Edwards Henry Sutherland
Old and New Paris: Its History, Its People, and Its Places, v. 1
CHAPTER XXV
THE PARIS HOSPITALS
The Place du Parvis – The Parvis of Notre Dame – The Hôtel-Dieu – Mercier’s Criticisms.
IN the matter of police administration and of civic government generally; the Hôtel de Ville is to the whole of Paris what the Mansion House and the Guildhall are to that part of London known specially as the City. The Hôtel de Ville has charge, moreover, of all the Paris hospitals and benevolent institutions. The general administration of the hospitals is entrusted to a Director, under the surveillance of a Consultative Committee.
The most ancient and most celebrated of all the Paris hospitals is the Hôtel-Dieu, occupying a space which is bounded on the north by the Quai aux Fleurs, on the south by the Place du Parvis, on the west by the Rue de la Cité, and on the east by the Rue d’Arcole.
The Place du Parvis deserves a word of mention to itself. The word “Parvis” has several derivations, the most popular of which is from the Latin paradisus. The ancient form of the French word was paraïs or paravis, contracted into parvis; and it was applied to the open space in front of a church because, in the days of the “mysteries,” it was here that the paradise of the play was located. According to another derivation, the “parvis” is the ground outside a church which “pare” or “guards” the principal door —huis in the ancient French. In this sense the word is used to denote, in the Jewish Temple, the space around the tabernacle. Parvis céleste is a phrase employed by French poets to signify heaven or the firmament; which does not at all prove – indeed seems to disprove – that parvis means, or ever did mean, the same thing as paradisus. The parvis of the old churches was, in any case, used as a place of penance for those who had scandalised the town by some offence against good morals; and it was there that on certain occasions holy relics were brought for exhibition to the people. The temples of Greece and Rome were surrounded by enclosures, as if to separate them from the public thoroughfare; and the first Christian churches had enclosures in front of the principal entrance, where tombs, crosses, statues, and sometimes fountains were to be seen. After the twelfth century the parvis ceased to be enclosed; though so late as the sixteenth century the Parvis of Notre Dame appears, by exception, to have been shut in by a wall not more than three feet high, through which there were three different gateways.
The Parvis of Notre Dame served in ancient days the most varied purposes. Here, before the establishment of the University of Paris, public schools were held. It was a place of punishment, moreover; and it was on a scaffold erected in the Parvis of Notre Dame that Jacques de Molay and the Templars heard the sentence read which was afterwards executed upon them (March 18, 1314) in the Île aux Vaches, as the little island was anciently called where now stands the statue of Henri IV. Here, too, under Francis I., Huguenots were given to the flames.
Jacques de Molay, the last grand master of the Templars, was born in Burgundy, and entered the order in 1265. He distinguished himself in Palestine, in the wars against the Mussulmans. Elected grand master in 1298, he was preparing to avenge the defeats which the Christian arms had recently sustained, when in 1305 he was recalled to France by Pope Clement V. The pretext for this summons was a projected union of the order of Templars with that of the Hospitallers. But the true object of Philip the Fair, for whom the Pope had acted only as instrument, was the destruction of the order, whose immense wealth had excited the monarch’s covetousness. On the 13th of October, 1307, all the Templars were arrested at the same hour throughout France; and a process was instituted against them in which every form of justice was violated. Thirty-six knights expired under torture, and several owned to the crimes and the shameful immorality of which they were falsely accused. Molay himself, in the agony of torture, allowed some words to escape him; but before dying nearly all the victims retracted the utterances wrung from them by pain. The Pope, throughout this tragic affair, followed the directions of the French king, to whom he owed his tiara.
To go back from history to legend, it was in the open space afterwards to become the Parvis of Notre Dame that in 464 Artus, King of Great Britain, son of Uther, surnamed Pendragon pitched his camp when invading Gaul and ravaging the country. Gaul was at that time governed for the Emperor Leo by the Tribune Flollo, who retired to Paris and there fortified himself. Artus now defied Flollo to single combat. The Tribune accepted, and the duel took place on the eastern point of the Île de la Cité, with lance and hatchet. Blinded by the blood which flowed from a wound he had received in the head, Artus invoked the Virgin Mary, who, it is said, appeared to him in presence of everyone, and covered him with her cloak, which was “lined with ermine.” Dazzled at this miracle, Flollo lost his sight, and Artus had now no trouble in despatching him. In memory of the Virgin’s interposition, Artus adopted ermine for his coat-of-arms; which for a long time afterwards was retained by the kings and princes of Britain. He wished at the same time to consecrate the memory of his triumph, and accordingly erected on the very ground where the combat had taken place a chapel in honour of the Virgin, which at last became the cathedral church of Paris. Then Artus (or Arthur) returned to his British island, and there founded the Order of the Knights of that Round Table which is still preserved in Winchester Cathedral.
