YALE UNIVERSITY
LIBRARY

Gift of
C. H. Clark

PARIS

IN OLD AND PRESENT TIMES
WITH ESPECIAL REFERENCE TO CHANGES IN ITS
ARCHITECTURE AND TOPOGRAPHY
BY
PHILIP GILBERT HAMERTON
Officier d'Acadlmie

WITH MANY ILLUSTRATIONS

BOSTON
ROBERTS BROTHERS
1885

Copyright, 1885,
By Roberts Brothers.

83'::. n

John Wilson and Son, Cambridge.

PREFACE.

IT is ' probable that there is not another city in the
whole world that has undergone so many and such
great changes as the capital of France. Those of us
who have been familiar with Paris since the accession
of Louis Napoleon have been eye-witnesses of the last
of these, which consisted chiefly in improving the
means of communication by opening wide new streets,
and in erecting vast numbers of houses of a new
type. From the sanitary point of view the change
was most desirable and circulation was made incom
parably easier; from the artistic point of view there
was a balance of loss and gain, as the old streets were
not always, or often, worth preserving, while the new
ones have always some pretension, at least to taste
and elegance, and many new buildings are really good
examples of modern intelligence and art. But there is
a certain point of view from which this reconstruction
of an ancient city was entirely to be regretted. Archae
ologists deplored the effacement of a thousand land
marks, and if it had not been for their patient labors
in preserving memorials of the former city on paper,
the topography of it would have been as completely

iv Preface.
effaced from the recollection of mankind as it is from
the actual site. Were it not for the existence of a very
few old buildings such as Notre Dame, the Sainte
Chapelle, the Hotel de Cluny, and one or two other
remnants of past architectural glories, Paris might seem
to date from the age of Louis XIV. ; and even the
remaining works of the great king are not sufficiently
numerous to give an aspect to the city, which seems
as new as Boston or New York, — I had almost written,
as Chicago. While Avignon and Aiguesmortes pre
serve their ancient walls, the enceinte of Paris has been
repeatedly demolished, carried farther out, and recon
structed on new principles of fortification. While the
palace of the Popes still rears its colossal mass on its
rocky height near the Rhone, and withstands, unshaken,
the unequalled violence of the mistral that sweeps down
upon Avignon, the palace of the mediaeval kings has
almost entirely disappeared from the island in the
Seine, and the old Castle of the Louvre is represented
by an outline in white stone traced in the pavement
of a quadrangle. Of the wall of Philippe-Auguste the
very last tower has long since disappeared, and the
grim fortress of the Bastille has utterly vanished from
its site, known to modern Parisians as a stopping-place
for omnibuses. Nor has the more modern palace of
the Tuileries escaped a similar annihilation. The last
stone of it was carted away not long since, and our best
record of its ruin is a little study or picture by Meis-
sonier. Every year it becomes less and less profitable
to visit Paris in ignorance of its past history; and there-

Preface. v
fore it has seemed to me that such an account of the
city as I should care to write must include constant
reference to what has been, as well as a sufficiently
clear description of what is. This has not been done
before in our language, and would not have been possi
ble now if the admirable labors of many French archae
ologists had not supplied the materials. I need not
add that whenever anything could be verified by per
sonal observation, I have taken the trouble to see
things for myself. Paris has been very familiar to
me for nearly thirty years; but in spite of this long
intimacy with the place, I went to stay there again with
a view especially to the present work.
I may add that, although I have written little hitherto
about architecture, it has always been a favorite study
of mine, and I have neglected no opportunity of in
creasing such knowledge of it as a layman may possess.
The facts about the history and construction of edifices
given in the present volume may, I believe, always
be relied upon ; as for mere opinions, I give them for
what they may be worth. The best way is for a critic
to say quite candidly what he thinks, but not to set up
any claim to authority.

CONTENTS.

PAGE
I. Introduction  i
II. Lutetia  i6
III. A Voyage round the Island  34
IV. Notre Dame and the Sainte Chapelle ... 59
V. The Tuileries and the Luxembourg .... 82
VI. The Louvre  104
VII. The H6tel de Ville  125
' VIII. The Pantheon, the Invalides, and the Made
leine  139
IX. St. Eustache, St. Etienne du Mont, and St.
SULPICE  159
X. Parks and Gardens  174
XI. Modern Parisian Architecture  197
XII. The Streets  219

LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS.

PAGE
Transept of Notre Dame  4
Old House with Tourelle  9
The h8tel de Cluny  12
The old Maison Dieu, and North Transept of Notre
Dame  14
The Frigidarium of the Roman Baths, called Les
Thermes  20
The Grand Chatelet  28
The Tour de Nesle. From the Etching by Callot . 30
The Louvre of Philippe-Auguste  32
Garden east of Notre Dame  40
Pont Notre Dame, iSth Century  44
The Pump near the Pont Notre Dame, 1861 ... 46
The Pont Neuf in 1845  So
The Morgue in 1840  52
The Little Chatelet, taken from the Petit Pont
IN 1780  54
The Archbishop's Palace in 1650. From an Etching
BY Israel Sylvestre  56
Anglers on the Quays  58
Tympanum of the Porte Ste. Anne  64
Pier and one of the Doors of the Porte Ste. Anne 66
Les Tribunes  68
The " PouRTOUR "  70

X List of Illustrations.
page
Royal Thanksglving in Notre Dame, 1782 ... . 74
The old Court of Accounts and the Sainte Chapelle 78
Saint Louis in the Sainte Chapelle  80
The Tuileries in 1837  96
The Luxembourg as it was built  100
The Louvre in its Transition State from Gothic to
Renaissance  104
The Louvre, from the Seine. From a Drawing by
H. Toussaint  106
Details by Pierre Lescot in the Quadrangle . . 107
The Classical Pavilion and the old Eastern Tower iio
The Interior of the Quadrangle. From a drawing
by H. Toussaint  114
Quadrangle of the Louvre, with the Statue of
Francis I., placed there in 1855, and since
removed  118
The Colonnade. From a drawing by H. Toussaint 120
Perrault's Colonnade. Interior View  122
An old Room in the Louvre  124
Front of the h8tel de Ville in the Time of Louis
XIII  128
The Hotel de Ville in 1583. From a Drawing by
Jacques Cellier . . . . '  130
The Great Ball-Room  136
The Pantheon  142
The Pantheon from the Gardens of the Luxembourg 146
The Invalides  152
The Madeleine  155
The Church of St. Eustache  160
Church of St. Etienne du Mont. From Sketch by
A. Brunet-Debaines  162
Interior of St. Etienne du Mont  164
West Front of St. Etienne du Mont  168
The Church of St. Sulpice  170
Grande All£e des Tuileries  ig,

List of Illustrations. xi

PAGE

Lac des Buttes Chaumont  183
Le Trocadero  184
Avenue des Champs ElysiSes  186
Au Jardin du Luxembourg  188
Lac du Bois de Boulogne  190
La Naumachie, — Parc de Monceau  192
Doorway of a Modern House  204
The Opera. Side View  206
The Opera. The Prinqipal Front  208
Interior of the Church of St. Augustine .... 210
The Church of St. Augustine  212
Interior of the Church of La Trinity  214
The Church of La Trinity  216
Boulevard St. Germain  222
Avenue Friedland  228
Hotel de Sens  230
The Mairie and St. Germain l'Auxerrois .... 234
Rue des Chiffonniers, Paris. Drawn by Leon
Lhermitte  236

PARIS
IN OLD AND PRESENT TIMES.

I.
INTRODUCTION.
NATIONALITY affects our estimates of every
thing, but most especially does it affect our
estimate of great cities. There is no city in the world
that does not stand in some peculiar relation to our
own nationality; and even those cities that seem quite
outside of it are still seen through it, as through an
atmosphere colored by our national prejudices or ob
scured by our national varieties of ignorance.
Again, not only does nationality affect our estimates,
but our own individual idiosyncrasy affects them to a
degree which unthinking persons never even suspect.
We come to every city with our own peculiar constitu
tion, which no amount of education can ever alter fun
damentally ; and we test everything in the place by its
relation to our own mental and even physical needs.
We may try to be impartial, to get at some sort of
abstract truth that has nothing to do with ourselves ;

2 Paris.
but it is not of any real use. There is a certain relation
between human beings and places which determines, in
a wonderfully short time, to what degree we are capable
of making ourselves at home in them, — how much of
each place belongs to us by reason of the obscure
natural affinities.
Before entering upon this great subject, Paris, I think
it will not be a waste of space, or a useless employment
of the reader's time, if I show in what way our estimate
of that city is likely to be affected by our national and
our personal peculiarities.
First, as to nationality. Englishmen admire Paris;
they speak of it as a beautiful city, even a delightful
city; but there is one point on which a Frenchman's
estimate of Paris usually differs from that of an English
man. I am not alluding to the Frenchman's patriotic
affection for the place ; that, of course, an Englishman
cannot have, and can only realize by the help of power
ful sympathies and a lively imagination. I am alluding
to a difference in the impression made by the place it
self on the mind of a French and an English visitor.
The Englishman thinks that Paris is pretty ; the French
man thinks that it is sublime. The Englishman admits
that it is an important city, though only of moderate
dimensions; the Frenchman believes it to be an im
mensity, and uses such words as "huge" and "gigantic''
with reference to it, as we do with reference to London.
Victor Hugo compares Paris with the ocean, and affirms
that the transition from one to the other does not in any
way exalt one's ideas of the infinite. " Aucun milieu

Introduction. 3
tUtst phis vasie," he says, very willingly leaving the much
larger British capital out of consideration. For him
Paris is everywhere, like the air, because it is ever
present in his thoughts. " On regarde la mer, et on voit
Paris." We Englishmen, always remembering London, and
more or less consciously referring every city to that,
are very liable to a certain form of positive error with
regard to Paris, against which, if we care for truth, it
is well to put ourselves on our guard. Most things in
Paris seem to us on rather a small scale. The river
seems but a little river, as we so easily forget its length
and the distance of Paris from the sea ; and most of the
buildings that Englishmen care to visit are near enough
to their usual haunts to produce the impression that the
town itself is small. The Louvre, the Luxembourg,
Notre Dame, the Madeleine, the Opera, and the Palais
de V Industrie, are included within that conveniently cen
tral space which to the Englishman is Paris. Even the
very elegance of the place is against it, insomuch as it
produces an impression of slightness. A great deal of
very substantial building has been done in Paris at all
times, and especially since the accession of Napoleon
III. ; yet how little this substantial quality of Parisian
building is appreciated by the ordinary English visitor !
I remember making some remark to an Englishman on
the good fortune of the Parisians in possessing such ex
cellent stone, and on their liberal use of it, and on its
happy adaptability to the purpose of the carver. The
only answer I got was a laugh at my own simplicity.

4 Paris.
" That white stuff is not stone at all ; it 's only stucco ! "
This observer had seen hundreds of carvers chiselling
that stone, yet he went back to London complacently
believing that all its ornaments were cast. Here you
have a striking example of patriotic error, — the stone
of a foreign city believed to be stucco because stucco
is a flimsy material, and because it was not agreeable
to recognize in foreign work the qualities of soundness
and truth. Even in this mistake may be traced the
pre-disposing influence of London. Stucco has been
used in very large quantities in London ; and the stone
employed there in public buildings, though of various
kinds, is never of the kind most extensively employed
in Paris.
It is unnecessary to dwell any longer upon what
Mr. Herbert Spencer would call the " patriotic bias."
French people bring the same bias with them into Eng
land, and write accounts of London with astounding
inaccuracy. In one of the most recent of these there
occurred a description of the House of Lords, giving no
idea whatever of its architecture, and stating that it was
not bigger than an ordinary council-room in a provincial
mairie} Many things in London are as heartily de
spised by intelligent Englishmen as they can possibly
be by foreigners, but the foreigner shows his own patri
otic bias by dwelling upon them, and by slighting allu-
1 I am inclined to think that the Frenchman's notions of size had
been upset by passing through Westminster Hall ; but the patriotic bias
in his account of the Houses of Parliament was shown by his omission
of architectural appreciation, and by his extreme readiness to describe
what he supposed to be eccentricities or defects.

transept of NOTRE DAME.

Introduction. 5
sions to what is really good and noble in London, — for
example, when he passes by St. Paul's as a feeble imita
tion of St. Peter's at Rome, or speaks of the Law Courts
as a medley of Gothic details, without doing justice to
the originality of either Wren or Street. A French
critic is usually so horrified by London smoke and by
the ugliness of our ordinary houses, that he becomes
incapable of perceiving beauty even where it really ex
ists, and confounds .all things together in undiscrimi-
nating, unsparing condemnation.
From these infiuences of nationality I do not hope to
be wholly free, though at the same time I am neither
conscious of any patriotic bias against the capital of
France, nor of any anti-patriotic bias in its favor. I have
been very familiarly acquainted with Paris for twenty-
seven years, and know both its beauties and its defects.
The only strong national prejudice against it which I
still retain is a rooted prejudice in favor of the old Eng
lish system of living in separate houses as against the
French system of living on flats. It may seem at first
sight that this has very little to do with the artistic
aspects of Paris, which will be the subject of the present
series of papers ; but, in truth, the connection between
them is very close. The magnificence of modern Pari
sian streets is almost entirely due to the flat system ; the
apparent meanness of English towns is due to our sepa
rate houses. I am quite aware of this ; and I know at
' the same time that where land is expensive, as it must
be in every great city, the flat system is the one which
i allows the widest and most spacious streets, and gives

6 Paris.
the most air and sunshine to the inhabitants. Still,
while admitting the convenience of the arrangement, its
reasonableness, and the architectural grandeur of the
combinations that result from it, I am EngHshman
enough to prefer, in my heart of hearts, a quiet English
house with a ground-floor and one upper storey, or two
at the very utmost, to the most imposing and preten
tious pile of towering appartements that the skill of
a French architect ever devised or the wealth of an
American colony ever rented. I revisited the north of
England towards the close of 1882, and remember
thinking, at Burnley, that one of the clean little houses
that are now built there for workpeople, each with its
own independent entrance and ready access to the
street, would be pleasanter to live in than an expensive
appartement au quatrihme on one of the finest boulevards
of Paris. This no doubt is an English prejudice ; but
one cannot denationalize oneself altogether.
With regard to personal as distinct from national
prejudices, the only important one that I am conscious
of is a strong dislike to such extension of size in towns
as that which makes them rather regions covered with
houses than creations complete in themselves. A city
of small size (what a Londoner would call insignificant),
well situated in beautiful scenery, with ready access to
the country from all its streets, and itself so constructed
that its principal edifices compose happily with the
landscape, and adorn it, — this is my ideal of a town ;
an ideal not so far from a possible reality, but that there
are actually some existing little cities in France and

Introduction. 7
Italy that respond to it. The complete opposite of this
ideal is London, which is not a town, but a spreading
and gathering of population, like irregular fungoid
growths joining together by their edges till a great
space is ultimately covered by them, while there seems
to be no reason why they should not spread indefinitely
on every side. There is nothing, on the outskirts of
London, of that pretty, sudden contrast between town
and country which gives such charm to both when the
real green country, with its refreshment of rural peace,
comes close up to the gray walls of the city, and shades
them with its trees and adorns them with its flowers ;
when the citizen can be at his business in the heart of
the city at sunset and in the quiet fields before the gold
has faded from the evening sky. That time is past for
Paris as for London; but some names of places still
remain to recall rural associations. St. permain-des-
Pris, now close to a noisy boulevard, was once an
abbey-church among meadows; Notre Dame des CJiamps
was really Our Lady of the Fields ; and the Rue Neuve
des Petits Champs, a new street in little fields. Prim
roses may once have been found in the Impasse des
Primevkres, and vines in the Impasse des Vignes. The
country came close up to the smaller Paris of the Mid
dle Ages, and round about it there were fortresses, mon
asteries, and villages, islanded in a sea of pasturage,
corn, and vines. Wall after wall was found to be too
narrow a boundary, till M. Thiers built the present for
tifications, which the municipal council, with the con
sent of the military authorities, are already disposed to

8 Paris.
demolish, except the detached forts. This continual
expansion of Paris beyond its boundaries, this continual
invasion of the surrounding country, has given to the
city that ill-defined zone of cheap and hasty construc
tion which surrounds every growing town. There is no
longer a complete Paris, that can be easily seen at once.
Giffard's captive balloon gave the means of seeing the
present Paris, which presented the appearance of a vast
basin covered with houses that die'd away into the sur
rounding country, and were divided by a many-bridged
river ; but the balloon was wrecked by a tempest, and
now it is only the adventurous free aeronauts who, as
they drift about in the upper air at the wind's will, can
see the great city of the Seine.
It is a convenience to divide history into epochs,
which we select to mark the accomplishment of great
changes ; but this habit of arbitrary division conveys in
one way a false impression to the mind. The changes
seem complete when we speak inaccurately and gen
erally ; but if we look carefully and strictly into the mat
ter we shall find that every age has left its peculiar work
unfinished, and has left it to be continued by the next
age, which, in its own turn, has begun something else,
and left that to be carried on by its successor. There
appears to be no such thing as finality in the history of
a great city ; and, indeed, we may conclude from what
has been actually done by past generations, that there
is no incentive to important public works so powerful
as the continual appeal of half-executed projects. The
stones of many a building call as loudly as if they could

Introduction.

OLD HOUSE with TOURELLE.

really speak ; they call not only for care in their preser
vation, but for additions to make them look less forlorn.
Sometimes too much is done; mistakes are committed

lo Paris.
that need correction, and new mistakes are made in try
ing to rectify old ones, or a certain thing is built that
would have been complete in itself if it could only have
been let alone; but it was not big enough for subse
quent practical needs, and so additions were made
which destroyed its proportion, as if the wings of an
eagle were fastened to a sparrow-hawk. Only a very
few buildings, either in Paris or any other modern city,
have possessed the virtue of unity.
We ourselves have witnessed one of the most^om-
plete transformations of Paris. We have seen the Paris
of Louis-Philippe transformed into that of Napoleon
III. ; but even this, the greatest change ever operated
in so short a time, had been prepared for, as I shall
demonstrate when we reach that portion of our subject,
by architectural tendencies and practical necessities
which had been seen and felt much earher. A much
more absolute distinction exists between Gothic Paris
and the Paris of the Renaissance. There, indeed, was
a radical change, right and necessary as preparing the
way for modern life, but at the same time exceed
ingly destructive, and not by any means generally favor
able to grace or beauty in its beginnings. It would be
easy to describe the Paris of Louis XI. in very eloquent
language, by the simple process of bringing every
beauty into brilliant relief and hiding every defect, and
it would be not less easy to make it appear that the
Paris of Louis XIV. was a heavy and expensive mis
take; but we shall have no controversial purpose to
answer in this book. The course of events by which a

Introduction. 1 1
beautiful and convenient modern city has replaced a pic
turesque mediaeval one, is full of interest to the student,
but need not awaken in him any very deep sentiment of
regret, unless it be for this or that particular building
which he knows to have once stood where dmnibuses
are now running on the Boulevard, or cafes display
their vulgar luxury close by. This is the way in which
our loss is most effectually brought home to us. There
is the H6tel de Cluny, for example, which has been pre
served almost by miracle down to the present time, and
is now made as safe for the future, by legislative protec
tion, as any human work well can be. Go through that
admirable dwelling, so charming in its variety, without
any violation of harmony, so unostentatious and yet so
beautiful, so well adapted to the needs of honorable and
peaceful human life, and then calculate how many fur
longs of monotonous modern houses in the Rue de
Rivoli might possibly be accepted as an equivalent for
it. The H6tel de Cluny is the best of the old houses
now remaining, almost the only important one that is
still anything better than a fragment; but historical stu
dents go from site to site, where the best of the old
dwellings used to be, and then, finding nothing equivalent
in their places, they lament what seems to them a blank,
uncompensated loss. The loss is seldom compensated
for on the spot, or in anything of the same kind ; but
there is a broader and more general compensation in
the grandeur of the modern city. If Paris had been
treated somewhat tenderly, as Bourges has been, if the
mediaeval houses had been generally preserved, and

1 2 Paris.
consequently the mediaeval streets, the houses keeping
their external appearance and being adapted to modern
requirements by internal alterations only, then indeed
the city would have been a pleasant place for the inves
tigations of the artist and the archaeologist; but com
munication would have been so difficult that the life-blood
of a great and populous modern city could never have
circulated through such narrow and frequently con
stricted arteries. Nor has the destruction been quite
absolutely complete. Notre Dame and the Sainte
Chapelle have been preserved at least as well as
Westminster Abbey and the Temple Church, while the
tower of St. Jacques is left standing, when the church
itself is gone. The less important remains of the Middle
Ages, a small house or a tourelle here and there, were
rapidly disappearing in Meryon's time, and with few
exceptions have vanished utterly since.
In Victor Hugo's " Notre Dame de Paris," written in
1830, after a long and brilliant description of Paris in
the Middle Ages, there comes a prediction of evil omen
which has happily not been realized. " Our fathers," he
says, " had a Paris of stone; our sons will have a Paris
of plaster."
"The Paris of the present day (1830) has no general charac
ter. It is a collection of specimens of different ages, and the
finest have disappeared. The capital increases only in houses —
and what houses ! At this rate there will be a new Paris every
fifty years. And then the historical significance of its archi
tecture is effaced daily. Buildings of importance become rarer
and rarer, and it seems as if we could see them gradually sink
ing—drowned in the flood of houses. Our fathers had a Paris
of stone ; our sons will have a Paris of plaster."

THE h6tEL DE CLUNY.

Introduction. 1 3
This city of plaster might have filled the whole space
within the fortifications to-day if the railways had not
brought stone so easily from a distance ; but by a happy
coincidence the colossal building enterprises of Napoleon
III. were not undertaken before the principal lines of
railway had been constructed, and by their means, not
stone only, but vast quantities of wood and other ma
terials were brought readily to hand. At the same
time the feeling, which an enemy calls vanity and a
friend self-respect, led the sovereign and the municipal
authorities of that time to desire that the new Paris
should be a credit to them, — one of the principal glo
ries of what was intended to be a very brilliant reign.
The consequence has been the reverse of what Victor
Hugo feared. The Paris of plaster was the capital of
Charles X. and of Louis-Philippe. Miles and miles of
new streets were driven through dense clusters of houses
so slight and poor in construction that they only kept
themselves from falling by leaning against each other,
while they did not possess the sHghtest architectural
merit. In the new streets the houses were built of
stone, and the work was done to endure. Of this new
stone Paris we shall have much to say in this volume.
The greatest fault of it is a certain monotony; but
this was especially the fault of the first attempts in
the new style.
During the later years of Napoleon III., and since his
time, there has been more variety in Parisian street archi
tecture, though it is true that the variety is often rather
in the invention of detail than in the conception of

1 4 Paris.
edifices. There are immense quantities of good orna
mental sculpture, by no means slavish in the copying of
set types, but full of delicate fancy, and really of our own
time, though deriving its origin from the best French
Renaissance. In a word, there is really a living street
architecture in Paris in which clever architects employ
ingenious artists and highly trained craftsmen to work
upon the best materials. What remains true in Victor
Hugo's criticism is, that the^reat height of these^mod-
ern houses, and their enormous quantity, make public
buildings seem as if they were drowned among them.
All the churches in Paris, not excepting Notre Dame,
have been diminished by gigantic modern house-build
ing; just as a great injury has been done to the National
Gallery, in London, notwithstanding its very favorable
site, by the neighborhood of the Grand Hotel. We
remember the time when the Nelson Column used to
appear unnecessarily high, but it is not an inch too high
at present; and we all know what a deplorable effect
has been produced upon the towers of Westminster
Abbey by the tall new houses in their neighborhood.
So the greater decorative enrichments of modern build
ings have often made an older edifice look poor, as
Westminster Hall was externally annihilated by the
panelled walls of the new palace, and the old Tuileries
made to look poverty-stricken beside the massive orna
ments of the new Pavilion de Flore. Hence it is a
most dangerous time for the public buildings in any
city when the people are beginning to take a delight
in lofty houses and palatial hotels. Nor is this danger

u!3'v'|f=e

H^

Introduction. 1 5
confined to cities only; an old building of moderate
dimensions, even in the country, may be reduced to
nothing by a large new one erected near enough to it
for comparison. They tell me that a great hotel has
been set up very near Kilchurn Castle. The only tol
erable thing near the moderately sized castles of the
Highlands is a lowly thatched cottage, with green moss
on its roof, and blue peat-reek rising through a hole
in it.

IL
LUTETIA.
IT is curious that the sites of the most important cities
in the old world should generally have been deter
mined by the choice made by a barbarous tribe thou
sands of years ago, with a view to its own security, and
that this choice made by barbarians should have settled
the .matter so irrevocably that succeeding generations
have had to do the best they could with the same posi
tion, well chosen for the needs of its first occupants, but
often ill chosen for the latest. The selection of Paris
as the site of the future capital of France depended on
the practical wisdom of some prehistoric savages, who
found that islands in the river were the safest places to
be had in that part of the country. There was one
large island, and a few smaller ones, in the midst of the
tract of country now occupied b.y Paris, and there is
evidence that some prehistoric tribe used these islands
for a protected dwelling-place. After them came the
Gauls, with a far higher degree of civilization and a
rather advanced military art, especially in defensive ar
rangements. The Gaulish oppidum was not what we
understand by a city, even when the city is fortified ; it
was simply a place of refuge, in some situation naturally

Lutetia. 1 7
difficult of access, either from steepness, as in hilly
countries, or from bogs and water in more level ones.
The Gauls preferred a steep hill to anything else as the
site of one of their great forts ; but where they had not
a hill high enough and steep enough for their purpose,
they were glad of a piece of solid ground in the middle
of a marsh, or an island in a river. The island on which
Notre Dame is now situated appears to have answered
their purpose, and for long afterwards its defensive
value was of some consequence; but I need hardly ob
serve that when Paris was besieged by the Germans in
1870, it did not signify in the least whether the central
part of the city was on an island or not. Paris has so
immensely outgrown its first insular beginning, that its
present military defences are a ring of forts far away
out in the country on all sides. I am rather inclined to
believe that in this extension we may see a prototype of
Great Britain, scarcely to be considered an island since
her Colonial Empire has become so vast as to give her
frontiers inside three continents.
The numbers of bridges in Paris make the islands as
much a part of the town as any other part, and indeed we
are hardly sensible that they are islands at all. But not
only was the Gaulish oppidum insular, the Gallo-Roman
city of Lutetia was so too ; and there is every reason to
believe that it presented rather a beautiful appearance
as seen from the surrounding country. In HoffTDauer's
valuable work on " Paris a travers les Ages," to which I
am under great obligations for archaeological details
not readily accessible elsewhere, there is a careful draw-

1 8 Paris.
ing of Lutetia as it must have appeared from the aque
duct of Arcueil, with Montmartre, then the Hill of Mars,
in the distance. The first impression one receives is
that, compared with mediaeval Paris, Lutetia must have
had a strangely modern look ; but the fact is, that since
the Renaissance we have got so thoroughly used to
classic forms that we are really at home in them, and it
is positively more natural for us to build (with certain
modifications) like the ancient Romans than hke our
own mediaeval ancestors. The aqueduct of Arcueil in
M. Hofftauer's drawing reminds one of a suburban rail
way viaduct; the Roman villas among the trees in the
valley are in outward appearance not very unlike many
French and Italian houses of the present day; and if
Lutetia on her island has an aspect rather unsatisfying
to modern eyes, it is more because there are neither
domes nor spires nor any lofty towers, than because
the edifices themselves are contrary to our taste.
The Gallo-Roman city of Lutetia was not absolutely
confined to the island. That was the stronghold, but
there were important buildings outside of it, especially
to the southward. The stronghold on the island was not
fortified in the early Roman time; a wall of defence
was built round it only in the beginning of the fifth cen
tury after Christ. There were at least two great Roman
palaces, one on the island where the Palace of Justice
now is, and another on the mainland of vast dimensions,
the west end of which was situated in what is now the
garden of the H6tel de Cluny. That in the island had
a sort of open gallery or colonnade on the river-side;

Lutetia. 19
and there is curious evidence, in some of the columns
which have been recovered, that the boatmen were
allowed to make use of them to haul and fasten their
craft, for near the bases we find deep grooves worn by
the ropes. That this Roman palace contained large
rooms was proved beyond a doubt when their founda
tions were laid bare during the modern alterations in
the Palais de Justice. The discoverers were even fortu
nate enough to come upon painted decorations, a speci
men of which they were able to remove from the wall,
and it is now preserved in the museum at the Hotel de
Cluny. Little more than this is now known about the
Roman palace on the island. As its site was used long
afterwards for royal dwellings, the Roman building
itself may have been preserved for a long time, and
have undergone a long series of alterations before it
was finally replaced by a Gothic one. There have been
great changes in the island since Roman times. There
were no buildings in Lutetia to the westward of the
palace, as its gardens went to what was then the western
extremity of the island. They are now covered by the
Prefecture de Police. In the times of Lutetia, and for
centuries afterwards, the island came to an end in what
is now the widest part of the Place Dauphine, and there
were two smaller islands side by side beyond that,
which have since been joined to the large one. -The
narrow end of the Place Dauphine is on one of these
islands, and the houses on the left (as you look down
the river) are partly built upon the other. There was
also a long, narrow strip of an island on the left side of

20 Paris.
the larger one, and the narrow channel which isolated
this strip of land has since been filled up, so that the
great island has annexed three islets in all. It has also
been considerably enlarged by quays built out into the
river, especially at the east end, where much ground
has been gained towards the Pont de I'Archev^che and
the Pont St. Louis. The south side of Notre Dame is
built upon the Roman wall, which it follows irregularly.
The Forum is supposed to have occupied ground under
the present barracks of the Republican Guard. Lutetia
had one bridge over the narrow arm of the Seine, and
another over the wider, but that was all. At present
the island is connected with the mainland by ten bridges,
if you count the Pont Neuf as two, because it crosses
the two arms of the river.
Nobody knows who built the great palace to the
south which bears the name of the Emperor Julian, and
has long been called Les Thermes. Some important
remains of this are still visible and are likely to be pre
served, being classed as historical monuments. The
great hall, which every visitor will remember, and which
used to be the frigidarium of the baths, is one of the
most impressive Roman remains still to be seen out of
Italy. It is extremely plain, except the sculptured
prows of vessels from which the vault springs ; but in
Roman times its broad and simple surfaces of. wall and
vault would no doubt be covered with stucco and deco
rated with some kind of mural painting, and there must
have been a marble floor. It is curious that we who
erect much larger buildings (though the size of this is

THE FRIGIDARIUM OF THE ROMAN BATHS, CALLED LES THERMES.

Lutetia. 2 1
considerable) should be, as we are, so deeply impressed
by the power and magificence of the ancient Romans
when we enter it ; but this may be attributed to its an
tiquity. An Englishman first coming to it from England
feels as an American may feel in a mediaeval cathedral ;
all the buildings he has ever entered are things of yes
terday in comparison with this. There is something,
too, which commands our admiration in the resistance
to ill usage as well as to mere time. The place has
been stripped bare. It has even been made to carry a
garden on the top of it, and has been used as a store
house for merchandise; yet still it stands, firm and
strong, and sure to outlast all the delicate Gothic chap
els in France unless they were constantly repaired.
The other remains of the baths, without being so well
preserved as the great frigidarium, are still sufficiently
so to permit detailed recognition. The hot and cold
baths, the swimming-bath, the aqueduct, the place for
the heating apparatus, are all visible. It is believed
that their preservation was due for a long time to the
persistence of Roman customs among the Christianized
Gauls, including of course the luxurious and cleanly
custom of bathing according to the rules of art.
Besides what remains of the baths, three rooms
belonging to the ancient palace are still in existence,
and are used as part of the Cluny Museum. The lost
vaults of the two larger ones have been replaced by
modern roofs, but the small room is still entire. The
foundations of a part of the Roman palace still exist
under the H6tel de Cluny.

22 Paris.
" An inscription," says M. Lenoir, "placed in the courtyard of
the old convent of the Mathurins commemorated the discovery
of Roman remains in continuation of those under the Hotel de
Cluny, and marked their extent almost to the monastery. On
the Rue des Mathurins the discoveries have been extensive, and
include — i, a great room twelve metres square, which has lost
its vault (this is annexed to the Hotel de Cluny) ; 2, the under-
structure of two great rooms, fifteen metres by eight, running
parallel from north to south; 3, a larger room than any of
these, measuring twenty-four metres by twelve. Its northern ex
tremity (between two buildings which still exist) is ended by a
curved wall like that of a Roman basilica. Possibly it may be
what remains of the consistorium mentioned by Ammianus
MarceUinus." It is beyond the province of this little work to follow
out archaeological discoveries in minute detail, but
enough has been said to show that the southern palace
was a building of great importance. It is believed to
have been destroyed by the Normans in the ninth
century. Like other great cities of Roman Gaul, Lutetia had
her amphitheatre. The ruins of it remained down to
the twelfth century, or were mentioned at that time.
Since then there survived a vague tradition about its
locality, but all doubts were set at rest when in 1869 an
important new street was cut on the south side of Paris,
the street now called the Rue Monge. The workmen
laid bare half the foundations of the amphitheatre, and
the other half still remains under the modern houses.
Much to the grief of the antiquaries, that half of the
amphitheatre which was exposed to view had to be

Lutetia. 23
destroyed to make way for the modern improvements.^
From the antiquarian point of view such regrets are
quite intelligible, but from that of art the loss is im
perceptible, as the remains were too low to have any
architectural effect. Had the amphitheatre been as
well preserved as that of Nimes, it would have been an
object of great interest, and a most valuable contrast to
the monotony of modern streets. There is some rea
son to believe that the amphitheatre was so arranged
that it might serve also as a theatre, and its western
seats would be supported by the rising ground of the
hill Lucotitius, that on which the Pantheon is now situ
ated, as the seats of the theatre at Augustodunum were
supported by the hill now occupied by the little semi
nary. In the imaginary view of Lutetia by the archi
tect Hoffbauer the upper portion of the amphitheatre
is visible on the left bank of the Seine, not very far
above the upper extremity of the great island. Like
the amphitheatre of Augustodunum, it would be almost
out in the country.
Very little is known about the temples. Unlike
Athens, Rome, Vienne, Nlmes, and a few other cities
of great antiquity, Lutetia has not left a single temple
standing, nor have we authentic data from which to
construct a drawing of any temple that once existed.
We know that there were two temples on Montmartre,
one dedicated to Mars, the other to Mercury. A great
piece of wall belonging to the latter existed so late as
1 The last news is that the other half of the amphitheatre is in dan
ger of sharing the same fate.

