originality, its reason, its genius, its beauty, nothing but
issued from the hand of art, from the humblest dwelling,
with its painted and carved wooden front, elliptical door-
way, and overhanging stories, to the royal Louvre, which
then had a colonnade of towers. But when the eye began
to reduce this tumult of edifices to some kind of order, the
principal masses that stood out from among them were
these.
To begin with the City. " The island of the City," says
Sauval, who, amidst his frivolous gossip, has occasionally
some good ideas, " the island of the City is shaped like a
great ship which hath taken the ground and is stuck fast in
the mud, nearly in the middle of the channel of the Seine."
We have already stated that in the fifteenth century this
ship was moored to the two banks of the river by five
bridges. This resemblance to a vessel had struck the
heralds of those times ; for it is to this circumstance, and
not to the siege of the Normans, that, according to Favyn
and Pasquier, the ship blazoned in the ancient arms of
Paris owes its origin. To those who can decipher it
heraldry is an algebra, a language. The entire history of
the second half of the middle ages is written in heraldry ;
as the history of the first half in the imagery of the Roman
THE HUNCHBACK OF NOTRE-DAME. 113
churches: 'tis but the hieroglyphics of the feudal system
succeeding those of theocracy.
The City, then, claimed the first notice, with its stern to
the east and its head to the west. Turning towards the
latter, you had before you a countless multitude of old roofs,
above which rose the widely swelling lead-covered cupola
of the Holy Chapel, like the back of an elephant support-
ing its tower. In this case, indeed, the place of the tower
was occupied by the lightest, the boldest, the most elegant
steeple that ever allowed the sky to be seen through its
cone of lace-work. Just in front of Notre- Dame, three
streets disgorged themselves into the Parvis, a handsome
square of old houses. On the south side of this square was
the Hotel- Dieu, with its grim, wrinkled, overhanging front,
and its roof which seemed to be covered with warts and
pimples. Then, to the right and to the left, to the east
and to the west, within the narrow compass of the City,
rose the steeples of its twenty-one churches of all dates, of
all forms, of all dimensions, from the low and crazy Roman
campanile of St. Denis du Pas to the slender spires of
St. Pierre aux Boeufs and St. Landry. Behind Notre- Dame,
to the north, the cloisters unfolded themselves with their
Gothic galleries ; to the south the semi- Roman palace of
the bishop ; to the east the open area called the Terrain.
Amidst this mass of buildings, the eye might still distin-
guish, by the lofty mitres of stone which crowned the top^
most windows, then placed in the roofs even of palaces
themselves, the hotel given by the city in the time of
Charles VI. to Juvenal des Ursins ; a little further on, the
tarred sheds of the market of Palus ; beyond that the new
choir of St. Germain le Vieux, lengthened in 1458 at the
expense of one end of the Rue aux Feves ; and then, at
intervals, an open space thronged with people ; a pillory
erected at the corner of a street ; a fine piece of the pave-
ment of Philip Augustus, composed of magnificent slabs,
channelled for the sake of the horses and laid in the middle
of the way ; a vacant back court with one of those trans-
parent staircase turrets which were constructed in the fif-
teenth century, and a specimen of which may still be seen
in the rue de Bourdonnais. Lastly, on the right of the
114 THE HUNCHBACK OP NOTRE-DAME.
Holy Chapel, towards the west, the Palace of Justice was
seated, with its group of towers, on the bank of the river.
The plantations of the king's gardens, which covered the
western point of the City, intercepted the view of the islet
of the Passeur. As for the water, it was scarcely to be seen
at either end of the City from the towers of Notre- Dame ;
the Seine being concealed by the bridges, and the bridges
by the houses.
When the eye passed these bridges, whose roofs were
green with moss, the effect not so much of age as of clamp
from the water, if it turned to the left, towards the Uni-
versity, the first building which struck it was a clump of
towers, the Petit Chatelet, the yawning gateway of which
swallowed up the end of the Petit Pont : then, if it followed
the bank of the river from east to west, from the Tournelle
to the Tower of Nesle, it perceived a long line of houses
with carved beams projecting, story beyond story, over the
pavement, an interminable zigzag of tradesmen's houses,
frequently broken by the end of a street, and from time to
time also by the front or perhaps the angle of some spacious
stone ma sion, seated at its ease, with its courts and gar-
dens, amid this populace of narrow, closely crowded dwell-
ings, like a man of consequence among his dependents.
