. The student of
architecture is interested to observe here that the Roman bricks were
much longer than ours, and only about an inch and a half thick. Their
original, cheerful red still shows occasionally through the Parisian
blackness. He will, however, probably be somewhat disturbed by the fine
indifference of the authorities to styles and chronologies. In the place
of the missing wall of the _piscine_ is set the arched porch of the
cloister of the Benedictines of Argenteuil; inside the enclosures are
tumulary stones, with inscriptions in Hebrew, found on the site of the
publishing house of Hachette. In the pleasant green garden in front of
these ruins, and in which the bare-legged Parisian children play at
soldiers or at digging gravel in the paths, are more incongruous
mediaeval bits of architecture and sculpture,--placid Madonnas and
Annunciations, much defaced by time; gargoyles from the church of
Saint-Germain-l'Auxerrois, in what may be called the size of life,
agonizing and tormented by queer little beasts like weasels under their
throats or bellies, and, guarding the gateway at the angle of the
boulevards, three great, deformed figures of the animals of the
Evangelists, the Lion, the Eagle, and the Ox, from the tower of
Saint-Jacques-la-Boucherie, where they have been replaced by copies.

For a number of centuries these ruins were forgotten, and were even
concealed until 1810 under hanging-gardens constructed above them. In
1819 it was proposed to establish in the Thermes a museum for the
Gaulish and Roman antiquities discovered in the soil of Paris; but this
project was not carried out until 1836, when, through the action of the
Prefect of the Seine and the Conseil Municipal, the remains of the Roman
palace became the property of the city. Seven years later, the State
having acquired the Hotel de Cluny and the collection Sommerard, the
city offered the Palais des Thermes to the national government, and the
two museums were united in one national one. The project of M. E. du
Sommerard, of clearing away all the surrounding modern buildings,
opening the new streets and planting the garden, was finally put in the
way of being realized in 1856.

The site of this palace, the ruins of which are among the most important
in France, was on the lower slopes of Mount Lucotitius, afterward the
mount of Sainte-Genevieve, overlooking both the city and the Roman road
to Genabum (Orleans). Its dependent buildings and enclosu