romanceros, whose sister it is; prodigious product of the groupingtogether of all the forces of an epoch, where, upon each stone, one sees the fancyof the workman disciplined by the genius of the artist start forth in a hundred fashions; a sort of human creation, in aword, powerful and fecund as the divine

creation of which it seems to have stolenthe double character,--variety, eternity. and what we here say of the facade must besaid of the entire church; and what we say of the cathedral church of paris, must besaid of all the churches of christendom in the middle ages. all things are in place in that art, self-created, logical, and well proportioned. to measure the great toe of the foot is tomeasure the giant. let us return to the facade of notre-dame,as it still appears to us, when we go piously to admire the grave and puissantcathedral, which inspires terror, so its chronicles assert: quoe mole sua terroremincutit spectantibus.

three important things are to-day lackingin that facade: in the first place, the staircase of eleven steps which formerlyraised it above the soil; next, the lower series of statues which occupied the niches of the three portals; and lastly the upperseries, of the twenty-eight most ancient kings of france, which garnished thegallery of the first story, beginning with childebert, and ending with phillip augustus, holding in his hand "the imperialapple." time has caused the staircase to disappear,by raising the soil of the city with a slow and irresistible progress; but, while thuscausing the eleven steps which added to the

majestic height of the edifice, to be devoured, one by one, by the rising tide ofthe pavements of paris,--time has bestowed upon the church perhaps more than it hastaken away, for it is time which has spread over the facade that sombre hue of the centuries which makes the old age ofmonuments the period of their beauty. but who has thrown down the two rows ofstatues? who has left the niches empty? who has cut, in the very middle of the centralportal, that new and bastard arch? who has dared to frame therein that commonplace and heavy door of carved wood, a la louis xv.,beside the arabesques of biscornette?

the men, the architects, the artists of ourday. and if we enter the interior of theedifice, who has overthrown that colossus of saint christopher, proverbial formagnitude among statues, as the grand hall of the palais de justice was among halls,as the spire of strasbourg among spires? and those myriads of statues, which peopledall the spaces between the columns of the nave and the choir, kneeling, standing,equestrian, men, women, children, kings, bishops, gendarmes, in stone, in marble, in gold, in silver, in copper, in wax even,--who has brutally swept them away? it is not time.

and who substituted for the ancient gothicaltar, splendidly encumbered with shrines and reliquaries, that heavy marblesarcophagus, with angels' heads and clouds, which seems a specimen pillaged from theval-de-grace or the invalides? who stupidly sealed that heavy anachronismof stone in the carlovingian pavement of hercandus? was it not louis xiv., fulfilling therequest of louis xiii.? and who put the cold, white panes in theplace of those windows, "high in color," which caused the astonished eyes of ourfathers to hesitate between the rose of the grand portal and the arches of the apse?

and what would a sub-chanter of thesixteenth century say, on beholding the beautiful yellow wash, with which ourarchiepiscopal vandals have desmeared their cathedral? he would remember that it was the colorwith which the hangman smeared "accursed" edifices; he would recall the hotel dupetit-bourbon, all smeared thus, on account of the constable's treason. "yellow, after all, of so good a quality,"said sauval, "and so well recommended, that more than a century has not yet caused itto lose its color." he would think that the sacred place hadbecome infamous, and would flee.

and if we ascend the cathedral, withoutmentioning a thousand barbarisms of every sort,--what has become of that charminglittle bell tower, which rested upon the point of intersection of the cross-roofs, and which, no less frail and no less boldthan its neighbor (also destroyed), the spire of the sainte-chapelle, buried itselfin the sky, farther forward than the towers, slender, pointed, sonorous, carvedin open work. an architect of good taste amputated it(1787), and considered it sufficient to mask the wound with that large, leadenplaster, which resembles a pot cover. 'tis thus that the marvellous art of themiddle ages has been treated in nearly

every country, especially in france. one can distinguish on its ruins threesorts of lesions, all three of which cut into it at different depths; first, time,which has insensibly notched its surface here and there, and gnawed it everywhere; next, political and religious revolution,which, blind and wrathful by nature, have flung themselves tumultuously upon it, tornits rich garment of carving and sculpture, burst its rose windows, broken its necklace of arabesques and tiny figures, torn outits statues, sometimes because of their mitres, sometimes because of their crowns;lastly, fashions, even more grotesque and

foolish, which, since the anarchical and splendid deviations of the renaissance,have followed each other in the necessary decadence of architecture.fashions have wrought more harm than revolutions. they have cut to the quick; they haveattacked the very bone and framework of art; they have cut, slashed, disorganized,killed the edifice, in form as in the symbol, in its consistency as well as inits beauty. and then they have made it over; apresumption of which neither time nor revolutions at least have been guilty.

they have audaciously adjusted, in the nameof "good taste," upon the wounds of gothic architecture, their miserable gewgaws of aday, their ribbons of marble, their pompons of metal, a veritable leprosy of egg-shaped ornaments, volutes, whorls, draperies,garlands, fringes, stone flames, bronze clouds, pudgy cupids, chubby-cheekedcherubim, which begin to devour the face of art in the oratory of catherine de medicis, and cause it to expire, two centurieslater, tortured and grimacing, in the boudoir of the dubarry. thus, to sum up the points which we havejust indicated, three sorts of ravages to-

day disfigure gothic architecture.wrinkles and warts on the epidermis; this is the work of time. deeds of violence, brutalities, contusions,fractures; this is the work of the revolutions from luther to mirabeau. mutilations, amputations, dislocation ofthe joints, "restorations"; this is the greek, roman, and barbarian work ofprofessors according to vitruvius and vignole. this magnificent art produced by thevandals has been slain by the academies. the centuries, the revolutions, which atleast devastate with impartiality and

grandeur, have been joined by a cloud ofschool architects, licensed, sworn, and bound by oath; defacing with the discernment and choice of bad taste,substituting the chicorees of louis xv. for the gothic lace, for the greater glory ofthe parthenon. it is the kick of the ass at the dyinglion. it is the old oak crowning itself, andwhich, to heap the measure full, is stung, bitten, and gnawed by caterpillars. how far it is from the epoch when robertcenalis, comparing notre-dame de paris to the famous temple of diana at ephesus, somuch lauded by the ancient pagans, which

erostatus has immortalized, found the gallic temple "more excellent in length,breadth, height, and structure." notre-dame is not, moreover, what can becalled a complete, definite, classified monument. it is no longer a romanesque church; nor isit a gothic church. this edifice is not a type. notre-dame de paris has not, like the abbeyof tournus, the grave and massive frame, the large and round vault, the glacialbareness, the majestic simplicity of the edifices which have the rounded arch fortheir progenitor.

