Palais de Justice

And, besides these castles and palaces, the closely packed streets were even more thickly strewn with churches, convents, and abbeys. Notre Dame, St. Eustache, St. Germain, I’Auxerrois, the Hotel de Ville, the Louvre, the Palais Royal, and the Palais de Justice were hemmed in with a labyrinth of old and entangled streets. Buildings, alleys, and even churches separated the Louvre from the Tuileries, Notre Dame from the Palais de Justice, cut off Notre Dame and the Hotel de Ville from the river, stood between Palais Royal and Louvre, and between the Pantliion and the garden of the Luxembourg. Where the graceful fountain of Victory now brightens one of the gayest spots in Paris, Place du Chatelet, bordered with two immense theatres, colonnades, gardens, and trees, there were then the decayed remnant of the great royal fortress and a network of crooked and unsightly lanes.

St. Germain of St. Martin

Besides the churches, chapels, hospitals, palaces, and castles, there also stood within the circuit of the city more than two hundred religious houses for both sexes; abbeys, convents, nunneries, and fraternities; peopled with thousands of men and women, leading separate lives, under different vows, owning obedience to far-distant superiors, and possessing various immunities. The vast areas occupied by the abbeys of St. Germain, of St. Martin, of St. Victor, by the houses of the Bernardins, and the Cilestins, and the Quinze- Vingts, were a sensible portion of the whole area within the walls. From the then new Place Louis XV. to the Bastille, from the Luxembourg garden to the Port St. Denis, Paris was a great fortified city of the Middle Ages, crammed with thousands of sacred buildings private tours istanbul, Catholic and feudal institutions, and thickly studded with Italian palaces, colleges, hospitals, and offices in the proud and lavish style of Louis xiv. Poverty, squalor, uncleanness, and vice jostled the magnificence of Princes and the mouldering creations of the ages of Faith.

The difference between the Paris of 1789 and the Paris of 1889 is enormous; but it is very far from true that the whole difference is gain. Much has been gained in convenience, health, brilliance: much has been lost in beauty, variety, and historical tradition. To the uncultured votary of amusement the whole of the change represents progress: to the artist, the antiquarian, and the sentimentalist it represents havoc, waste, and bad taste. It would be well if the tens of thousands who delight in the boulevards, gardens, and sunny bridges of to-day would now and then cast a thought upon the priceless works of art, the historical remains, and the picturesque charm which the new Paris has swept away.

Churches and towers, encrusted sculptures of the thirteenth, fourteenth, and fifteenth centuries, rare, inimitable, irrecoverable won-ders of skill and feeling, have been swallowed up wholesale in the modern ‘improvements.’ Sixteen churches have disappeared from the Citt4 alone: four of them and ten streets have been carted away to make the site of a single hospital. Where is the abbey of St. Victor, of St. Germain, of Ste. Gejievih’c, and the Conr des Comptes, and the churches of St. Andrt, St. Jacques de la Boucherie, Saints Innocents, St. Jean, and St. Paid? Where are the turrets of Saint Louis, and Etienne Marcel, and Philip the Fair? Where are the quaint passages and fantastic gables preserved for us only by Silvestre, Prelle, M6ryon, Gavarni, Martial, and Gustave Dorb?