The Petit-Pont joins the Île to the left bank at the very same spot where the Romans made a bridge across the river, one of two which spanned the Seine in their day, and on beyond. Like all town bridges of the Middle Ages it was made of wood and each side thickly built upon by houses and shops; windmills, too, stood on this ancient bridge, grinding corn for the citizens around. And where we now see the Place du Petit-Pont there stood a wooden tower, la Tour de Bois, erected to protect the bridge against the invading Normans. At the Musée Carnavalet an ancient inscription may be seen, recording the names of twelve warriors who fought here to defend their city, led by Gozlin, bishop of Paris, in 886. In the twelfth century Maurice de Sully, the builder of Notre-Dame, rebuilt the bridge in stone, but flood and fire laid it in ruins time after time. The last destructive fire was in the spring of 1718. It was then rebuilt minus its wooden houses. The present structure dates from 1853. The _place_ was built in 1782, when the Petit Châtelet, which had succeeded the Tour de Bois, was razed. In Rue du Petit-Pont we see some old houses on the odd number side. Many were demolished when the street was widened a few years ago. The other bridge of Roman times, succeeding no doubt a rude primitive bridge, stretched where the Pont Notre-Dame now spans the river. The Roman bridge, built on staves, was overthrown by the Normans in 861. Rebuilt as Pont Notre-Dame in 1413, it crashed to pieces some eighty years later, carrying down with it the house of a famous printer of the day. It was alternatively destroyed and rebuilt several times till its last reconstruction in 1853. Its houses were the first in France to be numbered (1507). There were sixty-eight of them and the numbering was done in gold or gilded ciphers. All these old houses were pulled down in 1786. Pont Notre-Dame was the “bridge of honour.” Sovereigns coming to Paris in state crossed it to enter the city. Close up to it stood for nearly two hundred years--1670 to 1856--the Pompe Notre-Dame, from which all the fountains of the district were supplied with water. Pont d’Arcole, built as we now see it in 1854, succeeded a wooden bridge erected in 1828 with the name Pont de la Grève, commonly called Pont de la Balance. It gained its present name, recalling Napoléon’s victory of 1796, in the Revolution of 1830, when a youth at the head of a band of insurgents rushed upon the bridge waving the tricolor and shouting: “If I die, remember my name is Arcole.” Pont-au-Double, so called because to cross it passengers paid a double toll for the benefit of the Hôtel-Dieu, is a nineteenth-century construction, replacing the original bridge of the name built in the sixteenth century, a little higher up the river.