Metronome

1a. Of the ancient grounds of the Saint-Martin-des-Champs, a turret and courtyard remain partially restored on the Rue du Vertbois. 1b. The bend in Rue Bailly retains the southeast border of the enclosure, whose corner tower is visible in the stairway cage of number 7. 1c. The Vertbois tower, about which Victor Hugo wrote to an architect who had suggested the demolition: “Demolish the tower? No. Demolish the architect? Yes.” 2. The boundaries of the priory. 3. During the Revolution, the priory was turned into the Conservatoire National des Arts et Métiers, which you can still find at 292 Rue Saint Martin. 4. Inside and outside the conservatory: Cluny’s Romanesque design. 5. The refectory of the monks. 6. Vestiges of the Cité palace. 7. The staircase of the condemned in front of the Palais de Justice. 8. The Sainte-Chapelle chapel.

The Arts et Métiers Métro stop is very handsome indeed. In fact it looks like it figures in a Jules Verne story, the Art Nouveau copperwork making it seem like something a mad scientist might come up with—a vessel to take us on a long voyage not only to some other place, but to some other time.

This is all a daydream, of course, because this ship doesn’t actually move; to get anywhere on it you have to get on the antique wood escalator, heading down one side and coming up the other, then repeating the operation. You will find yourself going round and round the Conservatoire National des arts et métiers on Rue Saint-Martin.

Until the Revolution, this stop is where the Saint-Martin-des-Champs priory had stood, a small oratory that had been constructed on the very spot where Saint Martin had kissed and cured a leper. The chapel was torn down in the eleventh century and replaced by a large monastery, which could be found on what are today the streets Saint-Martin, Vertbois, Montgolfier, and Bailly.

But let us return to the year 1000. It is an imposingly round number, to be sure. Nonetheless, millennialism did not seem greatly to disturb the thoughts of the realm’s inhabitants, although in certain Parisian churches somber-faced abbots proclaimed the imminent arrival of the Antichrist. These men were opposed by clear-thinking theologians who denounced such superstitious beliefs and assured their flocks that no one on earth could predict the end of the world.

In short, the year 1000 was not a doom-and-gloom moment. The notion of the medieval millennium was popularized in the nineteenth century by romantics and historians such as Jules Michelet, who viewed Christianity in the Middle Ages as a time of fervor and passion, a seething caldron of emotion.

With or without fear of the Apocalypse, the year 1000 was nonetheless part of a period dominated by the Church. Supported by the faith of its adherents, the pontifical seat gained enough momentum to reform practices that it deemed unworthy. Until then, it must be said, the Church had been completely integrated into the feudal system: the sacred and the profane intermixed; the preoccupations of the bishop were the same as those of the aristocracy, at least in terms of the governance of the land, the system of earnings, and the collection of taxes and duties. At bottom the spiritual and the temporal were one and the same. A more serious problem from the Church’s viewpoint was that some ecclesiastical functions were being monopolized by aristocrats, who didn’t necessarily have the ecumenical training but who nonetheless considered religious titles hereditary, to be handed down father to (eldest) son.

For Rome and all true Christians, the time had come to purge the Church of its abuses and rediscover the way to God. Rome would not be the plaything of barons and lords. Render unto the Lord what is the Lord’s.

This renewal started at Cluny, the Benedictine abbey in Burgundy that sought to release itself of all temporal domination and be placed under the sole authority of the pope. The two monks leading this fight for spiritual purity were Raoul Glaber and Adémar de Chabannes. They had endured years of war and invasions, and began convincing the people of Francia that if they, too, wanted peace and prosperity they needed to place themselves in God’s hands.

The Holy Father, for his part, was happy to inspire the faithful and in the process to enrich these new monasteries, refuges of the Truth Faith that came to flourish nearly everywhere in Francia and elsewhere in Europe.

