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cism is not very severe, and if it | cended strange odors of suspicious stopped there the Paris house would, at cookery. He did not annoy the tenall events, be a commodious piece of ants, and his good-will could be bought furniture. It possesses, in our opinion, | for a few half-crowns. The species is one serious defect, namely, that its not quite extinct, but is now only occupants are not at home; one has found in the old parts of the city, in the impression of being merely camped those houses of plaster and rubble there — that one is living in the street. whose dilapidated fronts, sloping inThe principal entrance is used by ward and resting on antiquated bases, people of all sorts and conditions. If hide the secrets of five or six generaone of your fellow-tenants happens to tions. The modern concierge is a be standing there, you cannot pass in totally different person. He is proor out. The staircase also is a public vided with a lodge furnished, if not thoroughfare; you risk meeting dis- luxuriously, at least in excellent taste, agreeable faces, people with whom you with stuff curtains to the windows, a do not care to come in contact. Even carpet on the floor, carved table and the door of your apartment is public, as sideboard, and large, comfortable armanybody can ring and cause it to be chairs. When you address him, he opened, with the excuse of having mis- replies, if at all, from the depths of taken the floor, or even without any one of these easy-chairs. He will not excuse at all. The tenant above you deign to answer unless your appearance may have dancing going on all night pleases him, or it is to his interest to over your head, and the little daughter do so. Should it be your intention to of the one beneath may awaken you at become a tenant of a flat in the house dawn by her piano practice. The over which he rules, it is well to exFrench horn is about the only thing amine him closely, as he will be your forbidden. The violoncello is not pro- master. He will see your visitors behibited, and a most perfidious instru- fore you do so, and if he disapproves of ment it is; when it begins to groan it them he will declare that you are not can be heard from the first floor to the at home. It is to him that the postsixth. Paris houses of recent construc- man will hand your letters and newstion are more sonorous than the older papers. He will read both, in order to ones, on account of the extensive use know your political views and your of iron and hollow pottery. The sound family affairs. The law does not forof the voice can often be heard from one bid him to do this, if he is so inclined. flat to another. Still, there are compen- Quite recently a discontented tenant sations for these annoyances. The man carried the question before the court, who tortures his violoncello, may have when the judge non-suited him, detalent, or the neighbor's young daugh- ciding that every concierge has the right ter may be a virtuoso in the bud. to read his tenants' letters, provided he Even the people who elbow you on the delivers them afterwards. stairs may please you, and you may perchance attend the ball on the floor above or the musical evening given below. After all, these are only minor miseries, and could easily be borne if it were not for the concierge.

The concierge is just as much a part of the Paris house as is the cornerstone thereof. Whoever may be the landlord, the concierge is the master of it. In former times he was called the porter, and followed some lowly trade, such as tailor, cobbler, or mender of broken china. From his lodge as

This is the great drawback of Paris houses. Certain persons regarded it so seriously that they concluded it would be preferable to live in houses built after the London style. Contractors came forward, ground was purchased in the outer parts of the city, and some very handsome "birdcage dwellings were erected. Some of the features of English architecture were slightly modified, and, on the whole, these houses did not present an unpicturesque aspect. In order to give them a more English air, each house

