bridge to the right bank. An engineer named Marie conceived the idea of joining the two islets, and now the island is a unit and only the name of a street indicates where the Seine once flowed between.

Once begun, this new residence section rapidly became popular among people who wanted to live somewhat remote from the turmoil of many streets. To-day the island is covered from tip to tip with dwellings and such few shops as are needed to supply the daily needs of the people, but there is still the atmosphere of remoteness that made its charm for Gautier and Baudelaire and Voltaire, and which induced Lambert de Thorigny, president of the Parliament, to build the superb mansion, still standing and restored to its original beauty, on whose decorations all the best French artists of the day lavished their skill. To cross one of the bridges on to the island is to find one’s self transported to one of the provinces. It is as true to-day as when it was written a hundred and thirty years ago that “the dweller in the Marais is a stranger in the Isle.”

Louis XIII cared little for letters. Richelieu, on the other hand, made some pretensions to being a literary man himself, recognized ability in others, and was able to understand the usefulness and the power of the pen. It was, in part, his encouragement that made the success of the literary meetings at the Hôtel de Rambouillet near the Louvre where the “precious” ladies and gentlemen conversed and wrote in a language whose high-flown eloquence was a reaction against the rough language of the military court of Henry IV. Corneille came to the fore in Louis’ reign, and, for his own political purposes, Richelieu organized a group of writers who had met for their own pleasure into the French Academy whose members, the forty “Immortals,” assume to-day to be the court of last resort on the literature and language of France.

The two succeeding sovereigns, Louis XIV and XV added other academies—of Inscriptions, Sciences and so on—which, after the Revolution, were combined as the Institute and established in the Collège Mazarin near whose dome a tablet now marks the former site of the Tour de Nesle.

It is quite probable that when the great cardinal died, Paris not being gifted with prophetic vision, drew a sigh of relief. His was indeed a master spirit. Beneath the rush of the city’s life there was no one of whatever class who did not know that he was neither too high nor too low to receive the premier’s attention if he drew it upon himself. Richelieu’s word meant his making or his breaking. If Richelieu stretched forth his hand he might be raised to prominence: if Richelieu frowned he might be sent to a prison from which only Death would release him.

Cardinal de Retz, who analyzed Richelieu’s qualities with impartiality and intelligence said of him “all his vices were those which can only be brought into use by means of great virtues.” Claude le Petit (1638-1662), author of “La Chronique Scandaleuse ou Paris Ridicule,” in describing the Palais Royal, wrote:

CHAPTER XVI

PARIS OF THE “GRAND MONARQUE”

War with Spain brought success at the beginning, but the Parisians were all too soon quarreling over the finances, and in the thick of a civil war. The people resented the arrest of a member of Parliament, Broussel, which had been accomplished while the general attention was engaged by the celebration at Notre Dame and in the streets over the victory at Lens. De Retz, who was at that time archbishop suffragan of Paris, went to Anne to ask for Broussel’s release. The queen laughed at him and so roused his wrath that he joined the insurgents. He did it whole-heartedly, for for some time to come he fought in the streets—alternately with trying to calm the people—and once was seen at a sitting of the Parliament of Paris with a dagger carelessly protruding from his pocket—“the archbishop’s breviary,” some wit called it.

After de Retz’s failure the Parliament sent a delegation to the regent at the Palais Royal to demand the release of Broussel. Anne refused and the burghers tucked up their gowns and clambered over the street barricades to report their failure to the people. Half way across town they were met by a mob who declined to accept any such decision as final, and once more the envoys turned about and made their laborious way back to the regent.

Anne finally yielded her prisoner, but her action did not end the struggle, which was carried on for some years and was called the Fronde (sling) because the members of Parliament behaved like the stone-slinging youngsters of the faubourg Saint Honoré who gave way before the king’s archers, but renewed their sport as soon as their backs were turned. The contest seems to have been rather absurd, for while the personal courage of the Parisians was unquestioned there was no organization, and the troop that rode gaily out to meet the royal regulars was pretty sure to ride back sad and bedraggled.

The little king was taken to Saint Germain for protection during this year-long commotion, and it was not until peace between the warring parties had been formally proclaimed that he returned to Paris.

