The Story of Paris

Thomas Okey wrote this in 1906 for J. M. Dent’s Mediaeval Towns series, revising his earlier Paris and its Story throughout and adding a wholly new second part. The first runs eighteen chapters, following the city from its Gallo-Roman beginnings through the medieval kings, the rise of the university and the great churches, the Revolution and the Terror, and out to Napoleon and modern Paris. The second part stops narrating and turns cicerone, Okey’s own word: Notre-Dame and the Sainte-Chapelle, the Latin Quarter, two long chapters on the Louvre, the old hotels of the Marais, taken building by building. He admitted in his preface that where the housebreaker’s pick is so active, any book on the monuments of the past must soon become imperfect, and he named houses already swept away since 1904. That honesty is much of the appeal.