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had a small garden in front, in which | portious, a revenue of three per cent. two or three shrubs were planted. can be counted upon from the second These abodes, pompously called hôtels, year after completion, and at the end were promptly let, and the success of of three years it ought to reach four this new departure enticed other build- or five per cent., if the house is well ers, so that at a certain moment it was placed, solidly constructed, intelligently believed that the English style would planned, richly decorated-if, in short, put the "chest of drawers" into the it has a fine appearance and sheds shade. But the burglars caused this lustre on those who live therein. The tendency to ceasc. Abandoning their insurance companies are alive to the favorite pursuit of pluudering servants' importance of these conditions, and bedrooms, which in houses built in spare no effort to meet them. They flats are in the attics, and are seldom give their architects a free hand, and visited by their occupants during the are not niggardly as to the choice of day, they combined together to transfer building materials, the interior and their energies to these small isolated exterior decoration, or the means of houses, where the booty promised to attracting tenants and keeping them. be richer and easier to secure. Left Capitalists on the lookout for good inunguarded during the summer, these vestments, contractors who want to elegantly furnished abodes were a keep their workmen employed, and tempting field of operations, and in a others, follow the lead thus given. few months the burglars reaped an Everybody feels obliged to go with the abundant harvest of plate, pictures, stream. The "boom" may terminate and works of art. Some of these in a crisis, but in the mean time houses gentry were caught in the act, but the are springing up that might be taken greater number escaped. The blow was struck; everybody said that these small places were unsafe, and that it was wiser to live in a big house, protected by a high personage who allowed no one to come in or go out without his knowledge. People argued that although it was, no doubt, unpleasant that this functionary should open the letters, it was still more annoying to find, on returning from the country or the seaside, that one's house had been ransacked.

for palaces, and rich people in search of luxurious appartements have only too wide a choice.

The case is not the same as regards the poor. In the centre of Paris small dwellings are getting dearer every day, while people who go to live in the outskirts, beyond the walls, find that the cost of the daily journey to and from town quite absorbs what is saved in rent. This state of things is principally felt by employés and the modest traders who have a small shop in the city. It will become more and more difficult for these classes to battle with the stern necessities of life, and we shall have the singular spectacle of a so-called democratic country dominated by one aristocratic castean aristocracy of wealth.

The builders of big houses, who had been discouraged by the new craze, took heart again, and at the present time new edifices, with five or six tiers of windows, are rising in all directions in the wealthy portions of Paris. The great life insurance companies provide the money, and architects supply plans It was under the Second Empire that in profusion. These companies are house-architecture made its first great compelled by law to invest their re- stride in advance. The Third Naposerve funds either in government stock leon himself took the initiative by apor in real estate situated in France. pointing M. Haussmann to be prefect French rentes no longer produce three of the Department of the Seine, which per cent., and have ceased to be a re- he did on the 23rd of June, 1853. It is munerative investment. House prop-true that a few fine houses were erected erty in Paris gives a better return. during the reign of Louis Philippe, but Even making allowance for the unlet in those days the greater number were

built of rubble, which made Victor | where two would barely be sufficient. Hugo say that the last century had be- If to these difficulties, due to a confined queathed to Parisians a city of stone, whereas they would hand down to their descendants a city of plaster. Thanks to the Empire and M. Haussmann, Victor Hugo's witty prediction will not be verified.

It is proper to state that in Paris the

style, one adds those caused by the configuration of the ground, it is not surprising that efforts should have been made, not always with success, to provide enough light and air, especially in the staircases, to introduce improveThe absorption of the suburban dis-ments, and to discover a means of actricts and the extension of the city to cess to all the principal rooms without the wall of circumvallation, which took being obliged to pass through one after place in 1860, gave a fresh impulse to another. Immense progress has been house-building. New streets were made in these directions. made, and wide boulevards and avenues, bordered by new houses, were ground-plots are usually large enough laid out, to make room for which an immense number of old tumbledown edifices had to be cleared away. The eminent architects who were called upon to regenerate the city endeavored to give their creations a monumental appearance. At the corners of some of the large thoroughfares there arose round pavilions ornamented with imbedded columns, and surmounted by cupola roofs. The plastered Corinthian style with pilasters, or profiled with colonnades, flourished again as in the time of Adrian. It was a return to classic art, a springing forth of festooned friezes and acanthus-leaves. The traditions of the Italian Renaissance were resumed: windows with small columns, the frontals having alternating angles and curves; balconies with balusters resting on consoles carved with lions' heads. French architectural art, brought back to life, and held momentarily in honor before 1848, again disappeared, to make room for a variety of pompous forms.

to contain a good-sized house, consisting of a main building fronting the street, a wing forming with the first building the shape of a set-square, and, at the rear of a courtyard, a third building, having a separate staircase and containing flats of a more modest character than the principal edifice. The ground-floor of the last-named block is generally taken up by the stables and coach-houses. The plots are rarely regular in shape, except in the very newest quarters. Some dovetail into each other like pieces of carpentry, others are long and narrow, while others again run so far back that the builder, in order to utilize them, is compelled to erect three or even four houses, separated by courtyards, which must be spacious, so as not to shut out the light.

