The Place de Grève — The Hunchback of Notre-Dame

Little of the fifteenth-century Place de Grève remains except a small turret at the north angle, its carving choked with plaster. The place was an irregular trapezoid, the quay on one side and tall, narrow, gloomy houses on the other three. By day the fronts showed building from the fifteenth century back to the eleventh, down to the round arch in the ground floor of the Tour Roland, at the Tannerie corner. By night only the gables showed. Houses then turned their gables to the street.

On the east stood three buildings in one pile: the House of the Dauphin, where Charles V had lived; the Marchandise, once the town hall; and the Pillared House, held up through three storeys. Paris kept a chapel there, a room for pleading the city's liberties, and rusty arquebuses under the roof. A gibbet and a pillory, a justice and a ladder, stood in the centre of the pavement. In the narrator's own day a furtive, shameful guillotine remains in one dishonoured corner of the Grève.