You may trace the line of the wall at this day by noting the street “Rue de Monsieur le Prince,” once called “Rue des Fossés Monsieur le Prince,” and running on the line of the outer ditch. The wall ran not twenty yards east of the modern street and exactly parallel to it. A portion of it may yet be seen in that neighbourhood, a great hollow round built into the wall of one of the houses, a cobbler’s shop in the Cour du Commerce; it is one (the last, I believe) of the half-towers which flanked Philip Augustus’s wall. In the beginning of the thirteenth century, very shortly after the death of St. Francis, the first preachers of the new Order which he had founded came to Paris. It was the moment when the University was climbing up the hill, building its colleges, having possessed its charter for some years, and already a strong, organised, wealthy, and therefore conservative body. This order of preachers, wandering, intensely new, and founded by a mystic whose place in Christendom was not yet finally determined, were bound to come into collision with the spirit of the place. It must be remembered that the thirteenth century was not transitional, but, on the contrary, a time of settled order. For a century it had known the Roman law; it had everywhere the Gothic architecture; it had systemised and made legal the rough accidents of feudal custom; it was wealthy, proud, and successful. On it there falls one of those creations which are only possible in a time of energy, and yet which almost invariably quarrel with the period that has produced them. An Order devoted to simplicity, making of holy poverty the foundation of the inner life, specially created for the poor (whom the growing differentiation of society was beginning to debase), the early Franciscans were essentially revolutionary, because they built on the great foundations of all active and permanent reform—I mean the appetite for primitive conditions, and the determination to break through the net of complexity which the long growths of time weave about a conservative society. The rich Abbey of St. Germains gave them asylum. It was proud to possess dependants, it was great enough to afford benevolent experiments, and it took pleasure in offending the University, which was an upstart in its eyes, and was beginning to show as a powerful rival in the affairs of the south side of Paris. The Franciscans, therefore—whom the populace already called the “Cordeliers” from the girdle of rope about their habit—were permitted to settle in that little corner of their estate which had been cut off by the building of the town wall, and they occupied a triangle of which the wall formed the south-western, a lane (afterwards called “Rue des Cordeliers”) the northern, and an irregular line bounding one of the University estates the south-eastern side.