architecture, which cause Gothic art to have
the air of beginning its combinations afresh with every monument.

Behind these palaces, extended in all directions, now broken, fenced in,
battlemented like a citadel, now veiled by great trees like a Carthusian
convent, the immense and multiform enclosure of that miraculous Hotel
de Saint-Pol, where the King of France possessed the means of lodging
superbly two and twenty princes of the rank of the dauphin and the Duke
of Burgundy, with their domestics and their suites, without counting the
great lords, and the emperor when he came to view Paris, and the lions,
who had their separate Hotel at the royal Hotel. Let us say here that
a prince's apartment was then composed of never less than eleven large
rooms, from the chamber of state to the oratory, not to mention the
galleries, baths, vapor-baths, and other "superfluous places," with
which each apartment was provided; not to mention the private gardens
for each of the king's guests; not to mention the kitchens, the
cellars, the domestic offices, the general refectories of the house, the
poultry-yards, where there were twenty-two general laboratories, from
the bakehouses to the wine-cellars; games of a thousand sorts, malls,
tennis, and riding at the ring; aviaries, fishponds, menageries,
stables, barns, libraries, arsenals and foundries. This was what a
king's palace, a Louvre, a Hotel de Saint-Pol was then. A city within a
city.

From the tower where we are placed, the Hotel Saint-Pol, almost half
hidden by the four great houses of which we have just spoken, was
still very considerable and very marvellous to see. One could there
distinguish, very well, though cleverly united with the principal
building by long galleries, decked with painted glass and slender
columns, the three Hotels which Charles V. had amalgamated with his
palace: the Hotel du Petit-Muce, with the airy balustrade, which formed
a graceful border to its roof; the Hotel of the Abbe de Saint-Maur,
having the vanity of a stronghold, a great tower, machicolations,
loopholes, iron gratings, and over the large Saxon door, the armorial
bearings of the abbe, between the two mortises of the drawbridge; the
Hotel of the Comte d' Etampes, whose donjon keep, ruined at its summit,
was rounded and notched like a cock's comb; here and there, three or
four ancient oaks, forming a tuft together like enormous cauliflowers;
gambols of swans, in the clear water of the fishpon