24 Paris.
1618, when it was blown down by a tempestuous wind,
and " the idol reduced to powder." All that we know
about its shape is that it was " a great ruinous piece of
wall." It is represented as such in the distance of a
picture painted in the fifteenth century for the Abbot
of St. Germain des Pr6s, and now in the Musee des
Monuments Frangais.
Still, if we have not accurate data concerning the
temples of Lutetia, we have clear evidence in the quan
tity of rich architectural fragments which the disturbed
soil of Paris has yielded up that the place contained
buildings of considerable magnificence, as did the other
great Gallo-Roman cities. Lutetia seems so remote
from us that we hardly realize its existence. It is more
like a poetical dream for us than that which was once a
reality. This is due in part to the total abandonment
of the name, and in part to the nearly total effacement
of all material vestiges. The case may be understood
in a moment by supposing a similar effacement at
Rome. Suppose that the Coliseum had simply dis
appeared long ago, that every vestige of temple, palace,
forum, triumphal arch, monumental column, and an
cient wall, had also vanished; finally, imagine a new
city where Rome had been, but so big as to cover its
environs, and that this new city, instead of being called
Roma by the Italians, was called, let us say, Avezzano
or Pescino, and had itself a more famous history than
any other modern town, — what would be the conse
quence? Simply, that the sites of old Rome, instead
of being familiar to all tourists, would be a matter of

LtUetia. 25
dubious speculation for melancholy-minded archaeolo
gists, who would continually deplore its disappearance,
and that the new city would go on with its business just
as if Roma had never existed. Such has been the fate
of Lutetia, once a fair city, with busy commerce by
land and water, with palaces, villas, aqueducts, and
baths, now a dream as remote from us as Troy, the
only difference being that, as we go down the Seine and
pass the most historical of her islands, we know that
once Lutetia was there.
In M. Hoffbauer's drawing of Lutetia the city is
prudently placed at a distance, while the aqueduct of
Arcueil (of which the details are known) occupies most
of the foreground. We have not ventured to attempt a
restoration of Lutetia seen near, so we give, instead, the
view of the island as it is to-day, seen from the windows
of the Louvre, certainly one of the finest urban views in
the world. It has already been explained in this chap
ter that the great island has been lengthened westwards,
that is, towards the foreground of the etching, by the
annexation of two small islands, which in ancient times
were separated from it by narrow channels. The elon
gated island now finishes prettily with a clump of trees,
behind which the reader may recognize the equestrian
statue of Henry IV. on its pedestal. Immediately in
front of the statue are two massive blocks of houses,
built in Henry's time, and remarkable for their heaped-
up, picturesque, and richly varied roofs, which have
often been sketched by Parisian artists. These houses

26 Paris.
are at the narrow end of the Place Dauphine, and the
space between them used to be its only entrance and
exit. The bridge in the foreground (I need hardly
observe) is the Pont Neuf, and after it, as we look up
the river on the broad arm, we see in succession the
Ponts au Change, Notre Dame, d'Arcole, and Louis-
Philippe. Near the Pont au Change are the mediaeval
towers of the Palace of Justice, and that is the place
where the Gallo-Roman boatmen, the Nautae Parisi-
aci, used to fasten their barges to the colonnade of
the Roman palace. The principal existing beauties of
the island, as seen from the western extremity, are the
towers of Notre Dame and the elegant spire of the
Sainte Chapelle. The work of modern times has not
been by any means entirely hostile to its beauty; for
if the island has lost something in the vanished Roman
palace and other buildings, it has gained immensely
in recent times by its beautiful bridges and quays.
The view was blocked in the Middle Ages by the
houses upon the bridges. We shall see later how su
perior the modern bridge is to the mediaeval one, and
what an incalculable gain the new kind of bridge has
been to city views. Let us, however, always exempt
from praise the modern railway pontifex, who thinks
nothing of spoiling a great capital with his cast-iron
abominations. To understand the injury that may be
done by them, the reader has only to imagine one of them
in the place of the Pont Neuf or the Pont au Change.
It has been said that Lutetia was walled late (about

Lutetia. 2 7
the close of the fourth century), and this first defence
lasted a considerable time. It is believed that it was
still in existence (probably after considerable repairs)
in the time of Charles the Bald, and that ruler strength
ened it by wooden towers, — one at the western end of
the city, called la tour du Palais, and the two others at
the ends of the bridges, where they abutted on the
mainland. To save the reader the trouble of a refer
ence, we may add that Charles the Bald reigned from
840 to 877. After this we know very little about the for
tifications till the reign of Louis VI. ( 1 108-1137). That
monarch built two gateways in stone to defend the ac
cess to the two bridges from the mainland to the island,
probably on or near the sites where the wooden towers
of Charles the Bald had been, and he called these Le
Grand Chatelet and Le Petit Chdtelet, names which the
reader is requested to remember, as they are of much
importance in the topography of Paris. Etymologi-
cally, chdtelet is exactly the same word as chalet, and
merely means a small castle ; but by one of those dis
tinctions which custom creates between words of like
origin, chatelet means a small strong castle, a work of
fortification, while chalet only means the diminutive of
a fine house. The present reminders of the Grand
Chatelet in Paris are the Place and the Theatre du
Chatelet. So little warlike is its present aspect, that
the pretty square has its own theatre on its western side,
and the Theatre Lyrique on its eastern, and between the
two is a fountain with a column opposite an elegant
undefended bridge. The extremely peaceful aspect of

28 Paris.
things inside Paris tempts us to forget that the town is
still a fortress, the only difference being that its defen
sive castles are now called forts, and are at a distance
in the country.
The Grand Chatelet had no doubt a fine imposing
aspect when first built, with its lofty conical-shaped
towers and gloomy portal. Our engraving shows it as
it still existed, injured both by diminution and addition,
in the middle of the seventeenth century. The reader
will easily see how little the original military architec
ture had been respected. In the structure between
the towers, which ends as a belfry, were the arms of
Louis XII. As the work of Louis VI. had been so little
respected, the complete destruction of it in 1802 need
not awaken in us any very profound regret.-*
The Gallo-Roman wall is counted by French antiqua
ries as the first wall, — la premihe enceinte. It is rather
important to remember the order of the successive rings
of wall that enclosed Paris as it grew larger, for they
constantly recur in the topography of the place. The
second wall was that of Louis VI., the builder of the
two Chatelets; but the learned do not seem to know
very much about this wall positively. They know, how
ever, that it included much of the town which had
spread out of the island, and therefore that it was the
first clear definition of mediaeval Paris as distinguished
from the antique Lutetia.
1 The Petit Chatelet was a simpler building than the other, — a sort of
donjon tower, with bartizans. We may have to recur to it on a future
occasion. It was used as a prison. The Grand Chatelet was at one
time the Provost's residence, and it became a court of justice.

wwH
'< iso fl
< wKH

Ltitetia. 29
The third wall was that of Philippe-Auguste, and of
this we know a great deal, — almost as much as if we
had actually seen it. That great and energetic sover
eign was as enterprising in building as in politics, and the
same instinct which made him enlarge and strengthen
his kingdom led him at the same time to enlarge and
strengthen his capital. He boldly included in his new
wall not only existing streets that lay outside that of
Louis VI., but also great spaces of garden-ground, of
vineyards, and even fields, which he foresaw would be
covered with houses in course of time. His wall was
a thoroughly good and substantial piece of work, and
handsome, too, in the simple beauty of mediaeval mili
tary architecture, which, though not so rich and elegant
as the ecclesiastical or domestic architecture of the
same period, was still incomparably superior in appear
ance to the ugly military works of our own time. The
enceinte de PJiilippe-Auguste consisted of two walls faced
with ashlar, one facing towards the country, the other
towards Paris, and the space between them was filled
with cemented rubble, of which were also the founda
tions. The wall was three metres thick and nine high,
including the parapet, which was embattled ; and at in
tervals of about seventy metres there were round tow
ers half buried in the wall, yet projecting from it about
two yards: these were at first covered with conical
roofs, but they were afterwards embattled like the para
pet. I am not sure about their height, but suppose it
to have been thirteen or fourteen metres to the eaves of
the conical roof At longer intervals were large gates.

30 Paris.
flanked by towers of more important size, and these
were fifteen or sixteen metres high.
On the south side of the river the wall of Philippe-
Auguste, which was interrupted by the Seine (there
being no fortified bridge in continuation of it), started
from the Tour de Nesle, which remained long after the wall
itself had disappeared, — long enough indeed to be drawn
and etched by Callot. This famous Tour de Nesle was
originally called after Philippe Hamelin, a provost of
Paris, and the name was afterwards changed when it
belonged to Amaury de Nesle. It is one of the most
important points in Parisian topography, and is easily
remembered in connection with Callot's etchings and
other prints. It is remembered also in connection with
the terrible legend of a vicious queen (Jeanne de Bour-
gogne, wife of Philippe le Long), who is said to have en
ticed handsome youths into the tower and then had
them cast into the Seine before daybreak that they
might tell no tales.^ We do not see the towel in
Callot's representations of it quite as it was originally
built. At first it is believed to have had a conical roof,
and the turret staircase was added by Charles V.
The exact situation of the Tour de Nesle was where
the eastern or right wing of the Institute stands at the
present day.
1 This is one of the best-known popular legends in France, being at
the same time romantic and horrible, and therefore exactly suited to the
popular taste ; but I have very little faith in the truth of it, because, as
a general rule, the water was too shallow at the foot of the tower for
such deeds to pass unperceived. If done at all, it could only be when
the Seine was in flood.

O i-l>J
<!utxn
o
l-(a
uM
KHs
ooi

M1-1wW
UQel
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Lutetia. 31
The reader is now requested to transport himself in
imagination across the river till he is in the courtyard
of what is now the old Louvre, the great square court
yard of the palace. Let him stand, in imagination, pre
cisely in the very centre of that square and look
southward, or towards the Seine. If the past could rise
like a ghost he would see a phantom wall crossing the
courtyard from north to south just at his left hand, and
there would be one of its round towers just within the
court on the north side of it near to the present en
trance from the Rue de Rivoli. That would be the wall
of Philippe-Auguste exactly in its old situation. Just
at the same spectator's right hand would be one of the
corner towers of the Castle of the Louvre that Philippe-
Auguste erected. It was a square castle with a court
yard in the middle of it, and in the court there stood a
great keep or donjon. The castle cannot have been of
very vast dimensions, as it occupied not quite one quar
ter of the present square, including the site of the pres
ent building, and not simply the open space. It was,
however, a strong place according to the military re
quirements, of the time, and is not to be confounded,
in its origin, with the palatial associations that have
since gathered round the word " Louvre." It began
by being purely and simply a fortress, and a part of
the defensive arrangements made by Philippe-Auguste.
Afterwards Charles V. heightened and embellished it,
opened windows in its grim walls, and turned it into an
agreeable royal residence.
Now, if the reader will suppose that he is walking

32 Paris.
from the centre of the Louvre Square straight towards
the river, he will just pass on his left hand, before com
ing to the present quay, the site of an old tower belong
ing to the fortifications of Philippe-Auguste, and which
used to be called La Tour qui fait le Coin. That tower
may be seen still in old drawings, and it stood exactly
opposite to the Tour de Nesle. A chain was carried
across the Seine there to bar the passage.
These archaeological details may not appear at first
sight to belong very closely to our subject, which is the
aspect of Paris, for these towers and the entire wall of
Philippe-Auguste have long since been swept away;
but the Paris. of old engravings is not to be understood
at all without some knowledge of the past, and nothing
adds so much to the interest of the present ground as
the knowledge of what stood there formerly. The old
court of the Louvre is a wonderful and magnificent en
closure, but the interest of it is much augmented when
we know that a strong mediaeval castle once stood
there, and that the city wall once traversed the same
space. The Institute is a building of some architec
tural merit, with many noble intellectual associations ;
but any visitor to Paris who is cultivated enough to care
about such associations as the present building pos
sesses will probably have enough of the historic sense to
care about the Tour de Nesle, and interest enough in
art to know that Callot drew it. The past is interesting
also for its wonderful influence in determining the sites
of present buildings, often in a way which nobody
would ever imagine. The visitor to Paris who knows

'l^'^^si^^^ 'j^^^ H^^^^L^t^

THE LOUVRE OF PHILIPPE-AUGUSTE.

Lutetia. 33
absolutely nothing about its history is likely to im
agine, when he sees the Louvre, that the site on which he
finds a picture-gallery was selected for the convenient
exhibition of art-treasures ; whereas the truth is that it
was first chosen for military reasons, when a fortress
was built just outside the walls of Paris, yet near the
river, and that the fortress became a royal residence,
which in its turn became a national art-gallery by a
series of transformations that we have still to follow.
It is well to remember what has been ; but there is little
reason to regret the disappearance of such relics as the
Tour de Nesle and the Tour qui fait le Coin. We have
only to see them in drawings of their old age to per
ceive how incongruous and out-of-place they had be
come. The present Louvre is magnificent enough to
deserve that the past should be sacrificed to it. Let
the past be sacrificed then, but not forgotten.

in.
A VOYAGE ROUND THE ISLAND.
IT is wonderful how much the interest of a piece of
land is augrtiented by the simple fact of its being
surrounded with water. The reason probably is, that
the isolation of the land gives it unity and limits, which
are the first conditions necessary to every work in the
fine arts. Our own faculties are so limited that the
infinite always disconcerts them ; but give us something
so defined that we can see its boundaries, and we have
the comfortable sensation that perhaps we may under
stand what lies within them. This feeling about islands
is naturally in inverse ratio to their size. Australia,
though strictly just as much an island as the Isle of
Man, is never spoken of as an island at all, and we do
not think of it as one. The two Americas are one
island, or two peninsulas ; but we call them a continent.
Even Great Britain is too large for us to feel its insu
larity unless we think about it. The perfection of an
island is to be just big enough for some variety of hill
and dale, and yet so little that the whole circumference
of it can be seen from some elevated point.
There are many such spots of earth in the world, of
great natural beauty, in lakes, rivers, and seas ; but if

A Voyage round the Island. 35
\ve except the half-artificial islets on which Venice is
built, there is not an island anywhere to be compared
for human interest to that which is crowned with the
towers of Notre Dame and the spire of the Sainte Cha
pelle. What may have been its natural beauty in pre
historic times we can only guess. It has no hill, no
rock, like that at Decize in the Loire. Probably it was
never anything better than a flat piece of land adorned
with groups of trees and reflecting itself, like hundreds
of other river islands, in the stream that washed and
undermined its banks. Man took possession of it, and
gave it an interest surpassing that of rocks and foliage.
In itself it is now nothing but a flat area, defended from
the destructive action of the water by well-built quays ;
but every inch of it has its history, and besides this the
island has an architectural interest of a peculiar kind, for
the work that has been done in it in past ages, and for
the remarkable changes that have been made in it both
in modern and in older times.
I must now ask the reader to accompany me in a
boat voyage round this famous little island, — a slow
voyage, with many pauses, as different as possible from
a trip in one of the swift little steamers that dart so
frequently under the bridges. They are not for us.
Neither do we require a swift and elegant rowing boat,
such as they build now down at Asnieres. Anything
that will float and be steady is good enough for us ; but
we require an experienced marinier de la Seine (a worthy
successor of the ancient Nautae Parisiaci) to look to
our safety in the currents, for we shall be far too much

36 Paris.
occupied with other matters to concern ourselves about
the details of navigation.
We will go down the broad arm of the Seine first, if
you please, and then ascend the narrow one ; and we
will start from the Pont Sully, which goes from the
Quai de la Tournelle across the eastern corner of the
Island of St. Louis, straight in the direction of the Bas
tille, which the pedestrian soon reaches by the Boule
vard Henri IV. Before leaving the Pont Sully, we may
observe that this spot where the Boulevard St. Germain
joins the Quai de la Tournelle is of considerable impor
tance in the historical topography of Paris, because the
Porte St. Bernard was just precisely there; and not
only was that gate in the original wall of Philippe-
Auguste, but it was preserved, after undergoing a trans
formation, till the comparatively recent times of Louis
XVI. In the days of Louis XIV. the old Gothic gate
was turned into a classical arch of triumph in honor of
the great king; but a piece of the old wall and two
towers were left intact on the side towards the Seine,
and that which stood close to the water was the Tour
nelle itself, from which the present quay takes its name.
For various reasons it is one of the most important
points in Paris. In the Middle Ages this tower was
connected by a chain with one that stood opposite to it
on the island of St. Louis, while on the land side the
wall which started from the Tournelle in a southerly
direction, and turned westward just above where the
Pantheon now stands, was the boundary of the great
mediaeval university of Paris. What is now called the

A Voyage round the Island. 37
Island of St. Louis was in the fifteenth century two isl
ands ; the one to the east being called llle aiix Vaches,
and that to the west llle Notre Dame. Farther east, and
separated from the He aux Vaches by a narrow channel,
and by one still narrower from the north shore of the
Seine, was another island, called ITle des Javiaux. This
was called Vile Louvier in the eighteenth century, and
was used as a storage ground for firewood ; but the chan
nel has now been filled up and the island annexed to the
mainland. The Boulevard Henri IV. and three smaller
streets cross what was once flowing water. As to the
present condition of the He St. Louis, it need not detain
us. The ground is covered with the usual tall, well-
built, modern Parisian houses, and connected with other
parts of Paris by seven bridges, if you count the Pont
Sully as two, which it really is. The island is said to be
an agreeable place of residence for its almost Venetian
quiet, and for the fine views from many of its windows.
Altogether it has now a very highly civilized appear
ance ; yet one cannot help regretting the fifteenth cen
tury, when there was only a bit of fortress wall upon it,
with towers, and a few trees, and when seventeen towers
could be counted along the north bank of the Seine, and
turning up to the great fortress, — the Bastille, — while
within the space so enclosed arose many a turret and
spire whereof there are none remaining.
• The Isle of St. Louis — which in the Middle Ages had
been so little dealt with by human art that the animals
upon it could get to the water all round, except where
the banks were undermined by the current — is now so

38 Paris.
surrounded with quays that the horses in the stables
could never approach the water at all unless access
were made for them artificially. This is one of those
numerous cases in which civilization first takes away a
natural convenience and then restores it in its own
fashion. Frenchmen are very fond of bathing their
horses in the fine weather; you may see them doing
it in all the rivers of France, as artists are well aware.
Nothing that men and animals are ever engaged in
together offers prettier and ipore unexpected effects
of grouping and active movement, while the rippling
of the water itself against the animals' bodies affords
ample variety of reflection. The view from the river
here has been much diminished in picturesque interest
by the gradual and now almost complete victory of
modern neatness in the works of the house-architect
and the engineer, the only very obvious gain being the
distant dome of the Pantheon. Notwithstanding the loss
of all the military mediaeval towers, such as the Tour
nelle on the left bank, the Tour Loriaux on the He St.
Louis, and many others, we have one consolation which
makes us easily forget them all. Notre Dame is still
erect on the greater island, the glory of the river as
you come down through the Pont de la Tournelle, so
that you can hardly take your eye off it as the motion
of your boat changes for you the intricate perspective
of tower and spire and flying buttress. There is many
a fine river-scene in France in which natural beauty
is mingled , with some remnant of noble architecture.
Here the natural beauty is limited to sky and water,

A Voyage round the Island. 39
and to the trees in the space at the upper end of the
island, now called the Jardin de I'Archevich^; but it is
a scene which nothing spoils, and which has a wonder
ful charm and grandeur at certain times, especially in
the splendor of sunset. Notre Dame looks imposing
from every side ; but there is no view of the building
quite so impressive as that which includes the apse,
with its long, light, flying buttresses in their varied
degrees of foreshortening.
This illustration shows the cathedral as it appears
from the garden itself; but, like all large edifices, it is
much more imposing from some distance, and looks
best in the well-known view from the left bank of
the Seine that has been so often drawn, painted, and
engraved, and that was the subject of one of Meryon's
most famous etchings.
The contrast between the two islands of St. Louis
and La Cite is in nothing more remarkable than in
the antiquity of the human life upon them. Here the
reader must be requested to give his special attention
for one moment to one of those points which are the
perpetual confusion of the careless and unobservant.
When the careless reader meets with the He Notre Dame
in the history of Paris, he inevitably imagines that it
is the island on which Notre Dame is built; whereas
it was the mediaeval name for the more southerly of
the two islands, now united into one under the name
of St. Louis; and what is most curious and remarkable
is, that although the island of the city on which Notre
Dame is situated was peopled in the time of the

40 Paris.
Romans, and covered with a most dense population
in the Middle Ages, the island called after Notre Dame
was waste land until the seventeenth century. This
accounts for the strange fact that there never was a
mediaeval bridge from one island to the other, though
they are so near that a bridge seems inevitable. The
distance is only sixty-five metres, and it is now spanned
by a single arch. In the seventeenth century there was
a wooden bridge from the southern extremity of the
He St. Louis (the present Pont St. Louis is higher
up), and this wooden structure has a strange history
connected with what was called the Cloister of Notre
Dame. This was not what we are accustomed to call
a cloister, but a sort of ecclesiastical village composed
of thirty-seven houses, each having its own garden,
and the whole being defended by a wall. The clois
ter was situated in the Island of the City, between
Notre Dame and the channel now crossed by the
Pont St. Louis. It appears that the clergy who lived
in it enjoyed such delightful quiet amid their gar
dens that they could not endure the idea of a bridge
with its noisy traffic ; so in order to spare the cloister
the bridge was made of a very peculiar form. First
it crossed the channel at such an angle as to make it
much longer than necessary; and then, when it had
got near what is now the Quai Napoldon, it ran parallel
with the shore of the island for some distance before
landing. This wooden bridge is known in history as the
Pont Rouge, because it was painted with red lead.
Next we come to the Pont d'Arcole, which has

GARDEN EAST OF NOTRE DAME.

A Voyage round the Island. 4 1
hardly any history.^ It is in one arch, and a light
and clever piece of modern engineering. It connects
the Rue d'Arcole, which leads to the west front of
Notre Dame, with that part of the north shore where
the Hotel de Ville is situated ; consequently in modern
Paris there are few points of greater architectural in
terest. Still, so far as the variety and abundance of
picturesque material is concerned, this part of Paris
has suffered even more than many others by modern
improvements. It was once extremely populous. In
the Middle Ages it was a labyrinth of narrow streets,
with tall gabled houses, all along the bank of the
river. Even in the last century there still subsisted
a number of small churches and tortuous streets, many
of which bore the old names, and remnants of them
may still be remembered. The improvements, begun
under the reign of Napoleon III., and carried out under
1 I quote the following passage in a letter from my old friend William
Wyld, the distinguished painter, as it adds to the interest of this bridge :
" Touching the Pont d'Arcole of which you say, I think, that there is
'hardly any history,' I will tell you a little anecdote. In 1830 I was an
eye-witness to much hard fighting across that bridge (which was then but
a small suspension passerelle for foot-passengers only), and saw there
many a tall fellow laid low (I was on the quay of the Isle St. Louis). I
think the bridge was then called the Pont de r Hotel de Ville, — but during
the hottest of the fight a youth dashed sword in hand on to the bridge
crying out, '_/<? m'appelle d'Arcole!' . . . Whether he escaped or not I don't
know, but his name was given to the bridge without any allusion to that
in Italy on which Napoleon I. carried the flag of the Republic amid a
shower of bullets." According to Joanne's Guide, the youth was killed
upon the bridge. Certainly nothing was subsequently heard of him ; and
so by a single exclamation joined to an act of courage he won lasting
fame, slightly obscured only by the confusion between his name and that
of a bridge in Italy. Joanne gives his name as " Arcole," without the
particle.

42 Paris.
the Republic, have cleared away all these, and substi
tuted for them broad streets, enormous public buildings,
and an extensive open space. The result has been a -
simplification not unfavorable to the effect of magnifi
cence, but very destructive of the picturesque, because
the picturesque requires the variety of mahy^lanex-
pected details. The pyramids of Egypt are grand,
but not picturesque ; the streets in old Cairo were
picturesque in the extreme. The new H6tel Dieu,
which has one front to the Seine and another on
the open space in front of Notre Dame, is so vast
that the site of it covers nearly three times the extent
of ground occupied by the cathedral. On the site of
this single building there used to be three churches and
part of a fourth, and no less than eleven streets ! ^
Another modern taste_ besides__,that for extensive
public _buildings^ has been extremely destractive of
houses. Throughout the Middle Ages, and even
down to comparatively recent times, it was consid
ered a wise economy of space to cover bridges with
houses ; and that to such a degree that instead of a
1 As some of these have a certain degree of historical interest,
I give the names of them in a note. The churches were those of St.
Landry, St. Denis de la Chartre, La Madeleine, and part of St. Pierre
aux Bosufs. The streets were Rue Basse des Ursins, Rue Haute des
Ursins, Rue du Rant Moulin, Rue des Marmousets (celebrated for the
pastry-cook who in the Middle Ages made pies of 'human flesh, and
etched by Lalanne before its demolition), Rue du Chevet St. Landry,
Rue St. Pierre aux Bceufs, Rue Cocatrix, Rue de Perpignan, Rue des Trois
Canettes, Rue de la Licorne. This list may serve to give the reader some
faint idea of the enormous effacement of old Paris which has been
necessary to make room for the gigantic modern public buildings, all
this being sacrificed to a single hospital.

A Voyage round the Island. 43
broad road over the bridge with open views on both
sides of it, the people of those days had the advantage
(as it must have seemed to them) of getting across the
water through a narrow street without any views at
all, but with plenty of delightful little shops. The old
notion of a bridge was to have it as much as possible
like the present passages of Paris, such as the Passage
JoUffroy, the Passage des Panoramas, etc. It may be
supposed that our ancestors thought a bridge without
houses bleak and uncomfortable, as the passengers
over it would be unpleasantly exposed to the draught
of wind that generally blows up or down a river.
Their arrangement gave no view, but it gave a sheltered
lounge, with plenty to see in the shop-windows. A
curious consequence of it, which scarcely strikes us
until we reflect a little, was that not only were the
passages deprived of a view on the river, but even from
the windows of the houses themselves very little was
to be seen, as the next bridge always blocked the view,
so that when the bridges were near together the houses
on them and on the banks of the river made a sort of
square with an enclosed area of water; and the river
was little better than a succession of such squares.
We may be severe on our own times for some errors
of taste, but surely in our treatment of rivers we have
reason on our side. The Middle Ages had nothing
to show like the quays and bridges of modern Paris.
There was not a single spot in the Paris of Philippe-
Auguste from which a view could be had up and down
the river hke the view from the modern bridges and

44 Paris.
quays. Old Paris had a thousand picturesque bits,
but it had no distances.
The Pont Notre Dame is that which joins the present
Rue de la Cite, which is on the island, to the Quai de
Gevres on the right bank of the Seine. It is one of the
most interesting bridges in Paris. I have not space to
give the history of the earlier bridges, and the reader
might not care to follow such archaeological details;
but we cannot pass in silence the wonderful catastrophe
of October 25, 1499, when the bridge fell into the
Seine with all the houses upon it. The year previous
some carpenters had noticed the rotten condition of the
piles, and gave ample warning ; but this was disregarded
till at length a master carpenter went to one of the au
thorities, the "lieutenant-criminal" Papillon, and- told
him that the catastrophe was imminent. By order of
a court then sitting (at seven o'clock in the morning)
Papillon went and gave notice to the inhabitants and
closed the bridge to the public. The dwellers on the
bridge tried to remove their goods (a great piece of
labor as they were all shopkeepers), but could not
effect this before the entire structure fell into the river
with a fearful noise, and amid such a cloud of dust
that nothing could be seen. It is difficult to imagine
anything more terrible except an earthquake. In the
midst of the confusion some lives were strangely pre
served. A porter with a burden of arrows on his back
was thrown into the river and simply swam to the side.
A man in one of the houses seeing a fissure yawn be
neath him jumped out of window and also saved him-

PONT NOTRE DAME, i8TH CENTURY.

A Voyage round the Island. 45
self by swimming. But the most remarkable case was
that of a little child, tied up closely in its swaddling
clothes and lying in its cradle. The cradle was flung
into the water, where it was afterwards found floating
like a boat, with the child alive and well inside it: so,
at least, says a contemporary chronicler.
The custom of having houses on bridges was too
deeply rooted for the new one to be without them, so.
it was covered with tall structures, with their gable-ends
to the stream, — more than thirty gables, like the teeth of
a saw, according to a careful old engraving. The bridge
so erected at the beginning of the sixteenth century
remained essentially the same till the eighteenth, except
that the fronts of the houses were modernized accord
ing to the taste of the day. A curious point to be noted
is that these houses were the first in Paris to be num
bered, and with odd numbers on one side and even num
bers on the other. It was a place for fashionable shops,
kept by jewellers, goldsmiths, picture-dealers, — a sort of
Palais Royal or Boulevard des Italiens of that time.
This street on the bridge existed till towards the close
of the eighteenth century, when Louis XVI. decreed
the demolition of the bridge-houses throughout the
capital. This innovation was very nearly contempo
rary with the political revolution, and was first carried
into effect on the Pont Notre Dame. Wonderful to
relate, in spite of so much modern improvement the
old bridge still exists ; but it has been re-cased in stone
and altered in some respects externally, so that it has
now quite a modern air.

46 Paris.
The very last relic of old-fashioned picturesquenesj
about the bridges of Paris was the pump just below the
Pont Notre Dame, built originally in 1678. I remember
it well ; and not only do I remember the thing itself as
a material object, but also a certain feeling that it awak
ened, — a feeling of respect for a sort of majesty that
the poor old structure undoubtedly possessed, and of
regret that the march of improvement would so soon
remove it. Meryon made a delightful etching of it, one
of the most remarkable of all his plates for clearness
and elegance of style, and he also wrote some verses in
pity for its fate. His etching showed the pump in
afternoon light; the accompanying woodcut shows the
aspect it had on sunny mornings. The truth is that,
though a poor, cheap structure, it had several fine
architectural qualities. Its masses were well composed,
well supported, and admirably crowned by the tower.
The short space between the Pont Notre Dame and
the Pont au Change is one of the most interesting in
Paris. The flower-market, as pretty a sight as the
modern city could show anywhere, used to extend in
an open space between the Quai Desaix and what was
the Rue de la Pelleterie. It had a fine background
towards the west in the buildings of the Palace of Justice,
with the picturesque corner tower, and it inspired artists
with the desire to make pictures of it.^ I wonder what
artist would care to paint the same scene to-day. Instead
1 A drawing of it by Turner was engraved in the " Rivers of France,"
but it is one of the weakest in the volume. Turner especially missed the
character of the clock-tower, which is and always was very definite and
peculiar

THE PUMP NEAR THE PONT NOTRE DAME, 1861.

A Voyage round the Island. 47
of the pleasant open space which so charmingly disen
gaged the buildings of the Palace, we have now a great,
heavy, ornate, and vulgar modern edifice with a dome,
— the Tribunal de Commerce; just one of those erec
tions which the Philistines always consider " very hand
some," and look upon with deep respect because of
their evident costliness. The best time of this bit of
Parisian scenery, from the artist's point of view, must
have been when Girtin drew it in 1800. Then the tow
ers of the Palace were not yet united by heavy masses
of modern building which reduce their importance, and
the old corner tower had not been replaced by the new
one. It we go farther back the view is spoiled again
by another cause. During the latter half of the seven
teenth and nearly the whole of the eighteenth centuries
a massive line of stone houses, five stories high, stood
on the Pont au Change, and of course effectually
blocked the view. Earlier still a row of gabled post-
and-plaster houses stood on a wooden bridge, but these
were all burnt down in 1621. There was at that time
another bridge, a very little lower down the river,
called the Pont Marchand. A servant-girl there let a
candle fall in a place where firewood was kept, probably
among shavings, for the house was soon on fire, and
with it the others and the bridge itself. The flames
soon reached the Pont aux Changeurs, which was totally
destroyed. Not only were the bridge-houses burnt, but
some on the land caught fire also. An eye-witness has
left an account of this fire, which must have been a
most remarkable spectacle. When the houses were

48 Paris.
already in flames the inhabitants remained as long as
possible, throwing their goods out of the windows.
There had been warning for the destruction of the Pont
Notre Dame : for this there was no warning.
The houses between the two bridges on the side of
the island had gables and balconies towards the river ;
the lower stories of them, near the water (there being
no quay in old times), were occupied by tanners who
congregated in this one quarter, according to the medi
aeval custom. ,If_these_bujl4ings could have been pre
served to our own day, they would have been favorite
subjects for Parisian artists (for whom there jsjittle left) ;
but as the natural progress of a modern city is towards
good quays, all the humble old river-side industries have
to go elsewhere.
I mentioned the simplification which had resulted from
modern improvements on the island north of the Pont
Notre Dame, where eleven streets- and three churches
had made way for a single building. The same process
has been carried out in the section of the island which
is included between the lines drawn across it from the
Pont Notre Dame and the Pont au Change. In this area
there were formerly^ nine streets and four churches,^ but
at the present day there are simply two buildings, —
the Tribunal de Commerce, already mentioned with the
degree of respect due to it, and a huge barrack called
1 The streets were Rue de la Pelleterie, Rue Gervais Laurent, Rue de
la vieille Draperie, Rue St. Eloi, Rue de la Calandre, Rue aux Feves,
Rue des Carcuissons, Rue du Marche Neuf, Rue St. Croix ; the churches
were St. Barthelemi, St. Croix, St, Eloi, and St. Germain. All these, as
well as the Marche Neuf, have entirely disappeared.

A Voyage round the Island. 49
the Caserne de la Garde R^publicaine, of which we can
only say that it is very extensive, very well built, and
as tiresome as it is extensive. The real improvement
which has followed from recent changes is, that the few
modern streets — the Rue de la Cit6, the Boulevard du
Palais, and the Avenue de Constantine — are so much
more spacious than the many little streets of former
times, and give such superior views. They are three
or four times as broad as the old Rue de la vieille
Draperie. In the Middle Ages there was a bridge for foot-
passengers only, but with houses upon it, just below the
present Pont au Change. This was erected exclusively
for the convenience of the millers, who were allowed to
occupy nearly the whole width of the river with their
wheels, placed in the open spaces between the wooden
piles of which the bridge was built. The whole structure
was carried away by an inundation towards the close of
the year 1596, and it was afterwards replaced by the
Pont Marchand, destroyed in the great fire of 1621.
There were eleven mills, and the names of the millers
have been preserved. After the fire it was not thought
necessary to rebuild the lower bridge, which was not of
much public utility, so the Pont au Change has remained
by itself ever since. The present structure is of very
recent date, having been built in 1859, not quite in the
same angle as the old bridge (being now more at right
angles with the river), and a little higher up the stream,
especially on the side of the island. There is little to
be said about its architecture, except that the essentially
4

50 Paris.
modern ideas of depressed arches and level roadway
have been carefully adhered to, while a certain elegance
is given by a cornice and balustrade. Such is the
course of bridge-architecture from the Middle Ages to
our own time. First comes the wooden mediaeval
bridge, consisting simply of tall piles rising straight
from the bed of the stream, and bearing a street of
crowded houses upon them ; next, the substantial, round-
arched stone bridge of the sixteenth and seventeenth
centuries, burdened with stone houses, massive and
lofty ; then the same bridge without the houses ; and,
lastly, the modern bridge, with depressed arches of
wider span, and a broad, level roadway above. The
modern ideal is by far the most rational of all, being
at the same time the most convenient for vehicles above
and boats or rafts below, while it reduces to a minimum
the obstruction of the view. The only objection to it i
is, that its extreme simplicity of purpose has a tendency
to produce a merely utilitarian structure, unless the |
architect is a man of great taste and intelligence, who
can give a touch of elegance to a work of plain utility.
There is a well-known etching by Meryon showing
the Pont au Change and the round towers of the Palace
of Justice, seen through an arch of the Pont Notre Dame,
with the wooden substructure of the old pump to the
spectator's left. This etching gives, as well as any
existing illustration, the character of the old Pont au
Change with its round arches, its plain parapet, its rising
roadway, and its angular cutwaters. The plate is inter
esting, too, for the ingenious introduction of the round

THE PONT NEUF IN 1 845.

A Voyage round the Island. 5 1
towers, which are now all that is left of the picturesque
between Meryon's position and the Pont Neuf On the
right bank of the Seine you have two pretty theatres
(Chatelet and Lyrique), and the light column of the
palm-fountain, with the very elegant tower of St. Jacques,
more visible than ever before; but the picturesque of
the river-side is gone.
In the Middle Ages there was no bridge connecting
the island with the mainland farther west than the Pont
Marchand. Another communication was felt to be de
sirable long before there was a definite project, and the
project was under consideration long before it was
executed. The work of the Pont Neuf was at length
actually and practically commenced in the year 1578,
under Henri III., by driving piles on the south side, and
the southern half of the bridge — that across the narrow
arm of the Seine — was completed long before the other.
Henri IV. took up the work vigorously in 1598 and
finished it in 1604.
Old fashions linger long, and although no houses were
erected on the Pont Neuf, small wooden booths were tol
erated upon it for a long time; and after they were
removed, they had descendants even in the present
century in the shape of curious little semicircular shops
erected on the projections between the arches. These
are still visible in Meryon's beautiful dry-point of the
Pont Neuf They have since been removed, and the pres
ent aspect of the bridge very closely resembles its aspect
in the seventeenth century. The woodcut opposite
page 50 shows the shorter portion of the bridge, — that

5 2 Paris.
over the narrow arm of the Seine as it appeared in 1845,
the little shops being still visible as turrets not very
disadvantageously.^ Turner liked them, certainly, as
they are made quite prominent in his impressive draw
ing of the entire bridge, while he would certainly have
removed them if they had displeased him. On the con
trary, he was so delighted with them that he made them
three times as big as they are in reality, relatively to the
width of the arches.^
We will now, if the reader pleases, turn up the narrow
arm of the Seine till we come to the Pont St. Michel.
There is a particularly fine view from this bridge, of
which Lalanne made a very successful etching many
years ago. The beauty of it consists chiefly in the dis
tance, which shows the long perspective of the Louvre
immediately above the Pont Neuf. All the bridges on
the island except the Pont Neuf have been carried away
by some disaster; but that famous one has become a
proverb for a sound and lasting constitution, so that
robust Frenchmen proudly compare themselves to it,
and complimentary ones apply the comparison to their
friends (never to their political opponents, who are
always represented as unhealthy). Few bridges have
been more unlucky than the Pont St. Michel. In
the fifteenth century it was carried away by a pack of
^ In this view we are looking down the river from the Quai des
Orfivres. 2 This assertion is founded on strict measurement. In reality the semi
circular projections on the Pont Neuf measure less than one third the
diameter of the arch. In Turner's drawing, those to the left are repre
sented as equivalent in their diameters to the diameters of the arches
under them. '

THE MORGUE IN 1840.

A Voyage round the Island. 5 3
moving ice. It was again carried away in the middle of
the sixteenth century, and destroyed again in the seven
teenth. The next structure was of stone, with houses ;
the present one was built by that true pontifex maximus.
Napoleon III.
Close to the Pont St. Michel, on the island shore, used
to stand a famous little building which had at one time
been a boucherie, and which for many years served as
the dead-house for bodies found in the Seine. The
" Doric little Morgue " will long be remembered on ac
count of the immortality conferred upon it by novelists
and also by at least one famous poet. Browning, and
one great artist, Meryon.
" First came the silent gazers ; next
A screen of glass, we 're thankful for ;
Last, the sight's self, the sermon's text,
The three men who did most abhor
Their life in Paris yesterday.
So killed themselves : and now, enthroned
Each on his copper couch, they lay
Fronting me, waiting to be owned.
I thought, and think, their sin's atoned.
" Poor men, God made, and all for that !
The reverence struck me ; o'er each head
Religiously was hung its hat.
Each coat dripped by the owner's bed.
Sacred from touch : each had his berth.
His boards, his proper place of rest,
Who last night tenanted on earth
Some arch where twelve such slept abreast, —
Unless the plain asphalte seemed best."

