Round the apartment are gnomic sentences in letters of gold, reminding judges, juries, witnesses, and suitors, of their duties.  The room itself is said to be the most beautiful in France for its proportions and quantity of light.  In the Antiquites Nationales, is described and figured an elaborately wrought chimney-piece in the council-chamber, now destroyed, as are some fine Gothic door-ways, which opened into the chamber.  The ceiling of the apartment called la seconde Chambre des Enquetes, painted by Jouvenet, with a representation of Jupiter hurling his thunderbolts at Vice, is also unfortunately no more.  It fell in, from a failure in the woodwork of the roof, on the first of April, 1812.  It was among the most highly-esteemed productions of this master, and not the less remarkable for having been executed with the left hand, after a paralytic stroke had deprived him of the use of the other.

Millin observes, with much justice, that one of the most remarkable of the decrees that issued from this palace, was that which authorized the meetings of the Conards, a name given to a confraternity of buffoons, who, disguised in grotesque dresses, performed farces in the streets on Shrove Tuesday and other holidays.  Nor is it a little indicative of the taste of the times, that men of rank, character, and respectability entered into this society, the members of which, amounting to two thousand five hundred, elected from among themselves a president, whom they dressed as an abbot[106], with a crozier and mitre, and, placing him on a car drawn by four horses, led him, thus attired, in great pomp through the streets; the whole of the party being masked, and personating not only the allegorical characters of avarice, lust, &c. but the more tangible ones of pope, king, and emperor, and with them those of holy writ.  The seat of this guild was at Notre Dame de Bonnes Nouvelles.

[Illustration:  Sculpture, representing the Feast of Fools]

In the cathedral itself the more notorious Procession des Fous was also formerly celebrated, in which, as you know, the ass played the principal part, and the choir joined in the hymn[107],—­

    “Orientis partibus
     Adventavit Asinus,” &c.

These, or similar ceremonies, call them if you please absurdities, or call them impieties, (you will in neither case be far from their proper name,) were in the early ages of Christianity tolerated in almost every place.  Mr. Douce has furnished us with some curious remarks upon them in the eleventh volume of the Archaeologia, and Mr. Ellis in his new edition of Brand’s Popular Antiquities.  I am indebted to the first of these gentlemen for the knowledge that the inclosed etching, copied some time ago from a drawing by Mr. Joseph Harding, is allusive to the ceremony of the feast of fools, and does not represent a group of morris-dancers, as I had erroneously supposed.  Indeed, Mr. Douce believes