The streets were dark, narrow, and winding, with a gutter running down the middle. In that part called the Cité the houses were tall and black, grim as prisons, and swarming with a squalid famishing population. Many of the streets were little wider than the curious rows or alleys in Yarmouth in which you can hardly turn a wheelbarrow. No lamps shed even a feeble light to guide the belated citizen. The tapers in the shrines at the street corners alone helped to direct his steps, if he chanced to be abroad without torch or lantern. It need hardly be said that the streets were very insecure, and acts of violence frequent. At intervals during the night, the watch, a company of armed men, went their round, but the noise they made and the torches they carried, were a warning to the evildoer to make his escape. The clear waters of the Seine cut the city into two parts. The stately quays that now line its banks scarcely existed in the reign of Charles IX. The gardens of private citizens extended in many places down to the water’s edge. The river flowed beneath five bridges--one of which (the Millers’ or the Birds’ bridge) was for foot passengers only. It joined what is now the Quai de la Mégisserie to the Quai de l’Horloge, and was swept away, both houses and inhabitants, by the flood of 1596. Thirty-four houses stood on each side of the bridge of Notre Dame, and the street thus formed was the favorite promenade of the Parisians. The road was so wide that three carriages could pass abreast, and the rents were higher than in any other part of the city. Among the attractions of this street, Gilles Corrozet does not forget to mention the charming women who served in the shops.[204] The modern traveler now seeks in vain for the ten islands which once interrupted the navigation of the Seine. That of Louviers, where Charles IX. used to bathe, and where he was once entertained with a naval fight, was united to the Quai Morland in 1847. The islands of Notre Dame and Vaches, composing the Isle of St. Louis, were once separated by a narrow ditch, which is now the Rue Poulletier. The Jews’ Island, where Jacques Molay was beheaded, was united to the Cité by Henry IV., and formed the Place Dauphine and the spur of the Pont Neuf, upon which the statue of the first Bourbon king still stands. The island of the Louvre, never little better than a mere sand bank, has been dredged away. The others have disappeared in the course of improving the navigation of the river, and, La Cité alone remains. This old quarter of Paris, the hot-bed of sedition, disease, and crime, has been so entirely metamorphosed by the hand of improvement, that travelers who knew it thirty years ago recognize it with difficulty.