The moon spreads its delicate white light over the old walls, and a silvern Paris rears itself in the darkness. At times, too, underneath a storm-red sky, an entirely sombre town arises, made known only as a tragic vision in successive flashes of lightning.

Either we have a Paris of sunny mirth or a Paris bathed in night's gloom.

Descending once again towards the Seine, through the picturesque streets that surround the Institute—the Rue Dauphine, the Rue de Nesles, the Rue Mazarine—we discover in the Rue Contrescarpe-Dauphine—at present the Rue Mazet—the remains of the old White Horse Inn. The stables, with their ancient mangers and quaint eaves, still exist. They date back to Louis XIV. In that time, every week the huge inn-yard was filled with travellers going to Orléans and Blois; and the unwieldy coach started in a cloud of dust, amidst crackings of whip, trumpetings, adieus, and shakings of handkerchiefs; horses pranced, women wept, dogs barked, postilions swore. To-day the animation has disappeared, but the scene has remained, age-stricken, impressive, still charming, so much so that Massenet, moved by it, murmured one morning: "It must be here that Manon[2] alighted from the diligence!"

The neighbouring house was once the Magny restaurant, at which those celebrated dinners were given that Goncourt speaks of so often in his Memoirs, dinners shared by Renan, Sainte-Beuve, Georges Sand, Flaubert, Théophile Gautier, Gavarni, and many others.

Not far away, and connecting the Rue Mazarine—where Molière and his company played—with the Rue de Seine, let us go through the Passage du Pont-Neuf, occupying the site of the ancient entrance to the theatre, and being the scene of Zola's terrible novel Thérèse Raquin.

It is a typical nook—sordid, dingy, and malodorous, but strangely attractive, with its fried-potato sellers and Italian modellers. The shops in it seem to belong to another century; some months back, one only was frequented by customers, that of a drawing-paper dealer. The artist, Bonnat, told us he had bought his "Ingres paper" there, when he was a pupil at the School of Fine Arts, of which to-day he is the eminent head. The shop had not altered for sixty years, and the saleswoman asserted that the "stomping-rags she sold were exactly similar to those used by Monsieur Flandrin." In front of us is the Institute, and it is impossible to walk along the interminable black-looking wall enclosing it, on the side of the Rue Mazarine, without thinking of the painful paragraph in the preface of the Fils Naturel, wherein the younger Dumas, speaking of his childhood, recalls the souvenir of the return from the first performance, at the Odéon, of Charles VI. chez ses grands vassaux, on the 20th of October 1831.

The evening had been a stormy one, and the success of the play was doubtful. Consequently, a continuation of their poverty was to be expected. Alexandre Dumas had heavy burdens to support—his mother, a household, a child. He had to live himself and to keep his family on the meagre salary his situation under the Duke d'Orléans procured him. It was not of his talents but of his star that he doubted; and the younger Dumas always remembered his father's broad shadow cast by the moon on the dark, gloomy wall of the Institute, and himself timidly guessing at his father's anxieties and endeavouring, with his little eight-year-old legs, to follow and keep up with the studies of the good-natured giant.

In what was, during the seventeenth century, a sumptuous dwelling—the mansion, 'tis said, of Gabrielle d'Estrées—behind the huge, tall front steps at the back of the courtyard, was the dingy, smoky habitation, stinking of wine, dirt, debauch, and vice.

One had to step over the bodies of male and female drunkards to get inside the dens where such poor wretches came seeking some sort of lodging and an hour of forgetfulness. It was at once hideous and lugubrious. Amateurs of ugly sights might continue their studies hard by, on the premises of "Gaffer" Lunette, in the Rue des Anglais. The inhabitants were similar; a prison population—"bestiality in all its horror," as Mephistopheles sings in the Damnation of Faust. Recent building and sanitary improvements have done away with the "Red Castle."

The sublime artists who, in several centuries, knew how to create the forest of fine carvings with which the apse is adorned, have, alas! left but sorry successors. By the side of old painted glass windows, brought from the church of Saint-Germain-des-Prés, other cold, modern stained windows of loud colour have taken from Saint-Séverin's the religious, poetical mysteriousness, the inviting half-obscurity that appeal to the soul of the believer; and their crude light renders only too visible the marks of successive mutilations inflicted on this fine church. In the next street, the present clergy-house is built on the old graveyard, where, in 1641—as the erudite Monsieur de Rochegude informs us—the first operation for gravel was publicly performed on a criminal condemned to death, who, happy man, was cured, and pardoned by Louis XI. The whole of the quarter is one of the busiest in Paris. It would seem as if the vagabonds, the lewd and their lemans, the tatterdemalions of bygone centuries, had left there a direct line of descendants. People live in the street, eat scraps in low drink-shops; a smell of spirits floats in the air at the corners of the various cross-roads; bars and petty restaurants are thronged with customers. Part of the money begged or stolen in Paris is spent there.

