vention of a friendly shower, and to the gradual pushing of the superabundant matter from one end of the narrow streets or "ruelles" to the other, when a heap of mud might happen to turn the corner, and be left to the charge of its new neighbours. In the Traité de Police, a document of the time of Louis XIV., a curious proof is given of the small degree of salubrity which the inner streets of the cité down to so late a period enjoyed. It is mentioned that the Sieur Courtois, a physician who dwelt in the Rue des Marmouzets, had his principal sittingroom looking out to this street, and he used to observe, that every morning a pair of large brass dogs, which he used for supporting the flaming logs of wood in his fire-place, were covered with a tolerably thick coating of verdegris, occasioned by the delete rious vapours which rose from the street below. The worthy physician appeared to have had sufficient confidence in his own healing skill not to remove from such a neighbourhood, or probably it was too lucrative a district, as may well be imagined, for any medical man to make bones about so small a matter; and, therefore, as he proceeds to relate, his servant used to clear the brass dogs every morning, and they were ready for the renewal of the phenomenon within the four-and-twenty hours next ensuing. How the shopkeepers fared in the dark holes which they rented on a level with the Stygian stream of mud and filth that stagnated in the central kennels, is not said; but in those days people were not so fastidious as in our degenerate times of "Eau de Cologne," "Eau de Mille fleurs," "Extrait du Zéphir," &c.; and, as Dr Courtois further remarks, they allowed" the corrupted air to make so much the more malignant an impression on their lungs and other viscera, as those parts of the body are incomparably more delicate than copper or brass-which is, no doubt, the cause of many maladies." In those days, no one in Paris, who pretended to the character of a gentleman, ever thought of going into the streets on foot unless stoutly booted; and a boot of the time of the "Grand Monarque" was a foot-and-leg preserver of about the same degree of elegance and strength as the waterproof equipments of a modern fen farmer from the heart

of Lincolnshire. As for the women, poor souls, they fared as they could; we find no mention made of how their "chaussures" were constructed for Parisian promenading; but we should not be surprised if the high-heeled shoes, which came into fashion about this time, were not merely an imitation from those of the men, but were really a feminine device for the preservation of dry pettitoes. An ordonnance of police, however, cleansed, or attempted to cleanse the streets, and the irruption of Gallo-Italian taste which pervaded all France and Western Europe about the time of the fourteenth Louis, made a most important change in the physiognomy of the cité. The old overhanging gable-topped houses were proscribed: every one set up a court front to his habitation; the streets gained in uniformity and width at the top, but remained as narrow as ever at the bottom, and the cité tried to ape the airs of the Marais, or the still more fashionable Faubourg St Germain.

Henry IV. and Louis XIII. had made serious inroads on the primitive antiquity of the island; the first, by contracting the Pont Neuf at its western extremity, and the latter, by building the Place Dauphin, which connected the Palais with the work of his father. The seat of the Parliament itself, in the ancient palaces of the kings, had begun to lose much of its mediæval appearance about the same period; and the accidental burning of the famous "Grande Salle"the Westminster Hall of Paris-in the reign of Louis XV., completed the metamorphosis; nothing now remains of the old Gothic work, except the gloomy towers of the Conciergerie, and the jewelled shrine of the Sainte Chapelle. But we leave aside for the present the Palais and its recollections-the Conciergerie and its horrors; and we return to the streets, their noise, their dirt, and their traditions. In the narrow compass of the island, which is only 2400 feet long, by 750 wide, were crammed together sixty streets, six culs-de-sac, six places or squares, eleven parish churches, four chapels, two collegiate churches, the great cathedral, the archbishop's palace, the "Palais," which alone occupied a fourth part of the entire space, the great hospital of the Hotel Dieu, and three prisons, be

sides other public buildings. The number of houses was 1300, besides 700 shops or stalls; the streets were lighted by day by as many, or rather by as few, of the sun's rays as could straggle into the interstices of the heaps of stone and timber called habitations; and by night, the absence of the chaste Diana was supplied by 311 lamps, or, more correctly speaking, according to the old police returns, lanterns. Reckoning twenty-five inhabitants to each house, which is a moderate computation for Paris, and also taking into account the inmates of public or monastic buildings in the cité, the population of this human anthill was upwards of 30,000.

The principal street of the cité what might be called its Regent street -was the old Roman thoroughfare athwart the fair Lutetia-the Rue de la Juiverie, so termed, as chronicles tell us, from the Jews that were established there previous to the reign of Philip Augustus. The inhabitants of this persuasion had long dwelt there: it was then the centre of business and all commercial operations. The wealthier Jews lived in the street itself, or else in those of La Pelleterie, or La Tisseranderie, while some were not ashamed to reside in the Rue de Judas; but the petty tradesmen and artisans of the Israelitish tribes, most of whom were "courtiers" and "fripiers," or brokers and old clothes-men, occupied the halles or markets, and the dirty streets that led to them. The Jews had schools of their own within the island, and their synagogue was allowed, as a matter of special favour, to exist in the Rue du Pet-auDiable; but their cemeteries were to the south of the Université, and occupied some waste ground where now the Rue Pierre Sarrazin stands. In 1183 Philip Augustus sent them all to the right-about, proceeding by the most approved methods of confiscation and torture to kill his geese with golden eggs, and to please the church at the same time that he tried to replenish his own coffers. The sufferings of this unhappy people in those days are too well known to need even allusion: it is sufficient to say, that they never more dwelt in the cité: they were never allowed to appear in public without a yellow mark on the breast, and a horned cap on the head; they were forbidden to bathe in the

