influence of the Greek. The best remaining example is the Odéon theater. This building has a dignified façade, but around the remaining three sides runs an arcade filled with open-air book shops whose widely varied stock is more picturesque than appropriately placed. Its actors are the students graduated in the second rank from the government school of acting. Those of the first grade make up the company of the Théâtre Française whose playhouse stands in columned ugliness today attached to the corner of the Palais Royal.

Of the causes of the Revolution which was soon to let loose the pent-up fury of generations of repression, the most evident are the economic and social. The lower classes were taxed inordinately, even on necessities. The nobility (of whom there were some 200,000 as against England's 500) and the clergy were not taxed at all. Politically, the power of the French monarch was practically absolute. The States General had not been convened for nearly two hundred years. Trial by jury had fallen into complete disuse and no man was sure of his personal liberty or of undisturbed ownership of his property, and, at the same time, he was denied freedom of belief and of speech.

Independence of belief and of speech was fast increasing, nevertheless, and its growth was one of the powerful though less evident causes of the Revolution. Paris was the center of this intellectual activity. In Paris lived or sojourned the men whose advanced thinking was percolating through all classes of society-Voltaire, Montesquieu, Rousseau. In Paris, too, was published the famous Cyclopedia, often interrupted by the prison visits of its contributors, Diderot being sent to the Bastille immediately upon the appearance of the first volume. Skepticism permeated the upper classes, irreligion the lower.

Paris, indeed, was the very crater of the Revolution. In the scholars' attics on the left bank argument was growing loud where only whispers had been heard before; in the

crowded tenements of the eastern quarter around the St. Antoine Gate, and especially amid the fallen grandeurs of the once fashionable Marais people were talking now where once they had hardly dared to think. The mob that was soon to take unspeakable license in the name of Liberty made its first trial of strength in rioting during the election of the States General which Louis was forced to summon when the Notables failed to suggest any solution of the country's problems.

Hardly had the sitting opened at Versailles when trouble with the king began. Louis closed the hall to the members. Then they met in the tennis court and took the famous oath by which they bound themselves not to disband until they had prepared a written constitution. They called themselves the National Constituent Assembly.

Three weeks after the Oath of the Tennis Court Desmoulins, a young journalist, made an inflammatory speech in the garden of the Palais Royal, declaring that the Bastille was a menace to the city, and two days later, on July 14, 1789, the Parisians poured against it a horde of citizens armed with weapons plundered from the Hôtel des Invalides. They forced the first drawbridge, burned the governor's house and easily compelled his surrender, since the garrison of which the people declared themselves in terror consisted only of about eighty men who were but scantily provided with ammunition. The crowd set free the prisoners, who numbered but a half dozen or so, seized the captain and hurried him to the Grève where they struck off his head and carried it about the city on a pike-the first of such hideous sights of which the Revolution was to know an appalling number. The destruction of the huge mass of masonry was begun the next day and lasted through five years. La Fayette sent one of the keys to General Washington.

Upon hearing of the fall of the citadel the king made concessions to the Assembly and then went to Paris accom