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

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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 Musée de Cluny) of the Roman emperors down through the Palais de la Cité (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.

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 Musées with stolen loot, which remorse, or popular clamour, induced him, for the most part, to return at a later day.