There were five or six of these mansions on the quay, from
the logis de Lorraine, which divided with the Bernardines
the extensive enclosure contiguous to the Tournelle, to the
hotel de Nesle, whose principal tower was the boundary
of Paris, and whose pointed roofs for three months of the
year eclipsed with their black triangles corresponding por-
tions of the scarlet disk of the setting sun.
On this side of the Seine there was much less traffic than
on the other ; the students made more noise and bustle
there than the artisans, and there was no quay, properly
speaking, except from the bridge of St. Michel to the
Tower of Nesle. The rest of the bank of the Seine was in
some places a naked strand, as beyond the Bernardines ; in
others a mass of houses standing on the brink of the water,
as between the two bridges.
Great was the din here kept up by the washerwomen :
they gabbled, shouted, sang, from morning till night, along
THE HUNCHBACK OP NOTRE-DAME. 115
the bank, and soundly beat their linen, much the same as
they do at present. Among the sights of Paris this is by
no means the dullest.
The University brought the eye to a full stop. From
one end to the other it was an homogeneous, compact, whole.
Those thousand roofs, close, angular, adhering together,
almost all composed of the same geometrical element, seen
from above, presented the appearance of a crystallisation
of one and the same substance. The capricious ravines of
the streets did not cut this pie of houses into too dispro-
portionate slices. The forty-two colleges were distributed
among them in a sufficiently equal manner. The curious
and varied summits of these beautiful buildings were the
production of the same art as the simple roofs which they
overtopped ; in fact, they were but a multiplication by the
square or the cube of the same geometrical figure. They
diversified the whole, therefore, without confusing it ; they
completed without overloading it. Geometry is a harmony.
Some superb mansions too made here and there magnificent
inroads among the picturesque garrets of the left bank ; the
logis de Nevers, the logis de Rome, the logis de Reims,
which have been swept away ; the hotel de Cluny, which
still subsists for the consolation of the artist, and the tower
of which was so stupidly uncrowned some years ago. That
Roman palace with beaut : ful circular arches, near Cluny,
was the baths of Julian. There were likewise many abbeys,
of a more severe beauty than the hotels, but neither less
handsome nor less spacious. Those which first struck the
eye were the Bernardines with their three steeples ; St.
Genevieve, the square tower of which, still extant, excites
such regret for the loss of the rest; the Sorbonne, half
college, half monastery, an admirable nave of which still
survives ; the beautiful quadrangular cloister of the Ma-
thurins ; its neighbour, the cloister of St. Benedict ; the
Cordeliers, with their three enormous gables, side by side ;
and the Augustines, the graceful steeple of which made the
second indentation (the Tower of Nesle being the first)
on this side of Paris, setting out from the west. The col-
leges, which are in fact the intermediate link between the
cloister and the world, formed the mean, in the series of
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116
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buildings, between the mansions and the abbeys, with an
austerity full of elegance, a sculpture less gaudy than that
of the palaces, an architecture less serious than that of the
convents. Unfortunately, scarcely any vestiges are left of
these edifices, in which Gothic art steered with such pre-
cision a middle course between luxury and economy. The
churches and they were both numerous and splendid in
the University, and of every age of architecture, from the
circular arches of St. Julian to the pointed ones of St. Severin
the churches overtopped all ; and like an additional
harmony in this mass of harmonies, they shot up every
instant above the slashed gables, the open-work pinnacles
and belfries, and the airy spires, the line of which also was
but a magnificent exaggeration of the acute angle of the
roofs.
The site of the University was hilly. To the south-east
the hill of St. Genevieve formed an enormous wen ; and it
was a curious sight to see from the top of Notre- Dame that
multitude of narrow, winding streets, now called Le Pays
Latin, those clusters of houses, which, scattered in all di-
rections from the summit of that eminence, confusedly co-
vered its sides down to the water's edge, seeming some of them
to be falling, others to be climbing up again, and all to be
holding fast by one another. An incessant stream of thou-
sands of black specks crossing each other on the pavement,
caused every thing to appear in motion to the eye : these
were the people diminished by distance and the elevated
station of the spectator.
