Just opposite the College of France is the Collège du Plessis. “From my window at the College of France,” says M. Renan, in the preface to his “Abbesse de Jouarre,” “I witness daily the fall, stone by stone, of the last walls of the Collège du Plessis, founded by Geoffroi du Plessis, secretary to King Philippe the Long in 1517, enlarged in the seventeenth century by Richelieu, and in the eighteenth one of the centres of the best philosophical culture. There Turgot, the greatest man in our history, received his education from the Abbé Sigorgne, the first in France to grasp perfectly the ideas of Newton. The Collège du Plessis was closed in 1790. In 1793 and 1794 it became the saddest of the Paris prisons. There the “suspects” were confined, condemned in a sense beforehand; whence they only issued in order to go to the revolutionary tribunal or to death. I often try to imagine the language these walls, now torn open by the builders engaged in reconstruction, must have heard; those grassplots whose last trees have just been cut down. I think of the conversations which must have been held in those large halls of the ground floor during the hours immediately preceding the summons; and I have conceived a series of dialogues which, if I wrote them, I should call ‘Dialogues of the Last Night.’ The hour of death is essentially philosophical; at that hour everybody speaks well, everyone is in the presence of the Infinite, and is not tempted to make phrases. The condition of good dialogue is the sincerity of the personages. Now, the hour of death is the most sincere--when one approaches death in happy circumstances, entirely oneself, that is to say; sound in mind and body, without previous debilitation. The work I now offer the public is probably the only one of this series that I shall execute.” [Illustration: THE LYCÉE CONDORCET.] [Illustration: THE COURT OF THE SORBONNE.] CHAPTER X. THE SORBONNE. Robert de Sorbonne--The Sorbonne, its Origin and History--Richelieu--The Revolution--The New Sorbonne--Mercier’s Views.