who might from time to time serve the royal
household, paying the highest fees.

It was during the period of Richelieu's ministry that Paris flowered the
most profusely. The constructions of this epoch were so numerous and
imposing that Corneille in his comedy "Le Menteur," first produced in
1642, made his characters speak thus:

Dorante: Paris semble a mes yeux un pays de roman
* * *
En superbes palais a change ses buissons
* * *
Aux superbes dehors du palais Cardinal
Tout la ville entiere, avec pomp batie
* * *

In 1701, Louis XIV divided the capital into twenty _quartiers_, or
wards, and in 1726-1728 Louis XV built a new city wall; but it was only
with Louis XVI that the faubourgs were at last brought within the city
limits. Under the Empire and the Restoration but few changes were made,
and with the piercing of the new boulevards under Napoleon III and Baron
Haussmann the city came to be of much the same general plan that it is
to-day.

In the olden time, between the Palais de la Cite and the Louvre and the
Palais des Tournelles, extending even to the walls of Charenton, was a
gigantic garden, a carpet embroidered with as varied a colouring as the
_tapis d'orient_ of the poets, and cut here and there by alleys which
separated it into little checker-board squares.

Within this maze was the celebrated Jardin Dedalus that Louis XI gave to
Coictier, and above it rose the observatory of the savant like a signal
tower of the Romans. This centered upon what is now the Place des
Vosges, formerly the Place Royale.

To-day, how changed is all this "intermediate, indeterminate" region!
How changed, indeed! There is nothing vague and indeterminate about it
to-day.

The earliest of the little known Paris palaces was the Palais des
Thermes. It may be dismissed almost in a word from any consideration of
the royal dwellings of Paris, though it was the residence of several
Roman emperors and two queens of France. A single apartment of the old
palace of the Romans exists to-day--the old Roman Baths--but nothing of
the days of the Emperor Constantius Chlorus, who founded the palace in
honour of Julian who was proclaimed Emperor by his soldiers in 360 A.D.
The Frankish monarchs, if they ever resided here at all, soon
transferred their headquarters to the Palais de la Cite, the ruins
falling into the possession of the monks of Cluny, who built the p