54 Paris.
The Petit Pont is of far greater historical interest
than the Pont St. Michel. At the present day it con
sists of a single stone arch of depressed curve, and is
precisely the sort of structure in which the modern
engineer displays his skill ; but the rather elegant and
extremely simple Petit Pont of the present day has
had many very different predecessors. At that spot the
Romans had a bridge joining Lutetia to the mainland ;
and just here, where the bridge abuts on the south bank
of the Seine, the gate, fortress, and prison called the
Petit Chdtelet stood grimly in the Middle Ages, and even
down to the last years of the eighteenth century. It
was a building of sinister aspect, with few openings to
the light of day, and nothing in the way of ornament
except four simple string-courses and about as many
bartizans. A Gothic archway led through it from the
bridge. I willingly spare the reader an account of the
cruelties committed in this building, and will speak of
the bridge only. Unlucky as were the other bridges of
the cit^, this was the most unfortunate of all. It is said
that the rapidity of the current in flood-times was the
cause of successive accidents, now happily at an end by
the construction of a single arch beneath which the
floods rise freely. M. Jourdain tells us, in " Paris ^
travers les Ages," that the Petit Pont fell in 1206, 1280,
1296, 1325, 1376, and 1393 ; but the most remarkable of
all its misfortunes occurred much later, in 1718. At that
date it consisted of a good stone bridge of three arches
covered with tall stone houses ; but it seems as if the
contemporary engineers had not much confidence in

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A Voyage round the Island. 55
their strength, for beneath the arches, and also at the
ends of the piers, there were strong wooden scaffoldings,
like those supporting the pump that Meryon drew.
Now it so happened in that year 171 8, in the month
of April, that a woman had lost her son by drowning,
and that her grief was greatly increased because she
could not find his body; wherefore the good folks, her
neighbors, told her of a sure method by which drowned
bodies might be found, and she believed and obeyed
them. She took a s^bille, which is a thick, round wooden
tray or dish, she stuck a taper upright in it, which she
lighted, and with the taper she put a piece of blessed
bread, the whole in honor of St. Nicholas ; she then
confided her little boat to the current and watched its
course. It floated straight to a barge laden with hay,
the taper set fire to the hay, the men in the barges near
to it severed the rope that fastened it in order to save
their boats ; and now, instead of the little votive taper
in its wooden dish, a great blazing haystack floated
quickly down to the Petit Pont, where it was stopped
by the wooden piles under the arch. These soon caught
fire, and so did all the houses, but the fortress of the
Petit Chatelet remained uninjured. The houses were
never rebuilt.
There is now nothing whatever of visible interest be
tween the Petit Pont and the upper extremity of the
island, except the view of the south side of Notre Dame.
Changes within our own recollection have entirely
altered this part of Paris, much to its advantage. The
old Hotel Dieu occupied the whole space between the

56 Paris.
present Petit Pont and the then existing Pont au Double,
which stood higher up the river than the bridge now
bearing the same name; and not only did the great
hospital occupy a long range of building, as ugly as a
factory, on the island, but it also had another large
building across the water, on the south bank of the
Seine, and a block called the Salle St. Cosme on the
bridge between them. All this effectually obstructed
the view of Notre Dame ; and, indeed, that half of the
hospital which stood upon the island was on what is
now the open space in front of the cathedral. Artists
are not agreed as to the policy of disengaging cathedrals
so much as Notre Dame is now disengaged; and cer
tainly the cathedral at Rouen comes upon us with a
sudden impressiveness in the midst of the narrow streets
and from the small market-place, — an impressiveness
which would be lost if it could be set in the middle of
a large field ; but Notre Dame was in former times so
much injured by the vast size of the ill-contrived old
H6tel Dieu, that the removal of that particular obstruc
tion is unquestionably a great gain. In old times the
cathedral used to be hidden in a considerable degree by
the archevicM, now entirely removed. The archbishop
now lives in a fine Louis XIV. mansion in the Rue Cre
nelle St. Germain. The accompanying reproduction of
an etching by Israel Sylvestre shows the Archbishop's
Palace as it existed in the seventeenth century, and the
reader may also see how the buildings of the H6tel Dieu
stretched across the river.
Nothing remains to be said concerning our circum-

THE archbishop's PALACE IN 1650. FROM AN ETCHING BY ISRAEL SYLVESTRE.

A Voyage round the Island. 5 7
navigation of the island except that the eastern point of
it, which in the Middle Ages was a shapeless piece of
waste land called Le Terrain, and in the eighteenth
century a garden called the Jardin du Terrain, is at
present very neatly arranged in true modern Parisian
style, and serves as a pretty site for a melancholy little
structure, the new Morgue, to which the inhabitants of
southern Paris have immediate access by the Pont de
I'Archevech^, a bridge which, unlike its elder brethren,
has no history.
A sketch of Anglers by Mr. Jacomb Hood gives a bit
of topography in its background which illustrates our
present subject. The anglers are on the Quai des Tour-
nelles, the church is Notre Dame (showing the apse),
the bridge is the Pont de I'Archeveche, and the bit of
land going from the bridge to the spectator's right is
what was formerly called Le Terrain, and is now well
embanked and defended by a river-wall ; while the low
building whose roof seems to crown the wall near the
boy's fishing-rod is the present Morgue.
The quays on both sides of the Seine appear to be
long more to the ordinary life of the city than the more
recently built embankment of the Thames. It gener
ally happens that some idle youth may be seen lounging
over the parapet and watching sympathetically an ab
sorbed angler below who from some stair, or boat at
anchor, or narrow ledge of masonry, pursues through
successive hours his mildly exciting sport. It is one of
the most curious contrasts in the French character that,
although it is said to be impatient, and often shows

58 Paris.
remarkable irritability, it is nevertheless exactly adapted
to the humblest and dullest sort of angling. Nothing
can exceed the patience of Parisian anglers or their
entire absorption in their pursuit. So completely do
they forget everything else in the indulgence of their
passion, that during the dreadful day of the Commune,
the 24th of May, 1871, when the Communards were
setting fire to the public buildings, and the soldiers from
Versailles were shooting down the people in the streets,
one or two faithful pecheurs a la ligne still followed their
tranquil pastime close to one of the bridges ; I believe
it was the Pont Neuf.

ANGLERS ON THE QUAYS.

¦ IV.
NOTRE DAME AND THE SAINTE CHAPELLE.
THERE are absolutely only these two churches left
standing in the island of the city, and there is
nothing in the history of Paris which more clearly ex
hibits the modern disposition to make a tabula rasa of
the past. The wonder is that Notre Dame and the Sainte
Chapelle should themselves have been preserved down
to our own time. There they stand, however, somewhat
injured by restoration, yet happily not so much as they
might have been, and likely to last for centuries still to
come, considering their present excellent condition of
material repair.
But where is the crowd of little churches that clus
tered round Notre Dame, as children round their great
mother? In the Middle Ages she seemed to gather
them about her as a hen gathers her chickens under her
wings; but now they are all gone, and she would be
left in the most complete solitude were it not that from
the court of the Palace of Justice there still rises one
solitary spire answering to hers, and still, as in the Middle
Ages, the birds fly from one to the other.
But where is St. Denis du Pas, where is St. Jean le
'Rond, and where may St. Christopher, Ste. Genevieve,

6o Paris.
St. Agnan, St. Landry, St. Peter, St. Denis de la Chartre,
Ste. Marine, and the Magdalen, find the churches once
dedicated to them? Can you discover even the sites of
St. Luke, Ste. Croix, and St. Germain le Vieux? Have
you ever seen St. Pierre des Areas, St. Barthelemi, and
St. Eloi? " There is my bridge still," Saint Michael may
think ; " but as for my church, I seek for it in vain ! "
Where are all these churches of the past, which once
stood in consecrated ground, and were thought to be safe
forever, — churches adorned by the mediaeval architect,
often repaired and injured by later experimentalists at
the Renaissance, yet interesting always for the bits of
beautiful old work to be found in them? Oil sont les
neiges d'antan f
Before the present cathedral of Notre Dame there
was a predecessor built by Childebert, of which we do
not know very much. It occupied part of the site of
the present edifice, standing near the Roman wall, and
to the southeast of it there was another church dedicated
to Saint Stephen. The site of the original Notre Dame
is now partly covered by the west front of the edifice
and a small portion of the nave, and partly left open in
the space before the cathedral. It was of Romanesque
architecture and of some splendor. Probably, if it had
been preserved to the present day, we should have
looked upon it with great interest as a very early speci-
rnen of church-building, but it is not likely that it would
have produced on our minds, accustomed as we are to'
the niagnificence of fully developed Gothic, the effect
that it produced on its own contemporaries. As for the

Notre Dame and the Sainte Chapelle. 6 1
site of St. Etienne, the present sacristy stands on a part
of it.
The present cathedral of Notre Dame was begun in
1161, the first stone being laid by a Pope, — Alex
ander III., — and in 1185 mass was said at the high
altar. This would only prove that the choir was finished,
or at least covered in. The southern entrance was be
gun in 1257, and the great western entrance from the
Place du Parois was finished in 1223, up to the line of
the gallery. The towers were finished in the time of
Saint Louis.
An important matter in the history of Notre Dame is
the fire of 12 18, caused by thieves, because that brought
about an architectural alteration clearly described as
follows by M. Drumont in " Paris k travrse les Ages: "
" Before this fire the great flying buttresses of the nave and
choir were constructed a double voice, which means that instead
of crossing over the space between the buttresses and the vaults
in arches of a single span, they were composed of two portions
or arches, with an intermediate support. The fire probably in
jured the second span of the old flying buttresses. At that time
other cathedrals had been erected, and their walls were pierced
with larger windows, filled with brilliantly stained glass, — a deco
ration which was rapidly becoming important. Instead of repair
ing the harm done by the fire, the restorers of that time seized
upon the opportunity for suppressing the rose-windows pierced
above the galleries, and brought the upper windows lower, cut
ting away their support down to the archivolt of the galleries.
The flying buttresses d double volee were demolished, and the
height of the windows of the triforium was reduced by lowering
its vaults."

62 Paris.
The tall windows were filled with simple tracery, and
in the opinion of VioUet-le-Duc the majesty of the first
edifice was in a great measure sacrificed by these
changes. So far as I am able to judge by M. Hoff
bauer's drawing, which restores the apse to its primitive
condition, and shows the double-arched buttresses, the
most striking difference between the first apse and the
present one was in the successive stages of roof which
were visible in the first, while at present only the high
est roof is visible, the others having been so much
lowered in pitch to make way for the elongated windows
that they are no more to be seen. The change, in fact,
is that change which we find everywhere in the progress
of Gothic architecture, — from a simple, strong-looking,
and dignified style, to a lighter, more airy, more deli
cate, and elegant style. It is perfectly intelligible that
a master of architecture like Viollet-le-Duc, who knew
all about construction, should have preferred the first
apse, with its short, plain windows, its visible tiers of
roof, and its substantial, doubly supported buttresses ;
but, at the same time, it is intelligible that most people
should prefer the east end of the church as it exists at
present, with its light, far-leaping buttresses, its long
clerestory windows, and the rich windows of the chapels
and aisle, decorated externally with crockets and finials.
Besides, there are many pinnacles now (people always
like pinnacles, — the great popularity of Milan Cathedral
is due to them), and it does not appear that there were
any pinnacles about the first apse.
The great west front, where the towers are, is one of

Notre Dame and the Sainte Chapelle. 63
the chief architectural glories of France. There is hardly
any work of architecture in the whole world, except one
or two Greek temples, which has evoked the same kind
and degree of admiration as the west front of Notre
Dame. It is considered to be one of those rarest pro
ducts of consummate genius in which imagination of
the highest kind works in perfect accordance with the
most severe reason. May I confess frankly that until
I had carefully studied it under the guidance of Viollet-
le-Duc, the front of Notre Dame never produced upon
me the same effect as the west fronts of some other
French cathedrals of equal rank? I believe the reason
to be that Notre Dame is not so picturesque as some
others, and does not so much excite the imagination as
they do. It is well ordered, and a perfectly sane piece
of work (which Gothic architecture is not always), but
it has not the imaginative intricacy of Rouen, nor the
rich exuberance of Amiens and Reims, nor the fortress
like grandeur of Bourges, nor the elegant variety of
Chartres. A man of very high architectural attainments
would probably value the romantic element less than I
do, simply because much that seems rich and imaginative
to an amateur in architecture is understood too quickly
in all its details by a master for it to produce the same
poetic feeling in his mind ; and I observe that architects
esteem especially the judicious ordonnance of parts,
which is a great virtue no doubt, but a very sober vir
tue, imposing a very strict discipline on the imagination.
The truth is, that the virtues of the west front of Notre
Dame are rather classic than romantic. Everything in

64 Paris.
it seems the result of perfect knowledge and consum
mate calculation. There are none of those mistakes
which generally occur in works of wilder genius. Story
after story the massive front rears itself to the towers ;
every division of it is acceptable either as a resting-place
for the eye or as an attraction. First, you have the
three great doorways, with the world of sculpture usual
in the French Gothic portals, but the row of statues
does not come out and round the buttresses as at
Amiens and Reims. The buttresses are left plain ex
cept that there is a niche in each of them twenty feet
from the ground, and one statue in each niche with
its feet higher than the heads of the great statues.
Above the arches the wall is perfectly plain instead of
being enriched with crocketed gables, as at Amiens and
Reims; and above this plain space comes the great
gallery of the kings, with its twenty-eight statues in
their niches. Over this gallery runs a sort of platform
or balcony called the Galerie de la Vierge ; and then
we come to the great space of wall, very plain in itself,
which is occupied by the great windows, the rose in the
middle and the ogival windows, of two lights and a rose
above, in each of the towers. Perhaps the most espe
cially characteristic thing in this front is the light colon
nade above the windows, which makes a sort of open
screen in the space between the towers, and by this
means prevents too much abruptness in the separation
of the towers from the main mass of the building. This
colonnade is not only extremely elegant in itself, but it
is placed with so much judgment as to give a lightness

TYMPANUM OF THE PORTE STE. ANNE.

Notre Dame and the Sainte Chapelle. 65
to the whole front, which could hardly have been ob
tained by any other means. The upper part of the
towers is remarkable for the great length of the open
ings (about fifty feet), and both towers seem to termi
nate very plainly and abruptly, having no pinnacles and
nothing to relieve the level line except the little turrets
at the top of the staircases. This, however, is explained
by the fact that it was intended to have spires, and that
the towers we see were entirely designed with a view to
them. That project was never carried into execution,
and even the enterprise of the nineteenth century shrank
from it when Notre Dame was restored. Is the absence
of the spires to be regretted? We have some means of
judging this question by a comparison of the west front
as it is with the drawing of it with spires which was
engraved and published in the " Entretiens sur I'Archi-
tecture," by Viollet-le-Duc. So far as the towers only
are concerned, the effect of the spires is excellent.
They at once reduce the long louvre-windows to due
proportions, and remove the otherwise unaccountable
plainness of the summits of the square towers. But on
the rest of the front the effect of the spires is not so
happy. The arcade is tall enough not to be stunted by
them, but the gallery of the kings and the great door
ways are made to appear much more insignificant than
they are at present. At the same time two consider
ations ought not to be forgotten. It is quite possible
that the spires intended by the mediasval architect may
have been lighter in appearance than those designed by
Viollet-le-Duc, and it is also to be remembered that an
5

66 Paris.
architect's elevation always produces quite a different
effect upon the mind from the sight of the reality in
stone. Had the spires been completed, no one ap
proaching close enough to see the statues in the portals
and in the gallery of the kings would have seen the
spires at the same time ; he would only have been con
scious of their existence.
I have said that the virtues of the west front of
Notre Dame are rather classic than romantic. It is
a generally received idea that exact symmetry was
one of the classical characteristics ; but a closer ex
amination of classical works reveals unsuspected varie
ties in measurements which are supposed to have had
for their object the avoidance of mechanical dulness.
The variety in Gothic architecture is so frequently
apparent that the popular mind associates the idea
of variety with Gothic work as it associates symmetry
with Greek. There are, however, in Gothic buildings
certain parts which appear to be symmetrical, and
which frequently are not so. That this variety was
intentional is quite certain. An architect is not like
a landscape-painter who draws by the eye, and, may
accidentally make one object smaller than another
when he intended them to be alike. An architect
measures everything, so that, so far as dimensions are
concerned, there can never be an undetected error in
his completed work. The two towers of Notre Dame,
which every careless tourist believes to be exactly ahke,
are not of the same size. The southern tower is nar
rower than the other. It has been suggested that this

PIER AND ONE OF THE DOORS OF THE PORTE STE. ANNE.

Notre Dame and the Sainte Chapelle. 6 7
may have been to give better access to the bishop's
residence, which was on that side, but the hypothesis
is unnecessary. The difference is sufficiently explained
by the dislike for exact repetition, which is a charac
teristic of living work in the fine arts. There are
also differences in the details, sufficiently visible to
give reasons for preferring one of the towers to the
other. MM. de Guilhermy and Viollet-le-Duc pre
ferred the larger tower, that to the north, as being
more ample in its details and better executed.
A detailed description of the sculpture on the west
front would occupy many pages, and be unreadable.
Of the three portals, that in the middle has the Last
Judgment for the subject of its tympanum; that on
the north side illustrates the life, death, and glorifica
tion of the Virgin ; that on the south side is more
confused. It is called the portail St. Anne, but is
composed of fragments illustrating the lives of Saint
Anne and the Virgin also. It is curious for the
adaptation of transitional work (from Romanesque to
Gothic) to a purely Gothic purpose. As the carvings
already existed, it seems to have been thought right
to employ them, but they would not fit the new fashion
of the pointed arch ; so the space between the two kinds
of arch had to be dissimulated by filling it up with
an enrichment in sculpture. Notwithstanding the great
ability of the architect, we may be allowed to remark
that he did not manage his raccord so cleverly as he
might have done. The lower arch should have been
effaced, and the space above it filled with angels. One

68 Paris.
objection applies even to the most perfect Gothic
tympana of this kind ; namely, the varying scales of
the figures, which deprive the composition of unity.
One of the strong points in Notre Dame is the
preservation of a few of her fine old doors. Those
of the Virgin and Saint Anne have still their magnifi
cent original iron-work of the twelfth and thirteenth
centuries. The common people used to believe quite
seriously that it was the Devil himself who had helped
the smith in exchange for his soul, as mere unaided
human skill was unequal to such a task. There was
also a popular belief that an enchanter had shut the
porte Ste. Anne so that it could not be opened, — the fact
being simply that for a long time it was disused.
The reader must excuse me if I do not enter into
details with reference to the north and south sides of
Notre Dame. We have not space for a study of the
subject, and it is not of any special interest except as
regards the buttresses, which are very massive, and
from which spring two arches to prop the walls, one
reaching to the wall of the higher aisle, by passing over
the roof of the lower aisle, and another clearing the
roofs of both the aisles in two leaps, with a rest on
the wall between, and then giving its support directly
to the lofty walls of the clerestory itself Another
notable feature in the north and south fronts is the
great rose-windows in the transepts, which, from their
height, may be seen from a distance.
Now, let us pass into the interior. The first thing
that strikes anybody conversant with architecture, after

LES TRIBUNES.

Notre Dame and the Sainte Chapelle. 69
the first strong impression of size and majesty, is that
the columns of the nave are massive and Romanesque
in character, and not so lofty, relatively to the height
of the vault, as the columns at Westminster or Amiens,
not to speak of the extraordinary ones at Bourges.
There is, in fact, room for no less than five of these
columns between the pavement and the apex of the
vault. When Notre Dame was begun the Romanesque
spirit was only just passing into the Gothic spirit, so
that the church is not quite completely Gothic as yet,
though very nearly so. Its double aisles are a remark
able feature, of great value in giving mysterious dis
tances with many intersections of the vaults. They
run entirely round the building, and have allowed the
architect the means of creating a great gallery above
the inner aisle (which is wider than the external one) ;
a gallery of much value in a cathedral where magnifi
cent royal ceremonies were expected to take place.
This gallery is always called Les Tribunes by French
writers. The view we give is taken on the south side
of the cathedral ; and the reason why it seems to come
to a sudden termination is because the transept occurs
there. With the exception of the interruption caused
by the transepts, this gallery goes round the entire
edifice, and has four staircases of its own.^ Not only
is it very useful on great occasions, but it adds im
mensely to the elegance of the whole church, and
looks all the more delicate and airy because it is
lighted from the exterior.
^ It also turns aside into the transepts to the extent of two large bays.

JO Paris.
In most of the French cathedrals the pourtour du
chceur, or aisle between the apse and the chapels,
excels all other portions of the church in the variety
of its perspective and in the delightful changes occur
ring at every step as the visitor slowly advances. When
he walks down the middle of a straight nave between
parallel rows of columns, he may be impressed by
the grandeur that surrounds him, but he always knows
what to expect. In the pourtour there is the new
element of the unforeseen. He sees first one part of
a chapel and then another; he loses one beautiful
and intricate composition of columns, vaults, and
windows, only to exchange it for another not less
beautiful; and so attractive is the desire for what is
coming, so keen the regret for what is left behind,
that it is almost equally difficult to stay in one place
or to leave it. This, at least, is what I have always
felt in the few great pourtours which are comparable
to that of Notre Dame. This one, in particular, has
the additional intricacy of its double aisle, and now
that it is enriched with painted glass and mural illu
mination the effect is at the same time more_ splendid
and more mysterious than in the chilly eighteenth
century. This brings one to speak of the restorations which
have been carried out at Notre Dame in our own day.
Nothing is easier than to condemn such restorations
absolutely ; but those who do so cannot surely realize
what was the state of such edifices as Notre Dame be
fore the modern restorer dealt with them. It should be

THE " POURTOUR."

Notre Dame and the Sainte Chapelle. 7 1
remembered that no age but our own ever had the
slightest respect for the work of any preceding age,
that we are the first human beings who ever valued
the architectural work of our ancestors, the first who
were ever pained by injury done to the work of another
time, the first who ever understood that unity of design
might be one of the merits of a building. Instances
of injury done to great edifices before the modern re
storer came are infinitely numerous ; but I must here
confine myself to Notre Dame. First, let us rapidly
survey the exterior.
In the west front the row of statues called the Kings
had been all cast down at the Revolution. Were the
niches to be left empty ? Certainly the original archi
tect never intended them to be empty ; his intention was
that there should be statues, and the modern restorer
fulfilled that intention, so far by putting statues there.
The subjects are supposed to have been the Kings of
Judah, and as the real faces of those kings have not
come down to posterity in portraits, the present set of
statues are as much likenesses as their predecessors.
The important point was to have statues in keeping
with the character of the building ; and this was done
as far as possible by copying such fragments of the old
statues as could be found, and by imitating others in
cathedrals of the same date. The restorer could not
have done less, and it is not easy to see how he could
have done more. Now let us pass to the central door
way. Among the lights of the eighteenth century was
a famous architect called Soufflot, who fancied that he

72 Paris.
could improve upon Gothic ideas, and who, unfortu
nately, had the power to alter as well as, to criticise.
So he removed the pier between the doors, with the
statue of Christ, and made a wide pointed arch in the
middle of the tympanum, cutting into its elaborate
sculpture as coolly as if it had been a common brick
wall. Then he put classical columns, with modern
doors, and was perfectly satisfied with his improvement.
Could Lassus and Viollet-le-Duc, the restorers, leave
this incongruous absurdity untouched? Clearly not.
They had the pier replaced, and they got an able
sculptor, Dechaume, to carve a Christ for it, which he
did after careful study of the statues at Amiens and
Reims. The tympanum was restored as far as possible,
and Soufflot's Renaissance doors were replaced by
others more in keeping with those of the Virgin and
Saint Anne. Surely, in this case also, it would hardly
have been possible to do less. Other details might be
dwelt upon if we had space; but let us consider a little
what was the condition of the north and south sides.
Let us hear VioUet-le-Duc's account of the state in
which he found them : —
"They (the architects of the eighteenth and nineteenth
centuries) had altered in the most deplorable manner the
architecture of the sides of the nave. One might say that this
portion of the edifice had been, as it were, planed. One after
another the architects had suppressed the advancing parts of
the buttresses between the chapels, the gables, the friezes, the
balustrades, — in one word, the entire ornamentation of these
same chapels, the pinnacles which decorated the tops of the
buttresses with the statues that accompanied them and their

'Notre Dame and the Sainte Chapelle. 73
flowering spires, the picturesque gargoyles which rendered
the service of throwing the rain-water to a distance from the
walls." Were the restorers to leave the sides of the cathedral
in this naked condition, or were they to attempt to
adorn them again as nearly as possible according
to the first intention of the builders? They decided
to make the attempt, and they felt authorized to do so
because they knew more about Gothic architecture, and
had more love for it, than any other architects since
the Renaissance. At the intersection of the roof there
had been a light spire in Gothic times, — light, I mean,
in appearance, made of oak, covered with lead. This
spire was pulled down in 1793. Was its place to be
left vacant? Certainly there was no inability to erect
an elegant new spire, as the one now existing clearly
proves. The architect Soufflot, who spoiled the great
doorway, had built a vestry on the south side of the
cathedral in a style which the reader may imagine. Part
of it remained to our own day, but this was removed,
and a new one erected by Viollet-le-Duc in thirteenth-
century Gothic. There are two objections to this build
ing: it looks rather too pretty and too intentionally
contrived for the picturesque, and its newness is still out
of keeping, but it does no harm whatever to Notre
Dame. It would be difficult to suggest anything better.
Now, with regard to the interior. Here the ignorance
and bad taste of the ages in which Gothic architecture
was not understood had full play for several generations.
The choir of a church is the part most richly furnished

74 Paris.
and decorated. In the Middle Ages the choir of Notre
Dame was completely furnished with all the elaborate
works of art which the feeling of the time held to be
necessary in a great religious edifice; and down to the
close of the seventeenth century these things were still
in existence. There were the old stalls of the fourteenth
century ; there was a magnificent carved screen in open
stonework going all round the choir; there was the
high altar, with its columns of brass, its shrine of silver-
gilt, its winged angels. All these things disappeared
to make way for costly Renaissance decorations, which
have been respected as far as possible by the modern
restorers. In 1741 the Chapter gave orders for the re
moval of the splendid stained glass which filled the
windows of the nave and choir ; and a man called
Pierre Levieil was ordered to replace them with common
glass ornamented with a border of fleurs-de-lis. Levieil
set about his work honestly and innocently, believing
that it was quite proper to destroy what future ages
could never replace, and he has left in writing some
record of his doings. Regret for all the magnificence
thus lost forever is happily tempered by rejoicing, as it
most fortunately happened that the barbarians let alone
the great rose-windows of the transepts and the west
front. Modern art has endeavored in some measure to
replace what was destroyed, being clearly authorized
to do so by the intention of the original builders, who
counted upon the effect of colored glass in temper
ing the excess of light. Viollet-le-Duc went a little
further in one detail, for he took the opportunity of

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ROYAL THANKSGIVING IN NOTRE DAME, 1 782.

Notre Dame and the Sainte Chapelle. 75
opening new rose-windows above the tribunes, near the
transepts and choir, to recall the original arrangement
by which such windows existed over the arches of the
tribunes. This adds to the interest and peculiarity of
the building, and has an historical reference.
All that remains to be said about the restoration is
that the architects found Notre Dame entirely covered
internally with thick coats of colored washes, which
they removed for two reasons, — firstly, because they
were hideous; and, secondly, because they prevented
the masons from examining the condition of the stone
work and making the necessary repairs.
The degree to which Gothic architecture was appre
ciated in the eighteenth century may be judged of by
the fact that when the old painted glass was removed,
the nave was turned into a picture-gallery, so as to hide
every one of the arches, — as if there could be anything
more necessary than its arches to the effect of a Gothic
church ! The pictures are now, happily, removed.
Good or bad, they were equally out of place. Pic
tures, other than mural paintings of a severely conven
tional kind, always are out of place in spacious Gothic
interiors. The origin of the Sainte Chapelle is probably known
already to most of my readers. It is nothing more
than a large stone shrine to contain relics. Nothing
could exceed the joy of Saint Louis when he believed
himself to have become the possessor of the real crown
of thorns and a large piece of the true cross. He
bought them at a very high price from the Emperor of

76 Paris.
Constantinople,^ and held them in such reverence that
he and his brother, the Count of Artois, carried them in
their receptacle on their shoulders (probably as a palan
quin is carried), walking barefooted through the streets
of Sens and Paris: such was the thoroughness of the
King's faith and his humility towards the objects of his
veneration. These feelings led Saint Louis to give orders for the
erection of a chapel in which the relics were to be pre
served, and he commanded Peter of Montereau to build
it, which Peter did very speedily, as the King laid the
first stone in 1245, and the edifice was consecrated in
April, 1248. There are two chapels, a low one on the
ground-floor and a lofty one above it; so both were
consecrated simultaneously by different prelates, the
upper one being dedicated to the Holy Crown and the
Holy Cross, the other to the Virgin Mary.
Considering the rapidity of the work done, it is re
markable that it should be, as it is, of exceptionally
excellent quality considered simply with reference to
handicraft and to the materials employed. The stone
is all hard and carefully selected, while each course is
fixed with clamp-irons imbedded in lead, and the fitting
of the stones, according to Viollet-le-Duc, is " d'une
precision rare!'
1 Some say that the crown of thorns was purchased from John of
Brienne, the Emperor, and the piece of the true cross from Baldwin IL,
his successor ; others say that both were purchased from Baldwin II.
The cost to Saint Louis, including the reliquaries, is said to have been
two millions of livres. So far as the King's happiness was concerned,
the money could not have been better spent.

Notre Dame and the Sainte Chapelle. jj
Like Notre Dame the Sainte Chapelle has undergone
thorough and careful restoration in the present century.
For those who blame such restorations indiscriminately
I will give a short description of the state of the build
ing when it was placed in the restorer's hands. It had
been despoiled at the Revolution and was used as a
magazine for law-papers. The spire had been totally
destroyed, the roof was in bad repair, sculpture injured
or removed, the internal decoration mostly effaced, the
stained glass removed from the lower part of the win
dows to a height of three feet, and the rest patched with
fragments regardless of subject. The chapel was an
unvalued survival of the past, falling rapidly into com
plete decay, and surrounded by the modern buildings
of the law courts, so its isolation made total destruc
tion probable. There had been a time when the
Sainte Chapelle had been in more congenial company.
The delightfully fanciful and picturesque old Cour des
Comptes had been built under Louis XII. (1504), on
the southwest side, and there was the great Gothic Cour
de Mai, and, finally, the Great Hall on the north. Not
only that, but there was the Tr^sor des Chartes, attached
to the south side of the Sainte Chapelle, itself a treasure,
almost a miniature of the glorious chapel, with its own
little apse, and windows, and high-pitched roof. All
these treasures of architecture were gone forever, re
placed by dull, prosaic building; the Sainte Chapelle
served no purpose that any dry attic would not have
served equally well, and there seemed to be no reason
why it should not be destroyed like the rest. The

78 Paris.
decision was to restore it, and give it a special destina
tion as the place where the lawyers might hear the mass
of the Holy Ghost. The work was done thoroughly and
carefully by learned and accomplished men. M. Lassus
designed a new spire,^ an exquisitely beautiful work of
art, much more elegant than its predecessor, as the
reader may judge in some degree by comparing the
etching with the woodcut.^ Still, to appreciate the new
spire properly, one needs an architectural drawing on a
large scale, like that in the monograph by Guilhermy.
It is of oak, covered with lead, with two open arcades.
There are pinnacles between the gables of the upper
arcade, and on these pinnacles are eight angels with
high, folded wings and trumpets. Near the roof are
figures of the twelve apostles. All along the roof-ridge
runs an open crest-work, and at the point over the apse
stands an angel with a cross. All these things, judi
ciously enlivened by gilding, with the present high
pitch of the roof, add greatly to the poetical impres
sion, especially when seen in brilliant sunshine against
an azure sky.
Thanks to the restorers, the interior of the chapel
once more produces the effect of harmonious splendor
which belonged to it in the days of Saint Louis. Of all
1 The spire by Lassus is the fourth. The first, by Pierre de Monte
reau, became unsafe from old age ; the second was burnt in 1630 j the
third was destroyed in the Great Revolution.
'^ The woodcut is from a picture now at Versailles, painted by an
artist named Martin in 1705. It is possible that he may have stunted the
spire a little to get it into his canvas ; he certainly has depressed the
roof, unless the roof then existing fell considerably short of the original
pitch.

THE OLD COURT OF ACCOUNTS AND THE SAINTE CHAPELLE.

Notre Dame and the Sainte Chapelle. 79
the Gothic edifices I have ever visited, this one seems to
me most pre-eminently a visible poem. It is hardly of
this world, it hardly belongs to the dull realities of life.
Most buildings are successful only in parts, so that we
say to ourselves, " Ah, if all had been equal to that ! "
or else we meet with some shocking incongruity that
spoils everything ; but here the motive, which is that of
perfect splendor, is maintained without fiaw or failure
anywhere. The architect made his windows as large
and lofty as he could (there is hardly any wall, its work
is done by the buttresses) ; and he took care that the
stonework should be as light and elegant as possible,
after which he filled it with a vast jewelry of painted
glass. Every inch of wall is illuminated like a missal,
and so delicately that some of the illuminations are
repeated of the real size in Guilhermy's monograph.
When we become somewhat accustomed to the uni
versal splendor (which from the subdued light is by no
means crude or painful), we begin to perceive that the
windows are full of little pictorial compositions ; and if
we have time to examine them, there is occupation for
us, as the windows contain more than a thousand of
these pictures. Thanks to the care of M. Guilhermy,
they have been set in order again. The most interest
ing among them, for us, on account of the authenticity
of the historical details, is the window which illustrates
the translation of the relics. Here we have the men of
the time of Saint Louis on land and sea. In the other
windows the Old and New Testaments are illustrated.
Genesis takes ninety-one compositions. Exodus a hun-

8o Paris.
dred and twenty-one, and so on, each window having
its own history.^
There are four broad windows in each side, though
from the exterior two of these look slightly narrower
because they are somewhat masked by the west turrets.
The apse is lighted by five narrower windows, and
there are two, the narrowest of all, which separate the
apse from the nave.
In the time of Henri II. a very mistaken project was
carried into execution. A marble screen, with altars
set up against it, was built across the body of the chapel
so as to divide it, up to a certain height, into two parts.
Happily, this exists no longer.
The original intention of Louis IX. when he built the
Sainte Chapelle was that the upper chapel should be
reserved for the sovereign and the royal house, while
the lower one was for the officers of inferior degree.
The King's chapel was on a level with his apartments
in the palace, so that he walked to it without using
stairs. The lower chapel has now been completely
decorated like the upper one, on the principles of illu
mination. It is beautiful, but comparatively heavy and
crypt-like, and the decoration looks more crude, perhaps
1 The only thing in the Sainte Chapelle which can be considered in
any degree incongruous with the unity of the first design is the rose-
window at the west end, which was erected by Charles VIII. near the
close of the fifteenth century. The flamboyant tracery is of a restless
character, all in very strong curves, and the glass is quite different from
the gorgeous jewel-mosaics of the time of Saint Louis. The subjects are
all from the Apocalypse. However, this window inflicts little injury on
the general effect of the chapel, as the visitor is under it when he enters,
and it is isolated from the rest. In service time everybody has his back
to it.

.jflSl^^fKr^

SAINT LOUIS IN THE SAINTE CHAPELLE.

Notre Dame and the Sainte Chapelle. 8 1
because the vault is so much lower and nearer the eye.
A curious detail may be mentioned in connection with
the religious services in the Sainte Chapelle. They
were of a sumptuous description, as the " treasurer,"
who was the chief priest, wore the mitre and ring, had
pontifical rank, and was subject only to the Pope. He
was assisted in the services by one chanter, twelve
canons, nineteen chaplains, and thirteen clerks. When
Saint Louis dwelt in his royal house close by and came
to the Sainte Chapelle, the place must have presented
such a concentration of mediaeval splendor as was
never seen elsewhere in such narrow limits. His enthu
siasm may seem superstitious to us, but he endeavored
earnestly to make himself a perfect king according to
the lights of his time, so that his splendid chapel is
:associated with the memory of a human soul as sound
;and honest as its handicrafts, as beautiful as its art.

