A Bird's Eye View of Paris
"The Paris of three hundred and fifty years ago, the Paris of the fifteenth century, was already a gigantic city."
From: 1300 C.E. To: 1500 C.E.
Location: Paris, France
Note: This article has been excerpted from a larger work in the public domain and shared here due to its historical value. It may contain outdated ideas and language that do not reflect TOTA’s opinions and beliefs.
From The Hunchback of Notre-Dame by Victor Hugo, translated by Frederic Shoberl, 1833.
We have just attempted to repair for the reader the admirable church of Notre-Dame at Paris. We have briefly touched upon most of the beauties which it had in the fifteenth century, and which it no longer possesses; but we have omitted the principal, namely the view of Paris then enjoyed from the top of the towers.
It was in fact when, after groping your way up the dark spiral staircase with which the thick wall of the towers is perpendicularly perforated, and landing abruptly on one of the two lofty platforms deluged with light and air, that a delightful spectacle bursts at once upon the view a spectacle sui generis, of which some conception may easily be formed by such of our readers as have had the good fortune to see one of the few Gothic towns still left entire, complete, homogeneous, such as Nuremberg in Bavaria, Vittoria in Spain, or even smaller specimens, provided they are in good preservation, as Vitre in Bretagne, and Nordhausen in Prussia.
The Paris of three hundred and fifty years ago, the Paris of the fifteenth century, was already a gigantic city. We modern Parisians in general are much mistaken in regard to the ground which we imagine it has gained. Since the time of Louis XI. Paris has not increased above one third; and certes it has lost much more in beauty than it has acquired in magnitude.
The infant Paris was born, as everybody knows, in that ancient island in the shape of a cradle, which is now called the City. The banks of that island were its first enclosure; the Seine was its first ditch. For several centuries Paris was confined to the island, having two bridges, the one on the north, the other on the south, and two tetes-de-ponts, which were at once its gates and its fortresses the Grand Chatelet on the right bank and the Petit Chatelet on the left. In process of time, under the kings of the first dynasty, finding herself straitened in her island and unable to turn herself about, she crossed the water.
A first enclosure of walls and towers then began to encroach upon either bank of the Seine beyond the two Chatelets. Of this ancient enclosure some vestiges were still remaining in the past century; nothing is now left of it but the memory and here and there a tradition. By degrees the flood of houses, always propelled from the heart to the extremities, wore away and overflowed this enclosure. Philip Augustus surrounded Paris with new ramparts. He imprisoned the city within a circular chain of large, lofty, and massive towers.
For more than a century the houses, crowding closer and closer, raised their level in this basin, like water in a reservoir. They began to grow higher; story was piled upon story; they shot up, like any compressed liquid, and each tried to lift its head above its neighbour's, in order to obtain a little fresh air. The streets became deeper and deeper, and narrower and narrower: every vacant place was covered and disappeared. The houses at length overleaped the wall of Philip Augustus, and merrily scattered themselves at random over the plain, like prisoners who had made their escape. There they sat themselves down at their ease and carved themselves gardens out of the fields.
So early as 1367 the suburbs of the city had spread so far as to need a fresh enclosure, especially on the right bank: this was built for it by Charles V. But a place like Paris is perpetually increasing. It is such cities alone that become capitals of countries. They are reservoirs, into which all the geographical, political, moral, and intellectual, channels of a country, all the natural inclined planes of its population, discharge themselves; wells of civilisation, if we may be allowed the expression, and drains also, where all that constitutes the sap, the life, the soul, of a nation is incessantly collecting and filtering, drop by drop, age by age.
The enclosure of Charles V. consequently 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 travelling onward. In the sixteenth, it seemed to be visibly receding more and more into the ancient city, so rapidly did the new town thicken on the other side of it. Thus, so far back as the fifteenth century, to come down no further, Paris had already worn out the three concentric circles of walls which, from the time of Julian the Apostate, lay in embryo, if I may be allowed the expression, 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 year ago. Under Louis XI. there were still to be seen ruined towers of the ancient enclosures, rising at intervals above this sea of houses, like the tops of hills from amidst an inundation, like the archipelagoes of old Paris submerged beneath the new.
Since that time Paris has, unluckily for us, undergone further transformation, but it has overleaped only one more enclosure, that of Louis XV., a miserable wall of mud and dirt, worthy of the king who constructed it and the poet by whom it was celebrated:
Le mur murant Paris rend Paris murmurant
In the fifteenth century Paris was still divided into three totally distinct and separate cities, each having its own physiognomy, individuality, manners, customs, privileges, and history: the City, the University, and the Ville. The City, which occupied the island, was the mother of the two others, and cooped up between them, like--reader, 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 Halle aux Vins, and the other with the Mint, of modern Paris. Its inclosure encroached considerably upon the plain where Julian had built his baths. It included the hill of St. 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 extensive of the three 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 Grenier d'Abondance now stands to that occupied by the Tuileries. These four points, at which the Seine intersected the inclosure of the capital, the Tournelle and the Tower of Nesle on the left, and the Tower of Billy and the Tower du Bois on the right, were called by way of eminence "the four towers of Paris." The Ville penetrated still further into the fields than the University. The culminating point of the inclosure of the Ville was at the gates of St. Denis and St. Martin, 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 complete, 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 of the merchants, the left under the rector of the University, and the whole under the provost of Paris, a royal and not a municipal 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 contained the Halles, the City the Hotel-Dieu, and the University the Pre aux Clercs. For offences committed by the students on the left bank in their Pre aux Clercs they were tried at the Palace of Justice in the island, and punished on the right bank at Montfaucon: unless the rector, finding the University strong and the king weak, chose to interfere: for it was a 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 him by the people...
