ky peep through its cone of lace. In front of Notre-Dame, and
very near at hand, three streets opened into the cathedral square,--a
fine square, lined with ancient houses. Over the south side of this
place bent the wrinkled and sullen facade of the Hotel Dieu, and its
roof, which seemed covered with warts and pustules. Then, on the right
and the left, to east and west, within that wall of the City, which was
yet so contracted, rose the bell towers of its one and twenty churches,
of every date, of every form, of every size, from the low and wormeaten
belfry of Saint-Denis du Pas (_Carcer Glaueini_) to the slender needles
of Saint-Pierre aux Boeufs and Saint-Landry.

Behind Notre-Dame, the cloister and its Gothic galleries spread out
towards the north; on the south, the half-Roman palace of the bishop; on
the east, the desert point of the Terrain. In this throng of houses the
eye also distinguished, by the lofty open-work mitres of stone which
then crowned the roof itself, even the most elevated windows of the
palace, the Hotel given by the city, under Charles VI., to Juvenal
des Ursins; a little farther on, the pitch-covered sheds of the Palus
Market; in still another quarter the new apse of Saint-Germain le Vieux,
lengthened in 1458, with a bit of the Rue aux Febves; and then, in
places, a square crowded with people; a pillory, erected at the corner
of a street; a fine fragment of the pavement of Philip Augustus, a
magnificent flagging, grooved for the horses' feet, in the middle of the
road, and so badly replaced in the sixteenth century by the miserable
cobblestones, called the "pavement of the League;" a deserted back
courtyard, with one of those diaphanous staircase turrets, such as were
erected in the fifteenth century, one of which is still to be seen in
the Rue des Bourdonnais. Lastly, at the right of the Sainte-Chapelle,
towards the west, the Palais de Justice rested its group of towers at
the edge of the water. The thickets of the king's gardens, which covered
the western point of the City, masked the Island du Passeur. As for the
water, from the summit of the towers of Notre-Dame one hardly saw it, on
either side of the City; the Seine was hidden by bridges, the bridges by
houses.

And when the glance passed these bridges, whose roofs were visibly
green, rendered mouldy before their time by the vapors from the water,
if it was directed to the left, towards the University, the first
edifice which struck it was