The Paris of the fifteenth century was a triple city of overhanging timbered houses, "thick as ears of corn in a wheatfield," of narrow, crooked streets,[100] unsavoury enough, yet purified by the vast open spaces and gardens of the monasteries, from which emerged the innumerable spires and towers of her churches and palaces and colleges. In the centre was the legal and ecclesiastical Cite, with its magnificent Palais de Justice; its cathedral and a score of fair churches enclosed in the island, which resembled a great ship moored to the banks of the Seine by five bridges all crowded with houses. One of the most curious characteristics of Old Paris was the absence of any view of the river, for a man might traverse its streets and bridges without catching a glimpse of the Seine. [Footnote 100: The drainage of an old city was offensive to the smell rather than essentially insanitary. "Mediaeval sewers," says Dr. Charles Creighton in his _History of Epidemics in Britain_, pp. 323-4, "were banked-up water-courses ... freely open to the greatest of all purifying agents, the oxygen of the air."] The portal of the Petit Chatelet at the end of the Petit Pont opened on the university and learned district on the south bank of the Seine, with its fifty colleges and many churches clustering about the slopes of the mount of St. Genevieve, which was crowned by the great Augustine abbey and church founded by Clovis. Near by, stood the two great religious houses and churches of the Dominicans and Franciscans, the Carthusian monastery and its scores of little gardens, the lesser monastic buildings and, outside the walls, the vast Benedictine abbatial buildings and suburb of St. Germain des Pres, with its stately church of three spires, its fortified walls, its pillory and its permanent lists, where judicial duels were fought. On the north bank lay the busy, crowded industrial and commercial district known as the Ville, with its forty-four churches, the hotels of the rich merchants and bankers, the fortified palaces of the nobles, all enclosed by the high walls and square towers of Charles the Fifth's fortifications, and defended at east and west by the Bastille of St. Antoine and the Louvre. To the east stood the agglomeration of buildings known as Hotel St. Paul, a royal city within a city, with its manifold princely dwellings and fair gardens and pleasaunces sloping down to the Seine; hard by to the north was the Duke of Bedford's Hotel des Tournelles, with its memories of the English domination. At the west, against the old Louvre, were among others, the hotels of the Constable of Bourbon and the Duke of Alencon, and out in the fields beyond, the smoking kilns of the Tuileries (tile factories). [Illustration: TOWER OF ST. JACQUES.]