These remains of the old girdle-wall, whose existence by many persons is scarcely suspected, are all that survives of the constructions of the sixteenth century. The thirteenth is still more imperfectly represented; though some forty years ago might be seen in the quarter of Saint-Marcel, at some paces from the river Bièvre, substantial remains of one of the lodges of St. Louis. In the Rue des Gobelins and the Rue des Marmousets are still extant relics, in the shape of a façade and the fragment of a wall, of the royal lodge where Queen Blanche listened beneath the willows of the Bièvre to the verses of Thibault de Champagne; where Charles VI. went mad one terrible night, which, beginning with a masquerade, ended with a conflagration; where Francis I. had secret rendezvous, to which playful reference is sometimes made in the pages of Rabelais. In the Rue Vieille du Temple, at the corner of the Rue des Francs Bourgeois, stands a graceful turret--bright relic of that sombre Hôtel Barbette which the Duke of Orleans, brother of Charles VI., was just leaving when he was killed at the very door by the followers of John the Fearless. A lamp, whose light was never to be extinguished, was placed there by one of the assassins, in expiation of the crime. Tradition says that “la belle Ferronnière” lived close by, and that it was by the light of the lamp, fixed beneath the turret, that the husband saw Francis I. escape one night from his wife’s house. After adorning a feudal mansion, subsequently to be transformed into the rich abode of a financier of the time of Louis XIV., what has this turret now become? Without losing anything of its graceful exterior, not even the grating, so finely worked, of its little window, it marks the corner of the bedroom occupied by the grocer who has his shop below! [Illustration: RUE DES CHANTRES, LOOKING TOWARDS THE QUAI.] John the Fearless was not troubled by the remorse experienced by his accomplice, whose repentance was for ever to be proclaimed by his votive lamp. The blow having been struck, his only thought was to guard against the consequences. Withdrawing to the Hôtel d’Artois, which afterwards took from him the name of the Hôtel de Bourgogne, he there constructed a stone room, or what was then called a donjon--not to be confounded with the English word obviously derived from it. The little fortress of John the Fearless was solidly built, for it exists even to this day. The square tower, at least eighty feet high, is indeed in perfect condition. Its walls are still crenellated, and it has lost nothing of its original physiognomy, except as regards the roof with which it has been covered in.