CHURCH OF SAINTE GENEVIÈVE, NOW THE PANTHEON.
of this century. Twice serious fires destroyed large parts of the Hotel Dieu, the old general hospital. It had become so crowded in the Sun King’s time that six and eight patients were put into one bed. Nothing was done to relieve the situation, however, until it reached such a pass that even the careless Regent was aroused and provided money for the building of a new wing by taxing public amusements. The second conflagration (in 1772) was not extinguished for eleven days. Many sufferers were burned in their beds, and hundreds of others, turned out into the December cold, took refuge in near-by Notre Dame.
In the same year with the earlier fire at the hospital (1737) a two-day conflagration started by prisoners worked havoc with the palace of the Cité. In 1777 another destroyed the front of the palace. Another fire earlier in the century had its origin in the efforts of a poor woman to recover the body of her drowned son through the mediation of Saint Nicholas. To that end she set afloat in the Seine a wooden bowl containing a loaf of bread and a lighted candle. The candle set fire to a barge of hay. Some one cut the boat loose and it was swept by the current under the Petit Pont which was consumed with all its burden of houses. The bridge was quickly replaced, but without any buildings on it, a fashion followed toward the end of Louis XVI’s reign when the Pont Neuf and the Pont Notre Dame were cleared.
The Pont Neuf’s broad expanse became at once the field for hucksters and mountebanks of all sorts; here strikers assembled near the statue of Henry IV; here, according to an old verse-maker, there was much love-making near the “Bronze Horse;” and here the enlisting officers plied their activities even up to a quarter of a century ago when army service became compulsory.
CHAPTER XVIII
PARIS OF THE REVOLUTION
LOUIS XV was succeeded in 1774 by his twenty year old grandson, Louis XVI, at whose birth the Paris that later was to kill him expressed extravagant delight in countless feasts, balls and displays of fireworks. Young as he was at his accession, Louis had been married for several years. His wife, Marie Antoinette, was but fourteen when she came to Paris as a bride, and an accident which occurred during the wedding festivities seemed a mournful prophecy of the troubled days to come. At the close of a fête in the Place Louis XV a panic seized the crowd. It rushed headlong into the rue Royale in such a passion of terror that the narrow street was swiftly filled with a mass of people fighting their way over the bleeding, dying bodies of those who had reached the exit first and by chance had fallen.
Again the royal family preferred Versailles to Paris. In the country the well-meaning young king tinkered with locks and was generally dull and uninteresting, while the queen made a charmingly elaborate pretence at living the simple life, à la Watteau. Louis did his ineffective best to straighten out the affairs of his kingdom but the deluge which Louis XV had predicted was coming and rapidly.