The historians quote from the _Journal d'un bourgeois de Paris_ for the years 1419-1421: "You would have heard through all Paris pitiable lamentations, little children crying: 'I am dying with hunger!' There were to be seen on a dunghill twenty, thirty children, boys and girls, who yielded up their souls through famine and cold. Death cut down so many and so fast that it was necessary to excavate in the cemeteries great ditches in which were put thirty or forty, packed close together, and scarcely powdered over with earth. Those who dug the graves asserted that they had buried more than a hundred thousand persons. The shoe-makers counted up, on the day of their trade reunion, those that had died among them, and found that they numbered some eighteen hundred, masters and apprentices, in these two months. Troops of wolves traversed the country and entered Paris during the night to carry off the dead bodies.... The working people said to each other: 'Let us fly to the woods with the wild beasts.... Farewell to wives and children.... Let us do the worst we can.... Let us place ourselves again in the hands of the devil.'" To multiply these historical incidents would be but dreary iteration,--we will rather give one or two presentations in full of some details of what may be called the subterranean aspect of the great city, sombre and rather unpleasant presentations that are not to be found in the dignified histories or in the guide-books, and that remain unknown to the usual decorous tourist and reader. That the first one may not be too sombre, we will select it, not in the gloom of the Dark Ages, but in full French Renaissance, under François I. Readers of Victor Hugo's _Notre-Dame de Paris_ will doubtless remember his very picturesque description of the famous Cour des Miracles as it existed in the reign of Louis XI,--more sober historians do not hesitate to corroborate these fantastic details in many particulars. M. Gourdon de Genouillac, Officier d'Académie, in his learned work, _Paris à travers les siècles_, gives a description which we condense. "Everything had been done in order to oppose an effective defence to the attacks of enemies outside the walls; but it was much more difficult to guard against the enterprises of those within; the assemblings of the malcontents which were held nightly, and those of the gentry of sack and cord who, as soon as the gates were opened, set off eagerly to ravage the suburbs of Paris, returning in the evening to conceal themselves in the quarters where no one scarcely ventured to go in search of them. The Cour des Miracles was the usual refuge of all those wretches who came to conceal in this corner of Paris, sombre, dirty, muddy, and tortuous, their pretended infirmities and their criminal pollution.