had any relation to the system of terror. But whatever defects there be in Carlyle, his readers will at least understand the significance of the Revolution, and why it is that the terrible, but temporary excesses which stained its progress have been so unduly magnified by reactionary politicians, while the cruelties of the White Terror[157] are passed by. Few of the buildings associated with the Revolution remain at Paris. The Salle du Manège, the Feuillants and Jacobin clubs were swept away by Napoleon's Rue de Rivoli. But at Versailles little is changed; the broad Avenue de Paris, once filled with double uninterrupted files of brilliant equipages, racing with furious speed from morning to evening along the five leagues between Versailles and Paris, is now silent and deserted. Here, outside the gates of the château were seen in 1775 that vast "multitude in wide-spread wretchedness, with their sallow faces, squalor and winged raggedness, presenting in legible, hieroglyphic writing their petition of grievances, and for answer two were hanged on a new gallows forty feet high." Here the traveller may see at the corner of the Rue St. Martin in the Avenue de Paris, that Hôtel des Menus Plaisirs, where the States-General sat, 5th May 1789, and where the Commons took the bit in their mouths by declaring themselves the National Assembly, whether the two privileged orders sat with them or not, and decided to set about the task of regenerating France. Here under the elm trees on the Paris road stood the Deputies in the drizzling rain when they found the doors of the hall closed, by royal order, against them, while giggling courtiers looked mockingly on. We may trace their footsteps as they angrily paced to the Rue St. François; we may stand in the very tennis-court whose walls echoed to the solemn oath sworn by their 700 voices never to separate until they had given a constitution to France. Hard by, in the Rue Satory, is the church of St. Louis, where they met the next day on finding the court retained for a tennis-party by the king's brother, the Count of Artois. We may return to the Menus Plaisirs, where the king's messenger, de Brézé, ordering them to disperse after the famous royal sitting, heard Mirabeau's leonine voice bidding him go back to his master and tell him that they were there by the people's will, and that nothing but the force of bayonets should drive them forth.[158] We may enter the royal apartments, the famous ante-room of the OEil de Boeuf with its oval ox-eyed windows, the king's bed-chamber, and the council hall; we may look on the foolish faces of the later Bourbons, of the princesses his daughters whom Louis XV. dubbed Rag, Tatter, Snip, and Pig. In the opera-house built for Mesdames Pompadour and Du Barry, we may recall that mad scene of 1st October, when the officers of the bodyguard, having invited their comrades of the Regiment of Flanders to a dinner on the stage, were shaking the roof with cries of "_Vive le roi!_" while