The booksellers' stalls of the quais of Paris are famous, though it is doubtful if genuine bargains exist there in great numbers. It is significant, however, that more volumes of Dumas' romances are offered for sale--so it seems to the passer-by--than of any other author. The Seine opposite the Louvre, and, indeed, throughout the length of its flow through Paris, enters largely into the scheme of the romances, where scenes are laid in the metropolis. Like the throng which stormed the walls of the Louvre on the night of the 18th of August, 1527, during that splendid royal fête, the account of which opens the pages of "Marguerite de Valois," the Seine itself resembles Dumas' description of the midnight crowd, which he likens to "a dark and rolling sea, each swell of which increases to a foaming wave; this sea, extending all along the quai, spent its waves at the base of the Louvre, on the one hand, and against the Hôtel de Bourbon, which was opposite, on the other." In the chapter entitled "What Happened on the Night of the Twelfth of July," in "The Taking of the Bastille," Dumas writes of the banks of the Seine in this wise: "Once upon the quai, the two countrymen saw glittering on the bridge near the Tuileries the arms of another body of men, which, in all probability, was not a body of friends; they silently glided to the end of the quai, and descended the bank which leads along the Seine. The clock of the Tuileries was just then striking eleven. "When they had got beneath the trees which line the banks of the river, fine aspen-trees and poplars, which bathe their feet in its current, when they were lost to the sight of their pursuers, hid by their friendly foliage, the farmers and Pitou threw themselves on the grass and opened a council of war." Just previously the mob had battered down the gate of the Tuileries, as a means of escape from the pen in which the dragoons had crowded the populace. "'Tell me now, Father Billot,' inquired Pitou, after having carried the timber some thirty yards, 'are we going far in this way?' "'We are going as far as the gate of the Tuileries.' "'Ho, ho!' cried the crowd, who at once divined his intention. "And it made way for them more eagerly even than before. "Pitou looked about him, and saw that the gate was not more than thirty paces distant from them. "'I can reach it,' said he, with the brevity of a Pythagorean. "The labour was so much the easier to Pitou from five or six of the strongest of the crowd taking their share of the burden. "The result of this was a very notable acceleration in their progress. "In five minutes they had reached the iron gates. "'Come, now,' cried Billot, 'clap your shoulders to it, and all push together.' "'Good!' said Pitou. 'I understand now. We have just made a warlike engine; the Romans used to call it a ram.'