This peace did not last long, for the bourgeoisie, some members of the nobility and even a few princes of the blood royal were among the disaffected Parisians. Anne and Mazarin adopted high-handed measures, but they soon found that imprisoning men like the Prince de Condé of the Bourbon family did not ingratiate the court with the people or advance its cause. Two years later on a summer’s day Mazarin took the child king to the top of the hill on which is now the cemetery of Père Lachaise that he might watch a battle between his own troops under Turenne and those under Condé just outside the city walls on the east. Condé’s force was out-numbered and it looked as if he were going to be crushed between Turenne’s army and the wall when the Porte Saint Antoine was suddenly opened and the guns of the Bastille were used against Turenne while Condé’s army gained this unexpected refuge.

It turned out that the king’s cousin, the Duchesse de Montpensier, known as “La Grande Mademoiselle,” had taken upon herself to give the orders which defeated the royal troops. This strong-minded young woman was the bachelor girl of her time, and a “character.” What she would do next was the constant guess and the constant diversion of the court. Although she was eleven years older than Louis he was so captivated by her vivacity that the cardinal thought it judicious to keep the cousins apart, and gave her apartments at the Louvre. At one time during the siege of Orléans she made her way across the moat in a small boat and squeezed her way into the town through a postern gate. At love she scoffed and she refused every offer of marriage that was made to her until she was of an age ostensibly of discretion when she fell madly in love with an adventurer. Her marital experiences undoubtedly made her return to her earlier beliefs in the foolishness of love and marriage.

The court retreated to Saint Denis. The city was given over to internal dissension for some of the city officials were accused of sympathizing with the hated foreign cardinal and his party, and the Hôtel de Ville became the center of violent scenes, its besiegers men who wore in their hats a tuft of straw, the badge of the Frondeurs. It was only when Anne consented to send Mazarin away that the Fronde came to an end and once again Louis could return to Paris.

With such youthful experiences of his chief city it is small wonder that Louis XIV had no great love for it as a place of residence and that he spent most of his life at Versailles. The hunting lodge which Louis XIII had built was the nucleus of the huge palace which his son made large enough not only for his family and retinue but for a large number of the nobles whom it was his policy to gather about him so that he could keep his eye on them. By this means the power of the nobles was decreased on their own estates while their respect for the king, on whose words and smiles they hung, was enormously increased. A lord was grateful for a room at Versailles even though it were so far from private as to be used as a passage-way. Many of the nobility paid handsomely for positions in the royal kitchens. Later in the reign these offices were held by bourgeois, for the finances of this class improved as those of the upper class lessened on account of decreased revenues from their neglected estates. The burghers aped the nobles in manners and in dress, and by favoring them, from whom he had nothing to fear, Louis gained the friendship of an important body. He raised no objection when the citizens took nobles into business partnership, for that served him both by lowering ancient pride and by providing money upon which he could make some demand.

In manners, dress and literature this reign was increasingly formal following upon the example of Louis who was formal because he honestly believed himself godlike and insisted on formality as appropriate. His was a grand manner and his an incomparable selfishness. His belief in the divine right of kings stretched until “right” meant the right to do whatever he chose however unkind or immoral. Beneath the gorgeousness of the court was a life of hypocrisy, self-seeking, and crime almost beyond belief.

The godlike sovereign certainly had a more than human appetite. It is related that at one dinner he ate:

In theatrical parlance, he was “playing to capacity.”

Upon Mazarin’s death the king, then twenty-three years old and ignorant of independent action, had made known his intention of conducting affairs himself. For the rest of his life he worked hard every day at the affairs of the state, comforted when things went wrong with the refreshing thought that the fault was not his because he had acted with God-given intelligence. The early part of his career was marked by such advance in the condition of the finances, the laws, education, the army, and industrial achievement that, provided he blinded himself to the fact that in Colbert, Vauban and Louvois he had exceptionally efficient administrators, he might well think himself a paragon of intelligence. Great generals won his battles; great writers praised his power; great artists and architects built grandly in his honor. It is not strange that he thought himself what others called him, the “Grand Monarque” and the “Roi Soleil.”

