nd the new Rue du
Temple, there was the Temple, a sinister group of towers, lofty, erect,
and isolated in the middle of a vast, battlemented enclosure. Between
the Rue Neuve-du-Temple and the Rue Saint-Martin, there was the Abbey
of Saint-Martin, in the midst of its gardens, a superb fortified church,
whose girdle of towers, whose diadem of bell towers, yielded in
force and splendor only to Saint-Germain des Pres. Between the Rue
Saint-Martin and the Rue Saint-Denis, spread the enclosure of the
Trinite.

Lastly, between the Rue Saint-Denis, and the Rue Montorgueil, stood the
Filles-Dieu. On one side, the rotting roofs and unpaved enclosure of the
Cour des Miracles could be descried. It was the sole profane ring which
was linked to that devout chain of convents.

Finally, the fourth compartment, which stretched itself out in the
agglomeration of the roofs on the right bank, and which occupied the
western angle of the enclosure, and the banks of the river down stream,
was a fresh cluster of palaces and Hotels pressed close about the base
of the Louvre. The old Louvre of Philip Augustus, that immense edifice
whose great tower rallied about it three and twenty chief towers, not to
reckon the lesser towers, seemed from a distance to be enshrined in the
Gothic roofs of the Hotel d'Alencon, and the Petit-Bourbon. This hydra
of towers, giant guardian of Paris, with its four and twenty heads,
always erect, with its monstrous haunches, loaded or scaled with slates,
and all streaming with metallic reflections, terminated with wonderful
effect the configuration of the Town towards the west.

Thus an immense block, which the Romans called _iusula_, or island, of
bourgeois houses, flanked on the right and the left by two blocks of
palaces, crowned, the one by the Louvre, the other by the Tournelles,
bordered on the north by a long girdle of abbeys and cultivated
enclosures, all amalgamated and melted together in one view; upon these
thousands of edifices, whose tiled and slated roofs outlined upon each
other so many fantastic chains, the bell towers, tattooed, fluted, and
ornamented with twisted bands, of the four and forty churches on the
right bank; myriads of cross streets; for boundary on one side, an
enclosure of lofty walls with square towers (that of the University had
round towers); on the other, the Seine, cut by bridges, and bearing
on its bosom a multitude of boats; behold the Town of Paris in the
fifteenth century.