The system of national education with nominal charges (averaging ten francs a month), at the gymnasiums, with free lectures by the best professors at the Sorbonne and the College of France, is due to the Convention. So, too, is the famous Conservatoire de Musique, with its gratuitous teaching, which has had the effect of turning France from an unmusical into an eminently musical nation. For an interesting and valuable account of the constructive measures adopted by the French Republic, which is usually credited with measures of destruction alone, the reader is referred to Mr. Morse Stephens’s excellent “History of the French Revolution.” Having been endowed by the Republic with a legislative body, France was never afterwards without one, though its importance varied according to the form and character of the Government. From the Riding School of the Tuileries the Assembly moved to the Tuileries itself, and governing the country as the Convention really did, it had the right, perhaps, to establish itself in the palace of the French kings. Napoleon, however, wanted the Tuileries for himself; and his Legislative Body now held its unimportant discussions in the Palais Bourbon; which remained the home of the French Parliament, under various names, until in 1871 the seat of government was changed from Paris to Versailles. CHAPTER XXXII. SOME HISTORICAL RESIDENCES. The Palace of the Legion of Honour--The Ministry of War--The Rue de Grenelle--Talleyrand. An interesting walk on the left bank of the Seine is from the end of the Rue du Bac along the quay to the Pont des Invalides. To many persons the most remarkable house on the Quai d’Orsay is the café of the same name, which, by reason, no doubt, of its proximity to the Ministry of War, is largely frequented by superior officers. At No. 5 is a cavalry barrack occupied under the Restoration by the King’s Body-guard. Here, up to the time of the Revolution, was the office of the Court carriages which conveyed the public of Paris to the different royal residences, but went nowhere else. In 1788, the year before the Revolution, the prices were three livres ten sols (three francs ten sous, that is to say) for Versailles and St.-Germain, nine livres ten sols for Fontainebleau, and thirteen livres ten sols for Compiègne. Close to the Café d’Orsay stood the Palace of the Council of State, laid in ruins by the Communists on the 24th of May, 1871.