Ville de Paris

“ The Hôtel de Ville in Paris built in the 16th century was burnt by the Commune in 1871 and has since been rebuilt on an extended site, the central portion of the main front being a reproduction of the old design. There is only one town hall in a French town, those erected for the mayors of the different arrondissements in Paris being called mairies. ”

“ In February, 1906, we had a visit from the London County Council, most of whom attended the ordinary service in the Embassy Church on February 4th. On Monday (5th) , there was a grand reception at the Hotel de Ville. This magnificent structure, erected on the site of the old historic building, is well worth a visit. The decorations and pictures are among the most beautiful in Paris, and when it is lit up and specially decorated with flags, etc., as it was on this occasion, presents a striking scene. ”

“ The Paris of the north bank has its slope, that looks across the Seine to this southern slope, and that has come to be its Scholarly Quarter. The high land away behind the lowlands stretching along the northern bank was taken early by the Romans for their villas, and then by nobles for their châteaux, and then by the bourgeoisie for their cottages. As la Ville grew, its citizens gave all their thought to honest industry and to the honest struggle for personal and municipal rights, so that none was left for literature. ”

“ Yes, the great window of Paris as it's called. They're clearing away the buildings that hide the Louvre and the Hôtel de Ville. But that's mere child's play! It's only good to rouse the public's appetite. When the first improvements are completed the grand work will begin. The city will be pierced in every direction to unite the suburbs to the main artery. The houses will fall amidst clouds of plaster. Look, follow the direction of my hand a minute. From the Boulevard du Temple to the Barrière du Trône will be one gap ”

“ BIRD'S-EYE VIEW OF PARIS, France.—Paris, the largest city in the French Republic, and its capital, covers an area of thirty square miles, with a population of about 2,000,000. The river Seine, which flows through the centre of the city, is spanned by twenty-eight bridges, of which the seven principal are shown on this photograph. The city is noted for its fine parks, magnificent churches, colossal buildings, and wide boulevards, of which the Champs Elysees is the most famous. Paris is the centre of the political, artistic, scientific, commercial and industrial life of the nation. ”

“ If you wish to see every type of Parisian go by in an endless stream of swarming humanity, seat yourself upon any of the terrasses of the grand cafés that line the sides of the grand Boulevards stretching from the Madeleine to the Théâtre du Gymnase. It is of all Paris the most frequented—the broad highway of this vast city into which pour the inhabitants of thousands of connecting byways. ”

“ The American soldier who told me, "Since I been in France I ain't seen nothing but kilometres and rain," was not looking for anything else.
Strolling after dark helps to bring into the foreground the human element in the picture of Paris streets. Your field of vision is limited. You do not see too many things at once. And you have to keep your eyes open. Many a quaint corner, many a building, is less often missed at nightfall than during the day.
Paris is divided into arrondissements, each one with its local administration, its maire, its mairie, its postal service, and its police. ”

“ On the highest point of the hills, a man is standing. His long shadow is cast upon the stony, moon-lit ground. He gazes on the immense city, which lies outspread beneath his feet. PARIS—with the dark outline of its towers, cupolas, domes, and steeples, standing out from the limpid blue of the horizon, while from the midst of the ocean of masonry, rises a luminous vapor, that reddens the starry azure of the sky. ”

“ Had Paris been governed by a Congress, the honorable gentlemen from Normandy, and Savoy, and other out-lying districts, would never have paid for the wonderfully beautiful boulevards that make Paris the most beautiful city in the world. ”

“ Look along the Rue de la Paix; at the end you will see La Place Vendôme, with its column in memory of the Grand Army standing out in its dark bronze against the fresh green of the Tuileries Gardens. Here all that is most Parisian in Paris may be seen: the finest shops, the most brilliant equipages, with all the glitter of fashionable life. The expensive jeweller and the exorbitant milliner here have their establishments side by side with hotels, restaurants, cafés, and clubs. ”

