hall try to describe.

For the spectator who arrived, panting, upon that pinnacle, it was first
a dazzling confusing view of roofs, chimneys, streets, bridges, places,
spires, bell towers. Everything struck your eye at once: the carved
gable, the pointed roof, the turrets suspended at the angles of the
walls; the stone pyramids of the eleventh century, the slate obelisks of
the fifteenth; the round, bare tower of the donjon keep; the square and
fretted tower of the church; the great and the little, the massive and
the aerial. The eye was, for a long time, wholly lost in this labyrinth,
where there was nothing which did not possess its originality, its
reason, its genius, its beauty,--nothing which did not proceed from art;
beginning with the smallest house, with its painted and carved front,
with external beams, elliptical door, with projecting stories, to the
royal Louvre, which then had a colonnade of towers. But these are the
principal masses which were then to be distinguished when the eye began
to accustom itself to this tumult of edifices.

In the first place, the City.--"The island of the City," as Sauval says,
who, in spite of his confused medley, sometimes has such happy turns of
expression,--"the island of the city is made like a great ship, stuck in
the mud and run aground in the current, near the centre of the Seine."

We have just explained that, in the fifteenth century, this ship was
anchored to the two banks of the river by five bridges. This form of a
ship had also struck the heraldic scribes; for it is from that, and
not from the siege by the Normans, that the ship which blazons the old
shield of Paris, comes, according to Favyn and Pasquier. For him
who understands how to decipher them, armorial bearings are algebra,
armorial bearings have a tongue. The whole history of the second half of
the Middle Ages is written in armorial bearings,--the first half is
in the symbolism of the Roman churches. They are the hieroglyphics of
feudalism, succeeding those of theocracy.

Thus the City first presented itself to the eye, with its stern to the
east, and its prow to the west. Turning towards the prow, one had before
one an innumerable flock of ancient roofs, over which arched broadly the
lead-covered apse of the Sainte-Chapelle, like an elephant's haunches
loaded with its tower. Only here, this tower was the most audacious, the
most open, the most ornamented spire of cabinet-maker's work that ever
let the s