Until the Revolution the Parvis of Notre Dame was shut in north and south by populous districts through which ran narrow, ill-built streets, and which contained several buildings of importance. Since then a clean sweep has been made of all the tumble-down buildings in the ancient Cité, between the two banks of the Seine north and south, between the Cathedral on the east and the barracks of the Republican Guard on the west. The southern part of the Parvis has been transformed into a sort of English garden, in the centre of which stands an equestrian statue of Charlemagne by the sculptor Rochet.
In old French, the second of two substantives joined together did duty as genitive; so that Hôtel-Dieu signified the hotel (or house) of God, just as in some ancient French towns Mère-Dieu, as the sign of an hotel, meant not, as is sometimes ignorantly supposed, “God the Mother,” but “The Mother of God.” The Hôtel-Dieu or Hôtel de Dieu (a house, that is to say, in which the poor and suffering were received and attended in the name of God and under His auspices) was founded about 660, in the time of Clovis II., son of Dagobert, by Saint Landri, twenty-eighth bishop of Paris. Here he was accustomed to receive, at his own expense, not only sick people, but also beggars and pilgrims. Medicus et Hospes, such was the motto of the bishop, who might justly claim the double title of physician and host. In the course of centuries the good work begun by Saint Landri was continued on a large scale by the French kings, with Philip Augustus, Saint Louis, and Henri IV. prominent among them. Among the benefactors of the Hôtel-Dieu must also be mentioned the Chancellor du Prat, and the first President, Pomponne de Bellièvre.
The old Hôtel-Dieu, after undergoing all kinds of repairs, was at last condemned as too small and too ill-ventilated. In 1868 a new hospital was begun just opposite the old one; and the building as it now stands, large, airy, and in every respect commodious, was finished in 1878. With abundance of space at their command, the architects of the modern Hôtel-Dieu made it their sole aim to secure for the patients every possible advantage, and their first care was to provide spacious wards replete with light and air. One result has been that in a larger edifice the number of the beds has, in accordance with the best hygienic principles, been greatly diminished.
In the time of Saint Louis the old Hôtel-Dieu received 900 patients. This number was increased under Henri IV. to 1,300, and under Louis XIV. to 1,900. At times, however, the sick or wounded persons admitted were far more numerous; and in 1709 the number of patients in the Hôtel-Dieu is said to have reached 9,000. Not, however, the number of beds; for in the same bed several patients, at the risk of infection, contagion, and frightful mortality, were placed together. The new Hôtel-Dieu, on the other hand, contains only 514 beds: 329 medical beds, 169 surgical beds, and sixteen cradles. The building having cost fifty million francs, it follows that each particular bed has cost nearly one hundred thousand francs; and philanthropists point out that at 6,000 francs per bed, “the ordinary figure in England and other countries,” more than 8,000 patients might have been provided for in lieu of 500. It must be remembered, on the other hand, that the Hôtel-Dieu contains, besides its hospital service properly so called, an administrative department: including amphitheatres of practical surgery, laboratories of pharmacy, chemistry, etc., which alone cost fourteen millions of francs. According, moreover, to the original plan as approved by the principal professors and physicians of the Hôtel-Dieu, there was to have been an additional storey containing 260 beds, to which the patients below were to have been transferred on certain days for change of air and to allow the lower rooms to be thoroughly ventilated and cleaned. This additional storey cost four millions of francs, and it had already been completed, when, for reasons unexplained, but which, according to M. Vitu, were political, it was pulled down.
