torians of the period, the wolves
entered the city at night by the river; the imagination of the people,
exalted, saw already in Paris a new Babylon, the ruins of which would
presently become the repair of the beasts of prey."

When the remains of what might well seem to be the last of the kings of
France were interred at Saint-Denis, a herald-at-arms recommended the
soul of the defunct to the prayers of the assembled multitude; then he
cried: "_Vive Henri de Lancastre, Roi de France et d'Angleterre!_" At
this cry, all the officers present reversed their maces, rods, and
swords, to signify that they considered themselves as no longer
exercising their offices. The English king was not crowned in Paris till
nine years later (1431), but his representative, the Duke of Bedford,
left his residence in the Hotel de la Riviere, Rue de Paradis, and Rue
du Chaume (to-day the Rues des Francs-Bourgeois and des Archives), to
establish himself in the Palais de la Cite. On the 8th of September,
1429, Jeanne d'Arc, having brought about the crowning of the sluggish
Charles VII at Reims in the preceding July, presented herself at the
head of a French corps under the orders of the Duc d'Alencon before the
northern walls of Paris, and herself directed the assault on the Porte
Saint-Honore. She surmounted the first entrenchment, constructed in
front of the pig market there established on the Butte des
Moulins,--afterward suppressed to make way for the opening of the Avenue
de l'Opera,--drove in the English, sounded the depth of the moat with
the staff of her banner, and fell wounded with an arbalist shaft through
her thigh, in front of what is now the entrance to the Theatre-Francais.
The chronicles of the time differ as to whether the French chiefs failed
to support her through jealousy, or fought with _acharnement_ to save
her from falling into the hands of the besieged. The attempt was
abandoned, and the Maid was carried to Saint-Denis to have her wound
dressed.

In Paris, opinions were very much divided, and even those who favored
the French king felt that they were too much compromised to open their
gates to him without some stipulations. Two years later, Jeanne having
been duly burned at Rouen, and the consecration of Charles VII, at
Reims, "to which he had been conducted by an agent of the demon, being
in itself and of its own nature null and void," the English monarch
entered his city of Paris to receive an orthodox and irreprehens