Paris (France) -- Description and travel; Paris (France) -- History
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 Vendome, 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. We enter the
Tuileries Gardens crossing the Terrace of the Feuillants, 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: 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. R. and L. of
the central avenue we find the two marble exhedrae, erected in 1793 for
the elders who presided over the floral celebrations of the month of
Germinal by the children of the Republic.
Of the gorgeous palace of the Tuileries at the E. end of the gardens,
with its inharmonious but picturesque facade stretching across the
western limit of the Louvre from the Pavilion de Flore to the Pavilion
de Marsan, not one stone is left on another. We remember it after its
fiery purgation by the Commune in 1871, a gaunt shell blackened and
ruined, fitting emblem of the wreck which the enthroned wantonness and
corruption of the Second Empire had made of France.
We fare again westward along the gardens and emerge into the Place de
la Concorde by the gate adorned with Coysevox' statues, Fame and
Mercury on Winged Horses, facing, on the opposite side of the vast
area, Guillaume Coustou's Horse Tamers from Marly.
The Place, formerly of Louis XV., with its setting of pavilions
adorned with groups of statuary representing the chief cities of
France, was created by Gabriel in 1763-1772 on the site of a dreary,
marshy waste used as a depot for marble. It was adorned in 1763 with
an equestrian statue of Louis XV., by Pigalle, elevated on a pedestal
which was decorated at the corners by statues of the cardinal virtues.
Mordant couplets, two of which we transcribe, affixed on the base,
soon expressed the judgment of the Parisians:--
"_Grotesque monument! Infame piedestal!
Les vertus sont a pied, le vice est a cheval._"
"_Il est ici comme a Versailles,
Toujours sans coeur et sans entrailles._"
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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