The Hunchback of Notre Dame (19 page)

The City, then, first fell upon the eye with its stern to the east and its prow to the West. Facing the prow, the spectator saw a countless collection of ancient roofs, above which rose, broad and round, the leaden bolster of the Sainte-Chapelle, like an elephant’s back laden with its tower. Only in this case the tower was the most daring, the most daintily wrought, the most delicately carved spire that ever gave glimpses of the sky through its lace-like cone. In front of Notre-Dame, close at hand, three streets emptied into the space in front of the cathedral,—a beautiful square lined with old houses. Over the southern side of this square hung the wrinkled and frowning front of the Hospital, or Hotel-Dieu, and its roof, which seemed covered with warts and pimples. Then to the left, to the right, to the east, to the west, throughout the City limits, narrow as they were, rose the steeples of its one-and-twenty churches of every age, of every form and every size, from the low, worm-eaten Roman campanile of Saint-Denis du Pas
(carcer Glaucini)
to the slender spires of Saint-Pierre-aux-Bœufs and Saint-Landry. Behind Notre-Dame were revealed, on the north, the cloisters with their Gothic galleries; on the south, the semi-Roman palace of the bishop; on the east, the borders of the Terrain, a plot of waste land. Amid this accumulation of houses, by the tall miters made of openwork stone, which crowned the highest windows of the palace, then placed even in the very roof, the eye could also distinguish the hotel given by the town in the reign of Charles VI to Juvénal des Ursins; a little farther away, the tarred booths of the Palus Market; elsewhere, again, the new chancel of Saint-Germain le Vieux, pieced out in 1458 with a bit of the Rue aux Febves; and then, at intervals, a square crowded with people; a pillory set up at some street corner; a fine fragment of the pavement of Philip Augustus,—superb flagging laid in the middle of the road, and furrowed to prevent horses from slipping, which was so ill replaced in the sixteenth century by the wretched flints and pebbles known as the “pavement of the League;” a deserted back yard with one of those open turret staircases which were common in the fifteenth century, and an example of which may still be seen in the Rue des Bourdonnais. Finally, to the right of the Sainte-Chapelle, towards the west, the Palace of Justice reared its group of towers on the water’s edge. The tall trees of the royal gardens, which covered the western end of the City, hid the Ile du Passeur. As for the water, from the top of the towers of Notre-Dame it was barely visible on either side of the City: the Seine was concealed by bridges, the bridges by houses.

And if the spectator looked beyond those bridges, the roofs of which were of a greenish tint, mouldy before their time by the damp vapors rising from the water, if he turned to the left in the direction of the University, the first building which attracted him was a broad, low group of towers, the Petit-Châtelet, whose wide-mouthed porch swallowed up the end of the Petit-Pont; then, if his eye followed the shore from east to west, from the Tournelle to the Tour de Nesle, he saw a long line of houses with carved beams and stained-glass windows, overhanging the pavement story upon story, an endless zig-zag of homely gables, often interrupted by the mouth of some street, and sometimes also by the front or the projecting corner of a huge stone mansion, spreading out its courtyards and gardens, its wings and its main buildings, quite at its ease amid this mob of narrow crowded houses, like a great lord in a rabble of rustic clowns. There were five or six of these mansions on the quay, from the house of Lorraine, which shared the great monastery enclosure next the Tournelle with the Bernardines, to the family mansion of the de Nesles, the main tower of which bounded Paris on that side, and whose painted roofs for three months in the year sliv ered the scarlet disk of the setting sun with their dark triangles.

This side of the Seine, moreover, was the less commercial of the two; students were noisier and more numerous than laborers, and, properly speaking, the quay extended only from the Pont Saint-Michel to the Tour de Nesle. The rest of the river-bank was now a bare beach, as beyond the Bernardine monastery, and then again a mass of houses washed by the water, as between the two bridges.

There was a vast clamor of washerwomen; they shouted, chattered, and sang from morning till night along the shore, and beat the linen hard, as they do in our day. This is not the least part of the gaiety of Paris.

