Offices, warehouses, leather stores have invaded the noble mansions of the sixteenth century, and the Bièvre winds, as if ashamed, through poor gardens, like it, fallen from their antique splendour. [Illustration: THE BIÈVRE TANNERIES _Etching by Martial_] Further on, there are more works and tanneries, black corners mean and malodorous, where thousands of rabbit-skins, hanging in mid-air, hard and dry, clash together with a noise of wood. To the very end, the unlucky river, harassed and exploited, cleans blood-stained skins, moves heavy wheels, or washes ghastly offal, amidst a smell as of barege. Finally, it runs to earth once more beneath the Hospital Boulevard, within evil-smelling, dark holes. But before the last fall, the Bièvre passes through an astonishingly strange lane, one of the oddest in this odd quarter: the Ruelle des Gobelins. It flows as a stream of red, green, and yellow tints, between patched-up, mouldy, tumble-down houses, in an odour of ammonia. And yet, near these hovels, among the heaps of tan, beside pits in which are macerating skins of flayed animals, a gem of carving rises as it were an appeal of beauty, a vestige of past splendour. It is the sculptured remains of an adorable Louis XV. pavilion of which Monsieur de Julienne had made a hunting-box; and this lovely paradox, this blossom of stone cast among such a mass of ugliness, is not one of the least surprises of the quarter so fertile in matters for astonishment. Moreover, a few yards from this sewer, the artists of the Gobelins Manufactory have laid out their work-and-study-gardens, in which shine the purple, gold and azure of the prettiest flowers in France. These, cleverly distributed, arrange a carpet of exquisite and radiant colours athwart the surrounding district of sombre sadness. On the confines of the town, is the Butte-aux-Cailles, a vast piece of waste land, cheerless and without charm, which, until 1863, was a sort of fresh country spot, with mills and farms on it. To-day, it is a quarter of hard labour, where numbers of rag-pickers classify the refuse of Paris. At the corner of the Ruelle des Peupliers, faggot-dealers have set up their huts; and hovels line strange streets made with the clearings of other streets. [Illustration: THE BIÈVRE ABOUT 1900--THE VALENCE MILL-RACE _Schaan, pinxit_ (Carnavalet Museum)] Once, these spacious grounds were one stretch of flower gardens and market gardens watered by the Bièvre.