The selection of the ground is the first step of the capitalist and his architect. Paris, like many other great cities, tends to spread westwardly. It is also extending along the valley of the For a long time, and almost down to Seine. Sooner or later, the fortified the present day, architects clung tena- wall will open on this side and embrace ciously to the laws of proportion as the Bois de Boulogne. Speculators taught in the schools. Even the bold-profit by this fact. At Auteuil, Passy, est dared not design a window beyond in the Faubourg Saint-Honoré and in the regulation size, however great the the Plaine Monceau, pieces of ground need of more light. Hence that objec- which, forty years ago, were only tionable monotony, that formal sym- worth from ten to fifty francs per metry in the architecture of the newer square mètre, have been sold at two Paris streets; hence also the difficulty hundred or three hundred francs. in arranging the various rooms accord- Ground near the Parc de la Muette, ing to requirements, and the necessity belonging to the municipality, brings of placing two windows where one from four hundred to five hundred would be ample, and of putting but one francs. Its value will be still higher

when the wall is removed. These three weeks the builder can begin oper

plots have, furthermore, the advantage over those in the heart of Paris of being larger and more regular in shape. They are also much lower in price. On the Grands Boulevards the figure often reaches three thousand francs, in the Faubourg Montmartre two thousand francs, while round the Halles it is still higher. Street frontages are especially valuable. In the ChampsElysées ground has changed hands at the rate of two thousand francs in the first zone, facing the south, fifteen hundred in the second zone, and one thousand francs in the third, with frontage on parallel streets. In the Avenue du Bois de Boulogne (formerly called the Avenue de l'Impératrice) there is a corresponding increase in value. In the east of Paris, however, and even in some central streets, prices have a tendency to drop, and they seldom exceed five hundred francs per square mètre.

These great differences in price are partly due to the laws and regulations concerning public roads. In the interior of the city, if it is a case of pulling down an old house and building another in its place, the first obstacle met with is one which may cause much delay. There are at least three adjoining owners, besides the city authorities, to be reckoned with. Various interests are aroused; servitudes, hidden and apparent, have to be taken into account-in brief, there are the elements of four or five lawsuits. Perhaps, also, there are no plans in existence, or there may be uncertainty as to the exact area, the rights to light, or the party-walls. We pass over the many points that crop up in verifying the title, the endless conferences with the conveyancing lawyers, the preliminary borings to make sure that there are no old quarries, subterranean watercourses, disused sewers, or shifting sand-beds, and so on. When all these details are in order, the next step is to apply to the Municipal Council for permission to build, and for this purpose it is necessary to submit a plan showing sections and elevations, and full dimensions of everything. In the course of

ations, provided he has not been forbidden to do so. It rarely happens that he is not kept waiting, as the plans must comply with the regulations as to salubrity, fire, drainage, cesspools, the area of the courtyards, the height of the walls, the nature of the building materials, and the size and position of the fireplaces and chimneys. There are, in fact, a host of obscure and intricate regulations, with which the most experienced people are not fully conversant.

