Gordon showed us the new buildings which were in course of erection in the Place Dauphine, and the Bridge Marchand, which had been built a few years before in place of the picturesque Pont aux Meuniers, by Charles le Marchand, captain of the arquebussiers and archers of Paris in 1608, who undertook, with permission of Henry IV., to erect the said bridge, on condition that it should bear his name. Close by were the ruins of the ancient Pont aux Meuniers which had a mill under every arch, and which broke down on the night of the 22nd December, 1596, destroying five hundred persons, every one of whom, as the Marechal de Logis informed us, had enriched themselves by the massacre of St. Bartholomew. Here, too, stood the pigeon market, whence the bridge was named at times the Pont aux Colombes.
'Oho, chevalier,' said Gordon, to a gay gentleman clad in cloth of gold, with a red feather in his hat, who was bidding adieu to a pretty woman, who seemed to be the wife of a bourgeois; 'I see they still sell pigeons on the Pont aux Colombes?'
'Occasionally, Patrick, and game of other kinds, too,' said he, saluting us with a merry smile.
'We are all going to dine at the Fleur-de-lis. Will you join us?'
'With pleasure.'
''Tis one of ourselves, gentlemen,' continued the frank old Marechal de Logis; 'allow me to introduce the Chevalier Livingstone, one of the bravest gallants in the Scottish Guard; Viscount Dundrennan, Sir Quentin Home, and the Laird of Blanerne, have all come, chevalier, from our dear auld mither Scotland, to fight for king Louis of France.'
We all bowed and shook hands.
The Chevalier Livingstone was the younger son of Henry Count of Angoulême, who was the son of Henry II., by a daughter of the Scottish house of Linlithgow, and in right of his grandmother's blood was admitted into the Scottish Guard.
As we rambled towards the Rue d'Ecosse, we passed the magnificent house of the famous courtesan Marion de l'Orme, which by chance had a company of the Cardinal's musketeers drawn up before it. This occasioned a hundred irreverend jokes from the chevalier and the lively old Marechal de Logis; and here another handsome cavalier of the Scottish Guard, Raynold Cheyne, of Dundargle in Fifeshire, joined us. His doublet was of black velvet, so thickly ornamented with jet that it glittered like a corslet in the sun. His mantle was dark crimson; his long boots were of black leather; his sword and dagger hilts of silver, and altogether he was a sombre, picturesque, and impressive-looking fellow.
I saw the statue of Henry the Great as we passed along the Rue St. Honoré, and in that quaint old street the Feronnerie, Cheyne showed me the exact spot where, twenty-three years before, Henry had perished under the dagger of Ravaillac, beneath the windows of a notary named Pontrain, at a place where the street was crowded and rendered more narrow by the little shops which are built against the walls of the churchyard of St. Innocent.