e cannon-balls of the 10th of August; on the other,
the balls of the 29th of July. It is sacred. Paris, April 1, 1831. (Note
to the fifth edition.)

** The tenth month of the French republican calendar, from the
19th of June to the 18th of July.

To each of these characteristic monuments there is attached by a
similarity of taste, fashion, and attitude, a certain number of
houses scattered about in different quarters and which the eyes of the
connoisseur easily distinguishes and furnishes with a date. When
one knows how to look, one finds the spirit of a century, and the
physiognomy of a king, even in the knocker on a door.

The Paris of the present day has then, no general physiognomy. It is
a collection of specimens of many centuries, and the finest have
disappeared. The capital grows only in houses, and what houses! At the
rate at which Paris is now proceeding, it will renew itself every fifty
years.

Thus the historical significance of its architecture is being effaced
every day. Monuments are becoming rarer and rarer, and one seems to see
them gradually engulfed, by the flood of houses. Our fathers had a Paris
of stone; our sons will have one of plaster.

So far as the modern monuments of new Paris are concerned, we would
gladly be excused from mentioning them. It is not that we do not admire
them as they deserve. The Sainte-Genevieve of M. Soufflot is certainly
the finest Savoy cake that has ever been made in stone. The Palace of
the Legion of Honor is also a very distinguished bit of pastry. The
dome of the wheat market is an English jockey cap, on a grand scale. The
towers of Saint-Sulpice are two huge clarinets, and the form is as good
as any other; the telegraph, contorted and grimacing, forms an
admirable accident upon their roofs. Saint-Roch has a door which, for
magnificence, is comparable only to that of Saint-Thomas d'Aquin. It
has, also, a crucifixion in high relief, in a cellar, with a sun of
gilded wood. These things are fairly marvellous. The lantern of the
labyrinth of the Jardin des Plantes is also very ingenious.

As for the Palace of the Bourse, which is Greek as to its colonnade,
Roman in the round arches of its doors and windows, of the Renaissance
by virtue of its flattened vault, it is indubitably a very correct and
very pure monument; the proof is that it is crowned with an attic, such
as was never seen in Athens, a beautiful, straight line, gracefully
broken here and there by