V.
THE TUILERIES AND THE LUXEMBOURG.
SOME readers may ask why the Tuileries should be
a subject for a chapter in a work on Paris, when
the palace is a thing of the past, and the last stones of
it have been carted away from its empty site.
To this objection there are two replies. The first is,
that the historical importance of the palace will make
some mention of it inevitable in every work on Paris for
ages yet to come ; because, if the stones are no longer
there, the site mu.st ever remain. The second answer
is of a more positive and practical nature, making no
appeal to feelings with reference to past history, which
exist powerfully enough in some minds but are entirely
absent from others. The Palace of the Tuileries has
always been held to include the two blocks of buildings
at the northern and southern extremities, called the
Pavilion de Marsan and the Pavilion de Flore ; and by
some authorities the lines of building running eastward
from these pavilions are held to belong to the Tuileries,
as far as the pavilions de Rohan and Lesdigui^res.
Now all this exists at the present day, after much res
toration, even after much reconstruction; and is still

The Tuileries and the Luxembourg. Z^,
an architectural feature of Paris too important to be
omitted. Many readers of these pages will remember the Tuile
ries as they appeared in the time of Napoleon III. In
those days the main body of the palace was a very thin
and very long line of building, which extended from the
Rue de Rivoli on the north to the bank of the Seine on
the south ; and included nine masses, each with its own
roof In the middle stood the Pavilion de I'Horloge,
and at the two extremities, as I have just had occasion
to observe, the pavilions Marsan and Flore. The re
maining six masses of building were distributed sym
metrically, three on each side the Pavilion de I'Horloge,
but each pair of them differed greatly from the others.
The first impression produced by the Tuileries on a
foreigner who knew nothing about its architectural his
tory was that " it was a vast and venerable pile " : —
"Huge halls, long galleries, spacious chambers, joined
By no quite lawful marriage of the arts.
Might shock a connoisseur ; but when combined.
Formed a whole which, irregular in parts.
Yet left a grand impression on the mind."
I remember that first "grand impression" well, and
can easily recover it even now. The great length of the
garden front gave a magnificent effect of perspective,
ending admirably with the towering pavilions, and di
vided by the central pavilion and the range of different
roofs which rose one behind another like mountains.
The color was a fine warm gray, turned to a golden
gray by the effulgence of sunset, when the long range

84 Paris.
of windows glistened in the evening light. It is said that
on a certain day in the year when the sun was to be seen
exactly within the great, far-away arch of triumph, the
last of the French kings would come out on the balcony
of the great central pavilion and watch the rare and
magnificent spectacle. It is not very long since then,
in mere numbering of years ; and there are people still
living who have seen the King on the royal balcony, yet
it belongs even now as much to the past as the princely
life at Nineveh. The last King lies, nearly forgotten, in
the mausoleum on the top of the hill at Dreux, wisely
chosen far from the capital, that the House of Orleans
might rest in final peace; and where the long, pictu
resque old palace stood is a great gap of empty air.
The destruction of the Tuileries by the Communards
was a lamentable event from the point of view of the
historian and the archaeologist, but artistically the loss
is not great. If the Empire had lasted, the palace
would have been destroyed by architects, as the total re
construction of it had been decided upon long before.
In spite of the immense sums which at different times
had been spent in making it habitable, it still remained
one of the most inconvenient houses in the world. The
extreme (relative) narrowness of it made communication
troublesome and long, while there was a great want of
proper corridors ; and, in short, the structure was only
the result of adding and mending, not the realization of
a logical and orderly plan. I cannot say whether the
projects for the new palace had ever been elaborated
in the shape of finished drawings ; if they were, it was

The Tuileries and the Luxembourg. 85
thought judicious not to show them to the pubhc ; but
long before the fall of the Empire I was told, by one
who knew the imperial intentions, that the old palace of
the Tuileries was condemned. The first step was taken
by pulling down the Pavilion de Flore, and when the
new one was erected in its place, a short piece of new
work, equally magnificent, was carried northward and
stopped abruptly, to accustom the public to the idea of
its ultimate continuation. At the same time it does not
appear that Louis Napoleon contemplated the imme
diate rebuilding of the Tuileries, as he arranged a very
beautiful and costly suite of private apartments for the
Empress within the shell of the old palace.
Hardly any old country-house in England has been
built in such a haphazard fashion. The first architect
no more thought of uniting the Tuileries to the Louvre
than the builder of Buckingham Palace thought of join
ing it to the Horse Guards; and yet this notion ulti
mately governed everything, entirely depriving the
Tuileries of completeness and independence, and mak
ing it only part of a colossal whole, which, from the
artistic point of view, was simply a colossal error.
The history of it begins in the year 1564, when
Catherine de Medicis conceived the idea of having a
palace to herself near the Louvre, yet independent, in
which she might be near enough to her son Charles IX.
to have influence over him. She wanted it to be a
country-house, or what we should call suburban, just
well without the walls of Paris. Here the reader must
be reminded that in 1564 the wall of Paris was no

86 Paris.
longer that of Philippe-Auguste, which went through
the present square of the Louvre, but that of Charles V.,
which went through what is now the Place du Carrousel,
just to the east of the Salle des Etats, or a little to the
west of the pavilions de Rohan and Lesdiguieres. It
was a fine strong wall, with square towers, and a round
tower at the corner near the Seine, called the Tour du
Bois, which remained long afterwards, and is a familiar
object in old prints.
There is this very curious coincidence in the first
construction of the palaces of the Louvre and the
Tuileries. Each of them, in the beginning, was intended
to be just outside the wall of Paris, the Louvre being
west of the wall of Philippe-Auguste, the Tuileries west
of Charles V.'s wall. The difference in the style of
architecture adopted marks the difference between the
temper of Gothic and Renaissance times. Philippe-
Auguste built the Louvre as a strong Gothic fortress ;
Catherine de Medicis, with ideas imported from Florence,
wanted a Renaissance palace of graceful architecture
where she might dwell in elegance and comfort. She
got her elegant dwelling, but had not much comfort
there, as it happened.
And now, from an artistic point of view, comes the
saddest part of the whole story. Catherine had a man
of taste and even genius at her orders, the great archi
tect Philibert Delorme, and he had a plan for a palace
of moderate dimensions but of perfectly rational con
ception, — such a palace as would have been a really
complete work of art, and a great ornament to Paris in

77^1? Tuileries and the Luxembourg. 87
our own day, had it been preserved so long. Catherine
appreciated and employed him ; but she was short of
funds, and he unluckily only lived a few years, so that
his complete plan could not be carried out in his life
time, which would have settled everything.
As the name of Philibert Delorme is so closely con
nected with the origin of the palace, there is a common
popular belief that at least the central pavilion and the
wings nearest it were built by him, as we knew them, and
such is the power of fame that they were often admired
on the strength of his reputation. If his shade could
have revisited the garden, and seen the front in the time
of Louis Napoleon, he would probably have found more
pain than pleasure in the knowledge that his name was
connected with it at all. The whole of his work, even
including the central pavilion, was altered by subse
quent architects till the beauty and grace of it were
effectually taken away. Delorme's building consisted
simply of a ground-floor and an upper story which was
lighted by beautiful dormer windows, with rich stone
panels inserted between them. Above these rose a
well-pitched roof, and care, of course, was bestowed
upon the chimneys. But the most important feature
in Delorme's design was the pavihon (he only lived to
erect one, in the centre of his front). The basis of this
pavilion was a strong square mass two stories high,
with a central doorway between two pairs of columns,
and a window above it, also between two pairs of col
umns. The whole square mass was surrounded by a
balustrade at the top, and there was a large round dome

88 Paris.
standing upon an elegant arcade and accompanied by
four small domes, occupying the angles of the square
mass beneath. These satellites were supported on
arches like the great dome, and on the top of the great
dome was a lantern, also on little arches. The windows
in the front were set in pairs near the pavilion and at
the extremities, but between these pairs were three sin
gle windows ; ' the composition, as a whole, was extremely
elegant, and, though quite palatial and fit for a queen,
it was neither cumbersome nor pretentious. If the
architect had lived, and if the queen had been richer,
they would have completed a quadrangle measuring
about 270 metres by 168 in that manner, but with cor
ner pavilions, one of which was erected by Jean Bullant
on the south side after Delorme's death, which occurred
in 1 5 70, after he had worked eight years for Catherine
de Medicis.
As the quadrangle was never completed, only one
side of it having been built, the palace was found to
be too small in later reigns, and so it was increased in
length and in height, as I shall have to explain shortly,
and Delorme's worR: was spoiled by heavy superposition.
He had chosen the Ionic order as more feminine than
the Doric, because the palace was for a lady. He him
self gives this reason, the Ionic having been employed
for the Temples of Goddesses. At the same time he
gave the palace an air of elegance of which it was after
wards deprived.
It is remarkable that Catherine hardly used the
1 This description is from what is now the Place du Carrousel.

The Ttiileries and the Luxembourg. 89
Tuileries. It appears to be certain that she only went
there as people go to a summer-house, for a few hours
at a time, or, at most, for a very short stay, and that the
palace was not even furnished, as the officers of her
household sent on each occasion the furniture that she
required, and had it removed when she was gone. The
architectural works were completely abandoned by
Catherine in 1572; either she was tired of her hobby,
or there may be some truth in the commonly repeated
tradition that she was frightened away from the Tuile
ries by the prediction of a fortune-teller.^
Some readers will remember the large space behind
the Tuileries, between the palace and the railings across
the Place du Carrousel. In recent times the space was
nothing but an arid desert of sand, very useful for
reviewing troops, but as monotonous as a barrack-yard.
In the early days of the palace this was occupied by a
beautiful garden, and even before the building of the
palace was begun a fine garden, in the formal taste of
the time, had been made to the west, on the ground
occupied by the present garden of the Tuileries. There
were six great straight walks going from end to end,
and these were crossed by eight narrower walks at
right angles ; the beds were consequently all rectan
gular, and even within the beds the same rectangular
1 The story is in the guide-books, so it is scarcely necessary to repeat
it ; but to save the reader the trouble of a reference I may say that the
fortane-teller tried to be agreeable to her Majesty by predicting for her
a quiet end " near St. Germain," as the Tuileries was in that parish.
Catherine avoided the palace afterwards to prolong her chances of life,
yet died near St. Germain after all, as the priest who attended her bore
that name.

90 Paris.
system was carried out in the subdivisions. At a later
period, while the stone borders of the beds were pre
served, there was a violent reaction against angles inside
them, and the most intemperately curved flourishes
were substituted. I have no doubt that this intem
perance in curvature was the direct consequence of the
straight-line system which had created a great hunger
for curves. In Catherine's original garden there was
not a single curve of any kind except the semicircle of
the echo. With regard to the general principle of the
formal French garden, it may be defended as a suit
able accompaniment to symmetrical architecture. Such
gardens, when of great size, are wearisome in the ex
treme ; but a small one is valuable close to a building,
as a sort of extension of the building itself upon the
ground. The new palace of the Tuileries had been so much
neglected that when Henri IV. came to it he found it
already nearly ruinous. He was one of the great
building sovereigns ; the constructive instinct was strong
in him from the beginning, so of course the unfinished
condition of the Tuileries excited him to architectural
effort. Unfortunately for the future artistic consistency
of these great palatial buildings, he conceived the idea
of uniting the Tuileries to the Louvre by a long gallery
on the river-side, which of course involved from the
first the necessity of a corresponding line of building_
on the north, along what is now the Rue de Rivoli.
The enterprise was so prodigious that nine sovereigns
reigned over France before it was completed ; and no

The Tuileries and the Ltixembourg. 91
sooner had it been finished by Louis Napoleon than
the incongruousness of old and new made him decide
to build the Tuileries over again. If Henri IV. had
simply confined himself to carrying out the first inten
tions of Philibert Delorme by building the whole of
that architect's projected quadrangle, the result would
have been charming. What he actually did spoiled
the Tuileries completely; he built the Pavilion de
Flore, which, by its great mass, made Delorme's dome
too small for its central position, and the heavy archi
tecture of the long gallery, with its big pilasters from
top to bottom, set an evil example for future work on
the Tuileries. It is believed that Henri IV. built the
long gallery for reasons of prudence, and that he de
sired to plan for himself a way of retreat in case of a
popular attack on his palace of the Louvre. The reader
is asked to remember that the Tuileries was still out
of Paris, and that the wall existed still except where
it was pierced by the new gallery. Henri had a pri
vate garden between the Tuileries and the city wall, and
special precautions were taken to secure the complete
ness of its privacy.
It is an interesting fact that from the beginning the
great gallery was used for works of art, while it served
as a means of communication; and it is also a remark
able proof of the interest taken by Henri IV. in the arts,
that he lent the extensive series of rooms on the ground-
floor to workers in painting, engraving, tapestry, and
sculpture. These rooms appear indeed to have been
employed as schools of art; and French writers believe

92 Paris.
them to have constituted at that time a sort of conserva
toire des arts et metiers, — a free school of fine and indus
trial art.
When Henri IV. had done his work the edifice must
have presented a strikingly awkward and unfinished
appearance. Fastened on one corner of the quadran
gular Louvre was a mass of building going down to
the quay, and from this the long gallery went to the
Pavilion de Flore ; the length of it not having been
determined by any architectural consideration whatever,
but simply by the distance which happened to exist
between two different palaces. At the west end the
appearance must have been most unsatisfactory. There
was the big Pavilion de Flore, and a mass of building
to connect it with the poor little palace of the Tuileries ;
and on the other side there was nothing. Between the
Tuileries and the Louvre lay a confusion of garden,
ditch, wall, and various habitations.
Henri IV. was able to walk under cover from one
palace to the other in the last year of his life, but the
device for escaping from the city did not save him
from assassination. After him Louis XIII. went on
with the work; but the great builder was Louis XIV.,
who was displeased with the one-sided appearance of
the palace, and also with the extreme irregularity of the
roofs. By that time the ditches and wall of Charles V.
had been removed, and the east garden (called the
Jardin de Mademoiselle) had been made into a desert;
so on the 5th of June, 1662, the King held a great
equestrian festival in the space between the Tuileries

The Tuileries and the Luxembourg. 93
and the Louvre (but nearer to the Tuileries), from
which that piece of ground has been called ever since
then the Place du Carrousel. The festival was a mixture
of costume cavalcades and games; the King himself
took an active part in it, and so did the flower of
French nobility. The minute accounts left by eye
witnesses make it certain that the scene was one of
extraordinary splendor; but the architectural back
ground was so incomplete, that perhaps the King's
resolution to take up the work may date from that
very day. Nothing could be done to save the Tuile
ries of Philibert Delorme. A great northern pavil
ion, the Pavilion de Marsan, was erected to make a
northern angle answering to the southern Pavilion de
Flore ; and it was joined to the other buildings, but
these were so disproportioned that it was thought
necessary to raise some of them by adding another
story (or more), and to bring the front more nearly
to a level by building across its cavities. The central
pavilion was raised a story, and a heavy dome with
angular corners was substituted for the elegant round
dome of the first architect. This was the Pavilion de
I'Horloge, that we remember.
I have said that the Tuileries consisted of nine
masses of building. It may be convenient to remem
ber that the architect, Philibert Delorme, only com
pleted three of these, — the central pavilion and two
wings; Jean Bullant added a pavilion to the south.
The architects of Henri IV. added two masses still
farther to the south; those of Louis XIV. added

94 Paris.
three to the north, so that in his time the nine ulti
mately attained were already complete. It is difficult
to see how his architects, Le Vau and d'Orbay, could
have dealt effectively in any other way with the difficult
problem before them, unless they had completely de
molished the old palace. The real blunder was not
committed by them, but by Henri IV. and his archi
tects, M6tezeau and Du Cerceau, when they made
the work of Louis XIV. an inevitable necessity of the
future. We have clear evidence that in the time of Louis XIV.
it was already intended to build the long northern
side of the great square. An engraving by Israel
Sylvestre, representing the famous equestrian festival,
anticipates the future by showing the Pavilion de Marsan
as already erected ; and not only that, but he even
shows the beginning of what was afterwards done by
Napoleon I. to unite the Tuileries to the Louvre.
The Great Napoleon was not quite so passionately
fond of building as Napoleon III., but he liked to leave
his mai:k on Paris, and his military love of order and
completeness was vexed by the confusion behind the
Tuileries. Where the eastern garden once had been
there were three spaces divided by hoardings, and also
separated by hoardings from the rest of the Place
du Carrousel, while there were a number • of wooden
booths within them, and a number of very ordinary
houses just behind. It is surprising that preceding
sovereigns should have tolerated such a state of things
just behind their palace; and it is a remarkably apt

The Tuileries and the Luxembourg. 95
illustration of the wise old French proverb, " Qui trap
embrasse, mal ^treint." The space included in the great
scheme was so vast that it was never properly dealt
with until our own time. Napoleon I. had two objects in
view when he began his improvements : he first wished
to keep people at some distance from the Palace for
reasons of privacy and safety, and then he wanted
a convenient place for small reviews of troops. He
therefore cleared away all the hoardings and booths,
and made an open gravelled space, which he sepa
rated from the Place du Carrousel with a railing.
He also made it his business to clear away the
houses and to build the north side according to
the intentions of Louis XIV., in a plain, rather heavy
style, with tall pilasters, suggested by the long gallery
of the Louvre.
The work done by Louis-Philippe was considerable,
but principally in the interior. The details of these
changes would not greatly interest the reader, and
would scarcely be intelligible without a plan. They
included a new grand staircase, a new great saloon, and
the improvement of the Galerie de Diane, with other
alterations, which placed the floors of a long series
of state apartments on the same level. These rooms
in the aggregate were eight hundred feet long, and
the bill for these improvements reached the handsome
sum of ;^2ii,6s6.
/^ Then came Louis Napoleon, who determined to
/'complete the whole vast edifice of the united palaces.
, He had the builder's passion quite as strongly as either

96 Paris.
Henri IV. or Louis XIV. ; and during those years when
nobody could resist his will, he indulged it to the utter
most. The greater part of his work belongs to the
Louvre, as it lies east of the pavilions de Rohan and
Lesdiguieres, but he did much to the Tuileries of Henri
IV. He pulled down the Pavilion de Flore, and rebuilt
it, and he did the same for all that part of the long
gallery that used to have long pilasters. In the execu
tion of this important work every opportunity for im
provement that was consistent with a respect for the
original idea was seized upon with avidity. The long
pilasters were abandoned, and the new work treated
in stories, like part of the older Louvre, with much
elegance of design and richness of sculptured detail.
The Pavilion de Flore was in some respects more
ornate than its predecessor, especially in the upper
parts ; and on the whole it was a more- lively com
position, with better contrasts of effective sculpture
and plain wall surface. An unquestionable improve
ment was in the roofs, which were made rich enough
in lead-work to accompany the sculptured ornaments
of the walls. The tiresome length of monotonous
gallery running eastward from the Pavilion de Flore
was happily and intentionally broken by the large
gateway called the Guichets des Saints Pires, by the
twin pavilions of that gateway, and the masses of
building on each side of them, which are loftier than
the roof of the gallery. Besides this, the space com
prised between the Pavilion de Flore and the Guichets
is itself wisely interrupted by a minor pavilion rising

The Tuileries and the Luxembourg. 97
above the cornice, though not above the roof By
these devices the great fault of the river front, inor
dinate length, is made less visible. As for perfection
of detail, there has never been any epoch of French
architecture in which the essentially national style was
worked out with more thorough knowledge and skill
than under Napoleon III.
It is a constant pleasure to examine such good work
manship closely, to see what a remarkably high level
the decorative sculptors have attained when none of
them disgrace the rest. Much as we admire Gothic
architecture, we have to acknowledge that the modern
work on the Tuileries is what Gothic sculptors could
never have accomplished. The renewal of the art by
the study of Greek antiquity was a necessary prepara
tion for palatial work of this kind.
It is a pity (from our present point of view) that
Louis Napoleon did not remain in power long enough
to rebuild the Tuileries with the help of M. Lefuel, who
erected the new Pavilion de Flore. The new palace
would, no doubt, have been lofty and massive enough to
hold its own against the new buildings of the Louvre ;
and the central pavilion, especially, would have been a
stately and imposing work of great size and magnificent
decoration. The intended imperial palace is, however,
gone to the shadowy realm of the things that might
have been. In the place it was to have occupied we
have seen for some years a blackened ruin ; certainly
one of the most beautiful and interesting ruins that
ever were, and so impressive by its combination of dire
7

98 Paris.
disaster with still visible traces of royal splendor that
only a poet could describe it adequately. Meissonier
has worked in it carefully, and his minutely faithful
brush will preserve for posterity those fire-crumbled
columns, those shattered walls on which were still to
be seen strangely preserved spaces of gold and color,
as in some ruin at Pompeii. Even the king's balcony
was still there, and the sunset light, indifferent to
human vicissitudes, refreshed its gilding in the summer
evenings. What the Republic has done since its establishment
may be told in a few words. The fire had destroyed
the Pavilion de Marsan and much of the line of build
ing along the Rue de Rivoli. These have since been
rebuilt, as magnificently as the new Pavilion de Flore
and the new part of the great gallery on the water-side.
There appears to be an intention of continuing the work
in the same style as far as the Pavilion de Rohan, or
perhaps of erecting some great hall to break the line,
for the new work stops abruptly; and as the new build
ing is much broader than the old, the walls can never
meet. The architects of the new portion have avoided
the heavy long pilasters of Napoleon I., and adopted
the more elegant system of division in stories already
so successfully carried out on the south. No decision
has been arrived at yet (1885) with regard to the space
occupied by the destroyed buildings of the Tuileries.
All that's certain is that nothing will be joined to the
pavilions of Marsan and Flore, as these pavilions are fin
ished on three sides. The open space seems to call for a

The Tuileries and the Luxembourg. 99
noble edifice of some kind, and it is probable that some
public building will ultimately be erected there. If this
is ever done, it will be highly desirable that it should be
set further back towards the Louvre, so as to give to the
two great pavilions the effect of advancing wings. This
would do more than anything to relieve the great length
and monotony of the garden front.
Through all their errors and experiments the archi
tects of the Tuileries and Louvre have been developing
a style of architecture which, in its ultimate stage, is
really imposing and palatial. The great pavilions are
very nearly related to towers, and their steep square
roofs are like truncated spires ; but the idea is so com
pletely adapted to the needs of a palace that we forget
its origin in mediaeval churches and fortresses. Such
pavilions are useful and necessary in edifices where the
lines of building are long. They serve as landmarks,
and by their perspective they enable us to measure
easily the scale of the whole edifice. The full maturity
of this architecture has only been reached in the present
generation. The new parts of the Tuileries are finer
than the older work which they replace, — finer, not
only as being more magnificent, but because, after so
many experiments, the resources of that kind of art
have come to be better understood. A contemporary
French architect eminent enough to be employed on a
national palace would naturally produce more elegant
work than the old river-front of the long gallery or the
alterations made under Louis XIV. The principles of
this architecture having been settled, it has reached that

lOO Paris.
mature stage when nothing remains to be done but to
perfect the application of them in detail.
I have not had space to speak of the historical inter
est of the Tuileries, and can only do so now on the con
dition of extreme brevity. The palace was never very
long or very closely connected with the history of the
monarchy. It is not at all comparable to Windsor in
that respect. Plenri IV. liked it, Louis XIV. preferred
Versailles, Louis XV. lived at the Tuileries in his mi
nority. The chosen association of the palace with the
sovereigns of France is very recent. Louis XVI. lived
in it, and so did Charles X. and Louis-Philippe. The
two Napoleons were fond of it, perhaps because it gave
them a better appearance of sovereignty than a new
residence could have done. The last inhabitant was
the Empress Eugenie, as Regent, and her flight has a
pathos surpassing the flights or last departures of other
sovereigns, since we know that the palace was never
again to be brightened by either royal or imperial
splendor. The parliamentary history of the Tuileries is impor
tant, as it has been not only a palace, but a parliament
house. In old times the royal stable was to the north,
close to what is now the Pavilion de Marsan, and in the
present Rue de Rivoli. The exercising-ground was in
a long, narrow enclosure, which occupied the ground
of that street as far as the Rue de Castiglione ; and at
its western extremity there was a building called the
manage, which served as a parliament house for the
Assemblee Nationale, while Louis XVI. lived in his

THE LUXEMBOURG AS IT WAS BUILT.

The Tuileries and the Luxembourg. loi
apartments in the palace and rarely came out of them.
In May, 1793, the Convention began to sit in a newly
arranged parliament house within the walls of the
palace itself, and for some time after that the palace
included Government Offices of all kinds, so that the
first rough-and-rude beginnings of popular government
in France were carried on in the royal house itself
The reader may be reminded also that Napoleon's coup
d'etat of the i8th Brumaire took place within the Tuile
ries, where Parliament was then sitting. The most im
portant events in the Tuileries have sometimes been
simply the arrival of a courier with news, or its mere
reception by the quiet-looking telegraphic wire. I was
in Paris when that little wire brought to the Emperor's
private cabinet in the Pavilion de Flore the terrible
news about Maximilian. I stood with a friend and
looked on the sunny outside of the great palace, and
we said, " It is a dark day for Napoleon III." From
that day everything went wrong with him till he was
laid in the sarcophagus at Chiselhurst.
The Tuileries and the Luxembourg have this in com
mon, that each was built by a queen, and that each of
the queens was a Medicis. Marie de Medicis began
her palace in 1615. Unlike the elder edifice, it has pre
served at least its original character, but in order to
obtain more room in the interior the garden front has
been replaced by a new one farther out ; and though the
original style of the building has been carefully imitated
its proportions have been inevitably destroyed. Un
luckily, too, the addition (begun in 1836 and finished in

102 Paris.
1844) was of a nature to increase the only serious defect
of the first design, which was the doubling of the south
ern pavilions. The first plan may be briefly described
as follows : there was a quadrangle with one pavilion
at each corner towards the street, but two pavilions at
each corner (or very near it) towards the garden. The
garden pavilions were so near each other as to lose the
advantage of perspective and appear heavy. The en
largement carried out by M. de Gisors, Louis-Philippe's
architect, consisted in constructing two new pavilions in
the garden close to the four already existing, so that at
the south end of the palace there are now six heavy
pavilions, three on each side. The new ones were con
nected by a new front which gave great additional space
inside for a library and senate-house; but the result
externally was to make the heavy end of the palace
look heavier still. Nevertheless, as the building had to
be enlarged to receive the senate, it is very difficult to
see how any equivalent increase of size could have
been conveniently obtained with so little deviation from
the first design. The garden front is practically the
same, the interior of the quadrangle is untouched, at
least so far as this alteration is concerned, so is the
street front, and it is only the east and west sides which
are lengthened without any alteration in their style.
The architecture of this palace is not at all compar
able, so far as the one quality of elegance is concerned,
with the most beautiful parts* of the Louvre and the
Tuileries, but it is serious and dignified, and almost in
faultless taste in its own grave way. It would be difficult

The Tuileries and the Luxembourg. 103
to find a more appropriate building for a senate-house.
The situation is pleasant and easily accessible, while
the great space of beautiful garden gives the palace a
degree of quiet not always attainable in a great city,
and which, we may suppose, ought to be favorable to
legislative deliberations. It is thought more prudent,
in France, not to have the two ' Chambers in one build
ing; and it was principally for this reason that a recent
proposition to rebuild the Tuileries, as a great parlia
ment house for both Chambers, met with few if any
adherents. The garden of the Luxembourg is a precious breath
ing-space for that part of Paris, and is still of fine
extent in spite of its mutilation at the south end, one of
the very few attempts at economy made by the Imperial
Government. It has a great population of statues, in
cluding many portrait- statues of famous Frenchwomen ;
but the charm of it in spring and summer is in the
abundance of bright flowers, fresh well-watered grass,
and graceful foliage. The reader must not expect from
me any adequate description of a garden, as I greatly
prefer wild nature to all gardens whatsoever; but if I
were compelled to choose between the lawns and alleys
of the Luxembourg and a dusty street pavement, I would
bear with the artificiality of the horticulturists.^
1 I have said nothing of the interior, which is inaccessible to the public,
with the exception of the galleries, about which there is nothing in the
slightest degree remarkable, except some of the pictures and statues
which they contain, and which lie outside the scheme of these papers.

VI.
THE LOUVRE.
THE present writer once met, in Paris itself, with
a very prosperous manufacturer from Yorkshire,
who was not at all aware that there were any pictures
in the Louvre. He considered it " a good, large build
ing," but had never heard of its connection with the fine
arts; and it is believed that he returned to his native
county without having visited the interior.
This case, among visitors to Paris, is no doubt very
exceptional, and there are even great numbers of people
in the world who have never been to Paris, and are yet
perfectly aware that the Louvre is a palace of the fine
arts. For myself, so far as memory can go back into
the hazy land of childhood, I can still recover the dim
grandeur of the as yet unknown Louvre, a palace of
colossal, fantastic architecture, like a dream, with end
less halls filled with solemn, sombre pictures in heavy
gilded frames. To see the reality was the longing of
my youth, and when at last I found myself in that inter
minable gallery of Henri IV., it seemed as if the whole
earth could not offer a delight so glorious.
Meanwhile — and in this I resembled nearly all other
English tourists — I knew nothing of the noble castle

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The Louvre. 105
which the present Louvre had replaced. It seemed to
me that the building had been made entirely as a mu
seum for works of art, chiefly pictures, and that nothing
of any consequence had ever stood upon the ground it
now occupied. Deeply interested in all remains of the
Middle Ages that were to be seen in my native island,
and passionately mediaevalist at heart (for all young
people who care at all about the past are enthusiasts for
some particular epoch), I little dreamed that one of the
most romantic royal castles that ever existed once stood
on the ground now occupied by chilly halls of antique
sculpture. Such a castle, if its ruins yet rose on some
lonely height by the Seine, would be visited by every
tourist, and sketched by every landscape-painter; but
as it had the misfortune to be enclosed within the walls
of a very great city, where the past is effaced to make
way for the present, as accounts are sponged from a
slate, not a stone is left standing, and only the learned
have measured its site or counted its lordly towers. Yet
the time when they were new and perfect, with conical
roofs and gilded vanes, is not exceedingly remote from
us in the great past of history; and if they could have
been simply left undemolished, even without repair,
we should still have had an unrivalled example of the
fortress-palace of the Middle Ages. The buildings
formed an oblong court with round towers at the angles
and in the middle of the sides, while nearly in the centre
of the court stood a massive round keep, and to the
south and east were well-defended gateways. All this
was moated, and on the side towards the river were

io6 Paris.
other walls and towers, the last of which maintained a
threatened existence down to the seventeenth century.
The origin of the word Louvre is believed to be a
Saxon word, Leowar or Lower, which meant a fortified
camp. Littre, however, does not go so far as this, but
contents himself with the base-Latin lupara or lupera,
which was a subsequent creation as a latinized form of
louve. Surely no two words could be more distinct
than louve and louvre, while lozver (pronounced, of
course, by all French people as lower) is a very near
approximation to the name of the modern palace. Nor
is there any reason to imagine a connection between
the castle of Philippe-Auguste and a she-wolf, whereas,
in its scheme of fortification, it bears a striking resem
blance to a Frankish moated camp. In " Paris a travers
les Ages" M. Fournier borrows a drawing of one of these
camps from Viollet-le-Duc's " Dictionary of Architec
ture," and the resemblance of its plan to that of the
Louvre Castle is most striking. It stands near a river,
which defends one of its sides; it is moated just as the
Louvre was ; the central round tower is placed in the
great enclosure precisely in the same position ; the gate
ways are in the same places, and the principal part of the
fortress is withdrawn somewhat from the river, with an
extra defence towards the river-side, exactly as in the
Louvre Castle. There seems, then, to be no reason for
doubting that the name of the present picture-gallery is
due to the early use of its site for military purposes.
Although nothing of the Louvre Castle is now visible
from the exterior, there still exists a small remnant of it

THE LOUVRE, FROM THE SEINE. FROM A DRAWING BY H. TOUSSAINT.

The Louvre.

107

DETAILS BY PIERRE LESCOT IN THE QUADRANGLE.

enclosed within the modern palatial buildings. There
is a considerable piece of the old wall in the Salle des
Cariatides, and even a small corkscrew staircase which
belonged to the old castle.

io8 Paris.
The transformation of the castle into a palace began
long before the present Renaissance palace was thought
of The first step was a consequence of the enclosure
of the Louvre within the walls of Paris. Under Philippe-
Auguste it had been outside, under Charles V. it was with
in the wall; and therefore, being no longer a fortress
dependent on its own strength for resistance, it could
be made more habitable without danger. Charles V.
increased its height for the purpose of giving more
room, and made great alterations in the arrangement of
the apartments. Under that sovereign the Louvre still
retained all the appearance of a feudal castle. The
moat still surrounded it, and all the towers, including
the great keep, were still in their places ; but the gen
eral aspect was richer and more elegant than before,
the towers were loftier, the masses of building between
them had become more spacious, and some new and
graceful domestic architecture had been added within
the courtyard. Lovers of books remember this epoch
in the history of the Louvre in connection with the royal
library which was established there. It is unnecessary
to observe that even a royal library in the fourteenth
century was but a small collection; and yet if that
library of Charles V. could have, been preserved to our
own day, few collections would have been more valued
by the curious. Some rooms in a particular tower were
set apart for it, two rooms at first, and afterwards a third
above them, the whole containing rather more than
nine hundred volumes. The collection was afterwards in
creased, and amounted in 1410 to 1,125 volumes, many

The Louvre. 109
of which were afterwards lent or lost ; and it is said that
the Duke of Bedford carried off the remainder with him
to England, after a sort of purchase, in 1429.
After being a splendid Gothic palace the old castle
of the Louvre was almost entirely abandoned by the
French sovereigns, and was employed as a prison and
an arsenal. Then succeeded a long period of utter con
fusion, during which the new Renaissance palace was
gradually coming into existence, while the remnants of
the Gothic castle were devoured one after another, look
ing more and more miserable as less remained, till the
wonder is that so late as Callot's time anything should
have been preserved at all.
The appearance of Francis I. upon the scene is the
doom of the old castle. With the help of an inven
tive and tasteful architect, Pierre Lescot, he began the
Louvre that we know, — colossal in scale, magnificent,
palatial, — utterly different in all ways from the domestic
architecture of the great building sovereigns who pre
ceded him ; a building of which Philippe-Auguste and
Charles V. could have had no conception whatever ; a
wonderful result of the study of antiquity, and of its
influence coming to the French through the Italian
mind. What a strange revolution it is, how radical, how com
plete ! The beautiful and picturesque French Gothic
cast aside as barbarous, and, in its place, not at all a
dull imitation of the antique,^ but rather a new modern
^ It is curious that Frenchmen in the time of Francis I. always spoke
as if the new style were simply an imitation of the antique. They did not
realize the fact that it was something more.

I lo Paris.
art having its roots far away in the past of Greece and
Rome, and drinking nouris-hment from those distant
sources. Imagine a French sovereign brought so com
pletely under this new influence as not to care in the. least
for the beautiful Gothic art which had so delighted his
ancestors ! Charles V. had taken an honest pride in his
Gothic towers, his tapestried halls, his comfortable wain
scoted parlors, the round rooms where his books were
kept ; we know that he was proud of them because he
showed the place himself to the Emperor. Had the
old Louvre castle come down to our own times, it would
have been restored in every detail with scrupulous
accuracy, like Pierrefonds; and every mediaevalist in
Europe would have visited it. Paris would have pre
served it, as she now preserves the Hotel de Cluny or
the Sainte Chapelle. But Francis I. did not care about
it in the least. Everything Gothic had gone completely
out of fashion, and whatever he built was to be in the
new Renaissance manner. He therefore deliberately
began certain buildings at the Louvre which must, of
necessity, either establish a permanent incongruity, or
compel his successors to remove every fragment of the
old castle. If any Parisian of those days yet held the
Gothic times in affection, he must have foreseen regret
fully the ultimate consequences of this new departure.
" Ceci tuera cela," he must have said to himself Con
temporary expressions of regret have come down to
our own times ; especially for the great tower, which
was first demolished. After that the old castle seemed
to take a new lease of existence. It was furbished up

*- I

K^ ft "di^JJir

'J-^P'^¥?^^

i5?53

THE CLASSICAL PAVILION AND THE OLD EASTERN TOWER.

The Louvre. 1 1 1
thoroughly to receive the Emperor Charles V. The
scene of the well-known picture by Bonnington of the
King and the Emperor visiting the Duchess d'Etampes
was probably in the old Louvre.-^
The new structure was begun in a very strange man
ner. The first part of it erected was a great classical
pavilion, occupying the site of the southwest corner
tower; and from this went a line of classical building
as far as the Gothic southeastern tower, which was pre
served. It is impossible to conceive an effect more incon
gruous than that of these huge new buildings introduced
into an old Gothic castle of moderate dimensions.
Francis I. did little more than decide the fate of the
old Louvre by introducing the new fashion. His suc
cessors went on with the work ; and the progress of it
may be followed, reign after reign, till the last visible
fragment of the Gothic castle had been ruthlessly carted
away. The northeastern and southeastern round towers
are still to be seen in Israel Sylvestre's etchings done in
the year 1650. It is very remarkable that the short
building which connects the Louvre with the long gal
lery on the water-side, and which now contains the
Galerie d'Apollon, should have been first erected, as
well as a considerable portion of the long gallery itself,
when the great square had as yet made no approach to
completion. The scheme appears to have been from
the beginning of the most confused kind. A liking for
the water-side, and a consequent tendency to build in
that direction, appear to have entirely overruled what-
1 An etching from the picture by Flameng appeared in the " Port
folio " for January, 1873.

