The grey pile of St. Germain des Prés, the burial-place of the Merovingian kings, once refulgent with gold and colour, has been wholly restored; but on the west porch, over the main entrance, a well-preserved, Romanesque relief of the Last Supper may be noted. The admirable frescoes in the interior by Flandrin are among the noblest achievements of modern French art. Part of the Abbots’ Palace of the sixteenth century is left standing in the Rue de l’Abbaye, but of all the fortress-monastery, with its immense domain of lands and cloisters, walls and towers, over which those puissant lords held sway, only a memory remains: the walls were razed in the seventeenth century and replaced by artizans’ houses. The Rue du Four recalls the old feudal oven. Lower down the Rue Bonaparte is the little visited but most interesting Ecole des Beaux Arts, once the monastery of the Petits Augustins, now rich in examples of early Renaissance architecture and other artistic treasures. It is a great teaching centre, and trains some fifteen hundred students in sculpture, painting and architecture. Westward of this, the artists’ quarter of Paris, is the select and aristocratic, but dull Faubourg St. Germain—the noble Faubourg—where many of the descendants of the noblesse who escaped from the wreck of their order during the Revolution, dwell in petulant isolation and haughty aversion from the Third Republic and all its ways. Further westward are the great hospital and church of the Invalides, with Napoleon’s majestic monument, and the military school of the Champ de Mars.
Two parallel historic roads named of St. Martin and St. Denis cut northwards through the masses of habitations that crowd the northern bank of the Seine. The former was the great Roman street, leading to the provinces of the north: the latter, the Grande Chaussée de Monseigneur St. Denis, led to the shrine of the patron saint and martyr of Lutetia. Along this, the richest and finest street of mediæval Paris, the kings of France and Henry V. of England passed in solemn state to Notre Dame. Four gates, whose sites are known in each of these two streets, mark the successive stages of the growth of the city. In 1141 a sloping bank of sand (grève), a little to the east of the Rue St. Martin and facing the old port of the Naut at St. Landry on the island of the Cité, was ceded by royal charter to the burgesses of Paris for a payment of seventy livres. “It is void of houses,” says the charter, “and is called the gravia, and is situated where the old market-place (vetus forum) existed.” This was the origin of the famous Place de Grève where throbbed the very heart of civic, commercial and industrial Paris. Here Etienne Marcel purchased for the Hôtel de Ville the Maison aux Piliers (House of the Pillars), a long, low building, whose upper floor was supported by columns. Here every revolutionary and democratic movement has been organised from the days of Marcel to those of the Communes of 1789—when the last Provost of the Merchants met his death—and of 1871, when Domenico da Cortona’s fine Renaissance hotel was destroyed by fire.