it is not, like the cathedral of bourges,the magnificent, light, multiform, tufted, bristling efflorescent product of thepointed arch. impossible to class it in that ancientfamily of sombre, mysterious churches, low and crushed as it were by the round arch,almost egyptian, with the exception of the ceiling; all hieroglyphics, all sacerdotal, all symbolical, more loaded in theirornaments, with lozenges and zigzags, than with flowers, with flowers than withanimals, with animals than with men; the work of the architect less than of the bishop; first transformation of art, allimpressed with theocratic and military

discipline, taking root in the lowerempire, and stopping with the time of william the conqueror. impossible to place our cathedral in thatother family of lofty, aerial churches, rich in painted windows and sculpture;pointed in form, bold in attitude; communal and bourgeois as political symbols; free, capricious, lawless, as a work of art;second transformation of architecture, no longer hieroglyphic, immovable andsacerdotal, but artistic, progressive, and popular, which begins at the return fromthe crusades, and ends with louis ix. notre-dame de paris is not of pureromanesque, like the first; nor of pure

arabian race, like the second. it is an edifice of the transition period. the saxon architect completed the erectionof the first pillars of the nave, when the pointed arch, which dates from the crusade,arrived and placed itself as a conqueror upon the large romanesque capitals whichshould support only round arches. the pointed arch, mistress since that time,constructed the rest of the church. nevertheless, timid and inexperienced atthe start, it sweeps out, grows larger, restrains itself, and dares no longer dartupwards in spires and lancet windows, as it did later on, in so many marvellouscathedrals.

one would say that it were conscious of thevicinity of the heavy romanesque pillars. however, these edifices of the transitionfrom the romanesque to the gothic, are no less precious for study than the puretypes. they express a shade of the art which wouldbe lost without them. it is the graft of the pointed upon theround arch. notre-dame de paris is, in particular, acurious specimen of this variety. each face, each stone of the venerablemonument, is a page not only of the history of the country, but of the history ofscience and art as well. thus, in order to indicate here only theprincipal details, while the little red

door almost attains to the limits of thegothic delicacy of the fifteenth century, the pillars of the nave, by their size and weight, go back to the carlovingian abbeyof saint-germain des pres. one would suppose that six centuriesseparated these pillars from that door. there is no one, not even the hermetics,who does not find in the symbols of the grand portal a satisfactory compendium oftheir science, of which the church of saint-jacques de la boucherie was socomplete a hieroglyph. thus, the roman abbey, the philosophers'church, the gothic art, saxon art, the heavy, round pillar, which recalls gregoryvii., the hermetic symbolism, with which

nicolas flamel played the prelude to luther, papal unity, schism, saint-germaindes pres, saint-jacques de la boucherie,-- all are mingled, combined, amalgamated innotre-dame. this central mother church is, among theancient churches of paris, a sort of chimera; it has the head of one, the limbsof another, the haunches of another, something of all. we repeat it, these hybrid constructionsare not the least interesting for the artist, for the antiquarian, for thehistorian. they make one feel to what a degreearchitecture is a primitive thing, by

demonstrating (what is also demonstrated bythe cyclopean vestiges, the pyramids of egypt, the gigantic hindoo pagodas) that the greatest products of architecture areless the works of individuals than of society; rather the offspring of a nation'seffort, than the inspired flash of a man of genius; the deposit left by a whole people; the heaps accumulated by centuries; theresidue of successive evaporations of human society,--in a word, species of formations. each wave of time contributes its alluvium,each race deposits its layer on the monument, each individual brings his stone.thus do the beavers, thus do the bees, thus

do men. the great symbol of architecture, babel, isa hive. great edifices, like great mountains, arethe work of centuries. art often undergoes a transformation whilethey are pending, pendent opera interrupta; they proceed quietly in accordance with thetransformed art. the new art takes the monument where itfinds it, incrusts itself there, assimilates it to itself, develops itaccording to its fancy, and finishes it if it can. the thing is accomplished without trouble,without effort, without reaction,--

following a natural and tranquil law. it is a graft which shoots up, a sap whichcirculates, a vegetation which starts forth anew. certainly there is matter here for manylarge volumes, and often the universal history of humanity in the successiveengrafting of many arts at many levels, upon the same monument. the man, the artist, the individual, iseffaced in these great masses, which lack the name of their author; humanintelligence is there summed up and totalized.

time is the architect, the nation is thebuilder. not to consider here anything except thechristian architecture of europe, that younger sister of the great masonries ofthe orient, it appears to the eyes as an immense formation divided into three well- defined zones, which are superposed, theone upon the other: the romanesque zone, the gothic zone, the zone of therenaissance, which we would gladly call the greco-roman zone. the roman layer, which is the most ancientand deepest, is occupied by the round arch, which reappears, supported by the greekcolumn, in the modern and upper layer of

the renaissance. the pointed arch is found between the two.the edifices which belong exclusively to any one of these three layers are perfectlydistinct, uniform, and complete. there is the abbey of jumieges, there isthe cathedral of reims, there is the sainte-croix of orleans. but the three zones mingle and amalgamatealong the edges, like the colors in the solar spectrum.hence, complex monuments, edifices of gradation and transition. one is roman at the base, gothic in themiddle, greco-roman at the top.

it is because it was six hundred years inbuilding. this variety is rare. the donjon keep of d'etampes is a specimenof it. but monuments of two formations are morefrequent. there is notre-dame de paris, a pointed-arch edifice, which is imbedded by its pillars in that roman zone, in which areplunged the portal of saint-denis, and the nave of saint-germain des pres. there is the charming, half-gothic chapter-house of bocherville, where the roman layer extends half way up.

there is the cathedral of rouen, whichwould be entirely gothic if it did not bathe the tip of its central spire in thezone of the renaissance. facies non omnibus una, no diversa tamen,qualem, etc. their faces not all alike, nor yetdifferent, but such as the faces of sisters ought to be. however, all these shades, all thesedifferences, do not affect the surfaces of edifices only.it is art which has changed its skin. the very constitution of the christianchurch is not attacked by it. there is always the same internal woodwork,the same logical arrangement of parts.

whatever may be the carved and embroideredenvelope of a cathedral, one always finds beneath it--in the state of a germ, and ofa rudiment at the least--the roman basilica. it is eternally developed upon the soilaccording to the same law. there are, invariably, two naves, whichintersect in a cross, and whose upper portion, rounded into an apse, forms thechoir; there are always the side aisles, for interior processions, for chapels,--a sort of lateral walks or promenades wherethe principal nave discharges itself through the spaces between the pillars.

that settled, the number of chapels, doors,bell towers, and pinnacles are modified to infinity, according to the fancy of thecentury, the people, and art. the service of religion once assured andprovided for, architecture does what she pleases. statues, stained glass, rose windows,arabesques, denticulations, capitals, bas- reliefs,--she combines all these imaginingsaccording to the arrangement which best suits her. hence, the prodigious exterior variety ofthese edifices, at whose foundation dwells so much order and unity.the trunk of a tree is immovable; the

foliage is capricious. -book third.chapter ii. a bird's-eye view of paris. we have just attempted to restore, for thereader's benefit, that admirable church of notre-dame de paris. we have briefly pointed out the greaterpart of the beauties which it possessed in the fifteenth century, and which it lacksto-day; but we have omitted the principal thing,--the view of paris which was then tobe obtained from the summits of its towers. that was, in fact,--when, after having longgroped one's way up the dark spiral which

perpendicularly pierces the thick wall ofthe belfries, one emerged, at last abruptly, upon one of the lofty platforms inundated with light and air,--that was, infact, a fine picture which spread out, on all sides at once, before the eye; aspectacle sui generis, of which those of our readers who have had the good fortune to see a gothic city entire, complete,homogeneous,--a few of which still remain, nuremberg in bavaria and vittoria inspain,--can readily form an idea; or even smaller specimens, provided that they are well preserved,--vitre in brittany,nordhausen in prussia.

