Paris from the Earliest Period to the Present Day. William Walton
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AND ST. GERMAIN. Restoration.
This information may be supplemented by various extracts from the ancient historians, who give us the usual picture of early man in the barbarous stage, bellicose, blood-thirsty, brutal, having the one virtue of courage. Cæsar says that when a man of importance died, his wives were tortured and put to death by fire if suspected of being instrumental in his taking off; but a short time before his conquests it was the custom to burn with the defunct his slaves and his favorite clients. It was also said that the women were not constrained in their choice of husbands, and that the latter were obliged to furnish an equivalent for the dowry brought by the wife. Human sacrifices were offered on certain great occasions, and it was thought possible that one of the upper stones of the great sepulchre discovered at Meudon in 1845, indicated one of the sites dedicated to these offerings.
Of the many attempts that have been made to restore the primitive man in his environments, one of the most learned and interesting is that shown by M. Cormon, the painter, in his series of large decorations for the plafond and walls of some ethnological museum, exhibited in the Salon of 1898. But an artist is an impossible archæologist; the more of an artist he is, the more will he be unwilling to represent the merely bestial, as the scientist finds it; and though the original inhabitant of the valley of the Seine and other favored spots may have circulated in some such early landscape, and have garbed himself and tattooed himself somewhat as the painter here paints him, it is probable that there was far less of the picturesque and presentable about him, of grace of attitude and whiteness of skin in his women-folk, than in any artist's presentation on a self-respecting canvas.
The habitations of the early Parisian were equally unlike those familiar to the Cook's tourist. On the pedestal of an antique statue of Melpomene of heroic size in the Louvre is a relief representing the head of a supposed Gaul defending his house against a Roman soldier, and this sculpture, confirmed by others on the column of Antoninus at Rome of those of the German barbarians, gives this dwelling as a species of circular, upright hut, covered with a conical-shaped roof constructed of branches and reeds, or thatch, or perhaps of a half-spherical piece of wood.
In the soil of the tertiary, or quaternary, basin in which Paris lies are found traces of marine plants, oyster-shells, skeletons of fish, etc., which indicate that it has risen from the bottom of the sea. As every one knows, the Seine, flowing in a general direction from east to west, curves toward the north to traverse the heart of the city, the former Palais de l'Industrie, but just demolished, having occupied nearly the centre of the upward curve of this bow. On the south, the river receives the waters of the Bièvre, a feeble stream which flows through a narrow valley, and, farther eastward, those of the river Marne. Under the Roman domination and that of the first Merovingian kings, that part of the city lying immediately south of the river seems to have become the most populous and important almost as soon as the narrow limits of the original islands became too confining. The pride of the Faubourg Saint-Germain may date itself back for some fifteen centuries. A central, principal street traversed the city from south to north, entering it in the general direction of the Rue Saint-Jacques, passing on the east side of the imperial palace whose ruins may still be seen in the Musée des Thermes, at the corner of the Boulevard Saint-Germain and Boulevard Saint-Michel. Under the Rue Saint-Jacques remains of the ancient pavement have been found at a great depth, and a fragment of it is preserved in the Musée de Cluny. The Roman street crossed the small arm of the Seine on a wooden bridge, near where is now the Petit-Pont, traversed the Ile de la Cité, at the western end of what is to-day the Place du Parvis-Notre-Dame, and crossed the larger branch of the river near the site of the present Pont Notre-Dame. On the northern shore, it followed for some distance nearly the course of the present Rue Saint-Denis, and then forked—one branch continuing in a general northerly direction toward Senlis, and the other turning off to the northwest, in the direction of the Bourse, toward Clichy, Saint-Ouen, Saint-Denis, and, finally, Rouen by the valley of the Montmorency.
