Place
Louis le Grand (now Vendome), and the Place des Victoires were
created; the river embankments were renewed and extended, and a fine
stone Pont Royal by J.H. Mansard, the most beautiful of the existing
bridges of Paris, was built to replace the old wooden structure that
led from the St. Germain quarter to the Tuileries. This in its turn
had replaced a ferry (_bac_) established by the Guild of Ferrymen, to
transport the stone needed for the construction of the Tuileries, and
the street which leads to the bridge still bears the name of the Rue
du Bac. The Isle Louviers was acquired by the Ville, and the
evil-smelling tanneries and dye-houses that disfigured the banks of
the Seine between the Greve and the Chatelet were cleared away; many
new fountains embellished the city, and ten new pumps increased the
supply of water. The poorer quarters were, however, little changed
from their old insanitary condition. A few years later Rousseau, fresh
from Turin, was profoundly disappointed by the streets of Paris as he
entered the city by the Faubourg St. Marceau. "I had imagined," he
writes, "a city as fair as it was great, and of a most imposing
aspect, whose superb streets were lined with palaces of marble and of
gold. I beheld filthy, evil-smelling, mean streets, ugly houses black
with dirt, a general air of uncleanness and of poverty, beggars and
carters, old clothes shop and tisane sellers."

[Footnote 150: Twelve alone were added to the St. Honore quarter by
levelling the Hill of St. Roch and clearing away accumulated rubbish.]

[Illustration: RIVER AND PONT ROYAL.]

It is now time to ask what had been done with the magnificent
inheritance which the fourteenth Louis had entered upon at the opening
of his reign: he left to his successor, a France crushed by an
appalling debt of 2,400,000,000 livres; a noblesse and an army in
bondage to money-lenders; public officials and fund-holders unpaid,
trade paralysed, and the peasants in some provinces so poor that even
straw was lacking for them to lie upon, many crossing the frontiers
in search of a less miserable lot. Scarcity of bread made disease
rampant at Paris, and as many as 4,500 sick poor were counted at one
time in the Hotel Dieu alone. Louis left a court that "sweated
hypocrisy through every pore," and an example of licentious and
unclean living and cynical disregard of every moral obligation, which
ate like a cancer into the vitals of the aristocracy.

CHA