aris. All the decorations were
then destroyed; and the tenants who lodge there have greatly damaged it;
nevertheless this palace, which is reached through the old house in the
rue de la Pelleterie, still shows the noble results obtained in
former days by the spirit of family. It may be doubted whether modern
individualism, brought about by the equal division of inheritances, will
ever raise such noble buildings.

PART II. THE SECRETS OF THE RUGGIERI

I. THE COURT UNDER CHARLES IX.

Between eleven o'clock and midnight toward the end of October, 1573,
two Italians, Florentines and brothers, Albert de Gondi, Duc de Retz
and marshal of France, and Charles de Gondi la Tour, Grand-master of
the robes of Charles IX., were sitting on the roof of a house in the
rue Saint-Honore, at the edge of a gutter. This gutter was one of those
stone channels which in former days were constructed below the roofs of
houses to receive the rain-water, discharging it at regular intervals
through those long gargoyles carved in the shape of fantastic animals
with gaping mouths. In spite of the zeal with which our present general
pulls down and demolishes venerable buildings, there still existed many
of these projecting gutters until, quite recently, an ordinance of the
police as to water-conduits compelled them to disappear. But even so,
a few of these carved gargoyles still remain, chiefly in the _quartier_
Saint-Antoine, where low rents and values hinder the building of new
storeys under the eaves of the roofs.

It certainly seems strange that two personages invested with such
important offices should be playing the part of cats. But whosoever
will burrow into the historic treasures of those days, when personal
interests jostled and thwarted each other around the throne till the
whole political centre of France was like a skein of tangled thread,
will readily understand that the two Florentines were cats indeed, and
very much in their places in a gutter. Their devotion to the person
of the queen-mother, Catherine de' Medici--who had brought them to the
court of France and foisted them into their high offices--compelled them
not to recoil before any of the consequences of their intrusion. But to
explain how and why these courtiers were thus perched, it is necessary
to relate a scene which had taken place an hour earlier not far from
this very gutter, in that beautiful brown room of the Louvre, all that
now remains to us of the a