replaced by
a dedication to God and St. Genevieve; in 1830 Louis Philippe, the
citizen king, transferred it to secular and monumental uses, and
restored the former inscription; in 1851 the perjured Prince-President
Napoleon, while the streets of Paris were yet red with the blood of
his victims, again surrendered it to the Catholic Church; in 1885 it
was reconverted to a national Walhalla for the reception of Victor
Hugo's remains.

The pseudo-classic church of St. Sulpice, begun in 1665 and not
completed until 1777, is a monument of the degraded taste of this
unhappy time. At least three architects, Gamart, Levau and the Italian
Servandoni, are responsible for this monstrous pile, whose towers have
been aptly compared by Victor Hugo to two huge clarionets. The
building has, however, a certain _puissante laideur_, as Michelet said
of Danton, and is imposing from its very mass, but it is dull and
heavy and devoid of all charm and imagination. Nothing exemplifies
more strikingly the mutation of taste that has taken place since the
eighteenth century than the fact that this church is the only one
mentioned by Gibbon in the portion of his autobiography which refers
to his first visit to Paris, where it is distinguished as "one of the
noblest structures in Paris."

CHAPTER XVII

_Louis XVI.--The Great Revolution--Fall of the Monarchy_

Crowned vice was now succeeded by crowned folly. The grandson of Louis
XV., a well-meaning but weak and foolish youth, and his thoughtless,
pleasure-loving queen, were confronted by state problems that would
have taxed the genius of a Richelieu in the maturity of his powers.
Injustice, misery, oppression, discontent, were clamant and almost
universal; taxes had doubled since the death of Louis XIV.; there were
30,000 beggars in Paris alone, and from 720,000 in 1700 the population
had in 1784 decreased to 620,000. The penal code was of inhuman
ferocity; law was complicated, ruinous and partial, and national
credit so low that loans could be obtained only against material
pledges and at interest five times as great as that paid by England.
Wealthy bishops and abbots[157] and clergy, noblesse and royal
officials, were wholly exempt from the main incidents of taxation; for
personal and land taxes, tithes and forced labour, were exacted from
the common people alone. No liberty of worship, nor of thought:
Protestants were condemned to the galleys by hundreds; booksellers met
the same f