This historic book may have numerous typos and missing text. Purchasers can usually download a free scanned copy of the original book (without typos) from the publisher. Not indexed. Not illustrated. 1888 edition. Excerpt: ...from the bridges to the gates. Somewhat of the same geometrical disposition still exists. Now what aspect did all this present, when viewed from the top of the towers of Notre-Dame in 1482? We will endeavor to describe it. The spectator, on arriving out of breath upon this summit, was first of all struck by a dazzling confusion of roofs, chimneys, streets, bridges, squares, spires, steeples. All burst upon the eye at once, --the formally-cut gable, the acute-angled roofing, the hanging turret at the angles of the walls, the stone pyramid of the eleventh century, the slate obelisk of the fifteenth, the donjon tower, round and bare, the church tower, square and decorated, the large and the small, tiie massive and the airy. The gaze was for some time utterly bewildered by this labyrinth, in which there was nothing but proceeded from art; from the most inconsiderable carved and painted house-front, with external timbers, low doorway, and stories projecting each upon each, up to the royal Louvre itself, which at that time had a colonnade of towers. But the following were the principal masses that were distinguishable when the eye became steady enough to examine this tumultuous assemblage of objects in detail. First of all the City. The island of the City, as is observed by Sauval, the most laborious of the old explorers of Parisian antiquity, who amid all his trashiucss has these occasional happinesses of expression, --" The isle of the City is shaped like a great ship, sunk in the mud, and run aground lengthwise in the stream, abou the middle of the Seine." We have already shown that, in the fifteenth century, this ship was moored to the two banks of the river by five bridges. This form of the hull of a vessel had also struck the heraldic...