From Paris: Its Sites, Monuments and History, compiled from the principal secondary authorities by Maria Hornor Lansdale, With an Introduction by Hilaire Belloc, Illustrated; Philadelphia: The International Press, The John C. Winston Co., 1898; pp. 74-124.
PARIS : ITS SITES, MONUMENTS AND HISTORY
74WHAT kind of city did Paris become when the order and pomp of Rome had grown old, crumbled and fallen into decay?
To answer this question it is necessary to form a clear idea of the long, dark time that followed the barbarian invasions. That vast period which we vaguely call the “middle ages,” with which we connect the feudal state of society, and whose interest and tenor of thought appear to us so distinct from those of modern times, is by no means the one continuous era which our imagination too frequently pictures it.
Apart from the innumerable minor changes and developments which make every part of it as diversified in its way as our own or the last century, the great epoch falls into two well-defined divisions, to the first of which the name “dark ages” may properly be given; to the second only should the term of “middle ages” be applied.
We must remember that these two together deal with the space of a thousand years; and the marvel is not so much that one revolution and total change in society should have occurred in such a prodigious lapse of time, but rather that only one such complete 75 renewal should have taken place. The short four centuries since their close have given us, in the Reformation and the Industrial and Political Revolution of the last hundred years, at least three such movements, and the immediate promise of more.
The two principal epochs of this thousand years are distinguished as follows: The first is that process of continual decline which, having its origin in the breakdown of Rome, — that is, in the lower empire of the fourth and fifth centuries, — reaches its nadir or lowest point in the generation which saw the millennium.
The year 1000, or more accurately the generation immediately succeeding it, marks the turning-point. The ninth and tenth centuries may be said to vie with one another for the evil primacy as to which was the most terrible: the heathen onslaught of the former and the brutal anarchy of the latter appear almost equally worthy to be called a furnace in which our civilization was tried. The second great epoch is connected, of course, with the first by a transitional period, but that period is comparatively short for the astounding work which it accomplishes. The long life of one man might cover it, for a person born before the Norman conquest of Calabria might easily have lived to see the discovery at Amalfi of the Roman code.
The whole of Europe awakens. The Normans show, first, how a true kingdom, with peace and order 76 and unity may be established. They accomplish this feat at the two extremities of Europe, the islands of Sicily and England. The Capetian House establishes in France the origin of that strong, central government without which a nation cannot live. The sentiment of nationality slowly emerges from the confusion of feudalism; then come the forging blows of the Hildebrandine reform and of the Crusades, and the brilliant career of the middle ages has definitely begun.
The great kingships, the Roman law, the universities, the vernacular literature have appeared, and with them the Gothic architecture, whose survivals can prove to our generation, better than any historical evidence, how intense and how vivid was the new life of Christendom.
From that day to our own Europe has never lost its eagerness, its abundant vigor, its power of expansion, and, in its mental attitude, the spirit of inquiry; what Renan so admirably calls “la grande Curiosité” — the basis of all her grandeur.
It is with the first period, however, with the “dark ages,” that we have to deal in this chapter. We have to trace the story of Paris during that long downward half of the valley that covers a thousand years. What characteristics shall we discover in the five hundred years and more which this degradation covers? Of the details in its history we shall treat later in the chapter; but before reaching these it is necessary to draw up some kind of picture of the time.
77In the first place, to repeat a phrase which has already been used more than once in this history, Rome did not die; it was transformed. On all sides, it is true, her civilization lost ground; her art was rude, inaccurate, and at the same time less idealized; her production of wealth less great; her architecture had become a matter of routine; her letters had grown crabbed. Only in one department of human energy had a change occurred, which a simple history such as this dares neither praise nor blame — the philosophy of the empire had been touched with mysticism; the Orient had convinced the Occident; the shrine, the miracle, the unseen had replaced the clear and positive attitude, the speculative and cold intellect, which had distinguished the philosophy of Rome in her time of greatest power. Mediæval religion, with its legends, its marvels, its passionate abnegations and its theories of the superhuman, had appeared.
Was this advance of mysticism part of the universal decay, or was it, on the contrary, the one good counterbalance that ultimately saved the world from barbarism? The answer can only be discovered in the attitude of the reader’s own mind; it is a problem, the solution of which lies not in the region of historical proof, but in the department of mental habit, of conviction and of faith.
Gibbon would tell us that it was the natural consequence of disaster and of decay; that with the 78 Saxons harrying the channel, the Hunnish cavalry laying waste the central west, fear produced its invariable accompaniment of superstition; that Geneviève (if she existed ever) was some leader of strong character, capable of organizing a prosaic resistance, and that an ignorant and debased populace saw in her mission something of the incomprehensible, and therefore of the divine.
But Michelet, who is as great as Gibbon, and has for his own people a far truer sympathy, would undoubtedly yield to the mystic influence, and would picture to us almost with devotion the church of the fifth and sixth centuries, because for him the people are its authors, and this conception of the people is, for him, the soul of history.
What were the causes of this beginning of decline? Perhaps the best general answer to this question is to say “old age;” but the proximate and immediate cause, or, if you will, the most obvious symptom of the break-down was economic. It was in the form of a decline of wealth, especially of the method of producing wealth which the Roman Empire had fostered with such marvellous success, that the pinch began to be felt. It was (roughly speaking) towards the close of the third century that the evil became marked. The system which Rome had spread over the whole of the west was one admirably suited to an immense expansion of wealth, and therefore of population. At the basis of it lay the conception of Order. 79 The Pax Romana was a domestic as well as a political thing, and Rome had made this duty of police the most sacred foundation of her power. She was savage in repressing savagery, and when her task was completed she had so strongly succeeded that perfect order and peace had atrophied her powers.
In the second place, the idea of absolute property and of its concomitant, the sanctity of contract, was very prominent in her civilization. The right, “utere at abutere,” to use or to wantonly destroy, was her exaggerated way of asserting this dogma of individualism. It is from this we get in our common law the conception of inviolable property in land; and from this, again, that the extreme and harsh deductions of the Common Law (which Equity came in to rectify on lines more consonant with Christian morals) proceed.
In the third place, excellent communications and practically free exchange completed the edifice.
Such rules of government are obviously calculated to increase productive power; and, indeed, those nations which to-day regard the accumulation of wealth as the end of civilization have adopted a very similar code. Rome’s success was the proof of the soundness of her premises. In places that are now deserts, wheat-fields furnished the vast capital with food; in the now half-barren uplands of Asia Minor she nourished a teeming population, and easily supported half a hundred of great cities. In Britain 80 alone, and almost by agriculture alone, she found place for ten millions of people; and in Gaul the villages became great and flourishing towns.
How did such a system begin to fail? The conditions which Rome had established were favorable — only too favorable — to the growth of that disease of which our present civilization stands in such terror. A few accumulated the means of production, and upon a few (but not the same) fell the burden of the state. A system of taxation which well suited a population among which wealth had been not ill-distributed became onerous and almost intolerable as the conditions changed. What we should now call “the upper middle class” bore the chief share of the public burden. Will it be credited that when Gaul had passed through less than four hundred years of the Roman system, many of this class voluntarily sank into a semi-servile status rather than continue to support the fisc.
