the north side of the cathedral, so
close under its walls that the supporting pillar of one of the great
flying buttresses was planted in the spinster's garden. If you wander
round behind the church in search of this more than historic habitation
you will have occasion to see that the side and rear of Saint Gatien
make a delectable and curious figure. A narrow lane passes beside the
high wall which conceals from sight the palace of the archbishop and
beneath the flying buttresses, the far-projecting gargoyles, and the
fine south porch of the church. It terminates in a little dead
grass-grown square entitled the Place Gregoire de Tours. All this part
of the exterior of the cathedral is very brown, ancient, Gothic,
grotesque; Balzac calls the whole place "a desert of stone." A
battered and gabled wing or out-house (as it appears to be) of the
hidden palace, with a queer old stone pulpit jutting out from it, looks
down on this melancholy spot, on the other side of which is a seminary
for young priests, one of whom issues from a door in a quiet corner,
and, holding it open a moment behind him, shows a glimpse of a sunny
garden, where you may fancy other black young figures strolling up and
down. Mademoiselle Gamard's house, where she took her two abbes to
board, and basely conspired with one against the other, is still farther
round the cathedral. You cannot quite put your hand upon it to-day, for
the dwelling of which you say to yourself that it must have been
Mademoiselle Gamard's does not fulfil all the conditions mentioned in
Balzac's description. The edifice in question, however, fulfils
conditions enough; in particular, its little court offers hospitality to
the big buttress of the church. Another buttress, corresponding with
this (the two, between them, sustain the gable of the north transept),
is planted in the small cloister, of which the door on the farther side
of the little soundless Rue de la Psalette, where nothing seems ever to
pass, opens opposite to that of Mademoiselle Gamard. There is a very
genial old sacristan, who introduced me to this cloister from the
church. It is very small and solitary, and much mutilated; but it
nestles with a kind of wasted friendliness beneath the big walls of the
cathedral. Its lower arcades have been closed, and it has a small plot
of garden in the middle, with fruit-trees which I should imagine to be
too much overshadowed. In one corner is a remarkably picturesque turret,
th