Читать книгу The Stones of Paris in History and Letters (Vol. 1&2) - Benjamin Ellis Martin - Страница 5

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We are to see a Paris unknown to the every-day dweller there, who is content to tread, in wearied idleness, his swarming yet empty boulevards; a Paris unseen by the hurried visitor, anxious to go his round of dutiful sight-seeing. This Paris is far away from the crowd, bustling in pursuit of pleasure, and hustling in pursuit of leisure; out of sound of the teasing clatter of cab-wheels, and the tormenting toot of tram-horns, and the petulant snapping of whips; out of sight of to-day's pretentious structures and pompous monuments. To find this Paris we must explore remote quarters, lose ourselves in untrodden streets, coast along the alluring curves of the quays, cruise for sequestered islands behind the multitudinous streams of traffic. We shall not push ahead just to get somewhere, nor restlessly "rush in to peer and praise." We shall learn to flâner, not without object, but with art and conscience; to saunter, in the sense of that word, humorously derived by Thoreau from Sainte-Terre, and so transform ourselves into pilgrims to the spots sacred in history and legend, in art and literature. In a word, if you go with us, you are to become Sentimental Prowlers.

In this guise, we shall not know the taste of Parisine, a delectable poison, more subtle than nicotine or strychnine, in the belief of Nestor Roqueplan, that modern Voltaire of the boulevards. And we shall not share "the unwholesome passion" for his Paris, to which François Coppée owns himself a victim. Nor, on the other hand, shall we find "an insipid pleasure" in this adventure, as did Voltaire. Yet even he confesses, elsewhere, that one would "rather have details about Racine and Despréaux, Bossuet and Descartes, than about the battle of Steinkerk. There is nothing left but the names of the men who led battalions and squadrons. There is no return to the human race for one hundred engagements, but the great men I have spoken of prepared pure and lasting pleasures for mortals still unborn." It is in this spirit that we start, sure of seeking an unworn sentiment, and of finding an undraggled delight, in the scenes which have inspired, and have been inspired by, famous men and women. Their days, their ways, they themselves as they moved and worked, are made alive for us once more by their surroundings. Where these have been disturbed by improvements, "more fell than anguish, hunger, or the sea," we get curious suggestions from some forgotten name cut in the stone of a street corner, from a chance-saved sign, a neglected tourelle, or a bit of battered carving. And where the modern despoiler has wreaked himself at his worst—as with the Paris of Marot, Rabelais, Palissy—we may rub the magic ring of the archæologist, which brings instant reconstruction. So that we shall seem to be walking in a vast gallery, where, in the words of Cicero, at each step we tread on a memory. "For, indeed," as it is well put by John Ruskin, "the greatest glory of a building is not in its stones, or in its gold. Its glory is in its age, and in that deep sense of voicefulness, of stern watching, of mysterious sympathy, nay, even of approval or condemnation, which we feel in walls that have long been washed by the passing waves of humanity."

These stone and brick vestiges of the people of old Paris are to be sought in its byways, narrow and winding; or hidden behind those broad boulevards, that have newly opened up its distant quarters, on the north or on the south. Sometimes these monuments have been brought into full view across the grassed or gravelled spaces of recent creation, so showing their complete and unmarred glory for the first time in all the ages. Thus we may now look on Notre-Dame and the Sainte-Chapelle, in dreamy surrender to their bedimmed beauty, that persuades us that Paris can hold nothing in reserve more reverend in comely old age. Yet, almost within touch of these two, stands a gray tower, another sturdy survivor of the centuries. Between the northern side of Notre-Dame and the river-bank, a happy chance has spared some few of the streets, though fewer of the structures, of this earliest Paris of Île de la Cité. This region recalls to us, by its street-names in part, and partly by its buildings, its former connection with the cathedral. In Rue des Chantres it lodged its choristers, and Rue du Cloître-Notre-Dame records the site of the clerical settlement, beloved by Boileau, wherein dwelt its higher officials. Rue Chanoinesse has its significance, too, and we will stop before the wide frontage of differing ages, whose two entrances, Nos. 18 and 20, open into the large courts of two mansions, now thrown into one. This interior court was a garden until of late years, and while grass and flowers are gone forever, it keeps its ancient well in the centre and its stone steps that mounted to the salons. Those salons, and the large court, and the smaller courts beyond—all these courts now roofed over with glass—are piled high with every known shape of household furniture and utensil in metal; notably with the iron garden-chairs and tables, dear to the French. For this vast enclosure is the storage dépôt of a famous house-furnishing firm, and is one more instance of the many in Paris of a grand old mansion and its dependencies given over to trade.

By the courtesy of those in charge, we may pass within the spacious stone entrance arch of No. 18, and pick our way through the ordered confusion, past the admirable inner façade of the main fabric, with its stately steps and portal and its windows above, topped by tiny hoods, to a distant corner; where, in the gloom, we make out the base of a square tower and the foot of a corkscrew staircase. We mount it, spirally and slowly. The well-worn stone steps are narrow, and the turn of the spiral is sharp, for this tower was built when homes were fortresses, when space was precious, and when hundreds huddled within walls that will hardly hold one thriving establishment of our day. In this steep ascent, we get scant assistance from our hold on the rude hand-rail, roughly grooved in the great central column—one solid tree-trunk, embedded in the ground, stretching to the top of the stairs. Experts assure us that this tree was fully five hundred years old, when it was cut down to be made the shaft of this stairway, nearly five hundred years ago. For this stone tower is evidently of late fifteenth-century construction. The mediæval towers were round, whether built upon their own foundations or rebuilt from Roman towers; and they gave way to square towers when battering-rams gave way to guns, in the fifteenth century. Yet this pile of masonry is known as "la tour de Dagobert," and with no wish to discredit this legend, cherished by the dwellers in this quarter, we may quote Brantôme concerning certain local traditions of the Tour de Nesle: "Je ne puis dire si çela soit vrai, mais le vulgaire de Paris l'affirme."

We can say, with certainty, that this tower was never seen by Dagobert, for, long before this tree had sprouted from the ground, he lived in the old Palace, the home of the early kings, at the other end of the island. There he flourished, for the ten years between 628 and 638, in coarse splendor and coarser conviviality, his palace packed with barbaric gold and silver, with crude wall paintings and curious hangings. For this monarch made much of the arts of his day, whenever he found leisure from his fighting and his drinking. Because of his love of luxury, a century of cyclopædias has "curved a contumelious lip" at his "corrupt court." On the other hand, he has been styled "Saint Dagobert" by writers unduly moved to emotion by his gifts to the churches at Saint-Denis, Rheims, Tours; and by his friendship for certain bishops. But Rome, mindful of sundry other churches plundered and destroyed by him, has not assented to this saintship. We may accept his apt popular epithet, "le bon," which meant, in those bellicose days, only merry or jovial; an easy virtue not to be denied by priggish biographers to this genial ruffian. By turns, he devoted himself to the flowing bowl in his palace there, and to building religious edifices all over the face of France. And he has accentuated the supremacy of the Church over all the warriors and the rulers of his day, in the soaring majesty of the two towers that dominate the buried outlines of his favorite church of Saint-Martin at Tours, solid and lasting in their isolation. There the man is brought almost into touch with us, while here only his name is recalled by this tower, which he never saw.

The shadow-land of ancient French history, into which we have made this little journey, is not darker than this narrow staircase, as we creep dizzily upward, losing count of steps, stopping to take breath at the infrequent windows, round-topped at first, then square and small. It is with surprise that we realize, stepping out on the tower-roof, that our standing-place is only five floors from the ground; and yet from this modest height, overtopped by the ordinary apartment house of Paris, we find an outlook that is unequalled even by that from Notre-Dame's towers. For, as we come out from the sheltering hood of our stair-way top, the great cathedral itself lies before us, like some beautiful living creature outstretched at rest. Words are impertinent in face of the tranquil strength of its bulk and the exquisite delicacy of its lines, and we find refuge in the affectionate phrase of Mr. Henry James, "The dear old thing!"

Beyond the cathedral square, over the bronze Charlemagne on his bronze horse, glints the untravelled narrower arm of the Seine; we turn our heads and look at its broader surface, all astir with little fidgetty bateaux-mouches and big, sedate barges. At both banks are anchored huge wash-houses and bathing establishments. From this island-centre all Paris spreads away to its low encircling slopes, to the brim of the shallow bowl in which it lies. In sharp contrast with all that newness, our old tower stands hemmed about by a medley of roofs of all shapes and all ages; their red tiles of past style, here and there, agreeably mellowing the dull dominant blue of the Paris slate. On these roofs below jut out dormers, armed with odd wheels and chains for lifting odd burdens; here on one side is an outer staircase that starts in vague shadow, and ends nowhere, it would seem; far down glimmers the opaque gray of the glass-covered courts at our feet. A little toward the north—where was an entrance to this court, in old days, from a gateway on the river-bank—is the roof that sheltered Racine, along with the legal gentry of the Hôtel des Ursins. And all about us, below, lies the little that is left of la Cité, the swept and set-in-order leavings of that ancient network of narrow streets, winding passages, blind alleys, all walled about by tall, scowling houses, leaning unwillingly against one another to save themselves from falling. This was the whole of Gallic Lutetia, the centre of Roman Lutetia, the heart of mediæval Paris, the "Alsatia" of modern Paris; surviving almost to our time, when the Second Empire let light and air into its pestilent corners. Every foot of this ground has its history. Down there, Villon, sneaking from the University precincts, stole and starved and sang; there Quasimodo, climbing down from his tower, foraged for his scant supplies; there Sue's impossibly dark villany and equally impossible virtue found fitting stage-setting; there, François, honest and engaging thief, slipped narrowly through the snares that encompassed even vagabonds, in the suspicious days and nights of the Terror.

