Twenty Centuries of Paris

by Mabell S. C. Smith

THE NEW LOUVRE.

See plan, page 382.

churches, even into Notre Dame, relic and record of centuries, and poured petroleum upon the flames devouring the Palace of Justice, the Sainte Chapelle, the library of the Louvre, the Luxembourg palace, the Palais Royal. The houses on the rue Royale were a mass of broken brick. The Ministry of Finance on the rue de Rivoli was so injured that it was torn down, to be replaced by a hotel. Three hundred years of historical association did not avail to save the palace of the Tuileries whose ruins were considered not sufficient to be restored. The Hôtel de Ville was a mere shell and required practically entire rebuilding. Property amounting to a hundred millions of dollars was destroyed, while the historical and sentimental value of many of the buildings cannot be computed.

The communists were as reckless with their own lives as with the buildings. Some two thousand persons—women and children as well as men—fell in the contest with the government. The last struggle was in the cemetery of Père Lachaise whose tombs could serve only as temporary protection against shell and shot from the rash fighters who were soon to need a final resting-place. It was only after the execution of many of the insurgent leaders that Marshal MacMahon brought about a semblance of peace.

With returning quiet all France turned its attention to securing the payment of the war indemnity of a billion dollars due to Prussia. Until that indebtedness was cleared off the hated uniform of the army of occupation was omnipresent. So eager were the French to rid themselves of this sight that every peasant went into his “stocking” or tapped his mattress bank until the necessary amount was subscribed many times over. Two years and a half after the capitulation of Paris not a German soldier was left in the country. There could be no stronger testimony to the national thrift fostered by the pinch of the pre-Revolutionary days and so alive to-day that the French are looked upon as the readiest financiers in Europe, prepared to invest in anything from a Panama Canal to a New York gratte-ciel (skyscraper).

The terms of the peace with Germany required the surrender of one-half of the border province of Lorraine and the whole of Alsace. It was a bitter day not only for these districts but for the whole country when the Germans took possession of the ceded territory. Fifty thousand people left their property behind and went over into France rather than lose the name of Frenchmen. Many came to America. Now, forty years later, the memory of the loss is not dulled, and the statue of Strasbourg in the Place de la Concorde wears perpetual mourning.

Many have been the problems faced by France since the Franco-Prussian war. Political adjustment has been of first importance, of course, but Paris has had her own questions to answer, and, because of her cosmopolitanism, her solutions have been of interest to the whole world. Much time and thought have been spent on the repairs required by the excesses of the communists. The rebuilding of the City Hall on the same spot on which it had stood for five hundred years and in the style which Francis I initiated three centuries before, was a task on which Paris lavished thought and money. The exterior is a finely harmonious example of renaissance. The mural paintings of the interior are a record of the work of the best French artists of the last quarter of the nineteenth century. They are enhanced by heavily handsome gildings and by chandeliers of glittering crystal.

As a whole, however, the city has put more expenditure into the perfecting of public utilities, the beautifying of streets and the construction of parks—works of use to the many—than into the erection of buildings of less general service. The panorama which make the frontispiece of this volume shows the care with which pavements and curbs and tree-guards are ordered. A small tricycle sweeper is 1912’s latest device for removing any last reproach of Lutetia’s mud—a reproach formulated to-day only by Parisians made fastidious by a century of cleanliness.

The panorama shows also the arrangement of the quays and the orderliness which makes them possible in the very center of the city, even when there is discharged upon them huge loads of freight brought from the sea by the strings of barges (seen in the picture of the Eiffel Tower opposite page 360) which are moved by a tug and a chain-towing device.