ength. A wide, deep
ditch, supplied by the Seine with water, which was swollen by the
floods of winter to a running stream, encircled the foot of the wall
all round Paris. At night the gates were closed, the river was barred
at the two extremities of the city by stout iron chains, and Paris
slept in quiet.

A bird's-eye view of these three towns, the City, the University, and
the Ville, exhibited to the eye an inextricable knot of streets
strangely jumbled together. It was apparent, however, at first sight
that these three fragments of a city formed but a single body. The
spectator perceived immediately two long parallel streets, without
break or interruption, crossing the three cities, nearly in a right
line, from one end to the other, from south to north, perpendicularly
to the Seine, incessantly pouring the people of the one into the
other, connecting, blending them together and converting the three
into one. The first of these streets ran from the Gate of St. Jacques
to the Gate of St. Martin; it was called in the University the street
of St. Jacques, in the City Rue de la Juiverie, and in the Ville, the
street of St. Martin; it crossed the river twice by the name of Petit
Pont and Pont Notre Dame. The second, named Rue de la Harpe on the
left bank, Rue de la Barillerie in the island, Rue St. Denis on the
right bank, Pont St. Michel over one arm of the Seine, and Pont au
Change over the other, Gate of St. Martin; it was called in the
University to the Gate of St. Denis in the Ville. Still, tho they bore
so many different names, they formed in reality only two streets, but
the two mother-streets, the two great arteries of Paris. All the other
veins of the triple city were fed by or discharged themselves into
these....

What, then, was the aspect of this whole, viewed from the summit of
the towers of Notre Dame in 1482? That is what we shall now attempt to
describe. The spectator, on arriving breathless at that elevation, was
dazzled by the chaos of roofs, chimneys, streets, bridges, belfries,
towers and steeples. All burst at once upon the eye--the carved gable,
the sharp roof, the turret perched upon the angles of the walls, the
stone pyramids of the eleventh century, the slated obelisk of the
fifteenth, the round and naked keep of the castle, the square and
embroidered tower of the church, the great and the small, the massive
and the light. The eye was long bewildered amid this labyrinth of
heights and depths in