It was calculated twenty years ago that the National Printing Office, with its one hundred hand-presses and a good number of presses worked by steam, prints every year about 200,000 reams of paper in different forms, or altogether about 100,000,000 sheets. Reducing these sheets to octavo volumes, each of thirty sheets, the National Printing Office produces every year 3,330,000 volumes; and reckoning 300 working days in the year, 11,100 volumes per day.
Beneath the statue of Guttenberg, cast from the statue by David d’Angers which adorns Strasburg, Guttenberg’s birthplace, is buried an historical account of the National Printing Office, with two commemorative medals.
One of the most interesting buildings in this neighbourhood is the Hôtel Lamoignon, which, by its architecture, presents the aspect of a fortress, though its walls and windows are ornamented with crescents, hunting-horns, and the heads of stags and hounds, in allusion to its having been built by Diana of France, the legitimatised daughter of Henri II. Passing down the Rue des Francs Bourgeois, along the southern {310} wall of the Hôtel Carnavalet, we reach, on the left, the entrance to the Musée Carnavalet, associated with the illustrious names of Jean Goujon the sculptor, François Mansard the architect, and Mme. de Sévigné the charming letter-writer. The Hôtel Carnavalet, which the Marquise de Sévigné inhabited from 1677 to 1698, was restored in 1867 and the years following, when Baron Haussmann resolved to create a municipal museum; of which, however, mention has already been made. It is impossible to quit the Marais, the ancient district in which we have lately been lingering, without calling attention to the beautiful façade of the Hôtel Carnavalet, with its graceful representations of the four seasons.
We are now once more in the Rue Saint-Antoine, within a few paces of the ancient Rue de Birague, at the end of which is a large arcade leading to the Place Royale, which Parisians have not yet learned to call the Place des Vosges, a name given to it as long ago as 1800 by Lucien Bonaparte, Minister of the Interior, to reward the department of the Vosges for being the first department to pay certain taxes which had fallen into arrear. After being styled for thirty-four years, from the time of the Restoration, Place Royale, the square was named in 1848 Place des Vosges.
In the previous description of this Place reference has been made to the statue of Louis XIII. which stands in its centre; and also to the beautiful garden which belongs to it.
CHAPTER XXVIII.
CENTRAL PARIS (continued).
The Rue Saint-Denis—Saint-Leu-Saint-Gilles—George Cadoudal—Saint-Eustache—The Central Markets—The General Post Office.