to-day
to realise the magnitude of the disaster which laid low the beautiful
capital of France. When I arrived within its shattered walls, the
monster conflagration that would have destroyed the whole city, had it
not been for the timely arrival of the Versailles troops, was all but
subdued. The firemen, however, were still kept busily engaged, for
clouds of smoke and tongues of fire would at intervals burst forth from
the smouldering ruins. Tottering walls on the one hand, huge _facades_
of masonry on the other, marked the places where but yesterday glorious
specimens of architecture, ancient and modern, had stood. There was the
shell of what had been the Tuileries, that palace built in the 16th
century, which had seen so much of the history of France. Mobs had
pillaged and sacked it; within its state-rooms one crowned head had been
forced to wear the cap of liberty, a humiliation which did not save it
from the knife of the guillotine. Some fifty years later a bourgeois
king had to fly for his life from the palace; and last, it was an
unfortunate Empress who had to make good her escape, and seek refuge on
the shores of England.

There would be no more pillaging and sacking now; the venerable specimen
of the Renaissance style was destroyed. To-day the stranger is just
shown the place where the Tuileries stood; then, as the walls crashed
down, burying treasures and relics of bygone days in their fall, one was
appalled by the tragedy enacted before one's eyes. I had my little
personal recollections too. I had danced there more than once with some
of the fairest Parisians; I had drunk the future Emperor's champagne
with a conviction that it was quite the best of its kind, and was
evidently intended to make us understand that our host meant business,
imperial business, pretty sure to be settled ere long, whether we liked
it or not.

Well, one fine old building is gone, I thought, as I turned away from
the ruins, but at least the Louvre is saved. That marvel of architecture
was intact. The principal works of art it contained had been taken to
places of supposed safety, and the whereabouts of the Venus of Milo were
said to be known only to some few persons, who had dug a hole and
therein buried her. Much else had been providentially saved; there were
large gaps in the Rue de Rivoli, but the unique old Tour St. Jacques had
escaped unscathed. At the Palais de Justice the fire had stopped short
on the threshold of the exquisit