The rules instituted at Cluny and its dependencies were those of Saint Benedict, and, apart from manual labor, which was essential to cultivate humility, occupations other than spiritual were considered secondary to prayer, writing, chanting, and copying manuscripts. Cluny became a temple of knowledge and intelligence.

The influence of this powerful congregation, which sought to take in hand man’s spiritual destiny, would reach Paris later. The Saint-Martin-des-Champs monastery would be brought into the Cluny orbit in 1079. Here, in the glory of God, the lights of Cluny illuminated Paris and its pious parishioners.

But before this “taking in hand” of religious matters by the Church, some seriously contentious issues faced the Church, starting with the son and successor of Hugh Capet, Robert II, who brought down upon himself the fury of the Holy See for having a somewhat turbulent private life. It had all started for purely political reasons, when, on the orders of his father, the sixteen-year-old Prince Robert married Rozala, an elderly woman of thirty-three, the widow of the Count of Flanders and the daughter of the king of Italy. The reason was her dowry, which consisted of the countship of Ponthieu, which henceforth became part of the royal properties.

After a fairly grim conjugal life (which nonetheless lasted for a dozen years), Robert met the woman of his dreams. Her name was Berthe and she was thirty-two. She dazzled the still-young prince. Berthe was the daughter of the king of Burgundy and Provence, which somewhat complicated the situation, because her mother was the sister of King Lothair, the last of the Carolingians. Therefore, in the play of relations and unions, she was the great-grandcousin of the smitten Robert. The Church made no exceptions when it came to consanguinity, however distant and tortuous. Robert didn’t care. Shortly after he had ascended to the throne, he repudiated Rozala and found a bishop willing to bless his relationship with his beloved Berthe.

The young Pope Gregory V was outraged by this. With this illicit marriage, the king of the Franks was defying not only papal authority but the holy laws of the saints. To prove his submission and to calm the waters, Robert sent an ambassador to the pontiff with a clear purpose: “We have certain matters in litigation with the Holy See. Assure Gregory that I will concede on them all if he lets me have my wife.”

The pope was in a real bind. Robert would agree to everything except the one thing that was being asked of him. Gregory refused to budge in the matter and ordered that the lovers part.

The ambassador returned sheepishly to Paris, bearing a message of intransigence.

“He will never make me part from my wife!” the king exploded. “She is dearer to me than anything in the world and I want the world to know this.”

In reply, the pope convened a synod in Pavia, and from the assembly of prelates came this declaration: “King Robert, against direct apostolic orders, has married his kin, and must deliver himself to us so that the matter can be rectified. Should he refuse to come, he will be denied communion.” They were delivering the ultimate threat: excommunication.

Robert was more than happy to respond to the summons, which obviously did nothing to restore his relations with the Holy See. So the pope convened another synod, this time in Rome. A ruling emerged from the debates, one that was canonically rigid and clear: “King Robert will leave Berthe, his kin, whom he has married against the laws. He will do seven years’ penance, as demanded by the Church in matters of incest. Should he refuse to submit, may he be excommunicated.”

At first Robert did not submit, and therefore was expelled by the Church and banned from the community of the faithful. The Cité palace emptied out. Terrified by the excommunication, courtiers, counselors, and clerics all departed, one after the other. Between the pope, who promised paradise, and the king, who could promise only earthly goods, lay no real choice. The last remaining servants purified the king’s plate by fire and prayer after each use, for fear of being contaminated by this terrible sentence upon him and because they believed that mere physical contact with the condemned man would lead to their own eternal damnation.

And it was thus that the king and the queen spent the year 1000 living in sin. On the Île de la Cité this absurd state of affairs endured, transforming the sovereigns into virtual prisoners in their own palace. Finally, Berthe was the first to crack. She had never wanted that badly to be queen of the Franks, and the idea of being forced to remain forever behind the palace’s walls horrified her.

