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Beyond the walls, several suburban villages pressed close about the gates, but less numerous and more scattered than those of the University Behind the Bastille there were twenty hovels clustered round the curious sculptures of the Croix-Faubin and the flying buttresses of the Abbey of Saint- Antoine des Champs; then Popincourt, lost ae of wine-shops; the hamlet of Saint-Laurent with its church whose bell tower, from afar, seemed to add itself to the pointed towers of the Porte Saint- Martin; the Faubourg Saint-Denis, with the vast enclosure of Saint-Ladre; beyond the Monte- Batelière, encircled hite walls; behind it, with its chalky slopes, Montmartre, which had then almost as many churches as windmills, and which has kept only the wind but bread for the body Lastly, beyond the Louvre, the Faubourg Saint- Honoré, already considerable at that ti away into the fields, and Petit-Bretagne glea abroad, in whose centre swelled the horrible apparatus used for boiling counterfeiters Between la Courtille and Saint-Laurent, your eye had already noticed, on the su amid desert plains, a sort of edifice which resembled from a distance a ruined colonnade, mounted upon a basement with its foundation laid bare This was neither a Parthenon, nor a temple of the Olympian Jupiter It was Montfauçon
Now, if the enumeration of so many edifices, summary as we have endeavored to eneral ie of old Paris, as we have constructed it, ill recapitulate it in a feords In the centre, the island of the City, rese out its bridges with tiles for scales; like legs froray shell of roofs On the left, the , of the University; on the right, the vast seardens and monuments The three blocks, city, university, and town, marbled with innumerable streets Across all, the Seine, "foster-mother Seine," as says Father Du Breul, blocked with islands, bridges, and boats All about an immense plain, patched with a thousand sorts of cultivated plots, soith fine villages On the left, Issy, Vanvres, Vaugirarde, Montrouge, Gentilly, with its round tower and its square tower, etc; on the right, twenty others, from Conflans to Ville-l'Evêque On the horizon, a border of hills arranged in a circle like the rim of the basin Finally, far away to the east, Vincennes, and its seven quadrangular towers to the south, Bicêtre and its pointed turrets; to the north, Saint-Denis and its spire; to the west, Saint Cloud and its donjon keep Such was the Paris which the ravens, who lived in 1482, beheld from the summits of the towers of Notre-Dame