The Paris of to-day has, therefore, no typical characteristic physiognomy. It is a collection of samples of several periods, of which the finest have disappeared. The capital is increasing in houses only, and what houses! At this rate, there will be a new Paris every fifty years. The historic significance, too, of its architecture is lessened day by day. The great edifices are becoming fewer and fewer, are being swallowed up before our eyes by the flood of houses. Our fathers had a Paris of stone; our sons will have a Paris of stucco.
As for the modern structures of this new Paris, we would much prefer not to dilate upon them. Not that we fail to give them their due. The Sainte-Geneviève of M. Soufflot is certainly the finest tea-cake that ever was made of stone. The palace of the Légion d’Honneur is also a most distinguished piece of confectionery. The dome of the Corn Market is a jockey-cap set on the top of a high ladder. The towers of Saint-Sulpice are two great clarinets—a shape which is as good as any other—and the grinning zigzag of the telegraph agreeably breaks the monotony of their roofs. Saint-Roch possesses a door that can only be matched in magnificence by that of Saint Thomas Aquinas; also it owns a Calvary in alto-relievo down in a cellar, and a monstrance of gilded wood—real marvels these, one must admit. The lantern tower in the maze at the Botanical Gardens is also vastly ingenious. As regards the Bourse, which is Greek as to its colonnade, Roman as to the round arches of its windows and doors, and Renaissance as to its broad, low, vaulted roof, it is indubitably in purest and most correct style; in proof of which we need only state that it is crowned by an attic story such as was never seen in Athens—a beautiful straight line, gracefully intersected at intervals by chimney pots. And, admitting that it be a rule in architecture that a building should be so adapted to its purpose that that purpose should at once be discernible in the aspect of the edifice, no praise is too high for a structure which might, from its appearance, be indifferently a royal palace, a chamber of deputies, a town hall, a college, a riding-school, an academy, a warehouse, a court of justice, a museum, a barracks, a mausoleum, a temple, or a theatre—and all the time it is an Exchange. Again, a building should be appropriate to the climate. This one is obviously constructed for our cold and rainy skies. It has an almost flat roof, as they obtain in the East, so that in winter, when it snows, that roof has to be swept, and, of course, we all know that roofs are intended to be swept. And as regards the purpose of which we spoke just now, the building fulfils it to admiration: it is a Bourse in France as it would have been a Temple in Greece. It is true that the architect has been at great pains to conceal the face of the clock, which would have spoilt the pure lines of the fa?ade; but in return, we have the colonnade running round the entire building, under which, on high-days and holidays, the imposing procession of stock-brokers and exchange-agents can display itself in all its glory.
These now are undoubtedly very superior buildings. Add to them a number of such handsome, interesting, and varied streets as the Rue de Rivoli, and I do not despair of Paris offering one day to the view, if seen from a balloon, that wealth of outline, that opulence of detail, that diversity of aspect, that indescribable air of grandeur in its simplicity, of the unexpected in its beauty, which characterizes—a draught-board.
Nevertheless, admirable as the Paris of to-day may seem to you, conjure up the Paris of the fifteenth century; rebuild it in imagination; look through that amazing forest of spires, towers, and steeples; pour through the middle of the immense city the Seine, with its broad green and yellow pools that make it iridescent as a serpent’s skin; divide it at the island points, send it swirling round the piers of the bridges; project sharply against an azure horizon the Gothic profile of old Paris; let its outline float in a wintry mist clinging round its numerous chimneys; plunge it in deepest night, and watch the fantastic play of light and shadow in that sombre labyrinth of edifices; cast into it a ray of moonlight, showing it vague and uncertain, with its towers rearing their massive heads above the mists; or go back to the night scene, touch up the thousand points of the spires and gables with shadow, let it stand out more ridged and jagged than a shark’s jaw against a coppery sunset sky—and then compare.
