Notre Dame de Paris - Bartleby.com

departure—the market-town of Saint-Victor, with its one-arched bridge spanning the Bièvre; its Abbey,
where the epitaph of King Louis the Fat—epitaphium Ludovici Grossi—was to be seen; and its church
with an octagonal spire, flanked by four belfry towers of the eleventh century (there is a similar one still
to be seen at Etampes). Then there was Saint-Marceau, which already boasted three churches and a
convent; then, leaving on the left the mill of the Gobelins with its white wall of enclosure, you came to
the Faubourg Saint-Jacques with its beautifully carved stone cross at the cross-roads; the Church of
Saint-Jacques du Haut-Pas, then a charming Gothic structure; Saint-Magloire, with a beautiful nave of
the fourteenth century, which Napoleon turned into a hayloft; and Notre Dame-des-Champs, which
contained some Byzantine mosaics. Finally, after leaving in the open fields the Chartreux Monastery, a
sumptuous edifice contemporary to the Palais de Justice with its garden divided off into compartments,
and the deserted ruins of Vauvert, the eye turned westward and fell upon the three Roman spires of
Saint-Germain-des-Prés, in the rear of which the market-town of Saint-Germain, already quite a large
parish, formed fifteen or twenty streets, the sharp steeple of Saint-Sulpice marking one of the corners of
the town boundary. Close by was the square enclosure of the Foire Saint-Germain, where the fairs were
held—the present market-place. Then came the abbot’s pillory, a charming little round tower, capped by
a cone of lead; farther on were the tile-fields and the Rue du Four, leading to the manorial bakehouse;
then the mill on its raised mound; finally, the Lazarette, a small, isolated building scarcely discernible in
the distance.
But what especially attracted the eye and held it long was the Abbey itself. Undoubtedly this monastery,
in high repute both as a religious house and as a manor, this abbey-palace, wherein the Bishop of Paris
esteemed it a privilege to pass one night; with a refectory which the architect had endowed with the
aspect, the beauty, and the splendid rose-window of a cathedral; its elegant Lady Chapel; its monumental
dormitories, its spacious gardens, its portcullis, its drawbridge, its belt of crenated wall, which seemed to
stamp its crested outline on the meadow beyond, its court-yards where the glint of armour mingled with
the shimmer of gold-embroidered vestments—the whole grouped and marshalled round the three high
Roman towers firmly planted on a Gothic transept—all this, I say, produced a magnificent effect against
the horizon.
When at length, after long contemplating the University, you turned towards the right bank—the
Town—the scene changed its character abruptly. Much larger than the University quarter, the Town was
much less of a united whole. The first glance showed it to be divided into several singularly distinct
areas. First, on the east, in that part of the Town which still takes its name from the “marais”—the morass
into which Camulogènes led Cæsar—there was a great group of palaces extending to the water’s edge.
Four huge mansions, almost contiguous—the Hôtels Jouy, Sens, Barbeau, and the Logis de la Reine
mirrored in the Seine their slated roofs and slender turrets. These four edifices filled the space between
the Rue des Nonaindières to the Celestine Abbey, the spire of which formed a graceful relief to their line
of gables and battlements. Some squalid, moss-grown hovels overhanging the water in front of these
splendid buildings were not sufficient to conceal from view the beautifully ornamented corners of their
façades, their great square stone casements, their Gothic porticoes surmounted by statues, the bold,
clear-cut parapets of their walls, and all those charming architectural surprises which give Gothic art the
appearance of forming her combinations afresh for each new structure. Behind these palaces ran in every
direction, now cleft, palisaded, and embattled like a citadel, now veiled by great trees like a Carthusian
monastery, the vast and multiform encircling wall of that marvellous Hôtel Saint-Pol, where the King of
France had room to lodge superbly twenty-two princes of the rank of the Dauphin and the Duke of
Burgundy with their retinues and their servants, not to mention the great barons, and the Emperor when