Paris has undergone atrocious sufferings through war, famine, pestilence, and calamities of all kinds. The Normans, after burning one half of Paris, allowed the remainder to be ransomed with an enormous sum of money. In one of the famines by which Paris in its early days was so often visited, people cast lots as to which should be eaten. The taxes were so excessive that many pretended to be lepers, in order to profit by the exemption accorded in such cases. But it was sometimes not well to be a leper, real or pretended; for it was proclaimed one day to the sound of horn and trumpet that lepers throughout the kingdom should be exterminated: "in consequence of a mixture of herbs and human blood, with which, rolling it up in a linen cloth and tying it to a stone, they poison the wells and rivers." How terrible, and often how ridiculous, were the proclamations issued in those days! In front of the Grand-Châtelet six heralds of France, clothed in white velvet, and rod in hand, were wont to announce after a plague, a war, or a famine that there was nothing more to be feared, and that the king would be graciously pleased to receive taxes as before. In the centre of the so-called "town"--Paris in general, that is to say, as distinct from the city--was "la Maubuée" (derived, according to Victor Hugo, from _mauvaise fumée_), where Jews innumerable were roasted over fires of pitch and green wood to punish what a chronicler of the time terms their "anthropomancy"; and what the Counsellor de l'Ancre further describes as "the marvellous cruelty they have always shown towards Christians, their mode of life, their synagogue, so displeasing to God, their uncleanliness, and their stench." The unhappy Jews, however, were not the only victims. Close by, at the corner of the Rue du Gros-Chenet, was the place where sorcerers used to be burned. Torture, moreover, in its most hideous forms was practised upon criminals even until the time of the Revolution; which, while introducing the guillotine, abolished, in addition to a variety of other torments, breaking on the wheel, and the beating of criminals to death with the iron bar. Many of the names, still extant, of the old Paris streets recall the ferocity and the superstition of past times. The Rue de l'Arbre Sec was the Street of the Gibbet, with "Dry Tree" as its familiar name. The Rue d'Enfer, or Hell Street, was so called from a belief that this thoroughfare on the outskirts of Paris, just beyond the Luxemburg Gardens, was haunted by the fiend. In order to put an end to the scandal by which the whole neighbourhood was alarmed, it occurred to the authorities to make over the street to the Order of Capuchins who, they thought, would know how to deal with their inveterate enemy. The Capuchins accepted, with gratitude, the valuable trust; and thenceforth, whether as the result of some exorcising process or because public confidence had been restored, no more was heard of the visitor from below.