Lastly, in the intervals between those roofs, those spires,
and those numberless peculiarities of buildings, which waved,
notched, twisted, the outline of the University in so whim-
sical a manner, were to be seen, here and there, the mossy
fragment of a massive wall, a solid round tower, an em-
battled gateway, belonging to the enclosure of Philip Au-
gustus. Beyond these were green fields and high roads,
along which were a few straggling houses, which became
thinner and thinner in the distance. Some of these sub-
urban hamlets were already places of consequence. Setting
out from la Tournelle, there was first the bourg St. Victor,
with its bridge of one arch over the Bievre, its abbey, where
THE HUNCHBACK OP NOTRE-DAME. 1 17
was to be seen the epitaph of Louis le Gros, and its church
with an octagon steeple flanked by four belfries of the
eleventh century; then the bourg St. Marceau which had
already three churches and a convent ; then, leaving the
mill of the Gobelins and its four white walls on the left,
there was the faubourg St. Jacques, with its beautiful
sculptured cross ; the church of St. Jacques du Haut Pas,
a charming pointed Gothic structure; St. Magloire, a beau-
tiful nave of the fourteenth century, converted by Napoleon
into a magazine for hay ; Notre-Dame des Champs, con-
taining Byzantine mosaics. Lastly, after leaving in the
open country the Carthusian convent, a rich structure con-
temporary with the Palace of Justice, and the ruins of
Vauvert, the haunt of dangerous persons, the eye fell, to the
west, upon the three Roman pinnacles of St. Germain de3
Pres. The village of St. Germain, already a large parish,
was composed of fifteen or twenty streets in the rear ; the
sharp spire of St.Sulpice marked one of the corners of the
bourg. Close to it might be distinguished the quadrangular
enclosure of the Fair of St. Germain, the site of the present
market ; next, the pillory of the abbey, a pretty little cir-
cular tower well covered with a cone of lead ; the tile-kiln
was further off, so were the rue du Four, which led to the
manorial oven, the mill, and the hospital for lepers, a small
detached building but indistinctly seen. But what par-
ticularly attracted attention and fixed it for some time on
this point, was the abbey itself. It is certain that this
monastery, which had an air of importance both as a church
and as a lordly residence, this abbatial palace, where the
bishops of Paris deemed themselves fortunate to be enter-
tained for a night, that refectory to which the architect had
given the air, the beauty, and the splendid window of a
cathedral, that elegant chapel of the Virgin, that noble dor-
mitory, those spacious gardens, that portcullis, that draw-
bridge, that girdle of battlements cut out to the eye upon
the greensward of the surrounding fields, those courts where
men-at-arms glistened among copes of gold the whole
collected and grouped around three lofty spires with cir-
cular arches, firmly seated upon a Gothic choir, formed a
magnificent object against the horizon,
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118 THE HUNCHBACK OF NOTRE-DAME.
"When, at length, after attentively surveying the Uni-
versity, you turn to the right bank, to the Ville, the cha-
racter of the scene suddenly changes. The Ville, in fact,
much more extensive than the University, was also less
compact. At the first sight you perceived that it was
composed of several masses remarkably distinct. In the
first place, to the east, in that part of the town which is
still named after the marsh into which Caesar was enticed
by Camulogenes, there was a series of palaces. Four
nearly contiguous mansions, the hotels of Jouy, Sens, Bar-
beau, and the Queen's house, mirrored their slated roofs,
diversified with slender turrets, in the waters of the Seine.
Those four buildings filled the space between the Rue des
Nonaindieres and the abbey of the Celestins, the spire of
which gracefully relieved their line of gables and battle-
ments. Some greenish walls upon the water's edge, in
front of these buildings, did not prevent the eye from
catching the beautiful angles of their fronts, their large
quadrangular windows with stone frames and transoms,
the pointed arches of their porches, surcharged with statues,
and all those charming freaks of architecture which give to
Gothic art the air of resorting to fresh combinations in
every building. In the rear of these palaces ran, in all
directions, sometimes palisaded and embattled like a castle,
sometimes embowered in great trees like a Carthusian con-
vent, the immense and multiform enclosure of that mar-
vellous hotel of St. Pol_, where the king of France had
superb accommodation for twenty-two princes equal in
rank to the dauphin and the duke of Burgundy, with their
attendants and retinues, without reckoning distinguished
nobles, or the emperor when he visited Paris, or the lions
which had their hotel apart from the royal habitation. Be
it here remarked that the apartments of a pririce in those
days consisted of not fewer than eleven rooms, from the
hall of parade to the oratory, exclusively of galleries, and
baths, and stoves, and other " superfluous places" attached
to each set of apartments ; to say nothing of the private
gardens of each of the king's guests ; of the kitchens, the
cellars, the servants' rooms, the general refectories of the
household ; of the officesjwhere there were twenty-two ge-
THE HUNCHBACK OF NOTRE-DAME. HQ
neral laboratories, from the bakehouse to the wine-cellar ;
of places appropriated to games of every sort, the mall,
tennis, the ring ; of aviaries, fish-ponds, menageries,
stables, libraries, arsenals, foundries. Such was then the
palace of a king, a Louvre, an hotel St. Pol. It was a city
within a city.
