The Catacombs of Paris are not used, like the Catacombs of ancient Thebes, Rome, and Naples, as places of original sepulture; for they were once quarries from which the stone employed in building the city was taken. The quarries were beneath the southern part of the town, directly below the Observatory, the Luxembourg, the Odéon, the Pantheon, and many of the well-known streets, such as St. Jacques, La Harpe, Tournou, Vaugirard, and others. Their extent is estimated to be about three millions of square yards; and long before they were cemeteries, they served as refuge and shelter for thieves, incendiaries, assassins, and all the desperate criminals who for many centuries abounded in the city. It is only a little more than a hundred years since Paris has been orderly, or in any sense secure. During the middle ages, and down to the latter half of the past century, property and life were extremely unsafe. Ruffians stalked abroad by day as well as by night, and bade defiance to law and its guardians. In those times the quarries shielded many of the greatest villains in the capital. After committing robbery, arson, or murder, they fled into those excavations, and the men whose duty it was to arrest them were afraid to follow where they would certainly have been massacred. Many are the stories told of policemen and soldiers meeting their death in the subterranean vaults at the hands of the malefactors they were pursuing. These were so familiar with all the recesses and windings of the quarries that they could not only escape, but they could lie in ambush, and fall upon the officers of the law with terrible vengeance. So numerous were the murders committed in the quarries by ruffians of the olden time, that finally none of the king’s minions could be found bold enough to venture into those abodes of mystery, darkness, and crime. [Sidenote: RESORTS OF THIEVES.]