The general plan of the Hôtel-Dieu as it now stands comprises two masses of parallel buildings: one beside the Parvis of Notre Dame, the other alongside the Quai Napoléon; the two façades, anterior and posterior, of the edifice being connected laterally by galleries at right angles to the Seine. The administrative department of the Hôtel-Dieu is in that part of the building which faces the Parvis. On the ground floor, to the left, is the Central Bureau of Hospitals; the head-quarters of the hospital service, not only of Paris, but generally of the Department of the Seine. The staff consists of twenty physicians, fifteen surgeons, and three accoucheurs chosen by competition; and from this body are selected the physicians and surgeons of the various Paris hospitals. Formerly patients were admitted on mere application; but at present they are carefully examined by the physicians of the Central Bureau, who give out tickets of admission and assign beds so long as there is room. If the Hôtel-Dieu is full the applicants for medical care are sent to other hospitals. Adjoining the Central Bureau are the rooms where out-door patients receive gratuitous advice.
The wards occupied by the patients are lighted by two rows of windows, north and south, and they look out upon the interior courtyards, which are planted with trees. This arrangement allows air to enter the well-kept apartments, and the rays of the sun to light up the curtains and white beds of a model hospital, where everything possible has been done to relieve the suffering and depression of its unhappy inmates. In the ophthalmic wards curtains of a particular kind are so arranged as only to admit the degree of light which the patients can bear.
Visitors to the Hôtel-Dieu, as to other hospitals in Paris, cannot fail to observe that the air is less pure in the men’s than in the women’s wards. This is to be explained by the men being allowed the only solace possible under the circumstances, that of tobacco. Nor are their grey dressing-gowns by any means so becoming as the white frocks and white caps worn by the female patients.
Many of the wards contain only from two to eight beds. There is a sitting-room, moreover, with lounges, chairs, and sofas for the convalescent, not to speak of an open gallery above the portico, where patients who are well enough may, in fine weather, stretch their limbs. The upper storey of that part of the building which faces the Quai aux Fleurs used to be occupied by the community of Dames Augustines, who from time immemorial had had no other abode and no other head-quarters. But after the civil government had withdrawn from the Dames Augustines the hospital service of La Pitié and La Charité, they all assembled at the Hôtel-Dieu, where additional sleeping rooms were prepared for them beneath the roof. Subscriptions were solicited for them in a pastoral letter from the Archbishop of Paris, dated December 2, 1888; and a new retreat was then found for them in the Hospital of Notre Dame de Bon Secours. One duty imposed upon them, in the days when the Hôtel-Dieu was composed of two large buildings on the banks of the Seine, was to wash, one day every month, whatever might be the temperature, 500 sheets. The sisters, equally with novices, were obliged to take part in these laundry operations. An ancient print, preserved in the National Library, gives a faithful representation of the washing of the 500 sheets.
Admirable as has been the work accomplished in recent times by the Hôtel-Dieu, the place seems to have been little better than a pest-house at the period when Mercier wielded his conscientious pen. “A man meets there,” he wrote, “with a death a thousand times more dreadful than that which awaits the indigent under his humble roof, abandoned though he be to himself and nature alone. And we dare call that the House of God! – where the contempt shown to humanity adds to the suffering of those who go there for relief! The physician and servant are paid – granted; the drugs cost nothing to the patient – true again; but he will be put to bed between a dying man and a dead corpse; he will breathe an air corrupted by pestiferous exhalations; he will be subject to chirurgical despotism; neither his cries, his complaints, nor his expostulations will be attended to; he will have nobody by to soothe and comfort him; pity itself will be blind and barbarous, having lost that sympathising compassion, and those tears of sensibility, which constitute its very being. In this abode of human misery every aspect is cruel and disgusting; and this is called the House of God! Who would not fly from the bloody, detested spot? Who will venture within a house where the bed of mercy is far more dreadful than the naked board on which lies the poorest wretch? This hospital, miscalled Hôtel-Dieu, was founded by Saint Landri and Comte Archambaud in the year 660 for the reception of sick persons of either sex. Jews, Turks, and infidels have an equal right to admission. There are 1,200 beds, and constantly between five and six thousand patients. What a disproportion! Yet the revenues of the hospital are immense. It was expected that the last fire which happened in this edifice would have been improved to the advantage of the patients, by the construction, on a healthier spot, of a new and more extensive structure. But no; everything remains on the same footing; though it is but too well proved that the Hôtel-Dieu has every requisite to create and increase a multitude of disorders on account of the dampness and confinement of the atmosphere. Wounds soon turn to a mortification; whilst the scurvy makes the greatest havoc amongst those who, from the nature of their maladies, are forced to remain there for some time. Thus, the most simple distempers soon grow into complicated diseases, sometimes fatal, by the contagion of that ambient air. Both the experience and observation of the naturalist concur to prove that a hospital which contains above one hundred beds is of itself a plague. It may be added that as often as two patients are laid up in the same room they will evidently hurt each other, and that such a practice is necessarily injurious to the laws of humanity. It is almost incredible, yet not the less true, that one-fifth of the patients are annually carried off. This is known and heard of with the most indifferent composure!”
