Quai) de la Megisserie, and bakers crowded along the Rue St.
Honore. The Rue des Juifs sheltered the ancestral traffic of the
children of Abraham. At the foot of the Pont au Change, on which were
the shops of the goldsmiths and money-lenders stood the grim
thirteenth-century fortress of the Chatelet, the municipal guard-house
and prison; to the north in the Rue de Heaumarie (Armourers) lay the
Four aux Dames or prison of the abbesses of Montmartre; further on
westward stood the episcopal prison, or Four de l'Eveque. North-west
of the Chatelet was the Hotel du Chevalier du Guet or watch-house and
round about it a congeries of narrow, crooked lanes, haunts of
ill-fame, where robbers lurked and vice festered. A little to the
north were the noisy market-place of the Halles and the cemetery of
the Innocents with its piles of skulls, and its vaulted arcade
painted (1424) with the Dance of Death. Further north stood the
immense abbey of St. Martin in the Fields, with its cloister and
gardens and, a little to the west, the grisly crenelated and turreted
fortress of the Knights-Templars, huge in extent and one of the most
solid edifices in the whole kingdom. This is the Paris conjured from
the past with such magic art by Victor Hugo in "Notre Dame," and
gradually to be swept away in the next centuries by the Renaissance,
pseudo-classic and Napoleonic builders and destroyers, until to-day
scarcely a wrack is left behind.

With the Italian campaigns of Charles VIII., _notre petit roi_, as
Brantome calls him, and of the early Valois-Orleans kings, France
enters the arena of European politics, wrestles with the mighty
Emperor Charles V. and embarks on a career of transalpine conquest.
But in Italy, conquering France was herself conquered by the charm of
Italian art, Italian climate and Italian landscape. When Charles VIII.
returned to Paris from his expedition to Naples he brought with him a
collection of pictures, tapestry, and sculptures in marble and
porphyry, that weighed thirty-five tons; by him and his successors
Italian builders, Domenico da Cortona and Fra Giocondo, were employed.
The latter supervised the rebuilding of the Petit Pont and after the
destruction of the last wooden Pont Notre Dame in 1499--when the whole
structure, with its houses and shops, fell with a fearful crash into
the river--he was made head of the Commission of Parisian artists who
replaced it by a noble stone bridge, completed in 1507. This, too, was