Seine, and whenever the public executioner did any of them the honour to suspend some of their community from the gibbet of Montfaucon, they were always hung up between two dogs. If the Rue de la Juiverie was the Regent street, the Rue de la Barillerie was the St James' street of the cité: it led by the gate of the Great Palace: had two considerable churches on the western side, one of St Bartholemy towards the northern end, the other of the community of the Barnabites in the middle: at the southern end was the carrefour of Port St Michael, where treaties of peace were proclaimed; and at the northern was the great clock tower, or Tour de l'Horloge, which still rears its pointed head in primitive simplicity. In front of the great gates of the palace was a space, where once stood the house of Jean Châtel-the precursor of Ravaillac, in attempting the life of Henry IV.; the habitation was razed to the ground after the torturing and execution of that criminal, and a semicircular place was formed at the entrance of the Rue de la Vieille Draperie. Immediately to the northward of this spot was the western entrance of the church of St Bartholemy; a site rendered remarkable by the superstition of Robert, the second king of the Capetian race. He had married Bertha, his cousin-german, with the consent of the bishop of France, but contrary to the wishes of Pope Gregory V.; and this pontiff took advantage of the uncanonical degree of consanguinity existing in this union, to declare the marriage void, and to excommunicate the sovereign. One morning Robert was praying at the steps of St Bartholemy, according to his daily custom -for ever since the issuing of the papal censure, he had never dared to enter the church, though it fronted his own royal residence-his courtiers were at a distance from him, afraid of the unholy contagion, and he was attended only by the two servants who waited on him at his meals, and purified, by passing through the fire, each plate and goblet as soon as the king had used them. Robert was absorbed in prayer, when Abbo, the abbot of Fleuri, accompanied by two females of the royal household, approached him to announce the accouchement of the queen. The women were carrying in their hands a large golden dish,

the gallants in town, and every body flocked to the pastry-cook's shop for his meat-pies, which were known not only throughout the cité, but were in reputation among the guards of the Châtelet over the Pont au Change, and were in no small demand among the hungry scholars and clerks of the university in the Rue du Fouarrethat street where Petrarch came to listen to the wrangling doctors. Whether it was that the two tradesmen amassed too much money for the rapacious officers of the royal treasury not to consider them fair game, or whether their neighbours and rivals grew envious of their success, and determined to effect their ruin, is not known; but the rumour was spread abroad, and was eagerly credited, that several persons who had submitted their weekly growth of bristles to the barber's razor were missing, while others had been observed to go into his shop but never to come out of it. The idea of murder was speedily caught up and improved on: the supposed fact of slaughter was accompanied by the invention of atrocious circumstances, and at length it was asserted, that, after the barber had cut the throats of his unfortunate customers, he used to deliver their bodies over to his friend, the pastry-cook, who immediately converted them into mince-meat, and therewith stuffed his pies. The story was too horrible, too monstrous, not to be exactly suited to popular credulity: and what was believed by the populace in the middle ages was generally acted on. The poor barber and the pastry-cook were torn from their houses by an infuriated multitude, were conducted to the king's justiciary at the palais, were incontinently condemned to death, were swinging as dead corpses at Montfaucon the same day, and twenty-four hours after, their habitations, which joined each other, were level with the ground. A stone cross was erected on the spot in commemoration of the event, and for upwards of a century a vacant space remained in the street, upon which no one considered himself entitled to build. In the reign, how

all molestation in right of prior claims. The Rue des Marmouzets still remains, but is much altered, and, as the term goes, "improved;" and out of it lead some of the smallest and most ill famed streets, even of the modern capital. This part of Paris is the notorious rendezvous of all the thieves and tramps that can find room to stow themselves away in it: here there are lodging-houses, where only two sous a-night are asked for a bed, and here the officers of the police, whose headquarters in the prefect's residence are not three hundred yards off, find their prey ready to their hands. Here the force of the law is held at a discount; and, provided the inmates of these houses and streets confine their orgies and their quarrels to their own precincts, little notice is taken of their proceedings; the district forms, in fact, one of the many "Cours des Miracles" with which Paris abounds; but it was not for want of spiritual assistance that it was almost as ill-famed in former days as it is now, since, round its immediate limits, and within a space half as large as Lincoln's Inn Fields, eight churches, or chapels, were situated, besides the cathedral.

At the south-eastern corner of the island, the clergy of the capital fixed their headquarters at an early period. Here the Cathedral of Notre Dame

rose

here on the south of that edifice was the Episcopal palace; on the north were the cloisters, the chapterhouse, and the canons' residences; the small church of St Denys du Pas almost touched the eastern end of the cathedral; that of St Jean le Rond was at the north-western corner; the church of St Christophe was opposite the western front, and the chapels of the Hotel Dieu, and of the Episcopal palace, were on the south. The churches of Ste Geneviève-des-Ardens, of St Pierre-aux-Boeufs, and of Ste Marine, were each within fifty yards of the Parvis," or enclosed area in front of the cathedral; so that, within a space of 200 yards square, there were nine edifices dedicated to public worship. The history of Notre Dame, the history of the Episcopal palace, and still more, the history of the Hotel Dieu, would each fill a volume; so fertile are the records connected with these places in events of deep historical interest; but we abstain from trenching on what is in part forbidden