2. Parvis de Notre Dame

(walk towards the Cathedral) 

 

A parvis is the plaza in front of a church. The one in front of the Notre Dame is now about four times the size of what it was in medieval Paris.Try to ignore the ugly display they've put up for the 850th anniversary of the Cathedral (I've cut it out of the photo because I feel it ruins the sight). Hopefully it'll be gone by next year. 

Make your way down to the Cathedral, elbowing through the multitude of tourists, and look around on the ground for a little bronze plaque that says Point Zero.

This is the official centre of the city. When you look up a distance to Paris, they're telling you the distance from this point. I was so fascinated by this that I kept stepping in and out of it, until I noticed people giving me funny looks.

You'll probably notice a large statue to your right, of Charles I "The Great" or Charlemagne. Most kings after Clovis weren't particularly impressive, and were given titles like "The Stammerer", "The Simple", "The Do Nothing", "The Mad", or (my personal favourite) "The Posthumous". Charles stood out, as is reasonably clear.

Charles, standing out.

His empire didn't last too long after he died. His grandkids divided it and apparently that was the foundation of Germany. At the time, the capital of the empire wasn't Paris, it'd been shifted to Aachen - closer to what's now Germany. Paris was still, however, a well known Cathedral town (it had both the St. Denis and the Notre Dame, impressive even now, so I'm not surprised). Through his many conquests, Charlemagne was apparently exposed to so much culture that he forced all churches to give lessons in reading, writing and basic arithmetic. All cathedrals, on the other hand, had to provide higher education: physics, theology, the lot. Much later, it was a bunch of teachers whose teachings got a little too radical for the Notre Dame that crossed over the river and founded the St. Genevieve university: the starting of what is now the Sorbonne.

If you're lucky - and you probably will be, if it's summer - you'll get to see people busking. Not all of them are good, I have to admit, but even so. This particular chap was from Spain (or so I gathered, given that he kept changing the lyrics of Englishman in New York to "Spanishman in Paris"). Towards the night on the walking bridge just behind the statue of Charlemagne, you'll probably see people roller-blading or - as I did in one rare occasion - people in afros dancing to Chaiyya Chaiyya.

Crossing over the square to the other side, you can get a view of the Hotel Dieu, the first hospital of Paris (in fact, if you read the Wikipedia article, it actually says it "was the first hospital in Paris until the Renaissance", which has left me a little confused). 

Constructed in 660 A.D, when poverty was a problem, the Hotel Dieu was very useful to the rich - who were faced with the awkward situation that the very things that had gotten them rich (or that being rich let them do) would also be responsible for their eternal damnation. So, supporting the hospital became a form of penance: buying your way into heaven, that sort of thing.

Interestingly, the view towards the poor soon changed, and by the 17th century, hospitals had turned into a sort of place to confine the poor and stop them from generally going around and showing people how poor they were. In fact, it was only by the 19th century that the place even started practising medicine, but hey better late than never.

A woodcut of what it must've looked like inside. Check out the dude using his mobile on the right. The sisters don't look pleased.

(Go back to the front of the Notre Dame and look contemplative)