ey complicated the whole effect, without disturbing
it; completed, without overloading it. Geometry is harmony. Some
fine mansions here and there made magnificent outlines against the
picturesque attics of the left bank. The house of Nevers, the house of
Rome, the house of Reims, which have disappeared; the Hotel de Cluny,
which still exists, for the consolation of the artist, and whose tower
was so stupidly deprived of its crown a few years ago. Close to Cluny,
that Roman palace, with fine round arches, were once the hot baths of
Julian. There were a great many abbeys, of a beauty more devout, of a
grandeur more solemn than the mansions, but not less beautiful, not less
grand. Those which first caught the eye were the Bernardins, with their
three bell towers; Sainte-Genevieve, whose square tower, which still
exists, makes us regret the rest; the Sorbonne, half college, half
monastery, of which so admirable a nave survives; the fine quadrilateral
cloister of the Mathurins; its neighbor, the cloister of Saint-Benoit,
within whose walls they have had time to cobble up a theatre, between
the seventh and eighth editions of this book; the Cordeliers, with their
three enormous adjacent gables; the Augustins, whose graceful spire
formed, after the Tour de Nesle, the second denticulation on this side
of Paris, starting from the west. The colleges, which are, in fact, the
intermediate ring between the cloister and the world, hold the middle
position in the monumental series between the Hotels and the abbeys,
with a severity full of elegance, sculpture less giddy than the palaces,
an architecture less severe than the convents. Unfortunately, hardly
anything remains of these monuments, where Gothic art combined with
so just a balance, richness and economy. The churches (and they were
numerous and splendid in the University, and they were graded there also
in all the ages of architecture, from the round arches of Saint-Julian
to the pointed arches of Saint-Severin), the churches dominated the
whole; and, like one harmony more in this mass of harmonies, they
pierced in quick succession the multiple open work of the gables with
slashed spires, with open-work bell towers, with slender pinnacles,
whose line was also only a magnificent exaggeration of the acute angle
of the roofs.

The ground of the University was hilly; Mount Sainte-Genevieve formed an
enormous mound to the south; and it was a sight to see from the summit
of Notre-Dame