Page:Victor Hugo - Notre-Dame de Paris (tr. Hapgood, 1888).djvu/159

Rh still in fine taste; the Paris of Henri IV., at the Place Royale: façades of brick with stone corners, and slated roofs, tri-colored houses;—the Paris of Louis XIII., at the Val-deGrâce: a crushed and squat architecture, with vaults like basket-handles, and something indescribably pot-bellied in the column, and thickset in the dome;—the Paris of Louis XIV., in the Invalides: grand, rich, gilded, cold;—the Paris of Louis XV., in Saint-Sulpice: volutes, knots of ribbon, clouds, vermicelli and chiccory leaves, all in stone;—the Paris of Louis XVI., in the Pantheon: Saint Peter of Rome, badly copied (the edifice is awkwardly heaped together, which has not amended its lines);—the Paris of the Republic, in the School of Medicine: a poor Greek and Roman taste, which resembles the Coliseum or the Parthenon as the constitution of the year III., resembles the laws of Minos,—it is called in architecture, "the Messidor ; taste;—the Paris of Napoleon in the Place Vendôme: this one is sublime, a column of bronze made of cannons;—the Paris of the Restoration, at the Bourse: a very white colonnade supporting a very smooth frieze; the whole is square and cost twenty millions.

To each of these characteristic monuments there is attached by a similarity of taste, fashion, and attitude, a certain number of houses scattered about in different quarters and which the eyes of the connoisseur easily distinguishes and furnishes with a date. When one knows how to look, one finds the spirit of a century, and the physiognomy of a king, even in the knocker on a door.

The Paris of the present day has then, no general