Hôtel-Dieu de Paris

“ The Hôtel-Dieu in Paris was founded in the year A.D. 660, has been extended at various times, and was entirely rebuilt between 1868–1878. One of the most ancient in France is at Angers, dating from 1153. ”

“ PARIS
MARSEILLES 455 82 SORGUES, pop. 4000, on the Sorgues, which rises at Vaucluse. Junction with line to Carpentras, 101⁄2 m. eastwards. Carpentras, pop. 10,500, on an eminence surrounded by avenues, rising from the Auzon. Hotels: Universe; Orient, both good, and in the large “Place” opposite, the Hôtel-Dieu, built in 1760 by Bishop Malachie. In the Hôtel-Dieu are a portrait by Rigaud of the Abbot Rancé, and a handsome staircase. In the centre of the Place is a bronze statue of the benevolent Malachie d’Inguimbert. ”

“ Any one who had formerly visited the Hôtel-Dieu in Paris would, I am confident, have participated in this sentiment.
What strange fatality impels men to persevere in such unprofitable erections? This was the first question which suggested itself to me, on getting fairly out of the Pantheon. Is it to gratify an excess of national vanity, or create a superior degree of admiration in the mind of foreigners? ”

“ Very conspicuous, and quite characteristic of these as a class, is the Hôtel Dieu, beside Notre-Dame in Paris, although this was actually built [66] very much later, in 1864-78, by A.-N. Diet (1827-90) . It is the only one that can be readily seen without being jailed or certified; but most of them were amply presented in contemporary publications.
Penchaud, whose Marseilles Protestant church has already been mentioned, was one of the ablest and most productive provincial architects of the Restoration and Louis Philippe periods. ”

“ Hence, not only the royal habitations, the Louvre, the Palace, the Bastille, the Tournelles, but simply seignorial residences, the Petit-Bourbon, the Hôtel de Sens, the Hôtel d’Angoulême, etc., had battlements on their walls, and machicolations over their doors. Churches were guarded by their sanctity. Some, among the number Notre-Dame, were fortified. The Abbey of Saint-Germain-des-Prés was castellated like a baronial mansion, and more brass expended about it in bombards than in bells. ”

“ It is from the Bourbon Quay that one of the most beautiful sights imaginable may best be obtained: a sunset over Paris.
The violet-tinted mass of Notre-Dame stands out with its superbly imposing silhouette against the purpled gold of the fiery sky. All the town dies away in a pink dust of light, whilst the broad roofs of the Louvre, the spire of the Sainte-Chapelle, the pepper-box turrets of the Conciergerie, the Saint-Jacques Tower, and the campaniles of the Town Hall, all this landscape alive with history glows in the last rays of the sinking sun. ”

“ At the grand Hotel du Louvre, near the Tuileries, where I lived, I noticed that the [473] number of arrivals kept up pretty well for the season. It is the St. Nicholas of Paris, and a stupendous structure, far exceeding anything of the kind in Europe as a hotel, for its style of architecture, decoration, magnificent marble staircases, luxuriant dining and reading rooms; the former has splendid crystal candelabra and six hundred gas lights at the six o’clock table d’hôte. ”

“ Impossible to place our Cathedral in that other family of lofty, aerial churches, rich in painted windows and sculpture; pointed in form, bold in attitude; communal and bourgeois as political symbols; free, capricious, lawless, as a work of art; second transformation of architecture, no longer hieroglyphic, immovable and sacerdotal, but artistic, progressive, and popular, which begins at the return from the crusades, and ends with Louis IX. Notre-Dame de Paris is not of pure Romanesque, like the first ”

“ In many places in France not more than two out of twenty of the inhabitants were left alive. Two queens, one bishop, and great numbers of other distinguished persons fell a sacrifice to it, and more than five hundred a day died in the Hôtel-Dieu, under the faithful care of the religious women, whose disinterested courage, in this age of horror, displayed the most beautiful traits of human virtue. ”

“ There is Notre-Dame de Paris, a pointed-arch edifice, which is imbedded by its pillars in that Roman zone, in which are plunged the portal of Saint-Denis, and the nave of Saint-Germain des Pres. There is the charming, half-Gothic chapter-house of Bocherville, where the Roman layer extends half way up. There is the cathedral of Rouen, which would be entirely Gothic if it did not bathe the tip of its central spire in the zone of the Renaissance. [4]
However, all these shades, all these differences, do not affect the surfaces of edifices only. It is art which has changed its skin. ”

