"One evening the setting sun lit up the sky with a purple red colour, and bordered the horizon that lay between Sèvres and Saint Cloud with a ribbon of fire; I was on the Pont des Arts, with M. de Jouy's _L'Ermite_ in my hand. Guided by the Academician, I had come there as an observer to the centre of a bird's-eye view; for this particular place is a focus where a thousand rays meet and converge. Opposite to me, the city, the cradle of Paris, with its houses piled up in the shape of a triangle, and as close to one another as a battle corps; at the head of the city, the Pont Neuf, with its ancient arches and its nine adjoining streets. To the left, the Louvre, which is no longer the old Louvre, with its heavy tower and belfry; the Tuileries, that royal _pied-à-terre,_ whose name is ennobled with the dignity of time and of the revolutions which have passed over its head; a monument of which can be said, as Milton said of Satan: 'Lightning has struck it and marked its face!' To the right, the Mint, the sole building in Paris which, together with the Timbre-Royal and the Morgue, possess a physiognomy of their own, and, so to speak, show the nature of their existence. Below, the Institut and the Bibliothèque Mazarine. "I had reached thus far in my _circumspection,_ when my _cicerone_ (I still refer to M. de Jouy) informed me, in a footnote, that at this place formerly stood the tower of Nesle, from the top of which, according to the chroniclers, several queens or princes were forced to fling themselves into the Seine, to get rid the more surely and swiftly of the misfortune they had drawn down upon themselves. I was much struck by this anecdote. When still young and at college, I had read Brantôme and what it contained about the tower of Nesle; but the recollection of it had been effaced from my memory: it now returned to me vividly and suddenly. Assuming a twofold power from the hour and the place where I stood, it returned with redoubled force and impressiveness; it completely took possession of me.... For the first time, I detected the drama, and my first and best drama was conceived! "There is something both attractive and terrible in this story of debauchery and of princely slaughters, consummated in the night, at midnight, between the thick walls of a tower, with no witnesses but the burning lamps, the attendant assassins, and God watching all! Something which takes possession of the soul, in the hutchery of these young men (they were all young and beautiful!) who had come there weaponless and without mistrust,... a truly royal quarry, which hyænas and tigers might envy! But I am letting myself run away in these poetical reflections, and I forget that I am, and only desire to be, a story-teller.