and there, three or four ancient oaks grouped together in one great bushy clump; a glimpse of swans floating on clear pools, all flecked with light and shadow; picturesque corners of innumerable court-yards; the Lion house, with its low Gothic arches on short Roman pillars, its iron bars and continuous roaring; cutting right through this picture the scaly spire of the Ave-Maria Chapel; on the left, the left, the Mansion of the Provost of Paris, flanked by four delicately perforated turrets; and, in the centre of it all, the Hôtel Saint- Pol itself, with its multiplicity of facades, its successive enrichments since the time of Charles V, the heterogeneous excrescences with which the fancy of the architects had loaded it during two centuries, with all the roofs of its chapels, all its gables, its galleries, a thousand weather-cocks turning to the four winds of heaven, and its two lofty, contiguous towers with conical roofs surrounded by battlements at the base, looking like peaked hats with the brim turned up.
Continuing to mount the steps of this amphitheatre of palaces, rising tier upon tier in the distance, having crossed the deep fissure in the roofs of the Town which marked the course of the Rue Saint-Antoine, the eye travelled on to the Logis d’Angoulême, a vast structure of several periods, parts of which were glaringly new and white, blending with the rest about as well as a crimson patch on a blue doublet. Nevertheless, the peculiarly sharp and high-pitched roof of the modern palace—bristling with sculptured gargoyles, and covered with sheets of lead, over which ran sparkling incrustations of gilded copper in a thousand fantastic arabesques— this curiously damascened roof rose gracefully out of the brown ruins of the ancient edifice, whose massive old towers, bulging cask-like with age, sinking into themselves with decrepitude, and rent from top to bottom, looked like great unbuttoned waistcoats. Behind rose the forest of spires of the Palais des Tournelles. No show-place in the world—not even Chambord or the Alhambra—could afford a more magical, more ethereal, more enchanting spectacle than this grove of spires, bell-towers, chimneys, weather-cocks, spiral stair-cases; of airy lantern towers that seemed to have been worked with a chisel; of pavilions; of spindle-shaped turrets, all diverse in shape, height, and position. It might have been a gigantic chess-board in stone.
That sheaf of enormous black towers to the right of the inky Tournelles, pressing one against the other, and bound together, as it were, by a circular moat; that donjon-keep, pierced far more numerously with shot-holes than with windows, its drawbridge always raised, its portcullis always lowered—that is the Bastile. Those objects like black beaks projecting from the embrasures of the battlements, and which, from a distance, you might take for rain-spouts, are cannon. Within their range, at the foot of the formidable pile, is the Porte Saint-Antoine, crouching between its two towers.
Beyond the Tournelles, reaching to the wall of Charles V, stretched in rich diversity of lawns and flower- beds a velvet carpet of gardens and royal parks, in the heart of which, conspicuous by its maze of trees and winding paths, one recognised the famous labyrinthine garden presented by Louis XI to Coictier. The great physician’s observatory rose out of the maze like a massive, isolated column with a tiny house for its capital. Many a terrible astrological crime was perpetrated in that laboratory. This is now the Place Royale.
As we have said, the Palace quarter, of which we have endeavoured to convey some idea to the reader, though merely pointing out the chief features, filled the angle formed by the Seine and the wall of Charles V on the east. The centre of the Town was occupied by a congeries of dwelling-houses. For it was here that the three bridges of the City on the right bank discharged their streams of passengers; and bridges lead to the building of houses before palaces. This collection of middle-class dwellings, closely packed together like the cells of a honeycomb, was, however, by no means devoid of beauty. The sea of roofs of a great city has much of the grandeur of the ocean about it. To begin with, the streets in their crossings and windings cut up the mass into a hundred charming figures, streaming out from the Halles like the rays of a star. The streets of Saint-Denis and Saint-Martin, with their innumerable ramifications, went up side by side like two great trees intertwining their branches; while such streets as the Rue de la Plâterie, Rue de la Verrerie, Rue de la Tixeranderie, etc., wound in tortuous lines through the whole. Some handsome edifices, too, thrust up their heads through the petrified waves of this sea of gables. For instance, at the head of the Pont-aux-Changeurs, behind which you could see the Seine foaming under the mill-wheels of the Pont-aux-Meuniers, there was the Châtelet, no longer a Roman keep, as