of the Bastille. Even the boucheries chevalines, the markets that sell horse steaks and “ass and mule meat of the first quality,” bring back the days when Henry IV cut off supplies coming from the suburbs of Paris and when, three hundred years later, the Prussians used the same means to gain the same end. That the Parisians of to-day are willing to take chances on universal peace in the future seems attested by the recent vote (1913) of the Municipal Council to convert the fortifications and the land adjacent into parks. The people of the markets, at any rate, are not worrying about any possibilities of hunger for they continue as hard-working and as fluent as when they acted as Marie Antoinette’s escort on the occasion of the “Joyous Entry” from Versailles, though kinder now in heart and action.
Paris charms the stranger as the birdman of the Tuileries Gardens charms his feathered friends—making hostile gestures with one hand and popping bread crumbs into open beaks with the other. The great city of three million people, like all great cities, threatens to overcome the lonely traveler; then, at the seeming moment of destruction, she gives him the food he needs most—perhaps a glimpse of patriotic gayety in the street revels of the fourteenth of July, perhaps the cordial welcome that she has bestowed on students since Charlemagne’s day, perhaps the less personal appeal of the beauty of a wild dash of rain seen down the river against the western sky, perhaps the impulse to sympathy aroused by the passing of a first communion procession of little girls, wide-eyed from their new, soul-stirring experience.
In a quiet corner behind a convent chapel where nuns vowed to Perpetual Adoration unceasingly tend the altar, rests the body of America’s friend, Lafayette. If for no other reason than because of his friendship, Americans must always feel an interest in the city in which he did his part toward crystallizing the bourgeois rule which makes the French government one of the most interesting political experiments of Europe to-day. Yet Paris needs no intermediary. In her are centered taste, thought, the gayety and exaggeration of the past, light-heartedness in the stern present. The city is a record of the development of a people who have expressed themselves in words and in deeds, and by the more subtle methods of Art. The story is not ended, and as long as the writing goes on, vivid and alluring as the “Gallic spirit” can make it, so long there will be no lack of readers of all nations, our own among the most eager.
APPENDIX
GENEALOGICAL TABLES OF THE SOVEREIGNS OF FRANCE
CHRONOLOGICAL TABLE OF RULERS, 1792-1913
THE MEROVINGIAN DYNASTY
Merovée
|
Childéric I
|
_Clovis_[10] (481-511)
|
+-----------------------+---------+-----------+---------------------+
| | | |
Thierry I Chlodomir Childébert I _Clotaire I_
(King of Metz) (King of Orleans) (King of Paris) (King of Soissons, then
Sole king, 558-561)
|
+-------------------+-----------------------+-------------------------+--+
| | | |
Caribert Gontran Sigebert I Chilpéric I
(King of Paris) (King of Burgundy) (King of Austrasia, (King of Soissons,
M. Brunehaut, M. Frédégonde, D. 584)
D. 575) |
| |
Childébert II _Clotaire II_
| 613-628
| |
Thierry II _Dagobert I_
628-638
|
_Clovis II_
638-656
|
+---------+---------------+
| |
_Childéric II_ _Thierry III_
D. 673 D. 691
|
Chilpéric II
|
Childéric III
(Deposed by Pepin le Bref in 752)
Pépin d’Héristal
(Duke of the Franks, D. 714)
|
Charles Martel
(Mayor of the Palace in Austrasia,
715-741)
_Pépin le Bref_
(Deposed Chïldéric III in 752.
752-768)
|
_Charlemagne_
768-814
|
_Louis le Débonnaire_
814-840
|
+-------------+---------+------------------------------------+
| | | |
Lothair Pépin Louis, the German _Charles I, the Bald_
840-855 | 840-877
| |
_Charles II, the Fat_ _Louis II, the Stutterer_
881-888 877-879
|
+------------+-------------------+-----+
| | |
_Louis III_ _Carloman_ _Charles III, the Simple_
879-882 879-884 892-929
|
_Louis IV d’Outremer_
936-954
|
+---+----+
| |
_Lothair_, Charles
(Duke of
Lorraine).
954-986
|
_Louis V_[11] 986-987