The Stones of Paris in History and Letters (Vol. 1&2). Benjamin Ellis Martin
shown by making the water in motion a signal feature of the decoration—another instance of this engaging characteristic of French fountains.
A few steps farther north take us to Rue Étienne Marcel, cutting its ruthless course through all that should be sacred, in a fashion that would gladden the sturdy provost. For all its destructive instincts, it yet has spared to us this memorable bit of petrified history, the tower of "Jean-sans-Peur." At No. 20, on the northern side of this broad and noisy street, amid modern structures, its base below the level of the pavement, stands the last remaining fragment of the Hôtel de Bourgogne; which, under its earlier name in older annals as the Hôtel d'Artois, carries us back again to the thirteenth century, for this was the palace-fortress built by the younger brother of Saint Louis, Robert, Count of Artois. He it was who fell, in his "senseless ardor," on the disastrous field of Massouah, in 1250; when the pious King and his devoted captains were made captive by the Sultan of Egypt, and released with heavy fines, so ending that Sixth Crusade.
The Hôtel d'Artois was a princely domain, reaching southward from the wall of Philippe-Auguste to Rue Mauconseil, a road much longer then, and extending from present Rue Saint-Denis to Rue Montorgueil, the two streets that bounded the property east and west. Some of its structures backed against the wall, some of them rested upon its broken top. For the grounds and gardens enclosed within this northern enceinte—completed between 1190 and 1208—stretched to its base, leaving no room for a road on its inner side. Because of this plan, and because this wall crumbled gradually, its broken sections being surrounded and surmounted by crowding houses, no broad boulevards were laid out over its line—as was done with its immediate successor, the wall of Charles V.—and it is not easy to trace it through modern streets and under modern structures. The only fragment left is the tower in the court of the Mont-de-Piété, entered from Rue des Francs-Bourgeois, and it is of build less solid than those we have seen on the southern bank. In the pavement of the first court is traced the line of the wall up to this tower. With this exception, we can indicate only the sites of the towers and the course of the wall.
The huge Tour Barbeau was at the easternmost river end, on Quai des Célestins, nearly at the foot of our Rue des Jardins-Saint-Paul. It commanded Port Saint-Paul, chief landing-place of river boatmen, and guarded the Pôterne des Barrés. That name was also given to the small street—now Rue de l'Ave Maria—that led from this postern-gate. They owe that name indirectly to Saint Louis. Returning from the Holy Land, he had brought six monks from Mount Carmel, and housed them on the quay, called now after their successors, the Célestins. The black robes, striped white, of these six monks, made them known popularly as "les Barrés." Our wall ran straight away from this waterside gate, parallel with and a little to the west of present Rue des Jardins, then a country road on its outer edge, to Porte Baudoyer, afterward Porte Saint-Antoine, standing across the space where meet Rues Saint-Antoine and de Rivoli. This was the strongest for defence of all the gates, holding the entrance to the town, by way of the Roman and later the Royal road from the eastern provinces. From this point the wall took a great curve beyond the bounds of the built-up portions of the town. The Pôterne Barbette, its next gate, in Rue Vieille-du-Temple, just south of its crossing by Rue des Francs-Bourgeois, lost its old name in this name taken from the Hôtel Barbette, built a century later, outside the wall here. Next came the gate in Rue du Temple, nearly half way between our Rues de Braque and Rambuteau. Through this gate passed the Knights Templar to and from their great fortified domain beyond. The Pôterne Beaubourg, in the street of that name, was a minor gateway, having no especial history beyond that contained in the derivation of its name, "beaubourg," from a particularly rich settlement, just hereabout. Next we come to two most important gates, Saint-Martin and Saint-Denis, across those two streets, that guarded the approaches by the great roads from Senlis and Soissons, and the heart of the land, old Île de France, and from all the northern provinces. Between the Saint-Denis gate and that at Rue Montorgueil, lay the property of the Comte d'Artois, and he cut, for his royal convenience, a postern in the wall that formed his northern boundary.
