Notre Dame de Paris - Bartleby.com

shot-holes than with windows, its drawbridge always raised, its portcullis always lowered—that is the
Bastile. Those objects like black beaks projecting from the embrasures of the battlements, and which,
from a distance, you might take for rain-spouts, are cannon. Within their range, at the foot of the
formidable pile, is the Porte Saint-Antoine, crouching between its two towers.
Beyond the Tournelles, reaching to the wall of Charles V, stretched in rich diversity of lawns and
flower-beds a velvet carpet of gardens and royal parks, in the heart of which, conspicuous by its maze of
trees and winding paths, one recognised the famous labyrinthine garden presented by Louis XI to
Coictier. The great physician’s observatory rose out of the maze like a massive, isolated column with a
tiny house for its capital. Many a terrible astrological crime was perpetrated in that laboratory. This is
now the Place Royale.
As we have said, the Palace quarter, of which we have endeavoured to convey some idea to the reader,
though merely pointing out the chief features, filled the angle formed by the Seine and the wall of
Charles V on the east. The centre of the Town was occupied by a congeries of dwelling-houses. For it
was here that the three bridges of the City on the right bank discharged their streams of passengers; and
bridges lead to the building of houses before palaces. This collection of middle-class dwellings, closely
packed together like the cells of a honeycomb, was, however, by no means devoid of beauty. The sea of
roofs of a great city has much of the grandeur of the ocean about it. To begin with, the streets in their
crossings and windings cut up the mass into a hundred charming figures, streaming out from the Halles
like the rays of a star. The streets of Saint-Denis and Saint-Martin, with their innumerable ramifications,
went up side by side like two great trees intertwining their branches; while such streets as the Rue de la
Plâterie, Rue de la Verrerie, Rue de la Tixeranderie, etc., wound in tortuous lines through the whole.
Some handsome edifices, too, thrust up their heads through the petrified waves of this sea of gables. For
instance, at the head of the Pont-aux-Changeurs, behind which you could see the Seine foaming under
the mill-wheels of the Pont-aux-Meuniers, there was the Châtelet, no longer a Roman keep, as under
Julian the Apostate, but a feudal tower of the thirteenth century, and built of stone so hard that three
hours’ work with the pick did not remove more than the size of a man’s fist. Then there was the square
steeple of Saint-Jacques-de-la-Boucherie, with its richly sculptured corners, most worthy of admiration
even then, though it was not completed in the fifteenth century; it lacked in particular the four monsters
which, still perched on the four corners of its roof, look like sphinxes offering to modern Paris the
enigma of the old to unriddle. Rault, the sculptor, did not put them up till 1526, and received twenty
francs for his trouble. There was the Maison-aux-Piliers, facing the Place de Grève, of which we have
already given the reader some idea; there was Saint-Gervais, since spoilt by a doorway “in good taste”;
Saint-Méry, of which the primitive pointed arches were scarcely more than circular; Saint-Jean, whose
magnificent spire was proverbial; and twenty other edifices which disdained not to hide their wonders in
that chaos of deep, dark, narrow streets. Add to these the carved stone crosses, more numerous at the
crossways than even the gibbets; the cemetery of the Innocents, of whose enclosing wall you caught a
glimpse in the distance; the pillory of the Halles, just visible between two chimneys of the Rue de la
Cossonnerie; the gibbet of the Croix du Trahoir at the corner of the ever-busy thoroughfare; the round
stalls of the Corn Market; fragments of the old wall of Philip Augustus, distinguishable here and there,
buried among the houses; mouldering, ivy-clad towers, ruined gateways, bits of crumbling walls; the
quay with its myriad booths and gory skinning yards; the Seine, swarming with boats from the Port au
Foin or hay wharf to the For l’Evêque, and you will be able to form some adequate idea of what the great
irregular quadrangle of the Town looked like in 1482.
Besides these two quarters—the one of palaces, the other of houses—the Town contributed a third