Cathedral Cities of France

by R. W. S. Herbert Marshall; Hester Marshall

PARIS AND SOME OF ITS CHURCHES

S a Cathedral city, Paris hardly comes within the scheme of this book. It has been written about so much and so often, and occupies, both architecturally and historically, such a position as would scarcely justify any but a full and detailed description. This great city, the living, moving source of one of the greatest nations of to-day, and at one time the mainspring of Europe itself, is not to be passed over with a few terse remarks; it is as though one tried to compress the history of France itself into a single chapter. On the one hand, a short sketch can hardly hope to do justice to Paris; on the other, to describe it at such length as it deserves would not be dealing fairly by the lesser towns, and further, this length would be so great as to render absurd its inclusion in a book of traveller’s notes. Rather let it be regarded here in the light of point d’appui from which other places may be visited which do not lie on the direct route from Paris to the provinces. Without attempting any architectural description, however, it may be as well, before we pass outside the city walls, to mention three churches within Paris of which illustrations are given here, and to offer the briefest possible outline of their early history and foundation, as well as that of the great city of which they form a part.

“Paris did not, like London, simply grow into the capital of a kingdom already existing. The city created first the county and then the kingdom, of which it was successively the head.” In those days Paris ranked no higher than Soissons, Sens, Lâon, Orléans, or Rouen; and in ecclesiastical dignity it was inferior to some of them, being, it is true, an episcopal see, but not a metropolitan. Certainly, as we have seen, it was approved as a military station by Cæsar, and beloved as a residence by Julian; and the great position the city now holds in modern Europe and the modern world is rather apt to bias our estimate of these early honours, which were undoubtedly shared by many other of the Gallic cities. Because Paris is now a metropolitan see, the centre of political and social France, we have a tendency to think that in all times the city must have ruled her neighbour towns in this way; whereas it was only by very slow degrees—long after it had become the seat of royalty and the nominal capital of France—that Paris acquired an influence beyond the bounds of her own territories. The great lords of Burgundy, of Aquitaine, of Anjou, of Champagne—they were vassals to the king, they paid him homage, they gave him their military service, but they and their domains formed no part of France; they were almost as separate from any head or centre as were the wide-scattered Teutonic states east of the Rhine. Nor was this felt to be in any way a disadvantage; the kings in Paris would doubtless have welcomed the firm allegiance of these kings in all but name, because it would have meant a fresh access of power, an added strength wherewith to face their other foes; but no idea of national unity had any place in their calculation. Paris had made for herself a dominion, and the time was to come when that dominion should stretch from the sea on the north, south and west, to the river and to the mountains on the east; but as yet that time had not arrived.

One more event which took place after Paris became the capital of France may be recorded here. This is the attempted siege in the days of Joan of Arc, which followed as the sequel to the king’s coronation at Rheims. Having subdued so many cities in the north of France, and given to Charles VII. the crown of his ancestors, it was but natural that Joan should be anxious to lead him in triumph into his capital, which at present declared for the enemy, and was occupied by Cardinal Beaufort’s English troops and the army of Burgundy. The newly-crowned king, however, apparently considered that he had borne his share of the burden in the late proceedings at Rheims, and seemed in no hurry to march upon Paris. Riding through the smaller towns, seeing their gates flung open wide to him, and receiving the homage and acclamations of the people, were occupations far more congenial to his indolent tastes than bestirring himself to take the field again; and to their infinite annoyance Joan and d’Alençon perceived that he was gradually but surely working his way down to his castles on the Loire, from whose pleasant meadows they knew well that he would never return. The only wonder is that the Maid did not lose all patience and leave this dilatory prince to his fate. Instead of this she set out with the Duc d’Alençon to Saint Denis, leaving Charles at Compiègne, whence he followed them, “very sore against his will,” as far as Senlis. Meanwhile each day of delay gave the English time to strengthen their position within the capital; and Joan found that having brought the king to Senlis was by no means the same thing as conquering his unwillingness to strike what she and her party believed might be, if rightly directed, the final blow. Each time the Maid and d’Alençon set out to invest Paris, messages came from the royal camp, commanding them to desist and return to Saint Denis. Finally the truth came out; the king cared more for peace and ease on the Loire than for glory in war, and desired to leave the camp. Had Joan believed less firmly in the divine right of kings, it is probable that she would have rebelled and besieged Paris on her own responsibility; on the other hand, had Charles been left to the counsels of d’Alençon and the brave captains Dunois and La Hire, there is reason to suppose that he might have been persuaded to follow where Joan led, and might under her guidance have subdued Paris in a very short time. But there were the king’s favourites to reckon with, and these were not men of war, but of peace, and not always of peace with honour—the foolish La Tremouille and the crafty Archbishop of Rheims, one of Joan’s worst opposers—and these advisers easily worked upon the king’s indolent good-nature to find in the eagerness of the Maid an undue desire for fresh conquest. As it was, Joan saw nothing before her but to obey the man to whom, as she believed, God had given the right to go or stay, to fight or to lie in peace, as his Majesty chose. She went to the statue of the Virgin at Saint Denis, bearing her armour; and there, kneeling in the church, she dedicated to Our Lady of Victories the helmet, hauberk and coat of mail in which she had done so many great feats of arms; and then rose and followed her king on his journey to the pleasant lands of the Loire.

