Paris is at once the most ancient and the most modern capital in Europe. Great are the changes it has undergone since it first took form, eighteen centuries ago, as a fortress or walled town on an island in the middle of the Seine; and at every period of its history we find some chronicler dwelling on the disappearance of ancient landmarks. Whole quarters are known to have been pulled down and rebuilt under the second Empire. But ever since the Revolution of 1789, under each successive form of government and in almost every district, straggling lanes have been giving way gradually to wide streets and stately boulevards, and suburb after suburb has been merged into the great city. The Chaussée d'Antin was at the end of the last century a chaussée in fact as well as in name: a mere high-road, that is to say; and there were people living under the government of Louis-Philippe who claimed to have shot rabbits on the now densely populated Boulevard Montmartre. The greatest changes, however, in the general physiognomy of Paris date from the Revolution, when, in the first place, as if by way of symbol, the hated fortress was demolished in which so many victims of despotism had languished. "Athens," says Victor Hugo, "built the Parthenon, but Paris destroyed the Bastille." In the days when the great State prison was still standing, the broad, well-built Rue Saint-Antoine, in its immediate neighbourhood, used to be pointed to by antiquarians as covering the ground where King Henry II. was mortally wounded in a tournament by Montgomery, an officer in the Scottish Guard. It was there, too, that, after the death of their protector, the "minions" of Henry II. slaughtered one another. The now thickly inhabited Place des Victoires, where stands the statue of Louis XIV., lasting monument of kingly pride and popular adulation, was at one time the most dangerous part of the capital. In the open space now enclosed by lordly mansions and commodious warehouses thieves and murderers held their nightly assemblies, or even in the face of day committed depredations on the passers-by. "Could a better site have been chosen," asks an historian of the last century, "for the effigy of that royal robber, born for the ruin of his subjects and the disturbance of Europe: who aimed at universal monarchy and sacrificed the wealth and happiness of a whole kingdom to pursue an empty shadow; who lived a tyrant and died an idiot?" Not far distant, the Halles, or general markets, stand on the spot where Charles V. made a famous speech against Charles, surnamed the Mischievous, King of Navarre; when the former was hissed and hooted by the mob because he had neither the good looks, the eloquence, nor the reasoning power of his antagonist. It was here, too, that the first dramas were acted in France; and here, significantly enough, that Molière was born.