"O ye stanch Swiss, ye gallant gentlemen in black, for what a cause are ye to spend and be spent! Look out from the western windows, ye may see King Louis placidly hold on his way; the poor little Prince Royal 'sportfully kicking the fallen leaves'. Fremescent multitude on the Terrace of the Feuillants whirls parallel to him; one man in it, very noisy, with a long pole: will they not obstruct the outer Staircase, and back-entrance of the Salle, when it comes to that? King's Guards can go no farther than the bottom step there. Lo, Deputation of Legislators come out; he of the long pole is stilled by oratory; Assembly's Guards join themselves to King's Guards, and all may mount in this case of necessity; the outer Staircase is free, or passable. See, Royalty ascends; a blue Grenadier lifts the poor little Prince Royal from the press; Royalty has entered in. Royalty has vanished for ever from your eyes.—And ye? Left standing there, amid the yawning abysses, and earthquake of Insurrection; without course; without command: if ye perish, it must be as more than martyrs, as martyrs who are now without a cause! The black Courtiers disappear mostly; through such issues as they can. The poor Swiss know not how to act: one duty only is clear to them, that of standing by their post; and they will perform that.

"But the glittering steel tide has arrived; it beats now against the Château barriers and eastern Courts; irresistible, loud-surging far and wide;—breaks in, fills the Court of the Carrousel, blackbrowed Marseillese in the van. King Louis gone, say you; over to the Assembly! Well and good: but till the Assembly pronounce Forfeiture of him, what boots it? Our post is in that Château or stronghold of his; there till then must we continue. Think, ye stanch Swiss, whether it were good that grim murder began, and brothers blasted one another in pieces for a stone edifice?—Poor Swiss! they know not how to act: from the southern windows, some fling cartridges, in sign of brotherhood; on the eastern outer staircase, and within through long stairs and corridors, they stand firm-ranked, peaceable and yet refusing to stir. Westermann speaks to them in Alsatian German; Marseillese plead, in hot Provençal speech and pantomime; stunning hubbub pleads and threatens, infinite, around. The Swiss stand fast, peaceable and yet immovable; red granite pier in that waste-flashing sea of steel.

"Who can help the inevitable issue; Marseillese and all France on this side; granite Swiss on that? The pantomime grows hotter and hotter; Marseillese sabres flourishing by way of action; the Swiss brow also clouding itself, the Swiss thumb bringing its firelock to the cock. And hark! high thundering above all the din, three Marseillese cannon from the Carrousel, pointed by a gunner of bad aim, come rattling over the roofs! Ye Swiss, therefore: Fire! The Swiss fire; by volley, by platoon, in rolling fire: Marseillese men not a few, and 'a tall man that was louder than any,' lie silent, smashed upon the pavement;—not a few Marseillese, after the long dusty march, have made halt here. The Carrousel is void; the black tide recoiling; 'fugitives rushing as far as Saint-Antoine before they stop'. The Cannoneers without linstock have squatted invisible, and left their cannon; which the Swiss seize....

"Behold, the fire slackens not; nor does the Swiss rolling-fire slacken from within. Nay they clutched cannon, as we saw; and now, from the other side, they clutch three pieces more; alas, cannon without linstock; nor will the steel-and-flint answer, though they try it. Had it chanced to answer! Patriot onlookers have their misgivings; one strangest Patriot onlooker thinks that the Swiss, had they a commander, would beat. He is a man not unqualified to judge; the name of him Napoleon Buonaparte. And onlookers, and women, stand gazing, and the witty Dr. Moore of Glasgow among them, on the other side of the River: cannon rush rumbling past them; pause on the Pont Royal; belch out their iron entrails there, against the Tuileries; and at every new belch, the women and onlookers 'shout and clap hands'. City of all the Devils! In remote streets, men are drinking breakfast-coffee; following their affairs; with a start now and then, as some dull echo reverberates a note louder. And here? Marseillese fall wounded; but Barbaroux has surgeons; Barbaroux is close by, managing, though underhand and under cover. Marseillese fall death-struck; bequeath their firelock, specify in which pocket are the cartridges; and die murmuring, 'Revenge me, Revenge thy country!' Brest Fédéré Officers, galloping in red coats, are shot as Swiss. Lo you, the Carrousel has burst into flame!—Paris Pandemonium! Nay the poor City, as we said, is in fever-fit and convulsion: such crisis has lasted for the space of some half hour.

"But what is this that, with Legislative Insignia, ventures through the hubbub and death-hail, from the back-entrance of the Manège? Towards the Tuileries and Swiss: written Order from his Majesty to cease firing! O ye hapless Swiss, why was there no order not to begin it? Gladly would the Swiss cease firing: but who will bid mad Insurrection cease firing? To Insurrection you cannot speak; neither can it, hydra-headed, hear. The dead and dying, by the hundred, lie all around; are borne bleeding through the streets, towards help; the sight of them, like a torch of the Furies, kindling Madness. Patriot Paris roars; as the bear bereaved of her whelps. On, ye Patriots: Vengeance! Victory or death! There are men seen, who rush on, armed only with walking-sticks. Terror and Fury rule the hour.