the paris of three hundred and fifty yearsago--the paris of the fifteenth century-- was already a gigantic city. we parisians generally make a mistake as tothe ground which we think that we have gained, since paris has not increased muchover one-third since the time of louis xi. it has certainly lost more in beauty thanit has gained in size. paris had its birth, as the reader knows,in that old island of the city which has the form of a cradle. the strand of that island was its firstboundary wall, the seine its first moat. paris remained for many centuries in itsisland state, with two bridges, one on the

north, the other on the south; and twobridge heads, which were at the same time its gates and its fortresses,--the grand- chatelet on the right bank, the petit-chatelet on the left. then, from the date of the kings of thefirst race, paris, being too cribbed and confined in its island, and unable toreturn thither, crossed the water. then, beyond the grand, beyond the petit-chatelet, a first circle of walls and towers began to infringe upon the countryon the two sides of the seine. some vestiges of this ancient enclosurestill remained in the last century; to-day, only the memory of it is left, and here andthere a tradition, the baudets or baudoyer

gate, "porte bagauda". little by little, the tide of houses,always thrust from the heart of the city outwards, overflows, devours, wears away,and effaces this wall. philip augustus makes a new dike for it. he imprisons paris in a circular chain ofgreat towers, both lofty and solid. for the period of more than a century, thehouses press upon each other, accumulate, and raise their level in this basin, likewater in a reservoir. they begin to deepen; they pile story uponstory; they mount upon each other; they gush forth at the top, like all laterallycompressed growth, and there is a rivalry

as to which shall thrust its head above its neighbors, for the sake of getting a littleair. the street glows narrower and deeper, everyspace is overwhelmed and disappears. the houses finally leap the wall of philipaugustus, and scatter joyfully over the plain, without order, and all askew, likerunaways. there they plant themselves squarely, cutthemselves gardens from the fields, and take their ease. beginning with 1367, the city spreads tosuch an extent into the suburbs, that a new wall becomes necessary, particularly on theright bank; charles v. builds it.

but a city like paris is perpetuallygrowing. it is only such cities that becomecapitals. they are funnels, into which all thegeographical, political, moral, and intellectual water-sheds of a country, allthe natural slopes of a people, pour; wells of civilization, so to speak, and also sewers, where commerce, industry,intelligence, population,--all that is sap, all that is life, all that is the soul of anation, filters and amasses unceasingly, drop by drop, century by century. so charles v.'s wall suffered the fate ofthat of philip augustus.

at the end of the fifteenth century, thefaubourg strides across it, passes beyond it, and runs farther. in the sixteenth, it seems to retreatvisibly, and to bury itself deeper and deeper in the old city, so thick had thenew city already become outside of it. thus, beginning with the fifteenth century,where our story finds us, paris had already outgrown the three concentric circles ofwalls which, from the time of julian the apostate, existed, so to speak, in germ in the grand-chatelet and the petit-chatelet. the mighty city had cracked, in succession,its four enclosures of walls, like a child

grown too large for his garments of lastyear. under louis xi., this sea of houses wasseen to be pierced at intervals by several groups of ruined towers, from the ancientwall, like the summits of hills in an inundation,--like archipelagos of the oldparis submerged beneath the new. since that time paris has undergone yetanother transformation, unfortunately for our eyes; but it has passed only one morewall, that of louis xv., that miserable wall of mud and spittle, worthy of the king who built it, worthy of the poet who sungit,-- le mur murant paris rend paris murmurant.*

* the wall walling paris makes parismurmur. in the fifteenth century, paris was stilldivided into three wholly distinct and separate towns, each having its ownphysiognomy, its own specialty, its manners, customs, privileges, and history:the city, the university, the town. the city, which occupied the island, wasthe most ancient, the smallest, and the mother of the other two, crowded in betweenthem like (may we be pardoned the comparison) a little old woman between twolarge and handsome maidens. the university covered the left bank of theseine, from the tournelle to the tour de nesle, points which correspond in the parisof to-day, the one to the wine market, the

other to the mint. its wall included a large part of thatplain where julian had built his hot baths. the hill of sainte-genevieve was enclosedin it. the culminating point of this sweep ofwalls was the papal gate, that is to say, near the present site of the pantheon. the town, which was the largest of thethree fragments of paris, held the right bank. its quay, broken or interrupted in manyplaces, ran along the seine, from the tour de billy to the tour du bois; that is tosay, from the place where the granary

stands to-day, to the present site of thetuileries. these four points, where the seineintersected the wall of the capital, the tournelle and the tour de nesle on theright, the tour de billy and the tour du bois on the left, were called pre-eminently, "the four towers of paris." the town encroached still more extensivelyupon the fields than the university. the culminating point of the town wall(that of charles v.) was at the gates of saint-denis and saint-martin, whosesituation has not been changed. as we have just said, each of these threegreat divisions of paris was a town, but too special a town to be complete, a citywhich could not get along without the other

two. hence three entirely distinct aspects:churches abounded in the city; palaces, in the town; and colleges, in the university. neglecting here the originalities, ofsecondary importance in old paris, and the capricious regulations regarding the publichighways, we will say, from a general point of view, taking only masses and the whole group, in this chaos of communaljurisdictions, that the island belonged to the bishop, the right bank to the provostof the merchants, the left bank to the rector; over all ruled the provost ofparis, a royal not a municipal official.

the city had notre-dame; the town, thelouvre and the hotel de ville; the university, the sorbonne. the town had the markets (halles); thecity, the hospital; the university, the pre-aux-clercs. offences committed by the scholars on theleft bank were tried in the law courts on the island, and were punished on the rightbank at montfaucon; unless the rector, feeling the university to be strong and the king weak, intervened; for it was thestudents' privilege to be hanged on their own grounds.

the greater part of these privileges, itmay be noted in passing, and there were some even better than the above, had beenextorted from the kings by revolts and mutinies. it is the course of things from timeimmemorial; the king only lets go when the people tear away. there is an old charter which puts thematter naively: apropos of fidelity: civibus fidelitas in reges, quoe tamenaliquoties seditionibus interrypta, multa peperit privileyia. in the fifteenth century, the seine bathedfive islands within the walls of paris:

louviers island, where there were thentrees, and where there is no longer anything but wood; l'ile aux vaches, and l'ile notre-dame, both deserted, with theexception of one house, both fiefs of the bishop--in the seventeenth century, asingle island was formed out of these two, which was built upon and named l'ile saint- louis--, lastly the city, and at its point,the little islet of the cow tender, which was afterwards engulfed beneath theplatform of the pont-neuf. the city then had five bridges: three onthe right, the pont notre-dame, and the pont au change, of stone, the pont auxmeuniers, of wood; two on the left, the

petit pont, of stone, the pont saint-michel, of wood; all loaded with houses. the university had six gates, built byphilip augustus; there were, beginning with la tournelle, the porte saint-victor, theporte bordelle, the porte papale, the porte saint-jacques, the porte saint-michel, theporte saint-germain. the town had six gates, built by charlesv.; beginning with the tour de billy they were: the porte saint-antoine, the porte dutemple, the porte saint-martin, the porte saint-denis, the porte montmartre, theporte saint-honore. all these gates were strong, and alsohandsome, which does not detract from strength.

