The University itself appeared as one block forming from end to end a compact and homogeneous whole. Seen from above, this multitude of closely packed, angular, clinging roofs, built, for the most part, on one geometrical principle, gave the impression of the crystallization of one substance. Here the capricious cleavage of the streets did not cut up the mass into such disproportionate slices. The forty-two colleges were distributed pretty equally over the whole, and were in evidence on all sides. The varied and charming roof-lines of these beautiful buildings originated in the same art which produced the simple roofs they overtopped, being practically nothing more than a repetition, in the square or cube, of the same geometrical figure. Consequently, they lent variety to the whole without confusing it, completed without overloading it—for geometry is another form of harmony. Several palatial residences lifted their heads sumptuously here and there above the picturesque roofs of the left bank: the Logis de Nevers, the Logis de Rome, the Logis de Reims, which have disappeared; also the Hôtel de Cluny, which for the consolation of the artist still exists, but the tower of which was so stupidly shortened a few years ago. Near the Hôtel Cluny stood the Baths of Julian, a fine Roman palace with circular arches. There was, besides, a number of abbeys, more religious in style, of graver aspect than the secular residences, but not inferior either in beauty or in extent. The most striking of these were the Bernardines’ Abbey with its three steeples; Sainte-Genevié ve, the square tower of which still exists to make us more deeply regret the rest; the Sorbonne, part college, part monastery, of which so admirable a nave still survives; the beautiful quadrilateral Monastery of the Mathurins;5
adjacent to it the Benedictine Monastery, within the wall of which they managed to knock up a theatre between the issue of the seventh and eighth editions of this book; the Abbey of the Cordeliers, with its three enormous gables in a row; that of the Augustines, the tapering spire of which was, after the Tour de Nesle, the second pinnacle at this side of Paris, counting from the west. The colleges, the connecting link between the cloister and the world, held architecturally the mean between the great mansions and the abbeys, more severe in their elegance, more massive in their sculpture than the palaces, less serious in their style of architecture than the religious houses. Unfortunately, scarcely anything remains of these buildings, in which Gothic art held so admirable a balance between the sumptuous and the simple. The churches (and they were numerous and splendid in the University quarter, illustrating every architectural era, from the Roman arches of Saint-Julien to the Gothic arches of Saint-Sèverin)—the churches dominated the whole, and as one harmony more in that sea of harmonies they pierced in quick succession the waving, fretted outline of the gabled roofs with their boldly cut spires, their steeples, their tapering pinnacles, themselves but a magnificent exaggeration of the sharp angles of the roofs.The ground of the University quarter was hilly, swelling in the southeast to the vast mound of the Montagne Sainte-Geneviève. It was curious to note, from the heights of Notre-Dame, the multitude of narrow and tortuous streets (now the Quartier Latin), the clusters of houses, spreading helter-skelter in every direction down the steep sides of this hill to the water-edge, some apparently rushing down, others climbing up, and all clinging one to the other.
The inhabitants thronging the streets looked, from that height and at that distance, like a swarm of ants perpetually passing and repassing each other, and added greatly to the animation of the scene.
And here and there, in the spaces between the roofs, the steeples, the innumerable projections which so fantastically bent and twisted and notched the outermost line of the quarter, you caught a glimpse of a moss-grown wall, a thick-set round tower, an embattled, fortress-like gateway—the wall of Philip Augustus. Beyond this stretched the verdant meadows, ran the great high-roads with a few houses straggling along their sides, growing fewer the farther they were removed from the protecting barrier. Some of these suburbs were considerable. There was first—taking the Tournelle as the point of departure—the market-town of Saint-Victor, with its one-arched bridge spanning the Bièvre; its Abbey, where the epitaph of King Louis the Fat—epitaphium Ludovici Grossi—was to be seen; and its church with an octagonal spire, flanked by four belfry towers of the eleventh century (there is a similar one still to be seen at ètampes). Then there was Saint-Marceau, which already boasted three churches and a convent; then, leaving on the left the mill of the Gobelins with its white wall of enclosure, you came to the Faubourg Saint- Jacques with its beautifully carved stone cross at the cross-roads; the Church of Saint-Jacques du Haut- Pas, then a charming Gothic structure; Saint-Magloire, with a beautiful nave of the fourteenth century, which Napoleon turned into a hayloft; and Notre-Dame-des-Champs, which contained some Byzantine
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