"The Swiss, pressed on from without, paralysed from within, have ceased to shoot; but not to be shot. What shall they do? Desperate is the moment. Shelter or instant death: yet How, Where? One party flies out by the Rue de l'Echelle; is destroyed utterly, 'en entier'. A second, by the other side, throws itself into the Garden; 'hurrying across a keen fusillade'; rushes suppliant into the National Assembly; finds pity and refuge in the back benches there. The third, and largest, darts out in column, three hundred strong, towards the Champs Elysées: 'Ah, could we but reach Courbevoye, where other Swiss are!' Wo! see, in such fusillade the column 'soon breaks itself by diversity of opinion,' into distracted segments, this way and that;—to escape in holes, to die fighting from street to street. The firing and murdering will not cease; not yet for long. The red Porters of Hôtels are shot at, be they Suisse by nature, or Suisse only in name....

"Surely few things in the history of carnage are painfuller. What ineffaceable red streak, flickering so sad in the memory, is that, of this poor column of red Swiss 'breaking itself in the confusion of opinions'; dispersing, into blackness and death! Honour to you, brave men; honourable pity, through long times! Not martyrs were ye; and yet almost more. He was no King of yours, this Louis; and he forsook you like a King of shreds and patches: ye were but sold to him for some poor sixpence a-day; yet would ye work for your wages, keep your plighted word. The work now was to die; and ye did it. Honour to you, O Kinsmen."

During the Second Empire some of the old splendour returned, and it was here, at the Tuileries, that Napoleon III. drew up many of his plans for the modern Paris that we now know; and then came the Prussian war and the Third Republic, and then the terrible Communard insurrection in the spring of 1871, in which the Tuileries disappeared for ever. Napoleon III., as I have said, assisted by Baron Haussmann, toiled in the great pacific task of renovating Paris, not with the imaginative genius of his uncle, but with an undeniable largeness and sagacity. He it was who added so greatly to the Louvre—all that part in fact opposite the Place du Palais Royal and the Magasins du Louvre as far west as the Rue de Rohan. A large portion of the corresponding wing on the river side was his too. But here is a list, since we are on the subject of modern Paris—which began with the great Napoleon's reconstruction of the ravages (beneficial for the most part) of the Revolutionaries—of the efforts made by each ruler since that epoch. I borrow the table from the Marquis de Rochegude.

"Napoleon I.—Arc de Triomphe du Carrousel, Vendôme Column, Façade du Corps Legislatif, Commencement of the Arc de Triomphe de l'Etoile, La Bourse, the Bridges d'Austerlitz, d'Iéna, des Arts, de la Cité, several Markets, Quais d'Orsay, de Billy, du Louvre, Montebello, de la Tournelle; the Eastern and Northern Cemeteries; numbering the houses in 1806, begun without success in 1728; pavements in the streets and doing away with the streams or flowing gutters in the middle of the streets." (How like Napoleon to get the houses numbered on a clear system! Throughout Paris the odd numbers occupy one side of the street and the even the other. All are numbered from the Seine outwards.)

"The Restoration.—Chapel Expiatoire, N.D. de Bonne-Nouvelle, N.D. de Lorette, St. Vincent de Paul; Bridges of the Invalides, of the Archbishopric, d'Arcole; Canals of St. Denis and St. Martin; fifty-five new streets; lighting by gas." (It was about 1828 that cabs came in. They were called fiacres from the circumstance that their originator carried on his business at the sign of the Grand St. Fiacre.)

"Louis-Philippe, 1830-1848.—Finished the Madeleine, Arc de Triomphe, erected the Obelisk (Place de la Concorde), Column of July; Bridges: Louis-Philippe, Carrousel; Palace of the Quai d'Orsay; enlarged the Palais de Justice; restored Notre Dame and Sainte Chapelle; Fountains: Louvois, Cuvier, St. Sulpice, Gaillon, Molière; opened the Museums of Cluny and the Thermes. In 1843—1,100 streets.

"Napoleon III., 1852-1870.—Embellished Paris—execution of Haussmann's plans, twenty-two new boulevards; Streets Lafayette, Quatre-Septembre, de Turbigo; Bvd. St. Germain; Rues des Ecoles, de Rivoli, the Champs Elysées Quarter, the Avenues Friedland, Hoche, Kléber, the Marceau, de L'Impératrice, many squares; a part of new Louvre; Churches of St. Augustine, The Trinity, St. Ambroise, Ste. Clotilde (finishing of); Theatres, Châtelet, Lyrique, du Vaudeville; Tribunal of Commerce, Hôtel Dieu, Barracks, Central Markets (also the ceinture railway); finishing of the Laribosière hospital, the Fountain of St. Michel, the Bridges of Solferino, L'Alma, the Pont au Change. In 1861, 1,667,841 inhabitants.

