A bird's-eye view of these three towns, the City, the University, and the Ville, exhibited to the eye an inextricable knot of streets strangely jumbled together. It was apparent, however, at first sight that these three fragments of a city formed but a single body. The spectator perceived immediately two long parallel streets, without break or interruption, crossing the three cities, nearly in a right line, from one end to the other, from south to north, perpendicularly to the Seine, incessantly pouring the people of the one into the other, connecting, blending them together and converting the three into one. The first of these streets ran from the Gate of St. Jacques to the Gate of St. Martin; it was called in the University the street of St. Jacques, in the City Rue de la Juiverie, and in the Ville, the street of St. Martin; it crossed the river twice by the name of Petit Pont and Pont Notre Dame. The second, named Rue de la Harpe on the left bank, Rue de la Barillerie in the island, Rue St. Denis on the right bank, Pont St. Michel over one arm of the Seine, and Pont au Change over the other, Gate of St. Martin; it was called in the University to the Gate of St. Denis in the Ville. Still, tho they bore so many different names, they formed in reality only two streets, but the two mother-streets, the two great arteries of Paris. All the other veins of the triple city were fed by or discharged themselves into these....
What, then, was the aspect of this whole, viewed from the summit of the towers of Notre Dame in 1482? That is what we shall now attempt to describe. The spectator, on arriving breathless at that elevation, was dazzled by the chaos of roofs, chimneys, streets, bridges, belfries, towers and steeples. All burst at once upon the eye—the carved gable, the sharp roof, the turret perched upon the angles of the walls, the stone pyramids of the eleventh century, the slated obelisk of the fifteenth, the round and naked keep of the castle, the square and embroidered tower of the church, the great and the small, the massive and the light. The eye was long bewildered amid this labyrinth of heights and depths in which there was nothing but had its originality, its reason, its genius, its beauty, nothing, but issued from the hand of art, from the humblest dwelling with its painted and carved wooden front, elliptical doorway, and overhanging stories, to the royal Louvre, which then had a colonnade of towers.
FOOTNOTES:
[58] From Book III, Chapter II, of "The Hunchback of Notre Dame." From an anonymous, non-copyright translation published by A. L. Burt Company.
ALEXANDRE DUMAS
Born in 1802, died in 1870; his father a French general, his grandmother a negress; at first a writer of plays; active in the Revolution of 1830; wrote books of travel and short stories, a great number of novels, some of them in collaboration with others; "Les Trois Mousquetaires" published in 1844; "Monte Cristo" in 1844-45; "Le Reine Margot" in 1845; wrote also historical sketches and reminiscences; his son of the same name famous also as a writer of books and a playwright.