blackened, worn-out window-sills, with delicate sculptures now
scarcely discernible, seem too weak to bear the brown clay pots from
which springs the heart's-ease or the rose-bush of some poor
working-woman. Farther on are doors studded with enormous nails, where
the genius of our forefathers has traced domestic hieroglyphics, of
which the meaning is now lost forever. Here a Protestant attested his
belief; there a Leaguer cursed Henry IV.; elsewhere some bourgeois has
carved the insignia of his _noblesse de cloches_, symbols of his
long-forgotten magisterial glory. The whole history of France is there.

Next to a tottering house with roughly plastered walls, where an
artisan enshrines his tools, rises the mansion of a country gentleman,
on the stone arch of which above the door vestiges of armorial
bearings may still be seen, battered by the many revolutions that have
shaken France since 1789. In this hilly street the ground-floors of
the merchants are neither shops nor warehouses; lovers of the Middle
Ages will here find the _ouvrouere_ of our forefathers in all its
naive simplicity. These low rooms, which have no shop-frontage, no
show-windows, in fact no glass at all, are deep and dark and without
interior or exterior decoration. Their doors open in two parts, each
roughly iron-bound; the upper half is fastened back within the room,
the lower half, fitted with a spring-bell, swings continually to and
fro. Air and light reach the damp den within, either through the upper
half of the door, or through an open space between the ceiling and a
low front wall, breast-high, which is closed by solid shutters that
are taken down every morning, put up every evening, and held in place
by heavy iron bars.

This wall serves as a counter for the merchandise. No delusive display
is there; only samples of the business, whatever it may chance to be,