The Story of Paris

If the traveller will place himself on the Pont Royal, or on the Pont du Carrousel, and look towards the Cite when the tall buildings, the spire of the Sainte Chapelle and the m...

An inscription opposite No. 230 Rue de Rivoli indicates the site of the old Salle du Manege, or Riding School,[169] of the Tuileries, where the destinies of modern France were d...

Two epoch-making developments--the creation of Gothic architecture and the rise of the University of Paris--synchronise with the period covered by the reigns of Philip Augustus...

During twenty-eight years of the reign of Louis VII. no heir to the crown was born. At length, on the 22nd of August, 1165, Adelaide of Champagne, his third wife, lay in child-b...

The century of Louis XIV., whose triumphs have been so extravagantly celebrated by Voltaire, saw the culmination and declension of military glory and literary splendour at Paris...

When the third of Catherine's sons, having resigned the sovereignty of Poland, was being consecrated at Rheims, the crown is said to have twice slipped from his head, the insent...

The advent of the printing-press and the opening of a Greek lectureship by Gregory Tyhernas and Hermonymus of Sparta at the Sorbonne warns us that we are at the end of an epoch....

Before Coryat left Paris he rode a sorry jade to Fontainebleau which, "though I did excarnificate his sides," would not stir until a gentleman of the court drew his rapier and r...

With the three sons of Philip who successively became kings of France, the direct line of the Capetian dynasty ends: with the accession of Philip VI. in 1328, the house of Valoi...

Crowned vice was now succeeded by crowned folly. The grandson of Louis XV., a well-meaning but weak and foolish youth, and his thoughtless, pleasure-loving queen, were confronte...

Chaos and misery followed the brilliant reign of Dagobert. In half a century his race had faded into the feeble _rois faineants_, degenerate by precocious debauchery, some of wh...

"Beware of Montmorency and curb the power of the Guises," was the counsel of the dying Francis to his son. Henry II., dull and heavy-witted that he was, neglected the advice, an...

In the Prologue to _Faust_, the Lord of Heaven justifies the existence of the restless, goading spirit of evil by the fact that man's activity is all too prone to flag,--

From 936 to the coronation of Hugh Capet at Noyon in 987, the Carlovingians exercised a slowly decaying power. The real rulers at Paris were Hugh the Tall and Hugh Capet,[39] gr...

Under the regency of the profligate Philip of Orleans, a profounder depth was sounded. The vices of Louis' court were at least veiled by a certain regal dignity, and the Grand M...

In 1302 the eyes of Europe were again drawn to Paris where the Fourth Philip, surnamed the Fair, a prince who, in Dante's grim metaphor, scourged the shameless harlot of Rome fr...

The mediaeval scribe in the fulness of a divinely-revealed cosmogony is wont to begin his story at the creation of the world or at the confusion of tongues, to trace the buildin...

_The Ville (S. of the Rue St. Antoine)--The Hotel de Ville--St. Gervais--Hotel Beauvais--Hotel of the Provost of Paris--SS. Paul and Louis--Hotel de Mayenne--Site of the Bastill...

Paris saw little of Charles VII. who, after the temporary activity excited by the expulsion of the English, had sunk into his habitual torpor and bondage to women. In 1461 the w...

The occupation of Paris by the English was the darkest hour in her story, yet amid the universal misery and dejection the treaty of Troyes was hailed with joy. When the two king...