study might be made of the successive title-deeds of property in
Paris! A private lunatic asylum performs its functions in the rue des
Batailles in the former dwelling of the Chevalier Pierre Bayard du
Terrail, once without fear and without reproach; a street has now been
built by the present bourgeois administration through the site of the
hotel Necker. Old Paris is departing, following its kings who
abandoned it. For one masterpiece of architecture saved from
destruction by a Polish princess (the hotel Lambert, Ile Saint-Louis,
bought and occupied by the Princess Czartoriska) how many little
palaces have fallen, like this dwelling of Petitot, into the hands of
such as Thuillier.

Here follows the causes which made Mademoiselle Thuillier the owner of
the house.



CHAPTER II

THE HISTORY OF A TYRANNY

At the fall of the Villele ministry, Monsieur Louis-Jerome Thuillier,
who had then seen twenty-six years' service as a clerk in the ministry
of finance, became sub-director of a department thereof; but scarcely
had he enjoyed the subaltern authority of a position formerly his
lowest hope, when the events of July, 1830, forced him to resign it.
He calculated, shrewdly enough, that his pension would be honorably
and readily given by the new-comers, glad to have another office at
their disposal. He was right; for a pension of seventeen hundred
francs was paid to him immediately.