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.
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