North and east and west of the municipal centre, the Maison des Piliers, or old Hôtel de Ville on the Place de Grève, was a maze of streets filled with the various crafts of Paris. The tower of St. Jacques de la Boucherie, as yet unfinished, emerged from the butchers' and skinners' shops and slaughter-houses, which at the Rue des Lombards met the clothiers and furriers; the cutlers and the basketmakers were busy in streets now swept away to give place to the Avenue Victoria. Painters, glass-workers and colour merchants, grocers and druggists, made bright and fragrant the Rue de la Verrerie, weavers' shuttles rattled in the Rue de la Tixanderie (now swallowed up in the Rue de Rivoli); curriers and tanners plied their evil-smelling crafts in the Rue (now Quai) de la Mégisserie, and bakers crowded along the Rue St. Honoré. The Rue des Juifs sheltered the ancestral traffic of the children of Abraham. At the foot of the Pont au Change, on which were the shops of the goldsmiths and money-lenders, stood the grim thirteenth-century fortress of the Châtelet, the municipal guardhouse and prison; further on stood the episcopal prison, or _Four de l'Evêque_ (the bishop's oven). Round the Châtelet was a congeries of narrow, crooked lanes, haunts of ill-fame, where robbers lurked and vice festered. A little to the north were the noisy market-place of the Halles and the cemetery of the Innocents with its piles of skulls, and its vaulted arcade painted (1424) with the Dance of Death. Further north stood the immense abbey of St. Martin in the Fields, with its cloister and gardens and, a little to the west, the grisly fortress of the Knights-Templars. This is the Paris conjured from the past with such magic art by Victor Hugo in "Notre Dame," and gradually to be swept away in the next centuries by the Renaissance, pseudo-classic and Napoleonic builders and destroyers, until to-day scarcely a wrack is left behind.