Later along in the seventeenth century, when the court end of the town went to the west, and the Church dignitaries found this region too far afield, this Hotel de Sens was sold. Its new owners and tenants were the merchants and financiers who crowded then to this quarter. They, too, soon moved farther west, and the place had many strange employments forced upon it. As early as 1692, the _messageries_ for Dijon and Lyons rented it for their town head-quarters. By the middle of the eighteenth century, the palace of the archbishops was degraded to a livery stable and a horsedealer's lair, and the ancient arms of Sens on its front and the escutcheons of Lorraine and Bourbon, prelates of the Church, were covered by a great sign, "_Maison de Roulage et de Commission_." From this court, in the words of the advertisement of that date, "_Le Courrier de la Malle de Paris a Lyons partit a cinq heures et demi du soir, 8 Floreal, an IV._"--which was April 27, 1796.

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