Читать книгу Twenty Centuries of Paris - Mabell S. C. Smith - Страница 4

INTERIOR OF THE ROMAN PALAIS DES THERMES.

AMPHITHEATER OF LUTETIA AT PRESENT TIME.

years ago to permit an adequate idea of the original appearance.

To Julian has been attributed the rebuilding of the Cité, and excavations at different points have unearthed remains unmistakably of Roman workmanship, which show that the island was completely surrounded by a wall. Probably some of the stones of the amphitheater went into it. This fortification has been related to the fourth century, and it is known that on the spot in the Cité where the Palais de Justice now houses the law courts, an administrative building of some kind has stood since this same early date. One of Julian’s successors, Maximus, erected a triumphal arch near the cathedral in 383, and it is probable that other pretentious structures justified the erection of the protecting wall.

The cathedral was a church dedicated to Saint Étienne, modest as compared with its medieval successor, Notre Dame, whose sacristy is placed on the same spot, yet showing that concentration of the arts in their expression of religious spirit which has made the churches of Europe at once the treasure-house of the student and the devotee, the inspiration of the poet, and the joy of the lover of color and of line. Both of these Christian churches have stood on ground already dedicated to religion, for under the choir of Notre Dame there was discovered in 1711 a pagan altar, now the chief relic of the museum in the Thermes. The inscription on the stone places it in the reign of the emperor Tiberius (14-37 A.D.), the successor of the great Augustus. Its inscription reads: “When Tiberius was emperor the Parisian Watermen publicly raised this altar to Jupiter, best and greatest.”

The Nautæ Stone.

These Watermen (Nautae) seem from early days to have been an important guild, first as carriers of merchandise and later as an administrative body. In the twelfth century the band was called the Brotherhood of Water Merchants, and its head the Provost of the Water Merchants, a name given in shortened form—Provost of the Merchants—to the first magistrate of the city up to the time of the Revolution at the end of the eighteenth century. Even to-day such of the duties of the Prefect of the Seine as apply not to the Department of the Seine but to the city of Paris alone are comparable to those of the Provost of the Merchants. From the seal of the Nautae, a boat, has developed the present coat of arms of the City of Paris.

It was about the middle of the third century that the altar to greatest Jupiter began to be deserted by its worshipers, for it was then that Saint Denis came to Paris to preach the new religion, and with his coming and the Emperor Constantine’s conversion Christian churches began to be built. Even the martyrdom of Saint Denis, who, according to Gregory of Tours, “ended his earthly life by the sword,” was no check to believers. Legend has it that his head was stricken off on Montmartre, the hill towering above Paris on the north, and to-day crowned by the pearl-white dome of the basilica of the Sacré Coeur gleaming, mysterious, through the city’s eternal haze. The hill’s name has been said to mean “Mount of Mars,” because of a pagan altar raised upon its summit, or “Mount of the Martyr,” referring to the death of Saint Denis. Either derivation may be defended, and neither contradicts the story that the holy Bishop of Paris, decapitated, picked up his head and carried it for several miles before a kindly-disposed woman offered him burial. Over his remains a chapel was raised, restored about two centuries later by Sainte Geneviève, and replaced in 630 by the basilica which Dagobert I (602-638) erected to house fittingly that most holy relic, the head of the saint. The existing church was begun about five hundred years later by Suger, the minister of Louis VI who adopted the oriflamme of Saint Denis as the royal standard of France. The flag hung above the altar and was used only when the king went into battle himself. Since the English victory on the field of Agincourt (1415) it has not left the church. The banner (in replica) stands to-day in the choir behind and to the left of the high altar. Throughout the church are the tombs of the Kings of France from Dagobert to Louis XVIII—twelve centuries of royal bones.

The canonization of Martin, bishop of Tours, the soldier saint who did not hesitate to divide his cloak with the shivering poor, received early recognition in Paris, where, indeed, he has always been popular. In what was in Roman days the country but is now well within the city limits a chapel was reared in his honor on the spot where he stopped to cure a leper when he was on his way to Paris. In the eleventh century it was replaced by the Priory of Saint Martin-des-Champs, which developed into one of the huge monastic establishments which were each a little world in itself during the middle ages. Another chapel to Saint Martin rose at the mainland end of the bridge leading from the island to the right bank.

It was a fair and prosperous city that the world conquerors had nursed beside the Seine; it remained for time to prove whether its five centuries of growth had made it strong and sound or whether its heart was rotten and its roots uncertain of their hold.