ncle Jerome, who left it to Prince
Napoleon, by whom it was fitted up in sumptuous style. The great
staircase and its balustrades and the Galerie des Fetes were fine in art
and in general effect, but nothing that may have been destroyed can be
half so great a loss as the Library which went in 1848, or as the Hotel
de Ville, a magnificent structure, dating in part from 1628. The
additions of 1842 to this municipal palace cost 640,000_l_., and some of
the saloons were the most gorgeous in Paris, perhaps in the world. Here
in the days gone by, the Prefect of the Seine was wont to entertain his
7,000 guests in the great gallery, with its gilt Corinthian columns and
3,000 wax lights, the whole suite of rooms measuring more than 1,000
yards in length. In and about the building were some 500 statues of
French celebrities, from Charlemagne to Louis XIV, in a full-bottomed
wig. Painting, gilding, carving, glass, and velvet here had done their
utmost, and as a specimen of magnificence in the modern French taste
the furniture and decorations of the Hotel de Ville were unrivalled. The
building, however, was far from depending altogether on its sumptuous
upholstery. Not only was the architecture worthy of all praise and the
art of much of the decoration as intrinsic as its gold, but here had
been enacted many famous and infamous scenes in the history of Paris.
Here the first Commune held its bloody sittings; here Robespierre took
refuge with his partisans, and was found by the soldiers with his broken
jaw; the "Citizen King" was presented here to the people by Lafayette
from a central window; here the soldiers were quartered in 1848; and
here in 1871 was the stronghold of the last Commune, less bloody in its
life but more desperate in its death than the first.

The Palais de Justice is a vast pile, which includes the Sainte
Chapelle, numerous courts of law, and the Prison of the Conciergerie.
Anciently the site of palaces inhabited by the Kings down to Francis I.,
afterwards the meeting place of the Parliaments of Paris, it has been
repaired and rebuilt since 1831 at a cost of nearly 1,000,000_l_. The
courts of law open from the vast but inelegant Salle des Pas Perdus,
which answers to our Westminster-hall. One of these courts was the
Chamber of the Tribunal Revolutionnaire, and communicated by a small
door with the Conciergerie Prison. In the precincts of the Palais
stands, or stood, the Sainte Chapelle, an exquisite specimen on a s