hickness of the fist
in a space of three hours; there was the rich square bell tower of
Saint-Jacques de la Boucherie, with its angles all frothing with
carvings, already admirable, although it was not finished in the
fifteenth century. (It lacked, in particular, the four monsters, which,
still perched to-day on the corners of its roof, have the air of so
many sphinxes who are propounding to new Paris the riddle of the ancient
Paris. Rault, the sculptor, only placed them in position in 1526, and
received twenty francs for his pains.) There was the Maison-aux-Piliers,
the Pillar House, opening upon that Place de Greve of which we have
given the reader some idea; there was Saint-Gervais, which a front "in
good taste" has since spoiled; Saint-Mery, whose ancient pointed arches
were still almost round arches; Saint-Jean, whose magnificent spire was
proverbial; there were twenty other monuments, which did not disdain to
bury their wonders in that chaos of black, deep, narrow streets. Add
the crosses of carved stone, more lavishly scattered through the
squares than even the gibbets; the cemetery of the Innocents, whose
architectural wall could be seen in the distance above the roofs; the
pillory of the Markets, whose top was visible between two chimneys of
the Rue de la Cossonnerie; the ladder of the Croix-du-Trahoir, in its
square always black with people; the circular buildings of the wheat
mart; the fragments of Philip Augustus's ancient wall, which could be
made out here and there, drowned among the houses, its towers gnawed by
ivy, its gates in ruins, with crumbling and deformed stretches of wall;
the quay with its thousand shops, and its bloody knacker's yards; the
Seine encumbered with boats, from the Port au Foin to Port-l'Eveque, and
you will have a confused picture of what the central trapezium of the
Town was like in 1482.

With these two quarters, one of Hotels, the other of houses, the third
feature of aspect presented by the city was a long zone of abbeys, which
bordered it in nearly the whole of its circumference, from the rising to
the setting sun, and, behind the circle of fortifications which hemmed
in Paris, formed a second interior enclosure of convents and chapels.
Thus, immediately adjoining the park des Tournelles, between the
Rue Saint-Antoine and the Vielle Rue du Temple, there stood
Sainte-Catherine, with its immense cultivated lands, which were
terminated only by the wall of Paris. Between the old a