Grève_, is rather in the character of the more ancient buildings in France:
it is exceedingly picturesque, and presents a noble façade. Being situated
amidst the older streets of Paris, nothing can harmonise better with the
surrounding objects. Compared with the metropolis, on its present extended
scale, it is hardly of sufficient importance for the consequence usually
attached to this kind of building; but you must remember that the greater
part of it was built in the sixteenth century, when the capital had
scarcely attained half its present size. The _Place de Grève_ during the
Revolution, was the spot in which the guillotine performed almost all its
butcheries. I walked over it with a hurrying step: fancying the earth to be
yet moist with the blood of so many immolated victims. Of other HÔTELS, I
shall mention only those of DE SENS and DE SOUBISE. The entrance into the
former yet exhibits a most picturesque specimen of the architecture of the
early part of the XVIth century. Its interior is devoted to every thing ...
which it ought _not_ to be. The Hôtel de Soubise is still a consequential
building. It was sufficiently notorious during the reigns of Charles V. and
VI.: and it owes its present form to the enterprising spirit of Cardinal
Rohan, who purchased it of the Guise family towards the end of the XVIIth
century. There is now, neither pomp nor splendour, nor revelry, within this
vast building. All its aristocratic magnificence is fled; but the antiquary
and the man of curious research console themselves on its possessing
treasures of a more substantial and covetable kind. You are to know that it
contains the _Archives of State_ and the _Royal Printing Office_.

Paris has doubtless good reason to be proud of her public buildings; for
they are numerous, splendid, and commodious; and have the extraordinary
advantage over our own of not being tinted with soot and smoke. Indeed,
when one thinks of the sure invasion of every new stone or brick building
in London, by these enemies of external beauty, one is almost sick at heart
during the work of erection. The lower tier of windows and columns round