The first well-organized attempt to light the streets of Paris at night seems to have been made under Louis XIV. The Abbé de Caraffe had previously undertaken to establish a force of link-boys and torch-bearers, but the bureau which he opened in the Rue Saint-Honoré was soon closed, to the great regret of the honest bourgeois who scarcely dared to stir out of his house after dark without a lantern. Thieves abounded, and even the lackeys of good houses, sword in hand, made a practice of insulting and striking the unlucky commoner who fell in their way. The lieutenant of police, La Reynie, undertook to establish a regular system of illumination,--at the end of each street and in the middle, he hung an iron and glass lantern, some two feet in height, enclosing a candle weighing a hundred and twenty-five grammes, the whole suspended from a rope, and hoisted and lowered by means of a pulley. The malicious breaking of these lanterns was punished by the galleys. This illumination at first was given only from the 1st of November to the 1st of March, but later, an ordinance of May 23, 1671, extended the period from the 20th of October to the 1st of April, and, still later, it was lengthened to nine months, with the exception of the week in which the moon shone. For the period of six months, the cost was a million and a half of francs, it is said. This innovation excited universal enthusiasm. The king was so well pleased with it, that he caused a medal to be struck bearing the inscription: "_Urbis securitas et nitor_ [security and lighting of the city]." In a passage in _Saint-Evremoniana_, we find: "The invention of lighting Paris during the night by an infinity of lamps is worthy of attracting the most distant peoples to come and contemplate that which the Greeks and the Romans never imagined for the policing of their republics. The lights, enclosed in glass lanterns suspended in the air at an equal distance from each other, are arranged in an admirable order and give light all the night; this spectacle is so handsome and so well planned, that Archimedes himself, if he were still living, could add nothing more agreeable and more useful."