The nineteenth century, cutting its clean way through this sinister quarter, cutting away with impartial spade the round dozen churches and the hundreds of houses that made their parishes, all clustered close about the cathedral and the palace, has happily left untouched this gray tower, built when or for what no one knows. It is a part of all that it has seen, in its sightless way, through the changing centuries of steady growth and of transient mutilation of its town. It has seen its own island and the lesser islands up-stream gradually alter their shapes; this island of the city lengthening itself, by reaching out for the two low-shored grassy eyots down-stream, where now is Place Dauphine and where sits Henri IV. on his horse. The narrow channel between, that gave access to the water-gate of the old Palace, has been filled in, so making one island of the three, and Rue de Harlay-au-Palais covers the joining line. So the two islands on the east—Île Notre-Dame and Île aux Vaches—have united their shores to make Île Saint-Louis. The third island, most easterly of all—Île des Javiaux of earliest times, known later as Île Louvier—has been glued to the northern bank of the mainland, by the earthing-in of the thin arm of the river, along the line of present Boulevard Morland, and Quai Henri IV. And the two great islands as we know them—the permanent outcome of all these topographical transformations—have been chained to each other and to both banks, by numerous beautiful bridges.

Our tower raised its head in time to see the gradual wearing away of the mighty Roman aqueduct, that brought water to the Palais des Thermes of the Roman rulers—whose immense frigidarium is safe and sound within the enclosure of the Cluny Museum—from the Bièvre, away off on the southern outskirts. This aqueduct started at the point where later was built the village of Arceuil—named from the mediæval, or late, Latin Arculi—where was quarried the best stone that builded old Paris; and curved with the valley of the Bièvre like a huge railway viaduct, leaving that stream when it bent in its course to the Seine near the Salpêtrière, and entering the town along the easterly line of Rue Saint-Jacques, and so straight away to the baths. This tower well remembers the new aqueduct, constructed massively on the ruins of the Roman, between 1613 and 1633, from Rungis, still farther south, to the Luxembourg Palace. Imperial and royal baths must have pure water, while wells and rivers must perforce content the townspeople. They had their aqueduct at last, however, laid, still along the top of these others, during the Second Empire. It is worth the little trip by rail to Arceuil to see the huge arches that climb along the valley carrying these piled-up conduits.

Our old tower has seen the baby town creep, from its cradle on the shore, up that southern slope to where on its summit it found the tomb of its patron, Sainte Geneviève—one tower of her abbey still shows gray above the garden-walls of Lycée Henri IV.—and thence, its strength so grown as to burst its girdle of restraining wall, it strode far afield. Roman and Christian settlements, with all their greenery—palace, abbey, and school, each set within its spacious gardens—gradually gave place to these serried shining roofs we see, here and there pierced by church spires and punctuated by domes. And on the northern bank, our tower has seen the rising tide of the centuries swallow up the broad marshes along the shore and the wide woodlands behind; bearing down Roman villa and temple, Christian nunnery and monastery, washing away each successive breakwater of wall, until it surged over the crest of the encircling hills, now crowned by the imposing basilica of the Sacred Heart on Montmartre.

It may have been here in time to look down on the stately procession escorting the little ten-year-old Henry IV., the new King of England, from the Palace to the cathedral; wherein was celebrated the service by which one English cardinal and two French bishops tried to consecrate him King of France. It saw, when the ceremony was ended, the turbulent mob of common French folk crowding about the boy-king and his English escort as they returned, and ignominiously hustling them into the Palace. Not many years later, on April 13, 1436, it possibly saw the French soldiery march into Place de Grève, over the bridge and through the streets behind, from their captured gate of Saint-Jacques; and not many days thereafter, the English soldiery hurrying along behind the northern wall from the Bastille to the Louvre, and there taking boat for their sail to Rouen; the while the Parisian populace, mad with joy on that wall, welcomed the incoming friend and cursed the outgoing foe.

Our tower has watched, from its own excellent point of view, the three successive fires in and about the Palace, in 1618, 1736, and 1776. Between them, these fires carried away the constructions of Louis XII., the vast Salle des Pas-Perdus, the ancient donjon, the spires and turrets and steep roofs that swarmed about the Sainte-Chapelle, whose slender height seems to spring more airily from earth to sky by that clearance. Only that chapel, the Salle-des-Gardes, the corner tower on the quay, the kitchens of Saint-Louis behind it, and the round-capped towers of the Conciergerie, are left of the original palace. The present outer casing of this Tour de l'Horloge is a restoration of that existing in 1585, but the thirteenth-century fabric remains, and the foundations are far earlier, in the view of the late Viollet-le-Duc. Its clock dates from 1370, having been twice restored, and its bell has sounded, as far as our tower, the passing of many historic hours. It rang menacingly an hour later than that of Saint-Germain-l'Auxerrois, which had been advanced by the queen-mother's eagerness, on Saint Bartholomew's night. It was en carillon all of Friday, June 12, 1598, for the peace procured by Henri IV. between Spain and Savoy; and the birth of his son was saluted by its joyous chimes, at two o'clock of the afternoon of Friday, September 28, 1601.

Nearly two years later—on Friday, June 20, 1603—our tower stared in consternation, out over the end of the island, at the gallant Henry treading jauntily and safely across the uncompleted arches of the Pont-Neuf, from shore to shore. The new bridge was a wonder, and in attempts to climb along its skeleton, many over-curious citizens had tumbled into the river; "but not one of them a king," laughed their king, after his successful stepping over. The bridge was built slowly, and was at last ready for traffic on February 6, 1607, and has stood so strong and stable ever since, that it has passed into a proverb as the common comparison for a Frenchman's robust health. It is the only bridge between the islands and either bank that has so stood, and this tower has seen each of the others wrecked by fire or flood. The tall wooden piles, on which the mediæval bridgeways were built, slowly rotted, until they were carried away by the fierce current. And fire found its frequent quarry in the tall houses that lined either side of the roadway, shops on the lower floor, and tenants above.

Thus our tower doubtless heard, on Friday, October 25, 1499, the wrenching and groaning of the huge wooden piles of Pont Notre-Dame—its first pile driven down by temporarily sane Charles VI.—as they bent and broke and tumbled into the Seine, with their burden of roadway and of buildings; whereby so thick a cloud of dust rose up from the water, that rescue of the inmates was almost impossible. Among the few saved, on that calamitous holiday of Saint-Crespin and Saint-Crespinien, was a baby found floating down-stream in its cradle, unwet and unharmed. So, too, Pont aux Meuniers and all its houses and mills fell in fragments into the stream on December 22, 1596. It was a wooden bridge, connecting the island end of Pont au Change diagonally with the shore of the mainland. It is reported that the dwellers on the bridge were rich men, many of them slayers and plunderers of the Huguenots on the festival of Saint Bartholomew. So it was said that the weak hand of city supervision, neglecting the bridge, was aided by the finger of God, pushing it down!

The Petit-Pont dropped into the Seine no less than six times between the years 1206 and 1393. The earliest Roman bridge, it had carried more traffic than any later bridge, and had been ruined and reconstructed time and again, until stone took the place of wood for its arches and road-way and houses. But the wooden scaffoldings used for the new construction were left below, and were the means of sacrificing it to an old woman's superstition. On April 27, 1718, she launched a sébile—a wooden bowl—carrying a bit of blessed bread and a lighted taper, in the belief that this holy raft would stop over, and point out, the spot where lay the body of her drowned son. The taper failed in its sacred mission, and set fire to a barge loaded with hay, and this drifted against the timbers under the arches, and soon the entire bridge went up in flames. When again rebuilt, no houses were allowed upon it. With the falling of all those bridges and all that they held, the river-bed grew thick with every sort of object, common and costly. Coins from many mints found their way there, not only through fire and flood, but because the money-changers, warily established on the bridges, dropped many an illicit piece from their convenient windows into the river, rather than let themselves be caught in passing counterfeits. This water museum has been dragged from time to time, and the treasures have gone to enrich various collections, notably that of M. Victorien Sardou.

With all helpless Paris, our tower watched the old Hôtel-Dieu—on the island's southern bank, where now is the green open space between Petit-Pont and Pont au Double—burning away for eleven days in 1772, and caught glimpses of the rescued patients, carried across Place du Parvis to hastily improvised wards in the nave of Notre-Dame.

Unscathed by fire, unmutilated by man, unwearied by watching, "Dagobert's Tower" stands, penned in by the high old buildings that shoulder it all around. Hidden behind them, it is unseen and forgotten. The only glimpses to be got of its gray bulk are, one from the neighboring tower of the cathedral, and another from the deck of a river-boat as it glides under Pont d'Arcole; a glimpse to be caught quickly, amid the quick-changing views of the ever-varied perspective of the island's towers and buttresses, pinnacles and domes.

Far away from the island and its river, over the edge of the southern slope, behind the distant, dreary, outer boulevards, we find another ancient staircase. It is within the vast structure known as "la maison dîte de Saint Louis," commonly called the "Hôtel de la Reine Blanche." The modern boulevard, which gets its name from the astronomer, philosopher, and politician, Arago, has made a clean sweep through this historic quarter, but it has spared this mansion and the legend, which makes it the suburban dwelling of Blanche of Castile. Hereabout was all country then, and a favorite summer resort of the wealthy citizens, whose modest cottages and showy villas clustered along the banks of the Bièvre; a free and wilful stream in the early years of the thirteenth century, often in revolt and sometimes misleading the sedate Seine into escapades, to the disquiet of these faubourgs. From its gardens, portly meadows smiled townward to Mont-Sainte-Geneviève, crowded with its schools, and to the convent gardens, snuggling close under the shelter of the southern wall of Philippe-Auguste.

