Chapter 7

SECTION I

_The Cite--Notre Dame--The Sainte Chapelle--The Palais de Justice_ 295

SECTION II

_St. Julien le Pauvre--St. Severin--The Quartier Latin_ 313

SECTION III

_Ecole des Beaux Arts--St. Germain des Pres--Cour du Dragon--St. Sulpice--The Luxembourg--The Odeon--The Cordeliers--The Surgeons' Guild--The Musee Cluny--The Sorbonne--The Pantheon--St. Etienne du Mont--Tour Clovis--Wall of Philip Augustus--Roman Amphitheatre_ 318

SECTION IV

_The Louvre--Sculpture: Ground Floor_ 333

SECTION V

_The Louvre (continued)--Pictures: First Floor_ 350

SECTION VI

_The Ville (S. of the Rue St. Antoine)--The Hotel de Ville--St. Gervais--Hotel Beauvais--Hotel of the Provost of Paris--SS. Paul and Louis--Hotel de Mayenne--Site of the Bastille--Bibliotheque de l'Arsenal--Hotel Fieubert--Hotel de Sens--Isle St. Louis_ 400

SECTION VII

_The Ville (N. of the Rue St. Antoine)--Tour St. Jacques--Rue St. Martin--St. Merri--Rue de Venise--Les Billettes--Hotels de Soubise, de Hollande, de Rohan--Musee Carnavalet--Place Royale--Musee Victor Hugo--Hotel de Sully_ 407

SECTION VIII

_Rue St. Denis--Fontaine des Innocents--Tower of Jean sans Peur--Cour des Miracles--St. Eustache--The Halles--St. Germain l'Auxerrois_ 417

SECTION IX

_Palais Royal--Theatre Francais--Gardens and Cafes of the Palais Royal--Palais Mazarin (Bibliotheque Nationale)--St. Roch--Vendome Column--Tuileries Gardens--Place de la Concorde--Champs Elysees_ 424

SECTION X

_The Basilica of St. Denis and the Monuments of the Kings, Queens and Princes of France_ 436

_Index_ 441

ILLUSTRATIONS

_The Winged Victory of Samothrace (Photogravure) Frontispiece_

_Map of the Successive Walls of Paris_ _facing_ 1

_The Cite_ 11

_Remains of Roman Amphitheatre_ 14

_Tower of Clovis_ 25

_St. Germain des Pres_ 31

_St. Julien le Pauvre_ 38

_St. Germain l'Auxerrois_ 45

_Wall of Philippe Auguste, Cour de Rouen_ 67

_La Sainte Chapelle_ 73

_Refectory of the Cordeliers_ 77

_Notre Dame and Petit Pont_ 95

_Tower in Rue Valette in which Calvin is said to have lived_ 99

_Palace of the Archbishop of Sens_ 115

_Palais de Justice, Clock Tower and Conciergerie_ 119

_Tower of Jean Sans Peur_ 135

_Tower of St. Jacques_ 153

_Pont Notre Dame_ 157

_Chapel, Hotel de Cluny_ 158

_Tower of St. Etienne du Mont_ 161

_La Fontaine des Innocents_ 171

_West Wing of Louvre by Pierre Lescot_ 173

_Tritons and Nereids from the Old Fontaine des Innocents_ (_Jean Goujon_) " 174

_Catherine de' Medici_ (_French School_) 180

_Petite Galerie of the Louvre_ 183

_Hotel de Sully_ 195

_Old Houses near Pont St. Michel, showing spire of the Ste. Chapelle_ 201

_The Medici Fountain, Luxembourg Gardens_ 209

_Pont Neuf_ 211

_The Institut de France_ 221

_Portion of the East Facade of the Louvre, from Blondel's drawing_ (_reproduced by permission of M. Lampue_) " 236

