_Grace before Meat_ (_Chardin_) " 384 _Madame Recamier_ (_David_) " 388 _The Binders_ (_Millet_) " 394 _Landscape_ (_Corot_) " 396 _St. Gervais_ 402 _Hotel of the Provost of Paris_ 404 _West door of St. Merri_ 409 _Cloister of the Billettes, fifteenth century_ 410 _Archives Nationales, Hotel Soubise, showing towers of Hotel de Clisson_ 411 _Tower at the corner of the Rue Vieille du Temple_ 413 _Place des Vosges, Maison de Victor Hugo_ 418 _Cathedral of St. Denis_ 437 _Plan of Paris_ " 448 _The majority of the photographs of sculpture have been taken by Messrs._ HAWEIS AND COLES, _while most of the other photographs are reproduced by permission of Messrs._ GIRAUDON. [Illustration: Map of the Successive Walls of Paris.] INTRODUCTION The History of Paris, says Michelet, is the history of the French monarchy: "Paris, France and the Dukes and Kings of the French, are three ideas," says Freeman, "which can never be kept asunder." The aim of the writer in the following pages has been to narrate the story of the capital city of France on the lines thus indicated. Moreover, men are ever touched by "sad stories of the death of kings," the pomp and majesty and the fate of princes. By a pathetic fallacy their capacity to suffer is measured by their apparent power to enjoy, and those are moved to tears by the spectacle of a Dauphin surrendered to the coarse and brutal tutelage of a sans-culotte, who read without emotion of thousands of Huguenot children torn from their mothers' arms and flung to the novercal cruelties of strangers in blood and creed. In the earlier chapters the legendary aspect of the story has been drawn upon rather more perhaps than an austere historical conscience would approve, but it is precisely a familiarity with these romantic stories, which at least are true in impression if not in fact, that the sojourner in Paris will find most useful, translated as they are in sculpture and in painting, on the decoration of her architecture, both modern and ancient, and implicit in the nomenclature of her ways.