Читать книгу Twenty Centuries of Paris - Mabell S. C. Smith - Страница 3

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FRANCE has been inhabited since the days when prehistoric man unconsciously told the story of his life through the medium of the household utensils and the implements of war which he left behind him in the caves in which he dwelt, or which his considerate relatives buried with him to make his sojourn easy in the land beyond the grave. From bits of bone, of flint, and of polished stone archæologists have reconstructed the man himself and his activities through the early ages. Of contemporary information, however, there is none until the adventurous peoples of the Mediterranean pushed their way as traders and explorers into the heart of Gaul, and then wrote about their discoveries. The Gauls, they said, were largely Celtic in origin and had displaced an earlier race, the Iberians, whom they had crowded to the southwest. They were brave, loyal, superstitious, and subject to their priests, the Druids. Their dress showed that they had made great advance in knowledge over the cave men, for they wore colored tunics—which meant that they knew how to spin and weave and dye—and brazen helmets and shields and gold and silver girdles—which meant that they could work in metal.

Such industries prove that the nomadic life was over, and, in truth, there were many towns throughout Gaul, some of them of no mean size, furnished with public utilities such as wells and bridges, and surrounded by fields made fertile by irrigation. An independent spirit had developed, too, for in about the year 500 B.C. the chiefs and nobles rebelled against the lay authority of the Druids. Then these chiefs and nobles seem to have ruled “without the consent of the governed,” for Cæsar relates that before he went to Gaul in 58 B.C. the lower classes had rebelled against the upper, and, with the aid of the Druids, had beaten them.

It is from Cæsar, too, that we first learn something about Paris. “Lutetia,” he calls it, “a stronghold of the Parisii,” who were one of the three or four hundred tribes who dwelt in Gaul. Lutetia—“Mudtown” Carlyle translates the name—was not much of a stronghold, for its fortifications could have been nothing more than a stockade encircling the round huts which made up the village occupying an island in the Seine, the present “Cité” (from the Latin civitas), and connected with both banks by bridges. It was only about half a mile long and an eighth of a mile wide. It was large enough and strong enough, however, to serve as a refuge for the tribesmen in time of war. Probably such a haven was not an unusual arrangement. Not far from Paris is another instance in Melun which has grown around the village which the Romans called Melodunum, built in the same way on an island in the river.

In the spring of 53 B.C. Cæsar summoned delegates from all the tribes of Gaul to meet at Lutetia, but the rebellion of the year 52 in which the Parisii joined determined the Roman general to destroy the town and crush the tribe. He sent Labienus with four legions to carry out his plans. The Gauls chose as their leader Camulogenus of the tribe of the Aulerci, an old man, but skilled in warfare. He took advantage of the marsh on the right bank of the river and so stationed his troops as to prevent the approach of the Romans to the little town. Labienus first tried to make a road across the bog by laying down hurdles plastered with clay. This proved too much of an undertaking, so he slipped away “at the third watch” and retraced his steps to Melodunum. There he seized fifty ships which he filled with Roman soldiers and with them threatened the town so effectually that it yielded to him. Then he repaired the bridge, crossed to the left bank, and once more began his march toward Lutetia. When the Lutetians heard of this move from refugees, they burned their town and destroyed its bridges. Labienus put a Roman knight in command of each of the fifty ships which he had captured and ordered them to slip silently down the river for about four miles under cover of darkness. Five steady cohorts he left to guard the camp, and another five he despatched up the river after midnight with instructions to carry their baggage with no attempt at quiet. In the same direction he sent certain small boats whose oars were to meet the water right noisily. He himself led a body of soldiers in the direction which the ships had taken. When the Gauls were informed by their scouts of the seeming division into three bands of the Roman army they, naturally but unwisely, made a like division of their own men. In the battle that ensued—probably near the Ivry of to-day—the Gauls resisted with such courage that very few took refuge in flight, preferring to fall with the valiant Camulogenus. The Gauls left to watch Labienus’s camp tried to aid their fellows when they heard of the battle in progress, but they could not withstand the attack of the victorious Romans, whose cavalry cut down all but the few who managed to escape to the wooded hills.

So it happens, rather humorously, that the earliest written account of Paris is that telling of the destruction which left its site a clean slate upon which the Romans might begin to write its story. For five hundred years they wrote, until the Frankish invasion swept its destructive might across Romanized Gaul.

