Such was the origin of the celebrated parliamentary house of Lecamus.  Tallemant des Reaux is in error when he states that they came originally from Picardy.  It is only true that the Lecamus family found it for their interest in after days to date from the time the old furrier bought their principal estate, which, as we have said, was situated in Picardy.  Christophe’s son, who succeeded him under Louis XIII., was the father of the rich president Lecamus who built, in the reign of Louis XIV., that magnificent mansion which shares with the hotel Lambert the admiration of Parisians and foreigners, and was assuredly one of the finest buildings in Paris.  It may still be seen in the rue Thorigny, though at the beginning of the Revolution it was pillaged as having belonged to Monsieur de Juigne, the archbishop of Paris.  All the decorations were then destroyed; and the tenants who lodge there have greatly damaged it; nevertheless this palace, which is reached through the old house in the rue de la Pelleterie, still shows the noble results obtained in former days by the spirit of family.  It may be doubted whether modern individualism, brought about by the equal division of inheritances, will ever raise such noble buildings.

PART II

THE SECRETS OF THE RUGGIERI

I

THE COURT UNDER CHARLES IX.

Between eleven o’clock and midnight toward the end of October, 1573, two Italians, Florentines and brothers, Albert de Gondi, Duc de Retz and marshal of France, and Charles de Gondi la Tour, Grand-master of the robes of Charles IX., were sitting on the roof of a house in the rue Saint-Honore, at the edge of a gutter.  This gutter was one of those stone channels which in former days were constructed below the roofs of houses to receive the rain-water, discharging it at regular intervals through those long gargoyles carved in the shape of fantastic animals with gaping mouths.  In spite of the zeal with which our present general pulls down and demolishes venerable buildings, there still existed many of these projecting gutters until, quite recently, an ordinance of the police as to water-conduits compelled them to disappear.  But even so, a few of these carved gargoyles still remain, chiefly in the quartier Saint-Antoine, where low rents and values hinder the building of new storeys under the eaves of the roofs.

It certainly seems strange that two personages invested with such important offices should be playing the part of cats.  But whosoever will burrow into the historic treasures of those days, when personal interests jostled and thwarted each other around the throne till the whole political centre of France was like a skein of tangled thread, will readily understand that the two Florentines were cats indeed, and very much in their places in a gutter.  Their devotion to the person of the queen-mother, Catherine de’ Medici—­who had brought them to the court