The pseudo-classic church of St. Sulpice, begun in 1665 and not completed until 1777, is a monument of the degraded taste of this unhappy time. At least three architects, Gamart, Levau and the Italian Servandoni, are responsible for this monstrous pile, whose towers have been aptly compared by Victor Hugo to two big clarionets. The building has, however, a certain _puissante laideur_, as Michelet said of Danton, and is imposing from its very mass, but it is dull and heavy and devoid of all charm and imagination. Nothing exemplifies more strikingly the mutation of taste that has taken place since the eighteenth century than the fact that this church is the only one mentioned by Gibbon in the portion of his autobiography which refers to his first visit to Paris, where it is distinguished as "one of the noblest structures in Paris." CHAPTER XVII LOUIS XVI.--THE GREAT REVOLUTION--FALL OF THE MONARCHY Crowned vice was now succeeded by crowned folly. The grandson of Louis XV., a well-meaning but weak and foolish youth, and his thoughtless, pleasure-loving queen, were confronted by state problems that would have taxed the genius of a Richelieu in the maturity of his powers. Injustice, misery, oppression, discontent, were clamant and almost universal; taxes had doubled since the death of Louis XIV.; there were 30,000 beggars in Paris alone. The penal code was of inhuman ferocity; law was complicated, ruinous and partial and national credit so low that loans could be obtained only against material pledges and at interest five times as great as that paid by England. Wealthy bishops and abbots[152] and clergy, noblesse and royal officials were wholly exempt from the main incidents of taxation; for personal and land taxes, tithes and forced labour, were exacted from the common people alone. No liberty of worship, nor of thought: Protestants were condemned to the galleys by hundreds; booksellers met the same fate. Authors and books were arbitrarily sent by _lettres de cachet_ to the Bastille. Yet in spite of all repression a generation of daring, witty, emancipated thinkers in Paris were elaborating a weapon of scientific, rationalistic and liberal doctrine that cut at the very roots of the old _régime_. And while France was in travail of the palingenesis of the modern world, the futile king was trifling with his locks and keys and colouring maps, the queen playing at shepherdesses at Trianon or performing before courtiers, officers and equerries the _rôles_ of Rosina in the _Barbier de Seville_ and of Colette in the _Devin du Village_, the latter composed by the democratic philosopher, whose _Contrat Social_ was to prove the Gospel of the Revolution.[153] Jean Jacques Rousseau, the solitary self-centred Swiss engraver and musician, has described for us in words that will bear translation how an ineffaceable impression of the sufferings of the people was burnt into his memory, and the germs of