Old and New Paris: Its History, Its People, and Its Places, v. 1

by H. Sutherland Edwards

It has been said that the Élysée Palace stands between the Rue du Faubourg St. Honoré and the Champs Élysées, with its principal entrance in the street. Between these two thoroughfares stood the ancient Village du Roule, which possessed, as far back as the thirteenth century, an asylum for lepers with a chapel attached to it. This chapel was in 1699 elevated to the rank of parish church, under the invocation of St. Philip. Being now too small it was pulled down; and in place of it was built the present church of St. Philippe du Roule, which underwent a partial transformation in 1845 and 1846.

The principal avenue of the Champs Élysées was planted with trees in 1723; but it was not until the reign of Louis XVI. that the Champs Élysées, or rather that portion of the avenue known as Longchamp, became a haunt of fashion.

The so-called promenade of Longchamp was, towards the end of the eighteenth century, frequented by the most aristocratic society. Gradually after the Revolution it got to be a more miscellaneous resort, to become ultimately, in modern times, a sort of show ground for fashionable milliners and dressmakers, hatters and tailors. The Abbey of Longchamp, whence the promenade derived its name, was founded as a convent in the thirteenth century by Isabelle of France, sister of Louis IX., and pulled down at the time of the Revolution. It was situated close to the Bois de Boulogne, near the village of that name.

“I wish to ensure my salvation,” wrote the Princess Isabelle to Hémeric, Chancellor of the university, “by some pious foundation. King Louis IX., my brother, grants me 30,000 Paris livres, and the question is, shall I found a convent or a hospital?” The Chancellor’s advice was to establish an asylum for the nuns of the order of St. Clara.

In 1260 Isabelle built the church, the dormitories, and the cluster of the Humility of Our Lady; and according to Agnes d’Harcourt, who has written her life, the whole of the 30,000 livres was consumed. The year afterwards, on the 23rd of June, the nuns of the rule of St. Francis took possession of the abbey in presence of Louis IX. and all the Court. The king gave considerable property to the nuns, whom he often visited, and, by his will, dated February, 1269, this sovereign, on the point of undertaking his last expedition to Palestine, left a legacy to the Abbey of Our Lady. Isabelle in this very year ended her days within its walls.

The royal origin and associations of the house which the princess had founded ensured for it the patronage of successive French sovereigns—Marguerite and Jeanne de Brabant, Blanche de France, Jeanne de Navarre, and twelve other princesses, taking the veil there; and it is recorded that Philippe le Long died in it with his daughter Blanche by his side on the 2nd of December, 1321, of complicated dysentery and quartan fever. When he was approaching his end the abbé and monks of St. Denis came in procession to his aid, bringing with them a piece of the True Cross, a nail that had been used at the Crucifixion, and one of the arms of St. Simon. The exhibition and application of these pious relics gained for the king enough time to make his will, after which he expired.

Longchamp had no fewer than forty nuns in residence. Its proximity to Paris, its illustrious origin, its not less illustrious visitors, its aristocratic inhabitants, its vicissitudes during the sanguinary civil wars of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, its decline, and, ultimately, its ruin, invested it with extraordinary interest. As regards the history of the abbey, it must be mentioned that, as with all other convents, its discipline gradually became relaxed until at last purity gave way to licence. Henri IV. took from Longchamp one of his mistresses, Catherine de Verdun, a young nun of twenty-two, to whom he gave the priory of St. Louis de Vernon, and whose brother, Nicholas de Verdun, became first President of the Parliament of Paris.

“It is certain,” wrote St. Vincent de Paul, on the 25th of October, 1652, to Cardinal Mazarin, “that for the last 200 years this convent has been gradually getting demoralised until now there is less discipline there than depravity. Its reception rooms are open to anyone who comes, {220} even to young men without relations at the convent. The order of friars (Cordeliers) under whose direction it is placed, do nothing to stop the evil. The nuns wear immodest garments and carry gold watches. When, war compelled them to take refuge in the town the majority of them gave themselves up to all kinds of scandals, going alone and in secret to the men they desired to visit.”

It is evident from this letter that there were intimate relations between the Abbey of Longchamp and Paris. It had been the custom, moreover, since the fifteenth century, to go to Longchamp to hear the friars of the order of Cordeliers preach during Lent.

“In 1420,” says the journal of Charles VII., “Brother Richard, a Cordelier, lately returned from Jerusalem, preached such a fine sermon that the people from Paris who had been to hear it made more than one hundred fires on their return—the men burning tables, cards, billiard-tables, billiard-balls, and bowls; while the women sacrificed head-dresses, and all kinds of body ornaments, with pieces of leather and pieces of whalebone, their horns and their tails.”