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DIPLOMACY.
Where the old wall of Paris, of which no vestige remains, ran down on the east to the north bank of the river, the space in the angle between the Seine and the ramparts beyond the Rue St.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.