THE ENTRANCE TO THE TUILERIES, OVER THE SWING-BRIDGE, IN 1788
Original water-colour of the eighteenth century (Carnavalet Museum)
Then comes the Place de la Concorde, the finest Square in the world, with its unrivalled perspectives of the Champs Elysées, the Seine, the Tuileries, the Garde-Meuble, the Crillon mansion, and the charming house of Grimod de la Reynière, to-day the Cercle de l'Union artistique, at the corner of the Rue de "la Bonne Morue"—at present the Rue Boissy d'Anglas—in front of which still stood, until the second Empire, one of the corner pavilions erected by Gabriel. What souvenirs! the raising of Louis the Fifteenth's statue; the festivities in honour of the Dauphin's marriage to Marie Antoinette, so tragically terminated by a catastrophe—the crowd that had come to witness the fireworks being crushed in the moat—which was the beginning of the hatred against the "Austrian woman"; the reviews of the Swiss Guards; the military charges of Lambesc; the people's storming of the swing-bridge, the gates forced, the ditches crossed, and then the sinister scaffold, smoking in front of the statue to Liberty, and the Conventionals terrified, stopping before they entered their hall and taking a close look at the death which, each day, hovered over them. "Yesterday, as I was proceeding to the Assembly with Pénières," writes Dulaure in his Memoirs, "we perceived, as we passed through the Revolution Square, preparations being made for an execution. 'Let us pause,' my colleague said to me; 'let us accustom ourselves to the sight. Perhaps we shall soon need to make proof of our courage by calmly ascending this scaffold. Let us familiarise ourselves with the punishment.'"
CORNER PAVILION OF THE LOUIS XV. SQUARE
At the angle of the Rue de la Bonne-Morue about 1850 (to-day the Rue Boissy-d'Anglas)
Etching by Martial
Severed heads were exhibited by the executioner at the four corners of the huge Square: Danton, Camille Desmoulins, Hérault de Séchelles, Charlotte Corday, Madame Roland, Louis XVI., Marie Antoinette, and Robespierre. A dreadful pell-mell, a disastrous butchery; the ground was red with blood. Then followed the soldiers of the Empire, singing as they defiled, on entering the Tuileries to cheer their triumphant Emperor at his return from some victorious campaign.
A white head, big golden epaulets, a blue ribbon: such was the appearance of Louis XVIII., impotent, with paralysed legs, who, in his carriage surrounded with body-guards, galloped through the Square at full speed.
It was at the corner of this Place de la Concorde that, on the 28th of February 1848, Louis-Philippe, broken and vanquished, got into the humble cab that proved to be the hearse of the Monarchy.
Napoleon III., with his blue dreamy eyes, used to cross it nearly every day, driving his phaeton; and the boy, whom the Parisians of that time called "the little Prince," would show his pretty fair head of hair at the window of the "berline" escorted by the household troops.