"The Commune.—Burning of the Tuileries, the Ministry of Finance, the Louvre Library, the Hôtel de Ville, the Palace of the Legion of Honour, the Palace of the Quai d'Orsay, the Lyric, the Châtelet and the Porte St. Martin theatres, etc.

"The Republic.—Reconstruction of the buildings burnt by the Commune; Avenue de l'Opéra, the Opera House; Streets: Etienne Marcel, Réaumur, Avenue de la République, etc. In 1892, 4,090 streets, in 1902 there were 4,261 streets. The Exhibition 1878 left the Trocadero, and that of 1889 the Eiffel Tower, and that of 1900 the two Palaces of the Champs-Elysées and the bridge Alexander III." (To this one should add the Métro, still uncompleted, which has the advantage over London's Tubes of being only just below the surface, so that no lift is needed.)

The Arc de Triomphe du Carrousel, at the east end of the gardens, is a mere child compared with the Arc de Triomphe de l'Etoile, which stands there, so serenely and magnificently, at the end of the vista in the west, nearly two amazing miles away; it could be placed easily, with many feet to spare, under that greater monument's arch (as Victor Hugo's coffin was); but it is more beautiful. Both were the work of Napoleon, both celebrate the victories of 1805-06. The Carrousel is surmounted by a triumphal car and four horses; but here again, as in the case of the statue of Henri IV. on the Pont Neuf, there have been ironical changes. Napoleon, when he ordained the arch, which was intended largely to reproduce that of Severus at Rome, ravished for its crowning the quadriga from St. Mark's at Venice: those glorious gleaming horses over the door. That was as it should be: he was a conqueror and entitled to the spoils of conquest. But after his fall came, as we have seen, a pedantic disgorgement of such treasure; the golden team trotted back to the Adriatic, and a new decoration had to be provided for the Carrousel. Hence the present one, which represents—what? It is almost inconceivable; but, Louis XVIII. having commissioned it, it represents the triumph no longer of Napoleon but of the Restoration! Amusing to remember this under the Third Republic, as one looks up at it and then at the bas-reliefs of the battle of Austerlitz, the peace of Tilsit, the capitulation of Ulm, the entry into Munich, the entry into Vienna and the peace of Pressburg. Time's revenges indeed.

Standing under the Arc du Carrousel one makes the interesting but disappointing discovery that the Arc de Triomphe, the column of Luxor in the Place de la Concorde, the fountain, the Arc du Carrousel, the Gambetta monument and the Pavillon Sully of the Louvre do not form a straight line, as by all the laws of French architectural symmetry they should—especially here, where compasses and rulers seem to have been at work on every inch of the ground, and, as I have ascertained, general opinion considers them to do. All is well, from the west, until the Arc du Carrousel; it is the Gambetta and the Pavilion Sully that throw it out.

The Gambetta! This monument fascinates me, not by its beauty nor because I have any especial reverence for the statesman; but simply by the vigour of his clothes, the frock coat and the light overcoat of the flamboyant orator, holding forth for evermore (or until his hour strikes), urgent and impetuous and French. To the frock coat in sculpture we in London are no strangers, for have we not Parliament Square? but our frock coats are quiescent, dead even, things of stone. Gambetta's, on the contrary, is tempestuous—surely the most heroic frock coat that ever emerged from the quarries of Carrara. It might have been cut by the Great Mel himself.

I have never seen a computation of the stone and bronze population of Paris, but the statues must be thousands strong. A Pied Piper leading them out of the city would be worth seeing, although I for one would regret their loss. Paris, I suppose, was Paris no less than now in the days before Gambetta masqueraded as a Frock Coated Victory almost within hail of the Winged Victory of Samothrace; but Paris certainly would not be Paris any more were some new turn of the wheel to whisk him away and leave the Place du Carrousel forlorn and tepid. The loss even of the smug figure of Jules Simon, just outside Durand's, would be something like a bereavement. I once, by the way, saw this statue wearing, after a snowstorm, a white fur cap and cape that gave him a character—something almost Siberian—beyond anything dreamed of by the sculptor.

It is not until one has walked through the gardens of the Tuileries that the wealth of statuary in Paris begins to impress the mind. For there must be almost as many statues as flowers. They shine or glimmer everywhere, as in the Athenian groves—allegorical, symbolical, mythological, naked. The Luxembourg Gardens, as we shall see, are hardly less rich, but there one finds the statues of real persons. Here, as becomes a formal garden projected by a king, realism is excluded. Formal it is in the extreme; the trees are sternly pollarded, the beds are mathematically laid out, the paths are straight and not to be deviated from. None the less on a hot summer's day there are few more delightful spots, with the placid bonnes sitting so solidly, as only French women can sit, over their needlework, and their charges flitting like discreet butterflies all around them; and here are two old philosophers—another Bouvard and Pécuchet—discussing some problem of conduct or science, and there a family party lunching heartily, without shame. Pleasant groves, pleasant people!

