Each day, in fact, found the party rolling farther from the shady environs, through into the hot heart of the city, towards scenes or structures that were multiplied by each previous discovery: for if the long stately façades of the Tuileries, from its formal gardens swarming with people and statues, ran already half-linked to the gorgeous old Louvre, steeped pale in the southern flood of light above the river, till all its deep-set, embossed windows seemed diamonds in the rich Corinthian filagree that framed them, though the workmen were still busy at its unfinished roof, like emmets from the crowd along the quays; so these also pointed to the Palais Royal court, with its new arcades and glittering shops—or, again, far through the labyrinth of exhaustless streets, where moted and dusty shadows plunged into the gloom of deep lanes, to the grim grey towers of the Bastille rising embattled out of the squalid fauxbourg, which blackened in manufactory smoke beyond—miles back, too, it led across some bridge, to the Gobelins, to the close and dingy quarter of the university, with its old legends of learning, or magic in dark ages; its careless students swaggering past, or smoking from their high-perched casements; its grisettes, that sat at work opposite with an air of coquettish grace amidst their poverty, their hair neither frizzed nor powdered, with a bright cotton handkerchief twined half about it, watering their little mignonette-boxes, or chirping to their bird-cages that hung outside to a gleam of sunshine;—or to where the golden dome of the great hospital hung in the air, faintly bright; to the bronze form of Henry of Navarre riding regardless above the throng of the market-place, and where the two huge cathedral-towers of Notre Dame stood over their mountain of roof, above the gaunt old houses of the island Cité; with the sharp-peaked prison-turrets and grated loopholes of the Conciergerie lifted from the river’s edge, whose muddy eddies swam each way by, among the barges. The Colonel had been in Paris many years before, ere he had had any interest in it save that of a young man, in lively company; when all sons of gentlemen made the grand tour, and the old glories of Versailles were still reflected even at the court of Louis Quinze, in the elegant dissipation of his latter days: he had come since then, indeed, into sterner contact with Frenchmen abroad; but it served him now, in making shift to act as guide among the principal wonders of the capital—when he rode near the carriage, sometimes accompanied by Mr Thorpe, the tutor, on a quiet white mare from the hackney stables. And Lady Willoughby mildly eyed the Bastille, or gently noticed the sumptuousness of the Louvre, at her husband’s remark; suffering herself to be handed out to some sentinel-guarded vestibule, and led along some chill historical corridor, although it might cost a shudder at what was told of it; if some positive domestic duty did not rather keep her all day at home.