From the tower where we have taken our station, the
hotel St. Pol, though almost half concealed by the four
great buildings above-mentioned, was still a right goodly
sight. The three hotels which Charles V. had incorporated
with his palace, though skilfully united to the principal
building by long galleries with windows and small pillars,
might be perfectly distinguished. These were the hotel of
the Petit Muce, with the light balustrade which gracefully
bordered its roof ; the hotel of the abbot of St. Maur, hav-
ing the appearance of a castle, a strong tower, portcullises,
loopholes, bastions, and over the large Saxon doorway the
escutcheon of the abbot ; the hotel of the Count d'Etampes,
the keep of which, in ruin at the top, appeared jagged to
the eye like the comb of a cock ; clumps of old oaks here
and there forming tufts like enormous cauliflowers ; swans
disporting in the clear water of the fish-ponds, all streaked
with light and shade ; the dwelling of the lions with its
low pointed arches supported by short Saxon pillars, its
iron grating, and its perpetual bellowing ; beyond all these
the scaly spire of the Ave Maria; on the left the resi-
dence of the provost of Paris, flanked by four turrets of
delicate workmanship ; at the bottom, in the centre, the
hotel St. Pol, properly so called, with its numerous facades,
its successive embellishments from the time of Charles V.,
the hybrid excrescences with which the whims of architects
had loaded it in the course of two centuries, with all the
apsides of its chapels, all the gables of its galleries, a thou-
sand , weathercocks marking the four winds, and its two
lofty contiguous towers, whose conical roofs, surrounded at
their base with battlements, looked like sharp-pointed hats
with the brims turned up.
Continuing to ascend that amphitheatre of palaces spread
out far over the ground, after crossing a deep ravine part-
ing the roofs of the Ville, the eye arrived at the logis d'An-
i 4
120 THE HUNCHBACK OF NOTRE-DAME.
gouleme, a vast pile erected at various periods, parts of
which were quite new and white, and harmonised no better
with the whole than a red patch upon a blue doublet. At
the same time the remarkably sharp and elevated roof of
the modern palace, covered with lead, upon which glisten-
ing incrustations of gilt copper rolled themselves in a thou-
sand fantastic arabesques, that roof so curiously damasked,
gracefully lifted itself from amidst the embrowned ruins
of the ancient building, whose old clumsy towers, bellying
like casks, and cracked from top to bottom, were ready to
tumble to pieces with age. In the rear rose the forest of
spires of the palace of the Tournelles. There was not a
view in the world, not excepting Chambord or the Alham-
bra, more aerial, more impressive, more magical, than this
wood of pinnacles, belfries, chimneys, weathercocks, spirals,
screws, lanterns, perforated as if they had been struck by
a nipping-tool, pavilions and turrets, all differing in form,
height, and altitude. You would have taken it for an im-
mense chess-board of stone.
To the right of the Tournelles that cluster of enormous
towers, black as ink, running one into another, and bound
together, as it were, by a circular ditch ; that keep con-
taining many more loopholes than windows ; that draw-
bridge always up, that portcullis always down that is
the Bastille. Those black muzzles protruding between the
battlements, and which you take at a distance for gutters,
are cannon.
At the foot of the formidable edifice, just under its guns,
is the gate St. Antoine, hidden between its two towers.
Beyond the Tournelles, as far as the wall of Charles V.,
were spread out the royal parks, diversified with rich
patches of verdure and flowers, amidst which might be
recognised by its labyrinth of trees and alleys the famous
garden which Louis XI. gave to Coictier. The doctor's
observatory rose above the maze in the form of a detached
massive column, having a small room for its capital. In
this laboratory were concocted terrible astrological predic-
tions. The site of it is now occupied by the Place Royale.