But the best thing in the Tuileries is M. Pol. Who is M. Pol? Well, he may not be the most famous man in Paris, but he is certainly the most engaging. M. Pol is the charmer of birds—"Le Charmeur d'oiseaux au Jardin des Tuileries," to give him his full title. There may be other charmers too at their pretty labours; but M. Pol comes easily first: his personality is so attractive, his terms of intercourse with the birds so intimate. His oiseaux are chiefly sparrows, whom he knows by name—La Princesse, Le Loustic, Garibaldi, La Baronne, l'Anglais, and so forth. They come one by one at his call, and he pets them and praises them; talks pretty ironical talk; uses them (particularly the little brown l'Anglais) for sly satirical purposes, for there are usually a few English spectators; affects to admonish and even chastise them, shuffling minatory feet with all the noise but none of the illusion of seriousness; and never ceases the while to scatter his crumbs or seeds of comfort. It is a very charming little drama, and although carried on every day, and for some hours every day, it has no suggestion of routine; one feels that the springs of it are sweetness and benevolence.

He is a typical elderly Latin, this M. Pol, a little unmindful as to his dress, a little inclined to shamble: humorous, careless, gentle. When I first saw him, years ago, he fed his birds and went his way: but he now makes a little money by it too, now and then offering, very reluctantly, postcards bearing pictures of himself with all his birds about him and a distich or so from his pen. For M. Pol is a poet in words as well as deeds: "De nos petits oiseaux," he writes on one card:—

"De nos petits oiseaux, je suis le bienfaiteur,
Et je vais tous les jours leur donner la pâture,
Mais suivant un contrat dicté par la nature
Quand je donne mon pain, ils me donnent leur cœur."

I think this true. It is a little more than cupboard love that inspires these tiny creatures, or they would never settle on M. Pol's hands and shoulders as they do. He has charmed the pigeons also; but here he admits to a lower motive:—

"Ils savent, les malins, que leur couvert est mis,
C'est en faisant du bien qu'on se fait des amis."

It amused me one day at the Louvre to fix one of these photographs in the frame of Giotto's picture of St. Francis (in Salle VII.), one of the scenes of which shows him preaching to the birds, thus bridging the gulf between the centuries and making for the moment the Assisi of the Saint and the Paris of M. Briand one.

London has its noticeable lovers of animals too—you may see in St. Paul's churchyard in the dinner hour isolated figures surrounded and covered by pigeons: the British Museum courtyard also knows one or two, and the Guildhall: quite like Venice, both of them, save that no one is excited about it; while in St. James's Square may be seen at all hours of every day the mysterious cat woman with her pensioners all about her on their little mats. Every city has these humorists—shall I say? using the word as it was wont to be used long ago. But M. Pol—M. Pol stands alone. It is not merely that he charms the birds but that he is so charming with them. The pigeon feeders of London whom I have watched bring their maize, distribute it and go. M. Pol is more of a St. Francis than that: as I have shown, he converses, jokes and exchanges moods with his friends.

Although he is acquainted with pigeons, his real friends are the gamins of the air, the sparrows, true Parisians, who have the best news. Pigeons, one can conceive, pick up a fact here and there, but it would have a foreign or provincial flavour. Now if there is one thing which bores a true Parisian it is talk of what is happening outside Paris. The Parisian's horizons do not extend beyond his city. The sun for him rises out of the Bois de Vincennes, and evening comes because it has sunk into the Bois de Boulogne. Hence M. Pol's wisdom in choosing the sparrow for his companion, his oiseau intime.

So far had I written when I chanced to walk into London by way of Hyde Park, and there, just by the Achilles statue, was a charming gentleman in a tall white hat whistling a low whistle to a little band of sparrows who followed him and surrounded him and fluttered up, one by one, to his hand. We talked a little together, and he told me that the birds never forget him, though he is absent for eight months each year. His whistle brings them at once. So London is all right after all. And I have been told delightful things about the friends of the grey squirrels in Central Park; so New York perhaps is all right too.

The Round Pond of Paris is at the Tuileries—not so vast as the mare clausum of Kensington Gardens, but capable of accommodating many argosies. Leaving this Pond behind us and making for the Place de la Concorde, we have on the right the remains of a monastery of the Cistercians, one of the many religious houses which stood all about the north of the Gardens at the time of the Revolution and were first discredited and emptied by the votaries of Reason and then swept away by Napoleon when he made the Rue de Rivoli. The building on the left is the Orangery. It is in this part that the temporary pavilions are erected for the banquets to provincial mayors and such pleasant ceremonies, while in the summer some little exhibition is usually in progress.

But what is that sound? The beating of a drum. We must hasten to the gates, for that means closing time.

