Balcony of Hôtel de Lauzan-Pimodan on Île de Saint-Louis.
Pont Louis-Philippe—an absurdly modern issue from this ancient quarter—carries us to the quay of the Hôtel de Ville, and we may turn to look in at Saint-Gervais, its precious window as brilliant as on the day it was finished by Jean Cousin. Passing in front of the imperious statue of Étienne Marcel, staring at the river that was his grave, we cross Place de l'Hôtel-de-Ville, once Place de Grève, when it had in the centre its stone cross reached by high steps, and its busy gallows close at hand. We forget its horrid memories in the sight of the new Hôtel de Ville, of no memories, good or bad, to dash our delight in this most nearly perfect of modern structures; perfect in design, execution, and material, a consummate scheme carried out to the last exquisite detail by architects, sculptors, and decorators, all masters of their crafts.
Our direct road takes us through the Halles, their huge iron and glass structures the lineal descendants of those heavy stone Halles, started in the twelfth century here in the fields, when the small market on the island no longer sufficed. Their square, dumpy pillars, and those on which the houses all about were once supported, survive only in the few left from the seventeenth-century rebuilding, now on the north side of Rue de la Ferronerie. Standing in that arcade, we look out on the spot where Ravaillac waited for the coming of Henri IV. The wretched fanatic, worked on by whom we shall never know, had found Paris crowded for the Queen's coronation, and had hunted up a room in the "Three Pigeons," an inn of Rue Saint-Honoré, opposite the Church of Saint-Roch. Here or in another tavern, while prowling, he stole the knife. The narrow street was widened a little by Richelieu, and few of its ancient buildings are left. Returning through this arcade, once the entrance to the Cemetery of the Innocents, to Rue des Innocents just behind, you will find many of the old charniers absolutely unchanged. They form the low-ceilinged ground floor of nearly all these buildings between Rue Saint-Denis and Rue de la Lingerie. Perhaps the most characteristic specimen is that one used for a remise de voitures à bras, a phrase of the finest French for a push-cart shed! And under No. 15 of this street of the Innocents, you may explore two of the cemetery vaults in perfect preservation. They are come to less lugubrious usage now, and serve as a club-room for the teamsters who bring supplies to the markets over-night, and for the market attendants who wait for them. Their wagons unloaded, here they pass the night until daylight shall bring customers, drinking and singing after their harmless fashion, happily ignorant or careless of the once grisly service of these caves. The attendants in the cabaret on the entrance floor, tired as they are by day, will courteously show the cellars, one beneath the other. One must stoop to pass under the heavily vaulted low arches, and the small chambers are overcrowded with a cottage piano and with rough benches and tables; these latter cut, beyond even the unhallowed industry of schoolboys, with initials and names of the frequenters of the club, who have scarred the walls in the same vigorous style. The demure dame du comptoir above assures you that you will be welcomed between midnight and dawn, but bids you bring no prejudices along, for the guests are not apt, in their song and chatter, to "chercher la délicatesse"!
The Church of the Innocents, built by Louis "le Gros" early in the twelfth century, had on its corner at Rues Saint-Denis and aux Fers—this latter now widened into Rue Berger—a most ancient fountain, dating from 1273. This fountain was built anew in 1550, from a design of the Abbé de Clagny, not of Pierre Lescot as is claimed, and was decorated by Jean Goujon. Just before the Revolution (1785-88), when church and charnel-houses and cemetery were swept away, this fountain was removed to the centre of the markets—the centre, too, of the old cemetery—and has been placed, since then, in the middle of this dainty little square which greets us as we emerge from our cabaret. To the three arches it owned, when backed by the church corner, a fourth has been added to make a square, and the original Naiads of Goujon have been increased in number. Their fine flowing lines lift up and lend distinction to this best bit of Renaissance remaining in Paris. And here we are struck by the ingenuity 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.