cis 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. R. and L. of
the central avenue we find the two marble exhedrae, erected in 1793 for
the elders who presided over the floral celebrations of the month of
Germinal by the children of the Republic.

Of the gorgeous palace of the Tuileries at the E. end of the gardens,
with its inharmonious but picturesque facade stretching across the
western limit of the Louvre from the Pavilion de Flore to the Pavilion
de Marsan, not one stone is left on another. We remember it after its
fiery purgation by the Commune in 1871, a gaunt shell blackened and
ruined, fitting emblem of the wreck which the enthroned wantonness and
corruption of the Second Empire had made of France.

We fare again westward along the gardens and emerge into the Place de
la Concorde by the gate adorned with Coysevox' statues, Fame and
Mercury on Winged Horses, facing, on the opposite side of the vast
area, Guillaume Coustou's Horse Tamers from Marly.

The Place, formerly of Louis XV., 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. It was adorned in 1763 with
an equestrian statue of Louis XV., by Pigalle, 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:--

"_Grotesque monument! Infame piedestal!
Les vertus sont a pied, le vice est a cheval._"

"_Il est ici comme a Versailles,
Toujours sans coeur et sans entrailles._"

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
Franc