The first stone of the very ornate Pont Alexandre III, formed of a single arch 107 mètres long, was laid with great ceremony by the Czar Nicholas II in 1896. It was opened in 1900.
A truly historic bridge is the Pont de la Concorde, built between 1787 and 1790, finished with stones off the razed Bastille, and called at first Pont Louis XVI. Louis’ head fell, and the bridge became Pont de la Révolution. Twelve immense statues of famous statesmen and warriors were set up on it in 1828. They were considered too big, and in 1851 were taken away to the Cour d’Honneur de Versailles.
PONT-NEUF
Pont de Solferino, built in 1858, records the victorious Italian campaigns of 1859.
Pont-Royal was designed by Mansart and built in 1689 by Dominican monks to replace a smaller, more primitive bridge which had been known successively as Pont-Barlier, Pont-des-Tuileries, Pont-Rouge, and Pont Ste-Anne; it underwent restoration in 1841. Pont des Saints-Pères, or Pont du Carrousel was one of the last of Paris bridges to pay toll; built in 1834, restored in recent years.
Pont-des-Arts, so called from its vicinity to the Louvre, leading in a straight line from the colonnaded archway of the Court Carrée to the Institut, was opened in 1804, restored 1854.
Pont-Neuf, the most characteristic of Paris bridges, dates back to the reign of Henri III. The King himself laid its first stone in 1578, but it was not finished till 1603, when Henri IV was King. “Le bon Roi” determined to be the first to cross it on horseback, and while it was still unsafe spurred his thoroughbred along the unfinished bridge way. His lords, hastening to follow where their master led, were jolted out of their saddles, and falling upon the unparapeted structure, rolled into the river and were drowned. Louis XIII set up a statue of his father on horseback on the bridge; the statue of the horse was a gift from Cosimo de’ Medici to Louis’ mother. At the Revolution it was overturned, taken away, and melted down to make cannons for the insurgents. Louis XVIII replaced it by a statue made of the bronze of the first statue of Napoléon that had been set up on Place Vendôme and that of his general, Desaix, on Place des Victoires. Though set up by the Bourbon King, the figure we see is believed to contain within it a statuette of Napoléon I and Voltaire’s Henriade. Until 1848 there were shops within the semicircles we see on either side of the old bridge, and beneath the second archway near the right bank there was one of the first hydraulic pumps, known as “la Samaritaine.” Its water was conveyed to the Louvre, the Tuileries, and to houses all around, and fed the famous old fountain built in 1608, destroyed a century later, rebuilt in 1715, again destroyed after another hundred years, with the figure of the Samaritan woman giving water to our Saviour. The bathing-house near the spot with its sign, and the big modern shop of hideous aspect, alone remain to record the name of the ancient pump and fountain. Two or three ancient houses still stand on the Place du Pont-Neuf in the middle of the bridge. At its picturesque western point we see the tree-shaded square Henri IV, known also as the Square du Vert-Galant. Place Dauphine, at its south-western side, dates from the days when Henri’s son, later Louis XIII, was dauphin.