The Living Age Volume 203

This historic book may have numerous typos and missing text. Purchasers can download a free scanned copy of the original book (without typos) from the publisher. Not indexed. Not illustrated. 1894 Excerpt: ...de Justice, inclnding in that the Couciergerie and all the subordinate buildings of the old palace of the kings, which occupied the western end of the original island cite. The learning, the ingenuity, the art which have gone to build up the H6tel de Ville of to-day out of the exquisite pavilion that was designed under Francois I., form a real chapter in the history of European architecture, as the story of the Town Hall for ueurly four centuries is the heart of the history of Paris. But even this is surpassed by the history of the Louvre and its final consolidatiou with the Tuileries, an operation of which the difficulties were much less successfully overcome. The entire mass of buildings, the most elaborate and ambitious of modern construction in Europe, is an extraordinary tour de force which provokes incessant stndy, even when it fails to satisfy very critical examination. Those who can remember Paris before the Second Empire of 1852 have seen not a few quarters of the city much in the state in which they were at the Revolution, and even in the days of the Grand Monarque. The sky-line 1 A luef nl account of these foundations and remains has recently appeared. "The Churches of Hririx. from Clovts to Charles X.," by Sophta Bpnle. with illustrations by the anthor. London, 1893. was infinitely broken and varied, instead of being a geometric and uniform line of cornice, as we now for the most part observe it. And the streets had a frontage-line as irregular as the skyline; they went meandering about or gently swaying to and fro, in a highly picturesque and inconvenient line. There was hardly a single street with a strictly geometric straight line in all Paris down to the First Empire. Now the ground plan of Paris looks as if an antocrat had laid it...