Notre Dame de Paris - Bartleby.com

Arrived in front of the great door of Notre Dame, Clop in Trouillefou had in fact drawn up his troops in
battle array. Though anticipating no resistance, yet, like a prudent general, he determined to preserve so
much order as would, in case of need, enable him to face a sudden attack of the watch or the city guard.
Accordingly, he had so disposed his brigade that, seen from above and at distance, it might have been
taken for the Roman triangle at the battle of Ecnoma, the boar’s head of Alexander, or the famous wedge
of Gustavus Adolphus. The base of this triangle ran along the back of the Place in such a manner as to
bar the Rue du Parvis, one side looked towards the Hotel Dieu, the other towards the Rue Saint-Pierre
aux Bœufs; Clop in Trouillenfou had posted himself at the point with the Duke of Egypt, our friend Jean,
and the boldest of the beggar tribe.
An enterprise such as the truandswere now attempting against Notre Dame was no means an
uncommon occurrence in the Middle Ages. What we now call “police” did not then exist. In the populous
cities, particularly in the capitals, there was no united central power regulating the whole. Feudalism
had shaped these great municipalities after an absurd fashion. A city was a collection of innumerable
seigneuries, cutting it up into divisions of all shapes and sizes; hence its crowd of contradictory police
establishments, or rather no police at all. In Paris, for instance, independently of the hundred and
forty-one feudal lords claiming manorial dues, there were twenty-five claiming justiciary and manorial
rights, from the Bishop of Paris, who possessed a hundred and five streets, to the Prior of Notre Dame
des Chaps, who had only four. All these feudal justiciaries recognised only nominally the paramount
authority of the king. All exercised right of highway, all were their own masters. Louis XI—that in
defatigable workman, who commenced on so large a scale the demolition of the feudal edifice, continued
by Richelieu and Louis XIV to the advantage of royalty, and completed by Mirabeau to the advantage of
the people—Louis XI had done his utmost to break up this network of seigneuries which covered Paris,
by casting violently athwart it two or three ordinances of general police. Thus, in 1465, we find the
inhabitants ordered to put lighted candles in their windows at nightfall, and to shut up their dogs on pain
of the halter; in the same year, the order to bar the streets at night with iron chains, and the prohibition
against their carrying daggers or any other offensive weapon in the streets at night. But in a short time
all these attempts at municipal legislation fell into disuse; the citizens let the candles at their windows be
extinguished by the wind and their dogs roam at large; the iron chains were only stretched across the
street in case of siege, and the prohibition against carrying weapons brought about no other changes
than converting the Rue Coupe-Gueule into Coupe-Gorge; which, to be sure, is a clear evidence of
progress. The old framework of the feudal jurisdictions remained standing—an immense accumulation of
bailiwicks and seigneuries, crossing one another in all directions through the length and breadth of the
city, embarrassing, entangling, overlapping one another—a useless thicket of watches, counter-watches,
and out-watches, through the very midst of which stalked brigandage, rapine, and sedition, sword in
hand. Under such condition of disorder, therefore, it excited no very great remark if a part of the
populace laid violent hands on a palace, a mansion, or any ordinary dwelling-house in the most
populated quarters of the city. In most cases the neighbours did interfere in the matter unless the
plundering extended to themselves. They stopped their ears to the report of the musketry, closed their
shutters, barricaded their doors, and let the struggle exhaust itself with or without the assistance of the
watch, and the next day it would be quietly said in Paris: “Last night Etienne Barbette’s house was
broken into.” or “The Marshal de Clermont was attacked,” etc. Hence, not only royal residences, the
Louvre, the Palais, the Bastille, the Tournelles, but the mansions of the nobility, such as the
Petit-Bourbon, the Hotel de Sens, the Hotel d’Angoulême, and so on, had their battlemented walls and
their fortified turrets over the entrances. The churches were protected turrets over the entrances. The
churches were protected by their sanctity. Some of them, nevertheless—among which was not Notre