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Rh the Hotel de Ville was a blackened and mouldering pile!

Leaving this fine building behind we travel a little further eastward and northward and arrive at the celebrated Place de la Bastille,—replete with the most thrilling associations. It was at this spot that in the middle of the fourteenth century was erected the fort of Bastille,—one of the strongest points in the fortifications of the city. But like the Tower of London it soon ceased to be used as a fort, and was long used as a prison and a political dungeon, closing its awful gates on all who incurred the displeasure or suspicion of a despotic monarch! For more than a century it remained an awful monument of Royal despotism, until the people rose against it like the waves of an angry sea, and surged in thousands against its solid walls. They rose and besieged and captured this fearful dungeon and razed it to the ground in 1789, and despotism in France was crushed and buried,—never to rise again. There is a panorama, not far from this place, which paints this scene of the taking of the Bastille. It shews at a glance the whole of Paris as it was in 1789, with its churches and towers and sea of houses on all sides and with its thousands of angry people pouring in torrents against the solid walls of the Bastille,—the hated monument of royal despotism.

The Bastille is no more, and in its place now stands a column raised to commemorate those who fell in the Revolution of July 1830. It is a column of bronze and bears the names of 645 persons who fell in the