“ There is also the company of our unattached archers of Monsieur de Chdteaupers: you will take it. You are provost of the marshals; you have the men of your provostship: you will take them. At the Hôtel Saint-Pol you will find forty archers of monsieur the dauphin's new guard: you will take them. And, with all these, you will hasten to Notre-Dame. Ah! messieurs, louts of Paris, do you fling yourselves thus against the crown of France, the sanctity of Notre-Dame, and the peace of this commonwealth! Exterminate, Tristan! exterminate! ”

“ It is with surprise that we realize, stepping out on the tower-roof, that our standing-place is only five floors from the ground; and yet from this modest height, overtopped by the ordinary apartment house of 19 Paris, we find an outlook that is unequalled even by that from Notre-Dame's towers. For, as we come out from the sheltering hood of our stair-way top, the great cathedral itself lies before us, like some beautiful living creature outstretched at rest. ”

“ And what we here say of the façade must be said of the entire church; and what we say of the cathedral church of Paris, must be said of all the churches of Christendom in the Middle Ages. All things are in place in that art, self-created, logical, and well proportioned. To measure the great toe of the foot is to measure the giant.
Let us return to the façade of Notre-Dame, as it still appears to us, when we go piously to admire the grave and puissant cathedral, which inspires terror, so its chronicles assert: quæ mole sua terrorem incutit spectantibus. ”

“ The Tuileries is not simply a masterpiece of the art of the sixteenth century, it is a page of the history of the nineteenth. This palace no longer belongs to the king, but to the people. Let us leave it as it is. Our revolution has twice set its seal upon its front. On one of its two facades, there are the cannon-balls of the 10th of August; on the other, the balls of the 29th of July. It is sacred. Paris, April 7, 1831. ”

“ The church of Notre-Dame de Paris is still no doubt, a majestic and sublime edifice. But, beautiful as it has been preserved in growing old, it is difficult not to sigh, not to wax indignant, before the numberless degradations and mutilations which time and men have both caused the venerable monument to suffer, without respect for Charlemagne, who laid its first stone, or for Philip Augustus, who laid the last. ”

“ As usual, the buildings dedicated to religion are far more numerous and valuable than the relics of military architecture. Of these, the first which salutes the stranger who enters by the great high road, is the Hôtel Dieu, which is almost intact and unaltered. ”

“ Antoine: at No. 119, we enter the Passage Charlemagne and pass to the second courtyard where remains a goodly portion of the old Hôtel of the Royal Provost of Paris, [226] given to Aubriot by Charles V. At No. 101 is the site of one of the gates of the Philip Augustus wall and at No. 99 stands the Jesuit Church of St. Paul and St. Louis, in the typical baroque style so familiar to visitors to Rome. The once lavishly decorated interior has suffered much from the Revolutionists. ”

“ All Paris appeared to be on the Boulevards, and looking as if the great end of this life was enjoyment.
Anxious to see as much as possible of Paris in the limited time I had to stay in it, I hired a cab yesterday morning and commenced with the Hotel des Invalids, a magnificent building, within a few minutes' walk of the National Assembly. On each side of the entrance gate are figures representing nations conquered by Louis XIV., with colossal statues of Mars and Minerva. The dome on the edifice is the loftiest in Paris—the height from the ground being 323 feet. ”

“ It is the kick of the ass at the dying lion. It is the old oak crowning itself, and which, to heap the measure full, is stung, bitten, and gnawed by caterpillars.
How far it is from the epoch when Robert Cenalis, comparing Notre-Dame de Paris to the famous temple of Diana at Ephesus, so much lauded by the ancient pagans, which Erostatus has immortalized, found the Gallic temple “more excellent in length, breadth, height, and structure.” ”

“ Behind Notre-Dame, the cloister and its Gothic galleries spread out towards the north; on the south, the half-Roman palace of the bishop; on the east, the desert point of the Terrain. In this throng of houses the eye also distinguished, by the lofty open-work mitres of stone which then crowned the roof itself, even the most elevated windows of the palace, the hotel given by the city, under Charles VI., to Juvénal des Ursins ”