Saint-Médard's church is quite close, with its small, dusty, quaint Square, and its round tower at the end of the Rue Monge and the corner of the Rue Mouffetard. It is a gloomy, rat-gnawed, poverty-stricken church, looking as if worn-out with age; and is blocked in by old houses covered with gaudy-coloured advertisements. It has left, far behind in the past, the days when the tomb of the Deacon Pâris in it performed its miracles, when the townsfolk and courtfolk crowded in the small graveyard, a door of which still exists, the one perhaps whereon was written the famous couplet:—

"In the King's name, forbid is God
To work a wonder on this sod."

The Rue Mouffetard passes in front of the church porch, overflowing with life and activity. A hundred petty trades are exercised in it; the house doors themselves—old eighteenth-century doors—shelter women-sellers of flowers, milk, fried potatoes, cooked mussels; children play about the middle of the road; carriage traffic is rare. Housewives gossip on their doorsteps, people live together—and in the street. The Passage des Patriarches, which opens at No. 99, was famous in days of yore. The Calvinists, who used to preach there, had bloody quarrels with the Catholics of Saint-Médard's. To-day, it is nothing but a dank, dirty, melancholy alley, inhabited by bric-à-brac dealers, old-iron sellers, and petty hucksters; and smells of rags, old lead, and cauliflower!

Maubert Square is the converging centre of these strange streets. At present, modernised and rearranged—adorned, if I may say so, with a wretched statue of Etienne Dolet, who was burnt there in 1546—the Square only vaguely resembles the "Plac' Maub'," still visible six or seven years ago, ill-famed, narrow, bordered with old steep-roofed houses, a den of vagabonds, full of suspicious lurking-corners where the police might be sure of making good hauls. Near at hand, in the Maubert Blind Alley, Sainte-Croix used to dwell; and it was in the same mysterious retreat that Madame de Brinvilliers, the sorry heroine of the Poisons drama so well told by our witty friend, F. Funck-Brentano, used to meet her accomplice and with him prepare the terrible "succession powder," composed, according to her avowal, of "vitriol, toad's venom, and rarefied arsenic," which she made use of to poison her father, her two brothers, and to try to make away with her sisters and husband.

Not far from this spot, the Rue Maître-Albert—which up to 1844 was called the Rue Perdue—owes its present name to the Dominican Maître Albert who, in the thirteenth century, taught in the open air in Maubert Square. It contains curious houses, to-day dens for tramps, who spend the night in them. In 1819, an old negro of miserable appearance and strange manners used to go down this dark street every evening, trying his best to escape observation, and used to seek food and shelter in one of its sorry eating-houses. People pointed him out as he went, whispering that he was formerly Dubarry's black servant, Zamore, whom Louis XV. had played with; Zamore who became a power, petted and courted by noble lords, fine ladies, and princes of the Church that emulously strove to gain the favourite's good graces. Later, having been appointed a municipal officer under the Terror, he vilely, ungratefully, and in a cowardly way, betrayed his benefactress, gave her up, and cast her beneath the knife of the guillotine. At length, sinking lower and lower, Zamore came and hid himself at No. 13, on the second courtyard floor of this gloomy Rue Perdue, and died there on the 7th of February 1820.

The two churches nearest the spot are those of Saint-Nicolas-du-Chardonneret and Saint-Julien-le-Pauvre. Connected with the former is a dismal little seminary, in which, under the guidance of the Abbé Dupanloup, the eminent philosopher Ernest Renan went through part of his theological studies. Every one should read in the Souvenirs of my Childhood and Youth the admirable pages this marvellous writer has devoted to his stay in this studious home. "The parish, which derived its name from the field of thistles well known of the students at the Paris University in the Middle Ages, was then the centre of a rich quarter inhabited chiefly by the legal profession. The boarding-school régime weighed heavily upon me. My best friend, a young man from Coutances, I think, like myself, full of enthusiasm, and of excellent heart, held himself aloof, refused to reconcile himself, and died. The Savoy students showed themselves still less acclimatisable. One of them, older than I, owned to me that, each evening, he measured with his eye the height of the three-storey dormitory above the pavement of the Rue Saint-Victor. I fell ill; apparently I was doomed. My Breton soul lost itself in an infinite melancholy. The last angelus of evening I had heard resound over our dear hills, and the last sunset I had watched over the tranquil landscape came back to my memory like sharp arrows. In the ordinary course of things I ought to have died. Perhaps it would have been better if I had...."

