uge, Gentilly, with its round
tower and its square tower, etc.; on the right, twenty others, from
Conflans to Ville-l'Eveque. On the horizon, a border of hills arranged
in a circle like the rim of the basin. Finally, far away to the east,
Vincennes, and its seven quadrangular towers to the south, Bicetre and
its pointed turrets; to the north, Saint-Denis and its spire; to the
west, Saint Cloud and its donjon keep. Such was the Paris which the
ravens, who lived in 1482, beheld from the summits of the towers of
Notre-Dame.

Nevertheless, Voltaire said of this city, that "before Louis XIV.,
it possessed but four fine monuments": the dome of the Sorbonne, the
Val-de-Grace, the modern Louvre, and I know not what the fourth was--the
Luxembourg, perhaps. Fortunately, Voltaire was the author of "Candide"
in spite of this, and in spite of this, he is, among all the men who
have followed each other in the long series of humanity, the one who has
best possessed the diabolical laugh. Moreover, this proves that one can
be a fine genius, and yet understand nothing of an art to which one
does not belong. Did not Moliere imagine that he was doing Raphael and
Michael-Angelo a very great honor, by calling them "those Mignards of
their age?"

Let us return to Paris and to the fifteenth century.

It was not then merely a handsome city; it was a homogeneous city, an
architectural and historical product of the Middle Ages, a chronicle in
stone. It was a city formed of two layers only; the Romanesque layer and
the Gothic layer; for the Roman layer had disappeared long before, with
the exception of the Hot Baths of Julian, where it still pierced
through the thick crust of the Middle Ages. As for the Celtic layer, no
specimens were any longer to be found, even when sinking wells.

Fifty years later, when the Renaissance began to mingle with this
unity which was so severe and yet so varied, the dazzling luxury of
its fantasies and systems, its debasements of Roman round arches, Greek
columns, and Gothic bases, its sculpture which was so tender and so
ideal, its peculiar taste for arabesques and acanthus leaves, its
architectural paganism, contemporary with Luther, Paris, was perhaps,
still more beautiful, although less harmonious to the eye, and to the
thought.

But this splendid moment lasted only for a short time; the Renaissance
was not impartial; it did not content itself with building, it wished
to destroy; it is true that it required