The printers and booksellers of the middle ages were favoured persons, and their rank was high. In the days of solemn processions the booksellers led the way, followed by the paper-makers, the parchment-makers, the scribes,--who had not wholly died out,--the binders and the illuminators. In these days the printers were granted an emblazoned arms, which was characteristic and distinguished. The same was true of the _avocats_, who bore upon their escutcheon a gowned figure, with something very like a halo surrounding its head. The innkeepers went one better, and had a bishop with an undeniable halo. This is curious and inexplicable in the light of our modern conception of similar things, but it's better than a shield with quarterings representing half a canal-boat and half a locomotive, which was recently adopted by an enterprising watering-place which shall be nameless. In the same ancient quarter are the old towers of Charlemagne and St. Martin. This part of the town is the nucleus of the old foundation, the site of the _oppidum_ of the _Turones_, the _Cæsarodunum gallo-romain_, and of the life which centred around the old abbey of St. Martin, so venerated and so powerful in the middle ages. To the inviolable refuge of this old abbey came multitudes of Christian pilgrims from the world over; the Merovingians to undergo the penances imposed upon them by the bishops and clerics in expiation of their crimes. Under Charlemagne, the Abbé Alcuin founded great schools of languages, history, astronomy, and music, from which founts of learning went forth innumerable and illustrious religious teachers. All but the two towers of this old religious foundation are gone. The years of the Revolution saw the fall of the abbey; a street was cut through the nave of its church, and the two dismembered parts stand to-day as monuments to the sacrilege of modern times. To-day a banal faubourg has sprung up around the site of the abbey, with here and there old tumble-down houses either of wood and stone, such as one reads of in the pages of Balzac, or sees in the designs of Doré, or with their sides covered with overlapping slates. Amid all these is an occasional treasure of architectural art, such as the graceful Fountain of Beaune, the work of Michel Colombe, and some remains of early Renaissance houses of somewhat more splendid appointments than their fellows, particularly the Maison de Tristan l'Hermite, the Hôtel Xaincoings, and many exquisite fragments now made over into an _auberge_ or a _cabaret_, which make one dream of Rabelais and his Gargantua.