Rue de Berri, opened 1778, across the site of the royal nursery gardens, went by several names before receiving that of the second son of Charles X, assassinated in 1820. The Belgian Legation at No. 20 was built by the aunt of Mme de Genlis and was in later times the home of princesse Mathilde who died there in 1904. Rue Washington was opened in 1789; Rue Galilée as chemin des Bouchers, then Rue du Banquet, in 1790. In Rue Daru, of the same date, opened as Rue de la Croix du Roule, we see the Russian church built in 1881, with its beautiful paintings and frescoes and rich Oriental decorations.
CHAPTER XXXIII
PARC MONCEAU
WE have already referred to Avenue Wagram. Modern buildings stretch along the whole course of the other eleven avenues branching from Place de l’Étoile. Avenue Hoche leads us to Parc Monceau, laid out on lands belonging in past days to the Manor of Clichy, sold to the prince d’Orléans in 1778, arranged as a smart jardin anglais for Philippe-Égalité in 1785, the property of the nation in 1794, restored to the Orléans by Louis XVIII, bought by the State in 1852, given to the city authorities in 1870. The Renaissance arcade is a relic of the ancient hôtel de Ville, burnt down in 1871. The oval bassin, called “la Naumachie,” with its Corinthian columns, came from an old church at St-Denis, Notre-Dame de la Rotonde, built as the burial-place of the Valois, razed in 1814. Avenue Friedland was opened in 1719, across the site of a famous eighteenth-century public garden and several demolished hôtels, and lengthened to its present extent some fifty years later. Avenue Marceau was of yore Avenue Joséphine.
Rue de Monceau, opened in 1801, lies along the line of the old road to the vanished village of Monceau or Musseau. Rue du Rocher, along the course of a Roman road, has gone by different names in its different parts. Its upper end, waste ground until well into the nineteenth century, at the close of the eighteenth century was a Revolutionists’ meeting-place, and there in the tragic months of 1794 many guillotinés were buried, among them the two Robespierres. In later years a dancing saloon was set up on the spot. It was a district of windmills. The Moulin de la Marmite, Moulin Boute-à-Feu, Moulin-des-Prés, stood on the high ground above Gare St-Lazare until a century ago. Few vestiges of the past remain. Rue de Laborde was known in 1788 as Rue des Grésillons, i.e. Flour Street (grésillons, the flour in its third stage of grinding). Then it became Chemin des Porcherons, and the district was known as that of la Petite-Pologne, a reference to the habitation there of the duc d’Anjou, who was King of Poland. In the courtyard of No. 4 we find an ancient boundary-stone, once in Rue de l’Arcade, where it marked the bounds of the city under Louis XV.
Rue de la Pépinière, its name and that of the barracks there so well known of late to British soldiers, recording the site of the royal nursery grounds of a past age, was marked out as early as 1555, but opened only in 1782. The barracks, first built in 1763 for the Gardes Françaises, was rebuilt under Napoléon III. All other streets in the neighbourhood are modern.
CHAPTER XXXIV
IN THE VICINITY OF THE OPERA
ARRONDISSEMENT IX. (OPÉRA)
THE Paris Opera-house was built between the years 1861-75 to replace the structure in Rue le Peletier burnt to the ground in 1873. On its ornate Renaissance façade we see, amid other statuary, the noted group “La Danse,” the work of Carpeaux. Of the “Grands Boulevards,” by which the Opera is surrounded, we shall speak later (see [p. 297]).
Most of the streets in its neighbourhood are modern, stretching across the site of demolished buildings, important in their day, but of which few traces now remain.
Rue des Mathurins lies across the grounds of the vanished convent, Ville l’Évêque. Rue Tronchet runs where was once the Ferme des Mathurins (see [p. 224]).