Nor does Mercier stop here. “Clamart,” he continues, “is the gulf that swallows up the remains of those hapless men who have paid the last debt to nature in the Hôtel-Dieu. It is an extensive burying-ground, or rather a voracious monster whose maw is ever craving for new food, though most plentifully supplied. The bodies are there interred without a coffin and only sewed up in the coarsest linen cloth. At the least appearance of death the body is hurried away, and there are many instances of people having recovered under the hasty hand that wrapped them up; whilst others have been heard to cry “mercy” when already piled up in the cart that carried them to an untimely grave. The cart is drawn by twelve men. A priest, covered with filth and mud, carrying a hand-bell and cross, are all the funeral pomp reserved for these unfortunate victims. But at that hour all is one! Every morning at four o’clock the dismal cart sets off from the Hôtel-Dieu, and, as it rolls along, strikes terror into the neighbourhood, who are awoke by the awful sound of that bell. A man must be lost to all feeling who hears it unmoved. In certain seasons, when mortality was most rife, this cart has been seen to go backwards and forwards four times in four-and-twenty hours. It contains about fifty corpses, besides children, who are crammed between their legs. The bodies are cast into a deep pit, and are next covered with unslackened lime. This crucible, which is never shut up, seems to tell the affrighted looker-on that it could easily devour all the inhabitants that Paris contains. Such is the obedience paid to the laws, that the decree of the Parliament prohibiting all buryings within the walls of this city has at no time been carried into execution. The populace never fail on the day of All Souls to visit that cemetery, where they foresee that their bodies will one day be carried. They kneel and pray, and then adjourn to a tavern. To this spot, where the earth is fattened with the spoils of mankind, young surgeons resort by night, and, climbing the wall, carry off the dead corpses to make upon them their bloody experiments. Thus, the poor find no asylum even in death. And such is the tyranny over this unfortunate part of the community, that it does not cease till their very remains are hacked and hewed so as not to retain the least resemblance of man.”
CHAPTER XXVI
CENTRAL PARIS
The Hotel de Ville – Saint-Jacques-la-Boucherie – Rue Saint-Antoine – The Reformation.
THE Hôtel de Ville, new by its architecture, is old by its history, and to some extent by the buildings still surrounding it; though the ancient streets of the neighbourhood have during the last forty years been gradually disappearing. Close to the Church of St. Gervais and St. Protais stood the street significantly named Rue du Martroi – of martyrdom, or death-punishment; also the Rue de la Mortellerie, where the workers in “mortar” – stone-masons that is to say – were in the habit of meeting when out of work. With this may be connected the name of Place de Grève, formerly borne by what is now called the Place de l’Hôtel de Ville. The word grève signifies in the present day a strike. Originally it meant simply the condition of being without employment; and it was on the Place de Grève that artisans who found, like Othello, their occupation gone, assembled in search of an employer. Afterwards this became a place of execution; and here it was that Ravaillac, Cartouche, Damiens, and such illustrious victims as the Constable of Saint-Pol under Louis XI., and Lally-Tollendal under Louis XVI., were decapitated, quartered alive, and otherwise tortured. “La journée sera rude,” said Damiens, when, having already undergone various tortures, he learned that he was to be torn to pieces by four horses; and “rough” indeed have been the days passed by the unhappy wretches brought to punishment on the Place de Grève.
