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Show SELECTED. TUB DEVASTATION IN PARIS. The London journals of May 27th and 2Sth contain the reports of theii correspondents in Paris, who went about die city after the fire to ascertain preciiely the extent of the damage. Their accounts agreed on nearly all points, the principal contradiction being be-ing that the Daily iYeurs reports the Hotel de Vilie to have been saved by the Boldiers, while the other paper? represent it as entirely destroyed. There seems to be no doubt, however, that all the interior of the building was 1 burned out; and that oa Thursday night, May 25th, it was a smouldering ruin. The Saint Chapelie had a very narrow nar-row escape. An eft'orc was made to destroy it, but it was little injured. The Palais de Justice, too, was saved, although at one time quite surrounded by fire. Nor was tbe Bank of France much harmed. Indeed, a very great part of Paris is actually fire-proof, and no human ingenuity could make the new buildings of the Hue de Kivoli burn, or destroy them save by violence and stone by stone. The Tulleriea, a part (about half) of tho Palais Royal, the Theatre Lyrique, the Theatre du ChaLelct, and the Theatre of the Porte St. Martin are burned down. The ruin of the Tuil-leries Tuil-leries went as fur as the Pavilion de Flor, that is, it included the whole of the ancient building. The Madelaine was seriously injured, the fluted edges of the columns having been largely shot away. Upon tbe Boulevard Haussmann all the fronts of the houses are disfigured. The corridors cor-ridors and corners are broken and battered, bat-tered, and the street torn up. Ihe houses along the Rue Koyale, from the Medeleine down, are in ruins. In the Place Vendome the statue of Napoleon Na-poleon lay on its back on the ground, and fragments of the column were strewn around it. The Place de la Concorde is nearly ruined. The statues of the cities arc mutilated, the fountains broken up, the stone balustrade broken in a hundred hun-dred places, and all the lamp-posts are down. The obelisk in the centre is not , injured. The "Bibliothcque Imperiaie" is unharmed; but many of the books were carried to the Louvre for safety, and there may have shared the late of the library of the Louvre, which was burned. Tbe pictures in the Louvre arc reported safe, but of the statuary in the basement, including the lovely Venus of Milo, and the curiosities in the great Napoleonic Museum, nothing is known. A Ihnes correspondent, an eye-witness of the fire in the building, gives them up. The Luxembourg is utterly destroyed; de-stroyed; and its noble collection of pictures, representing the modern French schools, seems to have been ruined. The Pantheon and the library of St. Genevieve have been injured by shot and shells, but not seriously. The Arc tie Triomphe seems to have been hopelessly battered. Innumerable private houses and some great public stores were burned or broken down by shells; but there is no detailed account as yet of (he extent ex-tent of tho damage douo in this way. |