THE ARC DE TRIOMPHE DE L'ETOILE
(APPROACHING FROM THE AVENUE DU BOIS DE BOULOGNE)
St. Merry's florid west front is in the Rue St. Martin, once the Roman road from Paris to the north and to England, and by the Rue St. Martin we may leave this district; but between it and the Rue du Temple there is much to see—such as, for example, the Rue Verrerie, south of St. Merry's, the head-quarters of the ancient glassworkers; the Rue Brisemiche, quite one of the best of the old narrow Paris streets, with iron staples and hooks still in the walls at Nos. 20, 23, 26 and 29, to which chains could be fastened so as to turn a street into an impasse during times of stress and thus be sure of your man; the Rue Taillepin, also leading out of the Rue du Cloître St. Merry into the Rue St. Merri, which has some fine old houses of its own, notably No. 36 and the quaint Impasse du Bœuf at No. 10.
Parallel with the Rue St. Merry farther north is the Rue de Venise, which the Vicomte de Villebresme boldly calls the most picturesque in old Paris. Now a very low quarter, it was once literally the Lombard Street of Paris, the chief abode of Lombardy moneylenders, while the long and beautiful Rue Quincampoix, into which it runs on the west, was also a financial centre, containing no less an establishment than the famous Banque of John Law, the Scotchman who for a while early in the eighteenth century controlled French finance. When Law had matured his Mississippi scheme, he made the Rue Quincampoix his head-quarters, and houses in it, we read, that had been let for £40 a year now yielded £800 a month. In the winter of 1719-20 Paris was filled with speculators besieging Law's offices for shares. But by May the crash had come and Law had to fly. Many a house in the Rue Quincampoix, which is now sufficiently innocent of high finance, dates from the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. There is a fine doorway at No. 34.
We may regain the Rue St. Martin, just to the east, by the Rue des Lombards, which brings us to the flamboyant front of St. Merry's once more. The Rue St. Martin, which confesses its Roman origin in its straightness, is still busy with traffic, but neither itself nor the Rue St. Denis, two or three hundred yards to the west, is one-tenth as busy as it was before the Boulevard Sebastopol was cut between them to do all the real work. It is a fine thoroughfare and no doubt of the highest use, but what beautiful narrow streets of old houses it must have destroyed! We may note in the Rue St. Martin the pretty fountain at No. 122, and the curious old house at No. 164, and leave it at the church of St. Nicholas-des-Champs, no longer in the fields any more than London's St. Martin's is.
And now after so many houses let us see some pictures!
CHAPTER VI
THE LOUVRE: I. THE OLD MASTERS
The Winged Victory of Samothrace—Botticelli's Fresco—Luini—Ingres—The Salon Carré—La Joconde—Leonardo da Vinci—Pater, Lowell and Vasari—Early Collectors—Paul Veronese—Copyists—The Salle des Primitifs—The Grande Galerie—Landor's Pictorial Creed—The Great Schools—Rembrandt—Van Dyck and Rubens—Amazing Abundance—The Dutch Masters—The Drawings.