After the Revolution of 1830, when the Hôtel de Ville became all at once a place of high political importance, the open space in front of it was looked upon as unworthy any longer to serve as a slaughter-ground, and the Place Saint-Jacques now became the head-quarters of the guillotine; which was afterwards to be transferred to the Place de la Roquette. The region of Paris commanded by the Hôtel de Ville forms a long irregular parallelogram, comprising, for the most part, the districts of Saint-Méry, Saint-Gervais and the Arsenal, bounded on the south by the Seine, on the west by the Place du Châtelet and the Boulevard Sébastopol, on the east by the Saint-Martin Canal and the Boulevard Bourdon, on the north by the Rue de Rivoli and the Rue Saint-Antoine, rejoining the Boulevard Bourdon at the Place de la Bastille. To the construction of the Rue de Rivoli is due the happy change which has taken place in this populous region, formerly deprived of light and air, and so overcrowded that the inhabitants were always suffering from some serious epidemic. The streets of the neighbourhood must at that time have been good specimens of those so energetically condemned by Arthur Young in one of his descriptions of Paris.
“This great city,” he wrote in the very year of the Revolution, “appears to be in many respects the most ineligible and inconvenient for the residence of a person of small fortune of any that I have seen; and vastly inferior to London. The streets are very narrow and many of them crowded, nine-tenths dirty, and all without foot-pavements. Walking, which in London is so pleasant and so clean that ladies do it every day, is here a toil and a fatigue to a man, and an impossibility to a well-dressed woman. The coaches are numerous, and, what is much worse, there is an infinity of one-horse cabriolets, which are driven by young men of fashion and their imitators, alike fools, with such rapidity as to be real nuisances and render the streets exceedingly dangerous without an incessant caution. I saw a poor child run over and probably killed, and have been myself many times blackened with the mud of the kennels. This beggarly practice of driving a one-horse booby-hutch about the streets of a great capital flows either from poverty or wretched and despicable economy; nor is it possible to speak of it with too much severity. If young noblemen at London were to drive their chaises in streets without footways as their brethren do at Paris, they would speedily and justly get very well threshed or rolled in the kennel. This circumstance renders Paris an ineligible residence for persons, particularly families, that cannot afford to keep a coach; a convenience which is as dear as at London. The fiacres (hackney coaches) are much worse than at that city; and chairs there are none, for they would be driven down in the streets. To this circumstance also it is owing that all persons of small or moderate fortune are forced to dress in black with black stockings: the dusky hue of this in company is not so disagreeable a circumstance as being too great a distinction; too clear a line drawn in company between a man that has a good fortune and another that has not. With the pride, arrogance, and ill-temper of English wealth, this could not be borne; but the prevailing good humour of the French eases all such untoward circumstances. Lodgings are not half as good as at London, yet considerably dearer. If you do not hire a whole suite of rooms at an hotel you must probably mount three, four, or five pair of stairs, and in general have nothing but a bed-chamber. After the horrid fatigue of the streets such an elevation is a delectable circumstance. You must search with trouble before you will be lodged in a private family, as gentlemen usually are in London; and pay a higher price. Servants’ wages are about the same as at that city. It is to be regretted that Paris should have these disadvantages, for in other respects I take it to be a most eligible residence for such as prefer a great city. The society for a man of letters or one who has any scientific pursuit cannot be exceeded. The intercourse between such men and the great, which, if it is not upon an equal footing, ought never to exist at all, is respectable. Persons of the highest rank pay an attention to science and literature, and emulate the character they confer. I should pity the man who expected, without other advantages of a very different nature, to be well received in a brilliant circle at London because he was a Fellow of the Royal Society. But this would not be the case with a member of the Academy of Sciences at Paris; he is sure of a good reception everywhere. Perhaps this contrast depends, in a great measure, on the difference of the governments of the two countries. Politics are too much attended to in England to allow a due respect to be paid to anything else; and should the French establish a freer government, academicians will not be held in such estimation when rivalled in the public esteem by the orators who hold forth liberty and property in a free parliament.”
Napoleon I. began the Rue de Rivoli, tracing it alongside the Tuileries Gardens and the Palais Royal to the Louvre as far as the Rue de Rohan. Napoleon III. continued the great conception of his uncle and pushed on the Rue de Rivoli through the mean habitations and crowded streets in the neighbourhood of the Palais Royal, of Saint-Germain-l’Auxerrois, and of the Halles as far as the upper part of the Rue Saint-Antoine.