“ A man might live in the Champs Élysées for a week or a month, seeing no more of Paris than he finds under its beautiful trees or on its broad thoroughfare, and be so well content with that much of the city as to prefer it to all other cities. ”

“ Between the Barriere d'Italie and the Barriere de la Sante, along the boulevard which leads to the Jardin des Plantes, you have a view of Paris fit to send an artist or the tourist, the most blase in matters of landscape, into ecstasies. Reach the slightly higher ground where the line of boulevard, shaded by tall, thick-spreading trees, curves with the grace of some green and silent forest avenue, and you see spread out at your feet a deep valley populous with factories looking almost countrified among green trees and the brown streams of the Bievre or the Gobelins. ”

“ Until we do learn the big American city will be intolerable in the summer months. Paris, built on ancient foundations, has increased to a city of millions, and one still feels that an outing does not mean going to the country. Boulevards and quais are lined with trees. Every open spot has grass and flowers. Best of all, when you want to sit down to read your paper or look at the crowd, there is always a bench. You do not have to go home or indoors to rest, and wherever you live, a park or boulevard is near at hand. Parisians are as closely huddled together as New Yorkers. ”

“ Where is lime-white Paris, with its green and disciplined foliage, its hard unflinching tastefulness, its smartly organized viciousness, and the myriads of workers, noisily shod, streaming over the bridges in the gray cold light of dawn. Where is New York, the high city of clangor and infuriated energy, wind swept and competition swept, its huge buildings jostling one another and straining ever upward for a place in the sky, the fallen pitilessly overshadowed. ”

“ It is a boulevard of the people, a rendezvous for the thrifty and the hard-working, the thoroughfare of the outcast and the unfortunate. It is sordid, but it is intensely human. It is this distinct character of Parisian thoroughfares, each one differing from its neighbor, which makes the highways and byways of the city so interesting to those who delight in walking abroad with their eyes open.
There is not a street one turns down but which is unique in itself. ”

“ Paris
that river to the north, as far as the heights of Montmatre and La Villette,—he can scarcely believe that so lovely a picture is not the vision of a dream, that a view so noble and so perfect can be a busy crowded city, the centre of busy traffic, and swarming with two millions of busy, hard-working men and women!
But the distinguishing and unique beauty of Paris consists not so much in her numerous palaces and noble churches and fine public buildings and streets, as in the harmony and proportion in architecture which strikes the observer in every street that he turns into. ”

“ In nearly every quarter of Paris, on either side of the river, we shall find shops, shops, shops; people, people, people; life, activity, and bustle of every sort. Splendid buildings meet our eyes at every turn,—churches, private residences, places of business, and public edifices. In the western portion of the city, near the Arc de Triomphe, there are fewer shops, these streets being generally occupied by fine private residences. But there is very little monotony in Paris; no quarter is entirely given up to any one thing. ”

“ The Paris we have rapidly surveyed is, mainly, enclosed by the inner boulevards, which correspond to the ramparts of Louis XIII. on the north demolished by his successor between 1676 and 1707, and the line of the Philip Augustus wall and the Boulevard St. ”

“ If you pass along the middle of the street, you are hurried out of breath; if on one side, you must pick your way no less cautiously. Paris is a vast pile of tall and dirty alleys, of slaughter-houses and barbers’ shops—an immense suburb huddled together within the walls so close, that you cannot see the loftiness of the buildings for the narrowness of the streets, and where all that is fit to live in, and best worth looking at, is turned out upon the quays, the boulevards, and their immediate vicinity. ”

“ To have gained even a superficial view of modern Paris, to have caught some of her accents and contrasts—the radiance of the Bois de Boulogne, the vivacity of the boulevards, the cafés overflowing on to the pavements, the view from her bridges, the differences between the two banks, the mean alleys lurking mischievously at the back of splendid thoroughfares, the broadest omnibuses comically invading the narrowest streets—is to have formed some general notion with which an earlier Paris can be compared. ”

