Rue des Trois-Bornes shows us several old-time houses and at No. 39 a characteristic old court. We find some characteristic vestiges also in Rue d’Angoulême. In Rue St-Ambroise we see the handsome modern church built on the site of the ancient church des Annociades. The monastery of the Annociades was sold in lots, and became in part by turns a barracks, a military hospital, a hospital for incurables, and was razed to the ground in 1864. At Musée Carnavalet we may see bas-reliefs taken from the fountain once on the space before the church. Rue Popincourt, which gives its name to the arrondissement, records the existence in past days of a sire Jean de Popincourt whose manor-house was here, and a sixteenth-century village, which became later part of Faubourg St-Antoine. Rue du Chemin-Vert dates from 1650, but has few interesting features. Parmentier died at No. 68 in 1813.
CHAPTER XXXVIII
IN THE PARIS “EAST END”
WE are now in the vicinity of the largest and most important of the Paris cemeteries—Père Lachaise. But it lies in the 20th arrondissement. The streets of this 10th arrondissement leading east approach its boundary walls—its gates. Rue de la Roquette comes to it from the vicinity of the Bastille. La Roquette was a country house built in the sixteenth century, a favourite resort of the princes of the Valois line. Then, towards the end of the seventeenth century, the house was given over to the nuns Hospitalières of Place-Royale. The convent, suppressed at the Revolution, became State property and in 1837 was used as the prison for criminals condemned to death. The guillotine was set up on the five stones we see at the entrance to Rue Croix-Faubin. The prisoners called the spot l’Abbaye des Cinq Pierres. It was there that Monseigneur Darboy and abbé Deguerry were put to death in 1871. On the day following fifty-two prisoners, chiefly monks and Paris Guards, were led from that prison to the heights of Belleville and shot in Rue Haxo. Read à ce propos Coppée’s striking drama Le Pater. La Roquette is now a prison for youthful offenders, a sort of House of Correction.
Lower down the street we find here and there an ancient house or an old sign. The fountain at No. 70 is modern (1846). The curious old Cour du Cantal at No. 22 is inhabited mostly by Auvergnats. Rue de Charonne, another street stretching through the whole length of the arrondissement, in olden days the Charonne road, starts from the Rue du Faubourg St-Antoine, where at No. 1 we see a fountain dating from 1710. Along its whole length we find vestiges of bygone times. It is a district of ironmongers and workers in iron and workman’s tools. A district, too, of popular dancing saloons. At No. 51 we see l’hôtel de Mortagne, built in 1711, where Vaucanson first exhibited his collection of mechanical instruments. Bequeathed to the State, that collection was the nucleus of the Conservatoire des Arts et Métiers: Arts and Crafts Institution (see [p. 64]). Here the great mechanic died in 1782. No. 97, once a Benedictine convent, was subsequently a private mansion, then a factory, then in part a Protestant chapel. The École Maternelle at No. 99 was in past days a priory of “Bon Secours” (seventeenth century). No. 98 is on the site of a convent razed in 1906. There are remains of another convent at Nos. 100, 102. No. 161 was the famous “Maison de Santé,” owned by Robespierre’s friend Dr. Belhomme, to which he added the adjoining hôtel of the marquis de Chabanais. There, during the Terror, he received prisoners as “paying guests.” His prices were enormous and on a rising scale ... the guests who could not pay at the required rate were turned adrift on the road to the guillotine. These walls sheltered the duchesse d’Orléans, the mother of Louis-Philippe, protected by her faithful friend known as comte de Folmon, in reality the deputé Rouzet, and many other notable persons of those troubled years. On the left side of the door we see the figures 1726, relic of an ancient system of numbering. The Flemish church de la Sainte Famille at 181 is modern (1862).