In five hundred years much may be brought to pass, and the Paris that Sainte Geneviève saved from Attila the Hun (451 A.D.) and in which Clovis established himself (481) was a town vastly different from the stockade-defended hamlet which Labienus set out to destroy. While its position was selected by the Gauls because it could be easily defended, it was evident in later and more peaceful times that the city could be developed into a valuable commercial station. The Seine and its tributaries, the Marne and the Oise, proved highways on which the products of a large district could be carried to the distributing center, Lutetia, whence they could be packed north or south or to the coast provinces over the masterly roads which always made an important feature of the Roman colonizing policy. There are Paris streets to-day which follow these same roads into the country.

Roman civilization made its last stand in Gaul, and Paris became one of the flourishing places which the Romans knew how to encourage. As soon as the strength of the builders permitted, the town ceased to be confined to the island and spread on both sides of the river. A bridge, fortified at the mainland end, connected the island with the right bank and with the road threading its way northward to avoid the marsh whose name (Marais) is still given to a district of the city. Where now on the north shore is the square in front of the Hôtel de Ville there has always been an open place, originally kept free for the landing of merchandise from the river boats. This open place was called the Grève or Strand, and the busy scenes enacted upon it sometimes included quarrels between the masters and the longshoremen. Such a dispute came to be called a grève, the French word to-day for a strike.

Where now the Palais Royal rises on the right bank, a reservoir held water to supply the public baths. Tombs clustered along the roads leading north and east, for cemeteries were not allowed within Roman cities. Otherwise the north side of the river with its unwholesome marsh was but scantily populated.

Far different was the southern or left bank, sloping pleasantly to the Seine from Mons

Lutetia under the Romans.

Lucotetius. This hill is now known as Mont Sainte Geneviève and is crowned by the church, Saint Étienne-du-Mont, that holds her tomb, and by the Pantheon, long dedicated to her, but now a secular building. This southern district was drained by the little stream, Bièvre, whose waters in later times were believed to hold some chemical properties which accounted for the brilliancy of the tapestries made in the Gobelins factory situated on its banks. Fields, fruitful in vines and olive trees, clustered around villas which the Romans knew well how to build for comfort and beauty, and which the conquered Gauls were not slow to adopt, modifying the form to their needs as they modified the Roman dress, covering with the graceful toga the business-like garments of older Gaul.

The later emperors came often to Lutetia. They, too, saw the beauty of the river’s left bank connected with the Cité by a fortified bridge. Some one of them, probably Constantius Chlorus, built a palace of majestic size with gardens sweeping to the river bank, and here in Lucotecia, Lutetia’s suburb, Constantine the Great and his two sons lived when they visited this part of Gaul. Constantine’s nephew, Julian, called the Apostate because of his adherence to the old philosophies, spent parts of three years here.

“I was in winter quarters,” he wrote, “in my dear Lutetia, which is situated in the middle of a river on an island of moderate size joined to the mainland by two bridges. The winter is less severe here than elsewhere, perhaps because of the gentle sea breezes which reach Lutetia, the distance of this city from the sea being only nine hundred stadia. This part of the country has excellent vineyards, and the people cultivate fig-trees which they protect against the winter’s cold by coverings of straw.”

In the huge palace where Julian found himself so happy his physician, Oribasius, prepared an edition of the works of Galen, the first book published in Paris; and here it was—or perhaps in the palace on the Cité—that in 361 the rebellious Roman soldiers proclaimed Julian as their emperor. Of the palace there is left to-day what was probably but a small part of the original building, but which is, in reality, a section of no small size. It was that portion of the structure which contained the baths, and it gave its name to the building—Palais des Thermes (Palace of the Baths). One room, preserved in fair condition and showing the enduring Roman brick and stone-work, is sixty-five feet long and thirty-seven feet wide and springs to a vaulted height of fifty-nine feet. It is used as a museum of Gallo-Roman remains. The baths were supplied with water by an aqueduct some eleven miles in length, fragments of which have been found at various parts of its course. At Arcueil, a town three miles from Paris, named from the Latin word arculus, a little arch, there still remain parts of two arches whose small stones are held by the extraordinarily tenacious Roman cement and are varied by occasional thin, horizontal layers of red tiles. At present they are built into the walls of a château which has recently been bequeathed to the town for an old men’s home.

Somewhere south of the palace and not far from it was a garrison to protect the suburb and the Cité from southern invasion. That it was not greatly needed during this peaceful and prosperous period seems proved by the fact that Lutetia’s amusement ground was not within its easy reach, but on the eastern slope of Mons Lucotetius. Here at some time during the Roman occupation, perhaps during the second or third century, an amphitheater was built, and here emperors and generals and merchants, Romans and Gauls, gazed upon the pageants and contests of the arena. Christianity wrought a milder mood in her believers and even before the invasion of the Franks the stone seats of the ellipse had been converted to other uses. Enough was discovered, however, some thirty