agents, the oxygen of the air."]

The portal of the Petit Chatelet at the end of the Petit Pont opened
on the university and learned district on the south bank of the Seine,
with its fifty colleges and many churches clustering about the slopes
of the mount of St. Genevieve, which was crowned by the great
Augustine abbey and church founded by Clovis. Near by, stood the two
great religious houses and churches of the Dominicans and Franciscans,
the Carthusian monastery and its scores of little gardens, the lesser
monastic buildings and, outside the walls, the vast Benedictine
abbatial buildings and suburb of St. Germain des Pres, with its
stately church of three spires, its fortified walls, its pillory and
its permanent lists, where judicial duels were fought. On the north
bank lay the busy, crowded industrial and commercial district known as
the Ville, with its forty-four churches, the hotels of the rich
merchants and bankers, the fortified palaces of the nobles, all
enclosed by the high walls and square towers of Charles the Fifth's
fortifications, and defended at east and west by the Bastille of St.
Antoine and the Louvre. To the east stood the agglomeration of
buildings known as Hotel St. Paul, a royal city within a city, with
its manifold princely dwellings and fair gardens and pleasaunces
sloping down to the Seine; hard by to the north was the Duke of
Bedford's Hotel des Tournelles, with its memories of the English
domination. At the west, against the old Louvre, were among others,
the hotels of the Constable of Bourbon and the Duke of Alencon, and
out in the fields beyond, the smoking kilns of the Tuileries (tile
factories).

[Illustration: TOWER OF ST. JACQUES.]

North and east and west of the municipal centre, the Maison aux
Piliers, on the Place de Greve, was a maze of streets filled with the
various crafts of Paris. The tower of the great church of St. Jacques
de la Boucherie, as yet unfinished, emerged from the butchers' and
skinners' shops and slaughter-houses, which at the Rue des Lombards
met the clothiers and furriers; the cutlers and the basket-makers were
busy in streets now swept away to give place to the Avenue Victoria.
Painters, glass-workers and colour merchants, grocers and druggists,
made bright and fragrant the Rue de la Verrerie, weavers' shuttles
rattled in the Rue de la Tixanderie (now swallowed up in the Rue de
Rivoli); curriers and tanners plied their evil-smelling crafts in the
Rue (now