Notre Dame de Paris - Bartleby.com

was the boldest, airiest, most elaborate and serrated spire that ever showed the sky through its fretted
cone.
Just in front of Notre Dame three streets opened into the Cathedral close—a fine square of old houses.
On the south side of this glowered the furrowed, beetling front of the Hôtel-Dieu, with its roof as if
covered with boils and warts. Then, on every side, right, left, east, and west, all within the narrow circuit
of the City, rose the steeples of its twenty-one churches, of all dates, shapes, and sizes, from the low,
worm-eaten Roman belfry of Saint-Denis du Pas (carcer Glaucini) to the slender, tapering spires of
Saint-Pierre aux Bœufs and Saint-Landry. Behind Notre Dame northward, stretched the cloister with its
Gothic galleries; southward, the semi-Roman palace of the Bishop, and eastward, an uncultivated piece
of ground, the terrain, at the point of the island. Furthermore, in this sea of houses, the eye could
distinguish, by the high, perforated mitres of stone which at that period capped even its topmost attic
windows, the palace presented by the town, in the reign of Charles VI, to Juvénal des Ursins; a little
farther on, the black-barred roofs of the market-shed in the Marché Palus; farther off still, the new
chancel of Saint-Germain le Vieux, lengthened in 1458 by taking in a piece of the Rue aux Febves with
here and there a glimpse of causeway, crowded with people, some pillory at a corner of the street, some
fine piece of the pavement of Philip Augustus—magnificent flagging, furrowed in the middle for the
benefit of the horses, and so badly replaced in the middle of the sixteenth century by the wretched
cobblestones called “pavé de la Ligue”; some solitary court-yard with one of those diaphanous
wrought-iron stair-case turrets they were so fond of in the fifteenth century, one of which is still to be
seen in the Rue des Bourdonnais. Lastly, to the right of the Sainte-Chapelle, westward, the Palais de
Justice displayed its group of towers by the water’s edge. The trees of the royal gardens, which occupied
the western point of the island, hid the ferry-man’s islet from view. As for the water, it was hardly visible
on either side of the City from the towers of Notre Dame: the Seine disappeared under the bridges, and
the bridges under the houses.
And when one looked beyond these bridges, on which the house-roofs glimmered green—moss-grown
before their time from the mists of the river—and turned one’s gaze to the left towards the University,
the first building which caught the eye was a low, extensive cluster of towers, the Petit-Châtelet, whose
yawning gateway swallowed up the end of the Petit-Pont. Then, if you ran your eye along the river bank
from east to west, from the Tournelle to the Tour de Nesle, it was one long line of houses with sculptured
beams, coloured windows, overhanging storeys jutting out over the roadway—an interminable zigzag of
gabled houses broken frequently by the opening of some street, now and then by the frontage or corner of
some grand mansion with its gardens and its court-yards, its wings and outbuildings; standing proudly
there in the midst of this crowding, hustling throng of houses, like a grand seigneur among a mob of
rustics. There were five or six of these palaces along the quay, from the Logis de Lorraine, which shared
with the Bernardines the great neighbouring enclosure of the Tournelle, to the Tour de Nesle, the chief
tower of which formed the boundary of Paris, and whose pointed gables were accustomed, for three
months of the year, to cut with their black triangles the scarlet disk of the setting sun.
Altogether, this side of the Seine was the least mercantile of the two: there was more noise and
crowding of scholars than artisans, and there was no quay, properly speaking, except between the Pont
Saint-Michel and the Tour de Nesle. The rest of the river bank was either a bare strand, like that beyond
the Bernardine Monastery, or a row of houses with their feet in the water, as between the two bridges.
This was the domain of the washerwomen; here they called to one another, chattered, laughed, and sang,
from morning till night along the river side, while they beat the linen vigorously—as they do to this day,
contributing not a little to the gaiety of Paris.