cathedral has become an object in the museum of the world's marvels and a subject of vague wonderment for tourists; but at the same time it remains a theme for the reveries of mystic dreamers, and a joy for all who appreciate the beauty of splendid architecture closing the perspectives of river and tree-lined quays. Notre Dame is the purest jewel of the many fair monuments that adorn the banks of the Seine "the first of our rivers," as Michelet calls it, "the most civilizable and the most perfectible."

IV.

The entrance to Venice by the Grand Canal is famous among the great sights of the world. If one entered Paris by the Seine and landed at the Hôtel de Ville, the impression received would perhaps be as striking as that produced by the antique palaces of the city of gondolas, and certainly more various.

From afar the position of the capital is announced by the Eiffel Tower. At the fortifications the city asserts itself by the great viaduct of the circular railway that crosses the river at the Pont du Jour, the extremity of Paris, a centre of cheap popular pleasures and the terminus of the city steamboats. Along the bank there are cafés - concerts, shooting - galleries, wooden horses, peep-shows, public-houses, and restaurants where the populace delights to eat fried gudgeons and to drink the sour wines of Suresnes, with the accompaniment of blatant barrel - organs and ambulant musicians. The point of view is vulgar, but the panorama as we ascend the stream is imposing. On the left is the amphitheatre of the Trocadéro, with its fountains and cascades, a souvenir of the universal exhibition of 1878. In the middle of the river, on the point of an island, is the familiar silhouette of a reduction of Bartholdi's statue of Liberty Enlightening the World, a symbol of international sympathy, if not perhaps a masterpiece of art. On the right rise the stupendous iron tower and the glittering domes of the buildings of the universal exhibition of 1889. In the background extends the vague horizon of the immense city, of modern Paris, the outcome of the revolution of 1789, of democratic Paris, which owes its supremacy to the great 14th of July. Successively Gaulish, Roman, Carlovingian, feudal, monarchical, and revolutionary, Paris has ascended

from darkness to light, from unconsciousness to consciousness, from servitude to liberty, from despotism to democracy. "Rome has more majesty," wrote Victor Hugo, “Trèves has more antiquity, Venice has more beauty, Naples has more grace, London has more wealth. What, then, has Paris? The Revolution.

"Paris is the pivot town on which at a given day the history of the world turned.

"Palermo has Etna, Paris has thought. Constantinople is nearer to the sun, Paris is nearer to civilization. Athens built the Parthenon, but Paris demolished the Bastille."

All along the river the silhouette of the Eiffel Tower, that monstrous plaything of humanity, that gigantic point of exclamation which Progress set up at the entrance of the world's fair in the centennial year of Liberty, will pursue us. At each step we turn to it as a standard or a contrast as we advance between rows of palaces and of quays lined with luxuriant trees; past the modest glass galleries of the Palais de l'Industrie, which seemed so gorgeous when the world's fair found sufficient room in them in 1867; past the Esplanade des Invalides and the dome that carries us back to Louis XIV.; past the embassies and ministries on the Quai d'Orsay; past the classic temple where the deputies meet to discuss and to make laws; past the place which used to be called the Place Louis XV., until one day it was called Place de la Révolution, and in 1795 Place de la Concorde, after it had been stained with the blood of Louis XVI., of Marie Antoinette, Charlotte Corday, Anacharsis Clootz, Danton, Camille Desmoulins, and how many others! Almost every inch of Paris is historic ground, and it needs but an ordinary memory to people the streets with illustrious phantoms.

Beyond the Place de la Concorde we pass between the vast garden of the Tuileries, and the ruins of the Cour des Comptes. The former reminds us of the Empire, the latter of the Commune. Then we pass the Louvre and the Quai Voltaire, dear to book-lovers, where the parapets are fringed with boxes full of books and pamphlets that invite the passer-by to hunt if, haply, he may find some rare neglected treasure, some pearl lost in the rubbish heap. Here we are in the heart of Paris, and the cradle of the city is before our eyes, the Île de la Cité, with

Notre Dame and La Sainte Chapelle; the crowded bridges; the palaces of learning and of pleasure; the Palais de l'Institut; the École des Beaux-Arts; the Mint; the Church of Saint Germain l'Auxerrois; the Theatre and Place du Châtelet; the Conciergerie with its pointed towers; the ancient Gothic tower of Saint Jacques; and at last the elegant silhouette of the Hôtel de Ville, with its innumerable statues of eminent citizens on the façade, and its gilded men-at-arms guarding the belfry and the roof. In the centre of the river façade of the municipal palace stands the bronze statue of Étienne Marcel, the Prévôt des Marchands, who played so important a rôle in the grave events of the middle of the fourteenth century, and almost succeeded in advancing the date of the revolution of 1789 by four centuries.

V.

Étienne Marcel is one of those great figures of Parisian history that have helped the city to become the capital. It was he who led the movement that transported the parloir aux bourgeois, or city hall, from the Montagne Sainte Geneviève to the Place de Grève, where it still stands. The bourgeois had wished for years to have the right of meeting in a hall near their quarter-near to the streets where they had their looms, their work-shops, and their offices. The kings refused, for if the chiefs of the guilds and the provost of the merchants were allowed to meet on the Place de Grève, it would be as if the populace had its Louvre beside the Louvre of the crown. In 1357, when the king was unsuccessful in battle, although the bourgeois had given him plenty of money, the mob became master of Paris, took some practical lessons in the art of revolution, conquered the Hôtel de Ville on the Place de Grève, and carried Étienne Marcel there in triumph.

