The Stones of Paris in History and Letters (Vol. 1&2). Benjamin Ellis Martin
conquest, had won the Holy Land of Eastern Learning; and Constantinople, lost later to the Christian world, gave to it fleeing Greek scholars, carrying precious manuscripts, Byzantine logic and physics, all through Europe. Pious soldiers, coming home with wealth; stay-at-home churchmen, who had amassed riches; royalty, anxious to placate Rome—all these built colleges, founded scholarships, endowed chairs, subsidized teachers.
From the cloisters on the island—the cradle of the University, as the Palace at the other end of the island was the cradle of the Town—from the new cathedral that Abelard had not seen, the schools stepped over to the mainland on the south. There, on the shore, were built the College of the Four Nations, and the School of Medicine, alongside that annex of the old Hôtel-Dieu, which was reached by the little bridge, that went only the other day, and that led from the central structure on the island. From this shore the scholars' quarter spread up the slope to the summit of Mont-Sainte-Geneviève. There teachers and scholars met in the cloisters of the great abbey, that had grown up around the tomb of the patron saint of Paris, where now stands the Panthéon. Of the huge basilica, its foundations laid by Clovis—who had paid for a victory by his baptism into Christianity—there is left the tower, rising, aged and estranged, above the younger structures of the Lycée Henri IV. Its foundations under ground are of Clovis, its lower portion is of eleventh-century rebuilding, its upper portion of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries. The plan of his cloisters, and some of its stones, are kept in the arches of the college court, to which one enters from No. 23 Rue Clovis. And, in the street named for his wife, Clotilde, you may see the massive side wall of the abbey refectory, now the college chapel.
Around about the southern side of the abbey, and around the schools on the slope below, that were the beginning of the University, Philippe-Auguste threw the protecting arm of his great wall. Within its clasp lay the Pays Latin, wherein that tongue was used exclusively in those schools. This language, sacred to so-called learning and unknown to the vulgar, seemed a fit vehicle for the lame science of the doctor, and the crippled dialectics of the theologian, both always in arms against the "new learning." It was not until the close of Henri IV.'s reign, that it was thought worth while to use the French language in the classes. All through the Middle Ages, this University was a world-centre for its teaching, and through all the ages it has been "that prolific soil in which no seeds, which have once been committed to it, are ever permitted to perish." While la Cité was the seat of a militant Church, and la Ville the gathering-place of thronging merchants, this hill-side swarmed with students, and their officials were put to it to house them properly and keep them orderly. They got on as best they might, ill-lodged, ill-fed, ill-clad, often begging, always roistering, in the streets. By day the sedate burghers of the other quarters trembled for their ducats and their daughters, and found peace only when night brought the locking of the gate of the Petit-Châtelet, and the shutting up in their own district of the turbulent students.
Turbulent still, the students of our day, of every land and all tongues—except Latin—stream through the streets of the Latin Quarter, intent on study, or on pleasure bent. Only the Revolution has ever thinned their ranks, what time the Legislative Assembly nearly wrecked the parent University, with all its offspring throughout France. Napoleon rescued them all, and by his legislation of 1806 and 1808, the University has been builded solidly on the foundations of the State. The ancient scholars' quarter, unlighted and undrained and unhealthful, is almost all gone; its narrow, tortuous streets are nearly all widened or wiped out; open spaces and gardens give it larger lungs; its dark, damp, mouldy colleges have made way for grandiose structures of the latest sanitation. Yet the gray walls of the annex of the Hôtel-Dieu still gloom down on the narrow street; the fifteenth-century School of Medicine, its vast hall perverted to base uses, is hidden behind the entrance of No. 15 Rue de la Bucherie; and above the buildings on the west side of Rue de l'Hôtel-Colbert rises the rotunda of its later amphitheatre. Rue Galande retains many of its houses of the time of Charles IX., when these gables on the street were erected. Except for the superb façade at No. 29 Rue de la Parcheminerie—a municipal residence dating from about the middle of the eighteenth century—that venerable street remains absolutely unaltered since its very first days, when the parchment-makers took it for their own. Some of their parchment seems to be still on sale in its shop windows. In the ancient house No. 8 Rue Boutebrie you will find as perfect a specimen of a mediæval staircase, its wooden rail admirably carved, as is left in Paris. And the street of the Mountain of Sainte-Geneviève still winds, stonily steep, up the slope.
