North of the Louvre is the Palais Royal, once the gayest, now the dullest scene in Paris. This quarter of Richelieu and of Mazarin drew to itself the wealth and fashion of the city in its migration westward from the Marais during the times of Louis XIII. and of the Regency of Anne of Austria. Nearly all the princely hotels that crowded the district have long since given place to commercial houses and shops. The mansions of the two great ministers remain as the Conseil d’Etat and the Bibliothèque Nationale, but all that is left of the immense Hôtel de Colbert in the Rue Vivienne is a name—the Passage Colbert. The same is true of the vast area of lands and buildings of the convent of the Filles de St. Thomas, of which the present Bourse and the Place before it only occupy a part. At the corner, however, of the Rue des Petits Champs and St. Anne the fine double façade of the Hôtel erected by Lulli with money borrowed from Molière may be seen, bearing the great musician’s coat-of-arms—a design of trumpets, lyres and cymbals. Further west, Napoleon’s Rues de Castiglione and de la Paix, the Regent Street of Paris, run south and north from the Place Vendôme, intended by its creator Louvois to be the most spacious in the city. A monumental parallelogram of public offices was to enclose the Place, but Versailles engulfed the king’s resources and the ambitious scheme was whittled down, the area much reduced, and the site and foundations of the new buildings were handed over to the Ville. What the Allies failed to do in 1814 the Commune succeeded in doing in 1871, and the boastful Column of Vendôme, a pitiful plagiarism of Trajan’s Column at Rome, was laid in the dust, only however to be raised again by the Third Republic in 1875. The Rue Castiglione leads down to the Terrace of the Feuillants overlooking the Tuileries gardens, all that is left of the famous monastery and grounds where Lafayette’s club of constitutional reformers met. The beautiful gardens remain much as Le Notre designed them for Louis XIV., and every spring the orange trees, some of them dating back it is said to the time of Francis I., are brought forth from the orangery to adorn the central avenue, and the gardens become vocal with many voices of children at their games—French children with their gentle humour and sweet, refined play. Right and left of the central avenue, the two marble exhedræ may still be seen which were erected in 1793 for the elders who presided over the floral celebrations of the month of Germinal by the children of the Republic.
The Place Louis XV (now de la Concorde), with its setting of pavilions adorned with groups of statuary representing the chief cities of France, was created by Gabriel in 1763-1772 on the site of a dreary, marshy waste used as a depot for marble. The Place was adorned in 1763 with an equestrian statue of Louis XV., elevated on a pedestal which was decorated at the corners by statues of the cardinal virtues. Mordant couplets, two of which we transcribe, affixed on the base, soon expressed the judgment of the Parisians:—
“O la belle statue! O le beau piédestal!
Les vertus sont à pied, le vice est à cheval.”[174]
“Il est ici come à Versailles
Il est sans cœur et sans entrailles.”[175]
After the fall of the monarchy the Place was known as the Place de la Revolution, and in 1792, Louis XV. with the other royal simulacra in bronze having been forged into the cannon that thundered against the allied kings of Europe, a plaster statue of Liberty was erected, at whose side the guillotine mowed down king and queen, revolutionist and aristocrat in one bloody harvest of death, ensanguining the very figure of the goddess herself, who looked on with cold and impassive mien. She too fell, and in her place stood a fascis of eighty-three spears, symbolising the unity of the eighty-three departments of France. In 1795 the Directory changed the name to Place de la Concorde, and again in 1799 a seated statue of Liberty holding a globe was set up. In the hollow globe a pair of wild doves built their nest—a futile augury, for in 1801 Liberty II. was broken in pieces, and the model for a tall granite column erected in its place by Napoleon I. One year passed and this too disappeared. After the Restoration, among the other inanities came, in 1816, a second statue of Louis XV., and the Place resumed its original name. Ten years later an expiatory monument to Louis XVI. was begun, only to be swept away with other Bourbon lumber by the July Revolution of 1830. At length the famous obelisk from Luxor, after many vicissitudes, was elevated in 1836 where it now stands.
The Place as we behold it dates from 1854, when the deep fosses which surrounded it in Louis XV.’s time, and which were responsible for the terrible disaster that attended the wedding festivities of Louis XVI. and Marie Antoinette, were filled up, and other improvements and embellishments effected. The vast space and magnificent vistas enjoyed from this square are among the finest urban spectacles in Europe. To the north, on either side of the broad Rue Royale which opens to the Madeleine, stand Gabriel’s fine edifices (now the Ministry of Marine and the Cercle de la Rue Royale), designed to accommodate foreign ambassadors. To the south is the Palais Bourbon, now the Chamber of Deputies; to the east are the gardens of the Tuileries, and to the west is the stately Grande Avenue of the Champs Elysées rising to the colossal Arch of Triumph crowning the eminence of the Place de l’Etoile. As our eyes travel along the famous avenue, memories of the military glories and of the threefold humiliation of Imperial France crowd upon us. For down its ample way there marched in 1814 and 1815 two hostile and conquering armies to occupy Paris, and in 1871 the immense vault of the Arc de Triomphe, an arch of greater magnitude than any raised to Roman Cæsars, echoed to the shouts of another exultant foreign host, mocking as they strode beneath it at the names of German defeats inscribed on its stones. And on the very Place de la Concorde, German hussars waltzed in pairs to the brazen music of a Uhlan band, while a line of French sentries across the entrance to the Tuileries gardens gazed sullenly on.