The City of Saint Louis

The first sound of a Paris morning in 1256 was a man walking the streets shouting that the baths were hot.

Three hours inside the largest city in Christendom — and very little of it looks the way we picture it.

This is a slow, sourced walk through the everyday life of one city in one decade: Paris in the 1250s, under Louis IX. Not a single day, but the whole era — the houses and the streets, the trades and the guilds, the students and their riots, the courts and the prison, marriage and the law, bread and wine and the tavern, the river that fed everything, the cathedral rising, the half of the city that was poor, birth and burial, the cold months, and the chained-up dark of a medieval capital at night. Everything here comes from the record: street cries set down in verse around 1265, guild statutes, royal ordinances, the university’s own archive, and testimony from poor Parisians taken down a generation later. Where the record runs out, we say so.

Narrated quietly and unhurried, with no sudden changes in volume. For anyone who wants to see that world clearly, and for anyone who would like to fall asleep inside it.