112 Paris.
ever intention there may have been to carry out a de
cided plan. As soon as the erection of the Tuileries
had been decided upon, the notion of a long gallery
from one palace to the other began to fix itself in
royal minds, and this long before the Louvre itself
was finished. Charles IX. began the long gallery at
his mother's instigation, and when Henri IV. finished
it, neither the Tuileries nor the Louvre presented any
thing like a complete appearance. It is the strangest
story ! Image an English sovereign, too poor to com
plete either Buckingham or St. James's palace, spend
ing vast sums in a line of building to connect them !
The conduct of Catherine de Medicis is more wonder
ful still, for when neither the Tuileries, nor the Louvre,
nor the connecting gallery, was finished, she began
(with these three huge enterprises on hand) a new
and most costly palace in a different part of Paris.
While the long gallery was slowly proceeded with,
and the great new buildings had gone no farther than
the western side of the great quadrangle, there was a
confusion of buildings round about these great struc
tures which it is surprising that a powerful sovereign
could tolerate. The rulers of France, in the midst of
the most gigantic plans, lived surrounded by eyesores.
It has been supposed that Henri. IV. intended to clear
the ground and embellish it with a garden, but he did
not live long enough. Vast as is the Louvre that we
know, it is as nothing in comparison with the prodigious
scheme imagined by Richelieu and Louis XIII. ; a
scheme which, though never carried out, gave a very

The Louvre. 1 1 3
strong impulse to the works, and insured the completion
of the present building, at least in a subsequent reign.
It is probable that of all palace-building ever seriously
imagined by a prince, the Louvre of Louis XIII. was
the most colossal. If the palace contemplated by him
had been carried out, it would have extended to the Rue
St. Honore, and included four great quadrangles of the
same size as the present quadrangle, which, in its turn,
is four times the size of the old castle of Philippe-
Auguste. Nothing is more remarkable in the history of
royal living than the great increase of scale that came in
with the Renaissance. In the old Gothic times kings were
contented with houses of moderate size, and with the
exception of the great hall where the retainers assem
bled, the rooms were seldom very large ; but no sooner
had the Renaissance revolutionized men's ideas, than
kings everywhere suddenly discovered that vastness was
essential to their state. In France this new idea began
with Francis I., and it is curious to observe how it
worked out its full consummation. He began, as we
have seen, with a spacious royal pavilion in the place of
a narrow round tower. After him, the long gallery was
conceived and executed. Then Louis XIII. imagined
an immensity, which he only partially executed ; finally,
Louis XIV., still preoccupied by the same idea of huge
ness, imagined another immensity, but this time outside
of Paris, — at Versailles, — and executed it. Thus at
length the new demon of the colossal got satisfied.
Happily for the Louvre, Louis XIV. interested him
self in it before he engulfed his millions at Marly and
8

114 Paris.
Versailles. While still quite young he felt urged to set
to work by the provokingly incomplete appearance of the
palace. Although Louis XIII. had demohshed the last
towers of the Louvre Castle, he had not done very much
towards the completion of the palace. Only two sides
of the quadrangle — the western and the southern —
were as yet erected. Louis XIV. determined to build
the two others, and as he had a clever and laborious
architect at his disposal, the work advanced rapidly.
We see Le Van's work at the present day in the interior
of the courtyard; but outside, especially towards the
river, it has been modified or concealed. The story of
this able architect, and his labors and tribulations, is
one of the most pathetic in the history of the fine arts.
It appears to be the doom of great architects, from the
earliest times to our own, to be plagued by their em
ployers, and compelled either to modify their plans or
abandon them ; but few have had to bear such mortifi
cations as Le Vau. The reader no doubt remembers
that eastern end of the Louvre where the great colon
nade is. That was the beginning of his troubles. He
had made his plans for that part of the outside, which,
in his opinion, was of paramount importance, and had
even begun its actual construction, when Colbert became
superintendent of public works, and put a stop to it.
Rival architects were appealed to for their opinion, and
of course they all condemned Le Vau, who up to that
time had been preferred to them. Not satisfied, how
ever, with their propositions, or not feeling himself
competent to decide among so many divergent pro-

THE INTERIOR OF THE QUADRANGLE. FROM A DRAWING BY H. TOUSSAINT.

The Louvre. \ \ 5
fessional schemes, Colbert sent their drawings to Rome
to have the opinion of the Italian architects of the day.
In those days Italian architects were as firmly convinced
that nobody but themselves knew anything about archi
tecture, as are the French painters of the present day
that English artists cannot have any knowledge of
painting; so their decision might have been accurately
foretold. They simply condemned everything that was
sent to them, and said that the French sovereign stood
in need of a real architect, who must of course be an
Itahan. Louis XIV. allowed himself to be dictated to
by men who were supposed to be the leaders of Europe
in architectural matters; and he engaged the famous
Bernini, who came to Paris animated by such a sense of
his own importance that he not only treated Le Vau
and his plans as non-existent, but claimed the right to
remodel the entire edifice without regard to the inten
tions of the earlier architects, Pierre Lescot and Le
Mercier. Everything in Bernini's project was to be
subordinate to stately architectural effects. The con
venient arrangement of the interior was of no conse
quence to him, and it is said that he even failed to
provide for the comfortable accommodation of the sov
ereign. Notwithstanding these very strong objections
to Bernini, he seems to have imposed himself for a while
so that works in stone and mortar were actually com
menced under his superintendence. Bernini was treated
like a prince, — paid, lodged, arid served magnificently;
but he did not produce a satisfactory impression, and
many French influences united themselves against him,

1 1 6 Paris.
so on his departure to winter in Italy it came to be
understood that he should not return ; and he was con
soled with a sum of three thousand louis d'or, and a hfe
pension of twelve thousand livres for himself and twelve
hundred for his son.
Then came a very strange thing in the history of the
Louvre. Claude Perrault, a doctor of medicine and
amateur architect, had elaborated a plan of his own for
an east front, but had carefully refrained from putting it
forward when the plans of the professional architects
were sent to Italy, to be condemned by the national
prejudice of the Italians. When Perrault's plan was
shown to Louis XIV., the King had had enough of
foreign opinion, and even of professional home opin
ion, and was in a humor to judge by himself. He
had only two projects left to choose between, — that of
Le Vau (modified and enriched) and the new one pro
posed by Perrault. Unfortunately for poor Le Vau
there was a stateliness in Perrault's colonnade which
pleased the pompous mind of the great King, so it
was adopted with very little regard to suitableness.
The final discomfiture of Bernini was most fortunate for
the Louvre in one respect, — it saved the great quad
rangle which Bernini wanted to spoil in various ways,
especially by putting huge staircases in the four cor
ners; but though the interior of the quadrangle was
saved, it cannot be said that the adoption of Perrault's
plan was by any means an unmixed benefit. The east
front does not really belong to the edifice ; it is merely
stuck on, and when it was built the fatal discovery

The Louvre. 117
was made that it did not fit. Surely this cannot have
been a mistake, in the common sense of the word,
as a joiner makes a mistake of an inch in a piece of
wood. Perrault's front was more than seventy feet
too long for the building it was to be applied to. He
must have known this. Most probably he was deter
mined to have his fine long colonnade at all costs,
and so deliberately exceeded the measurements at each
end, regardless of the consequences, which were suffi
ciently serious. It became necessary to advance the
river front farther towards the river. It was quite new.
The architect who had built it, Le Vau, was still alive,
yet the huge extravagance of building another, to
mask it, had to be committed. This was the last
drop of bitterness in the cup of sorrow served to
LeVau in his old age.
The consequence of Perrault's audacity is that the
buildings on the south side of the quadrangle are much
thicker than those on the other sides. It was not
thought necessary to advance the north front in the
same way, but the length of Perrault's colonnade made
it necessary to build a projecting mass at the northeast
corner. The external north front always seemed to
have received less attention than the others, though
now, in consequence of the much-frequented Rue de
Rivoli, it is as much seen as the colonnade itself
The colonnade has a great reputation, and is no
doubt majestic and noble in its proportions, but it is
wonderful how little it seems to belong to the building.
This effect of being something separate is felt more

1 1 8 Paris.
strongly when .we come out of the quadrangle by the
east entrance, and then look back on Perrault's front.
In all the alterations executed about the palaces nobody
has ever touched that front ; and, indeed, it is evidently
one of those works that do not admit of change. Like
all severely classical conceptions, it is an organic whole
from which every diminution would be mutilation, and
to which every addition would be an excrescence.
The western front of the Louvre remained extremely
simple until the time of Napoleon III., when a feeble
attempt was made to decorate it with some applied or
nament, so that it might hold its own against the new
buildings ; and when this was found to be impossible it
was masked by a new front of adequate magnificence.
Until our own time this west front looked upon an
accidental agglomeration of the commonest dwelling-
houses, which filled what are now the Squares du
Louvre and the Place du Carrousel. The completion
of the great project, by which the Tuileries and the
Louvre were to be united, has led to the clearance and
embellishment of these spaces.
One of the greatest difficulties about the union of the
two palaces was that they were neither parallel nor at
right angles to each other. The degree of inclination is
such that if a line drawn along the front of the Tuileries,
and another along the west front of the Louvre, were
both prolonged northward, they would meet within the
walls of Paris near La Chapelle. Every architect who
had studied the union of the palaces had proposed
some means of hiding this defect. In 1810 no less

^ L 8 ..pa

QUADRANGLE OF THE LOUVRE, WITH THE STATUE OF FRANCIS I.,
PLACED THERE IN 1 855, AND SINCE REMOVED.

The Louvre. 1 1 9
than forty-seven different projects were submitted to
the Government. That of Percier and Fontaine was
accepted, but never carried out. Those architects in
tended to hide the defect by carrying a line of building
from north to south, straight across the middle of the
Place du Carrousel. When Napoleon III. came into
power he found Visconti in office as architect of the
Louvre, and Visconti had another plan, which was exe
cuted. If the reader will refer to any recent map of
Paris, he will understand Visconti's scheme at a glance.
It consisted in the creation of a new court as wide as
the inside of the old quadrangle, but longer, and open
at the west end, in the direction of the Tuileries. Be
hind these massive lines of building are smaller enclosed
courts to the north and south, the irregularity of which
is only seen by the few who visit them. By this means
it was hoped that the want of parallelism between the
Tuileries and Louvre would be in a great measure con
cealed ; but, unfortunately, the new buildings only made
it more visible, by directing the eye towards the Tuile
ries in such a manner as to show plainly that the Pavilion
de I'Horloge was not in the middle of the view. Again,
it is easily seen from the Place du Carrousel that the
new buildings do not occupy the same space on the
north and the south sides. If, however, they are a
failure as a means of hiding a defect, they have certain
merits of their own. Considered in themselves, as ex
amples of magnificent palatial architecture, they deserve
little except praise ; but in their relation to older build
ings round the Place du Carrousel they were from the

I20 Paris.
first objectionable, because their imposing size and rich
ornamentation made everything else look thin, and low,
and poor. To borrow a term employed by painters,
the huge Visconti buildings simply " killed " the Tuile
ries. Their erection was the doom of the older palace
by making a grander one a necessity of the future. The
new pavilions Richelieu, Denon, Turgot, and Mollien,
being very splendid in themselves and near together,
made the Pavilion de I'Horloge of the Tuileries look
miserable and lonely. Besides this, the massive lines
of building that connected Visconti's pavilions, with
their richly carved arcades surmounted by colossal
statues, and their numerous groups of sculpture on the
balustrades in front of the roof, made the long wing
built (or begun) by Napoleon I. look fit for little else
than a barrack-yard ; and so we see it already replaced,
in great part, by a much more magnificent structure,
which will certainly join Visconti's buildings ultimately
at the Pavilion de Rohan. It is narrated that Napo
leon III., after gazing one day with a friend at the new
buildings from a window in the Tuileries, turned away
with a look of disappointment, and said, " If I listened
to my own feelings I would begin the whole thing over
again." There are limits, however, even to the extrava
gance of a Napoleon III. ; and though he might easily
have squandered as much in other and less visible ways,
he could hardly indulge in such a public repentir as the
reconstruction of his own Louvre.
The most obvious defect of Visconti's Louvre, con
sidered in itself, is that the two great fronts which face

The Louvre. 121
each other across the gardens are so near that the spec
tator cannot retire far enough to see them completely.
They can, in fact, only be seen in all their majesty
diagonally from the Place du Carrousel. There the
effect is stately in the extreme, and very original ; there
being, I believe, no other palace in the world which
offers a perspective of the same kind. Another great
merit of the new buildings is that as they enclose a con
siderable space with their hidden courts and cover a
large extent of ground, they furnish the space between
the Tuileries and Louvre better than some other pro
jects would have furnished it; and this is a merit of
some importance, considering the distance between the
two palaces. Indeed, Visconti's plan seems to bring
the Louvre, by continuing it, as far as the pavilions
Turgot and Mollien.
Visconti's buildings have been frequently and severely
criticised as " overcharged with ornament." This is an
unintentional compliment, for the fact is that his walls
are extremely plain, incomparably plainer than the new
long gallery of the Louvre, or the new building running
east of the Pavilion Marsan. The great effect of rich
ness in Visconti's work is due to the art with which he
lavished ornament on certain conspicuous places, espe
cially on his pavilions. A juster criticism is that his
work is heavy. No doubt it is massive rather than
graceful, but its appearance of enduring strength is not
out of place in a public edifice ; and though some parts
of the old Louvre are more delicate and charming, none
are more imposing. The abundance of statues has been

1 2 2 Paris.
blamed, but they are not more numerous than in me
diaeval architecture, and they are better detached.
A simpler plan than that adopted by Visconti would
have been to dissimulate the want of parallelism between
the palaces by making two or three large quadrangles,
and losing the radiation in the thickness of the buildings
between ; but such a plan would have lost the majestic
effect of space and distance which it was Visconti's
desire to preserve. By his plan the pavilion of the old
Louvre could be seen distinctly from the central pavilion
of the Tuileries.
The united palaces make so vast a building, that it
has been found necessary to give a distinct interest to
certain parts. Thus the openings towards the Pont des
Saints Peres, called Les Guichets des Saints Pkres, form
an architectural composition in themselves; and that
part of Visconti's Louvre which is opposite the Palais
Royal is a distinct work, composed for that place and
not repeated elsewhere. It is highly ornamented, and
contrasts strongly in this respect with the simple work
on each side of it.
The sums of money expended on the Louvre and
Tuileries defy all calculation. The palaces have not
been erected according to any sound principles of econ
omy, but by a system of additions and alterations
involving immense sacrifices. As the old castle was
pulled down before it was really decayed, so many
parts of the Louvre and Tuileries have been replaced
prematurely. The river front erected by Le Vau and '
masked by Perrault is a case in point. Even the long

perrault's COLONNADE. INTERIOR VIEW.

The Louvre. 123
gallery and the Pavilion de Flore erected by Henri IV.
cannot be considered to have lasted very long, as they
had to be rebuilt in our own time. The greatest
spender on these palaces was Napoleon III. Visconti's
plans,-' when finished by Lefuel, had cost him sums
greatly exceeding the first estimate of a million sterling.
I believe that the total expenditure on the palaces in
our time has reached at least four millions ; and if the
older work could be accurately estimated in our money
it would be equally costly. The total value of the pal
aces before the destruction of the Tuileries can scarcely
have been less than ten millions sterling without their
contents ; and the value of the site, with its vast area in
the best part of Paris, is prodigious.
I have little space to speak of the interior, and it is
not a part of my plan to attempt any description of
works of art other than architectural. Many rooms in
the Louvre are simply plain receptacles for interesting
things, but others are interesting in themselves, espe
cially the old wainscoted rooms lined with delicately
wrought wood-work from the chambers of the kings.
The most sumptuous room is perhaps the Galerie
d'Apollon, with its elaborate ceiling, its tapestries in
panels, and its collection of precious objects; but the
most imposing is the lofty salo7i carre, gravely magnifi
cent, and realizing the grand ideas of Henri IV. As
for the long gallery, it is too long to produce its due
effect upon the mind, which would be equally potent if
it were considerably shorter. It appears to be simply a
I Visconti died suddenly in his carriage in 1S53.

1 24 Paris.
very magnificent tunnel with pictures on the sides, and
nothing near enough to be really visible at the ends.
The mere sensation of being in an almost endless tunnel
has a distracting effect upon the mind. A room of
moderate dimensions, with a few pictures well isolated
and well lighted, is much more favorable to the concen
tration of the faculties in study. The clever comic
sketcher Robida has shown us the tramway which,
according to him, will be established in that gallery
next century. The idea is not unreasonable. A neat
little carriage on rails, arranged like an Irish jaunting-
car, would be a great convenience for the thousands of
tourists who now wearily plod from end to end of that
gilded and painted tunnel, with minds distraught and
eyes that gaze on vacancy.

vn.
THE HOTEL DE VILLE.
JUST at this present time (1885) the Parisian H6tel
de Ville seems the most perfectly beautiful of mod
ern edifices, not only on account of the grace and inter
est of its design, but also because the materials are
so irreproachable in their freshness and purity. It
would be bold to assert such a thing positively, but it
is very likely to be the simple truth that this building,
just at present, is the fairest palace ever erected in the
world. The reasons why this is likely to be true are
the following. To be as perfect as the H6tel de Ville
is now, a building must be erected all together and with
a certain rapidity ; but great edifices have usually come
into being by fragments, so that the parts first erected
had time to get old, dingy, and even ruinous before the
plan was completed, while the modifications introduced
by successive architects have in most cases been fatal
to the unity of the work. I need not go farther for ex
amples than to the two great Parisian palaces that we
have already studied. Neither the Louvre nor the
Tuileries was ever seen as their first architects intended
them to be. The palace of the Tuileries, in the whole
course of its existence, was never at any time a com-

126 Paris.
plete and harmonious work. When it was harmonious
(in the time of Catherine de Medicis) it was incom
plete, merely a beginning, and when it was complete
(in the time of Louis-Philippe) it had long since ceased
to be consistent and harmonious. The Louvre is better,
but still it is a combination of three or four different
architectural schemes, and it is spoiled externally, as a
work of art, by being tacked on to a larger edifice, or
collection of edifices. Now although the ruder kinds
of architecture admit of an unlimited jumble of addi
tions, it is not so with the more refined. The highest
kinds of architecture approach, in the strictness of their
organization, to the higher animal forms. You cannot
give an animal another limb, nor fasten him by suture
to another animal, without producing a monstrosity like
a five-legged calf or the Siamese twins. So it is in
classical architecture of the best kind, and even (though
not quite to the same degree) in the best Renaissance
architecture. In Gothic, the virtue of unity has been
less valued, for the Gothic architects themselves freely
added excrescences to their buildings ; yet whenever-
even a Gothic work is in itself exquisitely complete, it
cannot be so dealt with except at the cost of that exqui
site completeness. Any addition to the Sainte Chapelle
would be the destruction of its peculiar beauty.
Now the present Hotel de Ville (though the design,
as I shall show presently, is a growth from an earlier
design) is in itself a complete architectural conception
carried out at once in all its parts. It is not, like
the Tuileries of Philibert Delorme, a beautiful scheme

The Hotel de Ville. 127
spoiled before it was realized. And the material per
formance answers in all respects to the idea. The
workmanship throughout is of that extreme perfection
which is the pride of Parisian craftsmen. The "stone is,
just now, as fair and immaculate as a selected piece of
Parian marble. It is almost as white as snow, and as
faultless. It takes the most delicate sculpture as if it
were a fine-grained wood, and the quality of its grain
is so equal that an artist might sketch upon it as on
drawing-paper. The only reproach that can be made
against it is that the tone of the whole building is cold ;
but it is hardly so in sunshine, and there is a beginning
of mosaic decoration which promises enrichment of the
only kind admissible on so delicate a structure. But
not only is the stonework everywhere of the fairest and
best, the roofs are perfect to the smallest ornament;
and so elegant that although the building is on a great
scale it seems more beautiful than vast, and impresses
rather by an air of distinction, of aristocracy even, than
by any display of power and wealth. It may seem
strange to speak of aristocracy in connection with an
edifice that is the very centre and council-hall of a
mighty and sometimes turbulent democracy; but the
word is not misapplied, from an artistic point of view,
to a building so completely under the government and
discipline of the best architectural authority, having
under its command the best and most intelligently obe
dient labor. Such a building has no natural connection
with tumult and disorder. The powers of anarchy did
not produce it, could not have produced it. Nor is it

1 28 Paris.
either the product of Philistine wealth. The cost of it
will be about a million and a quarter sterling, yet it
only comes to us as an afterthought that so much good
work is costly. There is sometimes more of the self-
assertion of bourgeois money in a citizen's private house
than there is in this great palace. Ornament has been
used sparingly, and what there is of it is chiefly figure-
sculpture. The panels in the front are not carved but
simply divided by mouldings, lozenge-shaped or cir
cular. The consoles under the niches between the win
dows of the central pavilion are very delicately carved,
but the wall behind them is perfectly plain, and the
windows themselves are surrounded by very simple
mouldings. There is a little carving on the two taller
pavilions on each side. Over the arches of the two
beautiful dormer windows, near the clock, there is some
graceful figure-sculpture; and above and about the
clock itself is a fine central composition with colossal
figures and a pediment with the ship of Paris. Yet
even in this, the richest and most central part of the
whole edifice, the ornament is by no means overcharged,
and the figures are relieved by plain spaces of masonry,
as a drawing is by its margin. Among the ornaments
of the roof the most romantic are the men in armor,
with lances, who stand on pedestals along the ridge.
They are gilded, and produce a brilliant effect in strong
sunshine, besides recalling the times when the H6tel de
Ville was first erected. There are ten of them all
together, — six on the central pavilion, and two on each
of the pavilions to right and left.

FRONT OF THE HOTEL DE VILLE IN THE TIME OF LOUIS XIII.

The Hotel de Ville. 129
It is very commonly supposed that a building has
little influence upon the mind when it has no historical
associations, but in the case of the present Hotel de
Ville the gain is greater than the loss. It is a virgin
building as yet, and may be judged fairly on its merits
as a beautiful work of art. It is simply a palace which
looks as if it were awaiting the arrival of a prince in
a fairy-tale. It seems far too delicate to be in the
midst of a populace like that of Paris ; and one who
loves architecture can scarcely help wishing that it
might be transported by magic some night far away
in the woods and be safe from bullets and incendiarism.
The ways by which a people attains to municipal liberty
and parliamentary government are often so rough that
the recollection of them gives pleasure only to the
enemies of both. If the present building has no splen
did memories, if it has received no sovereign within
its walls, and been the scene of no extravagant enter
tainments, it is, at the same time, absolutely free from
all revolting and horrible associations. No stormy
councils have been begun in its chambers to end in
bloodshed; no murder has been perpetrated on its
threshold, nor have privileged spectators ever enjoyed
from its windows the burning of heretics at the stake,
or seen criminals torn limb from limb by four infuriated
horses. And not only is the present edifice free from
the horrors of history, but it is also free from its
vulgarities. The wretched quarrels of yelling dema
gogues, jumping on tables and crushing pens and
inkstands under their heels, have not, as yet, resounded
9

I30

Paris.

in a building that seems fit only for the presence of
gentlemen. The present building is in its main features a repro
duction of that which existed before 1871, but it is
not a slavish reproduction; and a comparison between
the two shows that the architect took the opportunity
for introducing many improvements. What has been
done may be explained to a certain extent as follows.
Suppose that an artist makes a drawing, well composed.

THE HOTEL DE VILLE IN I583. FROM A DRAWING BY JACQUES
CELLIER.
and in good general proportions, but still leaving room
for improvement in other ways ; and then suppose that
an artist of riper knowledge and more cultivated taste
goes over the drawing, pencil in hand, and shows how
the ideal which the first artist had in view may be
approached more closely. He finds excellent inten
tions, to which full justice has not always been done.
He says, "You might have made more of this idea;

The Hotel de Ville. 1 3 1
you intended this part of your composition to be
elegant, — it may be made more elegant still ; these
details might be enriched, though without deviating
from your intention ; " and while he talks in this way
he revises the whole work with his pencil ; and some
how, without making any very obvious alteration, he
gives it greater refinement, and makes it hold better
together. I have not space to show in all ways how
this has been done in the new Hotel de Ville, but I
may mention one or two instances. The gateway
pavilions (those that rise on each side of the central
mass) had each of them a sort of encorbelled turret
or bartizan, which, with excellent artistic judgment,
had been placed to the right in one instance, and to the
left in the other, so as to make each pavilion intention
ally lopsided and unsymmetrical in itself, yet forming
an imperfect part of a perfect whole. The first archi
tect had the idea, which was excellent, but he strangely
failed to make the most of it. He diminished the
size of the turret in its uppermost story and gave it
no roof! It is wonderful that he should have missed
such an opportunity. The architect of the new build
ing has been careful not to miss it. He has carried
the turrets up to the full height of the pavilions, and
then given to each of them a delightfully elegant little
roof of its own, carefully finished with an ornamental
ridge and finials so as to avoid a pyramidal point, and
imitate in little the roofs of the great pavilions. These
turrets now occupy the same position that pretty chil
dren have in a family, and they give a charm and

132 Paris.
lightness to the whole edifice that could have been
attained by no other means. Again, in the ornamental
structure about the clock, and in the bell-turret, the
architect has taken the old motives and made more
of them. After every allowance has been made for
the imperfect draughtsmanship of old engravers, it
is evident from their testimony that these important
and central parts of the H6tel de Ville, though the
same in general intention as at present, were in old
times much less elegant than they are now; and we
know from drawings and photographs, if personal rec
ollection were insufficient, that many small improve
ments upon the edifice as it existed immediately before
the Commune have been unobtrusively but effectively
introduced into the new design. The corner pavilions
are better finished than they were under Louis Napo
leon, and so it is all over the building. The intention
has been to preserve the traditional forms, but quietly
to take every opportunity of improving them. It is a
new edition of an old book, not revised by the author,
but by a respectful editor more skilful than the
author himself
It is curious that the front of the edifice, which
seems to us so happily designed, should be the result
of accident. The original plan included only the
central mass with the clock and the bell-turret,' and
the two pavilions which flank it. The design was
very pretty and complete in itself; but it was not im
posing by its size : and even such as it was the town had
the greatest difficulty in carrying it into execution, and

The Hotel de Ville. 133
it lingered from reign to reign. Francis I. planned
the Renaissance edifice; but although he employed
a hundred workmen upon it, afterwards reduced to
fifty, it was not very forward when he died. It was
not finished even at the death of Henri IV. The build
ing was in a very imperfect state for seventy-two years,
and remained imperfect afterwards. Nothing proves
more clearly the immense inferiority of old to modern
Paris in productive power, than the great difficulty
experienced by the sovereigns and people of former
times in getting forward with their architectural under
takings, which seem in almost every instance, except
that of the Sainte Chapelle, to have been far too heavy
for their resources. To the modern municipality the
erection of such a building as the old Hotel de Ville
would be a small matter. The present one, which has
grown from its foundations in the lifetime of a child,
is three or four times as vast as that which existed in
the imagination of Francis I., and which he could not
realize. The Hotel de Ville, the Tuileries, and the Palace of
the Luxembourg, are all instances of enlarged buildings.
If the reader has perused the article ¦ on those palaces,
he will have observed that they were enlarged in differ
ent ways. The Tuileries grew by the addition of masses
and pavilions, first on one side then on the other, and
all (except the very earliest) out of proportion with the
centre, which had to be enlarged afterwards. Then came
a general levelling-up and alignement, the consequence
being a piece of patchwork and mending which never

1 34 Paris.
presented the appearance of an artistic composition.
The Luxembourg was enlarged in another way. It
was already overloaded at one end by four heavy
pavilions which stood too near each other, when
Louis-Philippe, to get more internal accommodation,
made the four into six by adding two others and
advancing the front, thereby considerably increasing
the defect of heaviness. In the case of the Hotel de
Ville, on the contrary, the enlargement by the addition
of masses of building to right and left, set a little
back, and pavilions at the corners, coming forward,
was done so judiciously, and with such a fine sense
of what is suitable and proportionate in a great edifice,
that although the present architects had the oppor
tunity of substituting a design conceived all at once,
they have been perfectly satisfied with reproducing
all the main features of the old building with its
appendices. The truth is, that nobody could possibly
know, unless he was told, that the wings were additions
or appendices at all. It is the happiest instance of
successful enlargement that I ever met with. In the
interior the increase of dimensions was carried out
by the addition of two new courts, one on each side
the central quadrangle. All these courts in the new
building are exquisitely finished. The two lateral ones
have beautiful winding staircases, rich in sculpture,
with open balusters and turret-roofs, — an idea which
has descended from Gothic times and been adopted
by the Renaissance with the addition of elegant orna
ment. The central court is on a higher level (access

The Hotel de Ville. 135
to it is had by stairs from the side-courts and the
vestibule), and on occasions of great festivity it will
probably be converted into a vast hall by the addition
of a tent- roof
The festivities at the H6tel de Ville have long been
celebrated for the combination of magnificence with
good taste. The present writer remembers seeing the
old building at its best many years ago at a grand ball
given by the Municipality to Napoleon III. and Victor
Emmanuel. He happened to be in the great court
when the sovereigns ascended the stairs, and the com
bination of beautiful architecture with rich draperies,
abundant illumination, and splendid costumes, made a
spectacle hardly to be rivalled elsewhere, except in
some Italian palaces. The scene in the great gallery
was as splendid, but not so entirely outside of the com
monplace. The great gallery was converted for a short
time into a throne-i-oom ; and I happened to be at a
little distance from the thrones on which sat the two
potentates, — one of them at that time the most dreaded
of European majesties, the other only king of Sardinia,
a petty sovereign who had won recognition by sending
troops to the Crimean war. The guests formed a lane
all down the room, and the personages walked slowly
along it, greeting those they knew. Since that night
what changes ! The palace they came from is now the
last remnant of a ruin; the municipal palace, then
thronged by a crowd of guests, has since been reduced
to ashes and replaced by an entirely new structure.
The great Emperor, after defeat and humiliation, lies

1 36 Paris.
embalmed in a sarcophagus in England, the young hope
of his dynasty by his side, and the prince whom he
then patronized sleeps royally in the Pantheon at Rome,
the first of the kings of Italy. The lives of both have
now receded completely into the domain of history, and
are as sure to be remembered in future ages as those of
any other famous personages who have visited the old
H6tel de Ville. Italy will never forget the rough but
good-natured and hearty soldier who so often sacrificed
his simple personal tastes to the duties of a more and
more exalted station ; nor is France ever likely either
to forget or forgive the statesman, at one time consid
ered so astute, the ultimate outcome of whose deep-laid
schemes was the aggrandizement of her neighbors and
the humiliation of herself There are a hundred other
associations with the H6tel de Ville, which it would be
easy to enumerate, but these are among the most re
cent. If the Republic lasts, it is not very probable that
the new building will often be enlivened by the presence
of crowned heads; but the municipality will at least
be able to hold its sittings without the uncomfortable
anticipation of those requests for money which so
frequently came from the French sovereigns to the
provosts of Paris and the ^chevins of old. The only
real inconveniences from which the modern munici
pality is ever likely to suffer are the excess of its own
power and the temptations to its abuse. The Munici
pal Council has such great resources that it is constantly
tempted to place itself in antagonism to the State. The
two never work smoothly together for very long, and

soo I
< n<OXH

The Hotel de Ville. 137
the notice of civic independence has taken such deep
root in many minds that they are always ready to see
infringements of it in the most ordinary acts of the
National Government.
Whatever of evil there may be in our own time, what
ever evil deeds may have been done during the Com
mune, men are certainly less barbarous than they were
four or five hundred years ago. Executions are less
cruel, prisoners are treated with more humanity. I
have passed rapidly over the executions which took
place formerly in the Place de Greve, the open space
just before the Hotel de Ville, where they are making
the new garden-squares, and where boys amuse them
selves with bicycles on the smooth asphaltum ; but if
the reader wishes to thrill his nerves with horror, he
will find nothing more terrible than the deliberate cru
elty of those executions in old times ; the simple mur
der by a discharge of musketry under the Commune
was tender mercy in comparison. Our warfare, too,
barbarous as it still remains, is not quite so horrible as
in the middle of the fifteenth century, when hundreds
of English prisoners were thrown into the Seine near
the Hotel de Ville, with bound hands and feet, and
drowned there in the Seine before the eyes of an un-
protesting populace. Let us confess frankly that, not
withstanding all the picturesque interest of past times
so delightful to novelists and painters, they are terrible
if studied seriously, — terrible if once we realize what
they were; and there is no place in the world where
we feel this horror of the past more strongly than on

1 38 Paris.
the Place de Greve, just before the lovely modern pal
ace which I have been trying to describe. The horror
of that dreadful night in May, 1871, when the whole
edifice and the houses opposite were in flames, does
not really equal the horror of one quiet execution in
the feudal times. The destruction of a certain amount
of property however valuable, the loss of a certain num
ber of lives in a street battle however passionate and
sanguinary the conflict, are less odious than the quiet
application of vindictive torture to a single unresisting
victim. There are places in Europe where our best
charity to the past is to forget it if we can, and this is
one of them. Let us look hopefully to the future;
and may this, the fairest municipal palace in the whole
world, hear no harsher sounds than the discussions of
citizens in council, and see no fiercer flame than the
light of its own festal illuminations.

VIII.
THE PANTHEON, THE INVALIDES, AND THE
MADELEINE.
AS in a former article the two principal Gothic edi
fices in Paris were studied together, so in the
present case the reader is invited to consider three of
the principal Renaissance buildings at the same time.
The first of these is a church, which has been employed
alternately for divine worship and as a Walhalla for illus
trious Frenchmen, and which to the present day bears
traces of both uses ; the second is a church which has
become a mausoleum exclusively associated in the pop
ular mind with a great renown entirely unforeseen when
the building was erected ; the third, again, was begun
as a church, continued with the intention of making it
a temple for military commemorations, and finally used
for ecclesiastical purposes, while still preserving the
external appearance of a Greek temple, modified by
Roman and Gallic imitation. All these edifices have
thus been strangely connected both with religion and
with the vanities of human celebrity. All of them,
again, have a similar architectural interest as modern
experiments with antique architectural forms.
It is one of the commonest of errors, among people
who do not trouble themselves to keep chronology in

140 Paris.
mind, to connect Gothic architecture with Christianity
by such an intimate association that they can hardly
separate the two. Pointed arches and painted windows
appear to them ecclesiastical and even religious, while
classical architecture seems much more suitable for lay
purposes. Nobody who has this prejudice can regard
a Renaissance church with any fairness. The forms of
the architecture in Renaissance churches are not exactly
those with which the early Christians were familiar, but
they are incomparably nearer to them than the Gothic
forms. As Gothic work looks very old and ruinous
(when it has not undergone restoration), we vaguely
give it credit for great antiquity, while the real reason
for its ancient appearance is because it is an exceedingly
frail and unsubstantial kind of architecture, which, after
a short time, requires incessant repair. If you divide
in three parts the centuries which have passed since the
foundation of Christianity, you will place Gothic archi
tecture, a French invention, in the third. It is, in fact,
the most modern of all the really original styles, and
one which was never associated with the early history
of Christianity. There is, consequently, no religious
reason for the preference of Gothic architecture for
churches, unless it is found that pointed arches are
more favorable to religious feelings than round ones,
and the various fanciful columns and capitals of the
Gothic builders more serious than the limited but well-:
studied inventions of the Greeks.
The idea of the dome came to France from Italy, and
it is unnecessary in this place to trace the architectural

The Pantheon, Invalides, and Madeleine. 141
pedigree of the French Pantheon beyond its ancestor,
St. Peter's at Rome, the common inspirer of western
imitations. Soufflot, the architect of the Pantheon, was
one of those narrow-minded artists who identify them
selves completely with a certain phase of art, and who,
perhaps, by that concentration of their faculties, ex
press themselves in it as naturally as in their native
language. Souffiot committed terrible havoc in Notre
Dame, and proved to all future ages that he had neither
knowledge nor feeling about Gothic; but when, in 1764,
he began the church of St. Genevieve, he had found
congenial occupation. The foundation-stone was laid
by Louis XV. with a votive intention ; but the building
was completed^ in the beginning of the Revolution, and
the Constituent Assembly opened it as a " Pantheon,''
or temple dedicated to all gods, including by extension
all heroes or great men. The well-known inscription
then placed in large letters upon the frieze over the
portico, " AUX GRANDS HOMMES LA PATRIE RECONNAIS-
SANTE," is a clear explanation of the sense attached to
the Greek name of the building; and a very fine in
scription it is, saying all that is needed in six perfectly
cadenced words, full of noble purpose and patriotic
feeling. Louis XVIII. handed over the edifice to the
clergy in fulfilment of the original intention of Louis
XV., and it remained in their hands, with the inscrip
tion effaced, until the revolution of July. Under Louis-
Philippe and the Second Republic it was a Pantheon
again, with the inscription restored ; but on the estabhsh-
ment of Louis Napoleon's personal power, when he was

142

Paris.

buying the support of the clergy, the Pantheon was
given to them a second time, and they were allowed
to keep it until the funeral of Victor Hugo. They re
established altars in the interior, and a cross upon the

THE PANTHEON.

dome, but they did not efface the inscription. In the
early revolutionary stage of the Third Republic, there
being some apprehension that the Pantheon might be
secularized again, a plan was matured for its decoration

The Pantheon, Invalides, and Madeleine. 143
with religious paintings as a sort of final prise de pos
session in favor of the Church ; but this has availed
nothing, and now (1885) it seems possible that the
paintings may be removed. This could be done, I
believe, without destroying them.^
Much opprobrium has been cast upon the Republi
can Government for its conduct in this matter, but it
may be remembered that a monarch, Louis-Philippe,
did exactly the same thing; and if consecration is of
eternal effect, then the English noblemen who have
turned old abbeys into luxurious country-houses must
be equally culpable. The Pantheon has never been a
parish church, and the persons whose desires or in
terests have been most interfered with are a dead king
and a saint who died in the early twilight of French
history. The Pantheon has stood the test of a hundred years
of criticism, without which no building can be con
sidered sure of permanent fame. Its merits are not
of a kind to excite enthusiasm, but they gain upon us
with time, and satisfy the reason if they do not awaken
the imagination. We can never feel with regard to a
severe classical building like the Pantheon the glow of
romantic pleasure which fills sense and spirit in Notre
Dame or the Sainte Chapelle. If there is emotion here
it is of a different kind. The building has a stately and
severe dignity; it is at once grave and elegant, but it
is neither amusing as Gothic architecture often is by its
^ As the removal of the paintings is uncertain, the account of some of
them which appeared in the first edition of this book is retained.