Centralization was the basic policy of Louis’s career. In Paris it took the form of substituting a law court under royal control for the local courts in different parts of the city, and in making the municipal offices purchasable from the king. Municipal improvements made the city pleasanter to live in. An effort was made—not very successfully from the modern point of view—to keep the streets clean, and at night a lantern was hung midway between cross streets and burned until midnight. As the number of lights installed was but 6,500 and Paris at that time covered some four square miles of territory it may be seen that the illumination was not dazzling. It was enough, however, to be of assistance to Louis’ new police force, and to make visible in the evening as well as the morning the two gates—of Saint Denis and Saint Martin—erected by the admiring Parisians to do honor to his early victories. The fire department became a lay institution at this time for, rather curiously, fire fighting had previously been the work of a religious house. The population is estimated at between eight and nine hundred thousand.

Two new squares of this century were the Place des Victoires, in front of Notre Dame des Victoires, and the Place Vendôme, north of the rue Saint Honoré. By a city regulation no change is permitted to-day of the façades of the buildings on these two open places.

At the extreme eastern end of modern Paris the Place de la Nation is the former Place du Trône, which received its name when in 1660 Louis sat upon a temporary throne beyond the city wall to receive congratulations upon having secured the Peace of the Pyrenees.

The poet Scarron, husband of Françoise d’Aubigné who, after his death, became the governess of the king’s children by Madame de Montespan, and who later was married secretly to Louis, has left a description of Paris in the “Great Century.” The translation is by Walter Besant.

An epitome of society this. Paris was indeed full of adventurers, of criminals even among the high-born, of gamblers so mad over games of chance that special laws had to be passed driving them out of the city. There is still standing near the Hôtel de Ville the Hôtel d’Aubray where lived the famous poisoner, the Marquise de Brinvilliers.

A glance at the career of this woman shows a social condition amazing in its calm iniquity. The marquise herself, of seemingly guileless charm, acquired from a lover the destructive skill which she utilized in removing from her path her relatives and any other people who interfered with her in any way. Her trial is a “celebrated case” not only because of her own rank but because other people of note were suspected of being in collusion with her. Torture was abolished under Louis XIV but not until after Madame de Brinvilliers had been made to drink many buckets of water and to be sadly bent across wooden horses.

She was beheaded on the Grève, her body burned and the ashes thrown to the winds. At about the same time accident disclosed an astounding number of cases of poisoning or attempted poisoning. Mme. de Montespan undoubtedly tried to make way with the father of her children, the king, and rumors were constant of many other instances. “So far,” said Mme. de Sevígné’s son, “I have not been accused of attempting to poison little mamma, and that is a distinction in these days.”

Paris was lively enough during this reign, for Versailles was not so far away but that its people could go to town for city diversions, and as Louis grew more serious with age and court etiquette more rigorous and burdensome, the town made its call more and more insistently. Louis himself, hugely bewigged and elaborately elegant, however, does not often appear in the picture. Once he took part in a gorgeous carrousel—a carnival chiefly of equestrian sports—which took place in the large square—now called the Place du Carrousel—lying between the Louvre and the Tuileries. Once, twenty-five years later, he was entertained at the Hôtel de Ville at a dinner at which the city officials waited upon him in person. Yet neither of these pictures lingers in the memory like that of the bewigged monarch usually most punctilious in his dress for occasions, appearing in the palace of the Cité before the Parliament, booted for the chase, arrogantly careless of any courtesy toward the body he addressed and haughtily insisting with the full force of his sincere belief that he and the State were one,—“L’État c’est moi.”

Power was dear to the king’s heart and he so impressed his magnificence on his people that they thought it only fitting that he should have a rising sun carved on the buildings which he erected, such as that part of the Louvre which he built to complete the eastern quadrangle. (See plan, Chapter XXII). The eastern exterior of this section, facing the church of Saint Germain l’Auxerrois, shows the superb colonnade designed by Perrault, a sort of universal genius, who was both a physician and an architect. Another piece of his work was the Observatory, still in active use on the left bank near the University. The king’s appreciation of splendor demanded completeness, and so his handsome buildings were placed in the setting of stately gardens, his chief designer being Le Nôtre whose work is still to be seen encircling the palaces in the environs of Paris. In the city he laid out the gardens of the Tuileries, and that superb avenue, the Champs Elysées, which leads from the broad Place de la Concorde to Napoleon’s Arch of Triumph. The four hundredth anniversary of Le Nôtre’s birth was celebrated on March 12, 1913, when Parisians recalled his work with almost unanimous approval because of its harmony with the impressive buildings which it supplemented.