CHAPTER IX
THE PLACE DE LA CONCORDE—THE CHAMPS-ELYSÉES AND THE INVALIDES

A Dangerous Crossing—An Ill-omened Place—Louis the XVI. in Prosperity and Adversity—January 21st, 1793—The End of Robespierre—The Luxor Column—The Congress of Wheels—England and France—The Champs Elysées—The Parc Monceau—A Terrestrial Paradise—Oriental Museums—The Etoile's Tributaries—The Arc de Triomphe—The Avenue du Bois de Boulogne—A Vast Pleasure-ground—Happy Sundays—Longchamp—The Pari-mutuel—Spotting a Winner—Two Crowded Corners—The Rival Salons—The Palais des Beaux-Arts—Dutch Masters—Modern French Painters—Superb Drawing—Fairies among the Statues—The Pont Alexandre III.—The Fairs of Paris—A Vast Alms-house—A Model Museum—Relics of Napoleon—The Second Funeral of Napoleon—The Tomb of Napoleon.

The Place de la Concorde by day is vast rather than beautiful, and by night it is a congress of lamps. By both it is dangerous, and in bad weather as exposed as the open sea. But it is sacred ground and Paris is unthinkable without it. The interest of the Place is summed up in the Luxor column, which may perhaps be said to mark what is perhaps the most critical site in modern history; for where the obelisk now stands stood not so very long ago the guillotine.

The Place's name has been Concorde only since 1830 It began in 1763, when a bronze statue of Louis XV. on horseback was erected there, surrounded by emblematic figures, from the chisel of Pigalle, of Prudence, Justice, Force and Peace. Hence the characteristic French epigram:—

"O la belle statue, O le beau piédestal!
Les Vertus sont à pied, le Vice est à cheval."

Before this time the Place had been an open and uncultivated space; it was now enclosed, surrounded with fosses, made trim, and called La Place Louis Quinze. In 1770, however, came tragedy; for on the occasion of the marriage of the Dauphin, afterwards the luckless Louis XVI., with the equally luckless Marie Antoinette, a display of fireworks was given, during which one of the rockets (as one always dreads at every display) declined the sky and rushed horizontally into the crowd, and in the resulting stampede thousands of persons fell into the ditches, twelve hundred being killed outright and two thousand injured.

Twenty-two years later, kings having suddenly become cheap, the National Convention ordered the statue of Louis XV. to be melted down and recast into cannon, a clay figure of Liberté to be set up in its stead, and the name to be changed to the Place de la Révolution. This was done, and a little later the guillotine was erected a few yards west of the spot where the Luxor column now stands, primarily for the removal of the head of Louis XVI., in whose honour those unfortunate fireworks had been ignited. The day was January 21st, 1793.

"King Louis," says Carlyle, "slept sound, till five in the morning, when Cléry, as he had been ordered, awoke him. Cléry dressed his hair: while this went forward, Louis took a ring from his watch, and kept trying it on his finger; it was his wedding-ring, which he is now to return to the Queen as a mute farewell. At half-past six, he took the Sacrament; and continued in devotion, and conference with Abbé Edgeworth. He will not see his Family: it were too hard to bear.

"At eight, the Municipals enter: the King gives them his Will, and messages and effects; which they, at first, brutally refuse to take charge of: he gives them a roll of gold pieces, a hundred and twenty-five louis; these are to be returned to Malesherbes, who had lent them. At nine, Santerre says the hour is come. The King begs yet to retire for three minutes. At the end of three minutes, Santerre again says the hour is come. 'Stamping on the ground with his right-foot, Louis answers: "Partons, Let us go."'—How the rolling of those drums comes in, through the Temple bastions and bulwarks, on the heart of a queenly wife; soon to be a widow! He is gone, then, and has not seen us? A Queen weeps bitterly; a King's Sister and Children. Over all these Four does Death also hover: all shall perish miserably save one; she, as Duchesse d'Angoulême, will live,—not happily.

"At the Temple Gate were some faint cries, perhaps from voices of pitiful women: 'Grâce! Grâce!' Through the rest of the streets there is silence as of the grave. No man not armed is allowed to be there: the armed, did any even pity, dare not express it, each man overawed by all his neighbours. All windows are down, none seen looking through them. All shops are shut. No wheel-carriage rolls, this morning, in these streets but one only. Eighty thousand armed men stand ranked, like armed statues of men; cannons bristle, cannoneers with match burning, but no word or movement: it is as a city enchanted into silence and stone: one carriage with its escort, slowly rumbling, is the only sound. Louis reads, in his Book of Devotion, the Prayers of the Dying: clatter of this death-march falls sharp on the ear, in the great silence; but the thought would fain struggle heavenward, and forget the Earth.

"As the clocks strike ten, behold the Place de la Révolution, once Place de Louis Quinze: the Guillotine, mounted near the old Pedestal where once stood the Statue of that Louis! Far round, all bristles with cannons and armed men: spectators crowding in the rear; D'Orléans Egalité there in cabriolet. Swift messengers, hoquetons, speed to the Townhall, every three minutes: near by is the Convention sitting,—vengeful for Lepelletier. Heedless of all, Louis reads his Prayers of the Dying; not till five minutes yet has he finished; then the Carriage opens. What temper he is in? Ten different witnesses will give ten different accounts of it. He is in the collision of all tempers; arrived now at the black Maelstrom and descent of Death: in sorrow, in indignation, in resignation struggling to be resigned. 'Take care of M. Edgeworth,' he straitly charges the Lieutenant who is sitting with them: then they two descend.

