olice. And then, was it nothing to wield
absolute supremacy over the sergeants of the police, the porter and
watch of the Chatelet, the two auditors of the Chatelet, _auditores
castelleti_, the sixteen commissioners of the sixteen quarters, the
jailer of the Chatelet, the four enfeoffed sergeants, the hundred and
twenty mounted sergeants, with maces, the chevalier of the watch with
his watch, his sub-watch, his counter-watch and his rear-watch? Was it
nothing to exercise high and low justice, the right to interrogate,
to hang and to draw, without reckoning petty jurisdiction in the first
resort (_in prima instantia_, as the charters say), on that viscomty
of Paris, so nobly appanaged with seven noble bailiwicks? Can anything
sweeter be imagined than rendering judgments and decisions, as Messire
Robert d'Estouteville daily did in the Grand Chatelet, under the large
and flattened arches of Philip Augustus? and going, as he was wont to
do every evening, to that charming house situated in the Rue Galilee, in
the enclosure of the royal palace, which he held in right of his wife,
Madame Ambroise de Lore, to repose after the fatigue of having sent
some poor wretch to pass the night in "that little cell of the Rue de
Escorcherie, which the provosts and aldermen of Paris used to make their
prison; the same being eleven feet long, seven feet and four inches
wide, and eleven feet high?"*

* Comptes du domaine, 1383.

And not only had Messire Robert d'Estouteville his special court as
provost and vicomte of Paris; but in addition he had a share, both for
eye and tooth, in the grand court of the king. There was no head in the
least elevated which had not passed through his hands before it came to
the headsman. It was he who went to seek M. de Nemours at the Bastille
Saint Antoine, in order to conduct him to the Halles; and to conduct to
the Greve M. de Saint-Pol, who clamored and resisted, to the great joy
of the provost, who did not love monsieur the constable.

Here, assuredly, is more than sufficient to render a life happy and
illustrious, and to deserve some day a notable page in that interesting
history of the provosts of Paris, where one learns that Oudard de
Villeneuve had a house in the Rue des Boucheries, that Guillaume
de Hangest purchased the great and the little Savoy, that Guillaume
Thiboust gave the nuns of Sainte-Genevieve his houses in the Rue Clopin,
that Hugues Aubriot lived in the Hotel du Pore-Epic, a