ted, however, that if any work of contemporary sculpture is worthy of
honor and of proud municipal recognition, it is this admirable bronze.)

Many of the great public places in the city of Paris, moreover,
commemorate, more or less openly, what might be called the great stains
on the history of the nation. The Place de la Concorde is that of the
Guillotine, and the Luxor obelisk is the monument of the more than
twenty-eight hundred victims beheaded by that axe. The Place de l'Hotel
de Ville was formerly the Place de Greve, famous in all hangmen's
annals,--burnings alive, tearings asunder by horses, breakings on the
wheel, decapitations, hangings,--from Catherine de Medicis' Huguenot
chiefs and the unlucky Comte de Montgomery; Lally-Tollendal, Governor of
the Indies; Foulon, _controleur-general_ of the finances and his
son-in-law, hanged to the street lanterns by the mob, down to the famous
regicides and the obscure and ignoble multitude of criminals of all
ages. The Place de la Bastile commemorates the fortress-jail of that
name,--one of the worst of all jails and one to be discreetly forgotten;
the column of July, in the centre of this place, was erected in memory
of the victims of the Revolution of 1830. The statue of Henri IV on the
Pont-Neuf marks the spot where the Grand Master of the Templars and one
of his officers were burned at the stake; on the _carrefour_ of the
Observatory, that of Marshal Ney, the locality where that brave soldier
was shot by order of the Chamber of Peers; from the little bell-tower at
the side of the church of Saint-Germain-l'Auxerrois, back of the Louvre,
the signal was sounded for the Saint Bartholomew. The Chatelet and the
Conciergerie were famous prisons; the ruins of the palace on the Quai
d'Orsay have been but just removed, to make room for the new depot of
the Orleans railway, after having stood since 1871 a most eloquent
monument of the excesses of the Commune. It was even proposed to leave
the shattered walls of the Tuileries as a permanent record of the
follies of an unbridled democracy!

[Illustration: ARMED PARISIANS MEETING THE KING, 1383.

From an illuminated manuscript in the National Library, Paris.]

This expansiveness, this frank parading of unseemly things, is
supplemented by other public demonstrations of the passion of the hour.
For some years after the fall of the Commune the national emotions found
solace in stencilling in big letters on every possible wall or _fr