The most celebrated, and certainly the most beautiful, monument in the street is the tower of Saint-Jacques-la-Boucherie; so named from its having been built close to the great butchers’ market of Paris. Constructed in 1153, the church, which at first was little more than a chapel, was rebuilt in 1380, but not completed with the principal porch and the tower until the reign of Francis I. The tower is now all that remains of the church, which in 1737, under the Revolution, was alienated by the Administration of Domains and soon afterwards pulled down. Having become private property, the tower passed from hand to hand until 1836, when it was offered for sale, and purchased by the Municipality for 250,000 francs. This sum was not dear for a masterpiece of Gothic art in its last and most delicate period, when it was about to disappear in presence of the Græco-Roman Renaissance. Begun under the reign of Louis XII. in 1508, the tower was finished fourteen years afterwards in 1522. It measures fifty-two metres in height from the stone foundations to the summit. The platform of the steeple (which is reached by a staircase of 291 steps) is surrounded by a balustrade, which supports, at the north-west angle, a colossal statue of Saint Jacques. This statue replaces the ancient one which the Revolutionists of 1793 precipitated on to the pavement, though they respected the symbolical animals placed at the four corners of the balustrade. These have been carefully restored. From the height of the platform a magnificent view may be obtained.
“One sees,” wrote Sanval under Louis XIV., “as one looks over the town the distribution and course of the streets like the veins in the human body. Unfortunately this incomparable view can no longer be obtained – not at least without much difficulty. The tower of Saint-Jacques has been put in the hands of an astronomical and meteorological society, which denies access to the public, though on rare occasions it admits a few favoured persons to its experiments, which take place at night.”
It must here be mentioned that at the foot of the tower is a statue of Pascal, who continued from its top the observations he had begun from the summit of the Puy de Dôme. The writer Nicholas Flamel, librarian to the University of Paris, and Pernelle, his wife, both buried in the vaults of Saint-Jacques-la-Boucherie, had been the benefactors of this church; and their memory is preserved in the name, Nicholas Flamel, given to the street which, beginning on the right of the tower, leads from the Rue de Rivoli to the Rue des Lombards.
Around the tower of Saint-Jacques is a large square, well planted with trees. Further on, towards the east, the Rue de Rivoli runs past the Hôtel de Ville and the Napoleon Barracks. Of the Church of Saint-Gervais, one side of which looks towards the Rue de Rivoli, mention has already been made. Close to the point where the Rue de Rivoli and the Rue Saint-Antoine meet, is an offshoot from the Rue Saint-Antoine called Rue François Miron, after the independent provost of merchants under the reign of Henri IV. In this street stands the Hôtel de Beauvais. From the windows of this mansion Anne of Austria, accompanied by the Queen of England, Cardinal Mazarin, Marshal Turenne, and other illustrious personages, witnessed the procession headed by her son, Louis XIV., and her daughter-in-law, Marie Thérèse of Austria, when the newly married couple made their solemn entry into Paris through the Gate of Saint-Antoine, August 26, 1660.
Running from the Rue Saint-Antoine to the Rue Charlemagne is a narrow street scarcely twelve feet broad, with walls of extraordinary height. Rue Percée it was originally named. For some years past it has been called Rue du Prévôt, because at its south-east corner it joins the former mansion of the Provost of Paris, of which the principal entrance is in the Rue Charlemagne. The series of open courtyards known as the Passage Charlemagne, in which all sorts of trades are carried on, lead to the very centre of one of the most interesting and least known monuments of old Paris. It is composed of two blocks of parallel buildings constructed in the style of the first years of the sixteenth century, when French architects were beginning to throw aside the fantasies of Gothic art to subject themselves to the straight lines of the Neo-Roman style. After passing through various hands, and finally from François Montmorency, Governor of Paris, to Cardinal Charles de Bourbon – the structure was presented by the latter to the Jesuits, who attached to it a chapel dedicated to St. Louis and St. Paul. The Church of St. Louis and St. Paul possesses, among various works of modern art, the first picture known to have been painted by Eugène Delacroix: “Christ in the Garden of Olives.” This work is dated 1816.
