Notre Dame de Paris - Bartleby.com

circumvallation, and immures Paris within a chain of massive and lofty towers. For upward of a century
the houses press upon one another, accumulate, and rise in this basin like water in a reservoir. They begin
to burrow deeper in the ground, they pile storey upon storey, they climb one upon another, they shoot up
in height like all compressed growth, and each strives to raise its head above its neighbour for a breath of
air. The streets grow ever deeper and narrower, every open space fills up and disappears, till, finally, the
houses overleap the wall of Philip Augustus, and spread themselves joyfully over the country like
escaped prisoners, without plan or system, gathering themselves together in knots, cutting slices out of
the surrounding fields for gardens, taking plenty of elbowroom.
By 1367, the town has made such inroads on the suburb that a new enclosure has become necessary,
especially on the right bank, and is accordingly built by Charles V. But a town like Paris is in a state of
perpetual growth—it is only such cities that become capitals. They are the reservoirs into which are
directed all the streams—geographical, political, moral, intellectual—of a country, all the natural
tendencies of the people; wells of civilization, so to speak—but also outlets—where commerce,
manufacture, intelligence, population, all that there is of vital fluid, of life, of soul, in a people, filters
through and collects incessantly, drop by drop, century by century. The wall of Charles V, however,
endures the same fate as that of Philip Augustus. By the beginning of the fifteenth century it, too, is
over-stepped, left behind, the new suburb hurries on, and in the sixteenth century it seems visibly to
recede farther and farther into the depths of the old city, so dense has the new town become outside it.
Thus, by the fifteenth century—to go no farther—Paris had already consumed the three concentric
circles of wall, which, in the time of Julian the Apostate, were in embryo, so to speak, in the
Grand-Châtelet and the Petit-Châtelet. The mighty city had successively burst its four girdles of wall like
a child grown out of last year’s garments. Under Louis XI, clusters of ruined towers belonging to the old
fortified walls were still visible, rising out of the sea of houses like hilltops out of an inundation—the
archipelagoes of the old Paris, submerged beneath the new.
Since then, unfortunately for us, Paris has changed again; but it has broken through one more enclosure,
that of Louis XV, a wretched wall of mud and rubbish, well worthy of the King who built it and of the
poet who sang of it:
“Le mur murant Paris rend Paris murmurant.” 37
In the fifteenth century Paris was still divided into three towns, perfectly distinct and separate, having
each its peculiar features, specialty, manners, customs, privileges, and history: the City, the University,
the Town. The City, which occupied the island, was the oldest and the smallest of the trio—the mother of
the other two—looking, if we may be allowed the comparison, like a little old woman between two tall
and blooming daughters. The University covered the left bank of the Seine from the Tournelle to the
Tour de Nesle—points corresponding in the Paris of to-day to the Halles-aux-Vins and the Mint, its
circular wall taking in a pretty large portion of that ground on which Julian had built his baths. 38 It also
included the Hill of Sainte-Geneviève. The outermost point of the curving wall was the Papal Gate; that
is to say, just about the site of the Panthéon. The Town, the largest of the three divisions of Paris,
occupied the right bank. Its quay, interrupted at several points, stretched along the Seine from the Tour
de Billy to the Tour du Bois; that is, from the spot where the Grenier d’Abondance now stands to that
occupied by the Tuileries. These four points at which the Seine cut through the circumference of the
Capital—la Tournelle and the Tour de Nesle on the left, the Tour de Billy and the Tour de Bois on the
right bank—were called par excellence “the four towers of Paris.” The Town encroached more deeply
into the surrounding country than did the University. The farthest point of its enclosing wall (the one