The extensive district on the left bank of the Seine, through which was cut in modern times the wide boulevard St-Germain, was in its remotest days the Villa Sancti Germani, with its “_prés-aux-clercs_” a rural expanse surrounding the abbey and quite distinct from the city of Paris, without its bounds. The inhabitants of that privileged district were exempt from Paris “rates and taxes,” to use our latter-day expression, and enjoyed other legal immunities. They were subject only to the authority of the abbey administration and were actively employed in agricultural and other rustic occupations for the abbey benefit. The territory was a region of thatched-roofed dwellings, barns and granaries. When at length certain _grands seigneurs_ chose the district for the erection of country mansions, these newly built houses were soon forcibly abandoned, many of them destroyed, in the course of the Hundred Years’ War. A century or more later more mansions were built and the bourg St-Germain grew into the aristocratic quarter it finally became after the erection of the Tuileries, Catherine de’ Medeci’s new palace, in the middle of the sixteenth century. The venerable old Rue du Bac was made on the left bank of the Seine in a straight line with the ford (_bac_) across the river in the year 1550, for the transport of materials needed in the construction of the palace. The rough road along which the carters came with their loads, stone from the southern quarries, etc., grew into a fashionable street in the early years of the century following, when, after due authorization of the abbé of St-Germain-des-Prés, fine new _hôtels_ were built in every direction across the Prè-aux-Clercs, to be within easy distance of the Tuileries and the Court. Thus was created, in the first years of the eighteenth century, the patrician Faubourg St-Germain. The old houses in Rue du Bac which were nearest the river were burnt by the Communards in 1871, when the Tuileries itself was destroyed.