Paris charms the stranger as the birdman of the Tuileries Gardens charms his feathered friends--making hostile gestures with one hand and popping bread crumbs into open beaks with the other. The great city of three million people, like all great cities, threatens to overcome the lonely traveler; then, at the seeming moment of destruction, she gives him the food he needs most--perhaps a glimpse of patriotic gayety in the street revels of the fourteenth of July, perhaps the cordial welcome that she has bestowed on students since Charlemagne’s day, perhaps the less personal appeal of the beauty of a wild dash of rain seen down the river against the western sky, perhaps the impulse to sympathy aroused by the passing of a first communion procession of little girls, wide-eyed from their new, soul-stirring experience. In a quiet corner behind a convent chapel where nuns vowed to Perpetual Adoration unceasingly tend the altar, rests the body of America’s friend, Lafayette. If for no other reason than because of his friendship, Americans must always feel an interest in the city in which he did his part toward crystallizing the _bourgeois_ rule which makes the French government one of the most interesting political experiments of Europe to-day. Yet Paris needs no intermediary. In her are centered taste, thought, the gayety and exaggeration of the past, light-heartedness in the stern present. The city is a record of the development of a people who have expressed themselves in words and in deeds, and by the more subtle methods of Art. The story is not ended, and as long as the writing goes on, vivid and alluring as the “Gallic spirit” can make it, so long there will be no lack of readers of all nations, our own among the most eager. APPENDIX GENEALOGICAL TABLES OF THE SOVEREIGNS OF FRANCE CHRONOLOGICAL TABLE OF RULERS, 1792-1913 THE MEROVINGIAN DYNASTY