_River and Pont Royal_ 239

_South Door of Notre Dame_ 253

_Hotel de Ville from River_ 293

_Chapel of Chateau at Vincennes_ 296

_Near the Pont Neuf_ 297

_Notre Dame--Portal of St. Anne_ 301

_Notre Dame--south side_ 303

_Notre Dame--south side from the Seine_ 304

_St. Severin_ 315

_Old Academy of Medicine_ 317

_Interior of Notre Dame_ 320

_Cour de Dragon_ 323

_Tower and Courtyard of Hotel Cluny_ 325

_Arches in the Courtyard of the Hotel Cluny_ 329

_Interior of St. Etienne du Mont_ 332

_Diana and the Stag_ (_Jean Goujon_) " 342

_St. George and the Dragon_ (_M. Colombe_) " 344

_Triptych of Moulins_ (_Maitre de Moulins_) " 370

_Portrait of Elizabeth of Austria_ (_Francois Clouet_) _facing_ 372

_Shepherds of Arcady_ (_Poussin_) " 376

_Landing of Cleopatra at Tarsus_ (_Lorrain_) " 378

_Embarkation for the Island of Cythera_ (_Watteau_) " 382

_Grace before Meat_ (_Chardin_) " 384

_Madame Recamier_ (_David_) " 388

_The Binders_ (_Millet_) " 394

_Landscape_ (_Corot_) " 396

_St. Gervais_ 402

_Hotel of the Provost of Paris_ 404

_West door of St. Merri_ 409

_Cloister of the Billettes, fifteenth century_ 410

_Archives Nationales, Hotel Soubise, showing towers of Hotel de Clisson_ 411

_Tower at the corner of the Rue Vieille du Temple_ 413

_Place des Vosges, Maison de Victor Hugo_ 418

_Cathedral of St. Denis_ 437

_Plan of Paris_ " 448

_The majority of the photographs of sculpture have been taken by Messrs._ HAWEIS AND COLES, _while most of the other photographs are reproduced by permission of Messrs._ GIRAUDON.

INTRODUCTION

The History of Paris, says Michelet, is the history of the French monarchy: "Paris, France and the Dukes and Kings of the French, are three ideas," says Freeman, "which can never be kept asunder." The aim of the writer in the following pages has been to narrate the story of the capital city of France on the lines thus indicated. Moreover, men are ever touched by "sad stories of the death of kings," the pomp and majesty and the fate of princes. By a pathetic fallacy their capacity to suffer is measured by their apparent power to enjoy, and those are moved to tears by the spectacle of a Dauphin surrendered to the coarse and brutal tutelage of a sans-culotte, who read without emotion of thousands of Huguenot children torn from their mothers' arms and flung to the novercal cruelties of strangers in blood and creed. In the earlier chapters the legendary aspect of the story has been drawn upon rather more perhaps than an austere historical conscience would approve, but it is precisely a familiarity with these romantic stories, which at least are true in impression if not in fact, that the sojourner in Paris will find most useful, translated as they are in sculpture and in painting, on the decoration of her architecture, both modern and ancient, and implicit in the nomenclature of her ways.

The story of Paris presents a marked contrast with that of an Italian city-state whose rise, culmination and fall may be roundly traced. Paris is yet in the stage of lusty growth. Time after time, like a young giantess, she has burst her cincture of walls, cast off her outworn garments and renewed her armour and vesture. Hers are no grass-grown squares and deserted streets; no ruined splendours telling of pride abased and glory departed; no sad memories of waning cities once the mistresses of sea and land; none of the tears evoked by a great historic tragedy; none of the solemn pathos of decay and death. Paris has more than once tasted the bitterness of humiliation; Norseman and Briton, Russian and German have bruised her fair body; the dire distress of civic strife has exhausted her strength, but she has always emerged from her trials with marvellous recuperation, more flourishing than before.

