hich was to follow,--the
most wretched of all!"

The historians quote from the _Journal d'un bourgeois de Paris_ for the
years 1419-1421: "You would have heard through all Paris pitiable
lamentations, little children crying: 'I am dying with hunger!' There
were to be seen on a dunghill twenty, thirty children, boys and girls,
who yielded up their souls through famine and cold. Death cut down so
many and so fast that it was necessary to excavate in the cemeteries
great ditches in which were put thirty or forty, packed close together,
and scarcely powdered over with earth. Those who dug the graves asserted
that they had buried more than a hundred thousand persons. The
shoe-makers counted up, on the day of their trade reunion, those that
had died among them, and found that they numbered some eighteen hundred,
masters and apprentices, in these two months. Troops of wolves traversed
the country and entered Paris during the night to carry off the dead
bodies.... The working people said to each other: 'Let us fly to the
woods with the wild beasts.... Farewell to wives and children.... Let us
do the worst we can.... Let us place ourselves again in the hands of the
devil.'"

To multiply these historical incidents would be but dreary
iteration,--we will rather give one or two presentations in full of some
details of what may be called the subterranean aspect of the great city,
sombre and rather unpleasant presentations that are not to be found in
the dignified histories or in the guide-books, and that remain unknown
to the usual decorous tourist and reader. That the first one may not be
too sombre, we will select it, not in the gloom of the Dark Ages, but in
full French Renaissance, under Francois I. Readers of Victor Hugo's
_Notre-Dame de Paris_ will doubtless remember his very picturesque
description of the famous Cour des Miracles as it existed in the reign
of Louis XI,--more sober historians do not hesitate to corroborate these
fantastic details in many particulars. M. Gourdon de Genouillac,
Officier d'Academie, in his learned work, _Paris a travers les siecles_,
gives a description which we condense. "Everything had been done in
order to oppose an effective defence to the attacks of enemies outside
the walls; but it was much more difficult to guard against the
enterprises of those within; the assemblings of the malcontents which
were held nightly, and those of the gentry of sack and cord who, as soon
as the gates were open