The system of production which Rome had introduced gave to the rich man great advantages. With his gangs of slaves, making use of the admirable roads, of a sea protected from piracy, and competing with the poorer man under conditions where protection was unknown, he built up, not only in industry but in agriculture, a highly capitalistic system. The smaller men fell more and more into dependence, sometimes actually into servitude; and when the empire was at its height, great prosperity was gained at this price, namely, that but a few were actively 81 concerned even with the economic welfare of the state, and that the stability of the system depended upon the conservation of every iota of its gigantic energies. Were these to fail at any point, nothing could save it from decay.
This catastrophe (which was bound sooner or later to occur) was determined more rapidly than one might, in reading the glories of the Antonines, have anticipated. Within a century or a century and a half, the great scheme of production is found “not to be paying.” Civil war, the apathy of the general citizen, a little less order, a certain shaking of security, and the decline began. The initiative which might have saved it could only come from the energy of a mass of small owners, and they had disappeared. In their place men in every stage of dependence, the great bulk of them actually slaves, cultivated the vast estates or worked in the centralized manufactories, and it even began to be more profitable to ask of these masses a constant fraction of the produce of their labor than to directly exploit them. Custom, in the decay of public order, was replacing competition, and the first note of mediæval industry had sounded.
It was upon such a society that the barbarian invasions fell; and that the reader may form a picture of the fifth century citizen who endured them, we will ask him to imagine an owner of property in the neighborhood of Lutetia, and watching the course of 82 events from the mental standpoint of that city whose outward aspect we described in our last chapter.
Such a man would have a house, let us say, on the southern road between the Mons Lucotetius and the hills. Before him to the north would lie the city, which he would frequent for its baths, for its news and for its merchandise — possibly, also, for its public worship. He would probably be a Christian. That large body of Paganism which was left in Gaul was found rather among the people of the outlying districts, among the very poorest of the cities, or here and there in the members of some old family still maintaining the tradition of their ancestors of a hundred years before. But his Christianity would be of the official Roman sort — his bishop at Lutetia virtually an officer of the State, his religion the state religion.
About his house, however, a great estate would lie, and this was called a villa. The ancestor of our modern village, it was tenanted by a very different kind from the master — dependants, freedmen, slaves, living presumably in a cluster of houses along the road, the origin of the mediæval village, and cultivating the area of its parish. They would have their priest, their regular time and place of meeting, their customs and traditions even as to their method of cultivation, in which their master would less and less interfere, and in their religion much of legend, of local tradition, of national folk-lore was included. 83 They worshipped many saints whose very names their master had never heard, and they reverenced some who were indeed nothing but the old gods under new names; they kept the feasts with half-pagan ceremonies, which all the world has since loved to observe, and it is this lower community which forms our link with the prehistoric past. We owe it all.
The master of the villa spoke Latin, not more different from that of the Augustan era than is our English from that of the Elizabethans. His dependents spoke the more corrupt speech which they had learned from the Roman soldiery, and in a hundred matters of ordinary life they used words of which the classics knew nothing. Their accent, in the growing difficulty of communications, was taking a strongly local tone, and the termination of the cases were already clipped in ordinary speech. Still more curious, the accusative was being more commonly used for most of the other cases, and no doubt where their master would still talk of “Mons Lucotetius,” they would make some such sounds as “mont’m,” or even “mont’,” serve to describe it.
What would be the attitude of the master of the villa relative to the break-up of the empire going on around him? In the first place, we must dismiss from our minds the conception of any patriotism. The empire was not a nation to be loved; it was the whole of civilization — it was the world. That it could 84 fall was inconceivable, and remained inconceivable to the middle ages.
The mind had long grown familiar to the idea of infiltration of the outer barbarians. They had served, of course, in the armies; as pensions they had received frontier lands, and there was a long and continuous intercourse between the two sides of the border.
Even with invasion there was a considerable familiarity; invasion was a part of the weakness of the government, but then the government was known to have weakened. The number of the clamorers, and their pressure, increased; the shores of the narrow seas became untenable; at last even Britain is abandoned; still the Roman citizen cannot conceive that his empire — the whole world — is coming to an end. Tribes of barbarians break through the lines on the north-east; he hears that advantage has been taken of their prowess — that they are allied to the Roman forces. Some of them are given land — what of that? It is but an exaggeration of an old custom; anxiety, however, loss of security, cutting off the main roads — all these show his civilization to be falling.
Visiting, perhaps, that Roman Marcellus, the Bishop of the city, he hears from one event to another the symptoms of the fall. Before he is a man of middle age the final occupation of northern Gaul, and that dreadful name of sovereignty, given to the barbarian, is heard; in Lutetia probably chance warriors come, unmolested and stared at.
85Attila strikes the city with a terrible fear; but (how shall we represent in anything like sober history the story of Genevieve?) it is spared, and the poorer people, the makers of religion, found her legend and her sainthood.
Still our Roman provincial land-owner might have lived to see Clovis entering Paris, and to know that the land from the Loire northward was separated from the body of Rome.
Now, this catastrophe would have made less impression on him — or, let us say, on his successors, for he would have reached extreme old age — than the modern reader might imagine. The shell of Roman life remained: the buildings, the language, the organization, the administrative and domestic arrangements, — all these were captured by the barbarian, transformed by his arrival, but by no means destroyed.
The war band of Clovis numbered some 8000 men, and the whole nation of the Burgundians but 40,000. These comparatively small forces came into a Gaul of millions upon millions. They could not do more than affect it; they could not (as they did in Britain) change its language, nor could they even greatly change the institutions.
Well, as time went on, the predominance of these men, fighting battles between themselves “over the heads” (as it were) of the tillers of the soil, settling in the abandoned villages, intermarrying with the 86 Roman nobles and proprietors, continues to drag down the falling civilization. In this Lutetia the Roman palaces were the scenes of their revels; degraded Gallo-Roman and new Teutonic chieftain sit together, drinking on ruder benches than the Romans knew, beneath the half-barbarian trophies of the Merovingian kings. Even at last the new-comer learns (though he deforms) the tongue of the conquered, and beneath them all the huge majority, the people, go on at their servile work, paying the accustomed dues to the owners of the “villæ.”
The new garrison (for it was little more) brought with it no arts, no memories and no attachments. A violent prejudice (brought about by the sharp national differentiation of to-day) has tried to give the Teutonic tribes characteristics which all positive history denies. They demanded nothing better than to take Roman titles, to adopt the Roman habits, to be absorbed in this glittering and superior thing, Rome, not to prey upon it. Yet, as we have said, they debase it. Their own peculiar society disappears immediately; for a short while the “mallus”* or meeting of armed men is held; for a yet shorter time they hold to the vague gods of the forests and marshes, and then definitely merge in the vast population about them.
87But the effect of their conquest is tremendous, though that of their personalities is slight. Order, security and one code of laws — all these go down, and with them civilization itself.
For three hundred years the ruin continues. In Clovis’ time the merchants of Paris still traded with the East. Who shall say what vague and disturbed conception of foreign places lay in the brains of those later traffickers who haunted the palace doors where the “mayors” kept prisoners the last feeble descendants of the Merovingian line?