Since 1871, when the city, crushed under a twofold calamity of foreign invasion and of internecine war, seemed doomed to bleed away to feeble insignificance, her prosperity has so increased that house rent has doubled and population risen from 1,825,274 in 1870 to 2,714,068 in 1901. The growth of Paris from the settlement of an obscure Gallic tribe to the most populous, the most cultured, the most artistic, the most delightful and seductive of continental cities has been prodigious, yet withal she has maintained her essential unity, her corporate sense and peculiar individuality. Paris, unlike London, has never expatiated to the effacement of her distinctive features and the loss of civic consciousness. The city has still a definite outline and circumference, and over her gates to-day one may read, _Entree de Paris_. The Parisian is, and always has been, conscious of his citizenship, proud of his city, careful of her beauty, jealous of her reputation. The essentials of Parisian life remain unchanged since mediaeval times. Busy multitudes of alert, eager burgesses crowd her streets; ten thousand students stream from the provinces, from Europe, and even from the uttermost parts of the earth, to eat of the bread of knowledge at her University. The old collegiate life is gone, but the arts and sciences are freely taught as of old to all comers; and a lowly peasant lad may carry in his satchel the portfolio of a prime minister or the insignia of a president of the republic, even as his mediaeval prototype bore a bishop's mitre or a cardinal's hat. The boisterous exuberance of youthful spirits still vents itself in rowdy student life to the scandal of bourgeois placidity, and the poignant self-revelation and gnawing self-reproach of a Francois Villon find their analogue in the pathetic verse of a Paul Verlaine. Beneath the fair and ordered surface of the normal life of Paris still sleep the fiery passions which, from the days of the Maillotins to those of the Commune, have throughout the crises of her history ensanguined her streets with the blood of citizens.[1] Let us remember, however, when contrasting the modern history of Paris with that of London, that the questions which have stirred her citizens have been not party but dynastic ones, often complicated and embittered by social and religious principles ploughing deep in the human soul, for which men have cared enough to suffer, and to inflict, death.

[Footnote 1: "_Faudra recommencer_" ("We must begin again"), said, to the present writer in 1871, a Communist refugee bearing a great scar on his face from a wound received fighting at the barricades.]

Those writers who are pleased to trace the permanency of racial traits through the life of a people dwell with satisfaction on passages in ancient authors who describe the Gauls as quick to champion the cause of the oppressed, prone to war, elated by victory, impatient of defeat, easily amenable to the arts of peace, responsive to intellectual culture; terrible, indefatigable orators but bad listeners, so intolerant of their speakers that at tribal gatherings an official charged to maintain silence would march, sword in hand, towards an interrupter, and after a third warning cut off a portion of his dress. If the concurrent testimony of writers, ancient, mediaeval and modern, be of any worth, Gallic vanity is beyond dispute. Dante, expressing the prevailing belief of his age, exclaims, "Now, was there ever people so vain as the Sienese! Certes not the French by far."[2] Of their imperturbable gaiety and their avidity for new things we have ample testimony, and the course of this story will demonstrate that France, and more especially Paris, has ever been, from the establishment of Christianity to the birth of the modern world at the Revolution, the parent or the fosterer of ideas, the creator of arts, the soldier of the ideal. She has always evinced a wondrous preventive apprehension of coming changes. Sir Henry Maine has shown in his _Ancient Law_ that the idea of kingship created by the accession of the Capetian dynasty revolutionised the whole fabric of society, and that "when the feudal prince of a limited territory surrounding Paris began ... to call himself _King of France_, he became king in quite a new sense." The earliest of the western people beyond Rome to adopt Christianity, she had established a monastery near Tours, a century and a half before St. Benedict, the founder of Western monasticism, had organised his first community at Subiaco. In the Middle Ages Paris became the intellectual light of the Christian world. From the time of the centralisation of the monarchy at Paris she absorbed in large measure the vital forces of the nation, and all that was greatest in art, science and literature was drawn within her walls, until in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, she became the centre of learning, taste and culture in Europe.[3] "Alone of the capitals of Modern Europe," said Freeman, "Paris can claim to have been the creator of the state of which it is now the head." The same authority bears witness to the unique position held by France in her generous and liberal treatment of new subjects, and the late historian, Mr. C.A. Fyffe, told the writer that when travelling in Alsace in 1871 the inhabitants of that province, so essentially German in race, were passionately attached to France, and more than once he heard a peasant exclaim, unable even to express himself in French: "_Nimmer will ich Deutsch sein._"

[Footnote 2: _Inf._ XXIX. 121-123. A French commentator consoles himself by reflecting that the author of the _Divina Commedia_ is far more vituperative when dealing with certain Italian peoples, whom he designates as hogs, curs, wolves and foxes.]

[Footnote 3: Cobbett, comparing the relative intellectual culture of the British Isles and of France between the years 1600 and 1787, found that of the writers on the arts and sciences who were distinguished by a place in the _Universal, Historical, Critical and Bibliographical Dictionary_, one hundred and thirty belonged to England, Scotland and Ireland, and six hundred and seventy-six to France.]