To-day, all this quarter is made malodorous by its many tanneries and dye-works; they have enslaved the tiny Bièvre and stained it to a dirty reddish brown; so that it crawls, slimy and sluggish and ashamed, between their surly walls and beneath bedraggled bridges, glad to sink into the Seine, under the Orleans railway station. Its gardens and meadows are covered by square miles of stone, and the line of the old wall is hidden behind and under modern streets. And this so-called country home of Queen Blanche, become plain No. 17 Rue des Gobelins, yet refuses, in its mediæval dignity, to regard itself as a mere number in a street, and withdraws behind its wall, its shoulder aslant, to express its royal unconcern for the straight lines of city surveyors. These have not yet stolen all its old-time character from the remaining section of the street, nor spoiled such of its old-time façades as are left. This one at No. 19 demands our especial scrutiny, by its significant portal and windows, and by the belief that it was originally joined in its rear to No. 17, the two forming one immense structure of the same style of architecture. When was its date, who was its builder, what was its use, are undisclosed, so far, and we may follow our own fancies, as we enter through the narrow gateway into the front court of "Queen Blanche's house." Its main fabric on the ground floor, with its low arched window, insists that it is contemporary with the clever woman and capable queen, to whom legend, wider than merely local, brings home this building. Yet its upper windows, and the dormers of the wing, and the slope of the roof, suggest a late fifteenth or an early sixteenth century origin; and the cornice-moulding is so well worked out that it speaks plainly of a much later date than the mediæval fortress-home. In a tourelle at either end is a grand spiral staircase, as in Dagobert's Tower, and, like that, these turn on huge central oak trunks. Here, however, the steps are less abrupt; the grooving of the hand-rail, while it testifies to the stroke of the axe, is less rude; and daylight is welcomed by wider windows. Each of the three floors, that lie between the two staircase turrets, is made up of one vast hall, with no traces of division walls. Whether or no a Gobelin once made usage of this building, as has been claimed, it has now come into a tanner's service, and his workmen tread its stairs and halls, giving a living touch of our workaday world to these walls of dead feudalism.

The So-called Hôtel de la Reine Blanche.

(From a photograph of the Commission du Vieux Paris.)

It was in 1200 that Blanche of Castile was brought to France, a girl of twelve, for her marriage with little Louis, of the same ripe age. His father, Philippe-Auguste, was a mighty builder, and Paris flourished under him, her "second founder." In the intervals between crusades against infidels and wars with Christians, he founded colleges and gave other aid to the university on this bank; he pushed on with his strong hand the building of Notre-Dame and of the old Hôtel-Dieu on the island; he removed his residence from the ancient Palace, there, to the Louvre on the northern bank, constructed by him to that end—his huge foundation-walls, with some few capitals and mouldings, may be seen deep down in the substructures of the present Louvre—he shut in the unfenced cemetery of the Innocents from the merry-makers who profaned it; he roofed and walled-in the open markets in the fields hard by that burial-ground; and he paved the streets of the Cité. To meet this last outlay, he was lavish with the money of the citizens, notably of Gérard de Poissy, who was moved to donate one-half of his entire fortune by the sight of the King, "sparing neither pains nor expense in beautifying the town." Sparing himself no pains for the bettering of his beloved capital, Philippe-Auguste spared no expense to its worthy burghers, and in their purses he found the funds for his great wall. This he planned and began, toward the close of the twelfth century, when at home for awhile from the warfaring, during which he had captured the "saucy Château-Gaillard" of his former fellow-crusader, Richard the Lion-Hearted.

Around the early Lutetia on the island, with the river for its moat, there had been a Gallo-Roman wall, well known to us all; and there was a later wall, concerning which none of us know much. We may learn no more than that it was a work of Louis VI., "le Gros," early in the twelfth century, and that it enclosed the city's small suburbs on both banks of the mainland. Where this wall abutted on the two bridge-heads that gave access to the island, Louis VI. converted the wooden towers—already placed there for the protection of these approaches by Charles II., "le Chauve," in the ninth century—into great gateways and small citadels, all of stone. They were massive, grim, sinister structures, and when their service as fortresses was finished, they were used for prisons; both equally infamous in cruelty and horror. The Petit Châtelet was a donjon tower, and guarded the southern approach to the island by way of the ancient main-road of the Gaul and the Roman, known later as the Voie du Midi, and later again as the Route d'Orléans, and now as Rue Saint-Jacques. This châtelet stood at the head of Petit-Pont, on the ground where Quais Saint-Michel and Montebello meet now, and was not demolished until late in the eighteenth century. The Grand Châtelet ended the northern wall where it met Pont au Change, and its gloomy walls, and conical towers flanking a frowning portal, were pick-axed away only in 1802. It had held no prisoners since Necker induced Louis XVI. to institute, in La Force and other jails, what were grotesquely entitled "model prisons." On the building that faces the northern side of Place du Châtelet you will find an elaborate tablet holding the plan of the dreary fortress and the appalling prison. When we stroll about the open space that its destruction has left, and that bears the bad old name, we need not lament its loss.

Then came the wall of Philippe-Auguste, grandly planned to enclose the closely knit island Cité and its straggling suburbs on either bank, with all their gardens, vineyards, and fields far out; and solidly constructed, with nearly thirty feet of squared-stone height, and nearly ten feet of cemented rubble between the strong side faces. Its heavy parapet was battlemented, numerous round towers bulged from its outer side, the frequent gates had stern flanking towers, and the four ends on both river-banks were guarded by enormous towers, really small fortresses. The westernmost tower on this southern shore—with which section of the wall, built slowly from 1208 to 1220, we are now concerned—was the Tour de Nesle, and its site is shown by a tablet on the quay-front of the eastern wing of the Institute. Alongside was the important Porte de Nesle. Thence the wall went southwesterly, behind the line made by the present Rues Mazarine and Monsieur-le-Prince; then, by its great curve just north of Rue des Fossés-Saint-Jacques, it safeguarded the tomb and the abbey of Sainte Geneviève, and so bent sharply around toward the northeast, within the line of present Rues Thouin, du Cardinal-Lemoine, and des Fossés-Saint-Bernard, to the easternmost tower on Quai de la Tournelle, and its river-gate, Porte Saint-Bernard. That gate, standing until the end of the eighteenth century, had been titillated into a triumphal arch for Louis XIV., in whose time this quay was a swell promenade and drive. It still retains one of its grand mansions, the Hôtel Clermont-Tonnerre, at No. 27 on the quay, with a well-preserved portal.

Of the stately sweep of this wall we may get suggestive glimpses by the various tablets, that show the sites of the tennis courts made later on its outer side, and that mark the places of the gates; such as the tablet at No. 44 Rue Dauphine. The street and gate of that name date from 1607, when Henri IV. constructed them as the southern outlet from his Pont-Neuf, and named them in honor of the first dauphin born to France since Catherine de' Medici's puny sons. This Porte Dauphine took the place, and very nearly the site, of the original Porte de Buci, which stood over the western end of our Rue Saint-André-des-Arts, and was done away with in the cutting of Rue Dauphine. There was a gate, cut a few years after the completion of the wall, opening into the present triangular space made by the meeting of Rue de l'École-de-Médecine and Boulevard Saint-Germain, and this gate bore this latter name. Of the original gates, that next beyond Porte de Buci was Porte Saint-Michel, a small postern that stood almost in the centre of the meeting-place of Boulevard Saint-Michel and Rues Monsieur-le-Prince and Soufflot. Next came the important Porte Saint-Jacques, mounting guard over the street now of that name, nearly where it crosses the southern side of new Rue Soufflot, named in honor of the architect of the Panthéon. On that southwest corner is a tablet with a plan of the gate. It was a gate well watched by friends within, and foes without, coming up by this easy road. Dunois gained it, more by seduction than force, and entered with his French troops, driving the English before him, on the morning of Friday, April 13, 1436; and Henry of Navarre failed to gain it by force from the League, on the night of September 10, 1590. Stand in front of Nos. 174 and 176 of widened Rue Saint-Jacques, and you are on the spot where he tried to scale that gate, again and again.

More than suggestions of the wall itself may be got by actual sight of sections that survive, despite the assertions of authorities that no stone is left. At the end of Impasse de Nevers, within a locked gate, you may see a presumable bit. In the court that lies behind Nos. 27 and 29 Rue Guénégaud is a stable, and deep in the shadow of that stable lurks a round tower of Philippe-Auguste, massive and unmarred. At No. 4 Cour du Commerce a locksmith has his shop, and he hangs his keys and iron scraps on nails driven with difficulty between the tightly fitted blocks of another round tower. Turn the corner into Cour de Rohan—a corruption of Rouen, whose archbishop had his town-house here—and you shall find a narrow iron stairway, that mounts the end of the sliced-off wall, and that carries you to a tiny garden, wherein small schoolgirls play on the very top of that wall. Down at the end of Cour de Rohan is an ancient well, dating from the day when this court lay within the grounds of the Hôtel de Navarre, the property of Louis of Orleans before he became Louis XII. In style it was closely akin to the Hôtel de Cluny, and it is a sorrow that it is lost to us. Its entrance was at the present Nos. 49 and 51 of Rue Saint-André-des-Arts, and the very ancient walls in the rear court of the latter house may have belonged to the Hôtel de Navarre. When Louis sold this property, one portion was bought by Dr. Coictier, who had amassed wealth as the physician of Louis XI., and this well was long known by his name. It has lost its metal-work, which was as fine as that of the well once owned by Tristan l'Hermite, Coictier's crony, and now placed in the court of the Cluny Museum.

