SIRE.

On the other side of the sign were the words:--

TO MADAME LA ROYNE-MERE

AND MESSIEURS DV PARLEMENT.

The words "Madame la Royne-mere" had been lately added. The gilding was
fresh. This addition showed the recent changes produced by the sudden
and violent death of Henri II., which overturned many fortunes at court
and began that of the Guises.

The back-shop opened on the river. In this room usually sat the
respectable proprietor himself and Mademoiselle Lecamus. In those days
the wife of a man who was not noble had no right to the title of dame,
"madame"; but the wives of the burghers of Paris were allowed to use
that of "mademoiselle," in virtue of privileges granted and confirmed
to their husbands by the several kings to whom they had done
service. Between this back-shop and the main shop was the well of a
corkscrew-staircase which gave access to the upper story, where were
the great ware-room and the dwelling-rooms of the old couple, and
the garrets lighted by skylights, where slept the children, the
servant-woman, the apprentices, and the clerks.

This crowding of families, servants, and apprentices, the little space
which each took up in the building where the apprentices all slept in
one large chamber under the roof, explains the enormous population of
Paris then agglomerated on one-tenth of the surface of the present city;
also the queer details of private life in the middle ages; also, the
contrivances of love which, with all due deference to historians, are
found only in the pages of the romance-writers, without whom they would
be lost to the world. At this period very great _seigneurs_, such, for
instance, as Admiral de Coligny, occupied three rooms, and their suites
lived at some neighboring inn. There were not, in those days, more than
fifty private mansions in Paris, and those were fifty palaces belonging
to sovereign princes, or to great vassals, whose way of living was
superior to that of the greatest German rulers, such as the Duke of
Bavaria and the Elector of Saxony.

The kitchen of the Lecamus family was beneath the back-shop and looked
out upon the river. It had a glass door opening upon a sort of iron
balcony, from which the cook drew up water in a bucket, and where the
household washing was done. The back-shop was made the dining-room,
office, and salon of the merchant. In this important room (in all such
houses richly panelled and adorned with some special work of