Rue Hautefeuille, a Survivor of the Scholars' Quarter.
Nothing of Rue du Fouarre, as it was known to Rabelais and Dante, is left but its name in the broadened curtailment of this most ancient street. That name comes from the old French word meaning "forage," and was given to it at the time when the wealthier students bought near there and brought into it the trusses of hay and straw, which they spread on the floor for seats during the lectures, the reader himself being seated on a rude dais at the end of the hall. The forage market is still held, not far away, in Place Maubert. And the churches of Saint-Julien-le-Pauvre and of Saint-Séverin are unchanged, except by age, since those days when their bells were the only timekeepers for lecturers and lectured; giving signal, throughout the day, for the divisions of the classes, until vespers told that the working-day was done. The schools opened with the early mass at Saint-Julien-le-Pauvre, then the chapel adjoining the Hôtel-Dieu, now an exquisite relic of simple twelfth-century Gothic. Still older had been Saint-Séverin, a chapel of the earliest years of the monarchy, destroyed by the Normans when they camped just here in 866, besieging the island city and making their onslaught on the wooden tower that guarded the abutment of the Petit-Pont on the mainland. The twelve heroes, who held that tower against the Norman horde, are commemorated by the tablet in the wall of Place du Petit-Pont. Saint-Séverin was rebuilt in the thirteenth century, and its vast burial-ground on the south covered by the buildings and the street of la Parcheminerie. So that of the University seen by Dante, we can be sure only of the body of Saint-Séverin—its tower was built in 1347—and of Saint-Julien-le-Pauvre, and the buildings that are glued to it.
The Interior of Saint-Julien-le-Pauvre.
Dante's bronze figure looks pensively down from the terrace of the Collége de France on all the noise and the newness of modern Rue des Écoles. The date of his short stay in Paris cannot be fixed, but it was certainly after his exile from Florence, therefore not earlier than 1302, and probably not later than 1310, his own years being a little less, or a little more, than forty. There can be no doubt as to his having visited Paris, for Boccaccio, his admirer and biographer, records the fact; told him perhaps by the elder Boccaccio, who lived in the capital—where his famous son was born—and who probably met the expatriated poet there. And in the tenth canto of "Paradiso," we find these words in Longfellow's translation:
"It is the light eternal of Sigieri,
Who, reading lectures in the street of straw,
Did syllogize individious verities."
This closing line, meaning that Sigier of Brabant had the courage to speak truths that were unpopular, explains why he was Dante's favorite lecturer. In Balzac's pretty fragment of romance, in which the great Frenchman makes so vivid the presence of the great Italian, the home of the latter is in one of the small houses on the extreme eastern end of the City Island—such as the modest dwelling in which died Boileau-Despréaux, four centuries later. From there, Balzac has Dante ferried over to Quai de la Tournelle, and so stroll to his lectures. But Dante's home was really in that same street of straw, to which he had come from his quarters away south on the banks of the Bièvre, too far away from the schools. He had taken up his abode in that rural suburb, on first coming to Paris, as did many men of letters, of that time and of later times, who were drawn to the pleasant, quiet country without the walls.
There was one among these men to whose home, tradition tells us, Dante was fond of finding his way, after he had come to live in the narrow town street. The grave figure goes sedately up Rue Saint-Jacques, always the great southern thoroughfare, passing the ancient chapel of the martyrs, Saint-Benoît-le-Bétourné, and