The over-florid architecture of Louis XV’s reign showed signs of betterment under the younger Louis through the influence of the Greek. The best and, indeed almost the only remaining examples are the church of Saint Louis d’Antin which Louis built as a chapel for a Capuchin convent, and the Odéon, a theater. This building has a dignified façade, but around the remaining three sides runs an arcade filled with open-air book shops whose widely varied stock is more picturesque than appropriately placed. Its actors are the students graduated in the second rank from the government school of acting. Those of the first grade make up the company of the Comédie Française whose playhouse stands in columned ugliness to-day attached to the corner of the Palais Royal. The drama always has been fostered in Paris, but up to Molière’s time no especial provision was made for the presentation of the play from which the people derived so much pleasure. In early times the performance took place in the street. In the fifteenth century the clerks attached to the court held in the palace of the Cité performed farces in the great hall of the palace, using Louis IX’s huge marble table as a stage. In the sixteenth century a troupe remodeled for its use a part of the Hôtel of Burgundy of which a fragment is left in the Tower of John the Fearless. In the seventeenth century a disused tennis court in the Marais housed a company of players. Molière and his actors occupied the hall of a half-ruined residence opposite the eastern end of the Louvre until it was torn down, when they moved to the Palais Royal. Street fairs were enormously popular. They [Illustration: THE ODÉON.] [Illustration: THE COMÉDIE FRANÇAISE ABOUT 1785.] were often conducted by hospitals or religious houses. The best known are the Fair of Saint Germain and the Fair of Saint Laurent, both the left and the right banks being served by these two entertainments. There were side shows and mountebanks of all kinds, and some old verses say that “as one approaches his ears are as full as bottles with noise.”