Other important buildings of Louis’ reign were the Invalides or Soldiers’ Home with its church and its later addition, the work of Mansard who gave his name to the curb-roof which we know. Beneath Mansard’s beautiful dome the body of Napoleon now lies “among the people whom I loved.”

Louis’ contest with the pope over the king’s position as head of the French church tended to lessen his interest in the establishment of religious institutions, but the famous church of Saint Sulpice, whose twin towers are landmarks on the left bank, was begun by him, together with the seminary whose square ugliness is soon to house the overflow from the near-by Luxembourg museum. Since the quarrel between church and state in 1902-03, the building has stood bleakly empty except when it was used to shelter some of the refugees made homeless by the Seine floods a few years ago.

The Abbey-in-the-Woods, removed by Louis from Picardy to Paris and made famous by the residence there in the middle of the last century of the witty Madame Récamier, has been until very recently one of the chief historic “sights” near the celebrated left bank department store, the Bon Marché.

The Church of Saint Nicholas-du-Chardonnet is interesting chiefly because of the tomb which LeBrun, the painter, designed in honor of his mother, a sepulcher opening at the summons of a hovering angel.

Among Louis’ good works must be counted the union of several hospitals into one known as the Salpêtrière from its occupying the site of a saltpeter manufactory, and devoted to-day to the care of nervous diseases and insanity.

The tapestry manufactory of the Gobelins family was received into royal favor by Louis and then as now did its work only for the government. Its products to-day, painstakingly made by skillful workmen who have given their lives to this task as did their fathers before them, are never sold, but are used for the decoration of public buildings and as gifts for people whom the state wishes to honor.

Of comparatively small houses belonging to this century the best remaining instances are the Pavilion of Hanover, in which is the Paris office of the New York Times; the Hôtel Mazarin which now contains the fine collection of books known as the National Library; the Hôtel de la Vrillière, now the Bank of France, with an échauguette (observation turret) by Mansard; the Hôtel de Soubise, used with the Hôtel de

Clisson to house the national archives; the near-by Hôtel de Hollande, once the Dutch embassy; and the Hôtel Beauvais from whose balcony the queen-mother, the Queen of England, Cardinal Mazarin and Turenne watched the entrance of Louis XIV and his bride, Maria Theresa of Spain.

The latter part of Louis’ reign showed a constant decline in power resulting from a decline in common sense no less than from the loss of able advisers. Taxes brought the peasants to poverty, famine killed them when disease did not. Territory was lost. As a last burst of stupidity the revocation of the Edict of Nantes drove out of the country the best class of artisans who took their intelligence and skill to the enrichment of other countries. The beginning of the eighteenth century found France with a selfish nobility, and a disordered bourgeoisie and a peasantry in whose hearts was smoldering the fire of bitter hatred that was to burst forth into flame at the Revolution. During the winter of 1709, six years before Louis’ death, the cold was so severe that five thousand people died of their sufferings in Paris alone, and the scarcity of food was so pronounced that the purveyors of the court had difficulty in securing enough for the king himself to eat.

So ended in suffering and sullenness the reign of the Grand Monarque.

CHAPTER XVII

PARIS OF LOUIS THE “WELL-BELOVED”

At the time of his accession Louis was but five years old, and the regency was given into the hands of the unscrupulous Duke of Orleans. Both courtiers and Parisians were delighted at the removal of the court from Versailles to the city, but the good people of the town soon realized that the added liveliness was a doubtful advantage, for the gayeties of the Palais Royal in which the regent lived were gross debaucheries. Even holy days were not held sacred, and Orleans is said to have expressed extravagant admiration for a certain church dignitary who was reputed not to have gone to bed sober for forty years. To such a pass did the extravagances fostered by the regent grow that even Louis the Well-Beloved, himself the Prince of Extravagance, was compelled later to pass sumptuary laws regulating dress and the expense of entertainments.