In 1001, after four years of communal life, Berthe and Robert agreed to part, a separation that took place with tears of contrition but also in a somewhat noisy display of sentiment and regret. Berthe climbed aboard a carriage led by four horses, crossed the Grand Pont, went through the Left Bank, climbed up the long Saint-Jacques Passage, went over Mount Sainte-Geneviève, and headed south, toward Vienna, on the banks of the Rhone, where she would rejoin her father’s court.

Robert played up his show of repentance to the maximum. He wept, he lamented, he visited Parisian churches on each and every day, he sang the service louder than all the others, and he spent entire holy nights in prayer, prostrate.

And yet all this was still not enough. So he founded monasteries. In Paris he had Saint-Germain-l’Auxerrois reconstructed, and Saint-Germain-des-Prés as well; both had been treated rudely by the Vikings. To get on God’s good side, Robert had a chapel built in his palace and dedicated to Saint Nicholas; a century and a half later it would become Sainte-Chapelle.

Robert considered the state of his soul, of course, but not at the cost of ignoring personal comfort as well. He also restored the Cité palace, enlarged it by adding the Conciergerie, the residence of the palace concierge. “Concierge” is today not a prestigious title—designating as it does a building supervisor-cum-janitor—but in Robert’s day it meant something quite different. The concierge levied taxes, enforcing them by means of the bailiffs of the lower and middle justice courts. This was a position of real privilege and power. The concierge had the right to levy a tax on every barrel of wine and every bushel of oats. And despite the popular myth that “concierge” was a shortened form of “count of the cierges” (candles), hence presumably whoever was in charge of lighting, the term actually derives from the Latin conservius, “slavery companion,” and designated someone who worked at the pleasure of the palace.

What was the fate of the Conciergerie?

Along with its clock tower and Sainte-Chapelle, the kitchens, the guardroom, and the chamber housing the gendarmes of the Conciergerie are the sole vestiges of the medieval palace. The rest of what is there dates only back to Haussmann and looks lke something worthy of the Musée Grévin, a wax museum. The somewhat tacky results, which you now can visit, strives to re-create the prison that occupied the premises in 1392, after Charles V and his successors had abandoned the palace, until it was closed in 1914. The cells took up the ground floor of the building, which borders the Quai de l’Horloge.

What does remain takes us to the eighteenth century and the revolutionary period, a period quite rich in the number of those detained.

First of all, the women’s courtyard with its fountains where prisoners were forced to do their laundry and the iron grill that separates it from the men’s side. Here can be found the Chapelle des Girondins, in remembrance of those who spent their final hours here on the night of the twenty-ninth and thirtieth of October, and the Chapelle Marie-Antoinette built under Louis XVIII to commemorate the cell in which the queen had spent her last moments in 1793.

The room located between the two chapels was the one in which Robespierre, his head bandaged, waited to lose it entirely.

Stand in front of the eighteenth-century façade of the Palais de Justice and look for the small stairway on the right that leads to the bar. This is the staircase the condemned used when they were taken to the scaffold. This is the most moving and yet the most mute reminder of this terrible place.

By restoring the Cité palace, King Robert restored to Paris its role as a capital, a role that the Carolingian kings had somewhat neglected. Nonetheless, the status of this agglomeration of neighborhoods was still a little vague. Things simplified when the countship of Paris was finally attached to the crown. But what was Paris aside an island bordered by high walls? On the Right Bank, expansion was limited by the marais—or swamp. The Left Bank was principally home to the abbeys, churches, and their orchards.

In the year 1003, Robert’s efforts paid off: his wife—his first wife, Rozala—died in Flanders, where she had lived in seclusion. According to canon law, Robert was now free to remarry, which he did immediately, as he needed an heir. He wed Constance d’Arles, who was all of seventeen years old and neither a widow nor a matron.

