The Stones of Paris in History and Letters (Vol. 1&2). Benjamin Ellis Martin
mints found their way there, not only through fire and flood, but because the money-changers, warily established on the bridges, dropped many an illicit piece from their convenient windows into the river, rather than let themselves be caught in passing counterfeits. This water museum has been dragged from time to time, and the treasures have gone to enrich various collections, notably that of M. Victorien Sardou.
With all helpless Paris, our tower watched the old Hôtel-Dieu—on the island's southern bank, where now is the green open space between Petit-Pont and Pont au Double—burning away for eleven days in 1772, and caught glimpses of the rescued patients, carried across Place du Parvis to hastily improvised wards in the nave of Notre-Dame.
Unscathed by fire, unmutilated by man, unwearied by watching, "Dagobert's Tower" stands, penned in by the high old buildings that shoulder it all around. Hidden behind them, it is unseen and forgotten. The only glimpses to be got of its gray bulk are, one from the neighboring tower of the cathedral, and another from the deck of a river-boat as it glides under Pont d'Arcole; a glimpse to be caught quickly, amid the quick-changing views of the ever-varied perspective of the island's towers and buttresses, pinnacles and domes.
Far away from the island and its river, over the edge of the southern slope, behind the distant, dreary, outer boulevards, we find another ancient staircase. It is within the vast structure known as "la maison dîte de Saint Louis," commonly called the "Hôtel de la Reine Blanche." The modern boulevard, which gets its name from the astronomer, philosopher, and politician, Arago, has made a clean sweep through this historic quarter, but it has spared this mansion and the legend, which makes it the suburban dwelling of Blanche of Castile. Hereabout was all country then, and a favorite summer resort of the wealthy citizens, whose modest cottages and showy villas clustered along the banks of the Bièvre; a free and wilful stream in the early years of the thirteenth century, often in revolt and sometimes misleading the sedate Seine into escapades, to the disquiet of these faubourgs. From its gardens, portly meadows smiled townward to Mont-Sainte-Geneviève, crowded with its schools, and to the convent gardens, snuggling close under the shelter of the southern wall of Philippe-Auguste.
To-day, all this quarter is made malodorous by its many tanneries and dye-works; they have enslaved the tiny Bièvre and stained it to a dirty reddish brown; so that it crawls, slimy and sluggish and ashamed, between their surly walls and beneath bedraggled bridges, glad to sink into the Seine, under the Orleans railway station. Its gardens and meadows are covered by square miles of stone, and the line of the old wall is hidden behind and under modern streets. And this so-called country home of Queen Blanche, become plain No. 17 Rue des Gobelins, yet refuses, in its mediæval dignity, to regard itself as a mere number in a street, and withdraws behind its wall, its shoulder aslant, to express its royal unconcern for the straight lines of city surveyors. These have not yet stolen all its old-time character from the remaining section of the street, nor spoiled such of its old-time façades as are left. This one at No. 19 demands our especial scrutiny, by its significant portal and windows, and by the belief that it was originally joined in its rear to No. 17, the two forming one immense structure of the same style of architecture. When was its date, who was its builder, what was its use, are undisclosed, so far, and we may follow our own fancies, as we enter through the narrow gateway into the front court of "Queen Blanche's house." Its main fabric on the ground floor, with its low arched window, insists that it is contemporary with the clever woman and capable queen, to whom legend, wider than merely local, brings home this building. Yet its upper windows, and the dormers of the wing, and the slope of the roof, suggest a late fifteenth or an early sixteenth century origin; and the cornice-moulding is so well worked out that it speaks plainly of a much later date than the mediæval fortress-home. In a tourelle at either end is a grand spiral staircase, as in Dagobert's Tower, and, like that, these turn on huge central oak trunks. Here, however, the steps are less abrupt; the grooving of the hand-rail, while it testifies to the stroke of the axe, is less rude; and daylight is welcomed by wider windows. Each of the three floors, that lie between the two staircase turrets, is made up of one vast hall, with no traces of division walls. Whether or no a Gobelin once made usage of this building, as has been claimed, it has now come into a tanner's service, and his workmen tread its stairs and halls, giving a living touch of our workaday world to these walls of dead feudalism.
