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Sainte Chapelle and Pont Neuf
Yves promised me, after we had wandered through the Cathedral and its tangle of surrounding streets, that the Ile de la Cité had a jewel which was hidden from sight, a Gothic church called La Sainte Chapelle. It was built as the royal chapel in the courtyard of the great palace which straddled the island, of which only the conical towers of La Conciergerie remain, overlooking the Seine and the Right Bank.
King Saint Louis, the crusader king, had it made to house the Crown of Thorns which he bought in Venice on his way to the Holy Land, which is why the edifice itself reminds one of a translucent reliquary, tall and slender and enclosed in a web of stone and deeply-hued stained glass. That first day in Paris was grey, so we waited a few days until the sun began to show before paying our visit, and every time the clouds parted the interior was flooded with a prism of light. I had not, and still have not, seen any human creation which surpasses the Gothic window-walls of the Sainte Chapelle.
To reach it, we went through the same gate as the lawyers and clerks on their way to work at the Paris Courthouse. Yves explained that the royal palace was replaced in the 19th century by the squat, style-less buildings of the Palais de Justice, imprisoning the fragile, elegant church in an unsightly prison of granite walls, with only its tall black spire being visible from outside, as if it were crying out to be rescued.
The other end of the Ile de la Cité was spanned by a great bridge, the Pont Neuf. Was it not, my guide asked, an irony that the oldest bridge of the city should be called The New Bridge? This was because at the time it was built, in the early 16th century, it represented a great innovation for Paris, in many ways.
It was the city’s first bridge to be made of stone rather than wood, the first to cross the entire river rather than just one of the “arms” of the Seine, the first bridge to have a sidewalk to protect the pedestrians from the carts and carriages, and the site of the city’s first public statue, the equestrian statue of Henri IV, torn down in the Revolution but rebuilt a short time afterwards when the monarchy was restored.
Most notably, perhaps, it was the first bridge to be free of the houses and shops which made it so difficult for traffic to move to and fro, such as Le Pont au Change, the next one upstream, so called because it was lined on both sides with the boutiques and homes of money-changers, jewellers and goldsmiths. Since everyone had to use the bridges to get from one side of the city to the other, unless they took a ferry or “bac”, they were obviously the best places to sell things.
These bridges were prone to burning down with everything on them, as Le Pont au Change itself once did. And a great medieval tragedy occurred when the next one up, Pont Notre Dame suddenly collapsed under its own weight, sending 60 houses into the stream!
Until the Pont Neuf was built, every old bridge of Paris was like the Ponte Vecchio in Florence, which explains why, today, they are so wide: they were designed, like streets, to accommodate rows of houses, and were financed by the merchants who lived and kept shop in them. The trading position was so prized that each time the Parisians felt the need for a new bridge, the merchants on the existing ones would protest to the mayor, claiming that there was none.
When Baron Haussman modernized the city in the 19th century, he straightened out the bridges, which on the medieval “hump-backed” model required traffic to climb to the center before descending to the far side, and he also cleared the houses away, leaving broad thoroughfares which were used by street vendours and wandering musicians to entertain the crowds. But until then, the Pont Neuf was the city’s high street and fair ground as well, where such crowds thronged that, it was said, you only had to cross it once to find “a monk, a white horse or a harlot”!
When work was started on the Pont Neuf it, also, was designed to support the commercially desirable houses. But when it was finished twenty years later, the new king decided against it, so that when coming from his palace, the Louvre, his coach could cross the river more speedily. Perhaps Le Vert Galant, as Henri IV was admiringly known for his many affairs (“green” meaning “virile”), had a mistress on the Rive Gauche he liked to visit unannounced.
Curiously, for everyday Parisians, one of the unexpected attractions of the new bridge was that instead of being hemmed in on both sides by half-timbered houses, they could look up and down the river as they crossed and enjoy the spectacle of the fishing boats, the water mills, the washerwomen scrubbing on the shore, or, if the water there was too muddy, out on the laundry boats, les bateaux lavoir which were still in use a century ago.
I would add to all these qualities that the Pont Neuf is also the most handsome bridge in Paris, and one of its greatest monuments. The great white piers are so massive, in proportion to the height of the boulevard slung across them, that they remind me of pontoons or the bows of a fleet of warships, surmounted by the bulging balconies or resting places, like after-decks, which make the Pont Neuf such a pleasure to cross.
And the whole sinuously elegant thing is strung together by petrified garlands of figureheads, the famous “masked faces” which snarl down on the barges that crawl beneath them. In spite of this water-borne impression, thousands of wooden piles were driven into the river bed to provide firm feet for the bridge’s dozen piers, and of such sturdy oak that, after five hundred years, only a few have had to be replaced.
Yves took me down the steps which disappear into the pavement behind the statue of Henri IV to a place where he loved to watch the river, the needle-shaped park called le Square du Vert-Galant, that juts out into the water under its canopy of willows. We sat a while on the embankment, as the barges, laden with coal and sand, and sometimes with a family sitting on the deck among flowerpots and drying laundry, moved by in the winter fog. I cannot sincerely say that I remember just where I first fell in love with Paris, no more than I can be sure that I have not mixed up in my mind those first impressions and the things I learned from my excellent guide, but it may well have been there.
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