The Musie Dupuytren

This Conciergerie, with the hall of the Cordelier Club, the Musie Dupuytren, is the only extant building in Paris, which is closely associated with great scenes of the Revo-lution. The Bastille is gone, the Tuileries, the Hotel de Ville, the Hall of the Convention in the R. de Rivoli, the Jacobin Club, the prisons, the Temple, Abbaye, La Force, Chatelet, and the rest. So, too, the tombs of Mirabeau, Voltaire, Rousseau, Marat, Louis xvi., and Marie Antoinette no longer hold their bones, and cenotaphs record the spot where they were laid. Etiam periere sepulchra. New Haussmannic streets cover the soil, wherein the ashes of Danton and Vergniaud, Charlotte Corday and Madame Roland, moulder unknown. Of the Revolution no buildings remain but only sites; and the only edifices, which survive to speak to us of the September massacres and the Terror, are the dining-hall of the followers of St. Francis and the palace of St. Louis, the knight and crusader.

In spite of destruction and reconstruction, the history pf the great edifices of old Paris is wonderfully instructive, even that of the buildings which have wholly disappeared. But they must be studied in the learned and elaborate works, such as those of Dulaure, Piganiol, Viollet-le-Duc, Lacroix, Lenoir, Guilhermy, Fournier, Hoffbauer, Fergus- son, Hamerton, in the Histoire Generale, and in Paris a travers les Ages, in the splendid series of etchings and engravings of old Paris, which may be found in the library of the Carnavalet Museum, and in our British Museum. Bastille, Louvre, Hdtel de Ville, Tuileries, Luxembourg, the Citd, St. Germain, St. Genevilve, would each require an essay, or a volume with maps and plans and restorations, to make them intelligible private tours istanbul. But those who seek to know what Paris has been in the long succession of ages may still revive it in their minds, with the aid of the mass of literature that is open to them, and if they will study not only the extant churches, but such works of domestic art as the Hotel Cluny, and Hotel de Sens, Hotel la Valette, the house in the Corn’s la Reine, and the Hotel Carnavalet.

Ducerceau and M6ryon

A careful study of Silvestre, Ducerceau, and M6ryon will give some idea of old Paris, with its vast walls, gates, towers, castles, its crowded churches, its immense abbeys, its narrow winding streets, its fetid cemeteries, gloomy courts and impasses, its filthy lanes, and its bridges loaded with houses. We may linger about the old remnants of churches, the flotsam and jetsam of the Mediaeval Catholicism, such bits as the tower of St. Jacques, and the portals of the two St. Germains and of St. Nicolas des Champs, the old churches of St. Jnlien le Pauvre, and St. Martin des Champs, the church of St. Sdverin, and the chapel of the Chdteau de Vincennes.

Then let us study the tombs in St. Germain des Pris, of St. Denis, St. Etienne du Mont: and then we may go on to the tomb that all Englishmen visit — the tomb which I always feel to be the grandest of all sepulchral conceptions (to be set beside the tomb of Theod- oric at Ravenna, and the tomb of Cecilia Metella on the Appian way), almost the one work of modern art, which is at once colossal, noble, and pathetic — I mean the mighty vault beneath the dome of the Invalidcs, where the greatest soldier and the worst ruler of our age sleeps at last in peace, guarded by the veterans of France.

We need not deny to modern Paris the gift of charm; we may admit that her museums and libraries, her collections, and her treasures are inexhaustible to the fit student; but far more impressive is the history of this memorable city, with its vast range of time, of variety, of association — with its record of the dawn of Western civilisation, of Catholicism and Feudalism, of the Renascence, and the modern world, of the Revolution of the last century, and the Imperialism of this century — with its dust enriched with the bones of those who in things of the soul and in things of war, in the love of beauty, and in the passion for new life, have dared and done memorable deeds, from the days of Genevieve and Clotilda, the Louis and the Henrys, down to the two Napoleons, and the three Republics.