s, still keeps
alive the bitter memory of her loss.

To the south of the Champs Elysees is the Cours de la Reine, planted
by Catherine de' Medici, for two years the most fashionable carriage
drive in Paris. This we follow and at No. 16 find the charming Maison
Francois I. brought from Moret, stone by stone, in 1826. To the north,
in the Cours de Gabriel, a fine gilded grille, surmounted with the
arms of the Republic, gives access to the Elysee, the official
residence of the President. It was once Madame Pompadour's favourite
house in Paris, and the piece of land she appropriated from the public
to round off her gardens is still retained in its grounds. In the
Avenue Montaigne, leading S.W. from the Rond Point (once the Allee des
Veuves, a retired walk used by widows during their term of seclusion)
Nos. 51 and 53 stand on the site of the notorious Bal Mabille,[236]
the temple of the bacchanalia of the gay world of the Second Empire.
In 1764 the Champs Elysees ended at Chaillot, a little to the W. of
the Rond Point, an old feudal property which Louis XI. gave to
Philippe de Comines in 1450, and which in 1651 sheltered the unhappy
widow of Charles I. Here Catherine de' Medici built a chateau, but
chateau and nunnery of the Filles de Sainte Marie, founded by the
English queen, disappeared in 1790. S. of the Champs Elysees on the
opposite bank of the Seine rises the gilded dome of the Invalides, and
to the S.W. stretches the vast field of Mars, the scene of the Feast
of Pikes, and now encumbered with the relics of four World-Fairs.

[Footnote 236: A description of this and of other public balls of the
Second Empire will be found in Taine's _Notes sur Paris_, which has
been translated into English.]

The Paris we have rapidly surveyed is, mainly, enclosed by the inner
boulevards, which correspond to the ramparts of Louis XIII. on the
north, demolished by his successor between 1676 and 1707, and the line
of the Philip Augustus wall and the Boulevard St. Germain on the
south. Beyond this historic area are the outer boulevards which mark
the octroi wall of Louis XVI.; further yet are the Thiers wall and
fortifications of 1841. Within these wider boundaries is the greater
Paris of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, of profound concern
to the economical and social student, but of minor interest to the
ordinary traveller. The vogue of the brilliant and gay inner
boulevards of the north bank so familiar to the foreigner in P