River of Time - Morning of Day 6

Balzac wrote, “Paris is an ocean.  You may cast a sounding line, but you will never fathom its depth.”  The ebb and flow of time, like tides, perfectly conjures the sense I get of Paris’s connection with antiquity.  It also points to the city’s most enduring symbol and the reason for its earliest beginnings, the river Seine.

The first continuous settlement on what is now the Île de la Cité dates to the 4^th century BC at a time when the Seine and its muddy, marshy banks offered a protective perimeter against marauding raiders.  As the diagram shows, the  lighter blue marshlands effectively

extended the physical barrier to island access, and a Celtic tribe called the Parisii took advantage of that defensive barrier to create their settlement.  What little is known of this Celtic settlement mostly derives from records dating to the Roman conquest of the region in 52 BC and the subsequent establishment of the Roman town of Lutecia on what is now the Left Bank.  Trade and related routes of commerce were well established prior to the Roman conquest, and Lutecia expanded along the major road that crossed the Seine at the Île de la Cité.  The history of the roughly 300 years of relative peace of the Roman epoch is explained in detail through exhibits at the Crypte Archeologique, where we took pictures of these dioramas.

 

Numerous remnants of the Roman era of Lutecia are evident throughout the city, including the Arena described in an earlier post, which appears in the photograph at the eastern end of the town.  However, apart from remains of large public facilities, very little of the residential and street foundation and infrastructure can be found, because the continuous rebuilding over centuries of development both excavated and replaced early structures, and in fact re-used most of the building materials.

We had known none of this prior to the planned excursion for today, a visit to Notre Dame de Paris.  After meeting up with Clas and Ann-Catrine on Rue Linné, we enjoyed the cool Paris fall weather as we walked along the Rue du Cardinal Lemoine and along the Seine.  We crossed over the Pont de L’Archevêché, with railings adorned with hundreds of “lovelocks”, a trend that Clas reports has become common on bridges all across Europe.
 
From the bridge, we looked across to the Southeast façade of Paris’s most famous cathedral, beautifully framed by Annie’s unfailingly artistic eye.

 

 
 In the course of our narrated open-top bus tour, we learned that the Western end of the Ile de la Cite has been site of a royal palace since the start of the Merovingian dynasty in the 4^th century AD, and that the eastern end has hosted sites of worship since the Romans had erected a temple to Jupiter there.The area in between was, until the 1850s, mostly residential and commercial.


In the 4^th century, the Merovingians constructed Saint Étienne’s Cathedral where the Roman temple had stood, but this was demolished in 1160, and in 1163 construction of Notre Dame de Paris was started.  However, the classic Gothic structure was not fully completed until 1345, and subsequent episodes of architectural modification and civil unrest substantially disrupted, and in many cases severely damaged the monument.  Major restoration was initiated in 1845, and elements of that restoration are ongoing.


The detail and intricacy of the construction is evident in this view of the south façade, complete with flying buttresses, lofty spires, the original rose window, and of course, the filigree and sculptural adornment, including gargoyles.
 

 

Upon entering the sanctuary, the vastness of the nave extending 225 feet and the expansive grandeur of the vaulted ceilings rising 102 feet are impressive even by modern standards.   Although no two-dimensional representation can reproduce the immediate experience, this should give you the idea. 

Around the periphery are sequential chapels, each illuminated by its own stained glass window and adorned with sculpture and large paintings.

Most of the peripheral chapels included works of fine art, and this one in particular struck me as noteworthy:

 

This is the mausoleum of the Compte Claude Henri d’Harcourt, second in command of the King’s army in the mid 18^th century.  I found the composition striking and the imagery memorable.  However, although the sculptor, Pigalle, was well regarded during his lifetime, a modern critique of this piece (written in 1921) dismisses it saying, “the composition is scattered and the group lacks unity.”  Oh well, what do I know about art?

Originally, the cathedral was replete with many monuments to bishops and nobles of great antiquity, along with reliquaries filled with religious icons.  The depredations of revolutionary zeal have wreaked havoc on these, and there remains only one effigy in marble, Simon Matiffas de Buci, who died in 1304.  Recumbent in full clerical garb, with a characteristic Gothic lion sleeping at his feet, and bedecked with jewelry, this figure lies directly behind the altar, and is magnificent. 

Notre Dame’s enduring grandeur is all the more remarkable in light of the technology available at the time of its construction.  My favorite exhibit in the monument is a small diorama located far in the back of the sanctuary, depicting a construction site scene: 

 

Viewed in this context, it’s not at all hard to understand why it took 182 years to complete the job.

Our tour of Notre Dame complete, we stood briefly in the fore-court of the cathedral so Annie could snap a picture, before Ann-Catrine and Clas headed for a nearby café, and Annie and I walked the length of the broad Parvis fronting the cathedral to the Crypte museum entrance.

Surprisingly, relatively few visitors are either aware of or interested in the Crypte Archeologique, yet this trove of historical and cultural displays highlights the very origins of Paris.  I earlier showed models of the pre- and early settlement layout of the Paris basin on display in the museum, and many more exhibits may be found of not only relics from Ile de la Cite, but also reconstructions of other Roman era facilities in other parts of Paris.  However, the principal purpose of the museum is to display the full extent of major archeological excavations that lie beneath the Parvis of Notre Dame.  Within this relatively narrow area underlying the former Rue Neuve de Notre Dame are remains of riverbank quais, water tunnels, and thermal bath works dating to Roman times, as well as cellars, walls, foundations, stairs, and other features of both residential and public construction throughout centuries of city life. 

 

The remarkable integrity of these remains raises the question, why have extensive, relatively intact foundations of such antiquity survived here and nowhere else in Paris?  The answer lies in the combination of the alignment of Rue Neuve and Notre Dame itself.

Before construction of Notre Dame started in the twelfth century, the small parvis in front of the existing Cathedral St. Étienne contained smaller churches that held religious relics to protect them from Norman pillages.  At that time, population on the island was around 3,000 mostly living in densely-packed structures that covered the area between the royal palace at the western end of the island and the ecclesiastical complex at the east end.  Even the bridge crossing the Seine to the island from the right bank was crowded with some 60 residences and commercial establishments.

The Bishop of Paris, Maurice de Sully, under whose auspices and oversight the planning and initial construction of Notre Dame de Paris commenced ordered a new road (Rue Neuve) to be opened along the cathedral’s central axis. Construction of the road razed a maze of alleys, closely-built wooden houses, and seventeen chapels, but created the necessary access for transporting construction materials and connecting the construction site with the major existing thoroughfare.  Here’s a plan view of the Île de la Cité in 1380 showing the alignment of Rue Neuve and the nearly complete Notre Dame.

A display in the Crypte offers another perspective looking straight down the Rue Neuve towards the cathedral:  

  The present Parvis of Notre Dame dates to the period of major renovations of Paris under the direction of Georges-Eugène Haussmann in the mid 19^th century.   Much of Baron Haussmann’s work remains controversial, but his many critics seldom cite his creation of an open plaza to give an unencumbered view of the great West Façade of the Cathedral among their complaints.

Elsewhere on the island, the subsoil was repeatedly disturbed as successive generations built on the same sites, installing new foundations and digging out new cellars, frequently reusing intact building materials.  However, under Rue Neuve, ancient structures remained remarkably intact, because for the last seven centuries, demolishers and builders have respected the alignment of the street and its relation to the monumental Notre Dame de Paris.

Footweary, but fully versed in the lore of Notre Dame and the early settlers of Paris, we met up again with Clas and Ann-Catrine, and headed off in search of a lunchtime venue.