nogram on the parts they had severally built.
Now the part we speak of, the venerable and now blackened wing of
the Louvre, projecting on the quay and overlooking the garden of the
Infanta, bears the monograms of Henri III. and Henri IV., which are
totally different from that of Henri II., who invariably joined his H
to the two C's of Catherine, forming a D,--which, by the bye, has
constantly deceived superficial persons into fancying that the king put
the initial of his mistress, Diane, on great public buildings. Henri
IV. united the Louvre with his own hotel de Bourbon, its garden and
dependencies. He was the first to think of connecting Catherine de'
Medici's palace of the Tuileries with the Louvre by his unfinished
galleries, the precious sculptures of which have been so cruelly
neglected. Even if the map of Paris, and the monograms of Henri III. and
Henri IV. did not exist, the difference of architecture is refutation
enough to the calumny. The vermiculated stone copings of the hotel de la
Force mark the transition between what is called the architecture of
the Renaissance and that of Henri III., Henri IV., and Louis XIII. This
archaeological digression (continuing the sketches of old Paris with
which we began this history) enables us to picture to our minds the then
appearance of this other corner of the old city, of which nothing now
remains but Henri IV.'s addition to the Louvre, with its admirable
bas-reliefs, now being rapidly annihilated.

When the court heard that the queen was about to give an audience to
Theodore de Beze and Chaudieu, presented by Admiral Coligny, all the
courtiers who had the right of entrance to the reception hall, hastened
thither to witness the interview. It was about six o'clock in the
evening; Coligny had just supped, and was using a toothpick as he came
up the staircase of the Louvre between the two Reformers. The practice
of using a toothpick was so inveterate a habit with the admiral that
he was seen to do it on the battle-field while planning a retreat.
"Distrust the admiral's toothpick, the _No_ of the Connetable,
and Catherine's _Yes_," was a court proverb of that day. After the
Saint-Bartholomew the populace made a horrible jest on the body of
Coligny, which hung for three days at Montfaucon, by putting a grotesque
toothpick into his mouth. History has recorded this atrocious levity.
So petty an act done in the midst of that great catastrophe pictures
the Parisian populace, wh