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streets and 104 churches—which served a population of roughly 350,000 souls. Like most sixteenth-century cartographers, Olivier Truschet and Germain Hoyau could not content themselves with two dimensions; they were forever trying to provide a third dimension, to limn the elevations and to add a human element. Guilt must have affected the cartographers’ minds, because their cityscape included six cautionary gallows—occupied—not to mention plump-cheeked cupids blowing wind from the four corners of the map and drawing attention to the map’s river axis rather than compass orientation. The precision sacrificed to figuration was almost always art’s gain. The Plan de Truschet et Hoyau is often called the Plan de Bâle because the only extant original was discovered in the mid-nineteenth century in a library in Basel, where it had likely been carried by a traveler.

No modern chamber of commerce advised by the most go-go ad agency could outdo the purple prose of early map cartouche writers, as witness the etched Plan de Braun, published about 1572, on which a verse declares that “Paris is truly the royal house / Of the god Apollo.” Even more naive, the Plan de Saint-Victor is usually attributed to the engraver of architect Jacques Androuet du Cerceau. Only a single copy exists, but fortunately another engraver, Guillaume d’Heulland, copied it between 1755 and 1760 onto a copper plate that continues to yield purchasable restrikes at the Chalcographie. In 1609 both François Quesnel and Vassalieu produced plans for France’s first urbanist king, Henri IV; each was long on praise for both the monarch and the “marvels” of his capital, and short on accuracy, often depicting construction projects that were still on the drawing boards. Many such projects progressed no further, due to Henri’s assassination by the mad monk François Ravaillac, a crime that might never have succeeded—the king had eluded seventeen earlier attempts—but for the fact that the royal carriage was caught in a traffic jam on a narrow street.

Produced six years later, the splendidly engraved Plan de Mathieu Mérian includes an image of Henri’s successor, the young Louis XIII, as well as a number of his subjects. Jacques Gomboust’s 1647 nine-sheet map, peopled by 509 figures, decorated with engravings of six royal residences and the grander aristocratic seats, and framed by descriptive text, was a roll-up guide to the city and its environs. It omitted elevations of all but the most important structures and, overall, was considerably more accurate than its predecessors.

The Plan de Bullet et Blondel, drawn less than two decades later, reveals the city’s tremendous growth under Louis XIV and demonstrates the error in thinking that the Sun King neglected Paris in favor of Versailles. Drafted at the king’s behest and surrounded with long-winded text, this map features its authors’ own works, for architect François Blondel and his pupil Pierre Bullet had designed the triumphal gates at the Porte Saint-Denis, the Porte Saint-Martin, the Porte Saint-Antoine, and the Porte Saint-Bernard. Their architectural training is evident in their renditions of the gardens of the Louvre and Palais Royal; these lacy engravings define the term parterre en broderie. An inset map of the environs of Paris points to the court’s imminent transfer to Versailles.

The Plan d’Albert Jouvin de Rochefort is the most absorbing of all the seventeenth-century maps, alive with more than six hundred figures caught up in their daily lives: trudging to work, tilling the fields surrounding the city, hunting stag on the Plaine Monceau, dueling on Montparnasse, swimming in the river. For all its animation, Rochefort’s map, dated 1690, is remarkably scientific, oriented perpendicular to the meridian, that is, with the north at the top.

In the succeeding century, maps came into their own as administrative tools. In 1714 Marc-René, Marquis d’Argenson, lieutenant general of the Paris police, commissioned the Plan de Jean de la Caille, which enumerates every feature, from the 896 streets and 22,000 houses down to