Paris

Abstract

Dirichlet arrived in Paris on the last Sunday of May in 1822. The city that greeted him had a population of nearly three-quarter million inhabitants, almost fifteen times that of Cologne, the largest town he had known up to then. It shared the problems of other European cities of the period: poor sanitation (open gutters in the middle of the street), pollution, inadequate housing. While English visitors welcomed the relative lack of the coal pollution that hung heavily over London, and commented on the “crystalline green” of the Seine, Dirichlet may have found any contrast between the Seine and the Rhine, only in initial stages of surrounding industrializaton, less startling.