Notre Dame de Paris - Bartleby.com

have remarked a sort of building, presenting the appearance, in the distance, of a ruined colonnade with
its foundation laid bare. But this was neither a Panthèon nor a Temple of Jupiter; it was Montfaucon. 42
Now, if the enumeration of so many edifices, brief as we have done our best to make it, has not
shattered in the reader’s mind the image of old Paris as fast as we have built it up, we will recapitulate in
a few words. In the centre, the island of the City like an immense tortoise, stretching out its tiled bridges
like scaly paws from under its gray shell of roofs. On the left, the dense, bristling, square block of the
University; on the right, the high semicircle of the Town, showing many more gardens and isolated
edifices than the other two. The three areas, City, University, and Town, are veined with streets
innumerable. Athwart the whole runs the Seine—“the fostering Seine,” as Peter du Breul calls
it—encumbered with islands, bridges, and boats. All around, a vast plain checkered with a thousand
forms of cultivation and dotted with fair villages; to the left, Issy, Vanves, Vaugirarde, Montrouge,
Gentilly, with its round and its square tower, etc.; to the right, a score of others from Conflans to
Ville-l’Evêque; on the horizon, a border of hills ranged in a circle, the rim of the basin, as it were.
Finally, far to the east, Vincennes with its seven square towers; southward, Bicêtre and its sharp-pointed
turrets; northward, Saint-Denis with its spire; and in the west, Saint-Cloud and its castle-keep. Such was
the Paris which the ravens of 1482 looked down upon from the heights of Notre Dame.
And yet this was the city of which Voltaire said that “before the time of Louis XIV it only possessed
four handsome examples of architecture”—the dome of the Sorbonne, the Val-de-Grâce, the modern
Louvre, and I forget the fourth—the Luxembourg, perhaps. Fortunately, Voltaire was none the less the
author of Candide; and none the less the man of all others in the long line of humanity who possessed in
highest perfection the rire diabolique—the sardonic smile. It proves, besides, that one may be a brilliant
genius, and yet know nothing of an art one has not studied. Did not Molière think to greatly honour
Raphael and Michael Angelo by calling them “the Mignards 43 of their age”?
But to return to Paris and the fifteenth century.
It was in those days not only a beautiful city; it was a homogeneous city, a direct product—architectural
and historical—of the Middle Ages, a chronicle in stone. It was a city composed of two architectural
strata only—the Romanesque and the Gothic—for the primitive Roman layer had long since disappeared
excepting in the Baths of Julian, where it still pierced through the thick overlying crust of the Middle
Ages. As for the Celtic stratum, no trace of it was discoverable even when sinking wells.
Fifty years later, when the Renaissance came, and with that unity of style, so severe and yet so varied,
associated its dazzling wealth of fantasy and design, its riot of Roman arches, Doric columns and Gothic
vaults, its delicate and ideal sculpture, its own peculiar tastes in arabesques and capitals, its architectural
paganism contemporary with Luther, Paris was perhaps more beautiful still though less harmonious to
the eye and the strictly artistic sense. But that splendid period was of short duration. The Renaissance
was not impartial; it was not content only to erect, it must also pull down; to be sure, it required space.
Gothic Paris was complete but for a moment. Scarcely was Saint-Jacques-de-la-Boucherie finished when
the demolition of the old Louvre began.
Since then the great city has gone on losing her beauty day by day. The Gothic Paris, which was
effacing the Romanesque, has been effaced in its turn. But what name shall be given to the Paris which
has replaced it?
We have the Paris of Catherine de Mèin the Tuileries; the Paris of Henri II in the Hôtel-de-Ville, both