As we have already observed, the quarter of the Palace,
of which we have endeavoured to give the reader some
THE HUNCHBACK OF NOTRE-DAME. 121
idea, filled the angle which the wall of Charles V. formed
with the Seine to the east. The centre of the Ville was
occupied by a heap of houses of the inferior class. Here
in fact the three bridges of the city disgorged themselves
on the right bank, and bridges make houses before palaces.
This accumulation of dwellings of tradesmen and artisans,
jammed together like cells in a hive, had its beauty. There
is something grand in the houses of a capital as in the
waves of the sea. In the first place the streets, crossing
and entwining, formed a hundred amusing figures; the
environs of the Halles looked like a star with a thousand
rays. The streets of St. Denis and St. Martin, with their
numberless ramifications, ran up one beside the other like
two thick trees intermingling their branches ; and then the
streets of la Platerie, la Verrerie, and la Tixeranderie,
wound over the whole. There were some handsome build-
ings that overtopped the petrified undulation of this sea of
roofs. At the head of the Pont aux Changeurs, behind
which the Seine was seen foaming under the wheels of the
Pont aux Meuniers, there was the Chatelet, no longer a
Roman castle as in the time of Julian the Apostate, but a
feudal castle of the thirteenth century, and of stone so hard
that in three hours the pickaxe could not chip off a piece
larger than your fist. There too was the rich square tower
of St. Jacques de la Boucherie, with its angles all blunted
by sculptures, and already an object of admiration, though
it was not finished till the fifteenth century. It had not
then those four monsters which, perched to this day at the
corners of the roof, look like four sphynxes, giving to
modern Paris the enigma of the ancient to unravel. They
were not erected till the year 1526 by Rault, the sculptor,
who had twenty francs for his labour. There was the
Maison aux Piliers, of which we have conveyed some idea
to the reader ; there was St. Gervais, since spoiled by a
porch in a good taste; there was St. Mery, whose old
pointed arches were little less than circular ; there was St.
Jean, the magnificent spire of which was proverbial ; there
were twenty other buildings which did not disdain to bury
their marvels in this chaos of deep, black, narrow streets.
Add to these the sculptured stone crosses, more numerous
122 THE HUNCHBACK OF NOTRE-DAME.
even than the gibbets, the burying-ground of the Innocents,
the architectural enclosure of which was to be seen at a
distance above the roofs ; the pillory of the Halles, the top
of which was perceptible between two chimneys of the Rue
de la Cossenerie ; the ladder of the Croix d'u Trahoir, in
its crossing always black with people ; the circular walls of
the Halle au Ble ; the remains of the ancient enclosure of
Philip Augustus, to be distinguished here and there,
drowned by the houses, towers overgrown with ivy, gates
in ruins, crumbling and shapeless fragments of walls ; the
quay, with its thousand shops and its bloody slaughter-
houses ; the Seine covered with craft, from the Port au Foin
to the For-L'Eveque, and you will have a faint image of
the central trapezium of the Ville as it was in 1482.
Besides these two quarters, the one of palaces, the other
of houses, the Ville presented a third feature, a long
zone of abbeys, which bordered almost its whole circum-
ference from west to east, and formed a second enclosure
of convents and chapels within that of the fortifications
which encompassed Paris. Thus, immediately adjoining
to the park of Tournelles, between the street St. Antoine
and the old street of the Temple, there was St. Catherine's,
with its immense extent of gardens and cultivated grounds,
which were bordered only by the wall of Paris. Between
the old and the new street of the Temple there was the
Temple, a grim tall cluster of gloomy towers, standing in
the centre of a vast embattled enclosure. Between the
new street of the Temple and the street St. Martin was the
abbey of St. Martin, amidst its gardens a superb fortified
church, whose girdle of towers and tiara of steeples were
surpassed in strength and splendour by St. Germain des
Pres alone. Between the streets of St. Martin and St.
Denis was the enclosure of the Trinity; and lastly, between
the streets of St. Denis and Montorgueil, the Filles Dieu.
Beside the latter were to be seen the tumbling roofs and
the unpaved area of the Cour des Miracles. It was the only
profane link that intruded itself into this chain of convents.
The fourth and last compartment, which was sufficiently
obvious of itself in the agglomeration of buildings on
the right bank which occupied the western angle of the
THE HUNCHBACK OF NOTRE-DAME. 123
enclosure and covered the margin of the river, was a new