144 Paris.
variety, nor astonishing as Gothic buildings are by the
boldness with which they seem to contravene the ordi
nary conditions of matter. The edifice consists of a
very plain building in the form of a cross, with a pedi
ment on pillars at one end and a dome rising in the
middle. There are no visible windows, a renunciation
that adds immensely to the severity and gravity of the
composition, while it enhances the value of the columns
and pediment, and gives (by contrast) great additional
lightness and beauty to the admirable colonnade be
neath the dome. There does not exist, in modern
architecture, a more striking example of the value of
a blank wall. The vast plain spaces are overwhelming
when seen near, and positively required the little deco
ration which, in the shape of festooned garlands, relieves
their upper portion. At a little distance the building is
seen to be, for the dome, what a pedestal is for a statue;
and the projection of the transepts on each side of the
portico, when the edifice is seen in front, acts as margin
to an engraving. Had their plain surfaces been en
riched and varied with windows, the front view would
have lost half its meaning; the richness of the Corin
thian capitals and sculptured tympanum, and the im
portance of the simple inscription, -draw the eye to
themselves at once.
The situation of the Pantheon is the finest in Paris
for an edifice of that kind. Only one other is compar
able to it, Montmartre, on which is now slowly rising a
church of another order, dedicated to the Sacri Cceur.
The dome of the Pantheon is one of the great land-

The Pantheon, Invalides, and Madeleine. 145
marks of Paris ; it is visible from every height and from
a thousand places of no particular elevation. It does
not simply beloflg to its own quarter, but to the whole
city. The interior is interesting in different ways, both as
an experiment in architecture and as an experiment in
the employment of mural painting on an important
scale. The first point likely to interest an architectural
student is the manner in which the architect has com
bined his vaults and his pillars. Soufflot's tendency
(unlike that of the architects of St. Peter's in Rome and
St. Paul's in London) was towards an excessive light
ness. His project was to erect his dome on elegant
pillars; but these were found insufficient, and another
architect (Rondelet) replaced them by massive piers
of masonry. Elsewhere there are Corinthian columns
carrying a frieze and cornice, and above the cornice a
groined (intersected) vault, of course with round arches,
and having exceedingly slender terminations, as this
system of vaulting cuts away nearly everything and
leaves a minimum of substance at the corners to bear
the weight. You may see such vaults frequently in the
works of the early Itahan painters, but they always sup
port them by very- slender and elegant columns; where
as in Soufflot's work they rest on a Corinthian order,
with its entablature, which gives the idea of a contra-.
diction, for either the vaulting is too light or the en
tablature is needlessly heavy. The Italian painters
were consistent on the side of lightness. Wren on the
side of heaviness ; but it seems as if Soufflot had rather

146

Paris.

confounded the two, so far as the satisfaction of the eye
is concerned.
There is a remarkable peculiarity about the level
of the floor ; the aisles and transepts are higher than

.t%

THE PANTHEON FROM THE GARDENS OF THE LUXEMBOURG.

the nave, into which you have to descend by five
steps. The general aspect of the interior is agreeable,
from the pleasant natural color of the stone and its
thoroughly careful finish everywhere; but the large

The Pantheon, Invalides, and Madeleine. 147
spaces of wall, though divided by half-columns, were
felt to be too bare, and there have been various
projects for their decoration. That which is now
being carried into execution includes the painting
of many mural pictures at a height which we should
describe as the line in an exhibition, and also of
decorative friezes at a greater height above the eye.
I have mentioned the columns which, half buried in
the wall, divide what, without them, would be its too
extensive spaces. The existence of these columns
cuts the wall into a series of upright panels not always
convenient for the purposes of an artist, so it has been
decided that the larger compositions should include
three of these spaces, and that the picture should in
these cases appear as if it were seen behind the col
umns, which themselves are left without any kind of
painting or decoration. The plan was the best that
could have been adopted under the circumstances, as
the artists would have felt cramped by being confined
to narrow upright panels ; but it required very careful
management to preserve Souffiot's architectural effect.
Mural painting ought never to make us feel as if the
wall were taken away, because that is an injury to the
architecture. The painting should be so far removed
from realism that we feel the wall to be a wall still,
upon which certain events have been commemorated.
Among French mural painters, not one has under
stood this so well as Puvis de Chavannes, and it would
have been wise to entrust to him the entire decoration
of the Pantheon, both for the sake of the architecture

148 Paris.
and for the unity of the work; but, unfortunately (so
far as these considerations are concerned), other men
have also been called in, men of great ability, no doubt,
yet who were not disposed to make the necessary
sacrifices. Puvis de Chavannes is essentially a mural
painter. He has accepted the conventionalisms of that
kind of art, and his mind is so exceptionally consti
tuted that such restraints are evidently agreeable to him
and favorable to his inventive powers. His large work in
the Pantheon represents the finding of Saint Genevieve
when a child by Saint Germain and Saint Loup, at
Nanterre, when they were journeying towards England.
The bishop sees that the child has a religious aspect,
" has the Divine seal upon her," and predicts for her
a memorable future. This takes place in a vast land
scape, with undulating ground and fine trees in the
middle distance against a line of blue hills, and a blue
sky with white, long clouds. In the foreground is a
rustic scene, including the milking of a cow under
a shed ; and in the middle distance we have a view
of Nanterre, or at least of a mediaeval city. The
figures are all very simply painted in dead color, kept
generally pale and hardly going beyond tints, which
are often false so far as nature is concerned, but never
discordant. Such painting is very reticent, very con
sistent ; and, though it is not true, it contains a great
amount of truth, and implies far more knowledge than
it directly expresses. The landscape background, for
example, is simple, but it is not ignorant; it shows
quite plainly that the painter is a man of our own

The Pantheon, Invalides, and Madeleine. 149
century, perfectly conversant with our knowledge, yet
decided not to go beyond a certain fixed point in the
direction of actual imitation. The figures are exceed
ingly dignified; but when the painter gets away from
the muscular type, and has to deal with weaker men or
with children, he is not so satisfying. A smaller pic
ture represents the child Saint Genevieve praying in
a field, while the rustics watch and admire her. The
sentiment here is very pure and simple, like that of
an idyllic poem. In the upper part of the composition
a ploughboy, behind trees, watches the saint while
his oxen rest; in the lower part, a peasant man and
a woman watch her also.
Now, although these paintings tell their story per
fectly, not a single person or other object in them is
so far realized as to make us forget the wall-surface.
A story has been told upon the wall just as an inscrip
tion might have been written upon it, but nothing has
been done to take the wall away. Even the pale tint
ing is so contrived as not to contrast too violently with
the natural stone around it. Let the visitor who has
just seen these paintings, and, perhaps, been a little put
out by their conventionalism, glance up from them to
the pendentives under the dome painted by Carvallo
from drawings by G6rard. Those works are strong
in darks, and in far more powerful relief than the situa
tion warrants. They are also surrounded by heavily
gilt carvings, which make the surrounding stone look
poor; in short, from the architectural point of view,
they are a series of vulgar blunders. I would not use

1 50 Paris.
language of this kind with reference to so serious, so
noble an artist as Jean Paul Laurens, but I cannot help
regretting that his magnificent composition of the death
of Saint Genevieve was not in some pubhc gallery rather
than in the Pantheon. The realization is far too power
ful for mural painting. We do not see a record on
a wall, but the wall is demolished, and through the
opening we witness the scene itself, the infinitely
pathetic closing scene at the end of a saintly life, when,
even in the last moments of extremest weakness, a
venerable woman still throws into the expression of
her countenance the benedictions that she cannot utter.
One consequence of the external force with which all
the figures and objects are realized in full modelling
and color is that the two columns which cross the work
vertically are felt to be in the way; in other words,
the architecture of the Pantheon is in the way, and
so far from helping the architect, the painter has done
him an injury, for what are smoothly chiselled stones,
what are fluted columns and pretty Corinthian capitals,
to the awful approach of Death?
On the other mural paintings in the Pantheon we
have no need to dwell. So far as I know them yet ^
they belong to the class of historical genre common
in the French salons, and have neither the power
of Laurens nor the careful adaptation of Puvis de
Chavannes. Cabanel's pictures represent three scenes
in the history of Saint Louis, — one his childhood, when
1 Some paintings on the south side have been uncovered lately, and
these I have not seen.

The Pantheon, Invalides, and Madeleine. 1 5 1
he is being taught by his mother ; a second, his civil
justice; and a third, his military life as a Crusader.
The first subject is the best suited to Cabanel's talent,
and is a prettj' domestic scene. The subject selected
by M. Maillot for his paintings in the south transept
is a mediaeval procession with the relics of Saint
Genevieve, and these paintings are a good example
of a danger different from the powerful realization of
Laurens. In the present instance the evil is a crudity
of brilliant color, like mediaeval illumination, which
always seems out of place on a wall unless it is carried
out consistently by polychromatic decoration through
out the building.
It is sometimes said by journalists that these paintings
are frescos (wall-paintings are generally taken for fres
cos). The fact is that they are oil-paintings on toile
matoufl^e, that is, on canvas fastened to the wall by
a thick coat of white-lead. This is now the accepted
method for mural painting in France. It is convenient
for the artist, as it allows him to paint in his own studio
in a material he is accustomed to use ; and it is believed
to be as permanent as any other.
The dome of the Pantheon attracts the eye simply
by its own architectural beauty ; but that of the Inva
lides, by Mansard, is lustrous with abundant gilding,
and on a sunny day shines over Paris with the most
briUiant effect. It is splendid against one of those
cerulean skies that are still possible in the capital of
France. Certainly nothing does so much for the splen
dor of a great city as very conspicuous gilding. There

152

Paris.

are drives in Paris, as, for instance, from the Trocadero
to the Place de la Concorde, during which the dome
of the Invalides accompanies you like a harvest-moon.
On a nearer approach.it is the architecture that claims
attention. The dome itself is fine, but in many re-

^f. •^yi*.* «-..*-.^

THE INVALIDES.

spects the building as a whole is greatly inferior to the
Pantheon. Souffiot made the body of his church an
ample base for his dome in every direction ; but at the
Invalides one receives the impression of a man with
a prodigious head on a small body and very narrow
shoulders. The columns of the dome are in couples.

The Pantheon, Invalides, and Madeleine. 1 5 3
with projecting masses doing the work of buttresses.
This gives more light and shade than the simple colon
nade of the Pantheon, but not such beautiful per
spective, as the projections interfere with it. The
composition of the front makes us feel strongly the
special merits of the Pantheon. Instead of the majestic
columns of Souffiot's work, his rich pediment, and the
massive plain walls on each side as margin, we have in
the Invalides a poor little pediment reduced to still more
complete insignificance by the obtrusive windows, etc.,
on each side of it. Again, the front of the Invalides
offers an example of that vice in Renaissance architec
ture which Soufflot avoided, — the superposition of dif
ferent orders. It is divided into two stories, Roman
Doric below and Corinthian above, a variety that the
Renaissance architects enjoyed, though it does not seem
more desirable than two languages in one poem.
This criticism does not affect either the beauty of
Mansard's dome as a fine object seen from a distance,
or the importance of the interior, one of the most
impressive in all Paris, especially since it has become the
mausoleum of Napoleon I.
A lofty dome, supported by massive piers perforated
with narrow arched passages and faced with Corinthian
columns and pilasters, a marble floor of extraordinary
richness and beauty everywhere, all round the base of
the dome a stair of six marble steps descending to the
circular space under it, and in the midst of this space
a great opening or well, with a diameter of more than
seventy feet, and a marble parapet, breast-high, for the

154 Paris.
safety of the visitors who look down into it, — such is
the first impression of the interior.
Not only do the people invariably look down, but
they generally gaze for a long time, as if they expected
something to occur; yet a more unchanging spectacle
could not be imagined. In the middle there is a great
sarcophagus of polished red Russian granite, and twelve
colossal statues stand under the parapet, all turning
their grave, impassible faces towards the centre. They
are twelve Victories whose names have resounded
through the world, and in the spaces between them
are sheaves of standards taken in battle, and in the red
sarcophagus lies the body of Napoleon.
The idea of this arrangement is due to the architect
Visconti, who had to solve the problem how to arrange
a tomb of such overwhelming importance without hiding
the architecture of so noble an interior as this. His
solution was admirably successful. The arrangement
does not interfere in the slightest degree with the archi
tecture of the edifice, which would have been half hid
den by a colossal torrib on its own floor ; while we have
only to look over the parapet to be impressed with the
grandeur and the poetic suitableness of the plan. With
our customs of burial we are all in the habit of looking
down into a grave before it is filled up, and the impres
siveness of Napoleon's tomb is greatly enhanced by our
downward gaze. We feel that, notwithstanding all this
magnificence, we are still looking down into a grave, —
a large grave with a sarcophagus in it instead of a coffin,
but a grave nevertheless. The serious grandeur, the

The Pantheon, Invalides, and Madeleine. 155
stately order, of this arrangement seems to close appro
priately the most extraordinary career in history; and
yet it is impossible to look upon that sarcophagus with
out the most discouraging reflections. The most splen-

r---.

THE MADELEINE.

did tomb in Europe is the tomb of the most selfish, the
most culpably ambitious, the most cynically unscrupu
lous of men ; and the sorrowful reflection is that if he
had been honorable, unselfish, unwilling to injure others,
he would have died in comparative or in total obscurity,

156 Paris.
and these prodigious posthumous honors would never
have been bestowed upon his memory.'
The church of the Magdalen (Madeleine) is curiously
connected with the history of Napoleon I., who had the
incompleted edifice continued with the strange intention
of dedicating it as a temple to the memory of La Grande
Armee. Every year, on the anniversaries of the battles
of Austerlitz and Jena, the temple was to have been
illuminated and a discourse delivered concerning the
military virtues, with an eulogy of those who perished
in the two battles. This intention was never carried
out, and the building, which had been begun in 1764
as a church, was finished as a church under the reign
of Louis-Philippe. Nothing could apparently be more
decided in architectural intentions than the Madeleine
as we see it now. It seems to be plainly a temple, and
never to have been intended for anything else. In
reality, however, it was begun under Louis XV. as a
church, resembling what is now the Pantheon, and the
change of plan was carried into effect many years after
the works had been actually commenced. It is not by
any means a subject of regret that this temple should
have been erected in Paris, as it gives many students of
architecture who have not visited the south of Europe
an excellent opportunity for feeling what an antique
temple was like, to a degree that is not possible with no
1 Some fresh example of his baseness is constantly cropping up.
During the last visit I paid to the Invalides, in May this year (1883), I
could not help thinking all the time about that letter to which Napoleon
forged the signature of Davoust, and for publication too, as narrated not
very long since in the " Revue des Deux Mondes.''

The Pantheon, Invalides, and Madeleine. 1 5 7
more powerful teachers than photographs or small
models. Viollet-le-Duc said that it was barbarous to
build the copy of a Greek temple in Paris or London,
or among the mists of Edinburgh, condemning alike
the Madeleine and the fragmentary Scottish copy of
the Parthenon; but surely a student of architecture,
born in the north, would visit both the Scottish Parthe
non and the Parisian temple with great interest, simply
because they show him columns on their own scale,
real columns in the open air. We are so accustomed
to Gothic and Renaissance churches that a temple is
an acceptable variety, were it only to demonstrate, by
actual comparison, the immense superiority of more
modern forms for purposes of Christian worship. We
ought to bear in mind, however, that although the
Madeleine resembles- a Corinthian temple externally, it
has not the surroundings of such a temple and is not as
sociated with its uses. For Christian architecture, on the
other hand, such a system of building involves a great
waste of money and space in the colonnades and the
passages between them and the walled building or cella.
The space in the Madeleine, already so restricted, is
limited still farther by internal projections intended to
divide the length into compartments and to give a rea
son for six lateral chapels, so that every one who enters
it for the first time is surprised by the smallness of the
interior. I need hardly observe that there is not the
slightest attempt to preserve the internal arrangements
of a Greek temple, even if they were precisely known,
on which architects are not agreed. The side chapels

158 Paris.
have arches over them, the roof is vaulted with round
arches across the building, springing from Corinthian
columns, and in each section is a dome-ceiling with a
circular light (as in the Pantheon at Rome), these lights
being the only windows in the edifice. The high altar
is in a round apse en cut de four, with marble panels
and a hemicycle of columns behind the altar. There is
great profusion of marbles of various kinds, of gilding,
and of mural painting, that I have not space to describe
in detail. . Enough has been said to show that the work,
as a whole, is a combination of Greek, Roman, and
French ideas. The general idea of the exterior is
Greek, but if you examine details you see the infiuence
of Rome, and you find it still more strongly marked
inside, by the arches of the roof. The French spirit is
shown in the decoration chiefly, which is so truly Pari
sian that the Madeleine is instinctively preferred by
fashionable people. A fashionable marriage there is
one of the most thoroughly consistent spectacles to be
seen in modern Paris. Here is nothing to remind us
of the austerity of past ages, but the gilded youth of
to-day may walk along soft carpets, amid an odor of
incense and flowers and the sounds of mellifluous music.
The pretty ceremony over, they pass -out down the car
peted steps, and an admiring crowd watches them into
their carriages. And nobody thinks about the dead at
Austerlitz and Jena!

IX.
ST. EUSTACHE, ST. ETIENNE DU MONT,
AND ST. SULPICE.
TV TEXT to Notre Dame, St. Eustache is the largest
¦^ ^ church in Paris, and the difference between them
is much more marked in length than in height and
breadth. The length of Notre Dame is nearly 127
metres, that of St. Eustache only 88i; but while the
breadth of Notre Dame is 48 metres, that of St. Eus
tache is nearly 43 ; and the difference of height between
the two edifices, internally, is scarcely more than one
English foot in favor of the Cathedral. Besides their
similarity in height and width, the two churches have
an important feature in common, — ¦ their double aisles.
In short, it seems as if the builders of St. Eustache had
in their minds some distinct idea of rivalry with Notre
Dame, at least to a certain degree.
Before the present church of St. Eustache, there
existed a Gothic edifice that was not half so long, nor
half so broad either, so that it would not occupy a quar
ter of the area ; and if its height was proportionately
small (which is probable, as the present building is
very lofty), the cubic dimensions of the old church'
1 There had been another church still earlier, and perhaps a still
more remotely ancestral edifice than that ; but of these we know
nothing.

1 60 Paris.
would be less than one eighth of those of its successor.
It is evident, therefore, that so far as the importance of
the edifice is concerned we have nothing to regret ; and
it is not probable that the Gothic church exceeded the
present building either in elegance of design or perfec
tion of workmanship, while it may be accepted as cer
tain that it could not have been so interesting to the
student of architecture because the St. Eustache that
we know is a valuable experiment on a scale sufficiently
imposing for it to be really decisive.
The interest of St. Eustache consists in this, that the
designer, whoever he may have been, attempted to
combine the general impressiveness of a Gothic edifice
with the spirit of the Renaissance in every detail. He
must have admired Gothic architecture in a certain
fashion, and he must have appreciated its influence on
the mind, yet at the same time he did not admire it
enough to follow it slavishly in anything. Nobody
knows who the first architect was. It has been said
that his name was David ; and there was a Charles
David buried in the church, whose epitaph says that
he was architect and conductor of the building of that
church ; but he must have been a successor to the first
architect, as the first stone of the present building was
laid by the Provost of Paris in the year 1532 (August
19th), while Charles David was born in 1552. It is
much to be regretted that the original architect's name
should have lapsed into complete oblivion, as he was
an original thinker in architecture and a man of poetic
imagination.

THE CHURCH OF ST. EUSTACHE.

St. Eustache, St. Etienne, and St. Sulpice. 1 6 1
St. Eustache is closely connected, chronologically,
with the H6tel de Ville, as that edifice was begun just
a year after the church. It has been supposed that the
architect of St. Eustache must have been the architect
of the Hotel de Ville, or else one of his pupils; but this
is a mere supposition, without any evidence to support
it. We may observe that although both edifices are
works of remarkable merit, their merit is not the same.
The Hotel de Ville is simply a Renaissance palace, very
beautiful, but not attempting to solve any such problem
as the reconciliation of two opposite styles; while the
Church of St. Eustache is from beginning to end a sus
tained and conscious effort to unite the imposing effect
of Gothic with the delicacy and comparative sobriety
of Renaissance architecture. The result is a hybrid in
which every visitor who knows enough about architec
ture to be able to disentangle two opposite elements will
find ample and pleasurable occupation.
The ground-plan of St. Eustache approaches more
nearly to that of Notre Dame than would be believed
from the outward appearance of the two edifices. At
St. Eustache the long limb of the cross is much shorter
in proportion; but you have the same four lines of
columns, or piers, the same round apse and pourtour,
and the same series of small chapels outside. the double
aisles. In both edifices the transepts only reach to the
external walls of the chapels.
Other features that the two buildings have in com
mon are flying buttresses, rose-windows in the tran
septs, and spires at the intersection of the roof That

1 62 Paris.
of Notre Dame .has been restored, as we have seen, but
the spire of St. Eustache was long since shortened to
make a platform for a semaphore telegraph, and has
never been re-establi.shed.
The comparison fails most decidedly at the west end.
Everybody knows that Notre Dame .has twin towers
and a great west front ; but, unfortunately, of the twin
towers that St. Eustache was to have had only one has
been built, and that is small and not noteworthy. Nor
is it really one of the towers intended by the original
architect. It is an invention of the eighteenth century,
when it was thought necessary to erect a new portail,
which included a complete new front. The unknown
original architect had built a west front completely in
harmony with the rest of the edifice; but as for the
towers, he had only carried one of them partly towards
the height of the first detached story, while the other,
though prepared for, was not carried high enough to
detach it from the body of the church. Still, though
incomplete, the original front was beautiful, being as
elegant in jts severer parts as the rest of the exterior ;
while, in obedience to Gothic precedent, it was en
riched with statues on the buttresses and in the door
ways, and with other decorative sculpture, which, if we
may judge by what remains elsewhere, must have been
of the most delicate and refined quality. That was
in the time of the elegant Renaissance, when fancy and
invention were not yet excluded from architecture.
Then came the terrible mechanical period in the eight
eenth century, when both architects and the public per-

CHURCH OF ST. ETIENNE DU MONT. FROM SKETCH BY A.

BRUNET DEBAINES.

St. Eustache, St. Etienne, and St. Sulpice. 163
suaded themselves that graceful fancy was too light an
element to be admitted in serious art; and it happened
unfortunately that the west front of St. Eustache was
rebuilt during this period, without the slightest con
sideration for the desire of the original architect that
the church should be a combination of Gothic with
Renaissance forms.
The new portail was a very severe and very dull
arrangement of Roman Doric on the ground story, with
Roman Ionic and a plain pediment above. The one
tower that was built is in a sort of Italian Corinthian.
In order that the pediment might not appear too ab
surdly out of place, the lofty old gable which would
have appeared above it was cut off like the side of a
pyramid with an Italian balustrade at its base. The
general result is a huge applique that no more belongs
to St. Eustache than it would belong to the Sainte
Chapelle. It is much to be regretted that a complete
restoration of this part of the church was not under
taken during the reign of Napoleon III., when it might
have been quietly carried into effect. At the same
time towers might have been built in the spirit of the
original work. It is now too late to dream of any such
expenditure on the part of the Government; and the
priests have enough on their hands with the huge mon
umental church of the Sacred Heart on Montmartre,
which absorbs all the money that can be collected.
It is interesting to observe in what way the classical
tastes of a Renaissance architect modified Gothic forms.
Greek architecture, though elegant, was stiff and angu-

1 64 Paris.
lar; Roman architecture, though less visibly angular
because it had the round arch, was still simple and
severe; but Gothic architecture became pliant like the
branches of trees and lively like tongues of flame. In
St. Eustache the Gothic forms are stiffened by classical
feeling. The tracery of the windows is simplified and
monotonously repeated in corresponding parts of the
church. This simplification is especially visible in the
rose-windows, so poor and angular in comparison with
true Gothic. Again, in the spaces over the doors, in
stead of the richly inventive sculpture of the Gothic
tympanum, with its elaborate story of the Fall of Man
or the Last Judgment, the Renaissance architect has
introduced hexagonal tracery almost like the cells of a
honeycomb. Even in the large pilasters with Corin
thian capitals the half-column becomes an elongated
panel with a triangle at the top, and another triangle
at the bottom, pointing towards each other. For the
intricately curved iron-work on Gothic doors we have
plain oblong panels giving sixteen right angles to each
door. In a frieze running above the lowest windows
triglyphs are introduced, and all the rest of the orna
mentation is so angular that they do not seem out of
place. With its exceedingly perfect finish, and its
abundance of plain little details, the outside of St., Eus
tache reminds one of nothing so much as a masterpiece
of serious cabinet-making. And the wonder is, that
although the style is a jumble of reminiscences from
Greece, Italy, and mediaeval France, not one of them
in a condition approaching to purity, the whole is per-

INTERIOR OF ST. ETIENNE DU MONT.

.5"/. Eustache, St. Etienne, and St. Sulpice. 1 65
fectly harmonious. The reason is that every borrowed
idea has been so modified as to combine with every
other. The interior has one transcendent merit, and several
obvious defects. The merit is an overpowering sub
limity due to the expression of height which again is in
great part the result of the narrow space between the
columns, or piers, and the elevation of the point at
which the arches spring. It is like being at the bottom
of a deep and narrow ravine and seeing it spanned by
a little stone bridge far up above our heads. The im
pression of loftiness is also greatly aided by the unusual
height of the aisles.
Unfortunately, the narrowness of the space between
the piers, and the comparative massiveness of the piers
themselves, have the bad effect, sometimes met with in
Gothic churches, of impeding the view diagonally. So
long as you are in the large open space of the nave it is
' well, because that space is open enough to prevent any
sense of confinement; but though the aisles are very
lofty they convey the feeling of narrow passages, be
cause the successive piers of masonry are joined to
gether in perspective exactly as if they were walls, and
you only get a glimpse through the opening which is
nearest you. Some readers may remember the remark
able difference in this respect between the Cathedral at
Rouen and the well-known Church of St. Ouen in the
same city. The Church of St. Ouen is much more open,
• which gives more spacious perspectives, and may be
one of the reasons why it is so generally preferred to the

1 66 Paris.
Cathedral, in spite of some architectural authority on
the other side.
There is one notable advantage in the mixed style
of St. Eustache. It is near enough to classic architec
ture to admit without incongruity both learned figure-
sculpture and learned modern painting, so that there is
no necessity for archaic forms in either. It is probably
for this reason that St. Eustache seems more happily
and suitably decorated than most other churches.
On the whole, we must come to the conclusion that
the interesting experiment of combining Gothic effects
with classical details and finish could not have been
made more intelligently than here. It is not at all an
unreasoned decadence of Gothic ; it is a combination at
once logical and imaginative. The unknown architect
was an artist, and a great artist; he could rise to the
sublime, and enjoy the exercise of a delicate and dis
criminating taste. Yet in spite of his rare powers of
combination he founded nothing. The style of St. Eus
tache might have become the modern style, but it did
not. In the eighteenth century men fell into that heavy
style of pseudo-classical architecture founded on de
based Italian precedent, which mistook dulness for dig
nity, and of which we have a striking example in the
west front of St. Eustache itself In the nineteenth,
ecclesiastical architecture in Paris has gone in two direc
tions, — either towards a" revival of past styles, as in the
meagre Gothic Church of St. Clotilde, the Gothic Church
of St. Bernard (Rue d'Alger) and others, the Roman
esque St. Ambroise (Boulevard Voltaire), and St. Pierre

St. Eustache, St. Etienne, and St. Sulpice. 167
de Montrouge ; or else towards the invention of a thor
oughly modern style, as in St. Augustin, the Trinity,
and St. Francois Xavier. It is useless to indulge in
unavailing regret, and it may have been necessary to
the full understanding of Gothic by the architects of
our time that many of them should pass through that
wretched state of probation known by its fruits in miser
able pseudo-Gothic; yet it seems as if, in St. Eustache,
they had a compromise between modern finish and
Gothic invention which might have suited modern capa
bilities, and at the same time have harmonized with the
development of other arts.
The Church of St. Etienne du Mont (near the Pan
theon) is not, like St. Eustache, an example of the com
plete fusion of the Gothic and Renaissance ideas ; it is
an example of Gothic in its decadence, strongly influ
enced by Renaissance, and finally lost in the new style
from which every trace of Gothic is eliminated. There
is, consequently, in St. Etienne nothing. of that strong
and peculiar artistic interest that belongs to the remark
able edifice we have just been describing. St. Eustache
stands alone, but there are many churches in which a
debased Gothic is clung to with hesitation, and at length
abandoned, in some important part, for the style that
had come into fashion. Still, very few of these churches
can be compared to St. Etienne for a certain romantic
charm. Only the most severe and intolerant purists in
Gothic would quarrel with a decadence like this, in
which, if a great art is dying, it dies like the last
cadences of music, leaving only a regret for the end of

1 68 Paris.
inspiring or sweet emotions. You may build a church
entirely according to rule, you may copy in all its de
tails the best art of the best time, yet not succeed in
awakening any feeling beyond a cold approval of your
accuracy. In St. Etienne there are many deviations
from precedent, many things that are theoretically diffi
cult to defend ; but the building is a poem, the archi
tect was an artist who had feeling and imagination, and
this small interior impresses the mind more powerfully
than many that are far vaster and incomparably more
costly. We have seen that in St. Eustache the view is diago
nally blocked by the nearness and thickness of the piers.
In St. Etienne this fault is happily avoided. The archi
tecture is everywhere open and penetrable, and the
intersections are delightful, especially because you are
always sure to have painted windows in the background.
The clerestory is proportionately low, being only the
height of the arch in the groined vault itself; and con
sequently the pillars would have appeared too high had
they not been united, at nearly half their height, by a
gallery on arches, which is one of the original features
of the church. This gallery, which (though otherwise
placed) answers to the triforium in pure Gothic edi
fices, is exceedingly light, with open balustrades, and it
has afforded an excuse for the elegant staircases that
wind round the columns on each side the beautiful
rood-screen, and belong to it, not only by their design,
but also as parts of the same beautiful and elaborate
composition.

WEST FRONT OF ST. ETIENNE DU MONT.

St. Eustache, St. Etienne, and St. Sulpice. 1 69
The great charm of St. Etienne is the beauty and
variety of the accidental views in it. There is in every
church the great view down the nave, and if that is not
successful we say the building is a failure; but besides
this supremely important aspect of the building, there
is, or there is not, the quality of revealing unexpected
beauties. Some churches are very remarkable for the
possession of this quality, — they even possess it to a
degree that the architect himself may possibly not have
foreseen; others are absolutely destitute of it. There
is no trace of it in the Madeleine. When you have
been in the Madeleine a quarter of an hour you have
nothing more to discover as to the possibilities of its
architecture, and for any new interest you must turn to
the decorative details added by the sculptor and the
painter. On the other hand, there are many little-known
churches — such as that at Dreux, for example — of
which the charm consists in lovely combinations, that
seem entirely accidental, and which a painter would
immediately select in preference to the long, formal view
down the nave. The best places for finding these are
near the intersections of the nave and transepts, and in
the pourtour round the apse, when happily there is one.
In St. Etienne du Mont all the necessary conditions for
producing happy accidental combinations exist in the
utmost perfection. The view is never blocked up, and
there is always a rich mystery of painted glass at the
end of it, relieving the cool color of the stone. The
prettiest of these minor views are those from the aisles
looking across the transepts and towards the apse.

1 70 Paris.
because there you get the extremely elegant work of
the rood-screen, which is continued across the aisles,
leaving a passage through beautiful doorways under the
prettiest little pediments imaginable, surrounded with
fanciful and delicate sculpture in the charming taste of
the refined Renaissance.
The west front of St. Etienne is very well known from
photographs. It is a curious composition, not defensi
ble, logically, yet picturesque and elegant in the total
result. First you have a pediment supported on four
imbedded columns of a debased Corinthian, with an arch
above the tympanum over a square-headed door. Above
the apex of the pediment oddly comes a rose-window,
much nearer to pure Gothic than those in St. Eustache,
and over the rose-window 2. fronton in the segment of a
circle like those which alternate with pediments on the
river-front of the Louvre. To crown all, we have a
highly pitched gable, essentially Gothic in principle, but
with Renaissance ornament. The tower is narrow and
elegant, and the composition of the front is happily
aided by a little turret with pepper-box roof low down
to the left. To a taste educated in the severe tradition
either of Greek or of pure Gothic such a combination
as this must seem indefensible, yet it is at the same time
elegant and picturesque. It may be proved, by reason
ing, to be incongruous ; and yet there is so much good
management in the proportioning of the parts and the
finish of the details that it is impossible to turn away
from such a work without a tormenting desire to look
at it again.

THE CHURCH OF ST. SULPICE.

St. Eustache, St. Etienne, and St. Sulpice. 1 7 1
The Church of St. Sulpice is very imposing from its
dimensions and the sober massiveness of its construc
tion, but it has none of the charm which belongs to the
two edifices we have just been studying. The front is
composed of two stories that include the lower parts of
the towers, and between the towers an open portico with
a loggia aBove. The architect employed two orders in
the front, — ¦ Italian Doric in the lower story and Italian
Ionic in the loggia. Corinthian is freely employed in
the northern tower, and a sort of Corinthian also in the
other, which has never been externally finished, though
it has attained its full height. A common criticism of
this front is that it does not answer in any special man
ner to the interior of the church, of which it explains
nothing. It is, in fact, only a gigantic screen giving the
church a sort of adventitious importance. Architecture
of this kind may excite admiration by majesty and
grandeur, but, unlike the work of the elegant Renais
sance, it can never charm or delight. It is the archi
tecture of pride and power ; it is not the architecture of
inventive affection.
The rest of St. Sulpice externally is heavy, substantial,
and dull. It is, I believe, a most respectable piece of
building and likely to be very durable, but it seems des
titute of fancy and imagination. The interior has round
arches springing from massive piers against each of
which is a Corinthian pilaster, and the roof is simply
vaulted with a large arch springing from the walls pierced
with lower vaults for the clerestory windows. The effect
is serious without any of the lightness and grace that

172 Paris.
characterize the Pantheon. Much of the effect of St.
Sulpice is due to its great size. The measures given by
different authorities are not precisely alike; but it ap'
pears from them that the Church of St. Sulpice is longer
and broader than Notre Dame, and very nearly as lofty
in the interior. The towers of St. Sulpice are higher by
two metres than those of the metropolitan Cathedral,
which they resemble in this, that they were to have had
spires, or some kind of superstructure that was never
added for fear of insecurity.
The greatest artistic attraction in St. Sulpice is the
chapel of the Holy Angels, with three large mural
paintings by Eugene Delacroix. He painted these on
the wall itself, which he primed in white lead with his
own hand. They were finished in June, 1861, and Dela
croix admitted people to see the chapel by circular
before it was open to the general public. He was anx
ious about the effect on the art world, and rather disap
pointed, as M. Charles Blanc and others were decidedly
cool, and the press was much divided in opinion. Since
then Delacroix is better understood, and we are not
so much disconcerted by his violent action and strong
coloring. The subjects on the walls are Heliodorus
beaten and Jacob wrestling, while that on the ceiling is
a Saint Michael triumphing over Lucifer. I have not
space for any adequate criticism of these works, but
may say that the subjects suited the artist's genius
exactly, and that he did himself justice. Whether art
of that character, which is entirely wanting in repose, is
suitable to mural painting, is another question. I think

¦5"/. Eustache, St. Etienne, and St. Sulpice. 173
it is not. I believe that if the calm stability of architec
ture is to be happily accompanied by painting, the pic
torial accompaniment should neither be too active nor
too loud. It ought to. be serene, calm, majestic, and
severely conventional. In a movable picture the artist
may display as much fire and impetuosity as he pleases ;
if the owner afterwards hangs the work in a wrong place
it is not the artist's mistake, and it is easily remedied :
but mural painting becomes a fixed part of the edifice,
and the feverish energy of Delacroix seems out of har
mony with the stately and massive architecture of St.
Sulpice.