“ In the immediate neighbourhood of the University and the Sorbonne, in the very heart of the district of the schools, are two of the most ancient and interesting buildings in Paris: the Palais des Thermes, which carries us back to the Lutetia of the Romans, and the Hôtel Cluny, which recalls mediæval Paris. The Palace of the Hot Baths is in ruins, but these ruins of a building which dates from the third century contain monuments more ancient than themselves. ”

“ One of the most gorgeous church interiors of Paris is that of Sainte Chapelle; this building, although not very large, is a perfect gem of Gothic architecture, and most beautifully and perfectly finished in every part; it is one hundred and twenty feet long, forty wide, and has a spire of one hundred and forty feet in height. Every square inch of the interior is exquisitely painted and gilded in diamonds, lozenges, and fleurs-de-lis; and stars spangle the arched roof, which is as blue as the heavens. ”

“ The Hôtel de Paris is the public dining-place par excellence, the best vantage-ground from which to watch the passing show, but it is no easy matter to secure a table at the Hôtel de Paris during the height of the season. ”

“ The Scotch church is much inferior. The monastic establishments are spacious. The Hôtel-Dieu, founded in 1637 by the Duchess d’Aiguillon, includes a convent, church and courtyard, besides cemetery and gardens. ”

“ Before the revolution, Paris contained 46 parish churches, and 20 others answering the same purpose, 11 abbeys, and 133 monasteries or convents of men and women, 13 colleges, 15 public seminaries, and 26 hospitals. To these must be added the three royal habitations, the Louvre, the Tuileries, and the Luxembourg, also the Hôtel des Invalides, the Palais Royal, the Palais Bourbon, and a great number of magnificent hotels, inhabited by titled or wealthy persons. ”

“ This first Hôtel de Ville, however (a handsome Renaissance building) , was unfortunately burned down during the internal struggles of 1871. The present edifice was erected shortly after, in much the same style, but on a larger scale; a walk round the exterior will help to piece out the visitor’s conception of Renaissance Paris. Note here once more the pavillons at the angles, and other features which recall the Louvre. A visit to the interior is quite unnecessary for any save those hardened sight-seers who desire to inspect the decorations and arrangements of purely contemporary buildings. ”

“ Again, it is certain that the archdeacon had been seized with a singular passion for the symbolical door of Notre-Dame, that page of a conjuring book written in stone, by Bishop Guillaume de Paris, who has, no doubt, been damned for having affixed so infernal a frontispiece to the sacred poem chanted by the rest of the edifice. Archdeacon Claude had the credit also of having fathomed the mystery of the colossus of Saint Christopher, and of that lofty, enigmatical statue which then stood at the entrance of the vestibule, and which the people, in derision, called "Monsieur Legris." ”

“ Its Hôtel de Ville, one of the perfect things in architecture, I have spoken of elsewhere; its churches, at least six of them, are each engaging in a different way, and each contains treasures of endless pictures, wood carving, metal work, vestments, gathered from ruined monasteries and churches to take the place of the greater treasures pillaged and destroyed by the Calvinists. Our Lady’s Church, with its curiously beautiful tower and its gem-like porch; the cathedral with its ugly modern tower and its fine interior with all its pictures and treasures of “dinanderie” ”

“ Every house has some feature of old-time interest. Beneath No. 56 there is a Gothic cellar, once, tradition says, a chapel founded by Blanche de France, grand-daughter of Philippe-le-Bel, who died in 1358. At No. 39 we see the narrowest street in Paris, Rue du Paon Blanc, erewhile known as the “descente à la rivière.” Nos. 8-2 is the venerable hôtel de Sens (see p. 117) .
In Rue Geoffroy l’Asnier, between Rue de l’Hôtel de Ville and Rue François-Miron, thirteenth century, we find among many other vestiges of old times the fine seventeenth-century door of hôtel Chalons at No. ”

“ The lover of travel, of variety, of architecture, of fashion, frivolity, or excitement may enjoy himself in Paris to the extent of his desire. There is plenty to occupy the attention of all who wish to enjoy themselves, in a rational and profitable manner, in the mere seeing of sights that every one ought to see. There is the grand old cathedral of Notre Dame, famed in history and story, which has experienced rough usage at the hands of the fierce French mobs of different revolutions, who respect not historical relics, works of art, or even the sepulchres of the dead. ”