Free Seven Ages of Paris by Alistair Horne

under the reign of Philippe le Bel a hundred years later.
    Completed just before Bouvines (by which time the immediate threat of attack had passed, not to be revived until the Hundred Years War), the Great Wall of Philippe Auguste took the best part of twenty years to construct. Despite his preoccupation with external warfare, Philippe was very closely involved in the planning of it. He personally supervised construction details, specifying that the wall should be no less than three metres thick at ground level, and two and a half metres thick at a height of six metres; it was to have thirty-three towers north of the Seine and thirty-four to the south, each carefully rounded so as to deflect cannonballs, and two dozen fortified gates. Overall it would have been some ten metres high. Philippe’s engineers built extremely well, and to this day you can still find sections of immensely rugged masonry in various parts of the old city. An imposing stretch lies off the Rue Clovis, now set within the grim edifice of the new Sorbonne; the best part of a tower stands encompassed within a building close to the Procope, Paris’s oldest restaurant, in the Cour du Commerce Saint-André. On the Right Bank, you can find a section in a lycée near the Hôtel de Sens, another close to the Musée Carnavalet on Rue des Francs Bourgeois.
    THE LOUVRE AND LES HALLES
    To guard the approaches to Paris from where the Norsemen had come in the ninth century, Philippe stretched a thick chain across the Seine, supported on boats, and another at the eastern approaches to the city. Just outside his new wall, he built a powerful, squat and square donjon, flanked with turrets, just across the river from the Tour de Nesle. In the centre of it was a great tower, forty-five metres in circumference and thirty metres high—though, because of the thickness of its walls, it probably afforded an internal diameter of no more than eight metres across. It acquired the name of the Louvre, possibly derived from louve, or female wolf, because it was used as a hunting box, but more probably from the archaic word louver or blockhouse, or even, quite simply, from l’oeuvre, the work. The first stone of the Louvre was laid in 1202, and it was originally designed as a major stronghold (though it never came to be used as such) and a treasury. Not a palace to be lived in, it was only in the reign of Charles V (1364–80) that the Louvre, with windows struck through Philippe’s grimly functional arrow-slits and with fancifully decorative pointed roofs superimposed, became a palace fit for a king. Philippe Auguste, like his ancestors, continued to reside on the Ile de la Cité.
    In addition to the Louvre there were, now inside the enceinte, the two defensive towers of the Grand and Petit Châtelet guarding the bridges that linked the Ile de la Cité with both banks of the Seine. The Grand Châtelet, founded on a wooden guard tower built in 870 to ward off the Norsemen, was converted by Louis VI, Philippe’s grandfather, into a considerable fortress. Now Philippe’s wall rendered its original role obsolete, so instead it became the office of the prévôt (the acting governor of Paris, the representative of royal authority), and later the most sinister of all its prisons, its thick walls muffling the cries of the tortured. In his epic in praise of the King, Philippidos, Guillaume le Breton, poet laureate of the time, draws various parallels with the walls of Troy. But such fortifications were only the tip of the iceberg of Philippe’s construction work in Paris.
    When he was just twenty years old (as the story goes), Philippe went to the window of his palace on the Ile de la Cité to admire the Seine, but the stench that greeted him as a heavy wagon stirred up the mud on the street ouside made him reel back. Pigs had been banned from Paris ever since the Crown Prince, Philippe’s uncle, had been killed by one frightening his horse—but the law had proved all but