Fast were the devouring elements leaping through the palaces and superb
public buildings of the city; the petroleum flames were ascending from
basement to roof; streets were in sheets of fire; the charred beams
were breaking; the walls fell with thundering crash--the empress city
was indeed on fire. Like the winds unchained by the storm-god, the
passions of men marked their accursed sweep over the fairest city of
Europe in torrents of human blood and the wreck of material grandeur.
Those who have visited the superb queen of cities as she once flourished
in our days could not, even in imagination, grasp the contrast between
Paris of the present and the Paris of two hundred years ago. With a
power more destructive than the petroleum of the Commune, we must, in
though, sweep away the Tuileries, the boulevards, the Opera-House and
superb buildings that surround the Champs Elysees; on their sites we
must build old, tottering, ill-shaped houses, six and seven stories
high, confining narrow and dirty streets that wind in lanes and alleys
into serpentine labyrinths, reeking with filthy odors and noxious
vapors. Fill those narrow streets with a lazy, ill-clad people--men
in short skirts and clogs, squatting on the steps of antiquated cafes,
smoking canes steeped in opium, awaiting the beck of some political
firebrand to tear each other to pieces--and in this description you
place before the mind's eye the city some writers have painted as
the Paris of two hundred years ago.
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