“Ici Monsieur Tussieu barbier,
Rase le Sénat,
Accommode la Sorbonne,
Frise l’Académie.”
When the recent war was on the patriotic barber posted up in French, in Greek, in Latin, other words, the following:
“Bulgares de Malheur,
Turques, Austro-Hongrois, Boches,
Ne comptez sur Tussieu
Pour tondre vos caboches.”
He died a few months ago, leaving to his widow his shop full of valuable antiquities.
Rue Garancière owes its euphonious name to a notable sixteenth-century firm of dyers—la Maison Garance was on the site of the present publishing house Plon. In the seventeenth century the Garance hôtel was rebuilt as a mansion for the Breton bishop, René de Rieux. After the Revolution it was for thirty years the Mairie of the district. The words “stationnement de nuit pour huit tonneaux” on the wall at No. 9 refer to a vanished market fountain. The Dental School at No. 5 was originally the home of Népomacène Lemercier. Passing through Rue Palatine memorizing Charlotte de Bavière, widow of Henri de Bourbon, who lived at one time at the Luxembourg, we turn down Rue Servandoni, so named in recent times in honour of the architect of the façade of the church St-Sulpice, who died in a house opposite No. 1 (1766). Among the bas-reliefs at No. 14 is one of Servandoni unrolling a plan of St-Sulpice. We see on every side some interesting vestiges of the past. Rue Canivet and Rue Férou show many old houses. Rue du Luxembourg is modern, built along what was once a shady alley of the garden. The Café at No. 1, Rue Fleurus, was erewhile the meeting-place of great artists: Corot, Murger and others of their time. Rue Auguste Comte is another modern street along an old alley of the garden.
Rue d’Assas, across the garden at one point, runs through the whole of this arrondissement over what were once the grounds of the two old convents: the Carmes and Cherche-Midi; it shows a few ancient houses. No. 8 is eighteenth century. No. 19, l’Institut Catholique, is the ancient Carmelite convent. George Sand lived in a house once on the site of No. 28, and Foucault, a celebrated physician who made, besides, the notable proof of the earth’s rotation by the movement of a pendulum, died here in 1868. Littré the great lexicographer died at No. 44. Michelet at No. 76.
Turning again into Rue Vaugirard we find at No. 36, the house built for the household staff of the Princesse Palatine, its kitchen communicating with the Petit Luxembourg by an underground passage; at No. 19 remains of the couvent des Dames Benedictines du Calvaire, founded 1619, and on the site of the Orangery, the Musée du Luxembourg, inaugurated in 1818, which grew out of the exhibition in 1750 of a hundred pictures in possession of the King. Massenet lived and died at No. 48. No. 50, hôtel de Trémouille, called in Revolutionary times hôtel de la Fraternité, where Mme de Lafayette died in 1692. Nos. 52 and 54 are ancient, 56 was the hôtel Kervessan (1700). We reach at No. 70 the old convent of the Carmes Déchaussés.
CHAPTER XXII
LES CARMES
THE tragic story of “les Carmes” has been repeatedly told. The convent was founded in 1613 by Princesse de Conti and la Maréchale d’Ancre for the Carmes Déchaussés, who hailed from Rome. The first stone of their chapel here, dedicated to St. Joseph, was laid by Marie de’ Medici; its dome was the first dome built in Paris; Italian masters painted frescoes on its walls. The Order became very popular among Parisians who liked the eau de Mélisse, which it was the nuns’ business, in the secular line, to make and sell, and they were respected for their goodness to the poor. When the horrors of the Revolution were filling the city with blood, the Carmes were left unmolested, some even hidden away in secret corners of the convent with the connivance of Revolutionary chiefs. Then priests who refused to take the oath of allegiance were shut up there and to-day we see, in the old crypt, the bones of more than a hundred of them, slain by a band led by a revolutionist known as “Tape-dur”—strike-hard. A prison during the Terror, Mme Tallien, Joséphine de Beauharnais, and more than seven hundred others were shut up there, led forth thence, many of them, to execution. These tragic scenes overpast, the convent was let to a manager of public fêtes: its big hall became a ballroom, “le bal des Marronniers.” That wonderful woman Camille de Soyecourt, Sœur Camille, who had previously re-organized the convent, bought it back in 1797. The garden-shed where the bodies of the murdered priests had lain was made into a memorial-chapel, razed in 1867. Then the priests’ bones were carried to the crypt where we now see them. Every year in the first week of September, anniversary of the Massacre, the convent, the crypt and the ancient garden, little changed from Revolution days, are thrown open to the public, where besides the bones of the massacred priests many interesting tombs and relics are reverently cared for. It was at the Institut Catholique in the old Carmelite buildings that the principle of wireless telegraphy was discovered, in 1890.
The ancient burial-ground of St-Sulpice lies beneath the buildings Nos. 100-102 of the long Rue Vaugirard. No. 104, the Salle Montalembert, is the ancient convent of the Pères Maristes. At No. 85 we see an old-time boundary-stone and bas-reliefs.