Pont-Neuf, the most characteristic of Paris bridges, dates back to the reign of Henri III. The King himself laid its first stone in 1578, but it was not finished till 1603, when Henri IV was King. “Le bon Roi” determined to be the first to cross it on horseback, and while it was still unsafe spurred his thoroughbred along the unfinished bridge way. His lords, hastening to follow where their master led, were jolted out of their saddles, and falling upon the unparapeted structure, rolled into the river and were drowned. Louis XIII set up a statue of his father on horseback on the bridge; the statue of the horse was a gift from Cosimo de’ Medici to Louis’ mother. At the Revolution it was overturned, taken away, and melted down to make cannons for the insurgents. Louis XVIII replaced it by a statue made of the bronze of the first statue of Napoléon that had been set up on Place Vendôme and that of his general, Desaix, on Place des Victoires. Though set up by the Bourbon King, the figure we see is believed to contain within it a statuette of Napoléon I and Voltaire’s _Henriade_. Until 1848 there were shops within the semicircles we see on either side of the old bridge, and beneath the second archway near the right bank there was one of the first hydraulic pumps, known as “la Samaritaine.” Its water was conveyed to the Louvre, the Tuileries, and to houses all around, and fed the famous old fountain built in 1608, destroyed a century later, rebuilt in 1715, again destroyed after another hundred years, with the figure of the Samaritan woman giving water to our Saviour. The bathing-house near the spot with its sign, and the big modern shop of hideous aspect, alone remain to record the name of the ancient pump and fountain. Two or three ancient houses still stand on the Place du Pont-Neuf in the middle of the bridge. At its picturesque western point we see the tree-shaded square Henri IV, known also as the Square du Vert-Galant. Place Dauphine, at its south-western side, dates from the days when Henri’s son, later Louis XIII, was dauphin. The Pont St-Michel we see to-day was built in 1857. The first bridge there, joining the mainland to the island on the Seine, was constructed towards the close of the fourteenth century. That bridge and two successive ones were destroyed by fire. Pont-au-Change, the Money-changers’ Bridge, was in olden days a wooden construction which went by the names Pont de la Marchandise and Pont-aux-Oiseaux. Jewellers as well as money-changers plied their trade along its planks, perhaps also bird merchants. It was a little higher up the river in its early twelfth century days and was often flooded. It was badly burnt, too, more than once; then in the seventeenth century was entirely rebuilt of stone, and bronze statues of the royal family, Louis XIII, Louis XIV as a child, and Anne d’Autriche, set up there. In the century following the houses upon it were all cleared away and in 1858 it was again rebuilt.