The original tower of the Louvre seemed to Philip a good nucleus for an enlarged fortification which should be at the same time a palace to which he might withdraw from the palace in the crowded Cité. Around the old donjon he built a rectangular fortress, its short end lying along the river, its entrance defended by another huge tower whose work of protection was reinforced by smaller towers, by a surrounding wall, and by a moat. Down beneath the treasures of to-day’s Louvre and out under the courtyard still run passages of this old building. They twist and turn within walls of rough masonry and inflame the imagination with thoughts of adventurous possibilities, of plots and prisoners and escapes, until they land the wanderer of a sudden in the coal bin of the hopelessly up-to-date furnace that heats the Hall of the Caryatides.
Across the river on the south bank stood another huge tower, best known by its later name, the Tour de Nesle. It was from this tower, that, in the fourteenth century, Jeanne of Burgundy, widow of Philip the Long, is reputed to have had the people who displeased her dropped into the river. Villon’s “Ballad of Old-Time Ladies” says:
“And where, I pray you, is the Queen,
Who willed that Buridan should steer
Sewed in a sack’s mouth, down the Seine?”
Buridan was a professor in the University, and the author of the famous assertion that if an ass were placed between two equally attractive bundles of hay he would starve to death before he could determine which one to eat first. The tale goes that Buridan’s friends, fearing the outcome of his visit to the tower, were waiting in a boat and rescued him. Dumas’ play, “La Tour de Nesle” is based on the legends surrounding this old fortification, now existent only in a tablet placed on the eastern wing of the Institute to mark its site.
A chain across the stream from the Louvre to the Tour de Nesle regulated navigation, for it could only be taken down for the passage of boats by permission of the provost.
Starting south from the Tour de Nesle ran
TOUR DE NESLE IN 1661.