"The Cour des Miracles extended between the Impasse de la Corderie (on the site of which a part of the Rue Thévenot was opened) and the Rues de Damiette and des Forges; its entrance was in the Rue Saint-Sauveur. It had been in existence since the thirteenth century.... "Several other haunts of the same kind existed in Paris, and Dulaure asserts that under Louis XIV there were still to be seen, the Cour des Miracles, of which we have just spoken; the Cour du Roi-François, situated in the Rue Saint-Denis; the Cour Sainte-Catherine, in the same street; the Cour Brisset, Rue de la Mortellerie; the Cour Gentien, Rue des Coquilles; the Cour de la Jussienne, in the street of the same name; the Cour Saint-Honoré, between the Rues Saint-Nicaise, Saint-Honoré, and de l'Echelle; the Cour des Miracles, Rue du Bac; the Cour des Miracles, Rue de Reuilly, and still another Cour des Miracles, Rue Jean Beausire. "But that which, in the sixteenth century, formed a veritable quarter of the city, was the Cour des Miracles of the Rue Saint-Sauveur, which served as a refuge for beggars and vagabonds. "'It consisted,' as we read in Sauval's _Antiquités_, 'of an open place of very considerable size and of a very large _cul-de-sac_, evil-smelling, miry, and irregular, which had no pavement whatever. Formerly, it was confined to one of the farthest extremities of Paris. At present, it is situated in that one of the quarters of the city which is the worst built, the most filthy, and the most out of the way, between the Rue Montorgueil, the convent of the Filles-Dieu, and the Rue Neuve-Saint-Sauveur, as if it were in another world. To get to it, it is necessary to go astray in little streets, villainous, stinking, crooked; to enter it, it is necessary to descend a sufficiently long slope, tortuous, rugged, uneven. I have seen there a house of dirt, half buried, tumbling to pieces with old age and rottenness, which did not cover a space of four square fathoms, and in which were lodged, nevertheless, more than fifty households, having in charge an infinite number of little children, legitimate, natural, or stolen. I was assured that in this little dwelling and in the others dwelt more than five hundred large families, piled one upon the other. Large as is this court, it was formerly much more so. On every side it has been encroached upon by lodgings, low, sunken, dark, and deformed, constructed of earth and of mud, and all of them crowded with the evil poor.'