From this point our wall went in another wide curve to the river-bank, within the lines of old Rues Plâtrière and Grenelle, the two now widened into modern Rue Jean-Jacques-Rousseau. The country road that is now Rue Montmartre was guarded by a gate, opened a few years after the completion of the wall, and its site shown by a tablet in the wall of No. 30 of that street. A small gate was cut at the meeting of present Rues Coquillière and Jean-Jacques-Rousseau. Nearly opposite the end of this latter street, where Rue Saint-Honoré passes in front of the Oratoire, was the last public gate on the mainland. Thence the course was straight away to the river shore, as you may see by the diagram set in lighter stone in the pavement of the court of the Louvre. These stones mark also the huge round of the donjon of the old Louvre, on whose eastern or town side the wall passed to the river-side Tour-qui-fait-le-Coin. This tower was of the shape and size of the opposite Tour de Nesle, which we have already seen at the point where the southern wall came down to the shore; and between the two towers, a great chain was slung across the Seine to prevent approach by river pirates. Pont des Arts is almost directly over the dip of that chain. So, too, the river was protected at the eastern ends of the wall; the Barbeau tower was linked to the solitary tower on Île Notre-Dame, and that again across the other arm of the Seine, to the immense tower on Quai de la Tournelle. This island Tour Loriaux rose from the banks of a natural moat made by the river's narrow channel between Île Notre-Dame and Île aux Vaches, and this bank was afterward further protected by a slight curtain of wall across the island, with a tower at either end. Four centuries later, when this island wall and its towers had long since crumbled away, that moat was filled up—Rue Poulletier, the modernized Poultier, lies over its course—and the two small islands became large Île Saint-Louis.
And now, we have seen la Cité, la Ville, l'Université, all girdled about by Philippe-Auguste's great wall. The City could spread no farther than its river-banks; the University was content to abide within its bounds, even as late as the wars of the League; the Town began speedily to outgrow its limits, and within two centuries it had so developed that the capacious range of a new wall, that of Charles V., was needed to enclose its bustling quarters. That story shall come in a later chapter.
One hundred years after the death of Robert of Artois, his estate passed, by marriage, to the first house of Burgundy, whose name it took, and when that house became extinct, in the days of Jean "le Bon," second Valois King of France, it came, along with the broad acres and opulent towns of that duchy, into his hands, by way of some distant kinship. This generous and not over-shrewd monarch did not care to retain these much-needed revenues, and gave them, with the resuscitated title of Burgundy, to his younger son, "recalling again to memory the excellent and praiseworthy services of our right dearly beloved son Philip, the fourth of our sons, who freely exposed himself to death with us, and, all wounded as he was, remained unwavering and fearless at the battle of Poictiers." From that field Philip carried away his future title, "le Hardi." By this act of grateful recognition, rare in kings, were laid the foundations of a house that was to grow as great as the throne itself, to perplex France within, and to bring trouble from without, throughout long calamitous years. This first Duke Philip seems to have had the hardihood to do right in those wrong-doing days, for he remained a sufficiently loyal subject of his brother Charles V., and later a faithful guardian, as one of the "Sires de la Fleur-de-Lis," of his nephew, the eleven-year-old Charles VI. He married Margaret, heiress of the Count of Flanders, and widow of Philippe de Rouvre, last of the old line of Burgundy, and she brought, to this new house of Burgundy, the fat, flat meadows and the turbulent towns of the Lowlands, and also the Hôtel de Flandres in the capital, where now stands the General Post-office in Rue Jean-Jacques-Rousseau.
Duke Philip, dying in 1404, bequeathed to his eldest son, John, nick-named "Jean-sans-Peur," not only a goodly share of his immense possessions, but also the pickings of a "very pretty quarrel" with Louis de Valois, Duc d'Orléans. This quarrel was tenderly nursed by John, who, as the head of a powerful independent house, and the leader of a redoubtable faction, felt himself to be more important than the royal younger brother. Ambitious and unscrupulous, calculating and impetuous, he created the rôle on his stage, played with transient success by Philippe-Égalité, four hundred years later. He rode at the head of a brilliant train and posed for the applause of the populace. He walked arm in arm with the public executioner, Capeluche,