a large, deep moat, with a brisk currentduring the high water of winter, bathed the base of the wall round paris; the seinefurnished the water. at night, the gates were shut, the riverwas barred at both ends of the city with huge iron chains, and paris slepttranquilly. from a bird's-eye view, these three burgs,the city, the town, and the university, each presented to the eye an inextricableskein of eccentrically tangled streets. nevertheless, at first sight, onerecognized the fact that these three fragments formed but one body. one immediately perceived three longparallel streets, unbroken, undisturbed,

traversing, almost in a straight line, allthree cities, from one end to the other; from north to south, perpendicularly, to the seine, which bound them together,mingled them, infused them in each other, poured and transfused the peopleincessantly, from one to the other, and made one out of the three. the first of these streets ran from theporte saint-martin: it was called the rue saint-jacques in the university, rue de lajuiverie in the city, rue saint-martin in the town; it crossed the water twice, under the name of the petit pont and the pontnotre-dame.

the second, which was called the rue de laharpe on the left bank, rue de la barillerie in the island, rue saint-denison the right bank, pont saint-michel on one arm of the seine, pont au change on the other, ran from the porte saint-michel inthe university, to the porte saint-denis in the town. however, under all these names, there werebut two streets, parent streets, generating streets,--the two arteries of paris. all the other veins of the triple cityeither derived their supply from them or emptied into them.

independently of these two principalstreets, piercing paris diametrically in its whole breadth, from side to side,common to the entire capital, the city and the university had also each its own great special street, which ran lengthwise bythem, parallel to the seine, cutting, as it passed, at right angles, the two arterialthoroughfares. thus, in the town, one descended in astraight line from the porte saint-antoine to the porte saint-honore; in theuniversity from the porte saint-victor to the porte saint-germain. these two great thoroughfares intersectedby the two first, formed the canvas upon

which reposed, knotted and crowded togetheron every hand, the labyrinthine network of the streets of paris. in the incomprehensible plan of thesestreets, one distinguished likewise, on looking attentively, two clusters of greatstreets, like magnified sheaves of grain, one in the university, the other in the town, which spread out gradually from thebridges to the gates. some traces of this geometrical plan stillexist to-day. now, what aspect did this whole present,when, as viewed from the summit of the towers of notre-dame, in 1482?that we shall try to describe.

for the spectator who arrived, panting,upon that pinnacle, it was first a dazzling confusing view of roofs, chimneys, streets,bridges, places, spires, bell towers. everything struck your eye at once: thecarved gable, the pointed roof, the turrets suspended at the angles of the walls; thestone pyramids of the eleventh century, the slate obelisks of the fifteenth; the round, bare tower of the donjon keep; the squareand fretted tower of the church; the great and the little, the massive and the aerial. the eye was, for a long time, wholly lostin this labyrinth, where there was nothing which did not possess its originality, itsreason, its genius, its beauty,--nothing

which did not proceed from art; beginning with the smallest house, with its paintedand carved front, with external beams, elliptical door, with projecting stories,to the royal louvre, which then had a colonnade of towers. but these are the principal masses whichwere then to be distinguished when the eye began to accustom itself to this tumult ofedifices. in the first place, the city.--"the islandof the city," as sauval says, who, in spite of his confused medley, sometimes has suchhappy turns of expression,--"the island of the city is made like a great ship, stuck

in the mud and run aground in the current,near the centre of the seine." we have just explained that, in thefifteenth century, this ship was anchored to the two banks of the river by fivebridges. this form of a ship had also struck theheraldic scribes; for it is from that, and not from the siege by the normans, that theship which blazons the old shield of paris, comes, according to favyn and pasquier. for him who understands how to decipherthem, armorial bearings are algebra, armorial bearings have a tongue. the whole history of the second half of themiddle ages is written in armorial

bearings,--the first half is in thesymbolism of the roman churches. they are the hieroglyphics of feudalism,succeeding those of theocracy. thus the city first presented itself to theeye, with its stern to the east, and its prow to the west. turning towards the prow, one had beforeone an innumerable flock of ancient roofs, over which arched broadly the lead-coveredapse of the sainte-chapelle, like an elephant's haunches loaded with its tower. only here, this tower was the mostaudacious, the most open, the most ornamented spire of cabinet-maker's workthat ever let the sky peep through its cone

of lace. in front of notre-dame, and very near athand, three streets opened into the cathedral square,--a fine square, linedwith ancient houses. over the south side of this place bent thewrinkled and sullen facade of the hotel dieu, and its roof, which seemed coveredwith warts and pustules. then, on the right and the left, to eastand west, within that wall of the city, which was yet so contracted, rose the belltowers of its one and twenty churches, of every date, of every form, of every size, from the low and wormeaten belfry of saint-denis du pas (carcer glaueini) to the

slender needles of saint-pierre aux boeufsand saint-landry. behind notre-dame, the cloister and itsgothic galleries spread out towards the north; on the south, the half-roman palaceof the bishop; on the east, the desert point of the terrain. in this throng of houses the eye alsodistinguished, by the lofty open-work mitres of stone which then crowned the roofitself, even the most elevated windows of the palace, the hotel given by the city, under charles vi., to juvenal des ursins;a little farther on, the pitch-covered sheds of the palus market; in still anotherquarter the new apse of saint-germain le

vieux, lengthened in 1458, with a bit of the rue aux febves; and then, in places, asquare crowded with people; a pillory, erected at the corner of a street; a finefragment of the pavement of philip augustus, a magnificent flagging, grooved for the horses' feet, in the middle of theroad, and so badly replaced in the sixteenth century by the miserablecobblestones, called the "pavement of the league;" a deserted back courtyard, with one of those diaphanous staircase turrets,such as were erected in the fifteenth century, one of which is still to be seenin the rue des bourdonnais.

lastly, at the right of the sainte-chapelle, towards the west, the palais de justice rested its group of towers at theedge of the water. the thickets of the king's gardens, whichcovered the western point of the city, masked the island du passeur. as for the water, from the summit of thetowers of notre-dame one hardly saw it, on either side of the city; the seine washidden by bridges, the bridges by houses. and when the glance passed these bridges,whose roofs were visibly green, rendered mouldy before their time by the vapors fromthe water, if it was directed to the left, towards the university, the first edifice

which struck it was a large, low sheaf oftowers, the petit-chatelet, whose yawning gate devoured the end of the petit-pont. then, if your view ran along the bank, fromeast to west, from the tournelle to the tour de nesle, there was a long cordon ofhouses, with carved beams, stained-glass windows, each story projecting over that beneath it, an interminable zigzag ofbourgeois gables, frequently interrupted by the mouth of a street, and from time totime also by the front or angle of a huge stone mansion, planted at its ease, with courts and gardens, wings and detachedbuildings, amid this populace of crowded

and narrow houses, like a grand gentlemanamong a throng of rustics. there were five or six of these mansions onthe quay, from the house of lorraine, which shared with the bernardins the grandenclosure adjoining the tournelle, to the hotel de nesle, whose principal tower ended paris, and whose pointed roofs were in aposition, during three months of the year, to encroach, with their black triangles,upon the scarlet disk of the setting sun. this side of the seine was, however, theleast mercantile of the two. students furnished more of a crowd and morenoise there than artisans, and there was not, properly speaking, any quay, exceptfrom the pont saint-michel to the tour de

nesle. the rest of the bank of the seine was now anaked strand, the same as beyond the bernardins; again, a throng of houses,standing with their feet in the water, as between the two bridges. there was a great uproar of laundresses;they screamed, and talked, and sang from morning till night along the beach, andbeat a great deal of linen there, just as in our day. this is not the least of the gayeties ofparis. the university presented a dense mass tothe eye.

