Paris 'jj 



ordinary will happen ; and a bankruptcy is not at all uncommon. 

 But who is there that will have the courage to make it ? 



14^/2. To the Benedictine abbey of St. Germain, to see pillars 

 of African marble, etc. It is the richest abbey in France: 

 the abbot has 300,000 hvres a year (£13,125). I lose my 

 patience at such revenues being thus bestowed; consistent 

 with the spirit of the tenth century, but not with that of the 

 eighteenth. What a noble farm would the fourth of this in- 

 come establish! what turnips, what cabbages, what potatoes, 

 what clover, what sheep, what wool! — Are not these things 

 better than a fat ecclesiastic } If an active English farmer was 

 mounted behind this abbot, I think he would do more good to 

 France with half the income than half the abbots of the kingdom 

 with the whole of theirs. Pass the Bastille; another pleasant 

 object to make agreeable emotions vibrate in a man's bosom. I 

 search for good farmers, and run my head at every turn against 

 monks and state prisons. — To the arsenal, to wait on Monsieur 

 Lavoisier, the celebrated chemist, whose theory of the non- 

 existence of phlogiston has made as much noise in the chem.ical 

 world as that of Stahl, which established its existence. Dr. 

 Priestley had given me a letter of introduction. I mentioned 

 in the course of conversation his laboratory, and he appointed 

 Tuesday. By the Boulevards, to the Place Louis XV. ^ which is 

 not properly a square, but a very noble entrance to a great city. 

 The facades of the two buildings erected are highly finished. 

 The union of the Place Louis XV. with the Champs Elysees, 

 the gardens of the Tuileries, and the Seine is open, airy, elegant, 

 and superb, and is the most agreeable and best built part of 

 Paris; here one can be clean and breathe freely. But by far 

 the finest thing I have yet seen at Paris is the Halle anx bleds, 

 or corn market: it is a vast rotunda; the roof entirely of wood, 

 upon a new principle of carpentry, to describe which would 

 demand plates and long explanations ; the gallery is 150 yards 

 round, consequently the diameter is as many feet : it is as light 

 as if suspended by the fairies. In the grand area, wheat, pease, 

 beans, lentils, are stored and sold. In the surrounding divisions, 

 flour on wooden stands. You pass by staircases doubly winding 

 within each other to spacious apartments for rye, barley, oats, 

 etc. The whole is so well planned and so admirably executed 

 that I know of no public building that exceeds it in either France 

 or England. And if an appropriation of the parts to the con- 

 veniences wanted, and an adaptation of every circumstance 



1 Subsequently Place de la Revolution, now Place de la Concorde. 