There is in the French character to-day a certain credulity as concerns “get-rich-quick” schemes which renders the people astonishingly responsive to the efforts of swindlers like Madame Humbert, notorious a few years ago. It is a quality in curious contrast to the shrewdness which makes them the readiest financiers of modern Europe, yet in a way it supplements the thrift which some students look upon as a result of the bitter days of the “Old Régîme,” the pinching period that resulted in the Revolution. It would seem that this characteristic is not a modern phenomenon, for at the beginning of Louis XV’s reign a Scotsman named Law proposed a paper money scheme that was seized upon with eagerness by all classes of an impoverished society. Nor was it a phenomenon peculiar to France, for at about the same time the South Sea Bubble was exciting England to a frenzy of acquisitiveness. Whatever the psychology, all France and especially all Paris went wild over Law’s propositions. He issued small notes which he redeemed in specie until he won the confidence of the public and the government endorsed his bank and permitted the use of his paper in payment of taxes. The Mississippi valley was supposed at that time to abound in gold and silver and Law’s office in the rue Quincampoix, near the Halles and the church of Saint Leu, was fairly besieged by courtiers and clergy, by tradesmen and ladies of the nobility eager to buy stock in a mining company which Law organized. West of the Halles, near the Hôtel de Soissons, was a Bourse des Valeurs established entirely for the conduct of business connected with Law’s schemes.

It is probable that Law was self-deceived. At any rate, when the bubble burst he was as hard hit financially as any of his victims, and, in addition, barely escaped with his life from their wrath, when they besieged his bank in the Place Vendôme and rushed, howling with rage, to the Palais Royal where they thought he had taken refuge. The government repudiated its debts, but private individuals could not do that and the ruin was general. A rhyme of the day says:

Louis ruled—or misruled—for sixty years. In the space of six decades much may happen for good or ill, but this long reign was marked by no rises and by few falls, merely by a gradual, consistent decadence. The country engaged in the War of the Polish Succession, the War of the Austrian Succession, and the Seven Years’ War, and in all lost territory, men and prestige, while the effects of the hated tax collector added to the ever-growing misery. The people were too crushed to do more than look on dully while their sovereign secured in infamous ways the wherewithal for his infamous pleasures. He sold the liberty of his subjects, for any one who could pay for a warrant (lettre de cachet) could put a private enemy into prison where he might lie forgotten for years. He sold the lives of his people, for he starved them to death by scores through the negotiation of a successful corner in food stuffs. Even when he disbanded the parliaments (courts) the only bodies that were trying to do anything, there was small stir made about it.

Louis encouraged a persecution of the Huguenots, yet, Catholic though he was, he favored the expulsion of the Jesuits against whom the Jansenists, also Catholics, were contending. Friend was pitted against friend, neighbor against neighbor in these fierce quarrels based on religious differences, always the fiercest quarrels that man can know.

The persecution was often petty, always bitter, yet it had its serious side when Pascal and the writers who gathered at Port Royal entered into philosophic discussion. This serious addiction of the people was a curious aspect of the mental and moral state of the period. While some people were entering heart and soul into these arguments there was at the same time an ample number of readers who devoured with gusto poems, plays and novels so coarse that to-day they never would reach print. That the same people might be interested in both sorts of literature is attested by the temper of some of the highest ecclesiastics who not only connived at the king’s immoral life, but furthered it. In some temperaments the extremes of the age produced an unbalanced state. This showed itself at one time throughout Paris in the behavior of the “Convulsionaries of Saint Médard,” who hysterically proclaimed the miracles performed at the tombs of two priests buried in the ancient churchyard of Saint Médard, near the Gobelins factory. So wide-spread and so distracting was this belief that the graveyard was closed to the public. This step caused a wit to fasten upon the wall an inscription.

Contemporary accounts of the execution of a man who had made an attempt upon the life of the king shows a callousness to suffering that would seem impossible if one had not read recently of the brutalities of the Balkan war, nearly three hundred years later. The execution took place as usual in the Place de Grève, and every window and balcony was filled with eager spectators, many of them elegantly dressed ladies of the court who played cards to while away the moments of waiting. The poor wretch who was to furnish amusement for this gay throng was placed on an elevated table where all might see him, and he was gashed and torn and twisted and burned and broken for an hour before the breath mercifully left his mangled body.