Continuing along the course of the great wall, we find a longer section, whereon houses have been built, and another garden. At the end of the hallway of No. 47 Rue Descartes is a narrow stairway, by which we mount to the row of cottages on top of the wall, and beyond them is a small domain containing trees and bushes and flower-beds, and all alive with fowls. Still farther, in a vacant lot in Rue Clovis, which has cut deep through the hill, a broken end of the wall hangs high above us on the crest, showing both solid faces and the rubble between. Its outer face forms the rear of the court at No. 62 Rue du Cardinal-Lemoine. Still another section can be seen in the inner court of No. 9 Rue d'Arras, its great square stones serving as foundation for high houses. And this is the last we shall see of this southern half of the wall of Philippe-Auguste.

When that monarch lay dying at Mantes, he found comfort in the thought that he was leaving his Paris safe in the competent hands of his daughter-in-law—whose beauty, sense, and spirit had won him early—rather than in the gentle hold of his son, misnamed "le Lion." He lived, as Louis VIII., only three years, and "la reine blanche" (the widowed queens of France wore white for mourning, until Anne of Brittany put on black for her first husband, Charles VIII.) became the sole protector of her twelve-year-old son, on whom she so doted as to be jealous of the wife she had herself found for him. She ruled him and his hitherto unruly nobles, and cemented his kingdom, fractured by local jealousies. He is known to history as Saint Louis, fit to sit alongside Marcus Aurelius, in the equal conscience they put into their kingly duties. Voltaire himself ceases to sneer in the presence of this monarch's unselfish devotion to his people, and gives him praise as unstinted as any on record.

His Paris, the Paris of his mother and his grandfather, was made up of la Cité on the island, under the jurisdiction of the bishop; the northern suburb, outre-Grand-Pont or la Ville, governed by the Prévôt des Marchands; the southern suburb, outre-Petit-Pont or l'Université, appertaining to the "Recteur"; all ruled by the Prévôt of Paris, appointed by and accountable to the King alone. Hugo's "little old lady between her two promising daughters" holds good to-day, when the daughters are strapping wenches, and have not yet got their growth. In all three sections, the priest and the soldier—twin foes of light and life in all times and in all lands—had their own way. They cumbered the ground with their fortresses and their monasteries, all bestowed within spacious enclosures; so walling-in for their favored dwellers, and walling-out from the common herd outside, the air and sun, green sights, and pleasant scents. There were no open spaces for the people of mediæval days. Indeed, there were no "people," in our meaning of that word. The stage direction, "Enter Populace," expresses their state. There were peasants in the fields, toilers in the towns, vassals, all of them—villains, legally—allowed to live by the soldier, that they might pay for his fighting, and serve as food for his steel; sheep let graze by the priest, to be sheared for the Church and to be burned at the stake. This populace looked on at these burnings, at the cutting out of tongues and slicing off of ears and hacking away of hands by their lords, in dumb terror and docile submission. More than death or mutilation, did they dread the ban of the Church and the lash of its menacing bell. Their only diversion was made by royal processions, by church festivals, by public executions. So went on the dreary round of centuries, in a dull colorless terror, until it was time for the coming of the short, sharp Terror dyed red. Then the White Terror, that came with the Restoration, benumbed the land for awhile, and the tricolored effrontery of the Second Empire held it in grip. Against all royalist and imperial reaction, the lesser revolutions of the nineteenth century have kept alive the essential spirit of the great Revolution of 1789, inherited by them, and handed down to the present Republic, that the assured ultimate issue may be fought out under its Tricolor. France, the splendid creature, once more almost throttled by priest and soldier, has saved herself by the courage of a national conscience, such as has not been matched by any land in any crisis.

They who by the grace of God and the stupidity of man owned and ordered these human cattle of the darkest ages, had their homes within this new, strong town-wall; in fat monasteries, secluded behind garden and vineyard; in grim citadels, whose central keep and lesser towers and staircase turrets, stables and outer structures, were grouped about a great court, that swarmed with men-at-arms, grooms, and hangers-on. And so, endless walls scowled on the wayfarer through the town's lanes, narrow, winding, unpaved, filthy. On a hot summer day, Philippe-Auguste stood at his open window in the old Palace, and the odor of mud came offensively to the royal nostrils; soon the main City streets were paved. When a king's son happened to be unhorsed by a peripatetic pig nosing for garbage, a royal edict forbade the presence of swine in the streets; the only exceptions being the precious dozen of the abbey of Petit-Saint-Antoine. There were no side-paths, and they who went afoot were pushed to the wall and splashed with mud, by the mules and palfreys of those who could ride. They rode, the man in front, his lady behind, en croupe. Open trenches, in the middle of the roadway, served for drainage, naked and shameless; the graveyards were unfenced amid huddled hovels; and the constant disease and frequent epidemics that came from all this foulness were fathered on a convenient Providence! This solution of the illiterate and imbecile could not be accepted by the shining lights of science, who showed that the plague of the middle of the sixteenth century came from maleficent comets, their tails toward the Orient, or from malign conjunctions of Mars, Saturn, and Jupiter. Ambroise Paré, the most enlightened man of his day, had the courage to suggest that there were human and natural causes at work, in addition to the divine will. And the common-sense Faculty of Medicine, toward the close of the sixteenth century, indicted the drains and cesspools as the principal origin of all maladies then prevalent.

The only street-lighting was that given fitfully by the forlorn lanterns of the patrol, or by the torches of varlets escorting their masters, on foot or on horse. Now and then, a hole was burned in the mediæval night by a cresset on a church tower or porch, or shot out from a cabaret's fire through an opened door. When tallow candles got cheaper, they were put into horn lanterns, and swung, at wide intervals, high above the traffic. There, wind or rain put an untimely end to their infrequent flicker, or a "thief in the candle" guttered and killed it, or a thief in the street stoned it dead, for the snug plying of his trade. The town, none too safe in daylight, was not at all safe by night, and the darkness was long and dreary, and every honest man and woman went to bed early after the sunset angelus. Country roads were risky, too, and those who were unable to travel in force, or in the train of a noble, travelled not at all; so that the common citizen passed his entire existence within the confines of his compact parish. Nor could he see much of his Paris or of his Seine; he looked along the streets on stone walls on either side, and along the quays at timbered buildings on the banks. These rose sheer from the river-brink, and from both sides of every bridge, barring all outlook from the roadway between; their gables gave on the river, and from their windows could be seen only a little square of water, enclosed between the buildings on both banks and on the neighboring bridge. So that the wistful burgher could get glimpses of his river only from the beach by the Hôtel de Ville, or from the occasional ports crowded with boats discharging cargo.

These cargoes were sold in shops on ground floors, and the tenants were thick on the upper floors, of dwellings mostly made of timber and plaster, their high-fronted gables looking on the street. This was the custom in all towns in the Middle Ages, and it is a striking change that has, in our day, turned all buildings so that their former side has come to the front. The old Paris streets, in which shops and houses shouldered together compactly, already dark and narrow enough, were further narrowed and darkened by projecting upper floors, and by encroaching shop-signs, swinging, in all shapes and sizes, from over the doorways. Each shop sold its specialty, and the wares of all of them slopped over on the roadway. Their owners bawled the merits and prices of these wares in a way to shock a certain irritable Guillaume de Villeneuve, who complains in querulous verse, "They do not cease to bray from morning until night." With all its growth in coming years, the city's squalor grew apace with its splendor, and when Voltaire's Candide came in, by way of Porte Saint-Marcel here on the southern side, in the time of Louis XV., he imagined himself in the dirtiest and ugliest of Westphalian villages. For all its filth and all its discomfort, this mediæval Paris—portrayed, as it appeared three hundred years later, in the painful detail and inaccurate erudition of Hugo's "Notre-Dame de Paris"—was a picturesque town, its buildings giving those varied and unexpected groupings that make an architectural picture; their roofs were tiled in many colors, their sky-lines were wanton in their irregularity, and were punctuated by pointed turrets and by cone-shaped tower-tops; and over beyond the tall town walls, broken by battlements and sentry-boxes, whirled a grotesque coronet of windmill sails.

Turning from this attractive "Maison de la Reine Blanche," from this quarter where her son Louis learned to ride and to tilt, and glancing behind at the famous tapestry works, the Gobelins, of whose founder and director we shall have a word to say later, we follow the avenue of that name to Rue du Fer-à-Moulin. This little street, named for a sign that swung there in the twelfth century, is most commonplace until it opens out into a small, shabby square, that holds a few discouraged trees, and is faced by a stolid building whose wide, low-browed archway gives access to the court of the Boulangerie générale des Hôpitaux et Hospices. This was the courtyard of the villa of Scipio Sardini, whose name alone is kept alive by this Place Scipion—all that is left of his gardens and vineyards. Yet his was a notable name, in the days when this wily Tuscan was "écuyer du Roi Henri II.," and in those roaring days of swift fortunes for sharp Italian financiers, under the queen-mother, Catherine de' Medici. This man amassed scandalous riches, and built his villa, mentioned by Sauval as one of the richest of that time, here amid the country mansions that dotted this southern declivity. Of this villa only one wing still stands, and it is with unlooked-for delight that we find this admirable specimen of sixteenth-century architecture, of a style distinct from that of any other specimen in Paris. The façade, that is left in the court of the Boulangerie, is made up of an arcade of six semi-circular arches on heavy stone pillars, a story above of plum-colored brick cut into panels by gray stone, its square-headed windows encased with the same squared stone, and an attic holding two dormers with pointed hoods. Set in the broad band between the two lower floors, were six medallions, one over the centre of each arch; of these six, only four remain. These contain the heads of warriors and of women, boldly or delicately carved, and wonderfully preserved; yet time has eaten away the terra-cotta, wind and wet have dulled the enamel that brightened them. The buildings about this court and behind this unique façade are commonplace and need not detain us. It was in 1614 that the General Hospital took the villa and enlarged it; in 1636, to escape the plague, the prisoners of the Conciergerie were installed here; and it has served as the bakery for the civil hospitals of Paris for many years.

