fices still in fine taste; the Paris of Henri IV., at the Place Royale: façades of brick with stone corners, and slated roofs, tri-colored houses;—the Paris of Louis XIII., at the Val-deGrâce: a crushed and squat architecture, with vaults like basket-handles, and something indescribably pot-bellied in the column, and thickset in the dome;—the Paris of Louis XIV., in the Invalides: grand, rich, gilded, cold;—the Paris of Louis XV., in Saint-Sulpice: volutes, knots of ribbon, clouds, vermicelli and chiccory leaves, all in stone;—the Paris of Louis XVI., in the Pantheon: Saint Peter of Rome, badly copied (the edifice is awkwardly heaped together, which has not amended its lines);—the Paris of the Republic, in the School of Medicine: a poor Greek and Roman taste, which resembles the Coliseum or the Parthenon as the constitution of the year III., resembles the laws of Minos,—it is called in architecture, "the Messidor[1]; taste;—the Paris of Napoleon in the Place Vendôme: this one is sublime, a column of bronze made of cannons;—the Paris of the Restoration, at the Bourse: a very white colonnade supporting a very smooth frieze; the whole is square and cost twenty millions.
To each of these characteristic monuments there is attached by a similarity of taste, fashion, and attitude, a certain number of houses scattered about in different quarters and which the eyes of the connoisseur easily distinguishes and furnishes with a date. When one knows how to look, one finds the spirit of a century, and the physiognomy of a king, even in the knocker on a door.
The Paris of the present day has then, no general physiog-
- ↑ The tenth month of the French republican calendar, from the 19th of June to the 18th of July.
hope that they will not dare. Moreover, this demolition of the Tuileries now, would be not only a brutal deed of violence, which would make a drunken vandal blush it would be an act of treason. The Tuileries is not simply a masterpiece of the art of the sixteenth century, it is a page of the history of the nineteenth. This palace no longer belongs to the king, but to the people. Let us leave it as it is. Our revolution has twice set its seal upon its front. On one of its two facades, there are the cannon-balls of the 10th of August; on the other, the balls of the 29th of July. It is sacred. Paris, April 7, 1831. (Note to the fifth edition.)
