Roman semicircle,
which had been supplanted by the ogive, and which still occupies, below
it, the first story of that ancient house de la Tour Roland, at the
corner of the Place upon the Seine, on the side of the street with the
Tannerie. At night, one could distinguish nothing of all that mass of
buildings, except the black indentation of the roofs, unrolling
their chain of acute angles round the place; for one of the radical
differences between the cities of that time, and the cities of the
present day, lay in the facades which looked upon the places and
streets, and which were then gables. For the last two centuries the
houses have been turned round.

In the centre of the eastern side of the Place, rose a heavy and hybrid
construction, formed of three buildings placed in juxtaposition. It was
called by three names which explain its history, its destination, and
its architecture: "The House of the Dauphin," because Charles V., when
Dauphin, had inhabited it; "The Marchandise," because it had served as
town hall; and "The Pillared House" (_domus ad piloria_), because of
a series of large pillars which sustained the three stories. The city
found there all that is required for a city like Paris; a chapel in
which to pray to God; a _plaidoyer_, or pleading room, in which to hold
hearings, and to repel, at need, the King's people; and under the roof,
an _arsenac_ full of artillery. For the bourgeois of Paris were aware
that it is not sufficient to pray in every conjuncture, and to plead
for the franchises of the city, and they had always in reserve, in the
garret of the town hall, a few good rusty arquebuses. The Greve had then
that sinister aspect which it preserves to-day from the execrable ideas
which it awakens, and from the sombre town hall of Dominique Bocador,
which has replaced the Pillared House. It must be admitted that a
permanent gibbet and a pillory, "a justice and a ladder," as they were
called in that day, erected side by side in the centre of the pavement,
contributed not a little to cause eyes to be turned away from that
fatal place, where so many beings full of life and health have agonized;
where, fifty years later, that fever of Saint Vallier was destined to
have its birth, that terror of the scaffold, the most monstrous of all
maladies because it comes not from God, but from man.

It is a consoling idea (let us remark in passing), to think that the
death penalty, which three hundred years ago still en