To refresh ourselves after so painful a spectacle, let us come back to the lovely Parisian quays, and walk along the fair river, quivering in the daylight or in the moon's nightly rays; let us pass by the beautiful mansions of the Miramionnes, of Nesmond, of Judge Rolland, in front of the wine market—"catacombs of thirst," and pause at the old Jardin des Plantes, dear to Buffon. A touch of the charm of things past, but not entirely vanished, lingers yet!

The trees are centuries old, the ornamental hornbeams have not been altered; there are aviaries and goat-pens which are the same as when Daubigny and Charles Jacques sketched them in 1843, to illustrate the handsome work published by Curmer.

Within these finely decorated and cosy rooms there was, so to speak, an ideal assemblage of blossoms, a fairy scene of exquisite colours, an enchantment wrought by a brilliant palette.

There they were, all of them, beautiful butterflies, with their metallic lustres from India and Brazil, French butterflies of a thousand tints, both the great death's-head sphynx and the little blue creature of the meadows.

Perhaps time had powdered and somewhat dimmed the marvellous brightness of their first colouring; but it was better so. Their pristine lustre would have been too great a contrast in the quaint surroundings, and it was an extra charm to see such gems of the air thus lightly decked with the dust of the past! To-day, alas! these rooms, flowering with sculpture, are closed and forsaken; a part of their wainscoting has disappeared.... Where have decorations so pleasing gone?... Why these everlasting, culpable mutilations, which I know are a grief to Monsieur Périer, the eminent Director of the Museum? The collections of butterflies are now transferred to the vast and sumptuous central hall of the new pavilion devoted to natural history. I liked them better in the charming rooms which once contained them and suited them so well!

The water-flowers bloom, as of yore, in the same low, stifling hot-houses, near the bizarre-shaped orchids; and it was in the old amphitheatre, where so many illustrious scholars taught, that the noble artist Madame Madeleine Lemaire,—the only "woman professor" that has ever held a post at the Museum,—initiated her attentive, spell-bound audience into the divine beauty of flowers!

In all periods, artists have come and installed their light easel or their modelling-stands in front of the lions' cages, or in the Garden itself, on the grass, opposite the antelopes, hinds, walla-birds, or the goats of Thibet.

We remember, my brother and I, having, as little boys, accompanied our father, who was modelling from life the tigers and lions in the wild beasts' corridor. The odour was pungently alkaline, the heat sultry; we heard the hissing of polecats in the entrance and exit rotundas; sometimes a terrible roar, a complaint of anger, pain, or ennui, arose and shook the panes.

Most of these unfortunate animals, deprived of air and light, shut up in the horrible, narrow, stinking cages, died a lingering death of consumption. Indeed, they quickly grew familiar with those who spent whole weeks studying them; and their huge heads rubbed caressingly against the thick cage-bars, while their eyes became soft and almost tender.

Often we went, inquisitive, ferreting school-boys, to the reptiles' menagerie, an old building crumbling with age, and passed long hours peeping at the chameleons, gazing at the boa-constrictors, trying to rouse the sleepy crocodiles, which seemed to be already stuffed! What reminiscences and souvenirs in the dear old Jardin des Plantes, one of the few "Nooks and Corners of Paris" that have remained almost untouched!

On the side, the ancient house Cuvier lived in does not look very stable, and perhaps would go to pieces but for the network of plants round it: ivy, birthwort honeysuckle, lianes of all kinds caparisoned it with verdure. They are carpets, cascades of glossy green, shining together: a nosegay of leaves in a garden.

Behind the Jardin des Plantes is Salpêtrière with its walls of evil memory, the Salpêtrière of the September massacres, the Salpêtrière whence Madame de Lamotte so easily escaped after her condemnation; with its broad gardens and its ugly covered-yards surrounded by railings, where, as De Goncourt said, "Women madder than their fellows" are confined. The dome, visible from everywhere, commands, like a lighthouse of misery, all this quarter infected by the Bièvre, the poor, sacrificed river, which is now in part walled over; the oily Bièvre, streaked with tannery acids, reddened by skins of sheep recently flayed that steep in it; the Bièvre which flows miserably and sordidly, but yet so picturesquely, amidst starch factories, fellmongers' stores and other works, after traversing the tiny gardens of Gentilly and creating the illusion of a landscape in the quarter of the Fontaine-à-Mulard.

