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Escape from the torrents of urine would have been difficult in the narrow streets, and the Pont Notre-Dame and the Pont-au-Change leading to the Right Bank might both have been too crowded or too far away for escape. People, horses, carts, hawkers, beggars, and bankers jammed these bridges from morning until night. Garbage, manure, and mud lay as much as a foot deep on the surrounding streets. But for those who could take their eyes off Gargantua, there were other things to see. There was the cathedral itself.

The stakes and ashes on the Place Maubert impressed students and citizens tempted by Calvinism, but fear alone could not have kept Paris from going Protestant. Fanatical preaching and sober thinking on the part of clergy, judges, and merchants attached to the Crown and to Spain helped give the emotional horror of public executions an intellectual basis. The circle of abbeys surrounding the Left Bank began again at the Seine, just a few streets east of the Place Maubert. 01 9/25/02 8:00 AM Page 39 39 A Tr a v e l e r ’s Vi e w i n 1 6 0 0 the residence of the Knights of Malta.

Despite repairs under Francis I, from the fifteenth century on the Châtelet was partly in ruins, as shown in a Silvestre engraving of about 1650. Beyond the Châtelet stood the central commercial and marketing section of Paris. After Philip Augustus established the Halles there as a kind of perpetual fair, the Right Bank became the stronghold of commercial society in Paris. Street names were usually functional: the rue de la Savonnerie (soap), rue de la Chausseterie (stockings), rue de la Cossonnerie (fowl), and rue de la Lingerie (linens).