the room. Thus Gothic Paris was
complete only for a moment. Saint-Jacques de la Boucherie had barely
been completed when the demolition of the old Louvre was begun.

After that, the great city became more disfigured every day. Gothic
Paris, beneath which Roman Paris was effaced, was effaced in its turn;
but can any one say what Paris has replaced it?

There is the Paris of Catherine de Medicis at the Tuileries;*--the
Paris of Henri II., at the Hotel de Ville, two edifices still in fine
taste;--the Paris of Henri IV., at the Place Royale: facades of brick
with stone corners, and slated roofs, tri-colored houses;--the Paris of
Louis XIII., at the Val-de-Grace: a crushed and squat architecture, with
vaults like basket-handles, and something indescribably pot-bellied in
the column, and thickset in the dome;--the Paris of Louis XIV., in
the Invalides: grand, rich, gilded, cold;--the Paris of Louis XV., in
Saint-Sulpice: volutes, knots of ribbon, clouds, vermicelli and chiccory
leaves, all in stone;--the Paris of Louis XVI., in the Pantheon: Saint
Peter of Rome, badly copied (the edifice is awkwardly heaped together,
which has not amended its lines);--the Paris of the Republic, in the
School of Medicine: a poor Greek and Roman taste, which resembles
the Coliseum or the Parthenon as the constitution of the year III.,
resembles the laws of Minos,--it is called in architecture, "the
Messidor"** taste;--the Paris of Napoleon in the Place Vendome: this
one is sublime, a column of bronze made of cannons;--the Paris of the
Restoration, at the Bourse: a very white colonnade supporting a very
smooth frieze; the whole is square and cost twenty millions.

* We have seen with sorrow mingled with indignation, that it
is the intention to increase, to recast, to make over, that is to say,
to destroy this admirable palace. The architects of our day have too
heavy a hand to touch these delicate works of the Renaissance. We still
cherish a hope that they will not dare. Moreover, this demolition of the
Tuileries now, would be not only a brutal deed of violence, which
would make a drunken vandal blush--it would be an act of treason.
The Tuileries is not simply a masterpiece of the art of the sixteenth
century, it is a page of the history of the nineteenth. This palace no
longer belongs to the king, but to the people. Let us leave it as it is.
Our revolution has twice set its seal upon its front. On one of its two
facades, there are th