See page 331.] crucifix and the priests’ vestments which they threw into the river as they crossed the bridge to the Cité where they first sacked and then destroyed the archbishop’s palace.[7] Against this demonstration good-hearted Louis turned the firemen’s hose instead of the soldier’s bayonets. This riot was but one of many which marked the first ten years of Louis Philippe’s reign. That of the fifth and sixth of June, 1832, is well known because Victor Hugo described it in “Les Misérables.” The king’s life was attempted more than once, and it could have been small comfort to him to feel that his assassination was not undertaken for personal reasons but because he represented a hated party. It is not to be wondered at that the “Citizen King” ceased to beat time while the crowd sang the “Marseillaise,” and that he told an English friend who urged him to save his voice in the open air, “Don’t be concerned. It’s a long time since I did more than move my lips.” Hated by the Republican rabble the king was no less shunned by his own class, the nobility of the left bank _faubourg_ Saint Germain. They were so unwilling to frequent a court made up of worthy but uninteresting _bourgeois_ that Louis is said to have remarked that it was easier for him to get his English friends from across the Channel to dine with him at the Tuileries than his French friends from across the Seine. Added to the other troubles of this time was the cholera which swept Europe in 1832. Paris looked on it as something of a joke when it first broke out, several maskers at a ball impersonating Cholera in grisly ugliness. When some fifty dancers were attacked by the disease during the evening the seriousness of the situation began to be understood. Before it left the city twenty thousand people had died. Such fearful mortality was enough to give matter for thought to any ruler, and enough was known then about sanitation to cause Louis to set to work clearing out some of the countless narrow streets with their unwholesome houses with which the older parts of the city still abounded, though fifty-five new streets, many of them erasing former ones, had been opened during the Restoration. The Place du Trône, now the Place de la Nation was completed. The handsome columns, erected just before the Revolution, mark the city’s eastern boundary. They are surmounted by statues of Philip Augustus and Saint Louis. Before Louis Philippe’s reign ended there were some eleven hundred streets within the city limits, and the extension and improvement of the lighting system increased their safety, while they were made beautiful by many fountains. Of these the best known is that in memory of Molière. It is erected opposite the house in which the great dramatist died, and was made possible by one of those public subscriptions by which the French more than any other people express the gratitude of the masses for a genius which has given them pleasure.