"The drums are beating: 'Taisez-vous, Silence!' he cries 'in a terrible voice, d'une voix terrible'. He mounts the scaffold, not without delay; he is in puce coat, breeches of gray, white stockings. He strips off the coat; stands disclosed in a sleeve-waistcoat of white flannel. The Executioners approach to bind him: he spurns, resists; Abbé Edgeworth has to remind him how the Saviour, in whom men trust, submitted to be bound. His hands are tied, his head bare, the fatal moment is come. He advances to the edge of the Scaffold, 'his face very red,' and says: 'Frenchmen, I die innocent: it is from the Scaffold and near appearing before God that I tell you so. I pardon my enemies: I desire that France——' A General on horseback, Santerre or another, prances out, with uplifted hand: 'Tambours!' The drums drown the voice. Executioners, do your duty!' The Executioners, desperate lest themselves be murdered (for Santerre and his Armed Ranks will strike, if they do not), seize the hapless Louis: six of them desperate, him singly desperate, struggling there; and bind him to their plank. Abbé Edgeworth, stooping, bespeaks him: 'Son of Saint Louis, ascend to Heaven'. The Axe clanks down; a King's Life is shorn away. It is Monday the 21st of January, 1793. He was aged Thirty-eight years, four months and twenty-eight days.

"Executioner Samson shows the Head: fierce shout of Vive la République rises, and swells; caps raised on bayonets, hats waving; students of the College of Four Nations take it up, on the far Quais; fling it over Paris. D'Orléans drives off in his cabriolet: the Townhall Councillors rub their hands, saying, 'It is done, It is done'. There is dipping of handkerchiefs, of pike-points in the blood. Headsman Samson, though he afterwards denied it, sells locks of the hair: fractions of the puce coat are long after worn in rings.—And so, in some half-hour it is done; and the multitude has all departed. Pastry-cooks, coffee-sellers, milkmen sing out their trivial quotidian cries: the world wags on, as if this were a common day. In the coffee-houses that evening, says Prudhomme, Patriot shook hands with Patriot in a more cordial manner than usual. Not till some days after, according to Mercier, did public men see what a grave thing it was."

The guillotine for more ordinary purposes worked in the Place du Carrousel, not far from Gambetta's statue to-day; but from May, 1793, until June, 1794, it was back in the Place de la Concorde (then Place de la Révolution) again, accounting during that time for no fewer than 1,235 offenders, including Charlotte Corday, Madame Roland and Marie Antoinette. The blood flowed daily, while the tricoteuses looked on over their knitting and the mob howled.

Another removal, to the Place de la Bastille, and then on 28th July, 1794, the engine of justice or vengeance was back again to end a life and the Reign of Terror in one blow. What life? But listen: "Robespierre," lay in an anteroom of the Convention Hall, while his Prison-escort was getting ready; the mangled jaw bound up rudely with bloody linen: a spectacle to men. He lies stretched on a table, a deal-box his pillow; the sheath of the pistol is still clenched convulsively in his hand. Men bully him, insult him: his eyes still indicate intelligence; he speaks no word. 'He had on the sky-blue coat he had got made for the Feast of the Être Suprême'—O Reader, can thy hard heart hold out against that? His trousers were nankeen; the stockings had fallen down over the ankles. He spake no word more in this world.

"And so, at six in the morning, a victorious Convention adjourns. Report flies over Paris as on golden wings; penetrates the Prisons; irradiates the faces of those that were ready to perish: turnkeys and moutons, fallen from their high estate, look mute and blue. It is the 28th day of July, called 10th of Thermidor, year 1794.

"Fouquier had but to identify; his Prisoners being already Out of Law. At four in the afternoon, never before were the streets of Paris seen so crowded. From the Palais de Justice to the Place de la Révolution, for thither again go the Tumbrils this time, it is one dense stirring mass; all windows crammed; the very roofs and ridge-tiles budding forth human Curiosity, in strange gladness. The Death-tumbrils, with their motley Batch of Outlaws, some twenty-three or so, from Maximilien to Mayor Fleuriot and Simon the Cordwainer, roll on. All eyes are on Robespierre's Tumbril, where he, his jaw bound in dirty linen, with his half-dead Brother and half-dead Henriot, lie shattered; their 'seventeen hours' of agony about to end. The Gendarmes point their swords at him, to show the people which is he. A woman springs on the Tumbril; clutching the side of it with one hand, waving the other Sibyl-like; and exclaims: 'The death of thee gladdens my very heart, m'enivre de joie'; Robespierre opened his eyes; 'Scélérat, go down to Hell, with the curses of all wives and mothers!'—At the foot of the scaffold, they stretched him on the ground till his turn came. Lifted aloft, his eyes again opened; caught the bloody axe. Samson wrenched the coat off him; wrenched the dirty linen from his jaw: the jaw fell powerless, there burst from him a cry;—hideous to hear and see. Samson, thou canst not be too quick!