Paris grows barbarous — her population not less dense, but how lowered in its standard of subsistence! Her walls, her streets, her churches are still Roman (excepting those new churches and abbeys which the new kings had endowed), but those walls are repaired with clumsy masonry and buttressed here and there with mere rough heaps of stone; every new church would show an architecture more simple and more squat than the last; her streets and public squares are filled in and narrowed with the private buildings, which, when government weakens, can encroach upon public lands.
To all this decay a sudden halt is given by the personality of Charlemagne. He becomes almost the saviour of Europe. Nay, he really saves it, insomuch that but for his efforts Christendom would probably never have survived the evil time that followed his death.
88Of pure Latin stock on his father’s side (though we cannot tell, in these times, how far the Teutonic strain entered through the mother), he led the forces which still moved eastward upon the empire. For the empire, with all its diseases, yet had buildings and land, and, above all, political opportunities for the infinitely less developed peoples of the Rhine. The immediate predecessors of Charlemagne conquer the western Franks just as Clovis had conquered the Gallo-Roman — not from any superiority of courage or method of discipline, but because the society which they entered lacked cohesion. Moreover, the method of that conquest was eminently political. The Austrasian “mayors” become the tutors of the Neustrian kings after a decisive battle, and that is all. Another comparatively small war band comes in and inherits another batch of empty villæ, but the civilization is and remains debased Roman.
By this time interior paganism has disappeared, but, on the other hand, the heathendom without is pressing closely upon the little island of Christendom. A little way beyond the Rhine, a little south of the Pyrenees, the pagan or the Mussulman limited the faith.
Charlemagne is heir to that island of Christendom — its necessary defender — and for a little while he re-embodies the ghost of Rome, which has been dead or dying these three hundred years. During his lifetime the old order, the old conception of unity comes 89 back into the now limited territory of the empire, and work in it with a difficulty only barely surmounted by the superb energy of the leader. It is like the soul coming back to a body long mummied, or even falling to dust.
That attempt left Paris to one side. The city could never had made a good centre for a government which was ever on the march, and whose main quarrel lay far east and south; and, moreover, with all his southern blood and Roman conceptions, the Emperor was of German speech and clothing, and was more at home upon those frontier towns of the empire where the German tongue held its own with the low Latin. And thus, though the great bulk of his court held to the civilized language and habits, Aix was his centre, and he was buried there.
Paris, save perhaps for unheard levies of which history makes no mention, does not enter into his plans; a passage here or there in the capitularies relating to an abbey or to a local custom is all we can glean of his connection with the town. The Thermes are no longer kingly, and only the local under-leader can hang his trophies on the walls of the Palace when he comes back from Lombardy or Saxony or Roncesvalles.
Charlemagne’s attempt was fore-doomed to failure; he was fighting against the force of things. He did indeed for his one long life maintain with desperate energy the order of the empire, but even as he 90 marched across them the floors of society shook beneath his feet. The great task was accomplished at the expense of ceaseless wars, a life spent in the saddle; every man that was free to travel became familiar with continual combat, though unable to turn it to the Emperor’s majestic ends. Let the head of such an experiment fail and chaos is certain.
They say that as a very old man he saw from a southern seaport palace the distant sails of the pirates, and that he turned to his counts and told them what would follow his death.
What follows it is “the darkness of the ninth century.” It is probable that Charlemagne’s rule had given Europe just the strength to resist the onslaught; at any rate, our civilization barely escaped destruction. The Mussulman, the Hungarian and the Dane pour in like lava streams. Those invasions were ten times worse than the old attacks of the early barbarians. Then there had come small war bands, intent only on being admitted to the pleasures of a higher society, and easily accepting its faith and habits; but now came whole nations, bitterly hating the wretched, disunited remnants of what had once been Rome, and especially its creed. They burnt and they looted; they killed for the sake of killing, and they could see nothing worth adopting, in the base Europe of their time, but the silver and the gold of its churches or the rich clothes of the owners of its “villæ.”
Almost in proportion as they are able to meet the 91 storm, almost in that proportion do various centres of Europe prosper in the future. We all know how admirably Wessex weathered it under Alfred. Paris, also, just rides through it, and from the moment of accomplishing this feat she enters on the career which only ends when she has built up, with herself for a centre, the kingdom of France.
In such a time, which seemed almost as though the end of the world had come, no common action of Christendom appeared; it needed a Charlemagne to weld even the elements of his time into great armies; no one could hope to do it fifty or sixty years after his death.
Every group, almost every town and village, fought out its own salvation or died in its own agony. In this chaos the last vestige of clear Roman distinction falls, and everywhere it is the good leader who defends the isolated community. True, it would be the owner of the “villa,” the professional soldier or the rich man who tended to be such a leader; but it is accurate to say that the extraordinary hold of the “noble” upon the mind — and purse — of Europe came out of that time of despair.
How many families can trace themselves to this mist and no further! The Angevin, the “Aquitarian,” the Tolosian houses arise from it; and so, also, with the house of Paris. The man to whom Lutetia is entrusted (or has fallen a prey) at this moment is the forefather of the stout young man who to-day 92 aspires to the throne of France, but of the ancestry beyond him we know nothing. He claims to be connected with Charlemagne, and that is all.
The storm fell on Paris in the shape of the Norman siege, and the family that led the city out of this danger are destined to be kings. The chaos, in breaking up so much that was but a relic and a shadow, had left standing the ultimate political realities of Europe, as rocks remain when a flood destroys the buildings, and from all this turmoil Gaul re-emerges; the Latin people and the German cannot mix again, and Paris becomes the historic centre round which the former very gradually recognizes itself and grows.
The name takes substance; and from the moment that a Capet drives an Otto over the place where Valmy was to be fought, France has begun to exist.
Oh! if Rome could have formed in Italy a similar unit round which a Latin nation might through slow centuries have grown!
Such is the rough sketch of the line which her time and civilization followed before the city was shaken off, in the hurricane of the invasions, to form an isolated body round which the state could grow.
Let us now turn, in more detail, to the story of the kings and monuments in the town itself.
The Franks, already, by the end of the fifth century, in possession of the greater part of northern 93 Gaul, had pushed their incursions even across the Seine, and probably, as we shall see, had built a block-house where the Louvre now stands. Then came the victory achieved by Clovis over the Roman forces under Syagrius, and it resulted in the submission of all that district lying between the Somme and the Loire; so, about the year 496, Paris came under the Frankish rule, and the sharp differentiation of the “langue d’oil” was begun. During the years that immediately followed his conquest, Clovis, occupied in extending and strengthening his new empire, had no fixed place of residence; but it is certain that, at the time when he determined upon the expulsion of the Visigoths from the southern provinces of Gaul, he had established himself at Paris. Clovis had married Clotilde, who was a niece of Gondeband, the King of Burgundy; this marriage did much to reconcile the native population to their new ruler, for Clotilde was a Catholic, while Gondeband and Alaric, King of the Visigoths, were both Arians, and thus at issue with the Catholic Bishops, who were the last relic of the official empire, and whose influence, therefore, over the Gallo-Romans was very great. Every one knows the picturesque story of Clovis’ vow to become a Christian if the battle turned in his favor. As a fact, all over Europe, Christianity, the official religion of civilization, easily absorbed the new tribes, who wished nothing more than to be what Rome had been. Clovis was baptized with great pomp by 94 Saint Remi, bishop of Rheims, on Christmas day, 496. Gregory of Tours quotes what purports to be the phrase which the Roman bishop used to the tribal chief; it has a fine refrain: “Bow the head down, Sicambrian.” In truth, the spirit of the empire easily bowed down those barbarians’ heads, who loved to submit to its idea and its superb traditions. Clovis’ sister and a whole army of Franks were baptized at the same time.
