Page:The Rise and Fall on the Paris Commune in 1871.djvu/508

 the Hotel de Ville were unrivaled. Here, during the late Empire, the Prefect of the Seine entertained 7,000 guests in the great gallery, ornamented with gilt Corinthian columns, and illuminated by three thousand wax-*lights.

The architecture of the building equalled, and, if possible, excelled in worth its interior decorations.

The Hotel de Ville was associated with many of the most famous and infamous scenes of the history of Paris. The first Commune held here its sittings, and here Robespierre was taken prisoner by the soldiers, having sought, with his partisans, a refuge in the building.

From one of the windows Louis Philippe, the "Citizen King," was presented to the people by Lafayette. In 1848 the soldiers were quartered here, and in 1871 the building became the stronghold of the Central Committee, and afterwards of the Commune, who, determined that no other power should possess what they had lost, set fire to the magnificent pile and reduced it to ashes.

The Hotel de Ville was the one, of all the monuments of Paris, which the Commune had the least right and the least pretext to destroy, and it is precisely the Hotel de Ville whose ruin is most complete, most irreparable. Everywhere else, even where the fire has been most violent, something remains which, if required, renders reparation not impossible.

Here, however, the destruction was implacable; it seems as though a breath would overthrow what still remains standing; and yet, while this ruin is the most complete, it is also the most beautiful which has been left by the vandals of 1871.

Recent as the ruins are, they have already the majesty which is ordinarily given by time alone to the cruel work of the hand of man. Here a few hours have produced the slow effect of centuries.