The king was thirty-one and as far as his wife was concerned he was a grizzled old man. She therefore brought to the palace a host of young people. The old guard found these young pups alarming, in part because they wore their hair short, were clean-shaven, and dressed extravagantly. Their boots were ridiculous, for starters, since they had curled toes. If one wasn’t careful, all the youth of Francia might be taken in by these grotesque affectations. The pious abbots who surrounded the king tut-tutted and grumbled that the court wasn’t what it once was, that the youth of today seemed to think only of pleasure and debauchery. In short, Paris was going to the dogs.

Robert himself could have cared less about the boots his wife and her friends wore. He had done his conjugal duty to bring an heir to the throne; he had been quite assiduous, in fact, as pretty Constance gave him seven children. But his happiness was still elsewhere. His beloved Berthe had returned to the palace. Discreetly, of course. Happily, the royal residence was large enough to prevent unintended confrontations.

In any case, Constance did not really want to remain in Paris. The clerics and counselors looked askance at her, reproaching her for her arrogant youth, her escapades, and her joie de vivre. But there was more: every time she went through the passages of the palace she came across beggars whom her pious husband had sought out in order to feed and offer them a few coins. She wanted to lose herself in carefree frolics, and here she was forced to confront misery and unhappiness. On some days as many as a thousand beggars would clutter the palace, each one more filthy and foul-smelling than the next.

The worst was just before Easter. On Holy Thursday, some three hundred poor people made their way into the palace, settling down noisily at their tables. The king himself joined his valets in serving food to these miserable creatures. After dinner, in a well-planned ceremony, His Royal Highness cleansed the feet of several of them while a deacon sang the story from the Book of John in which Christ washed the feet of his disciples: “… so he got up from the meal, took off his outer clothing, and wrapped a towel around his waist. After that, he poured water into a basin and began to wash his disciples’ feet, drying them with the towel that was wrapped around him.”

Had it only been beggars, Constance might have resigned herself, but there were also lepers. Robert adored lepers, for they allowed him to show how deep his devotion and boundless his charity. He received them in the palace and kissed their disease-ravaged hands. Some of the lords were surprised by such excessive goodness.

“Jesus Christ took the form of a leper,” the king reminded them in a sententious voice.

According to Scripture, Christ cured the lepers; the king, in his noisy humility, would do no less. A few miracles were indeed attributed to him: he had made the sign of the cross over one poor sufferer and the man’s leprosy cleared up. The people believed, or pretended to believe, in these stories. Beginning with Robert and continuing until Louis XVI, kings were believed to have the power to cure scrofula.

Surrounded by his beggars and scrofulous subjects, Robert was as happy as he could be. In fact the longer he lived in sin with Berthe the more he made himself into a good Christian, modest and observant. Finally, Constance had had enough of the hypocrisy. She left Paris, leaving Robert to his beggars and his lepers and his mistress, and went off to Étampes, where her château quite comfortably housed her courtiers and her children.

In 1031, Robert the Pious—there was nothing else to call him—was fifty-nine, a formidable age for the period. He seemed in good health. On June 29 an eclipse of the sun took place and this aroused his religious fervor, convincing him that it foretold his death. And indeed soon enough the king was struck down by a fever. Three weeks later, he was gone. From Melun, where the king had taken sick, the king’s body was taken to Saint-Denis, where it was placed next to that of his father, Hugh Capet.

The monks of Saint-Denis were so grateful for all the generosity the late king had shown them that in their writings they ascribed to his death all sorts of extraordinary and cataclysmic phenomena: a comet that streaked across the sky; rivers that overflowed their banks, taking houses and drowning children. Heaven itself wept at the death of the pious king.

His piety had restored Paris. For the first time since the Viking invasions, a sovereign had cared enough to rebuild the city. It is true that Robert’s munificence had been lavished mainly on monasteries, abbeys, churches—in addition to his own palace, of course—but it was a start.

Henri I, son of Robert the Pious, succeeded his father, and his reign marked the dawn of a difficult period: shortages, epidemics, and fires visited one after the other. And Parisians were divided. Some supported the new King Henry; others thought that the crown should have been offered to his younger brother, Robert. Henry thought it prudent to leave town and took refuge in Fécamp, with his ally the Duke of Normandy.

