After the execution of the Duke of Orleans, who, having had the infamy to vote for the death of his blameless relative Louis XVI., was himself, by a mild retribution, to perish on the scaffold, the Palais Royal was appropriated by the State, and the place was now invaded by all the ruffians and reprobates of Paris. Let us on this subject hear Mercier in his "Tableau de Paris." "The Athenians," he writes, "raised temples to their Phrynes; curs find them in this enclosure already built. Speculators and their correlatives go three times a day to the Palais Royal, the centre of political and every other kind of debauchery. Some are occupied with the rise and fall of the funds. Gaming-tables are kept in every café, and it is a sight to see the sudden change in the expression of the players' faces as they lose or win. The Palais Royal is an elegant box of Pandora, beautifully carved, delicately worked, but containing what everyone knows it contains. All these followers of Sardanapalus or of Lucullus inhabit the Palais Royal, in apartments which the King of Assyria and the Roman Emperors would have envied." Under the Directory the number of gambling houses was limited, first to four, afterwards to eight; and it was not until the reign of Louis Philippe that they were finally suppressed. The gambling house at Number 113 figures in the "Peau de Chagrin" of Balzac; also in Dumas' "Femme au Collier de Velours." As for the "Palace"--the mansion inhabited by Mazarin and the infant Louis XIV., afterwards by Henrietta of England, and then by various members of the Orleans family--Napoleon established public offices in it. During the Hundred Days the palace was occupied by Lucien Bonaparte, and on the restoration of the Monarchy the whole place was bought back from the Government by the then Duke of Orleans, afterwards Louis Philippe. Some changes were made in the direction of the galleries, the popularity of which remained as great as ever. Nor was this diminished by the foreign occupation, for the Palais Royal was thronged day and night by officers of the Allied Army. It was now that the Café Lemblin became the head-quarters of Bonapartist officers on half-pay, and the Café des Mille Colonnes that of the officers serving in the newly organised Royalist army; and between the two bodies of officers numerous duels were fought. An ingenious rhymed description of the Palais Royal in its best and worst days has been left by Désaugiers, the celebrated songwriter of the period before Béranger, of which we may quote the concluding lines, telling how the resort, from being the scene of political storms, came to be the general _rendez-vous_ of pleasure-seekers of every kind and every nationality, from the Fleming to the Turk, and from the genius to the fool:--