able to say to the reader, "Go and look at it," and we should
thus both escape the necessity,--I of making, and he of reading, a
description of it, such as it is. Which demonstrates a new truth: that
great events have incalculable results.

It is true that it may be quite possible, in the first place, that
Ravaillac had no accomplices; and in the second, that if he had any,
they were in no way connected with the fire of 1618. Two other very
plausible explanations exist: First, the great flaming star, a foot
broad, and a cubit high, which fell from heaven, as every one knows,
upon the law courts, after midnight on the seventh of March; second,
Theophile's quatrain,--

"Sure, 'twas but a sorry game
When at Paris, Dame Justice,
Through having eaten too much spice,
Set the palace all aflame."

Whatever may be thought of this triple explanation, political, physical,
and poetical, of the burning of the law courts in 1618, the unfortunate
fact of the fire is certain. Very little to-day remains, thanks to this
catastrophe,--thanks, above all, to the successive restorations which
have completed what it spared,--very little remains of that first
dwelling of the kings of France,--of that elder palace of the Louvre,
already so old in the time of Philip the Handsome, that they sought
there for the traces of the magnificent buildings erected by King Robert
and described by Helgaldus. Nearly everything has disappeared. What has
become of the chamber of the chancellery, where Saint Louis consummated
his marriage? the garden where he administered justice, "clad in a
coat of camelot, a surcoat of linsey-woolsey, without sleeves, and a
sur-mantle of black sandal, as he lay upon the carpet with Joinville?"
Where is the chamber of the Emperor Sigismond? and that of Charles IV.?
that of Jean the Landless? Where is the staircase, from which Charles
VI. promulgated his edict of pardon? the slab where Marcel cut the
throats of Robert de Clermont and the Marshal of Champagne, in the
presence of the dauphin? the wicket where the bulls of Pope Benedict
were torn, and whence those who had brought them departed decked out, in
derision, in copes and mitres, and making an apology through all Paris?
and the grand hall, with its gilding, its azure, its statues, its
pointed arches, its pillars, its immense vault, all fretted with
carvings? and the gilded chamber? and the stone lion, which stood at the
door, with lowered head and t