He was wise to leave Paris, for there was nothing left to eat in the city. In the markets vendors were selling dog meat or mice, and even, it was said, meat taken from the bodies of the recently deceased, all of which had to be thoroughly cooked of course. The miserable and starving crowded into the churches, hoping to find some kind of help or simply an easy death—anything to end their suffering. Everything was going wrong. In 1034, a fire that was more destructive than any before destroyed the huts in which a small crowd had sought shelter. In 1035, famine accompanied a new kind of plague, one even more deadly than the famine.

King Henri meanwhile chased after rebels who were contesting his throne. This meant that he had almost no chance to come to Paris.

The moment had come for the Church to establish its authority and put an end to this chaos. In 1049, the newly elected Alsatian pope Leon IX was determined to eradicate the corruption that was plaguing the clergy. In Francia as a whole and in Paris in particular, the titleholders of the bishoprics and abbeys were not always the most devout or the most deserving. They had, after all, purchased their titles. This practice suited the ambitious wealthy, of course, as well as the king, who received a nonnegotiable fee from the sale of ecclesiastical positions. Moreover, the high clergy, beholden to the monarch, could not refuse him when he needed money to raise an army in the event of war.

Henri wondered why the pope chose to meddle in all this. Aiming to put an end to the worst practices, the Holy See was trying as well to extend its influence across all the Christian countries, which was unacceptable to the secular rulers. No bishop of Francia was permitted to accept the invitation by Leon IX to attend a council on the touchy topic of clerical simony.

Moreover, the pope was constantly trying to pick a fight with the king of the Franks. During a stay in Ratisbonne, His Holiness visited the abbey of Saint-Emmeran in which was housed a chest said to contain the body of Saint Denis. Saint Denis reposed near Paris; everyone knew that. Actually, not so, responded the pontiff, who declared that the true remains of the saint were secure in the care of the Germanic Empire.

Henri refused to accept this. Solemnly and before a large crowd of Parisians, he had the sarcophagus in the Saint-Denis Abbey opened. The odor that emanated from it was so sweet that everyone knew at once that they had to have been produced by the remains of a saint. Somewhat bitterly, they continued to pray to Denis at his church.

What does all this have to do with Arts et Métiers?

The kings of France who followed made sizable donations to Saint-Martin-des-Champs. And the post of prior was much sought after: it brought with it 45,000 livres in annual income.

The priory also ran the jails, and in the sixteenth century the cloister would become the royal prison of Saint-Martin. Inside were imprisoned prostitutes arrested in public places. One can only imagine how the ladies of limited virtue and the austere monks got along.

Starting in 1702, the old cloister was razed and reconstructed. The main building featured thirty crosses facing each other and the vestibule measured thirty “king’s feet” (nearly a hundred feet) by thirty-six (about 120 feet). Nonetheless, it soon became apparent that the building material had been shoddy; the monks had been ripped off. One mason had used earth and gravel; a carpenter had used old wood. The carpenter, for one, regretted what he had done and, fearing for his soul, confessed to his sin. He offered a small reduction of 25,000 livres to cover all of the construction.

The monks used this money to construct large and beautiful houses along Rue Saint-Martin, building a fountain at the corner of Rue du Vertbois and opening a public market.

Situated outside of Paris, the cloister had its own boundaries, as we’ve seen; those we can see today date from 1273. The town that developed around it was annexed by Paris in the fourteenth century and integrated behind a new wall built by Charles V.

During the Revolution the priory was turned into the Conservatoire National des Arts et Métiers, which visitors can still find at 292 Rue Saint-Martin. The Musée des Arts et Techniques within remains, just as it was during the days of the Cluny monks, a refuge from the march of human progress.

