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The excerpt represents the core issue or deciding factor on which you must meditate, and is drawn from Catherine de Medici by Honore de Balzac: city; also the queer details of private life in the middle ages; also,
the contrivances of love which, with all due deference to historians,
are found only in the pages of the romance-writers, without whom they
would be lost to the world. At this period very great /seigneurs/,
such, for instance, as Admiral de Coligny, occupied three rooms, and
their suites lived at some neighboring inn. There were not, in those
days, more than fifty private mansions in Paris, and those were fifty
palaces belonging to sovereign princes, or to great vassals, whose way
of living was superior to that of the greatest German rulers, such as
the Duke of Bavaria and the Elector of Saxony.
The kitchen of the Lecamus family was beneath the back-shop and looked
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