At the States-General in 1355, Étienne Marcel, the spokesman of the third estate and of the loyal towns, declared that they were all ready to live and die with the king, provided only the king would live better and allow the bourgeois to have a hand in arranging his life for him. "Requérons de parler ensemble et de nous réunir," said Marcel, humbly ("We claim to meet and to speak together"). "And then the Chancellor,' adds Froissart, "said, 'We grant the claim"" ("Lors le chancelier dit, nous l'octroyons").

This was the beginning of the end of monarchy, and the beginning of the reign of Paris; and when, a little later, King John was conquered and captured at Poitiers, and France was left without army, without king, and with a young prince of nineteen summers, the Dauphin Charles, for only guide and sovereign, Paris, with its provost of the merchants, took the initiative of government. The revolution of Etienne Marcel was the greatest effort that Paris ever made as capital and heart of France, greater even than the effort of 1789, for then Paris had the sympathies of all France, whereas, under Étienne Marcel, Paris acted almost alone for the sake of France. The aim of this revolution was noble and just, but when the victory was nearly won, it was spoiled by excesses and crimes. The spirit of imprudence and error blinded Étienne Marcel, and brought him to a violent and ignominious end, and all that the people of Paris remembered of the revolutionary days of the fourteenth century was the taste for blood and the appetite for pillage, which they have never lost. Since Étienne Marcel, Paris has been a city of intermittent revolutions; from the rival factions of Armagnac and Bourgogne to the massacre of the night of Saint Bartholomew, when the Seine was stained with blood as far as Rouen; from the riots of the Ligue and the Fronde to the great riot which ended in the capture and destruction of the Bastille; from the Commune of 1793 to the Commune of 1871-Paris has always been the leader and initiator of the national disorders as well as of the national life; of the noble movements as well as of the most pernicious and detestable excesses. And yet, as the calm and perspicacious Vauban said, "Paris is to France what the head is to the human body; it is the true heart of the kingdom, the common mother of France, by whom all the people of this great state subsist, and with whom this kingdom could not dispense without declining considerably."

numbered 100,000 souls. Under Louis XIV. the population reached 550,000. In the eighteenth century, Paris, with 650,000 inhabitants, made the Revolution, destroyed the Bastille, and began to pull the great tocsin to whose sounds the world is still listening. Only nowadays Paris has nearly two and a half millions of inhabitants to pull the bell-rope, and the sound is much mightier than it was since the tocsin has become purely a clangor of peace, industry, and genius.

VI.

La plaine est mère, la rivière est nourrice. In the topographical predestination of Paris to be the capital of France, the elements of river and plain have been all-important. The plain has been the producer of riches, and the river the carrier that has made them productive. When we approach Paris from the side of the Loire we cross the fertile plains of La Beauce, the great granary; on the Burgundy side the hills and slopes are covered with vineyards; in the fat pastures of Normandy may be seen countless herds of cattle; on the north, the south, the east, and the west the capital is surrounded by zones of forests-the forests of Orleans, Rambouillet, Versailles, Saint

Germain, Marly, Montmorency, Bondy, Chantilly, Compiègne, Villers-Cotterets, Senart, Fontainebleau, without counting the reserves of La Nièvre; in the centre of the valley of the Seine we find stone at Montrouge, plaster at Montmartre, bricks at Vaugirard, and paving-stones at Fontainebleau. Thus nature has provided all that is necessary for building a capital and nourishing its population, and the long collaboration of nature and man has produced that mighty city, the monster and the masterpiece, Paris, the pivot on which the history of modern humanity has turned.

The origin of the wealth and glory of Paris is the Seine. The first trade of the primitive inhabitants of Lutetia was that of watermen. Their future and their whole fortune lay in the river and its navigation. With the progress of the city the navigation has increased until, at the present day, Paris is the fourth in importance of all the ports of France, coming immediately after Bordeaux, the first being Marseilles, and the second Havre.

The arms of Paris, souvenir of Isis and of the ancient industry of the Lutetians, thus remain as significant as ever, and there is even a prospect that they may ac

quire greater fulness of meaning in the future, for the dream of Paris is to become a seaport, by means of the canalization of the Seine and the construction of lateral ship-canals between the capital and Rouen, above which point large ocean vessels at present cannot penetrate. The average visitor to Paris rarely realizes the importance of the Seine as a commercial route, and unless he has the blessed gift of lounging and the will to loaf and comprehend things by intuition and sympathy rather than by the study of his guide-book, he runs the risk of not seeing some of the most picturesque and restful bits of the town. The professional tourist and his mentor pay but small attention to the Seine. They remark the numerous bridges and the steamboats, mouches and hirondelles, "flies" and "swallows," as they are poetically called, that ply between Charenton and Auteuil, or run from the Louvre as far as Saint Cloud and Suresnes; but apart from this passenger service they know very little about the river. The sentimental idler, on the other hand, knows that the river is rich in variety and incident, and that

delicious hours may be spent by the dreamer who has the leisure to loiter on the bridges and along the quays, and to feast his eyes on simple phases and combinations of life, nature, and art. From the almost superhuman patience of the fishermen who line the quays and make them bristle with long bamboo poles, the loiterer may take example of hopefulness and perseverance. From the family groups that sit along the shore lost in contemplation of the water, and from the children who play on the sand heaps while their mothers sew and gossip, just as they might do at the sea-side, the thoughtful spectator may conclude that the source of happiness is within each one of us, in the prism of illusion that gives to reality the aspect that our fancy pleases.

How many pretexts for idling and looking on are offered by the banks of the Seine! A passing train of boats, a fisherman casting his net, a steamer gliding under the bridge, two men beating a carpet, an ambulant specialist carding a mattress on the tow-path, a steam-crane hoisting sand from a barge and deposit