The outside of the conservatory is also worth a side trip: Cluny’s Romanesque design remains an example of the kind of architecture emanating from Rome in the year 1100. The base of the southern clock tower, with its two-toned tiled roof, and the supporting apses that take the form of halos are handsome vestiges of the eleventh century. Inside the church one can still see the choir, whose foundations date back to 1067, and whose appearance actually dates from the beginning of the twelfth century, a period during which the Gothic style had begun to make an appearance: the fullness of Romanesque arches are intermixed with ribbed vaults, symbols of Gothic art.

The grandeur of the priory’s past can be found in the refectory of the monks, which has been turned into a library and remains a sublime example of twelfth century Gothic. A small courtyard and a partially restored turret can be found on Rue du Vertbois.

The bend in Rue Bailly retains the southeast border of the enclosure whose corner tower is visible in the stairway cage of number 7.

Finally, at the level of the intersection of Vertbois and Saint-Martin, rises up the tower of Vertbois, about which Victor Hugo wrote to an architect who had suggested its demolition, “Demolish the tower? No. Demolish the architect? Yes.”

Henri did more than that to weaken papal influence and control. He constructed a sumptuous abbey of which he would remain master, despite all kinds of protests from Rome. At the site of the chapel dedicated to Saint Martin, Henri founded the Saint-Martin-des-Champs monastery, protected behind thick walls, and gave it money and lands, as well as income, rights, privileges, and exemption from taxes. This undertaking was so enormous that it was only finished by Henri’s son, Philippe I. At the moment of its dedication in 1067, Saint-Martin-des-Champs boasted a huge wall with crenellations, eighteen bartizans, and four very solid guard towers.

In 1079 this monastery was given to the order of Cluny. The deacons who had occupied the place were immediately replaced by seventy Benedictine monks. Saint-Martin-des-Champs became a priory—“the fourth daughter of Cluny,” as a phrase from the period put it. This abbey possessed other abbeys, not only in Francia but in Spain and in England as well.

By means of this monastery Philippe very clearly intended to extract concessions from the Holy See and to get under the pope’s skin just a little bit. He had resigned himself to being forced to negotiate between two widely disseminated bans.

And so the century ended as it had begun: with illicit love. In 1092, Philippe fell hopelessly in love with a young woman named Bertrade, who was engaged to the Comte d’Anjou, an elderly man. The king repudiated his wife and had her locked up in the château at Montreuil-sur-Mer. In the meantime, unfortunately, Bertrade had married the count. Philippe was not about to let that stand in his way. Otherwise, what was the point of being king? He spirited Bertrade away, which didn’t prove all that hard to do given that the young woman was quite willing. She gave herself passionately to the king, who was nearly thirty years older, happy to parade around the Cité palace as if she were queen of the Franks.

The Parisians accepted her and greeted her as their queen when she came out of the palace. The king had the right to some happiness, thought some. Others held a somewhat different opinion.

Pope Urban II, for one, was outraged. “Such an event reveals the decadence of the entire kingdom and presages the ruin of your churches,” he wrote. Later, because he couldn’t make the lovers see reason and part, he excommunicated them for good. From then on the king and his lady could not attend church, and the gates of monasteries were closed to them. In fact, however, a number of them—in opposition to the pope—remained loyal to the king.

This lasted for twelve years: twelve years of councils, negotiations, broken promises; and twelve years during which the Cité palace was home to scandalous passion. In 1104, Bertrade rediscovered her faith. Her state of sin had become too much for her to bear, and she wanted to do penitence and thought only of putting on rags and retiring to a hut in Poitou.

As we might expect, Philippe was flabbergasted. Nonetheless he had no choice but to accede to Bertrade’s wishes. During a council meeting in Paris the king arrived in bare feet and wearing a simple habit, to swear that he had renounced the woman whom he had already lost. The king returned alone to his palace. Bertrade went off to her little hovel in Poitou. The bull of excommunication was lifted, and the world turned again.