Like his great-grandfather, Louis preferred Versailles to Paris, but not for the Sun King’s reason. He had no especial desire to keep his eye on his courtiers, but kindred spirits he gathered about him and the favorites of Madame de Pompadour ruled and of Madame du Barry vulgarized the once decorous though far from impeccable salons of Versailles.

With lowered taste architecture became rococo and decoration a mass of wreaths and shells and leaves and scrolls.

In Paris, meanwhile, the Louvre fell into such disrepair that it was habitable only by people willing to live in haphazard fashion for the sake of a free lodging, while private stables occupied much of the ground floor and the government post horses stamped and kicked beneath Perrault’s unfinished colonnade. Disgusted at this eyesore in their once beautiful city the Parisians authorized the Provost of the Merchants to offer to repair the building at the expense of the town. Louis, however, seems to have thought that if the citizens had so much money to spend it had better be on him, and he refused the offer and set about devising new ways of capturing the hidden coin.

Of building there could not be much at a time when the monarch took no pride in his own chief city and suffered no expenditures except those that he saw no way of diverting to his own yawning purse. One of the few constructions of Louis’ date is the Mint, built on one of the left bank quays on a part of the site once occupied

by the ancient Hôtel de Nesle. It contains a museum of coins and medals as well as the workshops for the making of coins.

Another of the king’s languid interests was the Military School which looms imposingly across the southeastern end of the Champ de Mars as the modern tourist sits at luncheon on the first ‘stage’ of the Eiffel Tower. The Field of Mars itself, now green with lawns and bright with flowers, was laid out as a drill ground on the very spot where a battle with the Normans took place during the siege of 885 A.D. Its great size has frequently made it useful for large gatherings of people, and no fewer than four World Exhibitions have erected their plaster cities upon its ample space.

Another open place of impressive size was the present Place de la Concorde, first called the Place Louis XV. This vast square, now the center of Paris, was framed on the side of the Tuileries gardens by balustrades designed by Gabriel, the architect of the Military School, and was planned as a setting for that colossal statue of the King on which a wag pinned a placard saying:

The square stood on the western edge of the settled part of the city, but not too far away for the appropriate erection of the handsome buildings still standing on the north side restored to their early dignity. One of these, built as a storehouse for state effects, is now used by the Ministry of Marine. The other was a private hôtel. Between the two the rue Royale runs a little way northward to the classic church of the Madeleine, whose cornerstone Louis laid on the site of a former chapel, but whose construction was long delayed. Standing on its broad steps to-day the eye follows the vista of the rue Royale across the square and over the river to the Palace of Deputies, begun as the Palais Bourbon in the early part of Louis XV’s reign.

It was in the rue Royale that most of the deaths occurred during Louis XVI’s wedding festivities, and it was through this street that the tumbrils laden with victims for the guillotine came from the rue Saint Honoré.

A little way from the place on the west is the Palace of the Élysée, which the government furnishes as a mansion for the President of the Republic. It has been rebuilt and restored since its first condition as a private house which Louis XV bought and gave to Madame de Pompadour.

Not being of a markedly religious turn except when he was ill, it is not surprising that Louis promoted the construction of very few churches. One of them, Saint Philippe-du-Roule, replaced a leper hospital. A few years before the Madeleine was begun, a new church of Sainte Geneviève was planned as a crown for the Mont Sainte Geneviève. Great difficulties had to be overcome in providing a firm foundation, for the elevation was found to be honeycombed with the quarries of Gallo-Roman days. It was fifty years after its beginning before the adjoining abbey chapel of Sainte Geneviève, which the new building was to replace, was torn down, leaving the fine dome-crowned church—now the Pantheon—to stand uncrowded.

Opposite the Pantheon to the west is the Law School, designed by the same architect, Soufflot.

In public utilities Paris found herself somewhat richer than before Louis’ reign. The postal service attained such effective organization that it made three deliveries a day and was housed in a large and adequately equipped building. It became usual to number all the houses as had been done for some two hundred years on the house-laden bridges. The names of streets were cut on stone blocks and affixed to a corner building.

In spite of the discomfort of getting about the large city through dirty streets carriages had been introduced but slowly into the city. As late as the sixteenth century only the king and ladies of the court used the heavy coaches which were called “chariots.” In the next century chairs carried by porters became fashionable among the extravagantly dressed and bewigged. A cab service, established midway through the hundred years won instant favor, and was greatly improved in Louis XV’s time, though Parisians were condemned for many decades longer to traverse the town through streets unprovided with sidewalks and defiantly dirty.