A bird's eye view of these three towns, the City, the University, and the Ville, exhibited to the eye an inextricable 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 spectator perceived immediately two long parallel streets, without break or interruption, crossing the three cities, nearly in a right line, from one end to the other, from south to north, perpendicularly to the Seine, incessantly pouring the people of the one into the other, connecting, blending, them together and converting the three into one.
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 twice by the name of Petit Pont and Pont Notre-Dame. The second, named rue de la Harpe on the left bank, rue de la Barillerie in the island, rue St. Denis on the right bank, Pont St. Michel over one arm of the Seine, and Pont au Change over the other, ran from the gate of St. Michel in the University to the gate of St. Denis in the Ville. Still, though they bore so many different names, they formed in reality only two streets, but the two mother-streets, the two great arteries of Paris. All the other veins of the triple city were fed by or discharged themselves into these...
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 spectator, on arriving breathless at that elevation, was dazzled by the chaos of roofs, chimneys, streets, bridges, 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 fifteenth, the round and naked keep of the castle, the square and embroidered tower of the church, the great and the small, the massive and the light.
The eye was long bewildered amidst this labyrinth of heights and depths in which there was nothing but had its originality, its reason, its genius, its beauty, nothing but issued from the hand of art, from the humblest dwelling, with its painted and carved wooden front, elliptical doorway, and overhanging stories, to the royal Louvre, which then had a colonnade of towers. But when the eye began to reduce this tumult of edifices to some kind of order, the principal masses that stood out from among them were these.
To begin with the City. "The island of the City," says Sauval, who, amidst his frivolous gossip, has occasionally 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 resemblance to a vessel had struck the heralds of those times; for it is to this circumstance, and not to the siege of the Normans, that, according to Favyn and Pasquier, the ship blazoned in the ancient arms of Paris owes its origin. To those who can decipher it heraldry is an algebra, a language. The entire history of the second half of the middle ages is written in heraldry; as the history of the first half in the imagery of the Roman churches: 'tis but the hieroglyphics of the feudal system succeeding those of theocracy.
The City, then, claimed the first notice, with its stern to the east and its head to the west. Turning towards the latter, you had before you a countless multitude of old roofs, above which rose the widely swelling lead-covered cupola of the Holy Chapel, like the back of an elephant supporting its tower. In this case, indeed, the place of the tower was occupied by the lightest, the boldest, the most elegant steeple that ever allowed the sky to be seen through its cone of lace-work.
Just in front of Notre-Dame, three streets disgorged themselves into the Parvis, a handsome square of old houses. On the south side 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 and crazy Roman campanile of St. Denis du Pas to the slender spires of St. Pierre aux Boeufs 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 top-most windows, then placed in the roofs even of palaces themselves, the hotel given by the city in the time of Charles VI. to Juvenal des Ursins; a little 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 expense 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; a fine piece of the pavement of Philip Augustus, composed of magnificent slabs, channelled for the sake of the horses and laid in the middle of the way; a vacant back court with one of those transparent staircase turrets which were constructed in the fifteenth century, and a specimen of which may still be seen in the rue de Bourdonnais.
Lastly, on the right of the Holy Chapel, towards the west, the Palace of Justice was seated, with its group of towers, on the bank of the river. The plantations of the king's gardens, which covered the western point of the City, intercepted the view of the islet of the Passeur. As for the water, it was scarcely to be seen at either end of the City from the towers of Notre-Dame; the Seine being concealed by the bridges, and the bridges by the houses.
When the eye passed these bridges, whose roofs were green with moss, the effect not so much of age as of clamp from the water, if it turned to the left, towards 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 bank of the river from east to west, from the Tournelle to the Tower of Nesle, it perceived a long line of houses with carved beams projecting, story beyond story, over the pavement, 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 some spacious stone mansion, seated at its ease, with its courts and gardens, amid this populace of narrow, closely crowded dwellings, like a man of consequence among his dependents. There were five or six of these mansions on the quay, from the logis de Lorraine, which divided with the Bernardines the extensive enclosure contiguous to the Tournelle, 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 black triangles corresponding portions 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 artisans, and there 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 naked strand, as beyond the Bernardines; in others a mass of houses standing on the brink of the water, as between the two bridges.
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, much the same as they do at present. Among the sights of Paris this is by no means the dullest.
Hugo, Victor. The Hunchback of Notre Dame. Frederic Shoberl, trans. 1833.
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