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Count Hannibal

Page 79

Where the old wall of Paris, of which no vestige remains, ran down on the

east to the north bank of the river, the space in the angle between the

Seine and the ramparts beyond the Rue St. Pol wore at this date an aspect

typical of the troubles of the time. Along the waterside the gloomy old

Palace of St. Pol, once the residence of the mad King Charles the

Sixth--and his wife, the abandoned Isabeau de Baviere--sprawled its maze

of mouldering courts and ruined galleries; a dreary monument of the

Gothic days which were passing from France. Its spacious curtilage and

dark pleasaunces covered all the ground between the river and the Rue St.

Antoine; and north of this, under the shadow of the eight great towers of

the Bastille, which looked, four outward to check the stranger, four

inward to bridle the town, a second palace, beginning where St. Pol

ended, carried the realm of decay to the city wall.

This second palace was the Hotel des Tournelles, a fantastic medley of

turrets, spires, and gables, that equally with its neighbour recalled the

days of the English domination; it had been the abode of the Regent

Bedford. From his time it had remained for a hundred years the town

residence of the kings of France; but the death of Henry II., slain in

its lists by the lance of the same Montgomery who was this day fleeing

for his life before Guise, had given his widow a distaste for it.

Catherine de Medicis, her sons, and the Court had abandoned it; already

its gardens lay a tangled wilderness, its roofs let in the rain, rats

played where kings had slept; and in "our palace of the Tournelles"

reigned only silence and decay. Unless, indeed, as was whispered abroad,

the grim shade of the eleventh Louis sometimes walked in its desolate

precincts.

In the innermost angle between the ramparts and the river, shut off from

the rest of Paris by the decaying courts and enceintes of these forsaken

palaces, stood the Arsenal. Destroyed in great part by the explosion of

a powder-mill a few years earlier, it was in the main new; and by reason

of its river frontage, which terminated at the ruined tower of Billy, and

its proximity to the Bastille, it was esteemed one of the keys of Paris.

It was the appanage of the Master of the Ordnance, and within its walls

M. de Biron, a Huguenot in politics, if not in creed, who held the office

at this time, had secured himself on the first alarm. During the day he

had admitted a number of refugees, whose courage or good luck had led

them to his gate; and as night fell--on such a carnage as the hapless

city had not beheld since the great slaughter of the Armagnacs, one

hundred and fifty-four years earlier--the glow of his matches through the

dusk, and the sullen tramp of his watchmen as they paced the walls,

indicated that there was still one place in Paris where the King's will

did not run.

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