House and Garden 
Marais , to a famous quarter of the 
modern city. About the Marais and 
the adjacent lands on the west was a 
semicircle of low hills—Passy on the 
extreme west, Montmartre directly 
north, and Belleville, Menilmontant 
and Charonne to the east. South of 
the river the land was firmer and cul¬ 
tivated, doubtless, before the Ro¬ 
mans came. This portion also was 
encircled by low wooded hills which 
completed the amphitheatre—Ivry, 
Bicetre, Montrouge,Vanves, Issy and 
Meudon : a quiet French landscape, 
such as one may find today about any 
large river in the tertiary basin of cen¬ 
tral France, except that the land was 
covered with forest up to the limits of 
the Marais and the narrow strip of 
cultivation : not an imposing picture 
compared with the royal setting of New York. 
Under all this quiet country, for an area 
measured by many miles in every direction, 
lie interminable beds of white limestone 
cropping out in many quarries of the best 
building material in the world : the meuli- 
eres, rough, hard and porous, excellent for 
foundations, which one sees in yellow banks 
along the quais; the fine oolites of Nor¬ 
mandy which the English were obliged to 
carry across the Channel for their cathedrals ; 
the travertines of Chateau Landon used in 
the Arc de l’Etoile; the “banc royal" of 
Conflans exploited in the eighteenth century ; 
the lias and cliquarts of which Notre-Dame 
is built; the lambourde of the quarries near 
Saint-Germain en Laye; the easily worked 
deposits between Creil and Chantilly, and 
many others. 
The first quarries used were those within 
the limits of the present city. Sometimes 
these were on the surface, as those at the 
Buttes-Chaumont; but more often they led 
under ground, and formed the catacombs. 
A large part of the southern central portion 
of the city is undermined in this way, oblig¬ 
ing engineers to support heavy buildings by 
piers passing through the quarries to the 
rock below. The great church of Val-de- 
Grace is built on substructures of this kind. 
One cannot conceive Paris without the 
fair white stone in which she has dressed her¬ 
self for all occasions, grave and gay. As 
A CORRECTION OF HOFFBAUER S MAP 
According to the consensus of other authorities 
well think of Athens without the marble of 
Pentelicus. Fancy the Parthenon built of 
poros , or Garnier’s Opera of the red sandstone 
of Bale. The best architecture in the world 
stands on, or near, beds of good limestone 
which, almost invariably, runs light in color. 
LUTECE 
The nucleus of Paris is found in the little 
cluster of islands in the Seine now contracted 
to two, the He de la Cite and the lie Saint- 
Louis, which furnished protection to traders 
whose business carried them up and down 
the river. Caesar calls these people Parisii, 
a name which may be derived from an old 
Celtic root, bar, the basis of various words 
meaning boat. We can fancy the primitive 
Gauls poling their way about in flat-bottomed 
affairs like those which the peasants use to¬ 
day on the Somme at Amiens. These boat¬ 
men, like those on the Tiber, the Loire and 
other great rivers in ancient time, had an or¬ 
ganization among themselves, which the 
Romans recognized under the name Naut^e 
Parisiaci. The Nautse became the Mar- 
chands de /’eau of the Middle Ages, and 
they in turn the present municipal govern¬ 
ment of Paris. The ship emblem of the 
Nautas Parisiaci is still the chief device of 
the civic arms. 
One is often astonished, in studying the 
history of Paris, by a deep-rooted conserva¬ 
tism which does not in the least conflict with 
the revolutionary record of the people. 
