At the north corner of the Rue des Archives is the entrance to the National Archives, housed in the fine pseudo-classical Hôtel de Soubise, constructed in 1704 on the site of the Hôtel of the Constable de Clisson, of which the old Gothic (restored) portal exists in the Rue des Archives. It was at the Hôtel de Clisson that Charles VI., after his terrible vengeance on the revolted burgesses, agreed to remit further punishment, and for a time the mansion was known as the Hôtel des Grâces. [Illustration: ARCHIVES NATIONALES IN HÔTEL SOUBISE, SHOWING TOWERS OF HÔTEL DE CLISSON.] Lower down the Rue des Archives are the Rue de l'Homme Armé and the fifteenth-century cloisters of the monastery of the Billettes, founded at the end of the thirteenth century to commemorate the miracle of the sacred Host, which had defied the efforts of the Jew Jonathan to destroy it by steel, fire and boiling. The chapel, built in 1294 on the site of the Jew's house, was rebuilt in 1754, and is now used as a Protestant church. The miraculous Host was preserved as late as Félibien's time in St. Jean en Grève, and carried annually in procession on the octave of Corpus Christi. At the north end of the Rue des Archives is the site, now a square and a market, of the grisly old fortress of the Knights Templars, whose walls and towers and round church were still standing a century ago. The enclosure was a famous place of refuge for insolvent debtors and political offenders, and sheltered Rousseau in 1765 when a _lettre de cachet_ was issued for his arrest. In the gloomy keep, which was not destroyed until 1811, were imprisoned the royal family of France after the abandonment of the Tuileries on 10th August 1792. The old market of the Temple, the centre of the _petites industries_ of Paris, is being demolished as we write. West of this is the huge Museum of the Arts and Crafts (Conservatoire des Arts et Metiers), on the site of the abbatial buildings and lands of St. Martin of the Fields, still preserving in its structure the beautiful thirteenth-century church and refectory of the Abbey. As we turn southwards again by the Rue St. Martin we shall pass on our left one of the most curious remains of old Paris, the narrow Rue de Venise, a veritable mediæval street formerly known as the Ruelle des Usuriers, the home of the Law speculators where men almost rent each other in pieces in their mad scramble for fortune. At No. 27, the corner of the Rue Quincampoix, is the famous old inn of the Epée de Bois, now A l'Arrivée de Venise, where De Horn, a member of a princely German family, and two gentlemen assassinated and robbed a financier in open day, and were broken alive on the wheel in the Place de Grève. Marivaux and L. Racine are said, with other wits, to have frequented the old inn, and Mazarin granted letters-patent to a company of dancing masters, who met there under the management of the Roi des Violins. From these modest beginnings grew the National Academy of Dancing.