The Stones of Paris in History and Letters (Vol. 1&2). Benjamin Ellis Martin
line made by the present Rues Mazarine and Monsieur-le-Prince; then, by its great curve just north of Rue des Fossés-Saint-Jacques, it safeguarded the tomb and the abbey of Sainte Geneviève, and so bent sharply around toward the northeast, within the line of present Rues Thouin, du Cardinal-Lemoine, and des Fossés-Saint-Bernard, to the easternmost tower on Quai de la Tournelle, and its river-gate, Porte Saint-Bernard. That gate, standing until the end of the eighteenth century, had been titillated into a triumphal arch for Louis XIV., in whose time this quay was a swell promenade and drive. It still retains one of its grand mansions, the Hôtel Clermont-Tonnerre, at No. 27 on the quay, with a well-preserved portal.
Of the stately sweep of this wall we may get suggestive glimpses by the various tablets, that show the sites of the tennis courts made later on its outer side, and that mark the places of the gates; such as the tablet at No. 44 Rue Dauphine. The street and gate of that name date from 1607, when Henri IV. constructed them as the southern outlet from his Pont-Neuf, and named them in honor of the first dauphin born to France since Catherine de' Medici's puny sons. This Porte Dauphine took the place, and very nearly the site, of the original Porte de Buci, which stood over the western end of our Rue Saint-André-des-Arts, and was done away with in the cutting of Rue Dauphine. There was a gate, cut a few years after the completion of the wall, opening into the present triangular space made by the meeting of Rue de l'École-de-Médecine and Boulevard Saint-Germain, and this gate bore this latter name. Of the original gates, that next beyond Porte de Buci was Porte Saint-Michel, a small postern that stood almost in the centre of the meeting-place of Boulevard Saint-Michel and Rues Monsieur-le-Prince and Soufflot. Next came the important Porte Saint-Jacques, mounting guard over the street now of that name, nearly where it crosses the southern side of new Rue Soufflot, named in honor of the architect of the Panthéon. On that southwest corner is a tablet with a plan of the gate. It was a gate well watched by friends within, and foes without, coming up by this easy road. Dunois gained it, more by seduction than force, and entered with his French troops, driving the English before him, on the morning of Friday, April 13, 1436; and Henry of Navarre failed to gain it by force from the League, on the night of September 10, 1590. Stand in front of Nos. 174 and 176 of widened Rue Saint-Jacques, and you are on the spot where he tried to scale that gate, again and again.
More than suggestions of the wall itself may be got by actual sight of sections that survive, despite the assertions of authorities that no stone is left. At the end of Impasse de Nevers, within a locked gate, you may see a presumable bit. In the court that lies behind Nos. 27 and 29 Rue Guénégaud is a stable, and deep in the shadow of that stable lurks a round tower of Philippe-Auguste, massive and unmarred. At No. 4 Cour du Commerce a locksmith has his shop, and he hangs his keys and iron scraps on nails driven with difficulty between the tightly fitted blocks of another round tower. Turn the corner into Cour de Rohan—a corruption of Rouen, whose archbishop had his town-house here—and you shall find a narrow iron stairway, that mounts the end of the sliced-off wall, and that carries you to a tiny garden, wherein small schoolgirls play on the very top of that wall. Down at the end of Cour de Rohan is an ancient well, dating from the day when this court lay within the grounds of the Hôtel de Navarre, the property of Louis of Orleans before he became Louis XII. In style it was closely akin to the Hôtel de Cluny, and it is a sorrow that it is lost to us. Its entrance was at the present Nos. 49 and 51 of Rue Saint-André-des-Arts, and the very ancient walls in the rear court of the latter house may have belonged to the Hôtel de Navarre. When Louis sold this property, one portion was bought by Dr. Coictier, who had amassed wealth as the physician of Louis XI., and this well was long known by his name. It has lost its metal-work, which was as fine as that of the well once owned by Tristan l'Hermite, Coictier's crony, and now placed in the court of the Cluny Museum.
