For
several centuries Paris remained an island, with two bridges, one
north, the other south, and two bridge heads, which were at once its
gates and its fortresses: the Grand-Châtelet on the right bank,
the Petit-Châtelet on the left. Then, after the kings of the
first generation, Paris, finding itself too cramped on its island
home, where it no longer had room to turn round, crossed the river;
whereupon, beyond each of the bridge-fortresses, a first circle of
walls and towers began to enclose pieces of the land on either side
of the Seine. Of this ancient wall some vestiges were still standing
in the last century; to-day, nothing is left but the memory, and here
and there a tradition, such as the Baudets or Baudoyer Gate—porta
bagauda.
By degrees the flood of
dwellings, constantly pressing forward from the heart of the city,
overflows, saps, eats away, and finally swallows up this enclosure.
Philip Augustus makes a fresh line of circumvallation, and immures
Paris within a chain of massive and lofty towers. For upward of a
century the houses press upon one another, accumulate, and rise in
this basin like water in a reservoir. They begin to burrow deeper
in the ground, they pile storey upon storey, they climb one upon another,
they shoot up in height like all compressed growth, and each strives
to raise its head above its neighbour for a breath of air. The streets
grow ever deeper and narrower, every open space fills up and disappears,
till, finally, the houses overleap the wall of Philip Augustus, and
spread themselves joyfully over the country like escaped prisoners,
without plan or system, gathering themselves together in knots, cutting
slices out of the surrounding fields for gardens, taking plenty of
elbowroom.
—Victor M. Hugo, Notre Dame de Paris
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Vista
of Paris from atop Notre Dame - 45k