There is a letter often quoted as having been written by Pope Anastasius on this occasion, but it has been recently shown to be a forgery, probably of the eighteenth century; an authentic letter of congratulation, however, written by Saint Avitus, Archbishop of Vienne, and the most prominent ecclesiastic in Gaul at that day, shows the importance attached to the conversion of Clovis. After lengthy congratulations, the official assures the Barbarian that the Church watches his career, and that every battle waged by him now is a victory for her. Clovis began the erection of a church on the Mons Lucotetius dedicated to Saints Peter and Paul, and called the Church of the Apostles. Sainte Geneviève was buried there, and, as we shall see later, it took her name. He lived in the Palais des Thermes, which he decorated with trophies of his numerous wars, some of his successors following his example. Dying in 511, he was interred in the Church of the Apostles, which, already far advanced, was completed by his widow.
95When the kingdom of Paris, in the division made of Clovis’ possessions among his sons, fell to the share of Childebert, the long list of crimes and confused plots which is the whole story of the Merovingians, begins. Thus, this Childebert is the accomplice, if not the actual instigator, of the murder of two of his young nephews, heirs to the Kingdom of Orleans. The third, Clodoald, took refuge in a hermitage near Paris, and was canonized. St. Cloud is the spot named from him. The See of Paris being vacant, Childebert appointed Saint German to it, and, again an example of the official meeting the Barbarian, he falls under the influence of that holy man, at whose instigation he built the Church of Ste. Croix and St. Vincent (the present Church of St. Germain des Prés) for the reception of the stole of Saint Vincent and a golden cross which had been brought from Spain. We still have Saint Germain’s signature affixed to the Acts of the Fourth Council of Paris, and it is worth quoting; it is: “Germain, sinner, and — though all unworthy — Bishop of Paris, in the name of Jesus Christ.” Dying in 558, Childebert was succeeded by his brother, Clotaire; and this, by the way, was the first recorded operation of the Salic law, his daughters being excluded from the throne. The regular Merovingian episode occurred. Violent discussions broke out among the four sons of Clotaire. Sigebert, to whose share had fallen the Kingdom of Metz, or Austrasia, — practically, the German-speaking 96 government, — overran the country surrounding Paris, and burned the wooden parts of the capital. The brothers, recognizing the advantage which the possession of Paris would give to any one of them, had agreed, on their father’s death, to enjoy equal rights in it. Chilperic, however, had broken this pact, and on various occasions had stayed in the capital and performed official acts there.
A series of misfortunes then fell upon that city. First, there was an inundation, due to a rising of the Seine, in 583, — probably an example of how the old Roman work in the river was falling into decay. It did much damage, and in the midst of this misery the inhabitants suffered still more from the disorderly conduct of the troops brought hither by Chilperic; and when that prince added a new form of oppression to his other acts of tyranny, the public discontent almost reached the point of revolt. Rigon, the king’s daughter, was married to a son of the King of the Visigoths, and her father forced a number of families to accompany her to Spain. Gregory of Tours gives a vivid description of the misery caused by this oppressive measure, as well as of the violent means adopted by Chilperic in order to enforce it. During these calamities the commercial prosperity, with every other sign of civilization, was rapidly declining. In the reign of Clovis we are told that there were merchants in Paris who travelled to Syria, where they purchased silks and ivory and costly 97 materials; a number of these men had accumulated large fortunes. In the time of Chilperic one of the squares of the city, called the “Merchants’ Square,” was surrounded by the houses of merchants and traders whose shops were filled with jewelry, silver-plate and all sorts of carved metal-work, and perfumes, but the foreign merchandise was less noticeable. The Paris tradesmen had just at the close of the Roman dominion extended their business even into Egypt; in a couple of hundred years Egypt was a name.
Clotaire had a son and successor, Chilperic, of whose reign the principal matter of note for Paris is a fire in which nearly all the private buildings on the Ile de la Cité were destroyed. Dagobert was the next king, and he has left a very powerful impression on the folk-lore of the country, — evidently a ruler under whom Paris enjoyed comparative prosperity, and occupied a position of political importance, the capital of a powerful northern kingdom the various provinces of which were now united under one crown. By the advice of Saint Eloi, who was Bishop of Noyon, and his constant counsellor, Dagobert built the church and abbey of St. Martial in the Cité. His successor is Clovis II., and with him begins that line of decadent sovereigns who fall more and more under the power of their ministers, the “mayors of the Palace.” In this decline of the dynasty the royal authority was only nominally in 98 the hands of a succession of degenerate men who passed their time shut up in their great manors on the banks of the Oise, or seen now and then by the people wandering from place to place in ox-drawn carts. The whole story reads like a legend of primitive folk. We are very far indeed from the splendors of Rome.
The rule of Charlemagne, of whose spirit we have given a very brief summary in the beginning of this chapter, passed without incident for the city of Paris. As we have said above, he was neither by training nor by the nature of his constant warfare fitted to settle down in the old Merovingian capital; and if we wish to get an accurate picture of how Paris fared during the sixty years or so between his accession and the first of the Norman troubles, it may best be put as follows:
After the gradual decay of society which had marked the Merovingian decline, the men of local eminence had, of course, assumed a preponderance far greater than the strong and united law of the Roman world would have allowed; added to this was the Teutonic sentiment of an exclusive and almost sacred aristocratic class — “The Sons of Odin.” Those two forces between them tended to the establishment of that personal local rule which we call feudalism, but the full system was not yet by any means affirmed. Charlemagne, with his vigorous Roman conceptions and imperial methods, rudely 99 disturbs it; in many places (not all, be it remembered) his “counts” are real “comites,” — personal followers that is, whom he appoints for life only, to local governorships.
With his death, however, in the general dissolution, individual men found families which are the hereditary leaders of particular districts and towns. One such family inherited or acquired Paris, and it is the story of their action during the barbarian siege which we are about to describe that explains how they became later the kings of France.
Although these Norman invasions began as early as the time of Charlemagne, Paris, owing to her protected position, escaped for nearly fifty years. In 845, however, a fleet appeared at the mouth of the Seine, and, after pillaging Rouen, proceeded up as far as St. Cloud; after ravaging the city, they were bought off, and returned, laden with booty and an enormous ransom, to encourage their countrymen to similar enterprises. Consequently, in 861, and again four or five years later, other fleets appeared before Paris. The second one met with less success, for Charles the Bald, stung to attempting some sort of resistance, managed to cut off their retreat, and forced them to surrender, to give up their booty and leave the country. Some years later a detachment of only two hundred men left their companions at the mouth of the Seine and boldly advanced nearly as far as Paris for the purpose of demanding a supply 100 of wine and provisions. The account goes on to say that they returned without any booty, but whether because they were repulsed or because there was none is not stated.