"Samson's work done, there bursts forth shout on shout of applause. Shout, which prolongs itself not only over Paris, but over France, but over Europe, and down to this generation. Deservedly, and also undeservedly. O unhappiest Advocate of Arras, wert thou worse than other Advocates? Stricter man, according to his Formula, to his Credo and his Cant, of probities, benevolences, pleasures-of-virtue, and suchlike, lived not in that age. A man fitted, in some luckier settled age, to have become one of those incorruptible barren Pattern-Figures, and have had marble-tablets and funeral-sermons. His poor landlord, the Cabinet-maker in the Rue Saint-Honoré, loved him; his Brother died for him. May God be merciful to him and to us!

"This is the end of the Reign of Terror."

In 1799 the Place won its name Concorde. The next untoward sight that it was to see was Prussian and Russian soldiers encamping there in 1814 and 1815, and in 1815 the British. By this time it had been renamed Place Louis Quinze, which in 1826 was changed to Place Louis Seize, and a project was afoot for raising a monument to that monarch's memory on the spot where he fell. But the Revolution of 1830 intervened, and "Concorde" resumed its sway, and in 1836 Louis-Philippe, the new king (whose father, Philippe Egalité, had perished on the guillotine here), erected the Luxor column, which had been given to him by Mohammed Ali, and had once stood before the great temple of Thebes commemorating on its sides the achievements of Rameses II. Since then certain symbolic statues of the great French cities (including unhappy Strassburg) have been set up, and the Place is a model of symmetry; and at the time that I write (1909) a great part of it is enclosed within hoardings for I know not what purpose, but I hope a subway for the saving of the lives of pedestrians, for it must be the most perilous crossing in the world. One has but to set foot in the roadway and straightway motor-cars and cabs spring out of the earth and converge upon one from every point of the compass, in the amazing French way. Concorde, indeed!

If the Place de la Concorde may be called at night a congress of lamps, the Champs-Elysées in the afternoon may be said to be a congress of wheels. Wheels in such numbers and revolving at such a pace are never seen in England, not even on the Epsom road on Derby Day. For there is no speed limit for the French motor-car. Nor have we in England anything like this superb roadway, so wide and open, climbing so confidently to the Arc de Triomphe, with its groves on either side at the foot, and the prosperous white mansions afterwards. It is not our way. We English, with our ambition to conquer and administer the world, have neglected our own home; the French, with no ambition any longer to wander beyond their own borders, have made their home beautiful. The energy which we as a nation put into greater Britain, they have put into buildings, into statues, into roads. The result is that we have the Transvaal, Australia, New Zealand, Canada and India, but it is the French, foregoing such possessions and all their anxieties, who have the Champs-Elysées.

The Champs-Elysées were planned and laid out by Marie de Médicis in 1616, and the Cours la Reine, her triple avenue of trees, still exists; but Napoleon is the father of the scheme which culminates so magnificently in the Arc de Triomphe. The particular children's paradise of Paris is in the gardens between the main road and the Elysée, where they bowl their hoops and spin their Diabolo spools, and ride on the horses of minute round-abouts turned by hand, and watch the marionettes, with the tired eyes of Alphonse Daudet, who sits for ever, close by, in very white stone, watching them. Here also are the open-air cafés, the Ambassadeurs and the Alcazar, while on the other, the river, side are the Jardin de Paris, a curiously Lutetian haunt, and Ledoyen's, one of the pleasantest of restaurants in summer.

Just above this point we ought to turn to the left to visit the Petit Palais and cross the Pont Alexandre III., but since we are on the way let us now climb to the Etoile, and on to the Bois, first, however, just turning off the Rond-Point for a moment to look at No. 3 Avenue Matignon, where Heine (beside whose grave we are to stand on Montmartre) suffered and died.

The Place de l'Etoile might be called a kind of gilt-edged Seven Dials, since so many roads lead from it. Aristocratic Paris comes to a head here. On the right runs from it the Avenue de Friedland, leading to the Boulevard Haussmann, which meets with so inglorious an end at the Rue Taitbout, but is perhaps to be cut through to join the Boulevard Montmartre. Next on the right is the Avenue Hoche, running directly into the Parc Monceau, a terrestrial paradise to which good mondaines certainly go when they die. A little appartement overlooking the Parc Monceau—there is tangible heaven, if you like!