We go our way toward our third staircase, not by the stupidly straight line of Rue Monge, but by vagrant curves that bring us to the prison of Sainte-Pélagie, soon to disappear, and to the Roman amphitheatre just below, happily rescued forever. Here, in Rue Cardinal-Lemoine, we slip under the stupid frontage of No. 49 to the court within, where we are faced by the hôtel of Charles Lebrun. We mount the stone steps that lead up to a wide hall, and so go through to a farther court, now unfortunately roofed over. This court was his garden, and this is the stately garden-front that was the true façade, rather than that toward the street; for this noble mansion—the work of the architect Germain Boffrand, pupil and friend of Hardouin Mansart—was built after the fashion of that time, which shut out, by high walls, all that was within from sight of the man in the street, and kept the best for those who had entry to the stiff, formal gardens of that day.

Pupil of Poussin, protégé of Fouquet, friend of Colbert, Lebrun was the favorite court painter and decorator, and the most characteristic exponent of the art of his day; his sumptuous style suiting equally François I.'s Fontainebleau, and Louis XIV.'s Versailles. He aided Colbert in the founding of the Royal Academy of Painting and Sculpture, and in the purchase by the State of the Gobelins. This factory took its name from the famous dyer who came from Rheims, and tinted the clear Bièvre with his splendid scarlet, says Rabelais; so that it took the name of la Rivière des Gobelins, of which Ronsard sings. The statesman and the artist in concert built up the great factory of tapestries and of furniture, such as were suitable for royal use. Made Director of the Gobelins and Chancellor of the Academy, and making himself the approved painter of the time to his fellow-painters and to the buying public, Lebrun's fortune grew to the possession of this costly estate, which extended far away beyond modern Rue Monge. The death of Colbert—whose superb tomb in Saint-Eustache is the work of his surviving friend—left him to the hatred of Louvois, who pushed Mignard, Molière's friend, into preferment. And Lebrun, genuine and honest artist, died of sheer despondency, in his official apartment on the first floor of the factory, facing the chapel. His rooms have been cut up and given over to various usages, and no trace can be found in the Gobelins of its first director.

His body rests in his parish church, a few steps farther on, through ancient Rue Saint-Victor, now curtailed and mutilated. Along its line, before we come to the square tower of Saint-Nicolas-du-Chardonnet, we skirt the dirty yellow and drab wall of the famous seminary alongside the church, and bearing its name. Its entrance is at No. 30 Rue de Pontoise, and among the many famous pupils who have gone in and out since Calvin was a student here, we may mention only Ernest Renan. In 1838, the director of the school being the accomplished Dupanloup, this boy of fifteen came fresh from Brittany to his studies here. We shall follow him to his later and larger schools, in other pages. When Jean "le Moine," the son of a Picardy peasant, came to sit in a cardinal's chair, and was sent to Paris as legate by Pope Boniface VIII., he established a great college in the year 1303. For it he bought the chapel, the dwellings, and the cemetery of the Augustins that were all in fields of thistles. So came the name "du Chardonnet" to the church now built on the ruins of Lemoine's chapel, in the later years of the seventeenth century. Lebrun decorated one of its chapels for the burial of his mother, and his own tomb is there near hers. Some of his work still shows on the ceiling; and in an adjacent chapel, in odd proximity, once hung a canvas from the brush of Mignard. In striking contrast, the busts of the two men face each other in the Louvre; that of Mignard is alert with intelligence in face and poise of head, while Lebrun's suggests a somewhat slow-witted earnestness.

From this short stay in the realm of Louis the Unreal, we go to the island that bears the name of the Louis who was called a saint, but who was a very real man. All the streets along here that take us to the river, as far easterly as the one that bears the name of Cardinal Lemoine, were cut through the grounds of his college and of the Bernadins, an ancient foundation alongside. Of the buildings of this vast monastery, the refectory remains, behind the wall on the western side of Rue de Poissy. This characteristic specimen of thirteenth-century architecture, but little spoiled by modern additions, is used for the caserne of the Sapeurs-Pompiers. Here, at the foot of the street on the river-bank on our right, is the great space where Boulevard Saint-Germain comes down to the quay, and where the old wall came down to its great tower on the shore. On our left, as we cross broad Pont de la Tournelle, we get an impressive view of Notre-Dame. And now we find ourselves in a provincial town, seemingly far removed from our Paris in miles and in years, by its isolation and tranquillity and old-world atmosphere. Its long, lazy main street is named after the royal saint, and its quays keep the titles of royal princes, Bourbon, Orléans, Anjou. A great royal minister, Maximilien de Béthune, gives his name to another quay, and his great master gives his to the new boulevard crossing it. Henry often crossed his faithful Sully, but they were at one in the orders issued, in the year before the King's murder, for the sweeping away of the woodyards, that made this island the storehouse of the town's timber, and for the construction of these streets and buildings. The works planned by Henri IV. were carried out by Marie de' Medici and Louis XIII. A concession was given for the laying out of streets and for the buildings on this island, and for the construction of a new stone bridge to the Marais, to the three associates, Marie, Le Regrettier, Poultier, who gave their names to the bridge and to two of the streets. There was already a small chapel in the centre, the scene of the first preaching of the First Crusade, and this chapel has been enlarged to the present old-time parish church. Just within its entrance is the bénitier, filled with water from the mouth of a marble cherub who wears a pretty marble "bang." It came from the Carmelites of Chaillot, in souvenir of "Sister Louise."

The sites on the island's banks, newly opened in the early years of Louis XIII.'s reign, were in demand at once for the mansions of the wealthy, and a precocious city started up. Corneille's Menteur, new to Paris and the island, rhapsodizes in one of his captivating flights, this time without lying:

"J'y croyais ce matin voir une île enchantée,

Je la laissai déserte et la trouve habitée;

Quelque Amphion nouveau, sans l'aide des maçons,

En superbes palais à changé ses buissons."

We shall come hither again, in company with Voltaire to one of these palaces, with Balzac to another. In these high old houses in these old streets dwelt old families, served by old retainers devoted to their mistresses, who hugged their firesides like contented tabby-cats. They had no welcome for intruders into their "Ville-Saint-Louis" from the swell quarters on the other side of the river, and it used to be said that "l'habitant du Marais est étranger dans l'Île."

Balcony of Hôtel de Lauzan-Pimodan on Île de Saint-Louis.

Pont Louis-Philippe—an absurdly modern issue from this ancient quarter—carries us to the quay of the Hôtel de Ville, and we may turn to look in at Saint-Gervais, its precious window as brilliant as on the day it was finished by Jean Cousin. Passing in front of the imperious statue of Étienne Marcel, staring at the river that was his grave, we cross Place de l'Hôtel-de-Ville, once Place de Grève, when it had in the centre its stone cross reached by high steps, and its busy gallows close at hand. We forget its horrid memories in the sight of the new Hôtel de Ville, of no memories, good or bad, to dash our delight in this most nearly perfect of modern structures; perfect in design, execution, and material, a consummate scheme carried out to the last exquisite detail by architects, sculptors, and decorators, all masters of their crafts.

Our direct road takes us through the Halles, their huge iron and glass structures the lineal descendants of those heavy stone Halles, started in the twelfth century here in the fields, when the small market on the island no longer sufficed. Their square, dumpy pillars, and those on which the houses all about were once supported, survive only in the few left from the seventeenth-century rebuilding, now on the north side of Rue de la Ferronerie. Standing in that arcade, we look out on the spot where Ravaillac waited for the coming of Henri IV. The wretched fanatic, worked on by whom we shall never know, had found Paris crowded for the Queen's coronation, and had hunted up a room in the "Three Pigeons," an inn of Rue Saint-Honoré, opposite the Church of Saint-Roch. Here or in another tavern, while prowling, he stole the knife. The narrow street was widened a little by Richelieu, and few of its ancient buildings are left. Returning through this arcade, once the entrance to the Cemetery of the Innocents, to Rue des Innocents just behind, you will find many of the old charniers absolutely unchanged. They form the low-ceilinged ground floor of nearly all these buildings between Rue Saint-Denis and Rue de la Lingerie. Perhaps the most characteristic specimen is that one used for a remise de voitures à bras, a phrase of the finest French for a push-cart shed! And under No. 15 of this street of the Innocents, you may explore two of the cemetery vaults in perfect preservation. They are come to less lugubrious usage now, and serve as a club-room for the teamsters who bring supplies to the markets over-night, and for the market attendants who wait for them. Their wagons unloaded, here they pass the night until daylight shall bring customers, drinking and singing after their harmless fashion, happily ignorant or careless of the once grisly service of these caves. The attendants in the cabaret on the entrance floor, tired as they are by day, will courteously show the cellars, one beneath the other. One must stoop to pass under the heavily vaulted low arches, and the small chambers are overcrowded with a cottage piano and with rough benches and tables; these latter cut, beyond even the unhallowed industry of schoolboys, with initials and names of the frequenters of the club, who have scarred the walls in the same vigorous style. The demure dame du comptoir above assures you that you will be welcomed between midnight and dawn, but bids you bring no prejudices along, for the guests are not apt, in their song and chatter, to "chercher la délicatesse"!