An expedition in the spring of 867 came only as far as St. Denis, and confined itself to raiding the immediate neighborhood. It is supposed that they were afraid to attack Paris because of the Grand Pont, which, although unfinished, already acted as a considerable barrier. About this time the Parisians, seeing that they would have to adopt entirely new means of defense, built some sort of fortifications on the spots where the Grand and Petit Châtelet stood later, in addition to which Charles the Bald erected a strong fortress at Pistres, to protect the approach to Paris from down the stream.
Robert the Strong, great-grandfather of Hugh Capet, was given the government of the Duchy of France — that is, the country lying between the Seine and the Loire. Under his vigorous and decided rule the Normans were driven back, and Paris having strengthened her defenses, little or no apprehension was felt as far as the English channel was concerned. It was, however, from the barbarians of the East and North that she was to sustain the siege of 885, of which historians have given so many details. Abbo, a monk of St. Germain des Prés, a contemporary, wrote an epic of twelve hundred verses on it.
An act of treachery on the part of Charles le Gros 101 was the immediate cause of this invasion of the Northmen. Godfrey having been lured to an island in the Rhine and there murdered, his kinsman, Sigfried, raised an army of forty thousand men and marched through Picardy, burning and ravaging as they went. At Pontoise, which they captured, they were reinforced by a fleet of seven hundred ships. Sigfried’s demand to be allowed to pass Paris having been refused by Gozlin, preparations for the siege were at once begun, while Paris, on the other hand, put herself in a state of defense. The forerunner of the Grand Châtelet was finished and a garrison placed there, as well as in the tower that guarded the approach to the small wooden bridge on the south.
Odo, Robert the Strong’s son, and King of France later, was then Count of Paris. He gathered about him his brother Robert, grandfather of Hugh Capet; Count Ragenaire, who had just carried on a long struggle with the Normans at Pontoise; Hascheim, brother of the Count of Meaux; the Abbot Hugh, the Marquis of Anjou, and a host of warlike lords of the Duchy of France and Neustria. The siege was, therefore, conducted almost entirely by Latin-speaking lords; it was, moreover, Paris defending itself against a foreign enemy; the king — utterly ineffectual — did not enter into the question.
On the 25th of November, 885, Sigfried and Rollo — he who was Duke of Normandy later on — appeared before Paris with a large force. By the following 102 day they had set up mangonelles for hurling javelins or combustible material into the city; had erected covered ways of approach to protect the besiegers and allow them to approach close to the walls, and towers to which they proposed setting fire. Fire-ships were floated on the Seine, against the bridges and the houses along its banks, closely followed by boats loaded with men armed with slings, bows and javelins, who kept the towns-people from flying to the defense of the threatened buildings.
The first and most violent of the assaults was carried on in regular mediæval fashion. Unlike former barbarian invasions, it had all the apparatus of a mediæval siege — its towers, catapults, etc. It reads like any of the assaults of the next four hundred years — the siege of Jerusalem itself.
The first attack repulsed, the besiegers next tried to starve out the town. Count Eudes took advantage of this respite to establish such order and discipline in the city as would serve to protect it better than any ramparts. The Bishop — Gozlin — not content with merely exhorting the people, appeared before them casque on head, and, armed with a bow and an axe, planted a cross on the outer defenses, while his nephew, Ebles, a man of enormous physical strength, fought beside him, exciting the enemy to attack him and pursuing them to their trenches.
The Scandinavian cavalry having returned, and there being danger that reinforcements for the besieged 103 might arrive at any moment, the Norman leader determined upon a general assault. This attempt was even more unsuccessful than the preceding ones. Feigned attacks were made at various places, but the real point of attack was the Great Tower. Count Eudes divided his men into three parts. Two were given the defense of the bridges, and the third, which he commanded himself, was shut up in the Great Tower.
The siege dragged slowly on. Skirmishes and single combats were of daily occurrence. In these the defenders yielded nothing in courage or vigor to their adversaries. The latter being, however, more dextrous in handling their arms, the advantage usually remained with them. At last an event occurred that threw the city into consternation.
In February heavy rains swelled the Seine and caused an overflow. The Parisians hailed this with delight, as it promised to give them an advantage and to shelter them from the enemy. But the Normans in attempting to fill in the small branch of the river south of the city had choked it with fagots and earth, with the bodies of horses, oxen, and it was even said soldiers who had been slain, and of prisoners. The water, thus impeded in its course, swept violently against the piles of the small wooden bridge leading to the left bank; these presently gave way, leaving the tower of the fortress called later the Petit-Châtelet cut off from the city, and hemmed in on 104 one side by the river and on the other by the detachment of the enemy stationed at the foot of Mont Ste. Geneviève.
At the sight of this disaster a cry of dismay went up from Paris, so loud as fairly to drown the joyous shouts of the Normans. The defenders of the tower were summoned to surrender, but this they proudly refused to do, although numbering but a dozen, and a mere handful of men, they held out until they were overpowered by the enemy. Eleven were killed, but Hervé, whom the chroniclers describe as being of great beauty, tall, well-made, and richly dressed, was taken prisoner, the Normans supposing him to be a great noble and hoping for a large ransom; but they were disappointed, for he got loose from his captors, and seizing a sword, sold his life dearly. The tower was razed to the ground, but its destruction hardly compensated for the heavy losses of the Normans on that day.
Historians state that the besieged expected from day to day to see the imperial army marching to their relief. “It becomes known,” says one of them, “That Count Eudes has left for Metz secretly; the bourgeois believe they have been deserted; the only gate of Paris is guarded by the Normans, so that no one can get in, and Eudes will be stopped if he attempts to return to the city.”
Just as they began to fear that they would have to treat with the enemy the Count of Paris reappeared, 105 with the news that he had wrung from the Emperor promise of a speedy relief, under the command of Henry of Bavaria.
Taking advantage, one day, of a part of the besieging force having gone off to plunder in the neighboring districts, a sortie was attempted, under cover of which some reinforcements and provisions were introduced into the city. The Parisians began to take courage; six months had elapsed and the Normans were no nearer their end than on the first day. Sigfried became discouraged and asked to treat.
An interview was arranged between him and Eudes, but the latter suspected treason. It had been agreed that each was to go entirely alone to a spot equally distant from the outposts of both armies; but while the negotiations were in progress Eudes either saw, or thought he saw, some of the enemy’s soldiers creeping forward under cover of the trenches and inequalities of the ground, and, fearing that he would be surrounded, he broke off the conference.
it was with the Abbot of St. Germain des Prés that a treaty was concluded; Sigfried offered to retire on receipt of a heavy ransom. To refuse would have meant the pillage and ruin of this abbey, as it was poorly garrisoned and its situation outside of the city put it at the mercy of the invaders.
