This can hardly be called an engaging description, and even Bohemians, it might be supposed, would shrink from such a dreadful slum. But Balzac was writing in 1847, more than ten years after Bohemia had left it, and he was making a protest against the continued existence of this quarter, which had probably deteriorated since the days when he sent there himself to offer Gautier work on the _Chronique de Paris_. However, whether Balzac was right in making the Rue du Doyenné an inferno or was only touching it up with livid tones appropriate to Cousine Bette and the Marneffes, it was certainly a more smiling spot in 1833. True, it was tumbling down, and lay below the level of the Place du Carrousel, in the midst of mournful débris, between the Louvre and the Tuileries, which Napoleon had meant to join after sweeping it away; the houses, as Gautier says,[21] were old and dark, repairs to them were forbidden, and they had the air of regretting the days when respectable canons and advocates were their inhabitants. Yet it was not a den of thieves by any means. Gérard[22] records that many _attachés_ and Government officials lived in the quarter, and that by the Place du Carrousel there was a collection of temporary wooden shops let out to curiosity dealers and print-sellers. It was enlivened, too, by the presence of a little Dutch beer-house served by a Flemish maid of considerable attractions. The view from the upper windows included, naturally, the heaps of stones, the rubbish, with the nettles and the dock-leaves by which Nature tries to cover such deformities at once; but it also included a good many trees, and the ruins of a delightful old priory, with one arch, two or three pillars, and the end of a colonnade still standing. This was the Priory of Doyenné, the dome of which, according to Gérard, fell one day in the seventeenth century upon eleven luckless canons who were celebrating the office. Its ruins stood out gracefully against the trees, and of a summer morning or evening, when, amid the peaceful silence of this forgotten corner, the bright rays of the Parisian sun lit up the lichen on its stones and a fresh breeze from the neighbouring Seine gently swayed the branches of its framing trees, it must have been well to be a-leaning out of a window.