Stuart, also the custom of the parliament,--a man who for twenty years
was the syndic of his corporation, and who lived in the street we have
just described.

The house of Lecamus was one of three which formed the three angles of
the open space at the end of the pont au Change, where nothing now
remains but the tower of the Palais de Justice, which made the fourth
angle. On the corner of this house, which stood at the angle of the
pont au Change and the quai now called the quai aux Fleurs, the
architect had constructed a little shrine for a Madonna, which was
always lighted by wax-tapers and decked with real flowers in summer
and artificial ones in winter. On the side of the house toward the rue
du Pont, as on the side toward the rue de la Vieille-Pelleterie, the
upper story of the house was supported by wooden pillars. All the
houses in this mercantile quarter had an arcade behind these pillars,
where the passers in the street walked under cover on a ground of
trodden mud which kept the place always dirty. In all French towns
these arcades or galleries are called /les piliers/, a general term to
which was added the name of the business transacted under them,--as
"piliers des Halles" (markets), "piliers de la Boucherie" (butchers).

These galleries, a necessity in the Parisian climate, which is so
changeable and so rainy, gave this part of the city a peculiar
character of its own; but they have now disappeared. Not a single
house in the river bank remains, and not more than about a hundred
feet of the old "piliers des Halles," the last that have resisted the
action of time, are left; and before long even that relic of the
sombre labyrinth of old Paris will be demolished. Certainly, the
existence of such old ruins of the middle-ages is incompatible with
the grandeurs of modern Paris. These observations are meant not so