and the three farms of the city of Paris disappeared in this commotion. Charles IX., who was a great hand at building, and was responsible for the sculpturing in the Louvre and the carving of the fountain of the Innocents, paid a visit to the ruins with his architect. He designed the plan of a new building, began the fresh erection and, as he was both a great artist and a great poet, it is probable that he would have made a good piece of work of it. But Queen Catherine of Medici, having already got rid of one son, was not sorry to be rid of Charles IX., after the fashion of François II., in order to hasten the coming of Henri III. In case this accusation against Catherine de Medici should strike our readers as rather too strong, who may prefer to look upon the death of Charles IX. as the judgment of God (an act which, indeed, might quite possibly go hand in hand with the poisoning of Charles IX. by his mother), we will here reproduce a dialogue recorded by Bassompierre; it is short, but instructive. "Sire," Bassompierre said to King Louis XIII., who was seated in the embrasure of a window of the old Louvre, fiercely blowing a horn,--"sire, you ought not to blow with all your strength like that; you are weak in the lungs, and the same thing might happen to you as happened to King Charles IX." "My dear Bassompierre," Louis XIII. replied, "King Charles IX. did not die from blowing his horn too long and too frequently; he died from being so imprudent as to become reconciled to his mother, after he had had the prudence to quarrel with Catherine of Medici." Let us return to the Arsenal, and to another king who was so imprudent as to quarrel with his wife--or, rather, with the House of Austria to which she belonged--to Henri IV. He it was, in fact, who finished the Arsenal and laid out the beautiful garden, which we can still see in pictures of the period of Louis XIII. He gave it to Sully, wherein to carry on his ministry of finance; and here it was that the parsimonious minister amassed the millions with which Henri III. intended to carry on his war with Flanders, when the poignard of Ravaillac put an end to that strange dream of the seventeenth century, which was to become a reality in the nineteenth, namely, the union of the seven elective republics and of the six hereditary monarchies, under one supreme head, established under the title of the _Congrès de la Paix._ Ah! my dear Mr. Cobden, you with whom I once spent several dull days and shared some melancholy dinners in Spain, the idea of this Peace Congress did not originate with you; it came from our unfortunate King Henri IV.,-"Let us render to Cæsar the things that are Cæsar's." And so all you who visit the Arsenal should know that those beautiful rooms which now form the library were decorated by Sully with Henri IV.'s money.