Here not only were the voices of the great scholars heard and the subtleties of the fourteenth century, but also Etienne Marcel called the States General of 1357. From hence that Danton of the mediæval invasion sent out his messengers to the Feudality. Here the District gathered for the elections of 1789; here the Club met in 1791 and urged the debate that finally produced the Republic of the next year. It was here also that the three watchwords of the Republic were devised; here Hérbert veiled the Declaration; and here the last few words of 1794 were spoken. Here the century, which owes more perhaps to that site than to any place in France, has collected a museum of surgery, where you may see anomalies preserved in spirits, skeletons hung on wires, and other objects, interesting rather than sublime. As for the college and its estate, they continued for some three hundred years—that is, during the fourteenth, fifteenth, and sixteenth centuries—to increase in importance. It is a matter of common knowledge how soon the pure ideals of St. Francis had to compromise with the world. This Order, like all others, became wealthy, rooted, and traditional. The Cordeliers, as Paris grew, found themselves possessed of a most valuable plot, whose ground-value continually increased. They reserved the garden to the west, but for the rest—and especially around the buildings and along the lanes—houses were built. When the wall of Philip Augustus was first embedded by the growth of the city, and afterwards in part destroyed, the Cordeliers bought an extension to their estate, so that it stretched a little beyond the new street of “the Fossés,” which had been built on the site of the ditch. In 1580 their old thirteenth-century chapel (which must have been one of the best bits of early Gothic in Paris) was burnt down, and a larger one in the style of the time was put up by the piety of Henry IV. Throughout the seventeenth century the house seems to have suffered from a decay which continued throughout the succeeding hundred years, and culminated in the disasters of the Revolutionary period. They permitted the alienation of a strip to the west of their grounds, through which the municipality drove in 1673 the new street which, in compliment to the Order, they called “Rue de l’Observance,” after the name of their rule. With this exception no important change occurred to change the aspect of the quarter until the Revolutionary period with which we have to deal. * * * * *