Notre Dame de Paris - Bartleby.com

he came to visit Paris, and the lions, who had a palace for themselves within the royal palace. And we
must observe here that a prince’s lodging comprised in those days not less than eleven apartments, from
the state chamber to the oratory, besides all the galleries, the baths, the “sweating-rooms,” and other
“superfluous places” with which each suite of apartments was provided—not to mention the gardens
specially allotted to each guest of the King, nor the kitchens, store-rooms, pantries, and general
refectories of the household; the inner court-yards in which were situated twenty-two general offices,
from the bakehouse to the royal cellarage; the grounds for every sort and description of game—mall,
tennis, tilting at the ring, etc.; aviaries, fish-ponds, menageries, stables, cattle-sheds, libraries, armouries,
and foundries. Such was, at that day, a King’s palace—a Louvre, an Hôtel Saint-Pol—a city within a
city.
From the tower on which we have taken up our stand, one obtained of the Hôtel Saint-Pol, though
half-hidden by the four great mansions we spoke of, a very considerable and wonderful view. You could
clearly distinguish in it, though skilfully welded to the main building by windowed and pillared galleries,
the three mansions which Charles V had absorbed into his palace: the Hôtel du Petit-Muce with the
fretted parapet that gracefully bordered its roof; the Hôtel of the Abbot of Saint-Maur, having all the
appearance of a fortress, with its massive tower, its machicolations, loopholes, iron bulwarks, and over
the great Saxon gate, between the two grooves for the drawbridge, the escutcheon of the Abbot; the Hôtel
of the Comte d’Etampes, of which the keep, ruined at its summit, was arched and notched like a
cock’s-comb; here and there, three or four ancient oaks grouped together in one great bushy clump; a
glimpse of swans floating on clear pools, all flecked with light and shadow; picturesque corners of
innumerable court-yards; the Lion house, with its low Gothic arches on short Roman pillars, its iron bars
and continuous roaring; cutting right through this picture the scaly spire of the Ave-Maria Chapel; on the
left, the Mansion of the Provost of Paris, flanked by four delicately perforated turrets; and, in the centre
of it all, the Hôtel Saint-Pol itself, with its multiplicity of façades, its successive enrichments since the
time of Charles V, the heterogeneous excrescences with which the fancy of the architects had loaded it
during two centuries, with all the roofs of its chapels, all its gables, its galleries, a thousand
weather-cocks turning to the four winds of heaven, and its two lofty, contiguous towers with conical
roofs surrounded by battlements at the base, looking like peaked hats with the brim turned up.
Continuing to mount the steps of this amphitheatre of palaces, rising tier upon tier in the distance,
having crossed the deep fissure in the roofs of the Town which marked the course of the Rue
Saint-Antoine, the eye travelled on to the Logis d’Angoulême, a vast structure of several periods, parts of
which were glaringly new and white, blending with the rest about as well as a crimson patch on a blue
doublet. Nevertheless, the peculiarly sharp and high-pitched roof of the modern palace—bristling with
sculptured gargoyles, and covered with sheets of lead, over which ran sparkling incrustations of gilded
copper in a thousand fantastic arabesques—this curiously damascened roof rose gracefully out of the
brown ruins of the ancient edifice, whose massive old towers, bulging cask-like with age, sinking into
themselves with decrepitude, and rent from top to bottom, looked like great unbuttoned waistcoats.
Behind rose the forest of spires of the Palais des Tournelles. No show-place in the world—not even
Chambord or the Alhambra—could afford a more magical, more ethereal, more enchanting spectacle
than this grove of spires, bell-towers, chimneys, weather-cocks, spiral stair-cases; of airy lantern towers
that seemed to have been worked with a chisel; of pavilions; of spindle-shaped turrets, all diverse in
shape, height, and position. It might have been a gigantic chess-board in stone.
That sheaf of enormous black towers to the right of the inky Tournelles, pressing one against the other,
and bound together, as it were, by a circular moat; that donjon-keep, pierced far more numerously with