Gone is the time when this ill-starred river washed the banks of smiling meadows and reflected the willows in its clear waters. Tamed, domesticated, adapted to tasks of every sort, unceasingly used by tanners, curriers, tawers, dyers, it flows dirty and putrid! To follow it in its windings, the Rue du Moulin-des-Prés must be ascended, and entrance made into the Rue de Tolbiac. There, through a gate, it enters a dark, dismal passage, whence it will issue only to glide in a kind of sinister-looking canal between black, repulsive manufactories. Here and there, along the scanty banks, a few washerwomen have fixed their tubs on a level with the water, and sing as they dolly their linen; elsewhere, wretched urchins endeavour to catch a stray fish that might have lost its way in the mephitic stream. Then the Bièvre disappears once again and this time underground, coming to view afresh in the Rue des Gobelins. At this spot, some rare traces of a glorious past are discovered. The ancient houses have many of them remained. But how often transformed! The owners of works and of shops, after enslaving the river, have taken possession of the houses bordering it.

But before the last fall, the Bièvre passes through an astonishingly strange lane, one of the oddest in this odd quarter: the Ruelle des Gobelins. It flows as a stream of red, green, and yellow tints, between patched-up, mouldy, tumble-down houses, in an odour of ammonia. And yet, near these hovels, among the heaps of tan, beside pits in which are macerating skins of flayed animals, a gem of carving rises as it were an appeal of beauty, a vestige of past splendour. It is the sculptured remains of an adorable Louis XV. pavilion of which Monsieur de Julienne had made a hunting-box; and this lovely paradox, this blossom of stone cast among such a mass of ugliness, is not one of the least surprises of the quarter so fertile in matters for astonishment. Moreover, a few yards from this sewer, the artists of the Gobelins Manufactory have laid out their work-and-study-gardens, in which shine the purple, gold and azure of the prettiest flowers in France. These, cleverly distributed, arrange a carpet of exquisite and radiant colours athwart the surrounding district of sombre sadness.

On the confines of the town, is the Butte-aux-Cailles, a vast piece of waste land, cheerless and without charm, which, until 1863, was a sort of fresh country spot, with mills and farms on it. To-day, it is a quarter of hard labour, where numbers of rag-pickers classify the refuse of Paris. At the corner of the Ruelle des Peupliers, faggot-dealers have set up their huts; and hovels line strange streets made with the clearings of other streets.

Once, these spacious grounds were one stretch of flower gardens and market gardens watered by the Bièvre.

In a most interesting book, somewhat forgotten now, Alfred Delvau tells us much of the former history, under Louis-Philippe, of the Saint-Marceau faubourg, the Butte-aux-Cailles, the Rue Croulebarde, and also the Rue du Champ-de-l'Alouette, in which last street the "Shepherdess of Ivry" was murdered, the crime by its bizarre character producing a deep impression in the Capital in 1827. It was a public-house waiter, Honoré Ulbach, who had stabbed a girl, Aimée Millot by name; she, as a keeper of goats, was popular at Ivry. Every day, she was to be seen, with a large straw hat on her head and a book in her hand, tending her mistress's goats. The "Shepherdess of Ivry" she was called in the neighbourhood; in 1827, there were still shepherdesses in Paris!

The trial that followed excited the whole town; the crime was one of love and jealousy; the victim was nineteen; she was virtuous and a shepherdess; women "cursed the murderer, even while pitying him perhaps," wrote the newspapers of the time; and even the giraffe but recently arrived at the King's Garden was neglected for the Ivry drama.

On the 27th of July, Ulbach, who seems to have been half-mad, was condemned to death; and, at four o'clock in the evening on the 10th of September, he was executed on the Grève Square.

A Municipal Crèche, in the Rue des Gobelins, occupies, at No. 3, a fine Louis XIII. mansion, once inhabited by the Marquis of Saint-Mesme, a lieutenant-general and the husband of Elizabeth Gobelin, close to a handsome lordly-looking building which in the quarter bears the name of Queen Blanche's Mansion.

The legend attaching to the latter is false, affirms Monsieur Beaurepaire, the learned and amiable librarian of the City of Paris. "It was," he says, "simply Catherine d'Hausserville's home, where Charles VI. was nearly burnt alive during the performance of a ballet, his fancy dress having caught fire." The edifice, with its noble appearance, forms a strange contrast in this poor yet picturesque district.