Of the stately buildings erected by the Roman officers sent to govern the city on the Seine and the province of which it was the capital, the only remains now above ground are those preserved in the Musée des Thermes, in somewhat curious juxtaposition with the late fifteenth-century Hôtel de Cluny. These ruins represent the great Roman baths of the palace, the frigidarium, the piscine, the tepidarium, and, somewhat deeper, the hypocaustum, or furnace for heating. By their size and importance, these ancient walls testify to the dignity of the imperial palace which rose on this site, and, surrounded by its gardens, extended along the southern bank of the Seine. Of the date of the erection of this Palatium Thermarum seu Thermæ Parisiaci nothing definite is known; it is generally ascribed to Constantius, surnamed Chlorus, "the pale," father of Constantine the Great, who died in 306 A.D. It is considered certain that it was occupied by Julian, and by Valentinian I, and Valens; after the expulsion of the Romans by the Franks, it served as a residence for the kings of the first and second race, and was still an important edifice in 1180 when Philippe-Auguste presented it to his chamberlain, Henri. About 1340 it passed into the possession of the Abbé of Cluny, Pierre de Chaslus.
These very antique walls are preserved by the national authorities in a manner that might be considered as more satisfactory to the lovers of the picturesque than to the archæologists. They are exposed to all the disintegrating influences of the sun and rain, much blackened by the Parisian climate, which darkens everything exposed to it, and largely overgrown with creeping vines. They are constructed of squared stones interspersed with layers of brick, with rectangular and arched niches, filled-up arches at the base of which may be seen still the remnants of the prows of ships, and in the niches are still the remains of the earthenware pipes that conveyed the water to the baths. The student of architecture is interested to observe here that the Roman bricks were much longer than ours, and only about an inch and a half thick. Their original, cheerful red still shows occasionally through the Parisian blackness. He will, however, probably be somewhat disturbed by the fine indifference of the authorities to styles and chronologies. In the place of the missing wall of the piscine is set the arched porch of the cloister of the Benedictines of Argenteuil; inside the enclosures are tumulary stones, with inscriptions in Hebrew, found on the site of the publishing house of Hachette. In the pleasant green garden in front of these ruins, and in which the bare-legged Parisian children play at soldiers or at digging gravel in the paths, are more incongruous mediæval bits of architecture and sculpture—placid Madonnas and Annunciations, much defaced by time; gargoyles from the church of Saint-Germain-l'Auxerrois, in what may be called the size of life, agonizing and tormented by queer little beasts like weasels under their throats or bellies, and, guarding the gateway at the angle of the boulevards, three great, deformed figures of the animals of the Evangelists, the Lion, the Eagle, and the Ox, from the tower of Saint-Jacques-la-Boucherie, where they have been replaced by copies.
For a number of centuries these ruins were forgotten, and were even concealed until 1810 under hanging-gardens constructed above them. In 1819 it was proposed to establish in the Thermes a museum for the Gaulish and Roman antiquities discovered in the soil of Paris; but this project was not carried out until 1836, when, through the action of the Prefect of the Seine and the Conseil Municipal, the remains of the Roman palace became the property of the city. Seven years later, the State having acquired the Hôtel de Cluny and the collection Sommerard, the city offered the Palais des Thermes to the national government, and the two museums were united in one national one. The project of M. E. du Sommerard, of clearing away all the surrounding modern buildings, opening the new streets and planting the garden, was finally put in the way of being realized in 1856.
The site of this palace, the ruins of which are among the most important in France, was on the lower slopes of Mount Lucotitius, afterward the mount of Sainte-Geneviève, overlooking both the city and the Roman road to Genabum (Orléans). Its dependent buildings and enclosures seem to have extended as far south as the Rue Soufflot, in front of the Panthéon, ruins of foundation-walls having been located at various periods in this quarter. Its magnificent baths were probably preserved during the earlier Christian centuries, when the civilization of the Romans had not entirely disappeared, until the siege of Paris by the Normans in the ninth century. On this (southern) side of the river have also been discovered the ruins of an amphitheatre, traces of a quarter or barracks for soldiers, another establishment of baths, the aqueduct of Arcueil, a great cemetery on the southern