In the court of the church and on the façade of the monastery toward the Rue Tchinar—the Street of the Plane-Tree—are stone escutcheons bearing the lilies of France and the arms of a Comte de St. Priest. He was a French ambassador at the time of our Revolutionary War. The building being under French protection and on the central street of old, of oldest Galata—the one which climbs past the palace of the Podestà from the water’s edge to the Tower—was occupied at different times by the notables of the French colony. Among these, about the middle of the eighteenth century, was a merchant named Louis Chénier. Settling as a young man in Galata, he had become deputy of the nation—an office peculiar to the colony from the time of Colbert—right-hand-man to the ambassador, and husband, like many a European before and after him, of a Levantine lady. Her family, that is, were of European—in this case of Spanish—origin, but by long residence in the Levant and by intermarriage with Greeks had lost their own language. The seventh child of this couple was André Chénier, the poet of the French Revolution. His birthplace is marked by a marble tablet. The poet never saw the Street of the Plane-Tree, however, after he was three years old. He grew up in Paris, where, as every one knows, he was almost the last victim of the Terror. The largest mission left in Galata is S. Benoît, whose walls now overshadow the least monastic quarter of the town. Its history is even more varied than that of S. Pierre, having been occupied and reoccupied at different times by the Benedictines, the Observants, the Capuchins, and the Jesuits. The last were the longest tenants, carrying on a devoted work for nearly two hundred years. After the secularisation of their order in 1773 they were succeeded by the Lazarists, who have not fallen behind in the high traditions of the mission. The place has a distinctly mediæval air, with its high walls, its Gothic gateway, and its machicolated campanile. Nothing is left, alas, of the mosaics which used to decorate the church. After so many fires I fear there is no chance of their being discovered under modern plaster. But the pillars of the porch are doubtless those which a diplomatic father obtained by gift from the Sheï’h ül Islam in 1686. And there are a number of interesting tablets about the building. One of them records not too truthfully the rebuilding of the church by Louis XIV. The most notable, perhaps, is the tombstone of Rakoczy, Prince of Transylvania and pretender to the throne of Hungary, who lived twenty years in exile at Rodosto, on the Sea of Marmora. When he died there in 1738 his friends asked permission to bury him in Galata, but were refused. They accordingly pretended to inter him at Rodosto. As a matter of fact, his coffin was sent in one of the many boxes containing his effects to S. Benoît. There the royal exile was secretly buried in the church, his grave long remaining unmarked. Another