reciation of
money: formerly the _livre_, which is now worth one franc and is usually
so called, was worth twenty francs. To-day, the lesser bourgeoisie and
the courtesans who edge their capes with sable, are ignorant than in
1440 an ill-disposed police-officer would have incontinently arrested
them and marched them before the justice at the Chatelet. Englishwomen,
who are so fond of ermine, do not know that in former times none but
queens, duchesses, and chancellors were allowed to wear that royal fur.
There are to-day in France several ennobled families whose true name is
Pelletier or Lepelletier, the origin of which is evidently derived from
some rich furrier's counter, for most of our burgher's names began in
some such way.

This digression will explain, not only the long feud as to precedence
which the guild of drapers maintained for two centuries against the
guild of furriers and also of mercers (each claiming the right to walk
first, as being the most important guild in Paris), but it will also
serve to explain the importance of the Sieur Lecamus, a furrier honored
with the custom of two queens, Catherine de' Medici and Mary Stuart,
also the custom of the parliament,--a man who for twenty years was the
syndic of his corporation, and who lived in the street we have just
described.

The house of Lecamus was one of three which formed the three angles
of the open space at the end of the pont au Change, where nothing now
remains but the tower of the Palais de Justice, which made the fourth
angle. On the corner of this house, which stood at the angle of the pont
au Change and the quai now called the quai aux Fleurs, the architect had
constructed a little shrine for a Madonna, which was always lighted by
wax-tapers and decked with real flowers in summer and artificial ones in
winter. On the side of the house toward the rue du Pont, as on the side
toward the rue de la Vieille-Pelleterie, the upper story of the house
was supported by wooden pillars. All the houses in this mercantile
quarter had an arcade behind these pillars, where the passers in the
street walked under cover on a ground of trodden mud which kept the
place always dirty. In all French towns these arcades or galleries are
called _les piliers_, a general term to which was added the name of
the business transacted under them,--as "piliers des Halles" (markets),
"piliers de la Boucherie" (butchers).

These galleries, a necessity in the Parisian climate, whi