The gardens of the Luxembourg were another favourite haunt of the characters of Dumas’ romances, and in “The Queen’s Necklace” they are made use of again, this time, as usual, as a suitable place for a promenade or a rendezvous of the fair Oliva, who so much resembled Marie Antoinette.
Like the Rue du Helder, celebrated in “The Corsican Brothers,” the Rue de Lille, where lived, at No. 29, De Franchi’s friend, Adrien de Boissy, is possessed of an air of semi-luxuriousness, or, at any rate, of a certain middle-class comfort.
It lies on the opposite side of the Seine from the river side of the Louvre, and runs just back of the site formerly occupied by the Duc de Montmorenci, where was held the gorgeous ceremony of the marriage of the Marquis St. Luc, of which one reads in “Chicot the Jester.”
There is not much of splendour or romance about the present-day Rue de Lille; indeed, it is rather commonplace, but as Dumas places the particular house in which De Boissy lived with definiteness, and, moreover, in that it exists to-day practically unaltered, there seems every good reason why it should be catalogued here.
![[Larger Image]](#7545372211037423608_fp_256.jpg.id-2959896735030424335.wrap-0.html.html){kind=link}
THE BUILDERS OF THE LOUVRE
(1) François I., 1546; (2) Catherine de Medici, 1566-1578; (3) Catherine de Medici, 1564 (destroyed at the Commune); (4) Louis XIII., 1524; (5) Louis XIV., 1660-1670; (6) Napoleon I., 1806; (7) Louis XVIII., 1816; (8) Napoleon III., 1852-1857; (9) Napoleon III., 1863-1868.