Rive Gauche
24
MENTIONS
3
EPISODES
3
PODCASTS
Search complete. 24 mentions across 3 episodes found for "Rive Gauche".
Oct 24, 2026
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If Paris was a game server, the island was where the admins sat.
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On the left bank of the Seine, to the south, was the Université, the University District.
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This was where tens of thousands of students and teachers lived.
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studied, drank, argued and occasionally fought, in colleges, lodging houses and taverns crammed onto the slopes of the Montagne Saint Geneviève.
23 MINS LATER
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They were organized into four groups called nations, based on where they came from.
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The French, the Picards, the Normans, and the English, which later became the English-German nation.
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They lived in colleges, lodging houses and rented rooms all over the Left Bank.
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Now put yourself in the position of a city official.
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A book that tells the story of a world without ice caps, without grasslands, without any of the familiar landscapes of the modern Earth.
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A world that would be unrecognizable to any human being, but that produced the stone that forty-five million years later would be cut from beneath the Left Bank and stacked into the walls of a cathedral.
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Beginning in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, quarrymen began cutting this stone from open pits on the Left Bank of the Seine.
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Extracting blocks for the great building projects that were transforming Paris from a medieval town into a capital city.
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The stone they pulled from the earth became Notre-Dame de Paris, the cathedral whose construction began in 1163 and continued for nearly two hundred years.
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It was a description of physical reality.
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Paris was eating itself from below to build itself above, and the eventual consequence, the collapses, the sinkholes, the fondrières, was as predictable as gravity.
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Every great stone building that rose above the surface of the Left Bank was, in a very real and physical way, a rearrangement of the material that had been removed from beneath it.
AndyHOST
It is cut east-west by the Seine River.
AndyHOST
The north side of Paris is called the right bank, and the south side of Paris is called the left bank, because that is the side of the river.
AndyHOST
If you're facing downriver, the left bank is on your left, the right bank is on your right.
AndyHOST
The right bank of Paris developed... much faster than the left bank because the right bank doesn't come up from the river nearly as fast so it was easier to build and therefore that's where a lot of the early and medieval and early renaissance buildings were built Whereas on the left bank, the ground comes up really quite quickly from the river.
AndyHOST
It's quite steep.
AndyHOST
And at the top of that bank, there was no water.
AndyHOST
possibly as a misunderstanding of the gates of iron, les portes de fer.
AndyHOST
It's kind of unclear.