North of the Louvre is the Palais Royal, once the gayest, now the dullest scene in Paris. This quarter of Richelieu and of Mazarin drew to itself the wealth and fashion of the city in its migration westward from the Marais during the times of Louis XIII. and of the Regency of Anne of Austria. Nearly all the princely hotels that crowded the district have long since given place to commercial houses and shops. The mansions of the two great ministers remain as the Conseil d'Etat and the Bibliothèque Nationale, but all that is left of the immense Hôtel de Colbert in the Rue Vivienne is a name--the Passage Colbert. The same is true of the vast area of lands and buildings of the convent of the Filles de St. Thomas, of which the present Bourse and the Place before it only occupy a part. At the corner, however, of the Rue des Petits Champs and St. Anne the fine double façade of the Hôtel erected by Lulli with money borrowed from Molière may be seen, bearing the great musician's coat-of-arms--a design of trumpets, lyres and cymbals. Further west, Napoleon's Rues de Castiglione and de la Paix, the Regent Street of Paris, run south and north from the Place Vendôme, intended by its creator Louvois to be the most spacious in the city. A monumental parallelogram of public offices was to enclose the Place, but Versailles engulfed the king's resources and the ambitious scheme was whittled down, the area much reduced, and the site and foundations of the new buildings were handed over to the Ville. What the Allies failed to do in 1814 the Commune succeeded in doing in 1871, and the boastful Column of Vendôme, a pitiful plagiarism of Trajan's Column at Rome, was laid in the dust, only however to be raised again by the Third Republic in 1875. The Rue Castiglione leads down to the Terrace of the Feuillants overlooking the Tuileries gardens, all that is left of the famous monastery and grounds where Lafayette's club of constitutional reformers met. The beautiful gardens remain much as Le Notre designed them for Louis XIV., and every spring the orange trees, some of them dating back it is said to the time of Francis I., are brought forth from the orangery to adorn the central avenue, and the gardens become vocal with many voices of children at their games--French children with their gentle humour and sweet, refined play. Right and left of the central avenue, the two marble exhedræ may still be seen which were erected in 1793 for the elders who presided over the floral celebrations of the month of Germinal by the children of the Republic.