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PLACE DE LA CONCORDE, PARIS. THE MADELEINE AND THE FOREIGN OFFICES IN THE MIDDLE DISTANCE.

JANUARY, 1903.

PARIS THE BEAUTIFUL.*

BY H. H. RAGAN.

T would be difficult to con-
ceive of two cities within
a day's ride of each other
more thoroughly unlike
than London and Paris.
You take breakfast in
London; you may take
late dinner the same day
in Paris. But you would
think you have travelled

into another world. Lon- DANS
don, built of bricks,

which the smoky atmosphere has turned almost black, is sombre and funereal. Paris, built of marble, or a yellowish white limestone resembling marble, is bright, gay, and sparkling. London impresses you as solid, substantial, immense, and intensely interesting, but not beautiful. Paris is much more than beautiful, it is magnificent. In London the chief interest centres in the past. You linger about the Tower, Westminster Abbey, and the Temple Church, because they carry you back many centuries along the path of history. In Paris you live almost wholly in the present. The few remaining relics of antiquity still to be discovered here seem strangely out of place, and it is difficult to believe in them. Everything speaks of the living present.

It was about the beginning of the fifteenth century that Clovis, the first of the Frankish kings, finally succeeded in driving out the Romans and making Paris the capital of the Frankish monarchy. By From The Chautauquan. VOL. LVII. No. 1.

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PORTE ST. MARTIN.

the year 1789 it had grown to be a city of six hundred thousand inhabitants. In the century which has since elapsed Paris as a part of France has turned more political somersaults, I venture to say, than any other important city on the globe. First a Bourbon monarchy, then a republic, then a directorate, then a consulate, then an empire, then the old Bourbon despotism restored, again an empire, and still again a republic. If you add to the list the two "Reigns of Terror" you will certainly be amazed at a people who could manufacture such an enormous amount of history in so short a time.

You have read, perhaps, of the

Englishman who, on taking apartments in Paris for a brief stay, stipulated with his landlord that a servant should knock at his door at an early hour every morning, informing him first what the state of the weather was, that he might know how to dress, and secondly, what the form of government was, that he might know how to conduct himself.

And yet, in spite of the frequent changes in the government and the consequent wear and tear upon the

accepted the gracious permission of Louis XV. to erect a statue to him there. The place then took his name and retained it till the new regime, in 1789, melted down the statue and converted it into twocent pieces. On the 30th of May, 1770, during an exhibition of fireworks here, a panic took place and twelve hundred people were trampled to death and two thousand more were severely injured. The occasion was the attempt of the people to express, by a grand celebration, their unbounded joy at the recent marriage of the young

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human system, the six hundred thousand people of 1789 have grown to more than two millions at the present day.

The most important public square in Paris, and one of the handsomest in the whole world, is the Place de la Concorde. In the centre rises the Obelisk of Luxor, presented by the pasha of Egypt to Louis Philippe. It is flanked on either side by a large fountain. The Place de la Concorde seems somewhat wrongly called, in view of the history of the spot. One hundred and fifty years ago it was an open field. But in 1748 the city

BOULEVARD DES CAPUCINES, PARIS.

Marie Antoinette. On the 21st of January, 1793, they gathered here again in immense numbers to see the head of the same dauphin, now Louis XVI., chopped off by the sharp guillotine. During the next two years the spot well earned its title "Place of the Revolution," for the guillotine had not ceased its work until Marie Antoinette, Charlotte Corday, Elisabeth (the king's sister), Robespierre, and more than twenty-eight hundred persons had here perished by its deadly stroke.

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The view in every direction from this point is imposing. To the westward rises the broad and handsome Champs-Elysees. On the north we look up the short Rue Royale to the front of the Madeleine. To the eastward lie the extensive and beautiful Gardens of the Tuileries, laid out originally by Louis XIV. as a playground for the royal princes, afterward thrown open to the whole people, and quite recently extended eastward from the portion on the farther side of the Palais des Tuileries. To the southward, just across the Seine, is the Greek front of the Corps Legislatif, otherwise known as the Palais Bourbon from the fact that it was built, or at least begun, by the dowager Duchess of Bourbon in 1722. Here the famous Council of Five Hundred sat in 1795, and

here the Chamber of Deputies now holds its sessions. From its portico we may enjoy a grand view backward over the whole superb Place de la Concorde, with its obelisk, and its splashing fountains striving to do what Chateaubriand declared not all the water in the world could do wash out the blood-stains of this fearful spot.

But starting now from the base of that Obelisk of Luxor, and walking straight northward by that short Rue Royale, we find ourselves in a moment standing just in front of the Madeleine, which to a stranger would seem rather a Greek temple than a Christian church. Louis XV. began the building in 1764; but the Revolution put a stop to it. Napoleon, in 1806, proposed to proposed to convert it into a temple of glory," to be dedicated

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