uggieri."

III. MARIE TOUCHET

The little house of Madame de Belleville, where Charles IX. had
deposited his prisoners, was the last but one in the rue de l'Autruche
on the side of the rue Saint-Honore. The street gate, flanked by two
little brick pavilions, seemed very simple in those days, when gates and
their accessories were so elaborately treated. It had two pilasters
of stone cut in facets, and the coping represented a reclining woman
holding a cornucopia. The gate itself, closed by enormous locks, had
a wicket through which to examine those who asked admittance. In each
pavilion lived a porter; for the king's extremely capricious pleasure
required a porter by day and by night. The house had a little courtyard,
paved like those of Venice. At this period, before carriages were
invented, ladies went about on horseback, or in litters, so that
courtyards could be made magnificent without fear of injury from horses
or carriages. This fact is always to be remembered as an explanation
of the narrowness of streets, the small size of courtyards, and certain
other details of the private dwellings of the fifteenth and sixteenth
centuries.

The house, of one story only above the ground-floor, was capped by a
sculptured frieze, above which rose a roof with four sides, the peak
being flattened to form a platform. Dormer windows were cut in this
roof, with casings and pediments which the chisel of some great artist
had covered with arabesques and dentils; each of the three windows on
the main floor were equally beautiful in stone embroidery, which the
brick of the walls showed off to great advantage. On the ground-floor,
a double portico, very delicately decorated, led to the entrance door,
which was covered with bosses cut with facets in the Venetian manner,--a
style of decoration which was further carried on round the windows
placed to right and left of the door.

A garden, carefully laid out in the fashion of the times and filled with
choice flowers, occupied a space behind the house equal to that of the
courtyard in front. A grape-vine draped its walls. In the centre of a
grass plot rose a silver fir-tree. The flower-borders were separated
from the grass by meandering paths which led to an arbor of clipped yews
at the farther end of the little garden. The walls were covered with a
mosaic of variously colored pebbles, coarse in design, it is true, but
pleasing to the eye from the harmony of its tints with those of