Notre Dame de Paris - Bartleby.com

the University, Rue de la Juiverie (Jewry) in the City, and Rue Saint-Martin in the Town, crossing the
river twice, as the Petit-Pont and the Pont Notre Dame. The second—which was called Rue de la Harpe
on the left bank, Rue de la Barillerie on the island, Rue Saint-Denis on the right bank, Pont Saint-Michel
on one arm of the Seine, Pont-aux-Change on the other—ran from the Porte Saint-Michel in the
University to the Porte Saint-Denis in the Town. For the rest, under however many names, they were still
only the two streets, the two thoroughfares, the two mother-streets, the main arteries of Paris, from which
all the other ducts of the triple city started, or into which they flowed.
Independently of these two principal streets, cutting diametrically through the breadth of Paris and
common to the entire capital, the Town and the University had each its own main street running in the
direction of their length, parallel to the Seine, and intersecting the two “arterial” streets at right angles.
Thus, in the Town you descended in a straight line from the Porte Saint-Antoine to the Porte
Saint-Honoré; in the University, from the Porte Saint Victor to the Porte Saint-Germain. These two great
thoroughfares, crossing the two first mentioned, formed the frame on to which was woven the knotted,
tortuous network of the streets of Paris. In the inextricable tangle of this network, however, on closer
inspection, two sheaf-like clusters of streets could be distinguished, one in the University, one in the
Town, spreading out from the bridges to the gates. Something of the same geometrical plan still exists.
Now, what aspect did this present when viewed from the top of the towers of Notre Dame in 1482?
That is what we will endeavour to describe.
To the spectator, arrived breathless on this summit, the first glance revealed only a bewildering jumble
of roofs, chimneys, streets, bridges, squares, spires, and steeples. Everything burst upon the eye at
once—the carved gable, the high, pointed roof, the turret clinging to the corner wall, the stone pyramid
of the eleventh century, the slate obelisk of the fifteenth, the round, stark tower of the donjon-keep, the
square and elaborately decorated tower of the church, the large, the small, the massive, the airy. The gaze
was lost for long and completely in this maze, where there was nothing that had not its own originality,
its reason, its touch of genius, its beauty; where everything breathed of art, from the humblest house with
its painted and carved front, its visible timber framework, its low-browed doorway and projecting
storeys, to the kingly Louvre itself, which, in those days, boasted a colonnade of towers. But here are the
most important points which struck the eye when it became some-what accustomed to this throng of
edifices.
To begin with, the City. “The island of the City,” as Sauval observes—who, with all his pompous
verbosity, sometimes hits upon these happy turns of phrase—“the island of the City is shaped like a great
ship sunk into the mud and run aground lengthwise, about mid-stream of the Seine.” As we have already
shown, in the fifteenth century this ship was moored to the two banks of the Seine by five bridges. This
likeness to a ship had also struck the fancy of the heraldic scribes; for, according to Favyn and Pasquier,
it was from this circumstance, and not from the siege by the Normans, that is derived the ship
emblazoned in the arms of Paris. To him who can decipher it, heraldry is an algebra, a complete
language. The whole history of the later half of the Middle Ages is written in heraldry, as is that of the
first half in the symbolism of the Roman churches—the hieroglyphics of feudalism succeeding those of
theocracy.
The City, then, first presented itself to the view, with its stern to the east and its prow to the west.
Facing towards the prow there stretched an endless line of old roofs, above which rose, broad and domed,
the lead-roofed transept of the Sainte-Chapelle, like an elephant with its tower, except that here the tower