ed, set off eagerly to ravage the suburbs of
Paris, returning in the evening to conceal themselves in the quarters
where no one scarcely ventured to go in search of them. The Cour des
Miracles was the usual refuge of all those wretches who came to conceal
in this corner of Paris, sombre, dirty, muddy, and tortuous, their
pretended infirmities and their criminal pollution.

"The Cour des Miracles extended between the Impasse de la Corderie (on
the site of which a part of the Rue Thevenot was opened) and the Rues de
Damiette and des Forges; its entrance was in the Rue Saint-Sauveur. It
had been in existence since the thirteenth century....

"Several other haunts of the same kind existed in Paris, and Dulaure
asserts that under Louis XIV there were still to be seen, the Cour des
Miracles, of which we have just spoken; the Cour du Roi-Francois,
situated in the Rue Saint-Denis; the Cour Sainte-Catherine, in the same
street; the Cour Brisset, Rue de la Mortellerie; the Cour Gentien, Rue
des Coquilles; the Cour de la Jussienne, in the street of the same name;
the Cour Saint-Honore, between the Rues Saint-Nicaise, Saint-Honore, and
de l'Echelle; the Cour des Miracles, Rue du Bac; the Cour des Miracles,
Rue de Reuilly, and still another Cour des Miracles, Rue Jean Beausire.

"But that which, in the sixteenth century, formed a veritable quarter of
the city, was the Cour des Miracles of the Rue Saint-Sauveur, which
served as a refuge for beggars and vagabonds.

"'It consisted,' as we read in Sauval's _Antiquites_, 'of an open place
of very considerable size and of a very large _cul-de-sac_,
evil-smelling, miry, and irregular, which had no pavement whatever.
Formerly, it was confined to one of the farthest extremities of Paris.
At present, it is situated in that one of the quarters of the city which
is the worst built, the most filthy, and the most out of the way,
between the Rue Montorgueil, the convent of the Filles-Dieu, and the Rue
Neuve-Saint-Sauveur, as if it were in another world. To get to it, it is
necessary to go astray in little streets, villainous, stinking, crooked;
to enter it, it is necessary to descend a sufficiently long slope,
tortuous, rugged, uneven. I have seen there a house of dirt, half
buried, tumbling to pieces with old age and rottenness, which did not
cover a space of four square fathoms, and in which were lodged,
nevertheless, more than fifty households, having in charge an infinite
number of little c