Another fine mansion, in the Rue Scipio, is the one built by Scipio Sardini, in the reign of Henri III., with terra-cotta medallions, rare Parisian specimens of the exceedingly pretty decoration that pleases us so much at Florence, Pisa, and Verona. This Scipio Sardini was a peculiar man, and his story deserves to be told. Of Tuscan origin, he came to France after the death of Henri II., just when Catherine de Medici seized the reins of power. Amiable, witty, ingratiating, a great financier, clever in his enterprises, and unscrupulous, he quickly gained a preponderant position in the frivolous, dissolute, mirth-loving Court. He excelled in combining business and pleasure. An illustrious marriage seemed to him essential to people's forgetting his low origin and the rapid rise of his fortunes. He married the "fair Limeuil," one of the most seductive beauties of the Queen's flying squadron—"All of them capable of setting the whole world on fire," said Brantôme. This attractive person had been successively courted by the most noble lords of the Court before effecting the conquest of Condé, by whom she had a child. At Dijon, during one of the Queen's receptions, Mademoiselle de Limeuil was taken ill and was delivered of a boy. "It is inexplicable," writes Mézeray, "that such a prudent woman should have so miscalculated." There was a scandal; the Queen Mother was indignant; the fair Isabella was imprisoned; but Condé who was still amorous, succeeded in effecting her escape. The Protestants, however, were on the watch, and induced their leader to give up his too compromising mistress. Then it was that Scipio Sardini came forward, the richest man of the period, the King's banker, as also the nobles' and clergy's. He managed to get himself accepted; the marriage took place; and he settled in this pretty mansion that we still admire, and that is mentioned by Sauval as one of the most beautiful in Paris, amidst vineyards, orchards, and fields bordering on the Bièvre. There he lived, surrounded by luxury, works of art, books and flowers, and died there about 1609. As early as 1636, the mansion was converted into a hospital, which in 1742 was once more transformed, this time into a bakery. To-day, it is the Bakery of the City of Paris Hospitals.

Let us keep along by the Wine Market, and, before crossing to the right bank of the river, respectfully pause on the Stockade Bridge, close to the small monument erected to the famous sculptor Barye by his admirers,—to the great Barye who, misunderstood and mocked, sold up by his creditors, often came in the evening, after leaving his modest studio on the Célestins Quay, to forget his sufferings and muse in this same place before the splendid panorama of Paris crowned by the grand silhouette of the Panthéon. Here, too, is one of the City's best views.

Nothing is more relative than an impression felt. To certain minds in love with the Past, this or that ruin is much more affecting than the most modern palace; it is the same with streets, houses, and pavements.

An exquisite hour to call up the soul of old Paris is at twilight.

The colour peculiar to each object has melted into the general shades and tints spread by the day which is departing and the night which comes.

Delicate lace-work outlines stand out against the sky, while huge violet, black, and blue masses of atmosphere bathe whole streets in fathomless mystery. Then thought awakens, souvenirs revive and grow clear; scenes are lived through again of which these streets and houses were the silent witnesses. One hears cries of fury or of joy; drums beat, bells ring, groups pass singing 'mid these dream visions that rise again!

In order to enjoy such an experience no better spot could be chosen than the Stockade Bridge, which, with its barrier of black beams, as it were shuts off to the east Paris of the olden days.

The City slumbers in the calm of evening, the smoke curls lazily up. Afar sound bells; swallows sweep crying in the air embalmed by falling night; noises ascend vague and weird, interpreted according to the fancy of one's musings. All life seems to sleep; the soul of the past awakes. It is the hour desired.

THE RIGHT BANK OF THE RIVER

The Arsenal quarter, built over the site of the two Royal Palaces—the Saint-Paul mansion, the Tournelles palace—and the soil of the Louviers Isle, joined to the river bank in 1843, serve as a natural transition from the old to modern Paris.

