Where the old wall of Paris, of which no vestige remains, ran down on the
east to the north bank of the river, the space in the angle between the
Seine and the ramparts beyond the Rue St. Pol wore at this date an aspect
typical of the troubles of the time. Along the waterside the gloomy old
Palace of St. Pol, once the residence of the mad King Charles the
Sixth--and his wife, the abandoned Isabeau de Baviere--sprawled its maze
of mouldering courts and ruined galleries; a dreary monument of the
Gothic days which were passing from France. Its spacious curtilage and
dark pleasaunces covered all the ground between the river and the Rue St.
Antoine; and north of this, under the shadow of the eight great towers of
the Bastille, which looked, four outward to check the stranger, four
inward to bridle the town, a second palace, beginning where St. Pol
ended, carried the realm of decay to the city wall.
This second palace was the Hotel des Tournelles, a fantastic medley of
turrets, spires, and gables, that equally with its neighbour recalled the
days of the English domination; it had been the abode of the Regent
Bedford. From his time it had remained for a hundred years the town
residence of the kings of France; but the death of Henry II., slain in
its lists by the lance of the same Montgomery who was this day fleeing
for his life before Guise, had given his widow a distaste for it.
Catherine de Medicis, her sons, and the Court had abandoned it; already
its gardens lay a tangled wilderness, its roofs let in the rain, rats
played where kings had slept; and in "our palace of the Tournelles"
reigned only silence and decay. Unless, indeed, as was whispered abroad,
the grim shade of the eleventh Louis sometimes walked in its desolate
precincts.
In the innermost angle between the ramparts and the river, shut off from
the rest of Paris by the decaying courts and enceintes of these forsaken
palaces, stood the Arsenal. Destroyed in great part by the explosion of
a powder-mill a few years earlier, it was in the main new; and by reason
of its river frontage, which terminated at the ruined tower of Billy, and
its proximity to the Bastille, it was esteemed one of the keys of Paris.
It was the appanage of the Master of the Ordnance, and within its walls
M. de Biron, a Huguenot in politics, if not in creed, who held the office
at this time, had secured himself on the first alarm. During the day he
had admitted a number of refugees, whose courage or good luck had led
them to his gate; and as night fell--on such a carnage as the hapless
city had not beheld since the great slaughter of the Armagnacs, one
hundred and fifty-four years earlier--the glow of his matches through the
dusk, and the sullen tramp of his watchmen as they paced the walls,
indicated that there was still one place in Paris where the King's will
did not run.