The house of M. Paillot, the bookseller, joins on to Queen Marguerite’s house. Originally it was built, like its neighbour, with a wooden front, and the visible timber-work was no less carefully carved. But, in 1860, M. Paillot’s father, bookseller to the Archbishopric, had it pulled down in order to rebuild it simply, in the modern style, without any pretence at wealth or art, merely taking care to make it convenient as a dwelling-house and place of business. A tree of Jesse, in Renaissance style, which covered the entire front of Paillot’s house, at the corner formed by the Place Saint-Exupère and the Rue des Tintelleries, was torn down with the rest, but not destroyed. M. de Terremondre, coming upon it afterwards in a timber-merchant’s yard, purchased it for the museum. This monument is in good style. Unfortunately the prophets and patriarchs, who cluster on each branch like marvellous fruits, and the Virgin, blossoming on the summit of the prophetic tree, were mutilated by the Terrorists in 1793, and the tree suffered fresh damage in 1860, when it was carried to the timber-yard as firewood. M. Quatrebarbe, the diocesan architect, expatiates on these mutilations in his interesting pamphlet on _Les Vandales modernes_. “One shudders,” says he, “at the thought that this precious relic of an age of faith ran the risk of being sawn up and burnt before our very eyes.” This sentiment, being expressed by a man whose clerical tendencies were well known, was trenchantly criticised by _le Phare_ in an anonymous paragraph in which was recognised, rightly or wrongly, the hand of the archivist of the department, M. Mazure. “In twenty words,” said this paragraph, “the architect of the diocese supplies us with several occasions for surprise. The first is that any one should be able to shudder at the mere idea of the loss of an indifferently carved beam, and one so much mutilated that the details are not recognisable; the second is that this beam should stand to M. Quatrebarbe, whose creed is well known, as a relic of an age of faith, since it dates from 1530—that is to say, from the year when the Protestant Diet of Augsburg assembled; the third is that M. Quatrebarbe should omit to say that the precious beam was torn down and sent to the timber-yard by his own father-in-law, M. Nicolet, the diocesan architect, who, in 1860, transformed the Paillot house in the way which one can now see; the fourth is that M. Quatrebarbe ignores the fact that it was none other than M. Mazure, the archivist, who discovered the carved beam in Clouzot’s wood-yard, where it had been rotting for ten years under M. Quatrebarbe’s very nose, and who pointed it out to M. de Terremondre, president of the Society of Agriculture and Archæology, who purchased it for the museum.”