The Church of the Innocents, built by Louis "le Gros" early in the twelfth century, had on its corner at Rues Saint-Denis and aux Fers—this latter now widened into Rue Berger—a most ancient fountain, dating from 1273. This fountain was built anew in 1550, from a design of the Abbé de Clagny, not of Pierre Lescot as is claimed, and was decorated by Jean Goujon. Just before the Revolution (1785–88), when church and charnel-houses and cemetery were swept away, this fountain was removed to the centre of the markets—the centre, too, of the old cemetery—and has been placed, since then, in the middle of this dainty little square which greets us as we emerge from our cabaret. To the three arches it owned, when backed by the church corner, a fourth has been added to make a square, and the original Naiads of Goujon have been increased in number. Their fine flowing lines lift up and lend distinction to this best bit of Renaissance remaining in Paris. And here we are struck by the ingenuity shown by making the water in motion a signal feature of the decoration—another instance of this engaging characteristic of French fountains.

A few steps farther north take us to Rue Étienne Marcel, cutting its ruthless course through all that should be sacred, in a fashion that would gladden the sturdy provost. For all its destructive instincts, it yet has spared to us this memorable bit of petrified history, the tower of "Jean-sans-Peur." At No. 20, on the northern side of this broad and noisy street, amid modern structures, its base below the level of the pavement, stands the last remaining fragment of the Hôtel de Bourgogne; which, under its earlier name in older annals as the Hôtel d'Artois, carries us back again to the thirteenth century, for this was the palace-fortress built by the younger brother of Saint Louis, Robert, Count of Artois. He it was who fell, in his "senseless ardor," on the disastrous field of Massouah, in 1250; when the pious King and his devoted captains were made captive by the Sultan of Egypt, and released with heavy fines, so ending that Sixth Crusade.

The Hôtel d'Artois was a princely domain, reaching southward from the wall of Philippe-Auguste to Rue Mauconseil, a road much longer then, and extending from present Rue Saint-Denis to Rue Montorgueil, the two streets that bounded the property east and west. Some of its structures backed against the wall, some of them rested upon its broken top. For the grounds and gardens enclosed within this northern enceinte—completed between 1190 and 1208—stretched to its base, leaving no room for a road on its inner side. Because of this plan, and because this wall crumbled gradually, its broken sections being surrounded and surmounted by crowding houses, no broad boulevards were laid out over its line—as was done with its immediate successor, the wall of Charles V.—and it is not easy to trace it through modern streets and under modern structures. The only fragment left is the tower in the court of the Mont-de-Piété, entered from Rue des Francs-Bourgeois, and it is of build less solid than those we have seen on the southern bank. In the pavement of the first court is traced the line of the wall up to this tower. With this exception, we can indicate only the sites of the towers and the course of the wall.

The huge Tour Barbeau was at the easternmost river end, on Quai des Célestins, nearly at the foot of our Rue des Jardins-Saint-Paul. It commanded Port Saint-Paul, chief landing-place of river boatmen, and guarded the Pôterne des Barrés. That name was also given to the small street—now Rue de l'Ave Maria—that led from this postern-gate. They owe that name indirectly to Saint Louis. Returning from the Holy Land, he had brought six monks from Mount Carmel, and housed them on the quay, called now after their successors, the Célestins. The black robes, striped white, of these six monks, made them known popularly as "les Barrés." Our wall ran straight away from this waterside gate, parallel with and a little to the west of present Rue des Jardins, then a country road on its outer edge, to Porte Baudoyer, afterward Porte Saint-Antoine, standing across the space where meet Rues Saint-Antoine and de Rivoli. This was the strongest for defence of all the gates, holding the entrance to the town, by way of the Roman and later the Royal road from the eastern provinces. From this point the wall took a great curve beyond the bounds of the built-up portions of the town. The Pôterne Barbette, its next gate, in Rue Vieille-du-Temple, just south of its crossing by Rue des Francs-Bourgeois, lost its old name in this name taken from the Hôtel Barbette, built a century later, outside the wall here. Next came the gate in Rue du Temple, nearly half way between our Rues de Braque and Rambuteau. Through this gate passed the Knights Templar to and from their great fortified domain beyond. The Pôterne Beaubourg, in the street of that name, was a minor gateway, having no especial history beyond that contained in the derivation of its name, "beaubourg," from a particularly rich settlement, just hereabout. Next we come to two most important gates, Saint-Martin and Saint-Denis, across those two streets, that guarded the approaches by the great roads from Senlis and Soissons, and the heart of the land, old Île de France, and from all the northern provinces. Between the Saint-Denis gate and that at Rue Montorgueil, lay the property of the Comte d'Artois, and he cut, for his royal convenience, a postern in the wall that formed his northern boundary.

From this point our wall went in another wide curve to the river-bank, within the lines of old Rues Plâtrière and Grenelle, the two now widened into modern Rue Jean-Jacques-Rousseau. The country road that is now Rue Montmartre was guarded by a gate, opened a few years after the completion of the wall, and its site shown by a tablet in the wall of No. 30 of that street. A small gate was cut at the meeting of present Rues Coquillière and Jean-Jacques-Rousseau. Nearly opposite the end of this latter street, where Rue Saint-Honoré passes in front of the Oratoire, was the last public gate on the mainland. Thence the course was straight away to the river shore, as you may see by the diagram set in lighter stone in the pavement of the court of the Louvre. These stones mark also the huge round of the donjon of the old Louvre, on whose eastern or town side the wall passed to the river-side Tour-qui-fait-le-Coin. This tower was of the shape and size of the opposite Tour de Nesle, which we have already seen at the point where the southern wall came down to the shore; and between the two towers, a great chain was slung across the Seine to prevent approach by river pirates. Pont des Arts is almost directly over the dip of that chain. So, too, the river was protected at the eastern ends of the wall; the Barbeau tower was linked to the solitary tower on Île Notre-Dame, and that again across the other arm of the Seine, to the immense tower on Quai de la Tournelle. This island Tour Loriaux rose from the banks of a natural moat made by the river's narrow channel between Île Notre-Dame and Île aux Vaches, and this bank was afterward further protected by a slight curtain of wall across the island, with a tower at either end. Four centuries later, when this island wall and its towers had long since crumbled away, that moat was filled up—Rue Poulletier, the modernized Poultier, lies over its course—and the two small islands became large Île Saint-Louis.

And now, we have seen la Cité, la Ville, l'Université, all girdled about by Philippe-Auguste's great wall. The City could spread no farther than its river-banks; the University was content to abide within its bounds, even as late as the wars of the League; the Town began speedily to outgrow its limits, and within two centuries it had so developed that the capacious range of a new wall, that of Charles V., was needed to enclose its bustling quarters. That story shall come in a later chapter.

One hundred years after the death of Robert of Artois, his estate passed, by marriage, to the first house of Burgundy, whose name it took, and when that house became extinct, in the days of Jean "le Bon," second Valois King of France, it came, along with the broad acres and opulent towns of that duchy, into his hands, by way of some distant kinship. This generous and not over-shrewd monarch did not care to retain these much-needed revenues, and gave them, with the resuscitated title of Burgundy, to his younger son, "recalling again to memory the excellent and praiseworthy services of our right dearly beloved son Philip, the fourth of our sons, who freely exposed himself to death with us, and, all wounded as he was, remained unwavering and fearless at the battle of Poictiers." From that field Philip carried away his future title, "le Hardi." By this act of grateful recognition, rare in kings, were laid the foundations of a house that was to grow as great as the throne itself, to perplex France within, and to bring trouble from without, throughout long calamitous years. This first Duke Philip seems to have had the hardihood to do right in those wrong-doing days, for he remained a sufficiently loyal subject of his brother Charles V., and later a faithful guardian, as one of the "Sires de la Fleur-de-Lis," of his nephew, the eleven-year-old Charles VI. He married Margaret, heiress of the Count of Flanders, and widow of Philippe de Rouvre, last of the old line of Burgundy, and she brought, to this new house of Burgundy, the fat, flat meadows and the turbulent towns of the Lowlands, and also the Hôtel de Flandres in the capital, where now stands the General Post-office in Rue Jean-Jacques-Rousseau.

Duke Philip, dying in 1404, bequeathed to his eldest son, John, nick-named "Jean-sans-Peur," not only a goodly share of his immense possessions, but also the pickings of a "very pretty quarrel" with Louis de Valois, Duc d'Orléans. This quarrel was tenderly nursed by John, who, as the head of a powerful independent house, and the leader of a redoubtable faction, felt himself to be more important than the royal younger brother. Ambitious and unscrupulous, calculating and impetuous, he created the rôle on his stage, played with transient success by Philippe-Égalité, four hundred years later. He rode at the head of a brilliant train and posed for the applause of the populace. He walked arm in arm with the public executioner, Capeluche, and when done with him, handed him over to the gallows. Finding himself grown so great, he schemed for sole control of the State. The one man in his way was Louis of Orleans, the mad king's only brother, the lover of the queen, and her accomplice in plundering and wasting the country's revenues. He was handsome and elegant, open in speech and open of hand, bewitching all men and women whom he cared to win. "Qui veult, peut," was his braggart device, loud on the walls of the rooms of Viollet-le-Duc's reconstructed Pierrefonds, whose original was built by Louis. In its court you may see the man himself in Frémiet's superb bronze, erect and alert on his horse. The horse's hoofs trample the flowers, as his rider trod down all sweet decencies in his stride through life. He was an insolent profligate, quick to tell when he had kissed. In his long gallery of portraits of the women who, his swagger suggested, had yielded to his allurements, he hung, with unseemly taste, those of his lovely Italian wife, Valentine Visconti, and of the Duchess of Burgundy, his cousin's wife; both of them honest women. For this boast, John hated him; he hated him, as did his other unlettered compeers, for his learning and eloquence and patronage of poetry and the arts; he hated him as did the common people, who prayed "Jesus Christ in Heaven, send Thou someone to deliver us from Orleans."

