“There are absolutely only these two churches (Notre Dame and the Sainte Chapelle) left standing in the island of the city, and there is nothing in the history of Paris which more clearly exhibits the modern disposition to make a _tabula rasa_ of the past.” In the Middle Ages the great Cathedral of Paris--“cathedral” since the twelfth century--stood in its island of La Cité amidst a perfect cluster of lesser churches, of which only the chapel of Saint Louis remains. Mr. Hamerton, whose words are quoted above, gives quite a considerable list of them in his “Paris in Old and Present Times,” Sainte Genèviève, Saint Jean le Rond, Saint Denis du Pas, and its brother church of La Chartre--these are but a few of their names, and yet these names are all that now remain of churches where mediæval knights and burghers and artificers worshipped, and into whose building mediæval architects, unknown and forgotten, put their best work and their highest service; even their sites are, in most cases, undiscoverable amongst the great mass of buildings, and bright wide streets, and green gardens of Paris as we know it. Some of these churches, like Saint Aignan and Saint Germain-le-Vieux, have left a few isolated columns and stones, but to find these, as one writer observes, “il faudrait pénétrer dans les maisons et se livrer à des recherches.” Another, the old Madeleine, has suffered an even worse fate, its last remaining chapel being now transformed into a wine-shop at the corner of the Rue des Marmousets; a private house now stands upon the site of Saint-Pierre aux Bœufs, built, says an inscription on the façade, in the middle of the twelfth century, and demolished as late as 1837; and as for Saint Michel du Palais, within whose walls Archibishop Maurice de Sully baptised Philip Augustus in 1165, nothing remains to the memory of the Archangel but the bridge over the Seine. “‘There is my bridge still,’ Saint Michael may think, ‘but as for my church I seek for it in vain.’” These vanished churches are too many all to be numbered here, since in La Cité alone there were, up to the eighteenth century, no less than seventeen of them, and outside the walls of the city there were many more. [Illustration: NÔTRE DAME, PARIS]