And if you would receive from the old city an impression the modern one is incapable of giving, go at dawn on some great festival—Easter or Whitsuntide—and mount to some elevated point, whence the eye commands the entire capital, and be present at the awakening of the bells. Watch, at a signal from heaven—for it is the sun that gives it—those thousand churches starting from their sleep. First come scattered notes passing from church to church, as when musicians signal to one another that the concert is to begin. Then, suddenly behold—for there are moments when the ear, too, seems to have sight—behold, how, at the same moment, from every steeple there rises a column of sound, a cloud of harmony. At first the vibration of each bell mounts up straight, pure, isolated from the rest, into the resplendent sky of morn; then, by degrees, as the waves spread out, they mingle, blend, unite one with the other, and melt into one magnificent concert. Now it is one unbroken stream of sonorous sound poured incessantly from the innumerable steeples—floating, undulating, leaping, eddying over the city, the deafening circle of its vibration extending far beyond the horizon. Yet this scene of harmony is no chaos. Wide and deep though it be, it never loses its limpid clearness; you can follow the windings of each separate group of notes that detaches itself from the peal; you can catch the dialogue, deep and shrill by turns, between the bourdon and the crecelle; you hear the octaves leap from steeple to steeple, darting winged, airy, strident from the bell of silver, dropping halt and broken from the bell of wood. You listen delightedly to the rich gamut, incessantly ascending and descending, of the seven bells of Saint-Eustache; clear and rapid notes flash across the whole in luminous zigzags, and then vanish like lightning. That shrill, cracked voice over there comes from the Abbey of Saint-Martin; here the hoarse and sinister growl of the Bastile; at the other end the boom of the great tower of the Louvre. The royal carillon of the Palais scatters its glittering trills on every side, and on them, at regular intervals, falls the heavy clang of the great bell of Notre-Dame, striking flashes from them as the hammer from the anvil. At intervals, sounds of every shape pass by, coming from the triple peal of Saint-Germain-des-Prés. Then, ever and anon, the mass of sublime sound opens and gives passage to the stretto of the Ave-Maria chapel, flashing through like a shower of meteors. Down below, in the very depths of the chorus, you can just catch the chanting inside the churches, exhaled faintly through the pores of their vibrating domes. Here, in truth, is an opera worth listening to. In general, the murmur that rises up from Paris during the daytime is the city talking; at night it is the city breathing; but this is the city singing. Lend your ear, then, to this tutti of the bells; diffuse over the ensemble the murmur of half a million of human beings, the eternal plaint of the river, the ceaseless rushing of the wind, the solemn and distant quartet of the four forests set upon the hills, round the horizon, like so many enormous organ-cases; muffle in this, as in a sort of twilight, all of the great central peal that might otherwise be too hoarse or too shrill, and then say whether you know of anything in the world more rich, more blithe, more golden, more dazzling, than this tumult of bells and chimes—this furnace of music, these ten thousand brazen voices singing at once in flutes of stone, three hundred feet high—this city which is now but one vast orchestra—this symphony with the mighty uproar of a tempest.
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1 This might be freely translated: The dam damming Paris, sets Paris damning.
2 Portions of these Roman baths still exist in the H?tel de Cluny.
3 The recreation and fighting ground of the students, the present Faubourg Saint-Germain.
4 Fidelity to the kings, though broken at times by revolts, procured the burghers many privileges.
5 An order formed in the twelfth century, specially vowed to the rescuing of Christians out of slavery.
6 The place of execution, furnished with immense gibbets, the site of an ancient Druidical temple.
7 Pierre Mignard (1610–1695), the well-known French painter, a contemporary of Molière.
8 From that period of the French Revolution when this bad imitation of the antique was much in vogue.
BOOK IV
Chapter 1 - Charitable Souls
Sixteen years before the events here recorded took place, early on Quasimodo or Low-Sunday morning, a human creature had been deposited after Mass on the plank bed fastened to the pavement on the left of the entrance to Notre-Dame, opposite the “great image” of Saint Christopher, which the kneeling stone figure of Messire Antoine des Essarts, knight, had contemplated since 1413. Upon this bed it was customary to expose foundling children to the charity of the public; any one could take them away who chose. In front of the bed was a copper basin for the reception of alms.
The specimen of humanity lying on this plank on the morning of Quasimodo-Sunday, in the year of our Lord 1467, seemed to invite, in a high degree, the curiosity of the very considerable crowd which had collected round it. This crowd was largely composed of members of the fair sex; in fact, there were hardly any but old women.
In front of the row of spectators, stooping low over the bed, were four of them whom by their gray cagoules—a kind of hooded cassock—one recognised as belonging to some religious order. I see no reason why history should not hand down to posterity the names of these discreet and venerable dames. They were: Agnès la Herme, Jehanne de la Tarme, Henriette la Gaultière, and Gauchère la Violette—all four widows, all four bedes-women of the Chapelle étienne-Haudry, who, with their superior’s permission, and conformably to the rules of Pierre d’Ailly, had come to hear the sermon.
