"There is, I believe, only one public monument in Paris--the Ecole de Droit--where the workmen employed in effacing that inscription will have a double duty. They will have to interfere with the 'Liberalism' of two generations. Immediately under the coat of yellow paint which covered the façade of the building, and on which time and the inclemency of the seasons have done their work, may still be traced, above the modern device, the following words, inscribed by order of the Commune of Paris during the Reign of Terror: 'Liberté, Egalité, Fraternité, Unité, Indivisibilité de la République Française!' As the effacing of the inscription of 1848 is not now by means of whitewash or paint, but by erasure, both the inscriptions will disappear at the same moment." Among the most important demolitions and renovations of the sixties was the work undertaken on the Louvre at the orders of the ambitious emperor, Napoleon III. The structure was cloven to the foundations, through the slated roof, the gilded and painted ceiling, the parqueted floors; and, where one formerly enjoyed an artistic feast that had taken four centuries to provide, one gazed upon, from the pavement to the roof, a tarpaulin that closed a vista which might otherwise have been a quarter of a mile in length. Builders toiled day and night to connect the Louvre with the main body of the Palace of the Tuileries, which itself was to disappear within so short a time. Meanwhile so great a displacement of the art treasures was undergone, that _habitués_ knew not which way to turn for favourite pictures, with which the last fifty years had made them so familiar. To those of our elders who knew the Paris of the early fifties, the present-day aspect--in spite of all its glorious wealth of boulevards and architectural splendour--will suggest the mutability of all things. It serves our purpose, however, to realize that much of the character has gone from the Quartier Latin; that the Tuileries disappeared with the Commune, and that the old distinctions between Old Paris, the faubourgs, and the Communal Annexes, have become practically non-existent with the opening up of the Haussman boulevards, at the instigation of the wary Napoleon III. Paris is still, however, an "_ancienne ville et une ville neuve_," and the paradox is inexplicable. The differences between the past and the present are indeed great, but nowhere--not even in the Tower of London, which is usually given as an example of the contrast and progress of the ages--is a more tangible and specific opposition shown, than in what remains to-day of mediæval Paris, in juxtaposition with the later architectural embellishments. In many instances is seen the newest of the "_art nouveau_"--as it is popularly known--cheek by jowl with some mediæval shrine.