running into each other and tied, as it were, by a circular moat;
that donjon keep, much more pierced with loopholes than with windows;
that drawbridge, always raised; that portcullis, always lowered,--is
the Bastille. Those sorts of black beaks which project from between the
battlements, and which you take from a distance to be cave spouts, are
cannons.

Beneath them, at the foot of the formidable edifice, behold the Porte
Sainte-Antoine, buried between its two towers.

Beyond the Tournelles, as far as the wall of Charles V., spread out,
with rich compartments of verdure and of flowers, a velvet carpet of
cultivated land and royal parks, in the midst of which one recognized,
by its labyrinth of trees and alleys, the famous Daedalus garden which
Louis XI. had given to Coictier. The doctor's observatory rose above the
labyrinth like a great isolated column, with a tiny house for a capital.
Terrible astrologies took place in that laboratory.

There to-day is the Place Royale.

As we have just said, the quarter of the palace, of which we have just
endeavored to give the reader some idea by indicating only the chief
points, filled the angle which Charles V.'s wall made with the Seine on
the east. The centre of the Town was occupied by a pile of houses for
the populace. It was there, in fact, that the three bridges disgorged
upon the right bank, and bridges lead to the building of houses rather
than palaces. That congregation of bourgeois habitations, pressed
together like the cells in a hive, had a beauty of its own. It is with
the roofs of a capital as with the waves of the sea,--they are grand.
First the streets, crossed and entangled, forming a hundred amusing
figures in the block; around the market-place, it was like a star with a
thousand rays.

The Rues Saint-Denis and Saint-Martin, with their innumerable
ramifications, rose one after the other, like trees intertwining their
branches; and then the tortuous lines, the Rues de la Platrerie, de la
Verrerie, de la Tixeranderie, etc., meandered over all. There were also
fine edifices which pierced the petrified undulations of that sea of
gables. At the head of the Pont aux Changeurs, behind which one beheld
the Seine foaming beneath the wheels of the Pont aux Meuniers, there was
the Chalelet, no longer a Roman tower, as under Julian the Apostate, but
a feudal tower of the thirteenth century, and of a stone so hard that
the pickaxe could not break away so much as the t