If you desire to see the Paris of those early days, imagine yourself beside the spot where the modern Pantheon stands. It is the summit of what Paris called ‘the hill’ for many a century—the hill of St. Genevieve. Save for the large monastery of secular canons beside you, the abbey of St. Genevieve, there is yet little sign of the flood of grimy masonry that will creep up slowly from the river valley, as the ages advance, and foul the sweet country for miles beyond. Paris lies down in the valley below, a toy city. The larger island in the Seine bears almost the whole weight of the capital of France. It has, it is true, eaten a little way into the northern bank of the river, to which it is joined by the Great Bridge. That is the Lombard Quarter, and Lutetian commerce is increasing rapidly. Numbers of curious ships sail up the broad, silver bosom of the Seine, and make for the port of St. Landry. The commercial quarter is already spreading in the direction of Montmartre, with the public butchery and bakery at its outskirt; but it is a mere fringe. The broad valleys and the gentle hills that are one day to support Paris are now clothed with vineyards and orchards and cornfields, and crowned with groves of olive[4] and oak. On the nearer side, too, the city has already overflowed the narrow limits of the island. There are houses on the fine stone bridge, the Little Bridge, and there is a pretty confusion of houses, chapels, schools, and taverns gradually stealing up the slope of St. Genevieve. But, here also, most of the hill is covered with gardens and vineyards, from which a chapel or a relic of old Roman Lutetia peeps out here and there—the ruins of the famous old thermæ lie half-way down the hill below us—; and along the valley of the ‘... florentibus ripis amnis’ (to quote a poet of the time), to east and west, are broad lakes of fresh green colour, broken only in their sweet monotony by an occasional island of masonry, an abbey with a cluster of cottages about it. [4] This and other details I gather from fragments of the minor poets of the time.