Susan Cahill

“Paris should be both walkable and walked, if the limitless variety, the unexpectedness, the provincialism, the rusticity, the touching eccentricity are to be appreciated.”

In 1115 Canon Fulbert, a cathedral staffer, gave some rent-free rooms to teacher/theologian Peter Abelard in exchange for his services as a tutor to the canon’s intellectually precocious niece, Héloise. She read French, Latin, and Greek; she wanted to learn Hebrew; she was interested in Abelard’s unorthodox philosophical project: to use dialectics to understand the ambiguities and contradictions of religious faith. Orthodox scholars refused the very notion of ambiguity and contradiction. Absolutism—religious, moral, political—defined the very ground of being.

His students adored him, his shocking humanism and open-mindedness freed them to think outside the prescribed boxes. Abelard, for instance, was the defender of sexual pleasure, rejecting the bachelor theologians’ dogma that marital intercourse is always sinful. Saint Augustine had preached that pleasure itself is a sin; Pope Gregory the Great echoed him: “There can be no sexual pleasure without sin.”

God is my witness that if Augustus, emperor of the whole world, thought fit to honor me with marriage and conferred all the earth on me forever it would be sweeter and more honorable to me to be not his empress but your whore.

Bisecting the Île from the Le Grand Pont on the north side to the Petit Pont on the south side was the old Roman road spanning the two channels of the Seine, leading to rue Saint-Martin in the north and rue Saint-Jacques to the south. In Héloise and Abelard’s time it was known as the rue de la Juiverie (the street of the Jews, now La rue de la Cité) where the synagogue, the Jewish market, and houses stood midway between the two bridges, a lively district crowded with knights on horses, merchants, a market, pilgrims, rabbis and their community. This Jewish quarter of Paris was mentioned in 1119, but the first Jews had come north to Paris with Caesar, settling on the Left Bank. Abelard wrote about Judaism with respect in his book Dialogue Between A Philosopher, A Christian, and A Jew. A celebrity, with a huge student following, he got away with all of it.

de Montagne Sainte-Geneviève,

That King Louis IX conceived the beauty of Sainte-Chapelle does present an enigma. For it’s hard to find an aesthetic dimension in his politics and policies. It is true that he looked out for the poor, and the lepers, the blind, and prostitutes. Possessed of a radical humility, he washed the feet of his nobles, sat beneath an oak tree in the Bois de Vincennes to hear the complaints of his subjects and administer royal verdicts. Such concern for social justice was unusual among kings.

But the stunning Sainte-Chapelle coexists with its creator-king’s twisted psychological profile, usually omitted from the catalogs and booklets sold outside the chapel and inside the Conciergerie.

disliked seeing people enjoy themselves. His marital sex life was furtive: He and his wife conceived their eleven children on a back stairway between their two bedrooms on different floors of the palais in order to avoid Blanche’s unannounced nighttime visitations to their respective bedchambers.

Blanche told Louis she’d rather see him dead than know he’d committed a mortal sin, the good son claimed to love his mother madly. As French historian Maurice Druon puts it in The History of Paris from Caesar to St. Louis “he was one of the great neurotics of history. Had he not inclined to saintliness he might have been a monster. Neros are made of the same fibre.… he would have made an admirable subject for psychoanalysis.”

and other Jewish districts), where they’d lived and worked since they came north with Caesar’s legions. Eventually, in 1254, Louis ordered their expulsion from the entirety of France. (His grandfather, King Philippe-Auguste, had expelled the Jews from Paris because he wanted their money and property to pay his debts; once paid, he allowed them to return.)