e National Library of
Paris.]

In Paris there were several _Cours des Miracles_, but the most celebrated
was that which, from the time of Sauval, the singular historian of the
"Antiquities of Paris," to the middle of the seventeenth century,
preserved this generic name _par excellence_, and which exists to this day
(Fig. 379). He says, "It is a place of considerable size, and is in an
unhealthy, muddy, and irregular blind alley. Formerly it was situated on
the outskirts of Paris, now it is in one of the worst built, dirtiest, and
most out-of-the-way quarters of the town, between the Rue Montorgueil, the
convent of the Filles-Dieu, and the Rue Neuve-Saint-Sauveur. To get there
one must wander through narrow, close, and by-streets; and in order to
enter it, one must descend a somewhat winding and rugged declivity. In
this place I found a mud house, half buried, very shaky from old age and
rottenness, and only eight metres square; but in which, nevertheless,
some fifty families are living, who have the charge of a large number of
children, many of whom are stolen or illegitimate.... I was assured that
upwards of five hundred large families occupy that and other houses
adjoining.... Large as this court is, it was formerly even bigger....
Here, without any care for the future, every one enjoys the present; and
eats in the evening what he has earned during the day with so much
trouble, and often with so many blows; for it is one of the fundamental
rules of the Cour des Miracles never to lay by anything for the morrow.
Every one who lives there indulges in the utmost licentiousness; both
religion and law are utterly ignored.... It is true that outwardly they
appear to acknowledge a God; for they have set up in a niche an image of
God the Father, which they have stolen from some church, and before which
they come daily to offer up certain prayers; but this is only because they
superstitiously imagine that by this means they are released from the
necessity of performing the duties of Christians to their pastor and their
parish, and are even absolved from the sin of entering a church for the
purpose of robbery and purse-cutting."

Paris, the capital of the kingdom of rogues, was not the only town which
possessed a Cour des Miracles, for we find here and there, especially at
Lyons and Bordeaux, some traces of these privileged resorts of rogues and
thieves, which then flourished under the sceptre of the Grand Coesre.
Sauval states