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212 of his reign, but he left it for Versaillies afterwards, and the Tuilleries were abandoned for about a century. It was in the year of the French Revolution in 1789 that the populace of Paris went en masse to Versailles,—the market women of the Halles forming a large portion of the crowd,—and brought the unfortunate Louis XVI. back to the Tuilleries. On the 10th August 1792 the populace armed in thousands, attacked the Tuilleries, massacred the faithful Swiss guards, took the palace, wrecked the apartments and destroyed its valuable contents or carried them to the Hotel de Ville. The poor king who had taken refuge in the riding school was after two days carried to the Temple where he remained till his execution.

The Tuilleries were again attacked and taken by the mob in the revolution of 1830 and of 1848. Napoleon III. on his accession restored and adorned the Tuilleries and "many men not beyond middle age have frequently seen him leave the Tuilleries with the Empress and the Prince Imperial, in state, escorted by soldiers and surrounded by thousands of enthusiastic spectators." But the storm of 1870 swept away the imperial dynasty of France, and what the war spared was destroyed by the vandalism of the Communists who rose in Paris after the Germans had left it. The Palace of the Tuilleries which had witnessed successive revolutions was finally destroyed by fire by the Communists of Paris on the 24th May 1871, and for ten years after that date all that remained of this magnificent palace was a pile of blackened and mouldering ruins! In my last visit to Paris in