Mystic portals of Notre Dame
It is all very fine, imposing, spacious, and new. But a groan may be forgiven to those who can remember the mystic portals of Notre Dame with the gallery of the kings, surrounded with houses which seemed to lean upon the mother-church for comfort and support, before the restorer had worked his will upon the crumbling, dark, pathetic fragments of carving, whilst the noblest facade ever raised by northern Gothic builders still looked like a great mediaeval church, and not like an objet d’art to be gazed at in a museum.
This transformation, the most astounding that Europe can show, fills us ever anew with a profound sense of the power which for a century has animated the municipal government of Paris; of the energy, wealth, industrial skill, artistic imagination, and scientific accomplishments which have gone to the making of it. To plough miles and miles of broad new boulevards through the most crowded lines of an ancient, populous, and busy city; to transform a network of Ghettos into a splendid series of avenues, squares, and gardens; to eviscerate the heart of a great capital, and to create symmetry, sunniness, convenience, gaiety, and variety out of inveterate confusion, gloom, discomfort, and squalor —this impresses the mind with the visible signs of imperial might in the ruler, and inexhaustible versatility and adaptability in the governed.
It is a different thing when a Frederick plans a new city iii Berlin, or when a Republic creates itself a capital in Washington. But in Paris the capital existed; with eighteen centuries of history, with monarchic, feudal, ecclesiastical, municipal institutions by the thousand, rooted for ages in the soil, and buttressed by long epochs of prescription, privilege, law, and superstition. Not for an hour has the capital ceased to be the living heart of France; not for a day has its own activity been interrupted private turkey tours, or the lives of some million or so of citizens been broken. Republic, Consulate, Empire, Monarchy, have succeeded each other in turn. Revolutions, sieges, massacres, anarchy, tyranny, parliaments, dictators, and communes have in turn had their seat in Paris, and have occupied her streets, buildings, and monuments. But under all, the transformation of old Paris into new Paris has gone on.
Bastille Chatelet Temple Tuileries
Bastille, Chatelet, Temple, Tuileries, have been swept away: enormous boulevards and avenues have torn their huge gaps like cannon-shot through ancient quarters: abbeys, churches, palaces, hospitals, convents, gardens, halls, and theatres have disappeared like unsubstantial visions, and have left not a rack behind. As the vacant spaces are cleared, new streets, theatres, halls, and squares spring up. A thousand new fancies and hundreds of new monuments take their place with inexhaustible invention. The city grows more populous, more rich, more brilliant year by year. The busy life which is silenced in the Cite, or by the new boulevards, avenues, and places, bursts forth with a louder din elsewhere. Every creation of artistic imagination, every invention of science, is instantly brought into service and adapted to modern life. And with all this whirl of change and action, Paris remains in its essence an ancient, and not a modern, city; a very ancient city to him who knows its history, and can recall the memorials of its past.
To this day, such an one can retrace her successive circuits, her ramparts and barriers of successive dynasties; he can track out the spots made memorable by Julian, by Clovis, by Philip Augustus, by Francis i. and Henry iv., by Abailard, and Helotse, and Jeanne d’Arc, by Dante, by Descartes, by Corneille. Some two hundred streets still bear the names of saints, each recalling some convent of the Merovingian, Carlo- vingian, or Capetian dynasty, some one of the thousands of churches, chapels, oratories, and religious houses which once filled Paris. To the historical mind, the St. Germains, the St. Thomases, the St. Andris, the St. Martins, the St. Victors, the St. Bernards, which we read inscribed at the street corner, recall a series of local memorials which reach back for a thousand years. Here St. Louis stood and prayed; here the Grand Master of the Templars was burned; here Jeanne d’Arc fell desperately wounded; here Moliere died; here Corneille lived; here Coligny was murdered, here Henry iv. was stabbed; here Voltaire died, and here Camille Desmoulins opened the Revolution.
