"The people," however, were not considered by nobles who lived in palaces. Indeed, they were only beginning to consider themselves--beginning dimly to comprehend that their day was dawning. [Pg 23]Two decades would have to pass before they were fully awake, but the scene was already being set for their great drama. Paris, the largest city in France, had increased in size one-third during the past twenty-five years. The old theory had been that too large a town was a public menace, both to health and to government. Nine times already in its history the limits of Paris had been fixed and had been outgrown. It now held between seven hundred thousand and eight hundred thousand souls. When viewed from the tower of Notre Dame it spread out ten or twelve miles in circumference, round as an orange, and cut into two nearly equal parts by the river Seine. "One is a stranger to one's neighbor in this vast place," a man wrote soon after this. "Sometimes one learns of his death only by receiving the invitation to his funeral." "Two celebrated men may live in this city twenty-five years and never meet." "So many chimneys send forth warmth and smoke that the north wind is tempered in passing over the town." Streets were so narrow and houses so high that dwellers on the lower floors "lived in obscurity"; while elsewhere there were palaces like the great house belonging to the De Noailles family with its garden large enough to stage a small hunt. Such gardens were carefully walled away from the public. These walled-in gardens and the high, evil-smelling houses in which people lived "three hundred years behind the times," crowded together and hungry from birth to death, were equally prophetic of the awakening to come; for the improvements [Pg 24]celebrated by this writer in describing old Paris were either of a kind to let light in upon the people or to make conditions more intolerable for them.