The University presented a huge mass to the eye. From one end to the other it was a compact and homogeneous whole. The myriad of roofs, close-set, angular, adherent, almost all composed of the same geometrical elements, looked from above like a crystallization of one substance. The fantastic hollows of the streets divided this pasty of houses into tolerably equal slices. The forty-two colleges were distributed about quite evenly, there being some in every quarter. The delightfully varied pinnacles of these fine structures were the product of the same art as the simple roofs which they crowned, being really but a multiplication of the square or cube of the same geometrical figure. In this way they made the sum total more intricate without rendering it confused, and completed without overloading the general effect. Geometry is harmony. Certain handsome mansions here and there stood out superbly among the picturesque garrets on the left bank of the river,—the Nevers house, the house of Rome, the Rheims house, which have all disappeared; the Hotel de Cluny, still standing for the consolation of artists, and the tower of which was so stupidly lowered some years since. That Roman palace near Cluny, with its beautiful arches, was formerly the Baths of Julian. There were also a number of abbeys of a beauty more religious, a grandeur more severe, than the mansions, but no less splendid, no less spacious. Those first attracting the eye were the monastery of the Bernardines, with its three spires; Sainte-Geneviève, whose square tower, still standing, makes us regret the rest sc much; the Sorbonne, half college, half monastery, of which the fine nave still remains; the elegant quadrangular cloister of the Mathurin friars; its neighbor, the cloister of St. Benedict, within the walls of which a theater has been knocked up in the interval between the seventh and eighth editions of this book; the Franciscan abbey, with its three enormous gables side by side; the house of the Austin friars, whose graceful spire was, after the Tour de Nesle, the second lofty landmark on this side of Paris, looking westward. The colleges, which are in fact the connecting link between the convent and the world, formed the central point in the series of buildings between secular and religious houses, with a severity full of elegance, their sculptures being less meaningless than those of the palaces, their architecture not so sober as that of the monasteries. Unfortunately, scarcely anything is left of these monuments in which Gothic art hit so happy a medium between richness and economy; the churches (and they were many and splendid in the University quarter, representing every period of architecture, from the semicircular arches of St. Julian to the painted arches of St. Severius) predominated over everything else; and, like one harmony the more in that mass of harmonies, they broke through the varied sky-line of gables with their sharp spires, their open steeples, and their slender pinnacles, whose line was but a magnificent exaggeration of the steep pitch of the roofs.

The ground on which the University stood was hilly. The mountain of St. Geneviève formed a huge mound to the southeast; and it was a sight well worth seeing, to look down from the top of Notre-Dame upon that crowd of narrow, winding streets (now the Latin Quarter), and those close clusters of houses which, scattered in every direction from the summit of the height, seemed hurrying haphazard and almost perpendicularly down its sides to the water’s edge, some apparently falling, others climbing up again, all clinging together for mutual support. The constant ebb and flow of a myriad of black dots crossing and recrossing each other on the pavement lent a shimmering and indistinct look to everything: these were the people seen from a height and a distance.

Lastly, in the spaces between these roofs, these spires, these unnumbered and irregular structures which curved and twisted and indented the outline of the University in so odd a fashion, might be seen at intervals a big bit of mossy wall, a thick round tower, or an embattled city gate, representing the fortress: this was the wall of Philip Augustus. Beyond were the green fields, and beyond these ran the roads, along which stretched a few suburban houses, becoming fewer in number as the distance increased. Some of these suburbs were of considerable importance: there was first, starting from the Tournelle, the borough of Saint-Victor, with its single arched bridge across the Bièvre; its abbey, where one might read the epitaph of Louis the Fat,—
epitaphium
Ludovici
Grossi;
and its church with an octagonal steeple flanked by four eleventh-century belfries (there is a similar one at Etampes, which has not yet been destroyed); then the borough of Saint-Marceau, which possessed three churches and a convent; then, leaving the Gobelins factory and its four white walls on the left, came the suburb of Saint-Jacques, with the beautiful carved cross in the market-place; the Church of Saint-Jacques du Haut-Pas, which was then Gothic, pointed and delightful; Saint-Magloire, with a fine fourteenth-century nave, which Napoleon turned into a hayloft; Notre-Dame des-Champs, where there were Byzantine mosaics; lastly, leaving in the open country the Carthusian monastery, a rich edifice of the same date as the Palace of Justice, with its little private gardens, and the ill-famed ruins of Vauvert, the eye fell, to the westward, upon the three Roman spires of Saint-Germain-des-Prés. The borough of Saint-Germain, even then a large parish, included fifteen or twenty streets in the rear; the sharp spire of Saint-Sulpice formed one of the boundaries of the borough. Close beside it might be seen the square enclosure of the Saint-Germain fair-ground, where the market now stands; then the abbot’s pillory, a pretty little round tower neatly capped with a leaden cone; the tile-kiln was farther on, as were the Rue du Four, leading to the town ovens, the mill on its knoll, and the hospital for lepers,—a small isolated building shunned by all. But the thing which particularly attracted and held attention was the abbey itself. It is certain that this monastery which held high rank both as a church and as a manor, this abbatial palace where the bishops of Paris held themselves happy to be allowed to pass a night, that refectory to which the architect had given the air, the beauty, and the splendid rose-window of a cathedral, that elegant Lady Chapel, that vast dormitory, those great gardens, that portcullis, that drawbridge, the battlements which intrenched upon the verdure of the surrounding fields, the courtyards glittering with men-at-arms mingled with golden copes, all grouped and combined around the three tall spires with their semicircular arches, firmly planted upon a Gothic chancel, made a magnificent figure on the horizon.