Notwithstanding its warlike name, the Arsenal quarter is one of the most peaceful parts of the Capital. Centuries ago, the palaces disappeared that brought it its wealth, life and movement. On their ruins and their huge gardens, humble, tranquil streets have been made: the Rue de la Cerisaie, where Marshal Villeroy received Peter the Great in the sumptuous Zamet mansion; the Rue Charles V., where once was the elegant home of the Marchioness de Brinvilliers, now at No. 12, premises in which a white-capped sister-of-charity distributes cod-liver oil and woollen socks to poor, suffering children; the Rue des Lions-Saint-Paul; the Rue Beautreillis, where Victorien Sardou was born; near there the great Balzac dwelt. "I was then living," he says in his admirable Facino Cane, "in a small street you probably don't know, the Rue de Lesdiguières. It commences at the Rue Saint-Antoine, opposite a fountain near the Place de la Bastille, and issues in the Rue de la Cerisaie. Love of knowledge had driven me into a garret, where I worked during the night, and spent the day in a neighbouring library, that of Monsieur. When it was fine, I took rare walks on the Bourdon Boulevard." This modest Rue de Lesdiguières still exists in part; on the site occupied by Nos. 8 and 10, could be seen, a few years ago, one of the containing walls of the Bastille; narrow houses have been stuck against it; and, at No. 10, it is the very wall of the old Parisian fortress which constitutes the back of the porter's lodge! What a destiny for a prison wall!

Of what was once the Arsenal only the mansion of the Grand Master is left; it is, at present, the Arsenal Library—formerly called, as Balzac says, the Library of Monsieur. It used to be a fine dwelling, the home of Sully, and possesses priceless books and autographs, and most valuable writings. In a coffer, covered with flower-de-luces, may be admired Saint Louis's book of hours, side by side with a fragment of his royal mantle, the blue silk of it, worn with time, being strewn with golden flower-de-luces; the old book bears this venerable inscription: "It is the psalter of Monseigneur Loys, once his mother's;" and was taken from the scattered treasures of the Sainte-Chapelle. Then there is Charles the Fifth's Bible with the King's writing on it: "This book (belongs) to me, the King of France;" and a missal, each leaf of which is framed with an incomparable garland due to the brush of the "master of flowers," a great artist whose name is unknown to us. Besides, there are rare manuscripts, marvellous bindings, unique editions, romances of chivalry, classics, poets of every age, complete in this fine palace; together with Latude's letters, the box that served for his ridiculous attempt against Madame de Pompadour; and, near them, the cross-examination of the Marchioness de Brinvilliers, and the death-certificate of the Man in the Iron Mask; Henri IV.'s love-letters too, with his kisses sent to the Marchioness de Verneuil, and the documents relating to the affair of the Necklace. How many more things in addition...!

Let us add that the curators—Henri Martin, so learned and obliging, Funck-Brentano, the exquisite historian of the Bastille, the picturesque relater of all its dramas. Sheffer and Eugène Muller are not only scholars needing no praise but most courteous and genial men—and you will quite understand why the Arsenal is one of the few corners in Paris where it is delightful to go and work or to saunter about. Indeed, it is a tradition of the house. Nodier, good old Nodier, who was one of Monsieur de Bornier's predecessors and a predecessor also of J. M. de Heredia, the master who has so recently gone from us, Nodier, the admirable author of the Trophées, had succeeded in making the Arsenal the centre of literary and artistic Paris. Hugo, Lamartine, de Musset, Balzac, Méry, de Vigny, and Fr. Soulié used to meet there; and fine verses were said while regarding the sun glow with red flame behind the towers of Notre Dame.

"The towers of Notre Dame his name's great H composed!"

wrote Vacquerie.

Of the Bastille nothing remains except a few stones which formed the substructure of one of the old towers; and these have been carefully removed to the Célestins Quay, along the Seine, where they are visible to-day. In vain, therefore, would any one now seek for a vestige of the sombre fortress over which so many legends hovered. Latude's great shade itself would hardly locate the spot; and yet how full Paris history is of this traditional Bastille, which the people, amazed with their easy victory, could not tire of visiting after the 15th of July 1789. Such was their curiosity and such their eagerness that Soulès, the governor appointed by the Parisian municipality, was compelled to stop the visits, on the curious ground "that such damage had already been done to the fortress by visitors that more than 200,000 livres would be required to repair it." Repair the Bastille! The souvenir manuscripts of Paré tell us the fury excited by this strange pretension in Danton, sergeant of a section of the National Guard, who, with his company, was turned back by the order.

Danton had himself admitted into the presence of the unfortunate Soulès, seized him by the collar and dragged him to the Town Hall; the prohibition was removed; and Citizen Palloy was thenceforth allowed to exploit the celebrated State prison. The stones were "hewn and cut into images of the fortress and dedicated to the various departments and assemblies," or into "commemorative slabs intended to rouse people's courage." Palloy cut up the leads into medals, and made rings with the iron chains; out of the marble he manufactured games of dominoes, and had the delicate thought to offer one of these games to the young Dauphin to inspire him with "the horror of tyranny."