"Jean-sans-Peur," Duc de Bourgogne.

(From a painting by an unknown artist, at Chantilly.)

At last "Jean-sans-Peur" mustered his courage and his assassins to deliver himself and France. Isabelle of Bavaria had left her crazed husband in desolate Hôtel Saint-Paul, and carried her unclean court to Hôtel Barbette—we shall see more of these residences in another chapter—where she sat at supper, with her husband's brother, on the night of November 23, 1407. It was eight in the evening, dark for the short days of that "black winter," the bitterest known in France for centuries. An urgent messenger, shown in to Orleans at table, begged him to hasten to the King at Saint-Paul. The duke sauntered out, humming an air, mounted his mule and started on his way, still musical; four varlets with torches ahead, two 'squires behind. Only a few steps on, as he passed the shadowed entrance of a court, armed men—many more than his escort—sprang upon him and cut him down with axes. He called out that he was the Duke of Orleans. "So much the better!" they shouted, and battered him to death on the ground; then they rode off through the night, unmolested by the terrified attendants. The master and paymaster of the gang, who was watching, from a doorway hard by, to see that his money was honestly earned, went off on his way. A devious way it turned out to be, for, having admitted his complicity to the Council, in his high and mighty fashion, he found himself safer in flight than in his guarded topmost room of this tower before us. He galloped away to his frontier of Flanders, cutting each bridge that he crossed. It was ten years before he could return, and then he came at the head of his Burgundian forces, and bought the keys of Porte de Buci, stolen by its keeper's son from under his father's pillow. Entering Paris on the night of Saturday, May 28, 1418, on the following day, the Burgundians began those massacres which lasted as long as there were Armagnacs to kill, and which polluted Paris streets with corpses. Within a year, John, lured to a meeting with the Dauphin, afterward Charles VII., went to the bridge at Montereau, with the infinite precautions always taken by this fearless man, and there he was murdered with no less treachery, if with less butchery, than he gave to his killing of Louis of Orleans.

Valentine Visconti, widow of Orleans, had not lived to see this retribution. Her appeal to the King for the punishment of the assassin was answered by pleasant phrases, and soon after, in one of his sane intervals, was further answered by the royal pardon to Burgundy, for that "out of faith and loyalty to us, he has caused to be put out of the world our brother of Orleans." She had counted on the King's remembering that, in the early years of his madness, hers had been the only face he knew and the only voice that soothed him. She crept away to Blois with her children, and with Dunois, her husband's son but not her own. The others were not of the age nor of the stuff to harbor revenge, and to him she said: "You were stolen from me, and it is you who are fit to avenge your father." These are fiery words from a rarely gentle yet courageous woman, grown vindictive out of her constancy to a worthless man. She is the one pure creature, pathetic and undefiled, in all this welter of perfidy and brutality. "She shines in the black wreck of things," in Carlyle's words concerning another "noble white vision, with its high queenly face, its soft proud eyes," of a later day. There, at Blois, she died within the year.

It would carry us too far from this tower to follow the course of the feud between the heirs of these two houses. "Philip the Good, Duke of Burgundy, Luxembourg, and Brabant, Earl of Holland and Zealand, Lord of Friesland, Count of Flanders, Artois, and Hainault, Lord of Salins and Macklyn," was a high and puissant prince, and versatile withal. "He could fight as well as any king going, and he could lie as well as any, except the King of France. He was a mighty hunter, and could read and write. His tastes were wide and ardent. He loved jewels like a woman, and gorgeous apparel. He dearly loved maids-of-honor, and, indeed, paintings generally, in proof of which he ennobled Jan van Eyck. … In short, he relished all rarities, except the humdrum virtues." Charles of Orleans, son of Louis, was of another kidney. Spirited at the start, this prince was spoiled by his training, "like such other lords as I have seen educated in this country," says Comines; "for these were taught nothing but to play the jackanapes with finery and fine words." Young Charles d'Orléans took his earliest lessons in rhyme, and he rhymed through life, through his twenty-five years of captivity in England, until he was old Charles, the pallid figure-head of a petty, babbling, versifying court. And the quarrel between the two houses came to nothing beyond the trifle of general misery for France.

It was only when Burgundy came into collision with the crafty Dauphin of France, the rebellious son of Charles VII., who had fled from his father's court and taken refuge with Duke Philip the Good, that this great house began to fail in power. When that Dauphin, become Louis XI., made royal entry into Paris, this Hôtel de Bourgogne showed all its old bravery. From its great court, through its great gate on Rue Saint-Denis, into the space behind the town gate of that name, Duke Philip rode forth on the last day of August, 1461, at his side his son—then Comte de Charolais, known later as Charles "le Téméraire"—to head the glittering array of nobles, aglow with silken draperies and jewels, their horses' housings sweeping the ground, who await the new King. Few of them are quite sure "how they stand" with him, and they hardly know how to greet him as he enters, but they take the customary oaths when they get to Notre-Dame, and thence escort him to the old palace on the island. There they feasted and their royal master pretended to be jolly, all the while speculating on the speedy snuffing-out of these flashing satellites. On the morrow he took up his residence in the Hôtel des Tournelles, almost deserted within, and altogether without. For the populace crowded about this Hôtel de Bourgogne, all eyes and ears for the sight and the story of its splendors. Its tapestries were the richest ever seen by Parisians, its silver such as few princes owned, its table lavish and ungrudging. The duke's robes and jewels were so wonderful that the cheering mob ran after him, as he passed along the streets, with his attendant train of nobles and his body-guard of archers.

With his death died all the pomp and show of this palace. His son, Charles the Bold, wasted no time in Paris from the fighting, for which he had an incurable itch, but no genius. He kept this deserted house in charge of a concierge for his daughter Mary, "the richest heiress in Christendom," who was promised to five suitors at once, and who married Maximilian of Austria at last. Their grandson, the Emperor Charles V., in one of the many bargains made and unmade between him and François I.—the one the direct descendant of Louis of Orleans and the other the direct descendant of John of Burgundy—gave up to the French crown all that Burgundy owned in France, one portion of it in Paris being this Hôtel de Bourgogne. By now this once most strongly fortified and best defended fortress-home in all the town was fallen into sad decay, its spacious courts the playground of stray children, its great halls and roomy chambers a refuge for tramps and rascals. So François, casting about for any scheme to bring in money, and greedy to keep alive the tradition, handed down from Hugh Capet, that gave to his crown all the ground on which Paris was built, sold at auction this old rookery, along with other royal buildings and land in the city, in the year 1543. This hôtel was put up in thirteen lots, this tower and its dependencies, Burgundian additions of the first years of the fifteenth century, being numbered 1, 2, 4, 6, 7, 8, and while all the other structures were demolished, these were kept entire by the purchaser, whose name has not come down to us. They may have been "bid in" by the State, for they reappear as crown property of Louis XIII.; and he gave "what was left of the donjon of the Hôtel d'Artois" to the monks of Sainte-Catherine du Val-des-Écoliers, in exchange for a tract of their land on the northern side of Rue Saint-Antoine, just west of Place Royale. By this barter it would seem that he intended to carry out one of his father's cherished schemes, to be spoken of in a later chapter.

In this donjon the good monks established "storehouses" for the poor, a phrase that may be modernized into "soup-kitchens." These were under the control of a certain "Père Vincent," who has been canonized since as Saint Vincent de Paul. This peasant's son had grown up into a tender-hearted priest, bountiful to the poor with the crowns he adroitly wheedled from the rich. For he had guile as well as loving-kindness, he was a wily and a jocular shepherd to his aristocratic flock, he became the pet confessor of princesses and the spiritual monitor of Louis XIII. So zealous was he in his schemes for the relief of suffering men and women, and signally of children, that Parliament expostulated, in fear that his asylums and refuges would fill Paris with worthless vagrants and illegitimate children. His is an exemplary and honored figure in the Roman Church, and his name still clings to this tower; local legend, by a curious twisting of tradition, making him its builder!

While its buyer, at the auction, is unknown to us, we do know to whom was knocked down one lot, that holds records of deeper concern to us than all the ground hereabout, thick as it is with historic footprints. The plot on the southeasterly corner of the property, fronting on Rue Mauconseil, was purchased by a band of players for a rental in perpetuity. The Parliament of Paris had not recognized the King's claim to all these ownerships, and would not give assent to some of the sales; and this perpetual lease was not confirmed by that body without long delay. We may let the players wait for this official warranty while we see who they are, whence they come, and what they play.

