alert gait and expressive gestures; the wonderful skill of the women
in dress. The glittering halls of pleasure that appeal to so many
visitors, the Bohemian cafes of the outer boulevards, the Folies
Bergeres, the Moulins Rouges, the Bals Bulliers, with their
meretricious and vulgar attractions, frequented by the more facile
daughters of Gaul, "whose havoc of virtue is measured by the length of
their laundresses' bills," as a genial satirist of their sex has
phrased it--all these manifestations of _la vie_, so unutterably dull
and sordid, are of small concern to the cultured traveller. The
intimate charm and spirit of Paris will be heard and felt by him not
amid the whirlwind of these saturnalia largely maintained by the
patronage of English-speaking visitors, but rather in the smaller
voices that speak from the inmost Paris which we have essayed to
describe. Nor can we bid more fitting adieu to Lutetia than by
translating Goethe's words to Eckermann: "Think of the city of Paris
where all the best of the realms of nature and art in the whole earth
are open to daily contemplation, a world-city where the crossing of
every bridge or every square recalls a great past, and where at every
street corner a piece of history has been unfolded."

SECTION X

_The Basilica of St. Denis and the Monuments of the Kings, Queens and
Princes of France._

No historical pilgrimage to Paris would be complete without a visit to
the Sanctuary of its protomartyr and the burial-place of its kings.
Taking train from the Gare du Nord, either main line or local
train-tramway and being arrived at the railway station of the grimy
industrial suburb of St. Denis, we cross the canal and continue along
the Rue du Chemin de Fer and the Rue de la Republique, to the
Cathedral, architecturally the most important relic of the great age
of the early ecclesiastical builders. The west facade before us,
completed about 1140 by Abbot Suger, is of profound interest, for here
we may behold the round Romanesque arch side by side with the Pointed,
and the very first grip of the new Gothic on the heavy Norman
architecture it was about to overthrow. The sculptures on the W.
portals, however, almost wholly and clumsily renewed, need not detain
us long. We enter and descend from the sombre vestibule. As we wait
for the verger we revel in the airy and graceful symmetry of the nave
and aisles; the beautiful raised choir and lovely apse with its
chevets and roun