Henry of Bavaria was killed in bringing the reinforcements, and Charles le Gros thereupon determined 106 himself to go to the relief of Paris at the head of quite a large army.
This prince, who owed his crown wholly to the blind partiality and trust with which the French people regarded this degenerate inheritor of the name of Charlemagne, appeared upon the heights of Montmartre. Pitching his camp in this advantageous position, he might well have afforded to await a favorable moment to annihilate the besieging army. But he had probably counted upon his mere appearance in the neighborhood to drive them off, for when he found that they showed no signs of retreating the cowardly prince opened negotiations, preferring that means of getting rid of them to a pitched battle. The result was a shameful treaty by which the Normans were not only to receive a large sum of money, but to be allowed to occupy Burgundy and Champagne until the entire amount of this species of tribute had been paid.
The Parisians meanwhile, left to themselves, kept their gates shut, refused to agree to the terms of the treaty, and harassed the retreating forces of the enemy, obliging them to drag their boats overland as far as the Marne in order to reach Champagne. In the following year Count Eudes marched against the Normans and drove them out of that province; he came upon them between Verdun, Stenay and Montmedy, and forced them to retreat into the forest of Montfaucon. Eudes was nearly killed in the onslaught, 107 but the rout of the Normans was so complete that only a very small remnant of their army, by taking refuge in the forest of Ardennes, was enabled to regain northern Germany.
Thus the Carlovingian dynasty had proved hopelessly incapable not a century after the death of its founder. One of the most important towns of the Empire had been left practically to defend itself, and the local lord who had done it, and his house, are marked for the local kingship on the break-up of the Empire.
When Charles le Gros was deposed after the siege of 885, the family of Eudes, Count of Paris, became the practical rulers of the duchy of France. Count Robert fought with and defeated the forces of Charles the Simple, and was succeeded by his son and grandson.
In 978 the Emperor Otto, who was at war with the Carlovingian Lothaire, appeared on the heights of Montmartre with an army of 60,000 men. Here, with a mystical spirit thoroughly German, they intoned the Te Deum on the summit of the hill and retreated, either afraid to undertake a siege or driven off by Hugh Capet, Count of Paris. Nine years later Hugh was declared King of France and the Carlovingian dynasty closed. In the first generation in the succeeding century, that is till about 1030, the history of Paris contains nothing of moment. We will make this point the end of our sketch of the 108 Dark Ages and turn to the changes which Paris has seen in its buildings during these 500 years.
We have seen that under the Romans Lutetia became a municipality with a prefect, who later on took the title of count. This prefect, who represented the central power, lived without doubt on the island, whose name, la Cité, is proof of the municipal government of Gallo-Roman Paris; and the present Palais de Justice stands on the spot once occupied by this first municipal building, at once palace and prefecture, remains of which have been found in the course of various excavations.
Some authorities think the Emperor Julian lived here, and not in the Palais des Thermes. M. Fournier argues that the allusions to the Seine in the Misopogon could not have been made had he been writing in the Thermes; he speaks of seeing pieces of ice floating down the stream; says that Lutetia is supplied with water by the Seine, and that the cold in his rooms was intense, the only means of heating them being the stoves, the coals of which nearly asphyxiated him; none of which remarks apply to the Palais des Thermes, situated some distance from the river, and supplied with complete heating apparatus and plenty of pure water.
The first revolution that took place in Paris broke out in the square in front of the Palais de l’Isle, when the legions whom Constantius had ordered to the east revolted and proclaimed Julian Cæsar Augustus.
109“To find the next instance,” says Chateaubriand, “of an Emperor being proclaimed in Paris we must pass from Julian to Napoleon.”
When this palace was enlarged, a small chapel, dedicated to Saint Michael, was built into it, and thus preserved until the present day, having only been pulled down in 1847 in order to carry on the façade begun under Louis XVI.
Dagobert lived in the Palais de la Cité, following the example of most of the Frankish kings who had preceded him. They thought that it helped to establish their right to the throne to live in the palace of the Roman Cæsars. We have no certain proof that Clovis lived there, but his sons Clotaire and Childebert did, and it is supposed that the murder of their two young nephews took place there. Although Childebert is said to have had a horror of the place after this, and to have gone elsewhere to live, the Palais de la Cité continued after his day to be the residence of the kings of France. When Count Eudes strengthened and fortified the Paris the Palais was almost rebuilt, losing the look of a royal residence, — a basilica which it had worn under the Romans and Merovingians, and taking on the form of a square fortification, something like the first Louvre, with the additional advantage of the tower at the extremity of the island to act as an outer defense. The Counts of Paris continued to make the “New Palace,” as it was called, the royal residence, and it was only finally abandoned for the Louvre.
110Was the building of the municipality, where the affairs of the government were conducted by a chosen body, also on the island? It seems most probable, but at the other end, close to where the Corporation of the Nautæ had erected their altar in the reign of Tiberius. That altar was demolished when Christianity was established in Paris, and the huge stones of which it was built buried, in order to erect a Christian church in its place; they have been found beneath the choir of Notre Dame, and it is likely that the principal establishment of this powerful association, the real centre of the municipality, was not far distant. These river tradesmen would naturally have placed their “College” on the water, and on that side where the stream is widest and most navigable; and, as a matter of fact, in the seventeenth century, the spot pointed out as having been occupied by the first Hôtel de Ville of Paris, which means the same thing as the “College” of the Nautæ, was that on which the great Hôtel des Ursins stood later, in the line of the present Rues Basse and Milieu des Ursins.
This tradition is supported by a passage in Gregory of Tours, where he speaks of a sort of permanent fair which had been held in front of the principal church from the time of Chilperic, as it is quite certain that the “bureau” of the Nautæ would not have been far from this fair, and would also have stood somewhere between the bridge and their landing-place, that is right on this spot; for the first bridge 111 of Lutetia was not the Pont au Change, but the bridge of Notre Dame, much nearer the centre of the island. Finally, the remains of a large Roman building have been found there in the present century.
Just opposite was the Place de Grève, about which, during the middle ages, there is practically nothing to be said: it probably continued to be a landing-place. Of its enormous importance during the Revolution this book will treat later.
The sole port of Gallo-Roman Paris, the port of St. Landry, was on the north-east side of the Island of the City, where it is nearest to the island of St. Louis; it was gradually encroached upon more and more by the neighboring buildings until it was finally swallowed up in the Quai Napoleon. A square tower built into the walls of a house in the Rue Chanoinesse,† which goes by the name of King Dagobert’s Tower, though it probably only dates from the fifteenth century, marks the site of the ancient port.
At the time of the Norman invasion the Nautæ moved their “College” across the island, near the Petit-Pont, on the smaller arm of the Seine, that being a more protected spot and less open to attack from the barbarians who came up the river. Just here the fortress called the Petit Châtelet stood later.
The course of the terrible fire of 1718 was blocked by a huge mass of masonry on the bank between the 112 Marché Neuf and the Petit-Pont, which went by the local name of “l’Ancien Hôtel de Ville,” or, more common still, “l’Hôtel de Ville du roi Pepin.”