It was a religious fraternity, calling itself "La Confrérie de la Passion de Notre Seigneur, Jésus-Christ," and it had been formed, during the closing years of the fourteenth century, mainly from out of more ancient companies. The most ancient and reputable of these was "La Basoche," recruited from the law clerks of the Palais de Justice, players and playwrights both. This troupe had enjoyed a long, popular existence before it received legal existence from Philippe "le Bel," early in that same fourteenth century. From its ranks, reinforced by outsiders—among them, soon after 1450, a bachelor of the University, François Villon—were enlisted the members of "Les Enfants sans Souci." Other ribald mummers called themselves "Les Sots." Men from all these bands brought their farcical grossness to mitigate the pietistic grossness of our Confrérie, and this fraternity soon grew so strong as to get letters-patent from Charles VI., granting it permission for publicly performing passion-plays and mysteries, and for promenading the streets in costume. Then the privileged troupe hired the hall of Trinity Hospital and turned it into a rude theatre, the first in Paris, the mediæval stage having been of bare boards on trestles, under the sky or under canvas. On the site of this earliest of French theatres are the Queen's fountain, placed in 1732 on the northeast corner of Rues Saint-Denis and Grenéta, and the buildings numbered 28 in the latter and 142 in the former street. There, in 1402, the confrères began the work that is called play, and there they remained until 1545. Then, during the construction of the new house, they took temporary quarters in the Hôtel de Flandres, not yet cut up by its purchaser at the royal sale, and settled finally, in 1548, in the Théâtre de l'Hôtel de Bourgogne. By then an edict of François I. had banished from the stage all personations of Jesus Christ and of all holy characters; such other plays being permitted as were "profane and honest, offensive and injurious to no one."

The name "mystery" does not suggest something occult and recondite, even although the Greek word, from which it is wrongly derived, sometimes refers to religious services; it carries back, rather, to the Latin word signifying a service or an office. The plays called "mysteries" and "moralities" were given at first in mediæval Latin, or, as time went on, in the vernacular, with interludes in the same Latin, which may be labelled Christian or late Latin. They were rudimentary essays in dramatic art, uncouth and grotesque, in tone with that "twilight of the mind, peopled with childish phantoms." Hugo's description of the "très belle moralité, le bon jugement de Madame la Vierge," by Pierre Gringoire, played in the great hall of the Palais de Justice, is too long and labored to quote here; well worth quoting is the short and vivid sketch, by Charles Reade, of the "Morality" witnessed in puerile delight by the audience, among whom sat Gérard, the father of Erasmus, at Rotterdam, in the same brave days of Louis XI. of France and Philip the Good of Burgundy.

He shows us the clumsy machinery bringing divine personages, too sacred to name, direct from heaven down on the boards, that they might talk sophistry at their ease with the Cardinal Virtues, the Nine Muses, and the Seven Deadly Sins; all present in human shape, and all much alike. This dreary stuff was then enlivened by the entrance of the Prince of the Powers of Air, an imp following him and buffeting him with a bladder, and at each thwack the crowd roared in ecstasy. So, to-day, the equally intelligent London populace finds joy in the wooden staff of the British Punch. When the Vices had vented obscenity and the Virtues twaddle, the Celestials with the Nine Muses went gingerly back to heaven on the one cloud allowed by the property-man, and worked up and down by two "supes" at a winch, in full sight of everybody. Then the bottomless pit opened and flamed in the centre of the stage, and into it the Vices were pushed by the Virtues and the stage-carpenters, who all, with Beelzebub, danced about it merrily to sound of fife and tabor. And the curtain falls on the first act. "This entertainment was writ by the Bishop of Ghent for the diffusion of religious sentiments by the aid of the senses, and was an average specimen of theatrical exhibitions, so long as they were in the hands of the clergy; but, in course of time, the laity conducted plays, and so the theatre, we learn from the pulpit, has become profane."

The dulness of moralities and mysteries was relieved by the farces, spiced and not nice, of the "Sots" and the "Basoche" on their boards. They made fun of earthly dignitaries, ridiculing even kings. Thus they represented Louis XII., in his Orleans thirst for money—never yet quenched in that family—drinking liquid gold from a vase. Their easy-going monarch took no offence, avowing that he preferred that his court should laugh at his parsimony, rather than that his subjects should weep for his prodigalities. To win applause, in his rôle of "le Père du Peuple," he encouraged the "powerful, disorderly, but popular theatre," and he patronized Pierre Gringoire, whose plays drew the populace to the booths about the Halles. The poet and playwright, widower of Hugo's happily short-lived Esmeralda, had been again married and put in good case by the whimsical toleration of Louis XI., if we may accept the dates of Théodore de Banville's charming little play. That monarch, easily the first comedian of his time, allowed no rivals on the mimic stage, and it languished during his reign. Nor did it flourish under François I., whose brutal vices must not be made fun of. Henri IV., fearless even of mirth, which may be deadly, not only gave smiling countenance to this theatre, but gave his presence at times; thus we read that, with queen and court, he sat through "une plaisante farce" on the evening of January 12, 1607. The Renaissance enriched the French stage, along with all forms of art, bringing translations through the Italian of the classic drama. The theatre of the Hôtel de Bourgogne became La Comédie Italienne, and its records recall famous names, on the boards and in the audience, throughout long and honorable years. The troupe was not free from jealousies, and did not escape secessions, notably that of 1598, when the heavy old men of the historic house cut adrift the light comedians and the young tragedians, who had been recruited within a few years, mainly from the country. Those who remained devoted themselves to the "legitimate drama," yet found place for approved modern work, such as that of young Racine. The seceders betook themselves to buildings on the east side of Rue de Renard, just north of Rue de la Verrerie, convenient to the crowded quarter of la Grève; but removed shortly to the theatre constructed for them from a tennis-court in Rue Vieille-du-Temple, in the heart of the populous Marais. You shall go there, a little later, to see the classic dramas of a young man from Rouen, named Corneille. These players called themselves "Les Comédiens du Marais," and by 1620 had permission from Louis XIII. to take the title of "La Troupe Royale." A few years later, perhaps as early as 1650, all the Paris of players and playgoers began to talk about a strolling troupe in the southern provinces and about their manager, one Poquelin de Molière. How he brought his comedies and his company to the capital; how he put them both up in rivalry with the two old stock houses; how he won his way against all their opposition, and much other antagonism—this is told in our chapter on Molière.

In the cutting up of the ancient domain of Robert of Artois, after the royal sale, a short street was run north and south through the grounds, and named François, since feminized into Rue Française. It lay between the tower, whose lower wall may be seen in the rear of the court of No. 8, and the theatre buildings, which covered the sites of present Nos. 7 and 9 of this street and extended over the ground that now makes Rue Étienne Marcel. The main entrance of the theatre was about where now hangs the big gilt key on the northern side of that fragment of Rue Mauconseil, still left after its curtailment by many recent cuttings. Gone now is every vestige of the theatre and every stone of the Hôtel de Bourgogne, except this tower of "Jean-sans-Peur."

The Tower of "Jean-sans-Peur."

By happy chance, or through pious care, this precious fragment has survived the centuries that looked with unconcern on things of the past, and has come into the safe keeping of our relic-loving age. It is an authentic document from the archives of the earliest architecture of the fifteenth century, convincing in its proof of the strength for defence of ducal homes in that day. Its massive stones are scrupulously shaped and fitted, the grim faces of its quadrangular walls are softened by wide ogival windows, its top is crowned all around by a deep cornice. Above, the former corbelled machiolations, heavy yet elegant, are debased into water-spouts, and a new roof has been added. Only the southern and eastern sides of the oblong are wholly disengaged, the other faces being mostly shut in by crowding buildings. On the angle behind is a tourelle supported by corbels, and in the ogival door is a tympanum, in whose carvings we make out a plane and a plumb-line. This was the device of John of Burgundy, worn on his liveries, painted and carved everywhere. Louis of Orleans had chosen a bunch of knotted fagots as his emblem, with the motto "Je l'ennuie;" and Burgundy's arrogant retort was the plane that cut through all that was not in plumb-line with his measurements, and the motto in Flemish "Ik houd," meaning "Je le tiens."

The great hall within has been partitioned off into small rooms, fit for the workingmen and their families formerly installed here; so that its ancient aspect of amplitude and dignity is somewhat marred. We "must make believe very much," to see either the sinner John mustering here his assassins, who file out through that door to their rendezvous with Orléans, or the saint Vincent gathering here his herd of hungry children. Happily, the grand stairway, on one side, is unmutilated, and it serves to bring home to us the ample magnificence of these Burgundian dukes. Dagobert's stair crawls, through twisting darkness, within its tower; Blanche's stair modestly suggests a venture toward ease and elegance in life; here we mount the stairway of a feudal château, broad and easy and stately, fitting frame for bejewelled courtiers and iron-clad men-at-arms. Its one hundred and thirty-eight steps, each a single stone, turn spaciously about the central column, which does not reach to the tower top. Its upper section is carved into a stone pot, from which springs a stone oak-tree to the centre of the vaulted ceiling of the broad platform that ends the stairway, the ribs of the vaulting outlined by carved branches and foliage. On each floor below, a large chamber, deserted and dreary, opens on the landing-place; from this upper stage a narrow staircase leads, through the thickness of the wall and up through the tourelle on the angle, to the tiny chamber occupied by John of Burgundy, tradition tells us. Here in his bedroom, that was an arsenal, at the top of his impregnable tower, the fearless one found safety and sleep. We peep out from his one small window, and far down we see the swarming length of Rue Étienne Marcel, and hear the low pervasive murmur of Paris all astir, accented by the shrill cries of the boys from the adjoining school, at play in the courtyard of our tower. Their voices chase back to their shadowy haunts all these companions of our stroll through the ages, and call us down to our own time and to our Paris of to-day.