Many new streets[150] were made, and others widened, among them the ill-omened Rue de la Ferronnerie. The northern ramparts were levelled and planted with trees from the Porte St. Antoine in the east to the Porte St. Honore in the west, and in 1704 it was decided to continue the planting in the south round the Faubourg St. Germain. The Place Louis le Grand (now Vendome), and the Place des Victoires were created; the river embankments were renewed and extended, and a fine stone Pont Royal by J.H. Mansard, the most beautiful of the existing bridges of Paris, was built to replace the old wooden structure that led from the St. Germain quarter to the Tuileries. This in its turn had replaced a ferry (_bac_) established by the Guild of Ferrymen, to transport the stone needed for the construction of the Tuileries, and the street which leads to the bridge still bears the name of the Rue du Bac. The Isle Louviers was acquired by the Ville, and the evil-smelling tanneries and dye-houses that disfigured the banks of the Seine between the Greve and the Chatelet were cleared away; many new fountains embellished the city, and ten new pumps increased the supply of water. The poorer quarters were, however, little changed from their old insanitary condition. A few years later Rousseau, fresh from Turin, was profoundly disappointed by the streets of Paris as he entered the city by the Faubourg St. Marceau. "I had imagined," he writes, "a city as fair as it was great, and of a most imposing aspect, whose superb streets were lined with palaces of marble and of gold. I beheld filthy, evil-smelling, mean streets, ugly houses black with dirt, a general air of uncleanness and of poverty, beggars and carters, old clothes shop and tisane sellers." [Footnote 150: Twelve alone were added to the St. Honore quarter by levelling the Hill of St. Roch and clearing away accumulated rubbish.] [Illustration: RIVER AND PONT ROYAL.] It is now time to ask what had been done with the magnificent inheritance which the fourteenth Louis had entered upon at the opening of his reign: he left to his successor, a France crushed by an appalling debt of 2,400,000,000 livres; a noblesse and an army in bondage to money-lenders; public officials and fund-holders unpaid, trade paralysed, and the peasants in some provinces so poor that even straw was lacking for them to lie upon, many crossing the frontiers in search of a less miserable lot. Scarcity of bread made disease rampant at Paris, and as many as 4,500 sick poor were counted at one time in the Hotel Dieu alone. Louis left a court that "sweated hypocrisy through every pore," and an example of licentious and unclean living and cynical disregard of every moral obligation, which ate like a cancer into the vitals of the aristocracy. CHAPTER XVI _Paris under the Regency and Louis XV.--The brooding Storm_