X.
PARKS AND GARDENS.
*" I "HE parks of London are so magnificent, so far
superior to those of any other capital, that we
Englishmen are naturally exposed to the mistake of
measuring all other town parks by that standard, and
then despising them accordingly. I say " mistake,"
because it is clearly an error to compare anything
with a quite exceptional example of its kind. A man
may be an admirable swimmer without being in any
way comparable to the wonderful man who threw
away his life at Niagara; a church may be a noble
and interesting building without being half so large
as the enormous cathedral at Rome ; and a town park
may be infinitely precious to the inhabitants of a great
city, though it would look small on the banks of the
Serpentine. A Londoner can never judge of town
parks with any fairness if he is constantly thinking
of his own. The right way to estimate such posses
sions is not the comparative, when comparison can
lead to no result. If you wish to buy a book it is
well for you to be told that there is a better and
bigger work on the same subject, as perhaps you can
afford to get it ; but the* Parisians cannot have Hyde

Parks and Gardens. 1 75
Park. They have their own places of recreation, and,
especially during the last thirty years, there has been
a laudable desire to multiply such places, and make
them both prettier and more convenient ; but there is
no attempt to rival the parks of London.
Even if Parisian town-councillors had been disposed
to make the necessary sacrifices, such parks would
have been impossible in a city enclosed by fortifica
tions. Let us remember what the history of Paris
has always been. The town has always been a for
tress ; ring after ring of military wall has defended and
limited it, nor was an old ring ever demolished until
it had been made needless by the larger one outside
of it. In the cramped interior of a mediaeval city
the nearest approach to a park was simply a private
garden, unless when land was enclosed, as it was within
the wall of Philip Augustus, as a provision of building-
land for future necessities. Such land was usually
cultivated for profit. until the time came for covering
it with crowded houses and narrow streets. Unfortu
nately, too, it invariably happens that the value of open
spaces is never strongly felt until the city has grown to
a great size and has generally covered the land which
would have been most convenient for a park. The
existence of some of the most important open spaces
in such cities is due to the merest chance. Some king
o,r queen has had a fancy for a palace or a garden just
outside the wall. A considerable space of land has
been enclosed for that purpose, and so protected from
miscellaneous buildings. Afterwards the old wall has

1 76 Paris.
been removed and a new one built at a distance, and
then the land happened accidentally to find itself within
the city. In future ages royalty prefers some other
garden, or else royalty is abolished, and then the open
space is preserved as a popular recreation-ground.
That is one way in which a town park may come
into existence; another way is very different from
that. A space of ground may be out of the way for
a long time, and so irregular as to be inconvenient
to build upon. Afterwards, as the town spreads, this
piece of awkward ground is surrounded by houses
and becomes valuable. Then the question arises how
to make it most useful, and the town or the Govern
ment turns it into a sort of park or garden. In all this
there is very little real planning of open spaces for the
best advantage of the public.
There was a time when the garden of the Tuileries lay
just outside the wall of Paris, the enceinte of Charles V. ;
and now it happens exactly in the same way that the
Bois de Boulogne lies just outside the present wall, and
if a new belt of fortifications is made at some future
time, the Bois de Boulogne will be within the city. So
the space of land occupied by the park of the Buttes
Chaumont lay outside of the fiscal wall erected under
Louis XVI., but it was afterwards included within the
fortifications of Thiers.
A short general account of the open spaces of Paris
might be written as follows : The spaces of chief im
portance within the present walls are the gardens of
the Tuileries and Luxembourg, the Champs Elysees,

Parks and Gardens. 177
the Champ de Mars, with the garden of the Trocadero
opposite to it across the Pont d'Jena, the Jardin des
Plantes, the Parc Monceau, and that of the Buttes
Chaumont. It would seem out of place to mention
the cemeteries here, but Parisian cemeteries are really
little else than very large, well-kept gardens dedicated
to the dead ; and they are constantly visited by rela
tives and friends, so that, in fact, such great cemeteries
as those of Mont Parnasse, Montmartre, and especially
P^re-la-Chaise, are places at least of retreat from the
noise of the city, though the pleasure to be found in
them belongs to the pleasures of melancholy. Just
outside the present walls we have the Bois de Boulogne
to the west and that of Vincennes to the east. Within
the town there are now a considerable number of small
gardens, with seats and fountains, besides trees, flowers,
and a little space of lawn. These little gardens are
always called " squares " by the Parisians ; they have
become immensely popular, and are most precious to
the inhabitants of crowded streets at a distance from
the Tuileries or the Luxembourg.
The origin of the Garden of the Tuileries is as
follows: In the fourteenth century it was a region
of market-gardens, brick-kilns, tile-kilns (whence the
name), lime and plaster kilns, and potteries, inter
spersed with small summer residences for the citizens,
at that time without the walls. It was in the highest
degree improbable that such a region would be cov
ered by anything better than a labyrinth of narrow
streets ; but it so happened that a large portion of the

1 78 Paris.
land fell into the hands of one family, called Le Gendre,
about the beginning of the sixteenth century, which
rendered it possible to make, from them, an impor
tant purchase at once. The Duchess of Angoul^me,
mother of Francis I., lived in a palace then existing,
called le palais des Tournelles, and there was some
horribly bad drainage near that dwelling, so that the
most evil exhalations from a great mismanaged sewer
offended the royal nostrils, and she looked out for a
healthier and less odoriferous dwelling-place. There
was a villa in the region of the Tuileries which sufficed
for her purpose, and her son procured it for her, with
a considerable estate of ground which belonged to
the family of Le Gendre. At that time there was
not the slightest intention of erecting a palace there ;
the Duchess simply wanted a summer residence for
health's sake, and afterwards she lent it for life to Jean
Tiercelin on his marriage. He was maitre dliotel to
the Dauphin.
This was the beginning, and the reader knows already
what very mjich larger projects occupied the mind of
Catherine de Medicis, who wanted an important palace,
and built part of the Tuileries, which she hardly ever
used. Her palace has already been described; her
garden was an exceedingly formal affair, so that a map
of it looks like the map of an ancient Roman city, with
alleys always crossing each other at right angles. It
was bounded to the north by a long riding-school, sit
uated where the Rue de Rivoli is now, and to the west
by a bastion close to the present Place de la Concorde.

Parks and Gardens. 179
The garden of Catherine de Medicis was in its perfec
tion in the latter part of the sixteenth century, but it
was altered to conform to later fashions. A century
later the great principle of the right angle was aban
doned, and both acute and obtuse angles, with segments
of circles, were freely employed in the outlines of the
beds, while their internal floral decoration was in flour
ishes of unrestrained curvature. In the latter half of
the eighteenth century the flower-beds were restricted
to a limited space in front of the palace, and beyond
this were trees in plantations crossed by alleys at right
angles. This arrangement has in the main been pre
served to the present day, except that the flower-garden
is now laid out differently ; yet even here there is some
respect for the old plan in the preservation of the ba
sins and in the outline of the four sections westward
of the great basin. The sections nearest the Louvre
have been laid out afresh; the large octagonal basin
near the Place de la Concorde remains exactly as it was
a hundred years ago. Not one of the basins dates from
the original garden of Catherine de Medicis.
The connection of cause and effect has seldom been
more remarkable than in this instance. A bad smell
which enters the palace of a royal lady in the sixteenth
century is the reason why a great Republican city in
the nineteenth has a garden for recreation precisely in
the most convenient place. One special function of
royalty in France appears to have been to prepare
pleasant places for its heirs and successors, the people.
It is well that the people know the value of such places.

i8o Paris.
The destruction of the Tuileries by the Communards
was an exceptional act committed by a small minority
in an hour of frenzied exasperation; the French peo
ple generally are fond of architecture and gardens, and
proud to possess them. The garden of the Tuileries is
likely to be preserved to a very remote future. At the
present time it may be described as a sort of wood
between two ornamental spaces. The trees in the wood
(principally horse-chestnut and lime trees) make a no
ble avenue down the middle ; but the ground beneath
them is a desert trodden constantly by thousands, so
that there is hardly room for a single blade of grass.
At the east end of the garden the lawns are protected
and kept in great perfection, as they are in all the pub
lic gardens of Paris. What the French call the salles
de verdure of the Tuileries are, with their statues and
the massive trees beyond, very beautiful examples of
the classic taste in gardening.
When the lawns are only protected by low borders
children are tolerated upon them. The garden of the
Tuileries is the earthly paradise of Parisian childhood;
and for any person of mature years who takes pleasure
in watching the ways of children, a quiet seat there is
an excellent post of observation. The extreme quick
ness and mobility of the French nature, and especially
of the Parisian nature, are never better seen than in the
children of the Tuileries. The wonder is that children
can play so freely and happily when they are so fash
ionably dressed ; the explanation must be, that as they
are always dressed in that manner when out of doors

Parks and Gardens.

i8i

they live in a state of unconsciousness of fine clothes,
which would be impossible in the country. The dress
ing of children is carried too far in all French towns ;
it seems as if they were little dolls for milliners to try
expensive experiments upon. Any person who takes
an interest in such matters has only to go and listen to

 '^£M..t£<^ iiJ^^t. bM^'i,

GRANDE ALLfiE DES TUILERIES.

a band on a sunny afternoon, when he will see a num
ber of over-dressed little beings disporting themselves
prettily enough.
The great defect of the Tuileries garden is the un
interesting nature of the ground itself, — a dead level.

1 82 Paris.
enclosed by straight hnes. The terraces are an excep
tion, though they also are straight, and seem to me
wearisome; but this is merely a personal impression,
and I know that there are many people who take
a mysterious pleasure in walking on gravel flat as a
barrack-yard between two monotonous rows of trees.
What is really noble and remarkable in this garden is
the frequent combination of sculpture and architecture
with foliage, — a combination that never loses its charm,
as the severe lines of stone and marble, and their gray
or white color, excite in the eye a longing for the grace
ful masses of foliage and a desire for the priceless re
freshment of its green. It is curious how little of_a-.b.ss
to the garden has been the destruction of the palace.
Its removal has opened the magnificent perspective„of
Visconti's Louvre, which is quite sufficiently massive
and imposing to fill up a distance effectively.'
The most complete contrast to the garden of the
Tuileries is the Parc des Buttes Chaumont, situated
1 It has been for some time proposed to erect a new palace of art on the
site of the Tuileries, but the French Parliament has hitherto refused to
sanction the plan. However, a Parisian friend tells me that M. Garnier,
the well-known architect of the Opera, has prepared drawings for such
an edifice, which is likely to be erected in course of time. There is evi
dently no intention of joining it to the pavilions de Flore and de Marsan,
as they have new and magnificent fronts where such a juncture would
have to be effected. The new palace, therefore, will probably be a com
pletely isolated building, or else it may be connected with the pavilions
by a light open screen in the form of an arcade. Whatever is done, it
may be taken as certain that, with the present accumulated experience
of the style, any modern Parisian architect of proved ability will produce
a far better work than the old palace of the Tuileries ultimately became,
and one much more in accordance with the buildings erected by Visconti,
henceforth inevitably dominant over the whole edifice.

Parks and Gardens.

183

in a place that seems quite out of the way of visitors,
though great numbers of them go there. It is near
the northeastern corner of Paris, between the Boulevard
de la Villette and the fortifications. There is a natural
hill belonging to the high ground of Belleville, and this
hill was partly cut up into quarries, chiefly plaster quar
ries, which left a broken and precipitous appearance,

LAC DES BUTTES CHAUMONT.

suggestive of great possibilities to the enterprise of a
modern landscape-gardener. When this part of the"
city was laid out afresh in the year 1866, it was deter
mined to reserve the roughest and most hilly portion
of the ground as a pleasure-ground, greatly needed by
that populous and unfashionable quarter. It is not very
extensive, only sixty-one English acres ; and this want

1 84 Paris.
of size is a serious defect, because one sees the sur
rounding houses too closely and too easily for the illu
sion of wild scenery to be possible; but it is very
amusing and interesting to see with what extreme inge
nuity the clever gardeners have made the most of their
opportunity. By the help of a little willingness to be
deluded, the visitor may imagine himself to be, — not in
Scotland or Wales certainly, nor indeed in wild natural
scenery anywhere, but in some picturesque park in
Derbyshire ; and to get so much of Nature as that is a
great thing indeed in Paris. There is a pond, of course ;
but this pond excels most others in the possession of a
precipitous rocky island, approached by a suspension-
bridge from one shore, and by a lofty arch from another,
and on the top of the island is a copy of the little tem
ple of Vesta at Tivoli. Besides this, the land in the
park rises to a considerable height in a steep green hill
of pleasant shape with a wooded crown, and a rivulet
makes music as it flows and falls happily from the wood
to the lake. The water, no doubt, is real water, and the
stones that it flows over are real stones, though placed
there by human labor; neither is there any deception
about the aquatic plants that grow gayly by its margin ;
but how comes the rivulet there? What is "The
Stream's Secret " ? Alas, for poetry ! The secret in
this case is a steadily toiling steam-engine on the banks
of St. Martin's Canal, which persuades the water to go
up the hill in a pipe, that it may come down again as
we see. And now that I have told the stream's secret
I will go yet a little further and tell mine, which is that

LE TROCADERO.

Parks and Gardens. 185
the poor little imitation rivulet seems to me distinctly
and decidedly the pleasantest thing in Paris.
The park possesses a cave, which is impressive from
its height, but wanting in the obscure depth of the
great caverns, which inspires one with a sort of vague
apprehension ; and in the cave is another purling rivu
let, so that the place is a paradise of shade and coolness
in the sultry Parisian summer. From the temple, and
also from several different places on the higher ground
of the park, the views of Paris are very extensive ; but
they do not answer in all respects to its great reputa
tion for beauty. It is true that in the remote distance
you have hazy visions of towers and domes, and, as in
all such city views, the sublimity of what seems an
infinite world of houses; but you have also, in close
proximity to the park itself, a region studded with long
chimneys belonging to works of various kinds, and
bearing a very close resemblance — I will not say to
Liverpool or Manchester, for that would be an exag
geration — but at any rate to one of our minor manu
facturing towns. The number of long chimneys in or
near Paris has increased during recent years. Industry
has made more visible progress than art, and there
is some ground for the apprehension that in course
of time the French capital may lose her beauty from
this cause. The long chimneys interfere, even now,
with the beauty of distant views. From the parapet
near the Passy stairs I counted sixty-three of them this
year, looking down the Seine and a little to the left.
To a visitor from the north of England they are a

1 86

Paris.

reminder - of home ; but as English chimneys are
equally tall, and emit smoke not less abundantly,
why travel so far southward to see others of the same
kind? The French are rather proud of them; their
artists paint them in big pictures of the Seine, their in-
dustriels have them engraved for their advertisements.

AVENUE DES CHAMPS ELYSEES.
Of recent improvements in Paris, there is nothing
prettier or more needed than the garden on the slope
between the Palace of the Trocadero and the river. It
has been extended by another garden on the opposite
bank of the Seine, taken from the Champ de Mars, and
which now seems a continuation of the Trocadero
Garden joined by the Pont d'Jena. The Champ de
Mars now ends in a sort of terrace with a balustrade ;

Parks and Gardens. 187
and on a fine starlight night a visitor can hardly spend
an hour in a manner more likely to be remembered
afterwards than in quietly leaning on that balustrade,
and giving himself up to the infiuences of the strange
and wonderful scene. Behind him is the vast, open,
desert space of the Champ de Mars, silent and empty
as so much land in the Sahara, and yet which has been
the theatre of so many historical spectacles. There is
no place in the world where the contrast between past
and present — between many different pasts and the
one monotonous present— is so striking and decided.
No place in the world presents such a perfect tabula
rasa, unless it be some area of salt water where fleets
have fought and tempests raged, and where to-day no
sound or motion disturbs the summer calm. The gar
den of the Tuileries was the chief scene of the Festi
val of the Supreme Being when Robespierre made a
speech full of piety and virtue, and burnt the effigies of
Atheism, Ambition, Self-seeking, and False Simplicity.
Yet that memorable festival was also celebrated on the
Champ de Mars; and on the next great occasion,
the Festival of Federation, the whole ceremony took
place there in the presence of three hundred thousand
spectators, who stood upon embankments laboriously
raised on purpose. Stood ! nay, they sang and danced,
in an ebullition of patriotic happiness. There was an
altar in the middle, — autel de la patrie ; and there was
a throne near the military school, whereon sat poor
Louis XVI., whose head still preserved its connection
with his body. Talleyrand said mass, Lafayette rode

1 88

Paris.

about on a white horse. There was a great deal of
solemn taking of oaths, in which the King and the
President of the Assembly took part. After this, we
learn that the fMMs, while they stayed in Paris, dis
played a sincere enthusiasm for the king, the queen,
the little dauphin, the constitution, and the Assembly.

3=S"^ — ^ riSsT^^ 

AU JARDIN DU. LUXEMBOURG.

In 1815 the desert of the Champ de Mars was covered
with another crowd; there was an altar once again,
with an officiating prelate, and a throne with another
sovereign. It was now the Champ de Mai, though the
ceremony took place on the ist of June, — that fateful
month which was to contain the date of Waterloo.

Parks and Gardens. 189
Napoleon came in coronation state, with a silken coat,
a feathered cap, and the imperial mantle, in a state
coach drawn by eight horses. Like Louis XVI., he,
too, sat upon a throne, and received homage, and
gazed over an ocean of human beings. Thiers says
that almost the whole population of Paris was in the
Champ de Mars that day ; and it is certain that there
were fifty thousand soldiers and a hundred pieces of
artihery. It was the last imperial ceremony of the
First Empire. When Napoleon laid aside the imperial
mantle that day, as he left the throne to distribute
colors, he had done forever with imperial state. Noth
ing remained for him but a fortnight of rough life as a
soldier, to be followed by a crushing defeat, a wretched
exile, and a miserable death.
There has been no public ceremony in more recent
times so memorable as the Champ de Mai, but many of
us remember the military reviews of the Second Em
pire, which were very striking spectacles of their kind ;
and then came the great exhibitions with their enor
mous buildings, which have vanished like enchanted
palaces in fairy tales. Changes which in other parts of
Paris have required centuries are effected in a year or
two on the Champ de Mars. Its permanent condition
is that of perfect emptiness and aridity, but occasionally
it is the scene of wonderful concentrations of humanity.
The exhibition of 1867 is like a page of ancient history
already. How remote it seems ! I remember, as if it
were yesterday, the Emperor arriving on the opening
' day, accompanied by his wife and child, and looking

I go Paris.
neither well nor happy. Coming events were already
casting their shadows. A German waiter calmly told
me that there would soon be a war between France
and Prussia, and he looked forward to the result with
confidence. The Empire was already tottering, nobody
counted upon its long continuance. When the next
great exhibition palace had been erected in 1878 the
object of the display was a revival of cheerful energy
after dispiriting disaster. It was a far more imposing
structure than the first, and surrounded by quite a town
of buildings filled with the densest crowds. Now, again,
the Champ de Mars is a tabula rasa, and all that is to
be seen across its vast expense at night is perhaps the
lamp of a solitary cab crossing near the ^ficole Militaire,
and proving the distance by the excessive apparent
slowness of its motion.
The Trocadero Palace, which is left as a permanent
legacy of the Exhibition of 1878, has often been se
verely criticised on account of its large protuberant cen
tral body and its great curving arms. French people
say it is like Victor Hugo's " Pieuvre," but these criti
cisms can only be applicable when the building is seen
from a little distance. From the Champ de Mars it
presents a most imposing appearance, especially on a
fine night. The site is incomparable. The whole width
of the building has a clear space before it for nearly
fifteen hundred metres, and it stands upon a stately
height, from which a beautiful garden slopes down, at
first rapidly, then more gently, to the river, crossed
there by one of the finest of its bridges ; then comes

'.\ ¦:, >*

Parks and Gardens. i g i
another wide space of garden, and beyond that the
Champ de Mars. When the sky is full of stars and all
this scene covered with lights like an illumination, it is
enough to inspire a poet, and would in itself be in the
highest degree poetical if it were not so modern and so
easily accessible. Only forget that it is in familiar Paris,
a day's journey from London, forget that these are
gaslights, imagine that those stately domes, those lofty
towers, are the dwelling of some mighty and myste
rious Oriental potentate, and by getting rid of the ob
trusive commonplace and familiar, you may enjoy the
real magnificence of the scene. On one occasion, the
National Festival of 1883, especial art was employed to
enhance the beauty of the spectacle, and then it reached
a degree of splendor that no Eastern sovereign ever
attempted. The French have a great liking for open and exten
sive city views. If London belonged to them, they
would clear away all the buildings between the British
Museum and Oxford Street, if they did not carry a
broad avenue down to the Strand. The feeling of
openness in Paris is immensely enhanced by the way
in which several different spaces are often happily com
bined. A man's garden gains in apparent liberty by
the width of his neighbor's field. The garden of the
Tuileries has the Place de la Concorde and then the
Champs Elysees, with the long and broad avenue be
yond, up to the triumphal arch. There is a general
feeling of openness about the Seine, with the Champs
Elys6es on one hand and the Esplanade des Invalides

192

Paris.

on the other. As for the Elysian Fields themselves,
they need no detailed description. They do not seem
to be very much of an Elysium, but they offer shade

LA NAUMACHIE, — PARC DE MONCEAU.

and seats and cool draughts of Vienna beer. The word
" fields " is too ambitious. There is nothing here but a
little wood with tidy walks, and grass kept green by
perpetual spray, — altogether a pleasant small substitute
for real nature, Hke the rivulet fed by the steam-engine.

Parks and Gardens. 193
The Palais de I'lndustrie here is better named perhaps
than if it had been more ambitiously entitled a Palace
of Art, since the pictures at the annual Salons are chiefly
industrial products on an extensive scale. The crudity ,
of color which used to be the peculiar distinction of in- '
experienced English painting has of late years been
attained, or surpassed, by a multitude of energetic
Frenchmen; and as they combine with it a national
delight in self-assertion and a peculiar enjoyment of the
horrible, the present Salons are not by any means scenes
of unmixed or refined pleasure, though held in the
Elysian Fields.
The garden of the Luxembourg is one of the most
frequented places of recreation in Paris, and it is much
to be regretted that in the latter days of the Empire it
was diminished by cutting off a large acute-angled tri
angle at the upper end of the pepiniire, to make room
for the Rue de I'Abbe de I'Epee and other streets. Some
important buildings, including the Ecole des Mines, the
Pharmacie Centrale des Hdpitaux, and a large new
Lyc^e, have been erected on ground that formerly be
longed to the nursery or the garden of the Luxembourg,
and this at a time when the rapid increase of Paris in
every direction made it more than ever desirable to pre
serve all open spaces with the most jealous care. It was
a piece of economy, and of very unpopular economy, the
only practical reason in its favor being that the new Rue
de I'Abbd de I'Epee rendered communication a little
easier. In the remaining ground there are five pretty
gardens with lawns and a considerable number of paral-
13

1 94 Paris.
lelograms planted with trees ; and these, with the more
or less open spaces between them, serve as playgrounds
for the children. The eastern side of the garden is the
favorite resting-place for grown-up people, who sit there
on many hundreds of chairs. What I have called es
pecially the gardens are spaces laid out as lawns, with
winding walks, a sufficiency of trees for shade, and plenty
of garden-seats. The lovers of tranquillity seek these
retreats, and sit quietly watching the fine spray that
spurts from the water-pipes on the lawn and makes little
rainbows over the grass. There are landscape-painters
who have studios in that quarter and who prize these
little gardens, not as if they were wild nature, but for the
degree of refreshment they afford to eyes weary of walls
and pavements.
The woods of Boulogne and Vincennes both he
immediately outside the fortifications, and are good
specimens of what the French understand by pleasure-
grounds. Both have artificial lakes of considerable
size with islands, and the woods are pierced in various
directions by well-kept roads. Although the recreation-
grounds within the walls of Paris are much smaller than
the London Parks, the Bois de Boulogne is very much
larger. Its area considerably exceeds two thousand
acres, which is much more than that of all the London
parks put together, and it includes about sixty miles of
rides and drives. Almost every reader of these pages
will be aware already that the Bois de Boulogne is the
resort of all Parisians who can afford to keep carriages
and horses; and it is visited on holidays by many

Parks and Gardens. 195
thousands of the middle and working classes. I heartily
appreciate the wisdom of setting apart a great space of
land for public recreation, the noise and crowding of
city life make such places necessary, and if they were
not firmly protected now the future would be entirely
deprived of them ; but I cannot say that the Bois de
Boulogne has ever seemed to me delightful. Any
country lane that winds about among fields, and crosses
a stream here and there, now hiding itself in a dell, now
affording a view from a little eminence, suits my taste
far better than well-kept carriage-drives between dense,
monotonous groves of green. The Bois de Boulogne
is one of those places in which a lover of real landscape
feels himself to be most a prisoner. The very perfec
tion with which it is all kept is enough to make him
long for a little uncared-for nature. It is difficult to im
agine any more tiresome form of recreation than that of
a wealthy Frenchman, who has himself dragged along
those miles and miles of road past millions of trees that
always seem the same. The real amusement of such a
Frenchman is to criticise people and equipages ; but he
might enjoy equal facilities for such a mental occupation
on a chair in the Champs Elysees.
The prettiest public garden in Paris is the Parc Mon
ceau, not to be in any way confounded with what we call
a park in England, yet a piece of ground very tastefully
laid out with undulating lawns, shady trees, statues, and
a little .sheet of water, that reflects a Corinthian colon
nade in a half-circle. Nothing can be more elegant
than this colonnade, which has been preserved from the

196 Paris.
times of the early French Renaissance, but nobody knows
exactly from what palace or monument it was taken.
In its present situation it seems like a remnant of an
tique architecture in some graceful picture by Claude,
and one is grateful for the good sense that has saved it
from destruction. Lalanne once made a very poetical
charcoal drawing of it, which has been reproduced in
the series of his charcoals. This is one example the
more of the happy combination of architecture with
foliage and water. Set up in the British Museum,
these columns would signify comparatively little; but
with graceful foliage and a mirror of water, they are
charming.

XI.
MODERN PARISIAN ARCHITECTURE.
OF all modern cities Paris is the one in which the
notion of architecture is most generally prevalent.
In London, as in all our English towns, the ordinary
builders have worked without any notion of architecture
at all, and the real architect has seldom been called in
unless to erect some important public building. In
Paris architecture of some kind is very common. Thou
sands of houses have been erected with a definite archi
tectural intention; and this architectural tendency has
of late years become so habitual that in the better quar
ters of the city a building hardly ever rises from the
ground unless it has been designed by some architect
who knOws what art is, and endeavors to apply it to
little things as well as great.
Modern Parisian architecture has settled definitely
into a new form of Renaissance. I find it convenient
to separate the early elegant Renaissance (of which
there are still some charming examples in France, full
of graceful art and invention, combined with delicate
finish in workmanship) from the heavy, ascetic Renais
sance that followed it, in which there was no enjoyment,
no fancy, no delicacy, no imagination, and scarcely a

1 98 Paris.
trace of any other feeling than pure pride in size, and
cost, and heaviness. The H6tel de Ville and the Court
of the Louvre belong to the elegant Renaissance. St.
Eustache is an attempt to marry that Renaissance with
Gothic, but the west front of St. Eustache is in that
tiresome style which in my own mind I always think of
as the stupid eighteenth-century Renaissance. Now the
effort of modern French domestic architects has been to
start afresh with a second elegant Renaissance, and in a
great measure they have succeeded. They have eman
cipated themselves from the dulness and heaviness of
their immediate predecessors ; they have allowed them
selves some variety, some free play of the fancy and
intelligence ; and although their art is seldom strikingly
imaginative, it is full of interesting experiments. A
firmly prejudiced visitor from another country might
easily shut his eyes against it altogether, and say that
it is all exactly alike, because it is generally governed
by the prevailing taste of the time ; but the real inter
est of it consists in the variety that underlies a general
fashion. The fashion is a cheerful and free Renaissance ;
the variety consists in the use of as much freedom as is
compatible with a dominant idea.
A few experiments have been tried with mediaeval
forms, or with mediaevalism passing into Renaissance ;
and one of the most successful of these latter is the
building of the Historical Society in the Boulevard St.
Germain; but true Gothic has been definitively and
wisely abandoned. It has been wisely abandoned" be
cause the pointed window-head never looks its best

Modern Parisian Architecture. 199
unless there is either a gable or a larger Gothic arch
above it. A Gothic window does not look well in a
room with a flat ceiling, and a row of Gothic windows
do not look in their right place under a long straight
cornice, like those in a modern street. Under the gables
of a mediaeval street they might look better, but a row
of gables, like the teeth of a saw, is neither the most
rational nor the most economical form of roofing for
street houses, and it has been finally and completely
abandoned. You may, it is true, fill up your Gothic
window-head with a tympanum in the shape of an in
verted shield, and so get a square head for the real
window inside, but such a process is unnecessarily ex
pensive. Evidently the plain course was to adopt the
straight head, the simple horizontal stone of classic
architecture, and that settled the question in favor of
Renaissance forms. The condition of another art may
also have had its influence. Modern French sculpture
comes almost directly from antiquity; it has come from
Greece and Rome through the Renaissance ; it has not
come out of Gothic forms by evolution. Modern French
sculptors can be trained to do something that will pass
with unobservant people as a substitute for Gothic sculp
ture, but it is not natural to them. They try to make
their work naif, but they only succeed in making it stiff;
they have not the true Gothic naivete, and they cannot
have it; they cannot have that delightful blending of
pre-scientific simplicity with deep feeling and shrewd
observation which characterized Gothic art. They know
far too much, and when they feel, they do not feel in

200 Paris.
that manner. Now there are great numbers of sculptors in
Paris who have received a considerable amount of artistic
instruction, but who cannot keep themselves by making
statues that only the Government buys, so these men
turn their talents to ornamental sculpture. Their edu
cation in art has been wholly classical, and their prac
tical influence upon modern architecture has been very
considerable, because the architects know exactly what
sort of ornamental work the carvers are fit to do. In
short, the sort of domestic architecture that naturally
springs from the Parisian mind, such as education has
fashioned it, must be a form of Renaissance architec
ture, and none other. A literary critic has remarked
that we are much nearer, intellectually, to the classic
authors than to the mediaeval ones ; and it is not less
true that the architects and workmen of modern Paris
work in Renaissance forms as naturally, and when left
to themselves as inevitably, as they speak French. Such
forms have no longer anything of an imported style ;
they seem as much a product of the soil as if they had
been invented by the ancient Gauls.'
1 I remember trying, many years ago, to get an oak pedestal carved in
Paris. It was supported by three griffins, and I had drawn Gothic
griffins, but the carvers I applied to immediately made sketches of Re
naissance griffins, and said they would do much better. As that was
the transformation I had been most anxious to avoid (for the particular
piece of furniture in question), I gave up the project. The carvers were
highly intelligent workmen, yet quite incapable of conceiving anything
that was not in a Renaissance spirit. I had another example of the same
difficulty afterwards. A French draughtsman was employed to copy with
the pen, for photographic reproduction, a series of pictures by an English
pre-Raphaelite artist. In making the copies he eliminated all the pre-
Raphaelite characteristics of feeling and style, and substituted those of

Modern Parisian Architecture. 201
Any adequate account of modern architecture in
Paris would require a volume to itself, and such an
account could not be made interesting or intelligible
without the help of minute and abundant architectural
engraving, while it would find few readers outside the
special public that really studies architectural subjects.
All that can be done here is to give a general account
of prevailing tendencies. The reader who cares to
follow out the subject may do so with the help of the
works issued by the Parisian architects themselves.
The mediaeval arrangement was to turn the gable
towards the street, and in a mediaeval city every house
had its own gable, whence the old French expression
concerning a well-to-do citizen that he had pignon
sur rue. Nothing strikes us more in the old engravings
of Paris than the wonderful number of gables, especially
round such open spaces as the Place de Gr^ve and the
Cimetiere des Innocents. Many of these survived until
the eighteenth century, but they belong essentially to
Gothic times. The greatest clearing away of gables
appears to have taken place in the seventeenth century,
after having been begun a hundred years earlier or
more. Under Louis XIV. every house-builder appears
to have turned the eaves towards the street like the
architects of the present day; and as in succeeding
reigns the old houses were finally removed from the
the Renaissance, thereby, of course, entirely falsifying the intentions of
the original painter. I believe he did this quite unconsciously ; at any
rate, he was evidently incapable of supposing that the peculiar interest
of the originals lay precisely in those very characteristics that he
eliminated.

202 Paris.
bridges and quays the eyes of the citizens became more
and more accustomed to continuity of line.
Still, although the eaves were turned towards the
street, the gable was not entirely abolished, because it
occurred at the end of every row of houses. Instead
of being innumerable, the gables had become few, bi^t
that was the extent of the change. Now in modern
Paris the gable is entirely aboHshed except in a few
private mansions where the owner has followed his
own taste; and the abolition of the gable is one of
the most important of all decisive changes. It cuts
modern architecture completely adrift from mediaeval. '
And please observe that this revolution has not been
accomplished, as in London, by the abolition of the
visible roof There are plenty of streets in London
where you cannot see the roofs of the opposite houses.
In Paris it is not so. There the roof is rightly felt to
be of the greatest expressional importance ; but instead
of ending with a gable, it is truncated either with a
roof sloping at the same angle as the other, or with
a curve when the rest of the roof is arched. The value
of space in Parisian houses has led to the very general
adoption of arched or bulging roofs, which have the
advantage of allowing so much more head-room, a
truth well known to all who use tents and wagons. In
cases where the curve is not employed, the roof often
begins by being exceedingly steep and then comes to
an angle from which it slopes back rapidly to the ridge,
and in the steep part of it there is a row of dormer
windows.

Modern Parisian Architecture. 203
The modern Parisian house, then, is characterized
by a visible roof, curved or angular, with dormer win
dows in it, but not any gable either towards the street
or at the end. The windows are flat-headed, they are
very frequently provided with an entablature and with
lateral mouldings, while in a great number of the bet
ter class of houses the stonework that surrounds the
window is carved more or less ¦ elaborately, but almost
always with knowledge and good taste. Great use
has been made of balconies as an element of archi
tectural interest and an excuse for tasteful decoration.
They are always supported on massive stone brackets
which in every instance show at least an attempt at
design, while many of them are beautiful in form and
enriched with excellent ornamental sculpture. The
doorways, in modern houses, are generally of impor
tance. The French habit of living on flats makes one
doorway the entrance to many dwellings, so that an
amount of ornament may be lavished upon it which
would be extravagant and impossible for a single
tenant. The finest ot such doorways consist of a
lofty stone arch decorated with sculpture and filled
with a tympanum of oak with folding-doors below,
large enough for the passage of carriages. The wood
work is thoroughly sound and well finished, very strong
and massive, and left almost of its natural color, but
varnished. Carving is employed on the woodwork,
but generally in moderation, and always in perfect
keeping with the stone-carving on the rest of the edi
fice. There is also a taste for massive handles plated

204

Parts.

with nickel or silver and set in small slabs of marble.
Up in the panels of the tympanum there is often a
window belonging to the entresol ; and when this occurs

DOORWAY OF A MODERN HOUSE.
the surroundings of the window in mouldings, carvings,
and panels are as carefully designed, though in wood
work, as the masonry of the house itself In such
a house there is not an inch of surface from roof to

Modern Parisian Architecture. 205
basement that is not ruled by thoughtful care and
taste, accompanied by sufficient knowledge. I do not
speak of genius and inspiration, these are as rare in
architectural as in literary work; but it is a great thing
to have banished ignorance and bad taste. It is a great
thing, too, that house-builders should have got well
out of that negative condition of perfect dulness, of
incapacity to desire or apprehend the beautiful, which
produced such houses as those in Harley Street. Even
in Paris itself, although the builders from Louis XIV. to
Louis Napoleon sometimes erected interesting separate
mansions, they treated houses in rows with wearisome
monotony whenever they had power to build a row of
houses at all. The last houses on the Pont au Change,
which were finished in 1647 and demolished in 1788,
were as dull as domestic architecture of the last century
in London. The supplementary buildings of the Hotel
Dieu on the left bank of the Seine, which were com
pleted in the eighteenth century, had not more archi
tecture than a cotton-mill, and the houses behind them
were no better. The pretty modern Parisian house
does not date farther back than Louis Napoleon, and
at first it was monotonously repeated. The desire for
variety came in due course, but it was only towards
the close of the reign that the possibilities of the new
style came to be thoroughly understood. It still re
quires, I think, a more obvious and clearly visible
variety, though it is easy to fall into the common error
of not observing the degree of variety that there is.
More will have to be said about street architecture in

2o6 Paris.
the next chapter. For the present I desire to point
Out a peculiar effect of the increased attention paid
to the architecture of houses. Since so many of the
houses have been made lofty and beautiful, many new
public buildings have been very strongly influenced by
them, both as to their proportions and their style of
architecture. Some readers will remember an absurdly
small church at Geneva with a miniature tower, which
is surrounded by very lofty modern houses. In a
village of low cottages such a church would look re
spectable ; at Geneva it is like a model set there for
the people to look down upon from their windows.
On the contrary, Rouen Cathedral gains by contrast
with the old-fashioned houses close to it, which are
not on a great scale. The merit of Parisian architects
is to have perceived the new necessities in public build
ings created by streets of magnificent private dwellings.
If the ordinary architecture of a city is on a large
scale and richly decorated, its public buildings must
still distinguish themselves by greater richness. One
consequence of the reconstruction of Parisian dwell
ings has been the rebuilding, in whole or in part, of
almost all those theatres that happened to be near
new streets or squares. The Theatre Frangais had
a new front; the Opera was rebuilt with unparalleled
magnificence ; the Vaudeville had a narrow but strik
ingly rich curved fagade at the corner of the Chauss^e
d'Antin, with Corinthian columns and Caryatides and
a fronton crowned with a statue of Apollo. The new
Theatre de la Renaissance is a heavy but sumptuous

Q

OWK

Modern Parisian Architecture. 207
structure, also adorned with Caryatides and Corinthian
columns. The GaJte was rebuilt in 1861 with a pretty
arcade on marble columns in front of its open loggia.
The Chatelet was built at the same date, and has also
its loggia, but with statues under the five arches. The
neighboring Theatre Historique, which used to be the
Lyrique, was also built under Louis Napoleon, though
it has been rebuilt since in consequence of incendiarism
by the Communards. The construction of these build
ings, and of many others, was made a necessity by
the handsome new houses. The Odeon belongs to the
beginning of this century and is a plain, respectable
structure. It may remain as it is because the houses
near it are plain, old-fashioned dwellings of the same
or an earlier date ; but if the Odeon could be placed
where the Opera is now, it would be too simple for
such a situation.
Yes, the French understand the effect of neighbor
hood in architecture, an effect which may either com
pletely destroy or wonderfully enhance the charm and
interest of a building. I wish it could be said that the
English understood this equally well, or were equally
ready to make the sacrifices that are necessary to protect
a building from being injured by its neighbors. The
French are not always careful enough, or, at least, not
always successful, as we see in the injury inflicted by
large buildings on Notre Dame and the Sainte Chapelle ;
still the principle is understood in Paris, and very few
public buildings of any consequence are inadequate to
the situations which they occupy.

