Beyond the walls, several suburban villages pressed close about
the gates, but less numerous and more scattered than those of the
University. Behind the Bastille there were twenty hovels clustered round
the curious sculptures of the Croix-Faubin and the flying buttresses of
the Abbey of Saint-Antoine des Champs; then Popincourt, lost amid wheat
fields; then la Courtille, a merry village of wine-shops; the hamlet of
Saint-Laurent with its church whose bell tower, from afar, seemed to
add itself to the pointed towers of the Porte Saint-Martin; the
Faubourg Saint-Denis, with the vast enclosure of Saint-Ladre; beyond
the Montmartre Gate, the Grange-Bateliere, encircled with white walls;
behind it, with its chalky slopes, Montmartre, which had then almost as
many churches as windmills, and which has kept only the windmills,
for society no longer demands anything but bread for the body. Lastly,
beyond the Louvre, the Faubourg Saint-Honore, already considerable
at that time, could be seen stretching away into the fields, and
Petit-Bretagne gleaming green, and the Marche aux Pourceaux spreading
abroad, in whose centre swelled the horrible apparatus used for boiling
counterfeiters. Between la Courtille and Saint-Laurent, your eye had
already noticed, on the summit of an eminence crouching amid desert
plains, a sort of edifice which resembled from a distance a ruined
colonnade, mounted upon a basement with its foundation laid bare. This
was neither a Parthenon, nor a temple of the Olympian Jupiter. It was
Montfaucon.

Now, if the enumeration of so many edifices, summary as we have
endeavored to make it, has not shattered in the reader's mind the
general image of old Paris, as we have constructed it, we will
recapitulate it in a few words. In the centre, the island of the City,
resembling as to form an enormous tortoise, and throwing out its bridges
with tiles for scales; like legs from beneath its gray shell of roofs.
On the left, the monolithic trapezium, firm, dense, bristling, of the
University; on the right, the vast semicircle of the Town, much
more intermixed with gardens and monuments. The three blocks, city,
university, and town, marbled with innumerable streets. Across all,
the Seine, "foster-mother Seine," as says Father Du Breul, blocked with
islands, bridges, and boats. All about an immense plain, patched with
a thousand sorts of cultivated plots, sown with fine villages. On the
left, Issy, Vanvres, Vaugirarde, Montro