Demolition of old houses in the central and western quarters had, they claimed, expelled the poor from these sections and concentrated them in the neglected eastern quarters and suburbs. Mixing memory with fancy they depicted Paris of the good old days before Napoleon III as a city where all social classes lived happily side by side in all parts of the city.

Who will in-deed enumerate the diverse types of animals of the land, sea, and air, the varieties of plants, fruits, vegetables, which, boiled or roasted, are suitable for the nourishment of man? I think it suffices for the moment to say that this city is supplied at any time with provisions so varied and so fine that a palate aroused by hunger will never be deprived of satisfying itself with s.imple or choice foods.

n the centre of it was a great tower, forty-five metres in circumference and thirty metres high - though, because of the thickness of its walls, it probably afforded an internal diameter of no more than eight metres across. It acquired the name of the Louvre, possibly derived from louve, or female wolf, because it was used as a hunting box, but more probably from the archaic word louver or blockhouse, or even, quite simply, from l'oeuvre, the work. The first stone of the Louvre was laid in 1202 and it , was originally designed as a major stronghold (though it never came to be used as such) and a treasury. Not a palace to be lived in, it was only in the reign of Charles V (1364-80) that the Louvre, with windows struck through Philippe's grimly functional arrow-slits and with fancifully decorative pointed roofs superimposed, became a palace fit for a king.