We have spoken of the Petit Châtelet; was the Grand Châtelet in existence under Charles le Chauve? In Abbo’s poem on the siege of 885, mention is made of a tower or fortress which guarded either the Grand-Pont, called later the Pont Notre-Dame, or another further down the stream, built, according to some, entirely of wood, while others say the lower part was of stone; all of this is very vague, and it is not until 1149 that we have any definite mention of the Châtelet, though it certainly was then a century and a half old. A Latin document of Louis de Jeune’s time speaks of it and of the shambles lying either to the north or the south — “Inter domum Carnifium et regis Castellucium.” The term “regis Castellucium“ suggests to Dulaure the idea that this building of wood or stone was put up by the king who preceded Louis le Gros, and that under his son, Louis VII., it was already occupied by the Grand-Prévôt.
Before leaving the right bank of the river let us see what stamp this age set upon a district lying a little below the island. Nowhere do we find so many names of Teutonic origin as in this corner of the suburbs of Paris. We have, for instance, two villages whose names are entirely German, Stein or Stain, and two called Franconville, “Francorum Villa,” as it is written 113 in the old charts; near the one above Argenteuil there stood until the last century “the Castle of Mail,” or of Mâhl, a word which, in the language of the Franks, meant a meeting-place. Ermonville, “Ermenoldi Villa,” says Abbé le Beuf, “bears a Teutonic or Frankish name.” It is the same with Coye, derived from the Saxon “Cote,” meaning cottage, and with the village of Piscot, above Montmorency, which the will of Saint Remy shows to have been a name of Frankish origin.
The etymology of the name of the village of Vémars, which Abbé Le Beuf made such efforts to trace without success, is still more significant. Except for the spelling it is the very same as that of a certain town in Saxony. It was, in fact, on the right bank, and just below the Island of la Cité, that the Saxon and Frankish tribes had their camp before they got possession of Paris, and it was here that they built their block-house, calling it leovar, lovar, lover, or lower, meaning a castle or fortified place; thus the district and the fortress-palace built on the site of the block-house got the name of Louvre.
If we turn back now and cross the bridge Notre Dame we shall find ourselves in the central part of la Cité. Off to the right stood the Palais already noticed, and immediately on our left the small oratory of Saint Denis, who was imprisoned there; opposite it was a church and convent, built in 1015, and called by the same name. On the other side of the island, 114 and a little to the west, was the Church of St. Germain-le-Vieux, founded by Chilperic with the idea of transferring the body of Saint Germain there from an oratory close to the Abbey of St. Vincent, though this was never done. The church was consecrated under his name long before the abbey ceased to be called St. Vincent, and during the Norman siege the monks brought the Saint’s body there for safe-keeping.
It is very possible that St. Germain-le-Vieux may originally have been the baptistery of the Cathedral Church St. Etienne — built on the river-bank because of the custom of baptism by immersion that prevailed in the early church. St. Etienne was the first Christian church erected on the Island of la Cité; after Julian’s death it replaced a temple to Jupiter on a spot partly covered by the present sacristy of Notre Dame, and for nearly three hundred years was the Cathedral of Paris. When Saint Germain cured Childebert of a serious illness the King, to show his gratitude, built a find new church at the eastern end of the island, and on the site of the altar raised by the Nautæ to Jupiter. From that time — the early part of the sixth century — until now, Notre Dame has been the Cathedral Church of Paris. There are some columns of Childebert’s church preserved in the Hotel Cluny. Although much injured by the Norman invasions, it stood until 1161.
Other Merovingian foundations in the city were first the Church of St. Bartholomew, near the Palais. 115 Tradition says it was a heathen temple, where Saint Denis was preaching when he was seized and thrown into prison. Hugh Capet enlarged it and called it St. Bartholomew and St. Magloire.
Next St. Martial, already an ancient church when Saint Aure’s body was brought there in the latter part of the seventh century. Saint Eloi had built it and the adjoining convent for nuns — so in the ninth century it took the name of St. Eloi and St. Aure.
And, finally, the little chapel of St. Pierre des Arcis, standing between the two others. Let us now cross the Petit-Pont to the left bank and see what the origin was of St. Germain des Prés.
It was not solely to please Saint Germain that Childebert built the Church of St. Vincent and Ste.-Croix. Gregory of Tours tells us that when the king besieged Saragossa in 542 the inhabitants had recourse to an odd means of defense; putting on hair-cloth, they marched around the town several times chanting psalms and bearing aloft the tunic of St. Vincent. Childebert was so much astonished that he consented to withdraw his army if they would give him the relic, and on his return to Paris built a church to receive it, which he dedicated to St. Vincent, adding the name of Ste.-Croix because of a gold cross, supposed to have belonged to Solomon, which he had also brought with him from Spain. Gislemar, an eleventh century chronicler, gives a glowing description of the original basilica, which 116 was dedicated in 558, and a religious order established in the abbey attached to it. Saint Germain was buried in an oratory close by, but in the middle of the eighth century his body was transferred to the basilica, which henceforth went by his name, and placed behind the altar of Ste.-Croix.
Childebert and his wife had already been laid there, as were their successors of the Merovingian line until Dagobert founded St. Denis in the seventh century. The church and abbey of St. Vincent were richly endowed by their founder. In addition to the enormous fief of Isciac or Issy, which stretched away to the west as far as across the Meudon, it owned the exclusive right to fish in the Seine, a roadway eighteen feet wide on both banks, from the Petit-Pont to Sèvres, gardens, vineyards, the Church of St. André des Arts, which had replaced the oratory of St. Andéol, and much other property, so that by the beginning of the ninth century St.-Germain des Prés owned land inhabited by more than ten thousand souls yielding an enormous income. In the Norman invasions the abbey was particularly unfortunate; repeatedly pillaged and nearly destroyed three times, it had to be rebuilt in the beginning of the eleventh century. The large square tower of the present façade is thought to be a part of the Merovingian Church.
It only now remains for us to speak of the Church of St. Peter and St. Paul, built by Clovis on Mons Lucotetius; he was buried there, and after him Clotilde 117 and Sainte-Geneviève. It was plundered and burned by the Normans, but rebuilt, and from its association with the patroness of Paris, came to be called by her name.
Thus ends the list of buildings belonging to this period; most of them, as will be noticed, Merovingian in their origin, the Carlovingian kings having hardly even preserved what their predecessors left them.
In closing this chapter it will be well to take a rapid survey of the town, just as the pivot-point is reached, after which the ascent of Europe is so marked and so continuous.
Let us imagine a distant traveller from Toulouse or from Provence arriving by the great southern road at the period where this division closes — I mean toward the end of the first third of the eleventh century.
In the first place, he is approaching a foreign town. For hundreds of miles already the language has been all but unintelligible to him, save where he could talk low-Latin with some priest or bailiff — and even then the southern accent would make it difficult to follow.
The Paris which is before him is, to him, a great town of the north, the centre of a country of which he has often heard, the “Duchy of France.” He knows, however, that quite lately, in his own lifetime, perhaps, the title of “King” has been given to its particular lord. This title gives him a vague — a very vague — feeling of the old unity of Gaul; but certainly in his mind the conception of sovereignty is attached 118 to the lord of his own country, as, for instance, the Count of Toulouse, or even (if he be a countryman) to the little local lord of the manor from which he comes. That vague feeling, however, will be the more enduring, and on it the strong edifice of French patriotism is soon to be founded.