Some of these regulations have the effect of considerably reducing the value of even the best-situated sites, and all of them seem to have been framed with the object of stifling every attempt at art and originality. The height of the houses varies according to the width of the streets. A decree dated the 23rd of July, 1884, provides that, "measured from the pavement in front of the building, at the highest part if the street slopes, this height may not exceed, including entablature, attics, and everything plumb with the front walls, the following limits, namely: twelve mètres in streets seven mètres eighty centimètres in width; eighteen mètres in those from eighteen to twenty mètres in width, and twenty mètres where the street is more than twenty mètres wide." We will not touch upon some of the other prescriptions which refer to minor details. The ridge of the roof must not exceed a radius of eight and one-half mètres. Thus, the largest houses cannot have a greater perpendicular height than twenty mètres, or, to the top of the roof, twenty-eight mètres fifty centimètres. We are, therefore, a long way from the American edifices of eighteen or twenty stories. It is impossible to find a house in Paris having more than five square floors within the perpendicular walls, a story in the roof, and some attics right under the ridge of the roof, which latter are used as servants' bedrooms. The height of the stories is regulated as follows: The minimum height of the attics is two mètres sixty centimètres, and that of the ground

floor two mètres eighty centimètres ;| It is surprising that, in spite of so then sixteen centimètres must be al-many difficulties, Parisian architecture lowed for the threshold, two mètres should still have plenty of vitality left. forty centimètres at least for the thick-Its red-tape fetters seem to have stimness of the floors, and one mètre fifty ulated invention instead of paralyzing centimètres for the loft under the roof-it. Having little liberty as regards the ridge. This absorbs nine mètres forty-exterior, architects have concentrated six centimètres, which, deducted from their ingenuity upon the inside. They twenty-eight mètres fifty centimètres, have devoted their efforts to the arleaves nineteen mètres four centimè-rangement of the rooms and their tres to be divided among the six other ornamentation. Yet, in the present stories-that is to say, an average of period, new houses do not differ vastly three mètres eighteen centimètres per in these respects from those built in story. But as the first three stories the preceding epoch. On each floor are made higher than the last three, the latter do not reach this average. The rules concerning projections are not less rigid. They seem made to discourage boldness of conception, and to deprive the finest houses of all ar-ancy. tistic character. Up to two mètres ground-floor is occupied by shops, sixty centimètres from the pavement while in fashionable streets and large projections must not exceed from four avenues it consists of bachelors' apartto ten centimètres. Pilasters above ments or sets of rooms called pied-àthis height can extend outwards from terre. Apartments in houses which six to ten centimètres. The string- have no shops are those most sought course, cornice, entablement, attics, after, and are the dearest. Flats are consoles, crowns, capitals, etc., may also dearer and more in demand where project from twenty-five to fifty centi- the house possesses an entrance and mètres. The large balconies are al- courtyard for carriages. lowed to extend outwards from fifty to The principal staircase is an imporeighty centimètres, according to the tant part of the edifice. According to width of the thoroughfare. Shop-the space at his disposal, the architect fronts must not project beyond six-makes it either circular, or straight, teen centimètres. Other projections with several flights. The latter are are regulated on the same scale. The liked best, because the equal steps give height and width of the various parts the staircase a more imposing appearof the edifice are subject to restric-ance. The circular staircases are tions, of which a few are perfectly usually built of wood, and the straight reasonable, but the larger number ap- ones of hard limestone, or, better pear to have been invented for the still, of white marble. If cost is not sole purpose of checking architectural an object, the baluster is made of progress, and finding posts for a crowd forged iron. Latterly, Flemish stairof useless people who live comfortably cases in oak have been much in favor; at the taxpayers' expense. France has these allow of some very handsome several hundred thousand employés carpentry work; yet many persons will who are paid to place obstacles in the not live in a house the main staircase way of intelligence and talent. We of which is built of wood, as, in case have in this article referred to only of fire, escape is more likely to be cut a few of the vexatious regulations laid off. The staircase walls were formerly down, and have not touched upon those painted in oil to imitate marble, but applying to courtyards, internal ar- this style of decoration is now only rangement, chimneys, and so forth, an seen in old houses or those of the account of which would certainly weary fourth class. Its place has been taken the reader. by polished stucco, inserted sometimes

the architect has provided either one or two complete sets of rooms, according to the size of the ground, so that, the house having five floors below the roof, there are five or ten flats for tenIn the populous quarters the

LIVING AGE.

VOL. VI. 280

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