It is hard for the admirers of twentieth century Paris cleanliness to realize that an English traveler, writing just before the French Revolution, complains bitterly of the dirt and disorder and danger of the streets and compares them most unfavorably with London thoroughfares.

Another undertaking, this time of scientific interest, was the tracing of the meridian of Paris from the Observatory of the left bank across the river to Montmartre on the right of the Seine. In the left transept of the church of Saint Sulpice is a section of the line, and a small obelisk on which a ray of sunlight falls from the south at exactly noon. At the same moment the sun’s rays set off a cannon, placed where the meridian crosses the garden of the Palais Royal.

That the fire service was not astonishingly competent seems to be indicated by the disasters

of this century. Twice serious fires destroyed large parts of the Hotel Dieu, the old general hospital. It had become so crowded in the Sun King’s time that six and eight patients were put into one bed. Nothing was done to relieve the situation, however, until it reached such a pass that even the careless Regent was aroused and provided money for the building of a new wing by taxing public amusements. The second conflagration (in 1772) was not extinguished for eleven days. Many sufferers were burned in their beds, and hundreds of others, turned out into the December cold, took refuge in near-by Notre Dame.

In the same year with the earlier fire at the hospital (1737) a two-day conflagration started by prisoners worked havoc with the palace of the Cité. In 1777 another destroyed the front of the palace. Another fire earlier in the century had its origin in the efforts of a poor woman to recover the body of her drowned son through the mediation of Saint Nicholas. To that end she set afloat in the Seine a wooden bowl containing a loaf of bread and a lighted candle. The candle set fire to a barge of hay. Some one cut the boat loose and it was swept by the current under the Petit Pont which was consumed with all its burden of houses. The bridge was quickly replaced, but without any buildings on it, a fashion followed toward the end of Louis XVI’s reign when the Pont Neuf and the Pont Notre Dame were cleared.

The Pont Neuf’s broad expanse became at once the field for hucksters and mountebanks of all sorts; here strikers assembled near the statue of Henry IV; here, according to an old verse-maker, there was much love-making near the “Bronze Horse;” and here the enlisting officers plied their activities even up to a quarter of a century ago when army service became compulsory.

CHAPTER XVIII

PARIS OF THE REVOLUTION

Again the royal family preferred Versailles to Paris. In the country the well-meaning young king tinkered with locks and was generally dull and uninteresting, while the queen made a charmingly elaborate pretence at living the simple life, à la Watteau. Louis did his ineffective best to straighten out the affairs of his kingdom but the deluge which Louis XV had predicted was coming and rapidly.

The court often came to town both to give and receive entertainment, and public festivities were not infrequent, for the people had a sort of tolerant affection for the king and queen whose gentleness and helplessness were not without their appeal. When the dauphin was born, eight years after the accession, the City of Paris gave a dinner at the Hôtel de Ville in honor of the event. The royal table was laid with seventy-eight covers and at it the king and his two brothers were the only men, the remaining seventy-five being the queen, the princesses and the ladies of the court. As seems frequently to have happened at these large dinners at the City Hall not everything went smoothly. This time the trouble arose from the commands of etiquette. The hosts bent their whole energies upon serving the king promptly. When he had finished his dinner the guests at the other tables had had nothing but butter and radishes, yet in spite of their hunger they were forced to rise and leave when the king rose. As the preparations for the feast are reported to have been lavishly extravagant it is to be hoped that “the left-overs” were given to the poor who were pitiably hungry most of the time in those days.

The public works of Louis’ reign were not many. The unrest of the people was too evident, the supply of money too small for much to be accomplished. To the clearing of the bridges which has been mentioned above was added an effort to bring light and air into at least one crowded spot on the left bank by tearing down the ancient Petit Châtelet. A new wall protected several of the outlying suburbs, and was not pulled down until 1860. At each of its gates was a pavilion, several of which are still standing, which served as an office for the collectors of the octroi, a tax levied even now upon all food brought into the city. As anything to do with taxes was obnoxious to the people this construction has been described as