The stone bridge lined with houses which led from the town to the left bank of the Loire was famous all over the world. It had nineteen arches of varying breadth. The first, on leaving the town by La Porte du Pont, was called l'Allouee or Pont Jacquemin-Rousselet; here was a drawbridge. The fifth arch abutted on an island which was long, narrow, and in the form of a boat, like all river islands. Above the bridge it was called Motte-Saint-Antoine, from a chapel built upon it dedicated to that saint; and below, Motte-des-Poissonniers, because in order to keep captured fish alive boats with holes in them were moored to it. In 1447, to provide against the occupation of this island by the enemy, the people of Orleans had constructed a tower, the tower or fortress of Saint-Antoine, beyond the sixth arch and occupying the whole breadth of the bridge. On the buttress between the eleventh and twelfth arch was a cross of gilded bronze, supported by a pedestal of stone. It was indeed what it was called, the Cross Beautiful,--La Belle-Croix. The buttresses of the eighteenth arch were extended, and on the abutment there rose a little castle formed of two towers joined by a vaulted porch. This little castle was called Les Tourelles. Between the nineteenth and the twentieth arch as in the first was a drawbridge. Outside it was Le Portereau; and thence ran the road to Toulouse, which beyond the Loiret on the heights of Olivet joined the road to Blois.[482] [Footnote 482: Jollois, _Lettre a Messieurs les membres de la Societe des Antiquaires de France, sur l'emplacement du fort des Tourelles de l'ancien pont d'Orleans_, Paris, 1834, in folio with illustrations. Abbe Dubois, _Histoire du siege_, dissertation, v. Lottin, _Recherches_, vol. i, pp. 15-18. Vergniaud Romagnesi, _Des differentes enceintes de la ville d'Orleans_, pp. 17-19. A. Collin, _Le Pont des Tourelles a Orleans_, Orleans, 1895, in 8vo. Morosini, vol. iii, p. 13, note 2.] In those days the lazy waters of the Loire flowed midst osier-beds and birchen thickets, since removed for purposes of navigation. Two and a half miles east of Orleans, on the height of Checy, l'Ile aux Bourdons was separated from the Sologne bank by a thin arm of the river and by a narrow channel from l'Ile Charlemagne and l'Ile-aux-Boeufs, with their green grass and underwood facing Combleux on the La Beauce bank. A boat dropping down the river would next come to the two islands Saint-Loup, and, doubling La Tour Neuve, would glide between the two Martinet Islets on the right and l'Ile-aux-Toiles on the left. Thence it would pass under the bridge which overspanned, as we have seen, an island called above bridge Motte-Saint-Antoine and below, Motte-des-Poissonniers. At length, below the ramparts, opposite Saint-Laurent-des-Orgerils, it would come to two islets Biche-d'Orge and another, the name of which is unknown, possibly it was nameless.[483]