wards the mystery, which was to be performed in the Grande Salle, or great hall of the Palais de Justice, well roofed and windowed; and that even the curious left the poor ill-dressed maypole to shiver all alone, under a January sky, in the cemetery of the Chapelle de Braque.

The people flocked chiefly into the approaches of the Palais de Justice, because it was known that the Flemish ambassadors who had arrived the day but one before, intended to be present at the performance of the mystery and the election of the Fools' Pope, which was likewise to take place in the Grande Salle.

It was no easy matter, on that day, to gain entrance into that great hall, although it was then reputed to be the largest single apartment in the world, Sauval not having as yet measured the great hall of the castle of Montargis. The open space in front of the Palais, thronged with people, presented to the gazers from the windows the appearance of a sea into which five or six streets, like the mouths of so many rivers, were every moment discharging fresh floods of human heads. The waves of this multitude, incessantly swelling, broke against the angles of the houses, which projected here and there, like so many promontories, into the irregularlyshaped basin of the Place. In the centre of the high Gothic 1 front of the Palais, the great flight of steps, incessantly ascended and descended by a double stream, which, after being broken by the intermediate perron or staircase leading from the basement story, spread in broad waves over its two lateral declivities, - the great staircase, we say, poured its stream incessantly into the Place, like a cascade into a lake. The shouts, the peals of laughter, the clattering of those thousands of feet, made altogether a great noise and clamor. From time to time this noise and clamor were redoubled; the stream which carried all the multitude towards the steps of entrance was checked, disturbed, and thrown into an eddy. This was occasioned by the thrust of some archer, or the horse of some one of the provost's sergeants, prancing about to restore order, which admirable expedient the provost has handed down to the constabulary, the constabulary to the mounted police, and the mounted police to our gendarmerie of Paris.

At the doors, at the casements and small round attic windows, and on the roofs, swarmed thousands of goodly bourgeois faces, looking calmly and soberly at the Palais or at the crowd, and exhibiting a most perfect satisfaction: for many of the good people of Paris are quite content with the spectacle of the spectators - nay, even a wall behind which something is going on is to us an object of no small interest.

If it could be given to us to mingle, in imagination, dominant feature is the pointed arch, a form that originated in the semicircular arch, the characteristic feature of that period of architecture that preceded the Gothic.

among those Parisians of the fifteenth century, and to enter along with them, thrust about, squeezed, elbowed into that immense hall of the Palais, which was found so small on the 6th of January, 1482, the spectacle would have both interest and attraction for us; for we should find around us the most striking kind of novelty, that of great antiquity brought suddenly before the eye.

With the reader's permission we will endeavor to retrace, in idea, the impression which he would have received in crossing with us the threshold of that great hall, amid that motley throng in surcoat, hacqueton, and cotte-hardie.

And first of all our ears are filled with the buzzing of the multitude, and our eyes dazzled by the objects around us. Overhead is a double vault of Gothic groining, lined with carved wainscoting, painted azure, and sprinkled with golden fleurs-de-lis; under our feet, a pavement of black and white marble in alternate squares; a few paces from us, an enormous pillar, then another, then another, making in all seven pillars in the length of the hall, supporting, in a central line, the internal extremities of the double vaulting. Around the first four pillars are little shops or stalls, all glittering with glass and trinkets; and around the last three are oaken benches, worn and polished by the breeches of the pleaders and the gowns of the procureurs. Around the hall, along its lofty walls, between the doors, between the windows, between the pillars, we behold the interminable range of the statues of all the French kings, from Pharamond downwards: the rois fainéans, or do-nothing kings, with their eyes upon the ground and their arms hanging down; the valiant and battling kings, with their faces and hands boldly lifted up to heaven. Then, in the long pointed windows glows painted glass of a thousand colors; at the large entrances of the hall are rich doors finely carved; and the whole, vaults, pillars, walls, cornices, and door-cases, wainscoting, doors, and statues, are splendidly illuminated from top to bottom with blue and gold, which, already a little tarnished at the period to which we have carried ourselves back, had almost entirely disappeared under dust and cobwebs in the year of grace 1549, in which the early Parisian antiquary, Du Breuil, still admired it by tradition.

Let the reader now imagine that immense, oblong hall, made visible by the wan light of a January day, and entered by a motley and noisy crowd, pouring along by the walls and circling round the pillars, and he will at once have a general idea of the scene, of which we will endeavor to point out more precisely the curious particulars.

It is certain that if Ravaillac had not assassinated Henry IV., there would have been no documents relative to the trial of Ravaillac deposited in the registry of the Palais de Justice, no accomplices interested in causing the disappearance of the said documents, and therefore no incendiaries obliged, for want of any better expedient, to burn the registry for the sake of burning the documents, and to burn the Palais de Justice for the sake of burning the registry, - in short, no fire of 1618. The whole Palais would have been still standing, with its old Grande Salle; we might have said to the reader, "You have only to go to Paris and see it;" and so neither we should have been under the necessity of writing, nor he of reading, any description of it whatever. All which proves this very novel truth, that great events have incalculable consequences.

It is indeed very possible that Ravaillac's accomplices had nothing at all to do with the fire of 1618. We have two other very plausible explanations of it. The first is, the great fiery star, a foot broad and half a yard high, which, as every Parisian knows, fell from the sky right upon the Palais, on the 7th of March, just after midnight. The other is, this noble quatrain of the old humorist Théophile :

"Certes, ce fut un triste jeu

Quand à Paris dame Justice,
Pour avoir mange trop d'épice,
Se mit tout le palais en feu." 1

Whatever may be thought of this triple explanation, political, physical, and poetical, of the conflagration of the Palais de Justice in 1618, the fact of which unfortunately there is no doubt, is the conflagration itself. Owing to that catastrophe, and above all to the divers successive restorations which have made away with what it had spared, there now remains very little of that original residence of the kings of France, of that palace the elder sister