"
Also, we made ourselves at home in Paris, especially old Paris.
For instance, there was the island of St. Louis, with its stately old
mansions _entre cour et jardin,_ behind grim stone portals and high
walls where great magistrates and lawyers dwelt in dignified
seclusion--the nobles of the rove: but where once had dwelt, in days
gone by, the greater nobles of the sword-crusaders, perhaps, and knights
templars, like Brian de Bois Guilbert.
And that other more famous island, la Cite, where Paris itself was born,
where Notre Dame reared its twin towers above the melancholy, gray,
leprous walls and dirty brown roofs of the Hotel-Dieu.
Pathetic little tumble down old houses, all out of drawing and
perspective, nestled like old spiders' webs between the buttresses of
the great cathedral and on two sides of the little square in front (the
Place du Parvis Notre Dame) stood ancient stone dwellings, with high
slate roofs and elaborately wrought iron balconies. They seemed to have
such romantic histories that I never tired of gazing at them, and
wondering what the histories could be; and now I think of it, one of
these very dwellings must have been the Hotel de Gondelaurier, where,
according to the most veracious historian that ever was, poor Esmeralda
once danced and played the tambourine to divert the fair damsel
Fleur-de-Lys de Gondelaurier and her noble friends, all of whom she so
transcended in beauty, purity, goodness, and breeding (although she was
but an untaught, wandering gypsy girl, out of the gutter); and there,
before them all and the gay archer, she was betrayed to her final
undoing by her goat, whom she had so imprudently taught how to spell
the beloved name of "Phebus.
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