Under Henri IV. it was the abode of La Reine Margot, as Marguerite de Valois, the king’s divorced wife, was popularly called. “Queen Venus,” as will afterwards be seen, was another of her familiar names. This legendary heroine of the Tour de Nesle had scarcely taken possession of her new mansion, in August, 1605, when a placard was affixed to her door, inscribed with a quatrain in which her licentious life was satirised. The evil reputation brought to the house by Queen Margot remained attached to it as long as she lived there. In a previous sketch of the locality the story has already been told of the tragic event which caused Queen Margot to abandon the Hôtel de Sens for ever. She had been there scarcely a year when one of her pages, whose professions of love she had accepted, finding another page preferred to him, shot his rival almost beneath the queen’s eyes. Marguerite’s cry for vengeance, her offer of her own garter to anyone who would use it to strangle the assassin, his arrest, and her vow neither to eat nor drink until he had been executed, have already been told. Two days after (or, as some authorities have it, only one) the page Vermond, who had fled but was duly captured, lost his head beneath the axe of the executioner, when Queen Margot fainted away, and, on recovering herself, left the place for ever. She had scarcely quitted Paris when this murder of her lover before her door and the speedy gratification of her desire for vengeance on the assassin were thus set forth in verses sung freely in the public streets:-- _La Royne Vénus demi-morte_ _De voir mourir devant sa porte_ _Son Adonis, son cher Amour,_ _Pour vengeance a devants a face_ _Fait défaire en la mesme place_ _L’assassin presque au mesme jour_. The Hôtel de Torpane, in the Rue de Bernardins, was the mansion of the Bignon family, which has produced so many illustrious men in literature and in law. It was demolished in 1830, but remains of it still subsist. Some years ago a stone, bearing the motto of the Bignon family--“_Multa renascentur_”--was found (what irony!) in the midst of the ruins. Nothing of a fallen house lives again except, perhaps, certain ornaments which, like the sculpture of the Hôtel de Tortonne, are carried elsewhere--in this particular case, to a back room in the École des Beaux-Arts. The statues which once adorned the Hôtel de Torpane are said--but probably without foundation--to be from the hand of Jean Goujon.