streets with the blood of citizens.[1] Let us remember, however, when contrasting the modern history of Paris with that of London, that the questions which have stirred her citizens have been not party but dynastic ones, often complicated and embittered by social and religious principles ploughing deep in the human soul, for which men have cared enough to suffer, and to inflict, death. [Footnote 1: "_Faudra recommencer_" ("We must begin again"), said, to the present writer in 1871, a Communist refugee bearing a great scar on his face from a wound received fighting at the barricades.] Those writers who are pleased to trace the permanency of racial traits through the life of a people dwell with satisfaction on passages in ancient authors who describe the Gauls as quick to champion the cause of the oppressed, prone to war, elated by victory, impatient of defeat, easily amenable to the arts of peace, responsive to intellectual culture; terrible, indefatigable orators but bad listeners, so intolerant of their speakers that at tribal gatherings an official charged to maintain silence would march, sword in hand, towards an interrupter, and after a third warning cut off a portion of his dress. If the concurrent testimony of writers, ancient, mediaeval and modern, be of any worth, Gallic vanity is beyond dispute. Dante, expressing the prevailing belief of his age, exclaims, "Now, was there ever people so vain as the Sienese! Certes not the French by far."[2] Of their imperturbable gaiety and their avidity for new things we have ample testimony, and the course of this story will demonstrate that France, and more especially Paris, has ever been, from the establishment of Christianity to the birth of the modern world at the Revolution, the parent or the fosterer of ideas, the creator of arts, the soldier of the ideal. She has always evinced a wondrous preventive apprehension of coming changes. Sir Henry Maine has shown in his _Ancient Law_ that the idea of kingship created by the accession of the Capetian dynasty revolutionised the whole fabric of society, and that "when the feudal prince of a limited territory surrounding Paris began ... to call himself _King of France_, he became king in quite a new sense." The earliest of the western people beyond Rome to adopt Christianity, she had established a monastery near Tours, a century and a half before St. Benedict, the founder of Western monasticism, had organised his first community at Subiaco. In the Middle Ages Paris became the intellectual light of the Christian world. From the time of the centralisation of the monarchy at Paris she absorbed in large measure the vital forces of the nation, and all that was greatest in art, science and literature was drawn within her walls, until in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, she became the centre of learning, taste and culture in Europe.[3] "Alone of the capitals of Modern Europe," said Freeman, "Paris can claim to have