verse, recounts a visit made to the Hotel de
Beauvais in 1663 by Marie Therese, the Queen of Louis XIV.

Mercredi, notre auguste Reine,
Cette charmante souveraine,
Fut chez Madame de Beauvais
Pour de son amiable palais
Voir les merveilles etonnantes
Et les raretes surprenantes.

Times have changed, for the worse or for the better. The sedan-chair and
the coach have given way to the automobile and the engine, and the wood
fire to a stale calorifer, or perhaps a gas-log.

The comparisons _are_ odious; there is no question as to this; but it is
by contrast that the subject is made the more interesting.

From the old Palais des Thermes (now a part of the Musee de Cluny) of
the Roman emperors down through the Palais de la Cite (where lodged the
kings of the first and second races) to the modern installations of the
Louvre is a matter of twelve centuries. The record is by no means a
consecutive one, but a record exists which embraces a dozen, at least,
of the Paris abodes of royalty, where indeed they lived according to
many varying scales of comfort and luxury.

Not all the succeeding French monarchs had the abilities or the
inclinations that enabled them to keep up to the traditions of the
art-loving Francis I, but almost all of their number did something
creditable in building or decoration, or commanded it to be done.

Louis XIV, though he delayed the adjustment of Europe for two centuries,
was the first real beautifier of Paris since Philippe Auguste. Privately
his taste in art and architecture was rather ridiculous, but publicly he
and his architects achieved great things in the general scheme.

[Illustration: _The_ Louvre _The_ Tuileries & _The_ Palais Royal _of_
To-Day]

Napoleon I, in turn, caught up with things in a political sense, in
truth he ran ahead of them, but he in no way neglected the
embellishments of the capital, and added a new wing to the Louvre, and
filled Musees with stolen loot, which remorse, or popular clamour,
induced him, for the most part, to return at a later day.

In a decade Napoleon made much history, and he likewise did much for the
royal palaces of France. After him a gap supervened until the advent of
Napoleon III, who, weakling that he was, had the perspicacity to give
the Baron Haussmann a chance to play his part in the making of modern
Paris, and if the Tuileries and Saint Cloud had not disappeared as a
result of his indiscretion the period of the Second