oose that which
is most to his liking, or may go back and show his preference for
_lower_, meaning a fortified place.

A palace--something more elaborate than a mere habitation--stood on the
same site in the twelfth century, a work which, under the energies of
Philippe Auguste, in 1204 began to grow to still more splendid
proportions, though infinitesimal one may well conclude as compared with
the mass which all Paris knows to-day under the inclusive appellation of
"The Louvre."

The Paris of Philippe Auguste was already a city of a hundred and twenty
thousand inhabitants, with mean houses on every side and little pretense
at even primitive comforts or conveniences. This far-seeing monarch laid
hand first on the great citadel tower of the fortified _lower_, added to
its flanking walls and built a circling rampart around the capital
itself. It is recounted that the rumbling carts, sinking deep in mud and
plowing through foot-deep dust beneath the palace windows, annoyed the
monarch so much that he instituted what must have been the first city
paving work on record, and commanded that all the chief thoroughfares
passing near the Louvre should be paved with cobbles. This was real
municipal improvement. He was a Solon among his kind for, since that
day, it has been a _sine qua non_ that for the well-keeping of city
streets they must be paved, and, though cobblestones have since gone out
of fashion, it was this monarch who first showed us how to do it.

The Louvre of Philippe Auguste was the most imposing edifice of the
Paris of its time. To no little extent was this imposing outline due to
its great central tower, the _maitresse_, which was surrounded by
twenty-three _dames d'honneur_, without counting numberless _tourelles_.
This hydra-towered giant palace was the real guardian of the Paris of
mediaevalism, as its successor is indeed the real centre of the Paris of
to-day.

The city was but an immense mass of low-lying gable-roofed houses, whose
crowning apex was the sky-line of the Louvre, with that of Tournelles
only less prominent to the north, and that of La Cite hard by on the
island where the Palais de Justice and Notre Dame now stand.

Before the hand of Francis fell upon the Louvre it was but an isolated
stronghold--a combined castle, prison and palace, gloomy, foreboding and
surrounded by moats and ramparts almost impassable. Philippe Auguste
built well and made of it an admirable and imposing castle and a pl