from one end to the other, it washomogeneous and compact. the thousand roofs, dense, angular,clinging to each other, composed, nearly all, of the same geometrical element,offered, when viewed from above, the aspect of a crystallization of the same substance. the capricious ravine of streets did notcut this block of houses into too disproportionate slices. the forty-two colleges were scattered aboutin a fairly equal manner, and there were some everywhere. the amusingly varied crests of thesebeautiful edifices were the product of the

same art as the simple roofs which theyovershot, and were, actually, only a multiplication of the square or the cube ofthe same geometrical figure. hence they complicated the whole effect,without disturbing it; completed, without overloading it. geometry is harmony.some fine mansions here and there made magnificent outlines against thepicturesque attics of the left bank. the house of nevers, the house of rome, thehouse of reims, which have disappeared; the hotel de cluny, which still exists, for theconsolation of the artist, and whose tower was so stupidly deprived of its crown a fewyears ago.

close to cluny, that roman palace, withfine round arches, were once the hot baths of julian. there were a great many abbeys, of a beautymore devout, of a grandeur more solemn than the mansions, but not less beautiful, notless grand. those which first caught the eye were thebernardins, with their three bell towers; sainte-genevieve, whose square tower, whichstill exists, makes us regret the rest; the sorbonne, half college, half monastery, of which so admirable a nave survives; thefine quadrilateral cloister of the mathurins; its neighbor, the cloister ofsaint-benoit, within whose walls they have

had time to cobble up a theatre, between the seventh and eighth editions of thisbook; the cordeliers, with their three enormous adjacent gables; the augustins,whose graceful spire formed, after the tour de nesle, the second denticulation on thisside of paris, starting from the west. the colleges, which are, in fact, theintermediate ring between the cloister and the world, hold the middle position in themonumental series between the hotels and the abbeys, with a severity full of elegance, sculpture less giddy than thepalaces, an architecture less severe than the convents.

unfortunately, hardly anything remains ofthese monuments, where gothic art combined with so just a balance, richness andeconomy. the churches (and they were numerous andsplendid in the university, and they were graded there also in all the ages ofarchitecture, from the round arches of saint-julian to the pointed arches of saint-severin), the churches dominated thewhole; and, like one harmony more in this mass of harmonies, they pierced in quicksuccession the multiple open work of the gables with slashed spires, with open-work bell towers, with slender pinnacles, whoseline was also only a magnificent

exaggeration of the acute angle of theroofs. the ground of the university was hilly;mount sainte-genevieve formed an enormous mound to the south; and it was a sight tosee from the summit of notre-dame how that throng of narrow and tortuous streets (to- day the latin quarter), those bunches ofhouses which, spread out in every direction from the top of this eminence, precipitatedthemselves in disorder, and almost perpendicularly down its flanks, nearly to the water's edge, having the air, some offalling, others of clambering up again, and all of holding to one another.

a continual flux of a thousand black pointswhich passed each other on the pavements made everything move before the eyes; itwas the populace seen thus from aloft and afar. lastly, in the intervals of these roofs, ofthese spires, of these accidents of numberless edifices, which bent andwrithed, and jagged in so eccentric a manner the extreme line of the university, one caught a glimpse, here and there, of agreat expanse of moss-grown wall, a thick, round tower, a crenellated city gate,shadowing forth the fortress; it was the wall of philip augustus.

beyond, the fields gleamed green; beyond,fled the roads, along which were scattered a few more suburban houses, which becamemore infrequent as they became more distant. some of these faubourgs were important:there were, first, starting from la tournelle, the bourg saint-victor, with itsone arch bridge over the bievre, its abbey where one could read the epitaph of louis le gros, epitaphium ludovici grossi, andits church with an octagonal spire, flanked with four little bell towers of theeleventh century (a similar one can be seen at etampes; it is not yet destroyed); next,

the bourg saint-marceau, which already hadthree churches and one convent; then, leaving the mill of the gobelins and itsfour white walls on the left, there was the faubourg saint-jacques with the beautiful carved cross in its square; the church ofsaint-jacques du haut-pas, which was then gothic, pointed, charming; saint-magloire,a fine nave of the fourteenth century, which napoleon turned into a hayloft; notre-dame des champs, where there werebyzantine mosaics; lastly, after having left behind, full in the country, themonastery des chartreux, a rich edifice contemporary with the palais de justice,

with its little garden divided intocompartments, and the haunted ruins of vauvert, the eye fell, to the west, uponthe three roman spires of saint-germain des pres. the bourg saint-germain, already a largecommunity, formed fifteen or twenty streets in the rear; the pointed bell tower ofsaint-sulpice marked one corner of the town. close beside it one descried thequadrilateral enclosure of the fair of saint-germain, where the market is situatedto-day; then the abbot's pillory, a pretty little round tower, well capped with a

leaden cone; the brickyard was further on,and the rue du four, which led to the common bakehouse, and the mill on itshillock, and the lazar house, a tiny house, isolated and half seen. but that which attracted the eye most ofall, and fixed it for a long time on that point, was the abbey itself. it is certain that this monastery, whichhad a grand air, both as a church and as a seignory; that abbatial palace, where thebishops of paris counted themselves happy if they could pass the night; that refectory, upon which the architect hadbestowed the air, the beauty, and the rose

window of a cathedral; that elegant chapelof the virgin; that monumental dormitory; those vast gardens; that portcullis; that drawbridge; that envelope of battlementswhich notched to the eye the verdure of the surrounding meadows; those courtyards,where gleamed men at arms, intermingled with golden copes;--the whole grouped and clustered about three lofty spires, withround arches, well planted upon a gothic apse, made a magnificent figure against thehorizon. when, at length, after having contemplatedthe university for a long time, you turned towards the right bank, towards the town,the character of the spectacle was abruptly

altered. the town, in fact much larger than theuniversity, was also less of a unit. at the first glance, one saw that it wasdivided into many masses, singularly distinct. first, to the eastward, in that part of thetown which still takes its name from the marsh where camulogenes entangled caesar,was a pile of palaces. the block extended to the very water'sedge. four almost contiguous hotels, jouy, sens,barbeau, the house of the queen, mirrored their slate peaks, broken with slenderturrets, in the seine.

these four edifices filled the space fromthe rue des nonaindieres, to the abbey of the celestins, whose spire gracefullyrelieved their line of gables and battlements. a few miserable, greenish hovels, hangingover the water in front of these sumptuous hotels, did not prevent one from seeing thefine angles of their facades, their large, square windows with stone mullions, their pointed porches overloaded with statues,the vivid outlines of their walls, always clear cut, and all those charming accidentsof architecture, which cause gothic art to have the air of beginning its combinationsafresh with every monument.

behind these palaces, extended in alldirections, now broken, fenced in, battlemented like a citadel, now veiled bygreat trees like a carthusian convent, the immense and multiform enclosure of that miraculous hotel de saint-pol, where theking of france possessed the means of lodging superbly two and twenty princes ofthe rank of the dauphin and the duke of burgundy, with their domestics and their suites, without counting the great lords,and the emperor when he came to view paris, and the lions, who had their separate hotelat the royal hotel. let us say here that a prince's apartmentwas then composed of never less than eleven

large rooms, from the chamber of state tothe oratory, not to mention the galleries, baths, vapor-baths, and other "superfluous places," with which each apartment wasprovided; not to mention the private gardens for each of the king's guests; notto mention the kitchens, the cellars, the domestic offices, the general refectories of the house, the poultry-yards, wherethere were twenty-two general laboratories, from the bakehouses to the wine-cellars;games of a thousand sorts, malls, tennis, and riding at the ring; aviaries, fishponds, menageries, stables, barns,libraries, arsenals and foundries.

