e to go; but along
others--and some of them remain to the present day--two stout citizens
could never have walked arm-in-arm. They looked like enormous cracks
between a couple of buildings, rather than as ways made for the
convenience of locomotion: they were pervious, perhaps, to donkeys,
but not to the loaded packhorse--the great street was intended for
that animal--coaches did not exist, and the long narrow carts of the
French peasantry, whenever they came into the city, did not occupy
much more space than the bags or packs of the universal carrier. To
many of these streets the most eccentric appellations were given;
there was the _Rue des Mauvaises Paroles_--people of ears polite had
no business to go near it; the _Rue Tire Chappe_--a spot where those
who objected to be plucked by the vests, or to have their clothes
pulled off their backs by importunate accosters, need not present
themselves; another in this quarter was called the _Rue Tire-boudin_.
Marie Stuart, when Queen of France, was riding, it is said, through it
one day, and struck, perhaps, by the looks of its inhabitants, asked
what the street was called. The original appellation was so indecent
that an officer of her guards, with courtly presence of mind, veiled
it under its present title. One was known as the _Rue Brise-miche_,
and the cleanliness of its inhabitants might instantly be judged of: a
fifth was the _Rue Trousse-vache_, and one of the shops in it was
adorned with an enormous sign of a red cow, with her tail sticking up
in the air and her head reared in rampant sauciness. A notorious
gambler, Thibault-au-de, well known for his skill in loading dice,
gave his name to one of these narrow veins of the town: Aubry, a
wealthy butcher, is still immortalized in another: and the _Rue du
Petit Hurleur_ probably commemorated some wicked youngster, whose
shouts were a greater nuisance to the neighbours than those of any of
his companions.

A wider kind of street was the _Rue de la Ferronerie_, opening into
the Rue St Denis, below the Church of the Innocents: it was the abode
of all the tinkers and smiths of Paris, and had not Henri IV. been in
a particular hurry that day, when he was posting off to old Sully in
the Rue St Antoine, he had never gone this way, and Ravaillac,
probably, had never been able to lean into the carriage and stab the
king. Just over the spot where the murder was committed, the placid
bust of the king still gazes on the busy scene