projecting stories, to the royal Louvre, which then had a colonnade of towers. But these are the principal masses which were then to be distinguished when the eye began to accustom itself to this tumult of edifices.

In the first place, the City. — “The island of the City,” as Sauval says, who, in spite of his confused medley, sometimes has such happy turns of expression, — “the island of the city is made like a great ship, stuck in the mud and run aground in the current, near the centre of the Seine.”

We have just explained that, in the fifteenth century, this ship was anchored to the two banks of the river by five bridges.

This form of a ship had also struck the heraldic scribes; for it is from that, and not from