The Parc itself is small but perfect, elegant and expensive and verdant. The children (one feels) are all titled, the bonnes are visibly miracles of distinction and the babies masses of point lace; the ladies on the chairs must be Comtesses or Baronnes, and the air is carefully scented. That is the Parc Monceau. It needed but one detail to make it complete, and that was supplied a few years ago: a statue of Guy de Maupassant, consisting of a block of the most radiant marble to be procured, with the novelist as its apex, and at the base a Parisienne reading one of his stories. Other statues there are: of Ambroise Thomas the composer, to whom Mignon offers a floral tribute; of Pailleron the dramatist, attended by an actress; of Gounod surrounded by Marguerite, Juliet, Sappho and a little Love; and of Chopin seated at the piano, with the figures of Night and Harmony to inspire him. These are only a few; but they are typical. Every statue in the Parc has a damsel or two, according to his desire. It is the mode. There is also a minute lake, on the edge of which have been set up a number of Corinthian columns; and before you have been seated a minute, an old woman appears from nowhere and demands twopence for what she poetically calls an armchair, the extra penny being added as a compliment to the two uncomfortable wires at the side which you had been wishing you could break off. Such is the Parc Monceau, the like of which exists not in London: the ideal pleasaunce of the wealthy. Through it, I might add, you may drive; but only at a walking pace—au pas. If the horse were to trot he might shake some petals off.

At the western gate is the Musée Cernuschi, containing a collection of oriental pottery and bronzes. I am no connoisseur of these beautiful things, but I advise all readers of this book to visit both this museum and the Guimet in the Place d'Iéna, which is a treasury of Japanese and Chinese art.

Returning to the Etoile, the next avenue is the Avenue de Wagram, running north to the Porte d'Asnières, while that which continues the Avenue des Champs-Elysées in a straight line west by north is the Avenue de la Grande Armée, running to the Porte Maillot and Neuilly. On the left the first avenue is the Avenue Marceau, which leads to the Place de l'Alma; the next the Avenue d'Iéna, leading to the Place d'Iéna; the next, the Avenue Kléber, running straight to the Trocadéro (into which I have never penetrated) and Passy, where the English live; the next, the Avenue Victor Hugo, which never stops; and finally the Avenue du Bois de Boulogne, the most beautiful roadway in new Paris, along which we shall fare when we have examined the Arc de Triomphe.

This trophy of success was begun, as I have said, by Napoleon to celebrate the victories of 1805 and 1806; Louis-Philippe finished it in 1836. Why Louis XVIII. did not destroy it or complete it as a further memorial of the Restoration, I cannot say. Napoleon's original idea was, however, tampered with by his successors, who allowed a bas-relief representing the Blessings of Peace in 1815 to be included. The sculptures are otherwise wholly devoted to the glorification of war, Napoleon and the French army; but they are not to be studied without serious inconvenience. My advice to the conscientious student would be to buy photographs or picture postcards, and examine them at home: the Arc de Triomphe is too great and splendid for such detail. From the top one can see all round Paris, and though one cannot look down on it all as from the Eiffel Tower, or see, beneath one, such an interesting district as from Notre Dame, it is yet a wonderfully interesting view.

The Avenue du Bois de Boulogne has the finest road in what is, so to speak, the Marais of the present day; that is to say, in the modern quarter of the aristocratic and wealthy. We have seen riches and rank moving from the Marais to the Faubourg St. Germain and from the Faubourg St. Germain to the Faubourg St. Honoré, and now we find them here, and here they seem likely to remain. And indeed to move farther would be foolish, for surely there never was, and could not be, a more beautiful city site than this anywhere in the world—with its wide cool lawns on either side, and its gay colouring, and the Bois so near. Here too, on the heads of the comfortable complacent bonnes, are the most radiant caps you ever saw.

The Bois de Boulogne, which takes its name from the little town of Boulogne to the south of it, now a suburb of Paris, began its life as a Paris park in the eighteen-fifties. Before that it was a forest of great trees, which indeed remained until the Franco-Prussian war, when they were cut down in order that they might not give cover to the enemy. That is why the present groves are all of a size. I cannot describe the Bois better than by saying that it is as if Hyde Park, Sandown Park, Kempton Park, and Epping Forest were all thrown together between Shepherd's Bush, Acton and the river. London would then have something like the Bois; and yet it would not be like the Bois at all, because it would rapidly become a desert of newspapers and empty bottles, whereas, although in the summer populous with picnic parties, the Bois is always clean and fresh.

There are several gates to the Bois, but the principal ones are the Porte Maillot at the end of the Avenue de la Grande Armée, and the Porte Dauphine at the end of the Avenue du Bois de Boulogne, and it is through the latter that the thousands of vehicles pass on their way to the races on happy Sundays in the spring and autumn. Most English people visiting the Bois merely drive to the races and back again; it is quite the exception to find any one who really knows the Bois—who has walked round the two lakes, Lac Inférieur, which feeds the cascade under which one may walk (as at Niagara), and Lac Supérieur; who has seen a play in the Théâtre de Verdure, or an exhibition at Bagatelle, the villa of the late Sir Richard Wallace, who gave the Champs-Elysées its drinking fountains and London the Wallace Collection. Bagatelle now belongs to Paris. Every English visitor, however, remembers the stone animals, dogs and deer, in the lawn of the Villa de Longchamp on the right as one approaches the race-course, and the windmill on the left, one of the several inoperative windmills of Paris, which marks the site of the old Abbey of Longchamp, founded by Isabella, the sister of Saint Louis.