ds, all in folds of
light and shade; many courtyards of which one beheld picturesque bits;
the Hotel of the Lions, with its low, pointed arches on short, Saxon
pillars, its iron gratings and its perpetual roar; shooting up above
the whole, the scale-ornamented spire of the Ave-Maria; on the left, the
house of the Provost of Paris, flanked by four small towers, delicately
grooved, in the middle; at the extremity, the Hotel Saint-Pol, properly
speaking, with its multiplied facades, its successive enrichments from
the time of Charles V., the hybrid excrescences, with which the fancy of
the architects had loaded it during the last two centuries, with all
the apses of its chapels, all the gables of its galleries, a thousand
weathercocks for the four winds, and its two lofty contiguous towers,
whose conical roof, surrounded by battlements at its base, looked like
those pointed caps which have their edges turned up.

Continuing to mount the stories of this amphitheatre of palaces spread
out afar upon the ground, after crossing a deep ravine hollowed out
of the roofs in the Town, which marked the passage of the Rue
Saint-Antoine, the eye reached the house of Angouleme, a vast
construction of many epochs, where there were perfectly new and very
white parts, which melted no better into the whole than a red patch on a
blue doublet. Nevertheless, the remarkably pointed and lofty roof of the
modern palace, bristling with carved eaves, covered with sheets of lead,
where coiled a thousand fantastic arabesques of sparkling incrustations
of gilded bronze, that roof, so curiously damascened, darted upwards
gracefully from the midst of the brown ruins of the ancient edifice;
whose huge and ancient towers, rounded by age like casks, sinking
together with old age, and rending themselves from top to bottom,
resembled great bellies unbuttoned. Behind rose the forest of spires of
the Palais des Tournelles. Not a view in the world, either at Chambord
or at the Alhambra, is more magic, more aerial, more enchanting, than
that thicket of spires, tiny bell towers, chimneys, weather-vanes,
winding staircases, lanterns through which the daylight makes its way,
which seem cut out at a blow, pavilions, spindle-shaped turrets, or, as
they were then called, "tournelles," all differing in form, in height,
and attitude. One would have pronounced it a gigantic stone chess-board.

To the right of the Tournelles, that truss of enormous towers, black as
ink,