The early history of Paris lies buried in the unrecorded pages of the life of primæval man. Its origin is humble in comparison with that of other capitals, although it bears a strong analogy to those surrounding physical conditions to which Venice owed its existence. Its cradle, according to M. Hoffbauer, Paris à traverse les ages, was a small narrow island in the middle of the young Seine, which had then cut for itself its channel through the alluvial plains which had been left by the retiring sea towards the end of the Geological Tertiary period at the close of the glacial epoch. It was part of a group of five islands, of which three very soon disappeared, their soil being probably used either for embankments or for purposes of defence. As in the great estuary leading up to the morass surrounding London, many changes had been wrought by the hand of man in the general appearance of the Paris basin. It is true that the great embankments constructed by the Romans to keep the waters of the Thames within defined limits are not to be traced in the valley of the Seine, yet the rude habitations of wattle huts built on whatever hillocks were attainable entailed embankments to a certain extent which should keep the Seine within its bounds at times of extraordinary flood. As it stands to-day Paris is in one of the most fertile parts of the territory; it is on the banks of a great river which brings to it by its main stream and by its affluents the tribute of the richest provinces; it is surrounded by materials most necessary for the construction of its public and private edifices; and it is endowed by nature with all the fruitful resources tending towards the aggrandisement both of power and fortune.

The condition of the early inhabitants of the Paris basin was that of one continual warfare against the denizens of the jungle, which with its rich and abundant vegetation covered the surrounding country. Caverns and other places chosen for their abodes were disputed with lions, hyenas and tigers. The chase was their only means of subsistence (the art of husbandry being entirely unknown), and the number of stone hatchets and harpoons, fishing-hooks, lances, &c., found deeply buried in the alluvial soil, bear testimony to the struggle for existence amongst the early inhabitants of the Seine valley.

Cæsar, when he was appointed commander of the Gauls in B.C. 59, found their central point of Paris inhabited by a Cymric or Celtic population, which he calls Gauls in his language but Celts in their own, and separated from the Belgæ by the Seine and Marne. Cæsar wrote the place “Lutetia,” and when he convoked the inhabitants of Gaul to this town the neighbouring tribe was designated as “Parisii,” and allied to the powerful clan of the Senones.

With reference to the meaning of the word “Parisii,” M. Bulet, in the “Dictionnaire Celtique,” says that “bar” or “par” means in Celtic a boat (bateau), and that the low Bretons call the cargo of a boat “far.” Herodotus (book ii., 96), in his description of the method of floating boats down stream on the Nile by means of a raft fastened on in front with a stone dragging behind, calls the boat “baris,” and says that some of them are many thousand talents burthen. They were probably flat-bottomed, and similar to those now seen on the rivers. The Celtic word “par,” signifying a boat, might well have produced the name Parisii, meaning boatmen, men who passed all their life in the “baris.”