A Wanderer in Paris

by E. V. Lucas

LA PENSÉE
RODIN
(Luxembourg)

Among the preachers of Notre Dame was St. Dominic, to whom in the pulpit the Virgin appeared, bringing with her his sermon all to his hand in an effulgent volume; here also preached Père Hyacinthe, but with less direct assistance.

That the Treasury is an object of interest to English-speaking visitors is proved by the notice at the door: "The Persons who desire to visit the Trésor are kindly requested to wait the guide here for a few minutes, himself charged of the visit"; but I see no good reason why any one should enter it. Those, however, that do will see vessels of gold, much paraphernalia of ecclesiastical pride and pomp, and certain holy relics. The crown of thorns is here, given to St. Louis by the King of Constantinople and carried to Notre Dame, on the 18th of August, 1239, by the barefoot king. Here also are pieces of the Cross, for the protection of which St. Louis built Sainte Chapelle, the relics afterwards being transferred to Notre Dame; and here is a nail from the Cross—one of the nails of which even an otherwise sceptical Catholic can be sure, because it was given to Charlemagne by Constantine. Charlemagne gave it to Aix la Chapelle, Charles the Bold brought it from Aix to St. Denis, and from St. Denis it came to Notre Dame, where it is enclosed in a crystal case.

The menace of 397 spiral steps in a narrow, dark and almost airless turret, is no light matter, but it is essential to see Paris from the summit of Notre Dame. That view is the key to the city, and the traveller who means to study this city as it deserves, penetrating into the past as industriously and joyously as into the present, must begin here. He will see it all beneath him and around him in its varying ages, and he will be able to proceed methodically and intelligently. Immediately below is the Parvis, the scene of the interrupted execution of Esmeralda, and it was from one of the galleries below that Quasimodo slung himself down to her rescue. Here, where we are now standing, she must often have stood, looking for her faithless Phœbus. Only one of the bells that Quasimodo rang is still in the tower.

Hugo draws attention to the shape of the island, like that of a ship moored to the mainland by various bridges, and he suggests that the ship on the Paris scutcheon (the ship that is to be seen in the design of the lamps around the Opera) is derived from this resemblance. It may be so. On each side of us, north and south, are the oldest parts of Paris that still stand; in the north the Marais, behind the Tour Saint-Jacques, and in the south the district between the Rue de Bièvre and the Boulevard St. Michel. On the south side of the river lived the students, clerics and professors—Dante himself among them, in this very Rue de Bièvre, as we shall see; while in the Marais, as we shall also see, dwelt the nobility. West of St. Eustache in the Middle Ages was nothing but waste ground and woodland, a kind of Bois, at the edge of which, where the Louvre now spreads itself, was a royal hunting lodge, the germ of the present vast palace.

When the Marais passed out of favour, the aristocracy crossed the river to the St. Germain quarter, which clusters around the twin spires of St. Clotilde that now rise in the south-west. And then the Rue Saint-Honoré and the Grands Boulevards were built, and so the city grew and changed until the two culminating touches were put to it: by M. Eiffel, who built the tower, and M. Abadie, architect of the beautiful and unreal Basilique du Sacré-Coeur that crowns the heights of Montmartre.

The chief eminences that one sees are, near at hand, the needle-spire of Sainte Chapelle, in the north the grey mass of St. Eustache, the Châtelet Theatre (advertising at this moment "Les Pilules du Diable" in enormous letters), the long roofs of the Halles, and the outline of the medieval Tour Saint-Jacques. Farther west the bulky Opera; then, right in front, the Trocadéro's twin towers, with Mont Valérien looming up immediately between them; and so round to the south—to the Invalides and St. Clotilde, the Panthéon and the heights of Geneviève. A wonderful panorama.

Of all the views of Paris I think that from Notre Dame is the most interesting, because the point is most central; but the views from Montmartre, from the Tour Saint-Jacques, the Panthéon and the Arc de Triomphe should be studied too. The Eiffel Tower has dwarfed all those eminences; they lie far below it, mere ant-hills in the landscape, although they seem high enough when one essays their steps; yet, although it makes them so lowly, these older coigns of vantage should not for a moment be considered as superseded, for each does for its immediate vicinage what the Eiffel giant can never do. From the Arc de Triomphe, for example, you command all the luxurious activity of the Avenue du Bois de Boulogne and the wonderful prospect of the Champs Elysées, ending with the Louvre; and from the Panthéon you may examine the roofs of the Latin Quarter and see the children at play in the gardens of the Luxembourg.

The merit of the Eiffel Tower is that he shows you not only Paris to the ultimate edges in every direction save on the northern slopes of Montmartre, but he shows you (almost) France too. How long the Eiffel Tower is to stand I cannot say, but I for one shall feel sorry and bereft when he ceases to straddle over Paris. For though he is vulgar he is great, and he has come to be a symbol. When he goes, he will make a strange rent in the sky. This year (1909) is his twentieth: he and I first came to Paris at the same time; but his life is serene to-day compared with what it was in his infancy. At that time his platforms were congested from morn to dusk; but few visitors now ascend even to the first stage and hardly any to the top. No visitor, however, who wants to synthesise Paris should omit this adventure. Only in a balloon can one get a better view, but in no balloon adrift from this green earth would I, for one, ever trust myself, although I must confess that the procession of those aerial monsters that floated serenely past the Eiffel Tower on the last occasion that I climbed it, suggested nothing but content and security. They rose one by one from the bosky depths of the Bois, five miles away, gradually disentangled themselves from the surrounding verdure, assumed their independent buoyant rotundity and came straight to my waiting eye. In an hour I counted fifteen, and by the time the last was free of the earth the first was away over Vincennes, with the afternoon sun turning its mud-coloured silk to burnished gold. Paris has always one balloon floating above her, but fifteen is exceptional.

Notre Dame remains, however, the most important height to scale, for Notre Dame is interesting in every particular, it is soaked in history and mystery. Notre Dame is alone in the possession of its devils—those strange stone fantasies that Méryon discovered. Although every effort is made to familiarise us with them—although they sit docilely as paper-weights on our tables—nothing can lessen the monstrous diablerie of these figures, which look down on Paris with such greed and cruelty, cunning and cynicism. The best known, the most saturnine, of all, who leans on the parapet exactly by the door at the head of the steps, fixes his inhuman gaze on the dome of the Invalides. Is it to be wondered at that he wears that expression?