When at length, after close study of the University, the spectator turned towards the right bank of the river, towards the Town, the character of the view changed abruptly. The Town, in fact, though much larger than the University, was less of a unity. At the first glance it seemed to be divided into several strangely distinct masses. First, to the east, in that part of the town which still retains the name of the Marais, derived from the marsh in which Camulo genes mired Caesar, there were a number of palaces. The buildings extended to the water’s edge. Four mansions, so close together as to be almost connected,—the homes of the Jouy, Sens, Barbeau families, and the queen’s residence,—mirrored their slated roofs, broken by slender turrets, in the Seine. These four buildings occupied the region between the Rue des Nonaindières and the Celestine Abbey, whose spire formed a graceful contrast to their line of battlements and gables. Certain moss-grown structures, overhanging the water in front of these sumptuous mansions, did not hide the fine outlines of their façades, their broad square windows with stone casements, their porches with pointed arches overloaded with statues, the sharp clear-cut edges of their walls, and all those dainty architectural accidents which make Gothic art seem as if it began a fresh series of combinations with every new building. Behind these palaces, stretched on every hand, here broken, palisaded, and crenelated like a citadel, here concealed amid tall trees like a monastery, the vast and varied wall around that marvelous Hotel Saint-Pol, where the king had sufficient space to lodge luxuriously twenty-two princes of the rank of the Dauphin and the Duke of Burgundy, with their servants and suites, to say nothing of great lords, and the Emperor himself when he visited Paris, and the lions, which had a separate residence in the royal establishment. Let us say here that the apartment of a prince at this period comprised no less than eleven rooms, from the audience chamber to the oratory, not to mention the galleries, baths, stove-rooms, and other “superfluous places” with which each apartment was provided; not to mention the private gardens for each guest of the king; not to mention the kitchens, cellars, offices, and general refectories of the house; the servants’ quarters, where there were twenty-two offices, from the bakehouse to the wine-cellars; the games of various sorts, mall, tennis, riding at the ring, etc.; aviaries, fish-ponds, poultry-yards, stables, cow-houses, libraries, arsenals, and foundries. Such was a royal palace of that period, a Louvre, a Hotel Saint-Pol, —a city within a city.

From the tower where in fancy we stand, the Hotel Saint-Pol, almost half concealed by the four great mansions just mentioned, was yet very vast and very wonderful to behold. Although skilfully joined to the main building by long glazed and columned galleries, the three residences which Charles V had added to his palace were readily to be distinguished: the Hotel du Petit-Muce, with the openwork balustrade so gracefully bordering its roof; the house of the Abbot of St. Maur, having the aspect of a stronghold, a great tower, bastions, loop-holes, iron cowls, and over the wide Saxon gateway, the abbot’s escutcheon between the two grooves for the drawbridge; the residence of the Count d‘Etampes, whose donjon-keep, in ruins at the top, was round and notched like a cock’s comb; here and there three or four low bushy old oak-trees grew close together, looking like huge cauliflowers; swans sported in the clear waters of the fish-ponds, rippled with light and shade; numerous courtyards afforded picturesque glimpses; the Hotel des Lions, with its low pointed arches resting upon short Saxon pillars, its iron portcullises and its never-ending roar; rising above all this, the scaly spire of the Ave-Maria; to the left, the house of the provost of Paris, flanked by four delicately designed turrets; in the center, in the background, the Hotel Saint-Pol itself, properly so called, with its multiplicity of façades, its successive embellishments from Charles V’s day down, the hybrid excrescences with which the caprice of architects had loaded it during the lapse of two centuries, with all the chancels of its chapels, all the gables of its galleries, its endless weathercocks, and its two tall adjacent towers, whose conical roofs, bordered with battlements at their base, looked like cocked hats.