However, if these good sisters were observing for the moment the rules of Pierre d’Ailly, they were certainly violating to their heart’s content those of Michel de Brache and the Cardinal of Pisa, which so inhumanly imposed silence upon them.
“What can that be, sister?” said Agnès la Gauchère as she gazed at the little foundling, screaming and wriggling on its wooden pallet, terrified by all these staring eyes.
“What are we coming to,” said Jehanne, “if this is the kind of children they bring into the world now?”
“I am no great judge of children,” resumed Agnès, “but it must surely be a sin to look at such a one as this.”
“It’s not a child, Agnès.”
“It’s a monkey spoiled,” observed Gauchère.
“It’s a miracle,” said Henriette la Gaultière.
“If so,” remarked Agnès, “it is the third since L?tare Sunday, for it is not a week since we had the miracle of the mocker of pilgrims suffering divine punishment at the hands of Our Lady of Aubervilliers, and that was already the second within the month.”
“But this so-called foundling is a perfect monster of abomination,” said Jehanne.
“He bawls loud enough to deafen a precentor,” continued Gauchère. “Hold your tongue, you little bellower!”
“And to say that the Bishop of Reims sent this monstrosity to the Bishop of Paris!” exclaimed Gaultière, clasping her hands.
“I expect,” said Agnès la Herme, “that it is really a beast of some sort, an animal—the offspring of a Jew and a sow; something, at any rate, that is not Christian, and that ought to be committed to the water or the fire.”
“Surely,” went on La Gaultière, “nobody will have anything to do with it.”
“Oh, mercy!” cried Agnès, “what if those poor nurses at the foundling-house at the bottom of the lane by the river, close beside the Lord Bishop’s—what if they take this little brute to them to be suckled! I would rather give suck to a vampire.”
“What a simpleton she is, that poor La Herme!” returned Jehanne; “don’t you see, ma s?ur, that this little monster is at least four years old, and that a piece of meat would be more to his taste than your breast?”
And in truth “the little monster” (for we ourselves would be at a loss to describe it by any other name) was not a newborn babe. It was a little angular, wriggling lump, tied up in a canvas sack marked with the monogram of Messire Guillaume Chartier, the then Bishop of Paris, with only its head sticking out at one end. But what a head! All that was visible was a thatch of red hair, an eye, a mouth, and some teeth. The eye wept, the mouth roared, and the teeth seemed only too ready to bite. The whole creature struggled violently in the sack, to the great wonderment of the crowd, constantly increasing and collecting afresh.
The Lady Alo?se de Gondelaurier, a wealthy and noble dame, with a long veil trailing from the peak of her head-dress, and holding by the hand a pretty little girl of about six years of age, stopped in passing and looked for a moment at the hapless creature, while her charming little daughter, Fleur-de-Lys de Gondelaurier, all clad in silks and velvets, traced with her pretty finger on the permanent tablet attached to the bed the words: “Enfants trouvés.”
“Good lack!” said the lady, turning away in disgust. “I thought they exposed here nothing but babes.”
And she went on her way, first, however, tossing a silver florin into the basin among the coppers, causing the eyes of the poor sisters of the Chapelle étienne-Haudry to open wide with astonishment.
A moment afterward the grave and learned Robert Mistricolle, protonotary to the King, came along, with an enormous missal under one arm, and on the other his wife (Dame Guillemette la Mairesse), having thus at his side his two monitors —the spiritual and the temporal.
“Foundling!” said he, after examining the object. “Found evidently on the brink of the river Phlegethon.”
“You can see but one eye,” observed Dame Guillemette. “There is a wart over the other.”
“That is no wart,” returned Ma?tre Robert Mistricolle. “That is an egg containing just such another demon, which has a similar little egg with another little devil inside it, and so on.”
“How do you know that?” asked Dame Guillemette.
“I know it for a fact,” replied the protonotary.
“Monsieur the protonotary,” asked Gauchère, “what do you predict from this pretended foundling?”
“The greatest calamities,” returned Mistricolle.
“Ah, mon Dieu!” cried an old woman among the by-standers, “and there was already a considerable pestilence last year, and they say that the English are prepared to land in great companies at Harfleur.”
