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: the second floor there was an outside gallery with a balustrade, on
which the owners of the house could walk under cover and survey the
street, also the river basin between the bridges and the two lines of
houses.
These houses on the river bank were very valuable. In those days a
system of drains and fountains was still to be invented; nothing of
the kind as yet existed except the circuit sewer, constructed by
Aubriot, provost of Paris under Charles the Wise, who also built the
Bastille, the pont Saint-Michel and other bridges, and was the first
man of genius who ever thought of the sanitary improvement of Paris.
The houses situated like that of Lecamus took from the river the water
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