Excerpt from Paris in Old and Present Times: With Especial Reference to Changes in Its Architecture and Topography
It is probable that there is not another city in the whole world that has undergone so many and such great changes as the capital of France. Those of us who have been familiar with Paris since the accession of Louis Napoleon have been eye-witnesses of the last of these, which consisted chiefly in improving the means of communication by opening wide new streets, and in erecting vast numbers of houses of a new type. From the sanitary point of view the change was most desirable and circulation was made incomparably easier; from the artistic point of view there was a balance of loss and gain, as the old streets were not always, or often, worth preserving, while the new ones have always some pretension, at least to taste and elegance, and many new buildings are really good examples of modern intelligence and art. But there is a certain point of view from which this reconstruction of an ancient city was entirely to be regretted.
About the Publisher
Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com
This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works. Это и многое другое вы найдете в книге Paris in Old and Present Times (Philip Gilbert Hamerton)