“ What a multitude of associations flitted across the memory, by a single glance at PARIS—the capital of that gay, light-hearted, and mercurial people—the French nation—the focus of European luxury, and the grand political arena of modern history, the very calendar of whose events, within the last half century, will form one of the most interesting episodes that ever glowed among the records of human character. ”

“ Really to take Paris unawares, one must get up in the morning before she does, and slip out into the street when the white-bloused baker’s boy and a sleepy cocher or two, with their drowsy, dawdling horses, are all the life to be seen. One walks along the empty boulevards, down the quiet Rue de la Paix, into the stately serenity of the Place Vendôme and on across the shining Seine into the grey, ancient stillness of the crooked Rue du Bac. ”

“ The entire population{113} of the city seems to be poured into the streets. Bands of music playing in the squares; the sidewalk cafés have their tables surrounded with ‘evening dressed’ ladies and gentlemen. There are illuminated swings, merry-go-rounds, inclined planes, roller skating platforms, for the children, and all seeming to be respectably conducted. Paris is a clean city; the streets are like a well-swept floor all the time, no dirt to be seen. Two-thirds of the families live in apartment houses. These are better arranged than our Boston flats. ”

“ Paris is the ceiling of the human race. The whole of this prodigious city is a foreshortening of dead manners and living manners. He who sees Paris thinks he sees the bottom of all history with heaven and constellations in the intervals. Paris has a capital, the Town-Hall, a Parthenon, Notre-Dame, a Mount Aventine, the Faubourg Saint-Antoine, an Asinarium, the Sorbonne, a Pantheon, the Pantheon, a Via Sacra, the Boulevard des Italiens, a temple of the winds, opinion ”

“ Par'is, the capital of France and the second city in Europe, is situated on the Seine, about no miles from its ntouth. It is the seat of the French senate and chamber of deputies, the executive of the president of the republic and the ministry and the legations of the foreign nations. The local or civic administration is the municipal council of Paris, a body of 80 members. It is the center of a network of rivers, canals and railroads. ”

“ There is but one Paris in the world,—and that is Paris! It would be difficult in any other part of the world to find such a crowd of public monuments and magnificent public buildings and fine specimens of architecture. It would be difficult to match her splendid Boulevards with spacious footpaths and fine rows of trees, and brilliantly lighted cafés on either side, thronged with people until midnight! The Bois de Boulogne is a perfect forest turned into a Park! The limpid Seine with her numerous bridges is a perfect picture, seen from any eminence. ”

“ Let the lover of the bright, the gay, the jovial, visit the broad boulevards of Paris by night, especially 84 the Avenue des Champs Élysées, which seems to be the favorite promenade of the populace. Upon both sides are groves of trees, brilliantly illuminated by myriads of colored lights, and here amid these bowers is to be found every variety of entertainment for the people. ”

“ It is enough to remember where your friends live without having to keep in mind twenty different arrondissements! Before the war your arrondissement meant little to you, and you often did not know its number if you wanted to be married, to register the birth of a new baby, or got into difficulties with the police. Since the war, residents in Paris came to know their own arrondissements because of bread tickets, passports, income-tax declarations and other annoyances. ”

“ Paris itself at that time was not the Paris of our day, glittering at night with thousands of reflected lights,—the Paris of busy promenades, of lively chat, with its riotous suburbs, the scene of audacious quarrels, and daring crime,— but a fearful, timid, busy city, whose few and scattered inhabitants, even in crossing from one street to another, ran concealing themselves in the darkness of the alleys, and ensconcing themselves behind their portes-cochères, like wild beasts tracked by the hunters to their lair. ”

“ We are to see a Paris unknown to the every-day dweller there, who is content to tread, in wearied idleness, his swarming yet empty boulevards; a Paris unseen by the hurried visitor, anxious to go his round of dutiful sight-seeing. This Paris is far away from the crowd, bustling in pursuit of pleasure, and hustling in pursuit of leisure ”