2o8 Paris.
The most magnificent of recent structures, and one
of the most happily situated, is the Opera. The situa
tion has been created for it purposely. The front might
have looked merely across a street, but a new street of
great length was opened, that it might be seen from a
distance. Besides this, arrangements were made for the
convergence of several other new streets in front of the
Opera, so as to give to its site the utmost possible im
portance. As the houses in these streets are all of them
lofty and many of them magnificent, the Opera itself
required both size and richness to hold its own in a
situation that would have been dangerous to a feeble or
even a modest architectural performance. The Opera
was compelled to assert itself strongly, and if it had
merits they must be of a showy and visible kind, —
rather those of the sunflower than those of the lily of
the valley. There can be no question that M. Garnier
aimed at the right kind of merit, — showy magnificence,
— but there are two opposite opinions about his taste.
Like all important contemporary efforts, the Opera has
its ardent admirers and its pitiless critics. Let me tell
a short anecdote about this building, which may help
us in some measure to arrive at a just opinion. Shortly
after its completion several distinguished men, who
were not architects, met at a Parisian dinner-table, and
they criticised M. Garnier with great severity. Among
them was a provincial architect, who remained silent
till the others appealed to him. Then he said : " Gentle
men, when an architect undertakes to erect a compara
tively small building it is still a very complex affair;

THE OPERA. THE PRINCIPAL FRONT.

Modem Parisiaji Architecture. 209
and how much more so must be such a gigantic work
as the Opera, where a thousand matters of detail and
necessity have to be provided for, all of which the
architect has to carry in his mind together, and to rec
oncile with the exigencies of art ! Such a task is one
of the heaviest and longest strains that can- be imposed
upon the mind of man; and if the architect does not
satisfy every one, it may be because other people are
not aware of the extreme complexity of the problem."
For me, I confess that I know really nothing about
theatres, except that they have mysterious difficulties
of their own. I like being outside better than inside
them, because to be outside is at the same time cooler
and cheaper ; and all I know about their peculiar form
is that they generally have a gabled superstructure,
which must be an awkward thing for an architect, and is
in some way connected with scene-shifting. I humbly
confess that the Parisian Opera seems to me a very odd
sort of structure when seen from behind, and perhaps it
might have been better to hide those parts of it. Yet I
like to see the whole of an edifice, the complete work
of the architect, and not merely a fine front, like the
front of a shop. The truncated angles at the back have
a decidedly weakening effect upon the design, but the
corners were cut off in order that there might be an
apparent correspondence between the building and the
Rues Scribe and Gliick. The rotundas on the east and
west sides have a good effect in breaking their mo
notonous length, and their domes make a good accom
paniment to the great flattened dome over the house.
14

2IO Paris.
The principle followed everywhere has been to conform
the exterior to the uses of the edifice, which is right.
The exterior dissimulates nothing, and consequently it
looks like nothing in the world but what it is, — a great
theatre; whereas the Vaudeville might be taken for
the entrance to a bank, and the Odeon for a scientific
lecture-hall and museum.
Whatever may be thought of the back and sides
of the Opera, the principal front may be admired with
out reserve. The basement is a massive wall, finished
plainly, and pierced with seven round arches. In the
intervals between five of these arches are statues and
medallions ; on each side of the two exterior ones are
groups representing Music, Lyrical Poetry, the Lyrical
Drama, and the Dance. The contrast here of extreme
architectural simplicity with figure-sculpture is excel
lent. Above is a colonnade of coupled Corinthian
columns supporting an entablature, and between each
two pairs of columns is an open space, in which a lower
and smaller entablature, with a wall above it, is sup
ported on smaller columns of marble. This wall is
pierced in each interval with a circular opening con
taining the gilded bronze bust of a great musician.
Above the great entablature, and immediately over
each pair of coupled columns, is a medallion with sup
porters, and above each open space of the loggia is
an oblong panel with sculpture. Then you come to the
dome of the house and the gable of the structure above
the stage. The effect of the whole is a combination
of splendor with strength and durability. The use of

INTERIOR OF THE CHURCH OF ST. AUGUSTINE.

Modern Parisian Architecture. 2 1 1
sculpture has been happy, and the sculpture has not
been killed by the architecture, as it often is. On the
other hand, it has lightened the appearance of the
architecture, especially on the top of the edifice where
the colossal winged figures are most valuable, — and so
is that on the apex which holds up the lyre with both
hands. With regard to the interior, my humble opinion — the
opinion of one who knows nothing about theatres — is,
that the business of plotting for splendor has been con
siderably overdone. Tas. foyer is palatial, but it is over
charged with heavy ornament, like the palace of some
lavish but vulgar king. As for poor Paul Baudry's
paintings on the ceiling, which cost him such an in
finity of labor and pains, it does not in the least signify
what he painted or how long it will last, for nobody can
see his work in its present situation. There can hardly
be any more deplorable waste of industry and knowl
edge than to devote it to the painting of ceilings that
we cannot look at without pains in the neck, and can
not see properly when we do look at them. The grand
staircase is more decidedly a success than 'dae foyer. It
almost overpowers us by its splendor ; it is full of daz
zling light; it conveys a strong sense of height, space,
openness ; it comes on the sight as a burst of brilliant
and triumphant music on the ear. The mind has its
own satisfaction in a work that is splendid without false
pretension. All the materials are really what they seem.
The thirty columns are monoliths of marble, every step
is of white Italian marble, the hand-rail of onyx, sup-

212

Paris.

}<il|i.J

THE CHURCH OF ST. AUGUSTINE.

ported by balusters of rouge antique, on a base of green
marble from Sweden. We may admire the grand stair
case or object to it, but it is honest work throughout.

Modern Parisian Architecture. 2 1 3
and may last a thousand years. The architect evidently
took pride in it, as he has so planned the design that
visitors may look down from galleries on four different
stories all round the building. The house itself is much
less original, with its decoration of red and gold, and the
customary arrangements for the audience.
House architecture in the modern streets of Paris has
led the architects to attempt the solution of a very diffi
cult problem. They have endeavored, — I will not say
to invent a new style of ecclesiastical architecture (for a
really new style is not possible), but to adapt an old
style in such a manner as to make it harmonize with the
secular and domestic architecture of our own time. If
the reader will glance back in memory at the styles of
church architecture that have prevailed or been experi
mented upon since the beginning of French civilization,
he will soon perceive that there really is not one of
them that would not look isolated in a modern boule
vard. The Romanesque and Gothic styles, in all their
varieties, look completely isolated. A classic temple
like the Madeleine looks out of place for various rea
sons, especially for its want of height in comparison
with modern houses, and its prison-like absence of
openings, so different from the modern wall, pierced
with many windows. The architect of St. Eustache
made a most important experiment in the union of
Gothic principles with the details of the elegant Renais
sance, but his example has not been followed. As for
the dull and heavy architecture that I have ventured to
call plainly the stupid Renaissance, it would look uglier

214

Paris.

than ever if placed in the neighborhood of intelligent
and inventive modern domestic building. Contempo-

INTERIOR OF THE CHURCH OF LA TRINITE.
rary Parisian architects have endeavored to solve the
problem by a free expansion of Byzantine ideas. The

Modern Parisian Architecture. 215
most interesting of these experiments is the Church
of St. Augustine, where stone and cast-iron have been
employed together. The use of cast-iron has been
almost entirely confined to the roof and dome. The
nave is crossed by light iron arches, with spandrels
of the same material; and from these arches a metal
column comes down to the ground on each side, set
against the stone pier like a pilaster. These iron arches
carry depressed vaults corresponding to the bays. The
dome is almost entirely metallic ; its ribs, and even the
mullions of its windows, are of iron. Each bay of the
nave consists of a round arch with three minor arches
above it in the triforium gallery, themselves included in
a higher arch, and in front of the triforium runs a gilded
railing. The windows of the clerestory are round-
arched, each with two lights, containing, in painted
glass, figures of bishops or other ecclesiastics. Orna
ment is used in moderation, and is not in itself of an
elaborate kind, a small lozenge-shaped or square panel
being considered enough to vary a space of plain wall.
The tympanum between the three small arches and the
large one that includes them is richer.
The interior of the church has certain merits in a
very high degree. It is not only spacious and airy in
reality, but it looks so. I have seldom found myself
beneath a dome that seemed so light and lofty. The
nave is of great width, but there are no aisles, and the
lateral chapels are unfortunate in shape, owing to the
site, which compelled M. Baltard, the architect, to make
them narrower and narrower as they approach the

2 1 6 Paris.
principal entrance. The exterior has been considerably
injured by this necessity, which gives the whole edifice
the appearance of being huddled together. The towers
are too close to the dome, and the front seems to
require lateral support of some kind. Much of the in
terest of this church as a piece of work consists in the
difficulty of the site. That may have been one of the
reasons for the employment of iron in the roof, as it
caused so much less outward thrust, and the building
could not spread itself laterally. Whatever the reason,
the iron has been skilfully used, and in that respect, as
well as in the character of all the other arts employed,
this church is thoroughly of our own time.
The Church of La Trinite is another important exam
ple of modernism. The nave is very wide, and vaulted
in a large round arch. The aisles are very narrow, and
separated from the nave by an arcade of round arches
supported on marble pillars between the piers. Above
the aisles runs a lofty gallery, with a similar arcade and
a pierced parapet. The space above the high altar is
narrowed by the projection of two arcades, equal in
height to those of the aisles, and finished by a contin
uation of the parapet just mentioned. There is a small
apse behind. The church has a tower crowned with an
octagonal dome and lantern, and flanked by two small
lanterns, also with domes. The round arch is dominant
everywhere, except over the niches and doors, where
pediments have been frequently employed. In the per
fect finish of the workmanship, the richness and excel
lence of the materials, and a general air of palatial

THE CHURCH OF LA TRINITY.

Modern Parisian Architecture. 217
elegance, this church is quite modern and Parisian. It
is curious to observe how well it holds its place between
two large blocks of houses built at the same date with
itself, which have round arches over the entresol, and
louvre windows not much unlike the upper niches, and
pilasters recalling those at the angles of the church.
Opposite the Trinity, the houses at the angles of the
Chaussde d'Antin are finished with domes. The balus
trade immediately in front of the Trinite (behind the
three fountains) is carried round the pretty garden,
which seems in this way to belong to the church. For
all these reasons this piece of ecclesiastical architecture
is allied to its surroundings just as the Gothic cathe
drals were in the Middle Ages.
Another example of the same modern style, founded
upon the combination of the round arch with the classic
capital, is the Church of St. Francois Xavier, near the
Invalides. This church is plainer and simpler than the
Trinite, and much smaller than St. Augustine. It is
not in any way imposing, but it is interesting as one of
the most honest attempts of a modern architect to build
in a modern way. Such work is far less unsatisfactory
than a thin attempt at Gothic like St. Clotilde.
In Paris, where there is really a modern style of do
mestic architecture, it is possible that in the future a
corresponding ecclesiastical architecture may become
habitual. Gothic is too remote from modern habits of
design and too much isolated in the midst of modern
houses. A heavy Renaissance like that of St. Sulpice
is too much wanting in grace and cheerfulness. What

2i8 Paris.
really suits modern Paris is a sort of Renaissance, very
delicate in workmanship everywhere, and combining
readily with intelhgent painting and sculpture. It
should employ beautiful materials, fine marbles, gilded
bronze, and other good modern metal-work. At St.
Augustine the doors are in electrotype copper. Above
all, the modern style should leave great liberty to the
taste and fancy of each individual architect, because it
is only in this way that any boldness of experiment can
be possible, or any new ideas evolved. These modern
churches show signs of real vitality, and in this respect
are more hopeful than any mere pastiche of Gothic or
Italian art.

XII.
THE STREETS.
THE English have invented the house, the French
have invented the street. By this I do not ven
ture to affirm or undertake to maintain that nobody
lived in what were called houses before the existence
of Englishmen, nor that ancient cities had not streets
of some kind ; but I mean that the English are the first
people who have thoroughly understood the house and
realized it, setting in this respect an example to other
nations, and that the French are the first people who
have thoroughly understood the street and realized a
conception of it which has become a model of excel
lence in its own kind.
An Englishman who finds himself in some great
Parisian street quite of our own time, such as the Boule
vard Haussmann or the Boulevard Malesherbes, has
nothing to do but simply confess that here is the ideal
street,' and that his own Piccadilly and Oxford Street
1 For our part of Europe and other temperate climates. It appears
that narrow, tortuous streets, with overhanging stories and a space above
that can be easily covered with an awning, are much preferable in hot
countries.

2 20 Paris.
are not yet the ideal. A street should not only be wide,
for the facility of traffic, but it should be of the same
width throughout, that there may be no local obstruc
tion. The causeways for foot-passengers ought to be
wide also, and there ought to be seats where they may
rest when weary. Trees are not an absolute necessity,
but next to space, air, and light, they are the greatest
of all luxuries, not only for their shade, but for the
delightful refreshment afforded by the green of their
foliage in a wilderness of stone and mortar. With the
blue sky and the passing clouds above, and the fresh
green leaves on the trees, it seems as if nature were not
quite banished yet.
True lovers of Paris (I am simply an admirer, and
have no sentiment of affection for the place) take a
keen delight in those broad trottoirs of the Boulevards.
They walk upon them for the mere pleasure of being
there, till absolute weariness compels them to sit down
before a cafe ; and when the feelings of exhaustion are
over, they rise to tire themselves again, like a girl at
a ball. They tell one that the mere sensation of the
Parisian asphaltum under the feet is an excitement
itself, so that when aided by " little glasses " in the
moments of rest at the cafes, it must be positively in
toxicating. These true lovers of Paris are most en
chanted with those parts of the Boulevards where the
crowd is always so dense that all freedom of motion
is impossible ; where half the foot-way is occupied by
thousands of caf6 chairs and the other half by a closely
packed multitude of loungers. The favorite places

The Streets. 221
appear to be the Boulevard des Italiens and the Boule
vard Montmartre. The shops are, in fact, a great per
manent exhibition of industry and the fine arts, wonder
fully lighted at night,' and very attractive to those who
visit Paris on rare occasions; but it is surprising how
much of the illusion disappears after close and old
acquaintance. You find the same things repeated,
either identically or with slight changes that are easily
seen through. It may not be exactly the same picture
that you saw in the dealer's window three years ago, but
very likely it will be the same kind of picture, set off in
the same way by an enormously disproportionate frame
on a background of dark red velvet, the whole so lighted
that the gilding flames across the street. The bronzes
are not quite the same perhaps, yet it is difficult to
believe them new. There is the old green caricature-
bronze, some meagre-limbed Mephistopheles ; there is
the Barye or Cain animal bronze ; there are the multi
tudes of coppery girls, as evidently daughters of Paris
as if they were dressed, and dressed in the fashion.
Amid the glittering shops, where the object is to
vanquish the eye by mere dazzle, you come upon the
intensely respectable, excessively quiet shops, that in
vite only to repose. Nothing amuses me more in the
French mind than its fine artistic faculty of taking up a
motive and keeping to it. The faculty deserves hearty
admiration, but the exercise of it is amusing because
it is simply artistic, like acting, and has nothing to do
1 On the old much-frequented Boulevards, but elsewhere early closing
is beginning to prevail.

22 2 Paris.
with character. You pass a glaring, frivolous-looking
shop, full of gayety and glitter, and then you meet with
a dark-looking, quiet shop, that looks like a retreat for
a profoundly meditative mind, and is severely finished
iri ebony and stamped leather. What is admirable in
such places is the determination to keep out the in
congruous. It must be one of the keenest pleasures to
plan a shop of the severe kind, to decide upon its sober
colors, its rich yet simple decoration. I am not the
inventor of the remark that the French have a genius
for shop-keeping. Their love of neatness and order,
their appreciation of pretty things, their talent for mak
ing the most of everything and showing it to the best
advantage, all combine to make them masters in the
art of managing a devanture. The proverb, Marchandise
bien par^e est a moiti^ vendue, is a piece of French mer
cantile wisdom. There are all varieties in the art of
exhibiting goods. One dealer overwhelms you with
quantity, but that is an appeal to the vulgar. The
opposite policy seems far more refined and crafty. I
confess to a sincere admiration for the tempter who
displays very few but very exquisite things, and has
the art of arranging them so that they shall help each
other. One Parisian dealer in works of art showed very
Httle, yet had a great collection. " You could fill a
museum," I said, and was told that he did not consider
it good policy to show many things at once.
'^he colossal shops that have sprung up in Paris of
late years are beginning to employ architecture as an
advertisement. The most curious instance of this is the

BOULEVARD ST. GERMAIN.

The Streets. 223
tower of the stables belonging to the Grands Magasins
du Louvre. The stables are somewhere near the Ecole
Militaire, and would of course be very easily overlooked
by the public ; so to prevent this the proprietors have
erected a tall slender tower, in shape somewhat resem
bling the clock-tower of the Houses of Parliament. It
has much gilding about the top, and glitters in the sun
shine like its great neighbor the dome of the Invalides.
It is visible all the way from Passy to the Place de la
Concorde, and from many other places besides, so that
thousands of people see it every day, and many of them
ask what it is. The Printemps has established its stores
in a new edifice with gilded domes at the corners, in
pursuance of the same policy. If the great shop
keepers found it worth while to spend money on really
fine architecture, instead of scattering it about in hid
eous mural advertisements, the change would be most
beneficial. The magnificence of the great Parisian streets results
from the habit of living in flats, as by this system a
single house produces a large rental, which enables the
builder to give it a magnificent, front. It is obvious
also that the superposition of dwellings is very favor
able to height, and height is a great element of nobility
in architecture. There is, however, a limit beyond
which the height of houses may become injurious to
the effect of a street by excluding light, and injurious
also to public buildings by making them seem low.
There is a tendency in London to carry houses with
flats to an altitude that is desirable neither for beauty

224 Paris.
nor security. This inconvenience has been prevented
in Paris by police regulations. The Prefect of Police is
empowered to fix the height of houses.
It must, I fear, be admitted that the system of living
on flats is likely to prevail more and more in great cities.
It is, in fact, the only practical way of reconciling wide
streets with a dense population. Parisians look upon it
as simply rational, and they can point to their own city
as evidence of the apparent spaciousness which results
from it, for many of the streets and avenues are so
broad that it seems as if land were of little value. The
excellence of the system as regards externaj appearance
and facility of communication is indisputable. When
the population is piled high it occupies less ground and
the distances are reduced. Streets that are at the same
time both broad and regular in their breadth are always
preferred by coachmen. On this, point _I have some
times taken the opinion of Parisian drivers, and they
always agreed that the new streets had immensely
facilitated their work. Tramways, also, can be estab
lished in such streets ; in the old narrow ones they are
impossible. Broad, open spaces are favorable to public
health, by giving to rooms that look out upon them as
much light as if they were in the country, and almost
as much air. Foot-passengers run no risk of accident
except at crossings, while on narrow causeways the
risks are continual. The system, then, is perfect so far
as the street is concerned, and has some other great
recommendations, but it is not altogether favorable to
the dwelling. The dwellings are small, and the sense of

The Streets. 225
confinement in them is oppressive to any one who has
been accustomed to space and liberty. Rents are so
high that every family not positively rich is reduced to
shifts and expedients. I know a young woman in the.
hills of the Morvan who went to Paris as a wet-nurse.
She was in the family of an independent gentleman,
with small or moderate means and eight children. He
might have lived in the country quite at his ease, but
the attraction of Paris was too great and he could not
leave the capital. He had a small appartement at a
great height, consisting of three rooms, a passage, and
a little kitchen. At night all the rooms, including the
passage, were converted into dormitories. The servants
slept in the passage. \Ve know what overcrowding is in
London ; it is a terrible evil, but it affects the poor only,
while in Paris it affects the middle classes also. The
evil would be still greater if the Parisians were not so
excessively ingenious in the economy of space ; but
they are like sailors, in that they make use of every
available corner. A practical result, as affecting hospi
tality, is that the middle-class Parisian can very rarely
invite a friend to stay with him. The friend stays at
some hotel, and is invited to the table only. Frequently
the dining-room and kitchen are so small that it is found
more convenient to dispense hospitality at a restaurant.
These are real evils, but not perhaps very serious evils ;
the most serious evils of the system are those that affect
old persons and invalids. People in weak health often
remain confined in a high lodging for months together,
when if they lived nearer to the ground and possessed a
15

2 26 Paris.
garden they might go into it every day. The intermin
able stairs have a deterrent effect on all except robust
visitors, and are a real obstacle to human intercourse.
Perhaps the system of superposed habitations has not
yet attained its perfection. It may be that in the future
there will be an extensive system of perfectly safe lifts,
and it may be possible to have gardens on the roofs.
The houses are admirably lighted from the streets,
and on that side they have plenty of air, but the back
windows look upon narrow courts, often mere wells,
which the great height of the houses makes gloomy.
Once, for a fortnight, I had a room that looked into
one of those wells, and the effect was so depressing that
I should have preferred the poorest cottage in the coun
try. In all other respects the new houses are a great
improvement on those built just before the time of
Louis Napoleon, and beyond all comparison superior
to the picturesque but ill-contrived tenements of the
Middle Ages.
There was one characteristic of Paris in the early part
of the present century that has disappeared from the
new streets : the old houses were so built, intentionally,
that the fronts leaned back, sometimes with a curve
that was very agreeable to artists. When Girtin went
to Paris and made his sketches this inclination of the
front was very common. You find it again in the etch
ings of Meryon and Lalanne. In contemporary street
architecture it has been entirely abandoned for the per
pendicular. There is another change of at least equal
importance. Before Louis Napoleon the houses were

The Streets. 227
generally of unequal height, but the love of the regular
line made Haussmann's Paris almost as regular at the
cornice as at the curbstone. These changes no doubt
give a more orderly appearance to the city, but they
detract sadly from its picturesque variety. In old Paris
there were three distinct and notable irregularities :
those in the tops of the houses, the slope of the fronts,
and the ground-plan of the street, all of which are now
replaced by straight lines. In some of the new streets
the straight line is exceedingly wearisome ; it is so in the
Rue de Rivoli. The reader will probably remember
the passage in Mr. Arnold's essay on "The Literary
Influence of Academies," where he criticises Mr. Pal-
grave for naming the feeble frivolity of the Rue de
Rivoli along with " the dead monotony of Gower or
Harley Street, or the pale commonplace of Belgrave,
Tyburnia, and Kensington." Mr. Arnold said that " the
architecture of the Rue de Rivoli expresses show, splen
dor, pleasure, — unworthy things, perhaps, to express
alone and for their own sakes, but it expresses them ;
whereas the architecture of Gower Street and Belgravia
merely expresses the impotence of the architect to ex
press anything." At the time when these criticisms were
written the Rue de Rivoli occupied a very different rank
among modern Parisian streets from that which it occu
pies at present. After the Boulevard Malesherbes, the
Boulevard Haussmann, and the Avenue Friedland, the
Rue de Rivoli, especially from the Place de la Concorde
to the Rue du Louvre, appears, I should say, rather a
street for business than anything else. The architec-

228 Paris.
ture is decent, but plain in the extreniej_ There is first
a simple arcade, not on pillars with pretty capitals, but
on plain square stone piers. Above the arches runs a
cornice that is a balcony, and carries a simple iron rail
ing. The windows of the first floor have entablatures
without sculpture, those of the second have none. On
the third floor runs another balcony without ornament.
I do not see either frivolity or pleasure here; it would
be scarcely possible to design anything more rigid in
its severity. The houses might be a line of mihtary
barracks. Eastward of the Rue du Louvre the arcade
comes to an end, and the fronts of the houses become
more varied. After the construction of this street the
architects seem to have perceived that the mechanical
repetition of the same bay, the same arch with the same
windows above it, might ultimately be carried too far;
so, happily for the future of Paris, it was thought that
the Rue de Rivoli and two or three little streets close to
it were a sufficient supply of identical arches with win
dows and cornices running to a vanishing point, like an
illustration in elementary perspective.
The Avenue de I'Opera is much finer than the Rue de
Rivoli, and owes much of its superiority to the variety
of its architecture. It is really a pleasure to walk
quietly down one side and study the architecture over
the way. As I did this once with an old French gentle
man, who always foresees evil for his country, he lamented
to me that the taste for material luxury should have
become so predominant. To me it seems that a love
for beautiful' architecture is of all possible tastes the

AVENUE FRIEDLAND.

The Streets. 229
least likely to be injurious in a wealthy nation. The
satisfaction it affords is purely artistic and intellectual.
The carved stones are not couches of ease to lie down
upon, nor dishes to pamper the appetite ; they belong
to the poorest as well as the richest of the citizens.
All that can be reasonably objected to is the waste of
wealth in the repetition of forms that have no mean
ing, and that are simply customary. Even incongruous
innovations may sometimes be useful as an interruption
to what we see every day. Somebody has built a
Moorish house in the Avenue de Friedland, which,
though out of place there, strikes the eye with a change
that is not unwelcome. The stately, separate mansions
are a great relief after the continuous blocks of buildings.
It is much to be regretted that many fine old houses
have disappeared, but a few are visible still. I remem
ber the feeling of sudden and keen pleasure with which
I first came upon the H6tel La Valette on the Quai des
Celestins. The restoration of it had been begun with
the intention of making it a private museum, but it has
changed hands and is now a school. These old houses
are seldom preserved as residences, and the best that
can happen to them is to be employed as museums,
like the H6tel Carnavalet, which is to be the future
lapidary museum of Paris and library of historical
records concerning the history of the city.' This pro
ject was due to Baron Haussmann, the great destroyer of
' A description of the H6tel Carnavalet, with an account of the mu
seum, was published in"L'Art"for .January i8 and January 25, 1880.
The hotel is situated at the angles of the Rue des Francs Bourgeois and
the Rue Sevigne, not far from the Rue Turenne.

230

Paris.

old Paris, who in this instance appears as a preserver.
The architecture of the hotel is heavy, but would
appear much heavier if it were not lightened by the
graceful sculpture of Jean Goujon. One of the curiosi-

^A«y .

HOTEL DE SENS.

ties of Paris in domestic architecture is the house on the
Cours la Reine, called the Maison de Frangois I. Here
we have an excellent example of what ought to have

The Streets. 231
been done with many old houses. This one was erected
near Fontainebleau by Francis I., and sold in 1826 to a
private purchaser, who had every stone removed to Paris
and erected again, as we. see. The house is not large,
but the size of it is practically much increased by its
having been rebuilt on a broad basement that gives a
terrace round the building without injuring its archi
tecture in the slightest degree, while it affords ample
room for kitchens and other offices and leaves the
beautiful little house itself for the master and his
family. In the front are three arches with a broad
frieze above them. Above the frieze are three win
dows, very large in proportion, as they are divided
only by piers the width of the pilasters in front of
them and by their own heavy mullions and transoms.
Over the windows is an entablature, and the whole is
crowned with a parapet which is pierced over the
windows, but not elsewhere, a refinement clearly dem
onstrating the artist-nature of the architect. There is
no visible roof, but the need for one is not felt. The
front is rich in beautiful sculpture, supposed to be by
Jean Goujon, and including medallion-portraits of royal
personages. There are also decorative trophies and
subjects illustrating the vintage.
Although the H6tel de Cluny has not been trans
ferred to another site like the Maison de Frangois I.,
it has been almost as wonderfully preserved. It was
built at first by the Abbots of Cluny, but not much
used by them. In the early part of the present century
it was private property let in tenements to a number of

232 Paris.
tenants. It now belongs to the State, a happy result
due entirely to the public spirit of a lady, Madame du
Sommerard, widow of the antiquary and collector who
had found a home for his treasures in the Hotel de
Cluny, which he owned. Madame du Sommerard sold
the whole together to the State at a loss to herself as
she had much more advantageous offers. Thus it has
most happily come to pass that in the midst of a very
busy part of Paris, close to the great Boulevards of
St. Germain and St. Michel, there is a safe little island
of the past amid the noisy torrents of the present. I
know nothing more delightful in Paris than the peace
of the Hotel de Cluny; and what a wonderful piece of
good luck it is that this beautiful relic of the fifteenth
century should have been quite close to the most in
teresting remnant of Roman Paris, so that both can be
kept together in the same safe enclosure ! I have only
space to point to a few of the chief characteristics of
the building. I do not know of any kind of domestic
architecture quite so satisfactory as that when the
house is isolated. For street architecture the modern
Parisian is practically much better; but for a builder
who has but one dwelling to erect, and is not restricted
to ground-space, this fifteenth-century architecture is
the one that best unites a homely expression with
beauty and convenience. The walls are not too high,
the roof has a comfortable appearance, the building
is of ample size yet not wearisome in vastness; it is
not a proud palace, but a beautiful home that one
might live in habitually and love with intense affection.

The Streets. 233
The windows in the walls are square-headed, with mul
lions, transoms, and weather-mouldings that connect
the windows together. There is a pierced parapet, and
the dormer-windows are beautifully finished with pinna
cles and finials. There are several staircase turrets.
It is beyond my province here to speak of collections,
but those in the Hotel de Cluny, illustrating the Middle
Ages and the Renaissance, are as interesting as the de
lightful building that contains them. The Louvre is the
place to study sculpture, but the lover of carving (in
stone, wood, and ivory) should go to the Hotel de
Cluny. The other beautiful example of fifteenth-
century domestic architecture, the Hotel de Sens, also
built by a great ecclesiastic (the Archbishop of Sens)
for his town residence, is remarkable for the great de
velopment of bartizan turrets relatively to the rest of
the building. I do not know of any edifice whatever
in which they are relatively so large ; but as they are
enriched with panels and carving, the size of them may
be forgiven. They have become very familiar objects
of late years, as the hotel is unfortunately occupied as a
manufactory of sweets, and the enterprising maker uses
a representation of the building in all his illustrated ad
vertisements. How little the architect in the fifteenth cen
tury foresaw this special kind of celebrity for his work !
There is a very curious example of the modern love
of symmetry and order in the arrangements concerning
the outside of St. Germain l'Auxerrois. As you stand
under the eastern entrance to the old courtyard of the
Louvre, the front of that church is to your right on

2 34 Paris.
the other side the Rue du Louvre, but it is not parallel
with the street; it inclines towards the east. It was a
very perplexing problem to get any symmetry out of
that, but the solution was found in the construction
of another building — a Mairie — inchned conversely,
and in the erection of a tower between the two. St.
Germain l'Auxerrois is in Gothic, and the Mairie is
in a modified Renaissance; yet the architect has had
the art and skill to give, in Renaissance, an echo of the
Gothic ideas in the church, so that there is a strong
general resemblance between the Mairie and the church,
in spite of the difference of style.
The vast increase of wealth and luxury in Paris dur
ing the present century has led to the construction of a
great number of isolated dwellings, many of which would
deserve study as examples of modern house-architecture.
They are generally much superior to the London villa
in elegance of design and in the quality and genuine
ness of the materials employed. The best of them are
to be found in the regions near the Bois de Boulogne,
especially about Passy and Auteuil. There are some
particularly good examples on the Boulevard Beaus6jour
and the Boulevard de Montmorency. The misfortune
of most residences of that kind is that they are almost
sure to be injured by the too near neighborhood of
others. I remember a house on the Boulevard Beau-
s6jour which is of classic design and in very perfect taste,
but it happens to be low and close to a lofty edifice that
crushes it completely. Again, from the variety of styles
adopted, it may easily happen that you cannot attune

THE MAIRIE AND ST. GERMAIN L'AUXERROIS.

The Streets. 235
your mind to the enjoyment of one style because a style
with opposite qualities is forcing itself upon your atten
tion at the same time. Formerly, when land was cheaper,
there were many isolated houses within the fortifications
which stood in their own little parks, quite separated from
others by groves of shady trees. These little parks are
becoming fewer every day. Where one villa stood thirty
years ago three stand now, and sometimes half-a-dozen.
Besides this, the old region for villas — Auteuil — is be
coming a town like Passy. Enormous blocks of new
houses, as large and lofty as any in the heart of Paris,
are rising on the park lands and cutting them into
formal streets. An old friend of mine had a delicious
retreat at Auteuil, — a small house in a large space of
grass and grove. I went to find it this year, and found
a block of buildings six stories high and as long as the
Hotel du Louvre.
The tendency of the French towards orderly and
jnethodical arrangement is exemplified nowhere, more
strongly than in the radiation of the avenues from the
Arc de I'Etoile. That huge triumphal arch is admirably
situated on its height, and the ediles appear to have
determined that it should be seen from as many points
as possible. There is no more stately arrangement in
any capital than the wheel of streets that radiate from
that wonderful centre. There are twelve of them, three
of which are a hundred metres wide, while seven of
them are more than a. thousand metres long, and in five
directions there is a clear view of more than an English
mile. Such sort of beauty and sublimity as the straight

236 Paris.
and broad street has to offer, with its interminable rows
of trees, its vast causeways, its lofty houses, has surely
been here attained, if anywhere. I admit the grandeur,
the masterful thoroughness with which the idea has
been carried out, but never felt the slightest desire to
live in streets so totally wanting in homeliness. Many
a snug, unpretending old house in some dull provincial
town has inspired me with a sudden, almost envious
affection ; but in these wearisome long avenues the best
thing seems to be the tram-car that carries one well to
the end of them.
A question very nearly affecting the appearance of
Parisian streets is at this date (1885) looming in the
immediate future. Paris is to have internal railways.
Commissioners have examined our London underground
system, and they have also examined the American
aerial system. For a long time the decision was un
certain, although it was confidently announced that the
American system had been adopted. Now, however, it
appears that the three powers, the Government, the
Municipal Council of Paris, and the Conseil GMral des
Ponts et Chauss^es are finally of one mind upon the sub
ject, and before these words are printed it is likely that
their scheme will have received the assent of the Cham
bers. It includes a great line traversing Paris from east
to west on the right bank of the Seine, and also a great
line crossing this from north to south. Besides these,
there will be a curved line on the left bank, and the
plan leaves room for 'extensions. The important ques
tion whether the new metropolitan railway is to be sub-

RUE DES CHIFFONNIERS, PARIS. DRAWN BY LEON LHERMITTE.

The Streets. 237
terranean as in London, or above the streets as in New
York, is decided in favor of a subterranean line for all
the more crowded parts of the city, which leaves a lati
tude for the aerial system elsewhere. Every one who
cares for the beauty of the most beautiful modern
capital must learn with apprehension that aerial rail
ways will be tolerated in it anywhere. Certainly there
is a degree of architectural taste and knowledge in Paris
that may preserve it from the engineering monstrosities
which England and America tolerate, and it is prob
able that if aerial railways are made at all, they will be
designed with as much art and care as the nature of the
'erection will permit. Still, a row of cast-iron columns
supporting an endless bridge in two stories can hardly
be otherwise than mechanically monotonous.'
Here may end this series of chapters on Paris, with
regard to which the writer is clearly aware that so vast
a subject cannot be treated without many omissions.^
He has principally concerned himself with its artistic
aspects, and has only made occasional reference to the
1 So far as the scheme is known hitherto, the aerial railway is to be a
double line in which one pair of rails will be placed above the other.
2 For example, I have omitted the Palais Royal, but that is chiefly in
teresting historically ; the present building is of little architectural im
portance, and the little shops in the square that were such an attraction
in the time of our grandfathers are eclipsed by others in the new streets.
I should have liked to mention some fountains and other things, but it is
most difficult to compress accurate description, and criticism that gives
reasons, within narrow limits. The Church of St. Germain des Pres
would have been an excellent subject for a chapter if the old Roman
esque edifice had been preserved in its integrity, but as that is not the
case I preferred to speak of churches fully representative of their styles.

238 Paris.
far wider historical and social aspects, concerning which
the reader may find abundance of information else
where. Paris, as it exists at present, is the model
modern city that others copy, and that London herself
is probably destined to copy when the density of popu
lation makes it more and more necessary to pile many
human beings on a square mile, without impeding a
constantly increasing circulation. What is chiefly to
be regretted in the French capital is, that of the beauti
ful mediaeval city that preceded it so little — and that
only in isolated specimens — has been preserved to our
own time. The Present is merciless to the Past, and
merciless it has always been. It may, however, be truly
said that our age shows less of this mercilessness than
its predecessors. When they preserved things it was
chiefly from carelessness and indolence ; but we pre
serve, when we think of it to preserve at all, from artistic
or archaeological interest. No century but our own
ever made intentional sacrifices for the preservation of
ancient monuments. The nineteenth century has made
some sacrifices of this kind ; its shame is that they have
been so few.

University Press : John Wilson & Son, Cambridge.

00769 5399