Continuing along the course of the great wall, we find a longer section, whereon houses have been built, and another garden. At the end of the hallway of No. 47 Rue Descartes is a narrow stairway, by which we mount to the row of cottages on top of the wall, and beyond them is a small domain containing trees and bushes and flower-beds, and all alive with fowls. Still farther, in a vacant lot in Rue Clovis, which has cut deep through the hill, a broken end of the wall hangs high above us on the crest, showing both solid faces and the rubble between. Its outer face forms the rear of the court at No. 62 Rue du Cardinal-Lemoine. Still another section can be seen in the inner court of No. 9 Rue d'Arras, its great square stones serving as foundation for high houses. And this is the last we shall see of this southern half of the wall of Philippe-Auguste.
When that monarch lay dying at Mantes, he found comfort in the thought that he was leaving his Paris safe in the competent hands of his daughter-in-law—whose beauty, sense, and spirit had won him early—rather than in the gentle hold of his son, misnamed "le Lion." He lived, as Louis VIII., only three years, and "la reine blanche" (the widowed queens of France wore white for mourning, until Anne of Brittany put on black for her first husband, Charles VIII.) became the sole protector of her twelve-year-old son, on whom she so doted as to be jealous of the wife she had herself found for him. She ruled him and his hitherto unruly nobles, and cemented his kingdom, fractured by local jealousies. He is known to history as Saint Louis, fit to sit alongside Marcus Aurelius, in the equal conscience they put into their kingly duties. Voltaire himself ceases to sneer in the presence of this monarch's unselfish devotion to his people, and gives him praise as unstinted as any on record.
His Paris, the Paris of his mother and his grandfather, was made up of la Cité on the island, under the jurisdiction of the bishop; the northern suburb, outre-Grand-Pont or la Ville, governed by the Prévôt des Marchands; the southern suburb, outre-Petit-Pont or l'Université, appertaining to the "Recteur"; all ruled by the Prévôt of Paris, appointed by and accountable to the King alone. Hugo's "little old lady between her two promising daughters" holds good to-day, when the daughters are strapping wenches, and have not yet got their growth. In all three sections, the priest and the soldier—twin foes of light and life in all times and in all lands—had their own way. They cumbered the ground with their fortresses and their monasteries, all bestowed within spacious enclosures; so walling-in for their favored dwellers, and walling-out from the common herd outside, the air and sun, green sights, and pleasant scents. There were no open spaces for the people of mediæval days. Indeed, there were no "people," in our meaning of that word. The stage direction, "Enter Populace," expresses their state. There were peasants in the fields, toilers in the towns, vassals, all of them—villains, legally—allowed to live by the soldier, that they might pay for his fighting, and serve as food for his steel; sheep let graze by the priest, to be sheared for the Church and to be burned at the stake. This populace looked on at these burnings, at the cutting out of tongues and slicing off of ears and hacking away of hands by their lords, in dumb terror and docile submission. More than death or mutilation, did they dread the ban of the Church and the lash of its menacing bell. Their only diversion was made by royal processions, by church festivals, by public executions. So went on the dreary round of centuries, in a dull colorless terror, until it was time for the coming of the short, sharp Terror dyed red. Then the White Terror, that came with the Restoration, benumbed the land for awhile, and the tricolored effrontery of the Second Empire held it in grip. Against all royalist and imperial reaction, the lesser revolutions of the nineteenth century have kept alive the essential spirit of the great Revolution of 1789, inherited by them, and handed down to the present Republic, that the assured ultimate issue may be fought out under its Tricolor. France, the splendid creature, once more almost throttled by priest and soldier, has saved herself by the courage of a national conscience, such as has not been matched by any land in any crisis.
They who by the grace of God and the stupidity of man owned and ordered these human cattle of the darkest ages, had their homes within this new, strong town-wall; in fat monasteries, secluded behind garden and vineyard; in grim citadels, whose central keep and lesser towers and staircase turrets, stables and outer structures, were grouped about a great court, that swarmed with men-at-arms, grooms, and hangers-on. And so, endless walls scowled on the wayfarer through the town's lanes, narrow, winding, unpaved, filthy. On a hot summer day, Philippe-Auguste stood at his open window in the old Palace, and the odor of mud came offensively to the royal nostrils; soon the main City streets were paved. When a king's son happened to be unhorsed by a peripatetic pig nosing for garbage, a royal edict forbade the presence of swine in the streets; the only exceptions