Ogival or Gothic architecture had been a growth, every part added with a meaning. Its development in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries was chiefly in details, windows, for example, being better drawn though less harmonious, and rose windows increasing in elaboration until they seemed the flames which gave their name to the flamboyant style of architecture. Decoration grew over-elaborate. It became customary to build chapels along the side aisles of the nave, and a gallery separating the choir and the nave. There is but one such gallery or jubé in Paris to-day, that of the Church of Saint Étienne-du-Mont.
After the Hundred Years’ War was over and the country knew peace again it was natural that the building of churches should begin once more. It is to this time that the church of Saint Laurent belongs, built on the site of an old monastery; Saint Nicholas-of-the-Fields not far away; Saint Germain l’Auxerrois, to which a bit here and a bit there had been added from very early days; Saint Séverin on the left bank. This church is one of the most interesting in modern Paris, crowded as it is into the old left bank quarter near Saint Julien-le-Pauvre, its façade taken bodily from Saint Pierre-aux-Boeufs, the ancient Cité church of the Butchers’ Corporation when it was demolished, its north doorway adorned with two lions between which the priests stood to decide causes, and its walls within decorated with tablets given to record many kinds of gratitude, from that for the passing of a successful school examination to that for a happy marriage.
Of examples of domestic architecture of this time there are still standing several examples. The little tower on the house from which Louis of Orleans went to his death is authentic, so is the tower of John the Fearless, once a part of the palace of the dukes of Burgundy, later the home of a troop of players, and now a curious spectator of a rushing twentieth century business street.
Louis restored the gardens of the palace on the Cité, and, although he did not live there, he established an oratory near the apartments of Saint Louis, and another from which he could look through a “squint” into the Sainte Chapelle.
CHURCH OF SAINT SÉVERIN.
So good a financier was he that there was never any demand on the people—after he had learned his early lessons—for money for city improvements. Not being asked to pay for them the burghers were enthusiastic in their coöperation in such repairs as the king undertook. The Hôtel de Ville was one such undertaking for a century had passed since Étienne Marcel had bought it and it was some two hundred years old then. The bridges over the Seine were patched up to last a while longer, but it was not long after Louis’ death that the Pont Notre Dame collapsed, houses and all, causing the death of several people.
A rather curious instance of the persistency of habit in Paris—a persistency which marks the French of to-day—may be noticed by comparing the testimony of a chronicler of the end of the twelfth century, with that of Villon, the poet of the fifteenth. To be sure the elder author’s statement is serious and the later man’s jocose, but there is an undoubted truth behind it. “The Petit Pont,” says Guy de Bazoches, “belongs to the dialecticians, who pace up and down, disputing.” Villon’s mention of the usage, “with a difference,” is in the third stanza of his tribute to the fluency and wit which he describes in his