In Paris there were several Cours des Miracles, but the most celebrated was that which, from the time of Sauval, the singular historian of the “Antiquities of Paris,” to the middle of the seventeenth century, preserved this generic name par excellence, and which exists to this day (Fig. 379).  He says, “It is a place of considerable size, and is in an unhealthy, muddy, and irregular blind alley.  Formerly it was situated on the outskirts of Paris, now it is in one of the worst built, dirtiest, and most out-of-the-way quarters of the town, between the Rue Montorgueil, the convent of the Filles-Dieu, and the Rue Neuve-Saint-Sauveur.  To get there one must wander through narrow, close, and by-streets; and in order to enter it, one must descend a somewhat winding and rugged declivity.  In this place I found a mud house, half buried, very shaky from old age and rottenness, and only eight metres square; but in which, nevertheless, some fifty families are living, who have the charge of a large number of children, many of whom are stolen or illegitimate....  I was assured that upwards of five hundred large families occupy that and other houses adjoining....  Large as this court is, it was formerly even bigger....  Here, without any care for the future, every one enjoys the present; and eats in the evening what he has earned during the day with so much trouble, and often with so many blows; for it is one of the fundamental rules of the Cour des Miracles never to lay by anything for the morrow.  Every one who lives there indulges in the utmost licentiousness; both religion and law are utterly ignored....  It is true that outwardly they appear to acknowledge a God; for they have set up in a niche an image of God the Father, which they have stolen from some church, and before which they come daily to offer up certain prayers; but this is only because they superstitiously imagine that by this means they are released from the necessity of performing the duties of Christians to their pastor and their parish, and are even absolved from the sin of entering a church for the purpose of robbery and purse-cutting.”

Paris, the capital of the kingdom of rogues, was not the only town which possessed a Cour des Miracles, for we find here and there, especially at Lyons and Bordeaux, some traces of these privileged resorts of rogues and thieves, which then flourished under the sceptre of the Grand Coesre.  Sauval states, on the testimony of people worthy of credit, that at Sainte-Anne d’Auray, the most holy place of pilgrimage in Brittany, under the superintendence of the order of reformed Carmelite friars, there was a large field called the Rogue’s Field.  This was covered with mud huts; and here the Grand Coesre resorted annually on the principal solemn festivals, with his officers and subjects, in order “to hold his council of state,” that is to say, in order to settle and arrange respecting robbery.  At these state meetings, which were not always