this was what a king's palace, a louvre, ahotel de saint-pol was then. a city within a city. from the tower where we are placed, thehotel saint-pol, almost half hidden by the four great houses of which we have justspoken, was still very considerable and very marvellous to see. one could there distinguish, very well,though cleverly united with the principal building by long galleries, decked withpainted glass and slender columns, the three hotels which charles v. had amalgamated with his palace: the hotel dupetit-muce, with the airy balustrade, which

formed a graceful border to its roof; thehotel of the abbe de saint-maur, having the vanity of a stronghold, a great tower, machicolations, loopholes, iron gratings,and over the large saxon door, the armorial bearings of the abbe, between the twomortises of the drawbridge; the hotel of the comte d' etampes, whose donjon keep, ruined at its summit, was rounded andnotched like a cock's comb; here and there, three or four ancient oaks, forming a tufttogether like enormous cauliflowers; gambols of swans, in the clear water of the fishponds, all in folds of light and shade;many courtyards of which one beheld

picturesque bits; the hotel of the lions,with its low, pointed arches on short, saxon pillars, its iron gratings and its perpetual roar; shooting up above thewhole, the scale-ornamented spire of the ave-maria; on the left, the house of theprovost of paris, flanked by four small towers, delicately grooved, in the middle; at the extremity, the hotel saint-pol,properly speaking, with its multiplied facades, its successive enrichments fromthe time of charles v., the hybrid excrescences, with which the fancy of the architects had loaded it during the lasttwo centuries, with all the apses of its

chapels, all the gables of its galleries,a thousand weathercocks for the four winds, and its two lofty contiguous towers, whose conical roof, surrounded by battlements atits base, looked like those pointed caps which have their edges turned up. continuing to mount the stories of thisamphitheatre of palaces spread out afar upon the ground, after crossing a deepravine hollowed out of the roofs in the town, which marked the passage of the rue saint-antoine, the eye reached the house ofangouleme, a vast construction of many epochs, where there were perfectly new andvery white parts, which melted no better

into the whole than a red patch on a bluedoublet. nevertheless, the remarkably pointed andlofty roof of the modern palace, bristling with carved eaves, covered with sheets oflead, where coiled a thousand fantastic arabesques of sparkling incrustations of gilded bronze, that roof, so curiouslydamascened, darted upwards gracefully from the midst of the brown ruins of the ancientedifice; whose huge and ancient towers, rounded by age like casks, sinking together with old age, and rending themselves fromtop to bottom, resembled great bellies unbuttoned.behind rose the forest of spires of the

palais des tournelles. not a view in the world, either at chambordor at the alhambra, is more magic, more aerial, more enchanting, than that thicketof spires, tiny bell towers, chimneys, weather-vanes, winding staircases, lanterns through which the daylight makes its way,which seem cut out at a blow, pavilions, spindle-shaped turrets, or, as they werethen called, "tournelles," all differing in form, in height, and attitude. one would have pronounced it a giganticstone chess-board. to the right of the tournelles, that trussof enormous towers, black as ink, running

into each other and tied, as it were, by acircular moat; that donjon keep, much more pierced with loopholes than with windows; that drawbridge, always raised; thatportcullis, always lowered,--is the bastille. those sorts of black beaks which projectfrom between the battlements, and which you take from a distance to be cave spouts, arecannons. beneath them, at the foot of the formidableedifice, behold the porte sainte-antoine, buried between its two towers. beyond the tournelles, as far as the wallof charles v., spread out, with rich

compartments of verdure and of flowers, avelvet carpet of cultivated land and royal parks, in the midst of which one recognized, by its labyrinth of trees andalleys, the famous daedalus garden which louis xi. had given to coictier. the doctor's observatory rose above thelabyrinth like a great isolated column, with a tiny house for a capital.terrible astrologies took place in that laboratory. there to-day is the place royale. as we have just said, the quarter of thepalace, of which we have just endeavored to

give the reader some idea by indicatingonly the chief points, filled the angle which charles v.'s wall made with the seineon the east. the centre of the town was occupied by apile of houses for the populace. it was there, in fact, that the threebridges disgorged upon the right bank, and bridges lead to the building of housesrather than palaces. that congregation of bourgeois habitations,pressed together like the cells in a hive, had a beauty of its own.it is with the roofs of a capital as with the waves of the sea,--they are grand. first the streets, crossed and entangled,forming a hundred amusing figures in the

block; around the market-place, it was likea star with a thousand rays. the rues saint-denis and saint-martin, withtheir innumerable ramifications, rose one after the other, like trees intertwiningtheir branches; and then the tortuous lines, the rues de la platrerie, de la verrerie, de la tixeranderie, etc.,meandered over all. there were also fine edifices which piercedthe petrified undulations of that sea of gables. at the head of the pont aux changeurs,behind which one beheld the seine foaming beneath the wheels of the pont auxmeuniers, there was the chalelet, no longer

a roman tower, as under julian the apostate, but a feudal tower of thethirteenth century, and of a stone so hard that the pickaxe could not break away somuch as the thickness of the fist in a space of three hours; there was the rich square bell tower of saint-jacques de laboucherie, with its angles all frothing with carvings, already admirable, althoughit was not finished in the fifteenth century. (it lacked, in particular, the fourmonsters, which, still perched to-day on the corners of its roof, have the air of somany sphinxes who are propounding to new

paris the riddle of the ancient paris. rault, the sculptor, only placed them inposition in 1526, and received twenty francs for his pains.) there was the maison-aux-piliers, thepillar house, opening upon that place de greve of which we have given the readersome idea; there was saint-gervais, which a front "in good taste" has since spoiled; saint-mery, whose ancient pointed archeswere still almost round arches; saint-jean, whose magnificent spire was proverbial;there were twenty other monuments, which did not disdain to bury their wonders inthat chaos of black, deep, narrow streets.

add the crosses of carved stone, morelavishly scattered through the squares than even the gibbets; the cemetery of theinnocents, whose architectural wall could be seen in the distance above the roofs; the pillory of the markets, whose top wasvisible between two chimneys of the rue de la cossonnerie; the ladder of the croix-du-trahoir, in its square always black with people; the circular buildings of the wheat mart; the fragments of philip augustus'sancient wall, which could be made out here and there, drowned among the houses, itstowers gnawed by ivy, its gates in ruins, with crumbling and deformed stretches of

wall; the quay with its thousand shops, andits bloody knacker's yards; the seine encumbered with boats, from the port aufoin to port-l'eveque, and you will have a confused picture of what the centraltrapezium of the town was like in 1482. with these two quarters, one of hotels, theother of houses, the third feature of aspect presented by the city was a longzone of abbeys, which bordered it in nearly the whole of its circumference, from the rising to the setting sun, and, behind thecircle of fortifications which hemmed in paris, formed a second interior enclosureof convents and chapels. thus, immediately adjoining the park destournelles, between the rue saint-antoine

