been married for several years. His wife, Marie Antoinette, was but fourteen when she came to Paris as a bride, and an accident which occurred during the wedding festivities seems a mournful prophecy of the troubled days to come. During a fête in the Place Louis XV the fireworks set ablaze some scaffoldings around an unfinished building. A panic seized the crowd. It rushed headlong into the rue Royale in such a passion of terror that the narrow street was swiftly filled with a mass of people fighting their way over the bleeding, dying bodies of those who had reached the exit first, and, by chance, had fallen. Again the royal family preferred Versailles to Paris, but the court often came to town both to give and receive entertainment, and public festivities were not infrequent. When their second son was born, the City of Paris gave a dinner at the Hôtel de Ville in honor of the event. As seems frequently to have happened at these large dinners at the City Hall not everything went smoothly. The hosts bent their whole energies upon serving the king promptly, so that when he had finished his dinner the guests at the other tables had had nothing but butter and radishes. In spite of their hunger, however, they were forced to rise and leave when the king rose. The public works of Louis' reign were not many. The chief was the building of a new wall, not demolished until 1860, which protected several of the outlying suburbs. At each of its gates was a pavilion, several of which are still standing, which served as an office for the collectors of the octroi, a tax levied even now upon all food brought into the city. As anything to do with taxes was obnoxious to the people this construction has been thus described: "Le mur murant Paris rend Paris murmurant," which may be inadequately translated, "The wall walling Paris makes Paris wail." The over-florid architecture of Louis XV's reign showed signs of betterment under the younger Louis through the |