the wall whose erection Philip commanded when he first went off to the wars, that his fair city might be well protected in his absence. It was higher and heavier than its predecessors, with a battlemented top to hide soldiers in action and frequent towers which served the triple purpose of sheltering extra men, of storing weapons and of affording points of observation somewhat above the wall itself. A dozen gates opened each upon a drawbridge whose lifting compelled the invader to cross a ditch in some way before he attempted to storm an entrance.
Leaving the Tour de Nesle the wall swept around Mont Sainte Geneviève and back to the river at a point about opposite the center of the present Île Saint Louis, east of the Cité. On the right bank it ran north and west, keeping below the Priory of Saint Martin which lay outside of it. Its course is traced on the pavement of the eastern courtyard of the present Louvre, part of one of the towers is extant in a government pawnshop in the Marais, a considerable section is to be seen in the enclosure beside Saint Julien-le-Pauvre, and its course is marked elsewhere by an occasional fragment, by some street named Fossé, or by a tablet placed by the Commission of Old Paris, which is doing excellent antiquarian work in the preservation and marking of historic buildings and localities.
The Paris of Philip Augustus was but a thirtieth part as large as the Paris of to-day, but it had three hundred streets. Narrow, dark and dirty alleys they were, the best of them, and even in this early century the devastating epidemics of a later day were not unknown. A contemporary historian says: “One day the king was in his castle of the Louvre and was walking back and forth, pondering the affairs of the kingdom, when there passed a heavy wagon whose wheels stirred up the street and caused an insupportable odor to rise from it. When he smelled this stench Philip experienced a profound nausea. At once he summoned the provost and the burgesses of the city and he gave them orders to pave the streets with large stones and strong, which was done.”
“Which was done in part” would have been nearer the truth, for, although one public-spirited citizen gave a large sum, most of the contributions were of the nature of samples from the shopkeepers’ stocks, and the actual amount of paving accomplished was very little for many centuries to come. As late as the sixteenth century Montaigne was deploring the evil odors of the city he loved so well, and Arthur Young, at the end of the eighteenth, compared the cleanliness of Paris most unfavorably with that of London. In Philip’s reign ladies seldom went afoot, so thick was the mud, composed of indescribable filth, and knights had good need of armor in times of peace to protect them from buckets of water, poured casually into the streets from abutting houses with only a cry of “Gare l’eau” as a warning.
Nevertheless, in days of festival these same narrow streets might be gorgeous to behold. When Philip Augustus returned from the battle of Bouvines the whole city came out to meet him. Chanting priests, singing girls, shouting urchins ushered him into a town decorated to do him honor. From windows and balconies hung rich tapestries and carpets; banners waved, and the sunlight flashed on glittering spearpoints by day as bonfires made breastplates glitter at night.
It would be hard to find in all history so complete an instance of a nation’s spiritual and mental growth expressing itself in outer form rapidly and in transcendent beauty as is exhibited in the evolution of Gothic architecture in France in the twelfth century. It originated in the Île de France and within the span of this hundred years Paris was rebuilt, bursting into the elegance and grace of the new style from the heaviness of the old as a butterfly casts aside its constraining cocoon.
The nave of Saint Germain-des-Prés, is an example of the heavy-pillared, round-arched building of the Romanesque era. The desire to give visible form to the universal feeling of uplift brought to birth the ogive or pointed arch which gave its name to “ogival” or Gothic architecture best shown, of course, in churches. Higher and higher the arches pointed skyward; lancet windows above helped to light the deep “vessel” or nave (from the Latin navis, ship) and the roof crowned all at a dizzying height.
Satisfying as this was from the point of view of beauty and of symbolism, it gave rise to serious practical questions. How were such lofty walls to be made strong enough to support the outward push of the roof? The thirteenth century had come about before the problem was solved entirely. By that time outer buttresses had been evolved strong enough for their work yet so delicate that they were called “flying,” spread as they were like the wings of a bird.
Decoration became more beautiful, also. Romanesque pillar capitals had been adorned with conventional vegetation and strange beasts whose originals never were on land or sea. The sculptors of the ogival period took Nature as their teacher and France as their schoolroom and carved the leaves and flowers and fruits that grew about them, the oak and willow and rose-bush and clover and grape. Pinnacles gave an effect of lightness to exteriors and their edges were