The So-called Hôtel de la Reine Blanche.
(From a photograph of the Commission du Vieux Paris.)
It was in 1200 that Blanche of Castile was brought to France, a girl of twelve, for her marriage with little Louis, of the same ripe age. His father, Philippe-Auguste, was a mighty builder, and Paris flourished under him, her "second founder." In the intervals between crusades against infidels and wars with Christians, he founded colleges and gave other aid to the university on this bank; he pushed on with his strong hand the building of Notre-Dame and of the old Hôtel-Dieu on the island; he removed his residence from the ancient Palace, there, to the Louvre on the northern bank, constructed by him to that end—his huge foundation-walls, with some few capitals and mouldings, may be seen deep down in the substructures of the present Louvre—he shut in the unfenced cemetery of the Innocents from the merry-makers who profaned it; he roofed and walled-in the open markets in the fields hard by that burial-ground; and he paved the streets of the Cité. To meet this last outlay, he was lavish with the money of the citizens, notably of Gérard de Poissy, who was moved to donate one-half of his entire fortune by the sight of the King, "sparing neither pains nor expense in beautifying the town." Sparing himself no pains for the bettering of his beloved capital, Philippe-Auguste spared no expense to its worthy burghers, and in their purses he found the funds for his great wall. This he planned and began, toward the close of the twelfth century, when at home for awhile from the warfaring, during which he had captured the "saucy Château-Gaillard" of his former fellow-crusader, Richard the Lion-Hearted.
Around the early Lutetia on the island, with the river for its moat, there had been a Gallo-Roman wall, well known to us all; and there was a later wall, concerning which none of us know much. We may learn no more than that it was a work of Louis VI., "le Gros," early in the twelfth century, and that it enclosed the city's small suburbs on both banks of the mainland. Where this wall abutted on the two bridge-heads that gave access to the island, Louis VI. converted the wooden towers—already placed there for the protection of these approaches by Charles II., "le Chauve," in the ninth century—into great gateways and small citadels, all of stone. They were massive, grim, sinister structures, and when their service as fortresses was finished, they were used for prisons; both equally infamous in cruelty and horror. The Petit Châtelet was a donjon tower, and guarded the southern approach to the island by way of the ancient main-road of the Gaul and the Roman, known later as the Voie du Midi, and later again as the Route d'Orléans, and now as Rue Saint-Jacques. This châtelet stood at the head of Petit-Pont, on the ground where Quais Saint-Michel and Montebello meet now, and was not demolished until late in the eighteenth century. The Grand Châtelet ended the northern wall where it met Pont au Change, and its gloomy walls, and conical towers flanking a frowning portal, were pick-axed away only in 1802. It had held no prisoners since Necker induced Louis XVI. to institute, in La Force and other jails, what were grotesquely entitled "model prisons." On the building that faces the northern side of Place du Châtelet you will find an elaborate tablet holding the plan of the dreary fortress and the appalling prison. When we stroll about the open space that its destruction has left, and that bears the bad old name, we need not lament its loss.
Then came the wall of Philippe-Auguste, grandly planned to enclose the closely knit island Cité and its straggling suburbs on either bank, with all their gardens, vineyards, and fields far out; and solidly constructed, with nearly thirty feet of squared-stone height, and nearly ten feet of cemented rubble between the strong side faces. Its heavy parapet was battlemented, numerous round towers bulged from its outer side, the frequent gates had stern flanking towers, and the four ends on both river-banks were guarded by enormous towers, really small fortresses. The westernmost tower on this southern shore—with which section of the wall, built slowly from 1208 to 1220, we are now concerned—was the Tour de Nesle, and its site is shown by a tablet on the quay-front of the eastern wing of the Institute. Alongside was the important Porte de Nesle. Thence the