"But address yourself to the keeper of the seals; he has the right of entry at the
Tuileries, and can procure you audience at any hour of the day or night."
When I went to see him, he was still living in his little flat in the Rue de Rivoli, opposite the
Tuileries. He was very ill, and it required all my ardor as an historian pledged to the truth to persuade him to live the incredible tragedy over again for my benefit.
In the year 1800, toward the close of October, a foreigner, accompanied by a woman and a little girl, was standing for a long time in front of the palace of the
Tuileries, near the ruins of a house recently pulled down, at the point where in our day the wing begins which was intended to unite the chateau of Catherine de Medici with the Louvre of the Valois.
Among the more curious of such remains is part of a skull, which in the year was disinterred in the Rue Dauphine in Paris, a short street opening almost directly upon the palace of the
Tuileries; and bones disinterred in excavating the great docks of Antwerp, in Napoleon's time.
But the cream- coloured house (supposed to be modelled on the private hotels of the Parisian aristocracy) was there as a visible proof of her moral courage; and she throned in it, among pre-Revolutionary furniture and souvenirs of the
Tuileries of Louis Napoleon (where she had shone in her middle age), as placidly as if there were nothing peculiar in living above Thirty-fourth Street, or in having French windows that opened like doors instead of sashes that pushed up.
My husband, you know, has principles, and the first on the list is that the
Tuileries are dreadfully vulgar.
Its quay, broken or interrupted in many places, ran along the Seine, from the Tour de Billy to the Tour du Bois; that is to say, from the place where the granary stands to-day, to the present site of the
Tuileries. These four points, where the Seine intersected the wall of the capital, the Tournelle and the Tour de Nesle on the right, the Tour de Billy and the Tour du Bois on the left, were called pre-eminently, "the four towers of Paris." The Town encroached still more extensively upon the fields than the University.
From time to time he went to the
Tuileries to get his cue.
"Then is it not," resumed the duke, "the Superintendent Emery, who gave his son, when he was married, three hundred thousand francs and a house, compared to which the
Tuileries are a heap of ruins and the Louvre a paltry building?"
Bartholomew's Massacre, and they saw the slaughter that followed; later they saw the Reign of Terror, the carnage of the Revolution, the overthrow of a king, the coronation of two Napoleons, the christening of the young prince that lords it over a regiment of servants in the
Tuileries to-day--and they may possibly continue to stand there until they see the Napoleon dynasty swept away and the banners of a great republic floating above its ruins.
She was desperately in earnest with her study of art, and when Philip, passing in the Long Gallery a window that looked out on the
Tuileries, gay, sunny, and urbane, like a picture by Raffaelli, exclaimed:
No house, though it were the
Tuileries or the Escurial, is good for anything without a master.