and the vielle rue du temple, there stoodsainte-catherine, with its immense cultivated lands, which were terminatedonly by the wall of paris. between the old and the new rue du temple,there was the temple, a sinister group of towers, lofty, erect, and isolated in themiddle of a vast, battlemented enclosure. between the rue neuve-du-temple and the ruesaint-martin, there was the abbey of saint- martin, in the midst of its gardens, asuperb fortified church, whose girdle of towers, whose diadem of bell towers, yielded in force and splendor only tosaint-germain des pres. between the rue saint-martin and the ruesaint-denis, spread the enclosure of the

trinite. lastly, between the rue saint-denis, andthe rue montorgueil, stood the filles-dieu. on one side, the rotting roofs and unpavedenclosure of the cour des miracles could be descried. it was the sole profane ring which waslinked to that devout chain of convents. finally, the fourth compartment, whichstretched itself out in the agglomeration of the roofs on the right bank, and whichoccupied the western angle of the enclosure, and the banks of the river down stream, was a fresh cluster of palaces andhotels pressed close about the base of the

louvre. the old louvre of philip augustus, thatimmense edifice whose great tower rallied about it three and twenty chief towers, notto reckon the lesser towers, seemed from a distance to be enshrined in the gothic roofs of the hotel d'alencon, and thepetit-bourbon. this hydra of towers, giant guardian ofparis, with its four and twenty heads, always erect, with its monstrous haunches,loaded or scaled with slates, and all streaming with metallic reflections, terminated with wonderful effect theconfiguration of the town towards the west.

thus an immense block, which the romanscalled iusula, or island, of bourgeois houses, flanked on the right and the leftby two blocks of palaces, crowned, the one by the louvre, the other by the tournelles, bordered on the north by a long girdle ofabbeys and cultivated enclosures, all amalgamated and melted together in oneview; upon these thousands of edifices, whose tiled and slated roofs outlined upon each other so many fantastic chains, thebell towers, tattooed, fluted, and ornamented with twisted bands, of the fourand forty churches on the right bank; myriads of cross streets; for boundary on

one side, an enclosure of lofty walls withsquare towers (that of the university had round towers); on the other, the seine, cutby bridges, and bearing on its bosom a multitude of boats; behold the town ofparis in the fifteenth century. beyond the walls, several suburban villagespressed close about the gates, but less numerous and more scattered than those ofthe university. behind the bastille there were twentyhovels clustered round the curious sculptures of the croix-faubin and theflying buttresses of the abbey of saint- antoine des champs; then popincourt, lost amid wheat fields; then la courtille, amerry village of wine-shops; the hamlet of

saint-laurent with its church whose belltower, from afar, seemed to add itself to the pointed towers of the porte saint- martin; the faubourg saint-denis, with thevast enclosure of saint-ladre; beyond the montmartre gate, the grange-bateliere,encircled with white walls; behind it, with its chalky slopes, montmartre, which had then almost as many churches as windmills,and which has kept only the windmills, for society no longer demands anything butbread for the body. lastly, beyond the louvre, the faubourgsaint-honore, already considerable at that time, could be seen stretching away intothe fields, and petit-bretagne gleaming

green, and the marche aux pourceaux spreading abroad, in whose centre swelledthe horrible apparatus used for boiling counterfeiters. between la courtille and saint-laurent,your eye had already noticed, on the summit of an eminence crouching amid desertplains, a sort of edifice which resembled from a distance a ruined colonnade, mounted upon a basement with its foundation laidbare. this was neither a parthenon, nor a templeof the olympian jupiter. it was montfaucon.

now, if the enumeration of so manyedifices, summary as we have endeavored to make it, has not shattered in the reader'smind the general image of old paris, as we have constructed it, we will recapitulateit in a few words. in the centre, the island of the city,resembling as to form an enormous tortoise, and throwing out its bridges with tiles forscales; like legs from beneath its gray shell of roofs. on the left, the monolithic trapezium,firm, dense, bristling, of the university; on the right, the vast semicircle of thetown, much more intermixed with gardens and monuments.

the three blocks, city, university, andtown, marbled with innumerable streets. across all, the seine, "foster-motherseine," as says father du breul, blocked with islands, bridges, and boats. all about an immense plain, patched with athousand sorts of cultivated plots, sown with fine villages. on the left, issy, vanvres, vaugirarde,montrouge, gentilly, with its round tower and its square tower, etc.; on the right,twenty others, from conflans to ville- l'eveque. on the horizon, a border of hills arrangedin a circle like the rim of the basin.

finally, far away to the east, vincennes,and its seven quadrangular towers to the south, bicetre and its pointed turrets; tothe north, saint-denis and its spire; to the west, saint cloud and its donjon keep. such was the paris which the ravens, wholived in 1482, beheld from the summits of the towers of notre-dame. nevertheless, voltaire said of this city,that "before louis xiv., it possessed but four fine monuments": the dome of thesorbonne, the val-de-grace, the modern louvre, and i know not what the fourth was--the luxembourg, perhaps. fortunately, voltaire was the author of"candide" in spite of this, and in spite of

this, he is, among all the men who havefollowed each other in the long series of humanity, the one who has best possessedthe diabolical laugh. moreover, this proves that one can be afine genius, and yet understand nothing of an art to which one does not belong. did not moliere imagine that he was doingraphael and michael-angelo a very great honor, by calling them "those mignards oftheir age?" let us return to paris and to the fifteenthcentury. it was not then merely a handsome city; itwas a homogeneous city, an architectural and historical product of the middle ages,a chronicle in stone.

it was a city formed of two layers only;the romanesque layer and the gothic layer; for the roman layer had disappeared longbefore, with the exception of the hot baths of julian, where it still pierced throughthe thick crust of the middle ages. as for the celtic layer, no specimens wereany longer to be found, even when sinking wells. fifty years later, when the renaissancebegan to mingle with this unity which was so severe and yet so varied, the dazzlingluxury of its fantasies and systems, its debasements of roman round arches, greek columns, and gothic bases, its sculpturewhich was so tender and so ideal, its

peculiar taste for arabesques and acanthusleaves, its architectural paganism, contemporary with luther, paris, was perhaps, still more beautiful, althoughless harmonious to the eye, and to the thought. but this splendid moment lasted only for ashort time; the renaissance was not impartial; it did not content itself withbuilding, it wished to destroy; it is true that it required the room. thus gothic paris was complete only for amoment. saint-jacques de la boucherie had barelybeen completed when the demolition of the

old louvre was begun. after that, the great city became moredisfigured every day. gothic paris, beneath which roman paris waseffaced, was effaced in its turn; but can any one say what paris has replaced it? there is the paris of catherine de medicisat the tuileries;--the paris of henri ii., at the hotel de ville, two edifices stillin fine taste;--the paris of henri iv., at the place royale: facades of brick with stone corners, and slated roofs, tri-colored houses;--the paris of louis xiii., at the val-de-grace: a crushed and squatarchitecture, with vaults like basket-

handles, and something indescribably pot- bellied in the column, and thickset in thedome;--the paris of louis xiv., in the invalides: grand, rich, gilded, cold;--theparis of louis xv., in saint-sulpice: volutes, knots of ribbon, clouds, vermicelli and chiccory leaves, all instone;--the paris of louis xvi., in the pantheon: saint peter of rome, badly copied(the edifice is awkwardly heaped together, which has not amended its lines);--the paris of the republic, in the school ofmedicine: a poor greek and roman taste, which resembles the coliseum or theparthenon as the constitution of the year

iii., resembles the laws of minos,--it is called in architecture, "the messidor"taste;--the paris of napoleon in the place vendome: this one is sublime, a column ofbronze made of cannons;--the paris of the restoration, at the bourse: a very white colonnade supporting a very smooth frieze;the whole is square and cost twenty millions. to each of these characteristic monumentsthere is attached by a similarity of taste, fashion, and attitude, a certain number ofhouses scattered about in different quarters and which the eyes of the

connoisseur easily distinguishes andfurnishes with a date. when one knows how to look, one finds thespirit of a century, and the physiognomy of a king, even in the knocker on a door. the paris of the present day has then, nogeneral physiognomy. it is a collection of specimens of manycenturies, and the finest have disappeared. the capital grows only in houses, and whathouses! at the rate at which paris is nowproceeding, it will renew itself every fifty years. thus the historical significance of itsarchitecture is being effaced every day.