During the first Empire and the Restoration, after the tempest was stilled and the great heritage of the Revolution taken possession of, an amazing outburst of scientific, artistic and literary activity made Paris the _Ville Lumiere_ of Europe. She is still the city where the things of the mind and of taste have most place, where the wheels of life run most smoothly and pleasantly, where the graces and refinements and amenities of social existence, _l'art des plaisirs fins_, are most highly developed and most widely diffused. There is something in the crisp, luminous air of Paris that quickens the intelligence and stimulates the senses. Even the scent of the wood fires as one emerges from the railway station exhilarates the spirit. The poet Heine used to declare that the traveller could estimate his proximity to Paris by noting the increasing intelligence of the people, and that the very bayonets of the soldiers were more intelligent than those elsewhere. Life, even in its more sensuous and material phases, is less gross and coarse,[4] its pleasures more refined than in London. It is impossible to conceive the pit of a London theatre stirred to fury by an innovation in diction in a poetical drama, or to imagine anything comparable to the attitude of a Parisian audience at the cheap holiday performances at the Francais or the Odeon, where the severe classic tragedies of Racine, of Corneille, of Victor Hugo, or the well-worn comedies of Moliere or of Beaumarchais are played with small lure of stage upholstery, and listened to with close attention by a popular audience responsive to the exquisite rhythm and grace of phrasing, the delicate and restrained tragic pathos, and the subtle comedy of their great dramatists. To witness a _premiere_ at the Francais is an intellectual feast. The brilliant house; the pit and stalls filled with black-coated critics; the quick apprehension of the points and happy phrases; the universal and excited discussion between the acts; the atmosphere of keen and alert intelligence pervading the whole assembly; the quaint survival of the time-honoured "overture"--three knocks on the boards--dating back to Roman times when the Prologus of the comedy stepped forth and craved the attention of the audience by three taps of his wand; the chief actor's approach to the front of the stage after the play is ended to announce to Mesdames and Messieurs what in these days they have known for weeks before from the press, that "the piece we have had the honour of playing" is by such a one--all combine to make an indelible impression on the mind of the foreign spectator.

[Footnote 4: "Nous cuisinons meme l'amour."--TAINE.]

The Parisian is the most orderly and well-behaved of citizens. The custom of the _queue_ is a spontaneous expression of his love of fairness and order. Even the applause in theatres is organised. A spectacle such as that witnessed at the funeral of Victor Hugo in 1885, the most solemn and impressive of modern times, is inconceivable in London. The whole population (except the Faubourg St. Germain and the clergy) from the poorest labourer to the heads of the State issued forth to file past the coffin of their darling poet, lifted up under the Arc de Triomphe, and by their multitudinous presence honoured his remains borne on a poor bare hearse to their last resting-place in the Pantheon. Amid this vast crowd, mainly composed of labourers, mechanics and the _petite bourgeoisie_, assembled to do homage to the memory of the poet of democracy, scarcely an _agent_ was seen; the people were their own police, and not a rough gesture, not a trace of disorder marred the sublime scene. The Parisian democracy is the most enlightened and the most advanced in Europe, and as of old the Netherlanders, in their immortal fight for freedom against the monstrous and appalling tyranny of Spain, were stirred to heroic deeds by the psalms of Clement Marot, even so to-day, where a few desperate and devoted men are moved to wrestle with a brutal despotism, the Marseillaise is their battle hymn. It is to Paris that the dearest hopes and deepest sympathies of generous spirits will ever go forth in

"The struggle, and the daring rage divine for liberty, Of aspirations toward the far ideal, enthusiast dreams of brotherhood."

"Siede Parigi in una gran pianura, Nell' ombilico a Francia, anzi nel core. Gli passa la riviera entro le mura, E corre, ed esce in altra parte fuore; Ma fa un' isola prima, e v'assicura Della citta una parte, e la migliore: L'altre due (ch' in tre parti e la gran terra) Di fuor la fossa, e dentro il fiume serra."

_Orlando Furioso_, Canto xiv.