rrower and deeper,
every space is overwhelmed and disappears. The houses finally leap the
wall of Philip Augustus, and scatter joyfully over the plain, without
order, and all askew, like runaways. There they plant themselves
squarely, cut themselves gardens from the fields, and take their
ease. Beginning with 1367, the city spreads to such an extent into the
suburbs, that a new wall becomes necessary, particularly on the right
bank; Charles V. builds it. But a city like Paris is perpetually
growing. It is only such cities that become capitals. They are funnels,
into which all the geographical, political, moral, and intellectual
water-sheds of a country, all the natural slopes of a people, pour;
wells of civilization, so to speak, and also sewers, where commerce,
industry, intelligence, population,--all that is sap, all that is life,
all that is the soul of a nation, filters and amasses unceasingly, drop
by drop, century by century.

So Charles V.'s wall suffered the fate of that of Philip Augustus. At
the end of the fifteenth century, the Faubourg strides across it, passes
beyond it, and runs farther. In the sixteenth, it seems to retreat
visibly, and to bury itself deeper and deeper in the old city, so thick
had the new city already become outside of it. Thus, beginning with the
fifteenth century, where our story finds us, Paris had already outgrown
the three concentric circles of walls which, from the time of Julian the
Apostate, existed, so to speak, in germ in the Grand-Chatelet and the
Petit-Chatelet. The mighty city had cracked, in succession, its four
enclosures of walls, like a child grown too large for his garments of
last year. Under Louis XI., this sea of houses was seen to be pierced
at intervals by several groups of ruined towers, from the ancient wall,
like the summits of hills in an inundation,--like archipelagos of the
old Paris submerged beneath the new. Since that time Paris has undergone
yet another transformation, unfortunately for our eyes; but it has
passed only one more wall, that of Louis XV., that miserable wall of
mud and spittle, worthy of the king who built it, worthy of the poet who
sung it,--

_Le mur murant Paris rend Paris murmurant_.*

* The wall walling Paris makes Paris murmur.

In the fifteenth century, Paris was still divided into three wholly
distinct and separate towns, each having its own physiognomy, its own
specialty, its manners, customs, privileges, and histo