monuments are becoming rarer and rarer, andone seems to see them gradually engulfed, by the flood of houses. our fathers had a paris of stone; our sonswill have one of plaster. so far as the modern monuments of new parisare concerned, we would gladly be excused from mentioning them. it is not that we do not admire them asthey deserve. the sainte-genevieve of m. soufflot iscertainly the finest savoy cake that has ever been made in stone. the palace of the legion of honor is also avery distinguished bit of pastry.

the dome of the wheat market is an englishjockey cap, on a grand scale. the towers of saint-sulpice are two hugeclarinets, and the form is as good as any other; the telegraph, contorted andgrimacing, forms an admirable accident upon their roofs. saint-roch has a door which, formagnificence, is comparable only to that of saint-thomas d'aquin.it has, also, a crucifixion in high relief, in a cellar, with a sun of gilded wood. these things are fairly marvellous.the lantern of the labyrinth of the jardin des plantes is also very ingenious.

as for the palace of the bourse, which isgreek as to its colonnade, roman in the round arches of its doors and windows, ofthe renaissance by virtue of its flattened vault, it is indubitably a very correct and very pure monument; the proof is that it iscrowned with an attic, such as was never seen in athens, a beautiful, straight line,gracefully broken here and there by stovepipes. let us add that if it is according to rulethat the architecture of a building should be adapted to its purpose in such a mannerthat this purpose shall be immediately apparent from the mere aspect of the

building, one cannot be too much amazed ata structure which might be indifferently-- the palace of a king, a chamber ofcommunes, a town-hall, a college, a riding- school, an academy, a warehouse, a court- house, a museum, a barracks, a sepulchre,a temple, or a theatre. however, it is an exchange.an edifice ought to be, moreover, suitable to the climate. this one is evidently constructed expresslyfor our cold and rainy skies. it has a roof almost as flat as roofs inthe east, which involves sweeping the roof in winter, when it snows; and of courseroofs are made to be swept.

as for its purpose, of which we just spoke,it fulfils it to a marvel; it is a bourse in france as it would have been a temple ingreece. it is true that the architect was at a gooddeal of trouble to conceal the clock face, which would have destroyed the purity ofthe fine lines of the facade; but, on the other hand, we have that colonnade which circles round the edifice and under which,on days of high religious ceremony, the theories of the stock-brokers and thecourtiers of commerce can be developed so majestically. these are very superb structures.

let us add a quantity of fine, amusing, andvaried streets, like the rue de rivoli, and i do not despair of paris presenting to theeye, when viewed from a balloon, that richness of line, that opulence of detail, that diversity of aspect, that grandiosesomething in the simple, and unexpected in the beautiful, which characterizes achecker-board. however, admirable as the paris of to-daymay seem to you, reconstruct the paris of the fifteenth century, call it up beforeyou in thought; look at the sky athwart that surprising forest of spires, towers, and belfries; spread out in the centre ofthe city, tear away at the point of the

islands, fold at the arches of the bridges,the seine, with its broad green and yellow expanses, more variable than the skin of a serpent; project clearly against an azurehorizon the gothic profile of this ancient paris. make its contour float in a winter's mistwhich clings to its numerous chimneys; drown it in profound night and watch theodd play of lights and shadows in that sombre labyrinth of edifices; cast upon it a ray of light which shall vaguely outlineit and cause to emerge from the fog the great heads of the towers; or take thatblack silhouette again, enliven with shadow

the thousand acute angles of the spires and gables, and make it start out more toothedthan a shark's jaw against a copper-colored western sky,--and then compare. and if you wish to receive of the ancientcity an impression with which the modern one can no longer furnish you, climb--onthe morning of some grand festival, beneath the rising sun of easter or of pentecost-- climb upon some elevated point, whence youcommand the entire capital; and be present at the wakening of the chimes. behold, at a signal given from heaven, forit is the sun which gives it, all those

churches quiver simultaneously. first come scattered strokes, running fromone church to another, as when musicians give warning that they are about to begin. then, all at once, behold!--for it seems attimes, as though the ear also possessed a sight of its own,--behold, rising from eachbell tower, something like a column of sound, a cloud of harmony. first, the vibration of each bell mountsstraight upwards, pure and, so to speak, isolated from the others, into the splendidmorning sky; then, little by little, as they swell they melt together, mingle, are

lost in each other, and amalgamate in amagnificent concert. it is no longer anything but a mass ofsonorous vibrations incessantly sent forth from the numerous belfries; floats,undulates, bounds, whirls over the city, and prolongs far beyond the horizon thedeafening circle of its oscillations. nevertheless, this sea of harmony is not achaos; great and profound as it is, it has not lost its transparency; you behold thewindings of each group of notes which escapes from the belfries. you can follow the dialogue, by turns graveand shrill, of the treble and the bass; you can see the octaves leap from one tower toanother; you watch them spring forth,

winged, light, and whistling, from the silver bell, to fall, broken and limpingfrom the bell of wood; you admire in their midst the rich gamut which incessantlyascends and re-ascends the seven bells of saint-eustache; you see light and rapid notes running across it, executing three orfour luminous zigzags, and vanishing like flashes of lightning. yonder is the abbey of saint-martin, ashrill, cracked singer; here the gruff and gloomy voice of the bastille; at the otherend, the great tower of the louvre, with its bass.

the royal chime of the palace scatters onall sides, and without relaxation, resplendent trills, upon which fall, atregular intervals, the heavy strokes from the belfry of notre-dame, which makes themsparkle like the anvil under the hammer. at intervals you behold the passage ofsounds of all forms which come from the triple peal of saint-germaine des pres. then, again, from time to time, this massof sublime noises opens and gives passage to the beats of the ave maria, which burstsforth and sparkles like an aigrette of stars. below, in the very depths of the concert,you confusedly distinguish the interior

chanting of the churches, which exhalesthrough the vibrating pores of their vaulted roofs. assuredly, this is an opera which it isworth the trouble of listening to. ordinarily, the noise which escapes fromparis by day is the city speaking; by night, it is the city breathing; in thiscase, it is the city singing. lend an ear, then, to this concert of belltowers; spread over all the murmur of half a million men, the eternal plaint of theriver, the infinite breathings of the wind, the grave and distant quartette of the four forests arranged upon the hills, on thehorizon, like immense stacks of organ

pipes; extinguish, as in a half shade, allthat is too hoarse and too shrill about the central chime, and say whether you know anything in the world more rich and joyful,more golden, more dazzling, than this tumult of bells and chimes;--than thisfurnace of music,--than these ten thousand brazen voices chanting simultaneously in the flutes of stone, three hundred feethigh,--than this city which is no longer anything but an orchestra,--than thissymphony which produces the noise of a tempest.