It was in Henry's reign that the Penitents, a regularised order of reformed Franciscan Tertiaries, were established at Picpus, a small village south-east of the Porte St. Antoine, and the friars became known to the Parisians as the Picpuses. The buildings are now occupied by the nuns of the Sacré Coeur, whose church contains a much venerated statuette of the Virgin, which, in Henry's reign, stood over the portal of the Capucin convent in the Rue St. Honoré. Readers of _Les Misérables_ will remember that it was over the high walls of this convent that Jean Valjean escaped with Cosette from his pursuers. At the end of the garden lie buried in the cemetery of Picpus the victims of the Revolution who were guillotined on the Place du Trône Renversé (now du Trône). [Illustration: OLD HOUSES NEAR PONT ST. MICHEL, SHOWING SPIRE OF THE STE. CHAPELLE.] [Illustration: PONT ST. MICHEL.] We are able to give the impression which the Paris of Henri Quatre made on an English traveller, a friend of Ben Johnson and author of _Coryat's Crudities, hastily gobbled up in five months' Travell_. The first objects that met Coryat's eye are characteristic. As he travelled along the St. Denis road he passed "seven[124] faire pillars of freestone at equal distances, each with an image of St. Denis and his two companions, and a little this side of Paris was the fairest gallows I ever saw, built on Montfaucon, which consisted of fourteene fair pillars of freestone." He notes "the fourteene gates of Paris, the goodly buildings, mostly of fair, white stone and"--a detail always unpleasantly impressed on travellers--"the evil-smelling streets, which are the dirtiest and the most stinking I ever saw in any city in my life. Lutetia! well dothe it brooke being so called from the Latin word _lutum_, which signifieth dirt." Coryat was impressed by the bridges--"the goodly bridge of white freestone nearly finished (the Pont Neuf); a famous bridge that far exceedeth this, having one of the fairest streets in Paris called our Ladies street; the bridge of Exchange where the goldsmiths live; St. Michael's bridge, and the bridge of Birds." He admires the "Via Jacobea, full of bookesellers' faire shoppes, most plentifully furnished with bookes, and the fair building, very spacious and broad, where the Judges sit in the Palais de Justice, the roofs sumptuously gilt and embossed, with an exceeding multitude of great, long bosses hanging downward." Coryat next visited the fine quadrangle of the Louvre, whose outside was exquisitely wrought with festoons, and decked with many stately pillars and images. From Queen Mary's bedroom he went to a room[125] "which excelleth not only all that are now in the world but also all that were since the creation thereof, even a gallery, a perfect description whereof would require a large volume, with a roofe of most glittering and admirable beauty. Yea, so unspeakably fair is it that a man can hardly comprehend it in his mind