He comes over the brow of a hill which has lost its old name of “Lucotetius,” and which he hears the peasants call “Mont de Ste. Geneviève,” and as he crosses the summit, the squat Romanesque church where she is buried, which had been in view for miles, lies close to him on his right. Its architecture is that part of the northern country which most reminds him of home. Indeed, all the western world was building in the same way; copying, that is, the later Roman work. Thick pillars crowned with rude capitals, these carved now and then with rough foliage, or attempts to represent animals and men; a flat or wide-angled roof; sometimes a massive square tower, and everywhere in window and door the plain round arch, three great specimens of which would form the main entrance on the west front — such were the features of this and of a hundred other buildings with which he was already familiar. But he would certainly notice how much ruder was this than the southern work, and especially how terribly fallen from the relics of the fourth and fifth centuries, in which his native province abounded.
Strength obtained only by thickness, irregularity 119 of outline, lack of finish in the surface of the stone, — all this would contrast unpleasantly, in his eyes, with the memories of his own towns.
The church would have about it much scaffolding. It was indeed a feature of every town for generations to come; for the buildings undertaken were great and the progress made was extremely slow.
About the church a great burial-place still stood, but already numerous houses, a kind of little village, had grown up. Square, with low doorways and few windows, they formed the worst dwellings that the place had known since the Gaulish huts gave place to the dwellings of the Romans.
Beneath him as he passed this suburb the town of Paris would be spread out.
First he would notice to his left, and close to him, — less, indeed, than a mile away, — a large monastery and church, the latter incomplete, covered with a temporary wooden roof, while the workmen were still laboring at its walls. In some places these walls would be evidently far older than in others, and such spots would have often a charred and dark surface. All round the monastery and church a great wall would be seen, enclosing many acres of ground. These were the house and garden of the new St. Germain des Prés — the great shrine which had been burnt more than a century ago by the Normans, and which the last two generations had been rebuilding. About this church was a little village, like that near 120 which he stood. Following the view to the right, and along the river, he would come to a great square enclosure, round which ran a wall still Roman in its brick-work, but buttressed here and there by the rude masonry of his own time. This garden, he would be told, was the “Clos de Laas,” and he would see it stretching right up to the river in a northerly direction, while easterly it ran three-quarters of a mile, all the way from the abbey of St. Germain to the great ruin at his feet. This great ruin, a confused mass of burnt and charred stone, built up here and there into temporary dwelling-places, and in other places again quarried of its old stones for the purposes of the later buildings, was, of course, the palace of the Thermes — the road ran right past it, through the wall of the “Clos de Laas,” and reached a little wooden bridge going over to the island.
Round the island itself was a great and thick wall, while on the main-land end of the little bridge a bastion, as it were, called the “Petit Châtelet,” defended its approach. The walls, both of the Petit Châtelet and of the island were of that large, coarse work which distinguishes all the works of defense up to the Crusades. The best idea of this kind of building may be found by looking at one of those great “keeps” which yet remain in some of those castles of England that date from the eleventh century.
Probably these walls of the Cité were not thirty feet high, but immensely thick — fifteen feet, let us 121 say — built of two outer cases of masonry and filled in between with clay and large stones. This wall would have neither battlement nor projection of any kind. Here and there a window in places where a house stood against the inside of it; at long intervals a slightly projecting square tower, a little higher then the rest of the structure, would defend it by flanking its assailants. Finally, around it all was a continuous and broad walk, on which, as he approached the city, our traveller would probably have seen a watch stationed.
On the island itself was a dense mass of private buildings, hemming in the public monuments on all sides.
Indeed, the traveller would see little more than the roofs of the churches and the upper story of the palace.
Still, by what could be seen, he would have made out on the extreme left of the island the old Roman palace, little changed, and having a garden between it and the western point of the island. Outside the wall at this spot lay two small islands, which were, and remained for many centuries, uninhabited and unused. Beside the palace, and to the right of it, that is, towards the eastern end of the island, he would have seen the Church of St. Stephen, close to the river bank and just to the right of the bridge. The walls could appear to him partly old and partly repaired, for the edifice had suffered greatly in the Norman siege of more than a century before.
122Behind this church (which was of the Basilican type), overlapping it as it were, and partly appearing to the left of it, stood the Romanesque Church of Notre Dame; low, flat-roofed, with small, round windows on the south side, which was turned to the spectator. The Church of St. Martial, and probably a great square prison tower on the northern bank of the island, standing above the churches and towers, would be all he would see of the town.
Beyond it, however, a northern wooden bridge, in a line with the southern one, connected the island with the further bank, and, where the bridge reached the shore,‡ a very strong building, corresponding to the smaller one on his side of the river, would arrest the traveller’s attention. It was called “Le Grand Châtelet,” and was indeed the principal defense of the city. Massive, perfectly plain, and probably higher than any part of the island, it must have formed the principal object in his view.
To the left of this a small and unimportant block-house marks the site of the future Louvre, while on the right a dense but small undefended suburb surrounded the Place de Grève; while further yet to the right the two large islands spoken of in the last chapter still lay, unbuilt upon and unbridged, close against the northern shore.
123Such was the Paris of the early Capetians, upon which our traveller would gaze. On the road there might be passing him, going into the city, a group of villeins in rough tunics, entering it to sell their market-produce, or perhaps a groups of nobles and fighting men, the former armed with a great sword, a long kite-shaped shield, a little conical cap of iron, and the body only covered with links of mail, while the legs remained unarmed. They would be riding on great thick-set horses. These were by no means like our riding-horses (whose Arab blood was introduced through the Crusades), but rather like our cart-horses.
By the side of these lords of manors, or independent knights, went their footmen, who, for all their insignificance, were the bulk of fighting men even then. They were clothed in no mail, but only thick leather coats, armed with a dirk. Some had small bows and arrows, and some would be wearing little steel caps on their heads, as did their masters.
Following one or other of these groups our traveller would pass through the Petit Châtelet, cross the wooden bridge (exactly where the Petit-Pont now stands), and would enter the narrow central street on which stood the market-place, already encroached upon by the private houses. Directing himself to some of the inns, the southerner would pass (probably) through a low, round doorway to find himself in a great common hall. And there, after eating, the 124 long evening (for the principal meal came early in the day) would pass in songs. He might well hear from a travelling singer, of such as were beginning to awaken the north, a passage from one of the great war epics of the langue d’Oil, Roncesvalles, or Ogier, or the Kings of Lombardy. With such sights and sounds he would have seen and heard rude origins of a city and of a literature which were to mould the character of the west.
Footnotes
* You get, of course, a resurrection of German speech and customs with the advent of the Austrasian dynasty much later, but they do not affect Gaul.
† No. 18, belonging to M. Aley.
‡ There is some ambiguity on this point. The Châtelet may have been to the right of the bridge, if, as we suppose, from M. Jules Cousin’s hypothesis, it (the Grand Pont) was identical with the Pont Notre Dame.