Crossing Rue de Charonne in its earlier course, we come upon the sixteenth-century Rue Basfroi, a corruption of beffroi, referring to the belfry of the ancient church Ste-Marguerite in Rue St-Bernard. Ste-Marguerite, founded in 1624 as a convent chapel, rebuilt almost entirely in 1712, enlarged later, is interesting as the burial-place of the Dauphin, or his substitute, in 1745, and as possessing a much-prized relic, the body of St. Ovide, in whose honour the great annual fair was held on Place Vendôme. A tiny cross up against the church wall marks the grave where the son of Louis XVI was supposed to have been laid, but where on exhumation some years ago the bones of an older boy were found. We see some other ancient tombs up against the walls of what remains of that old churchyard, and on the wall of the apse of the church two very remarkable bas-reliefs, the work of an old-time abbé, M. Goy, a clever sculptor, to whom are due also many of the statues in the park at Versailles. Within the church we see several striking statues and a remarkable “Chapelle des Morts,” its walls entirely frescoed in grisaille but in great need of restoration. From the end of Rue Chancy, where at No. 22 we see an old carved wood balcony, we get an interesting view of this historic old church.
Rue de Montreuil, leading to the village of the name, shows us many old houses, one at No. 52 with statuettes and in the courtyard an ancient well, and at No. 31, remains of the Folie Titon, within its walls a fine staircase and ceiling, the latter damaged of late owing to a fire.
CHAPTER XXXIX
ON TRAGIC GROUND
RUE DU FAUBOURG ST-ANTOINE forms the boundary between the arrondissements XI and XII. From end to end it shows us historic vestiges. It has played from earliest times an all-important part in French history, leading, when without the city walls, to Paris and the Bastille from the fortress of Vincennes and lands beyond, while from the time of its incorporation with Paris, popular political demonstrations unfailingly had their mise en scène in the Rue du Faubourg St-Antoine. In the seventeenth century it was a country road in its upper part, the Chaussée St-Antoine, and led to the fine Abbaye St-Antoine-des-Champs; the lower part was the “Chemin de Vincennes.” Along this road, between Picpus and the Bastille, the Frondeurs played their war-games. Turenne’s army fired from the heights of Charonne, while the Queen-Mother, her son, Louis XIII, and Mazarin watched from Père-la-Chaise. At No. 8 lived the regicide Pépin, Fieschis’ accomplice. The sign, the “Pascal Lamb,” at No. 18 dates from the eighteenth century. We see ancient signs all along the street. The Square Trousseau at No. 118 is on the site of the first “Hospice des Enfants Trouvés,” built in 1674 on abbey land. In 1792 it became the “Hôpital des Enfants de la Patrie.” The head of princesse de Lamballe was buried in the chapel graveyard there. What is supposed to be her skull was dug up here in 1904. In 1839 the hospital was made an annexe of the hôtel-Dieu, in 1880 it was Hôpital Trousseau, then in the first years of this twentieth century razed to the ground. At No. 184 the hospital St-Antoine retains some vestiges of the royal abbey that stood there in long-gone days. Founded in 1198, it was like all the big abbeys of the age a small town in itself, surrounded by high fortified walls. At the Revolution it was sequestrated, the church demolished. Till the early years of the nineteenth century, one of the most popular of Paris fairs was held on the site of the old abbey, la Foire aux pains d’épices, which had its origin in an Easter week market held within the abbey precincts. The house No. 186 is on the site of the little chapel St-Pierre, razed in 1797, where of old kings of France lay in state after their death. Two daughters of Charles V were buried there. The fountain and butcher’s shop opposite the hospital date from the time of Louis XV, built by the nuns of the abbey and called la Petite Halle. The nuns alone had the right to sell meat to the population of the district in those old days. Almost every house and courtyard and passage along the whole course of this ancient thoroughfare dates, as we see, from days long past. In the courts at Nos. 245 and 253 we find old wells.
So we reach Place de la Nation, of yore Place du Trône, styled in Revolution days Place du Trône Renversé, and the guillotine set up there “en permanence”: there 1340 persons fell beneath its knife, 54 in one tragic day. The two pavilions on the eastern side of the place were the custom-houses of pre-Revolution days. The monument in the centre is modern (1899). Of the streets and avenues leading from the place, that of supreme interest is the old Rue Picpus, a curious name explained by some etymologists as a corruption of Pique-Pusse, and referring to a sixteenth-century monk of the neighbourhood who succeeded in curing a number of people of an epidemic which studded their arms with spots like flea-bites and who was called henceforth “le Père Pique-Pusse.” In previous days the upper part of the road—it was a road then, not yet a street—had been known as Chemin de la Croix-Rouge. Nos. 4 and 6 are the remains of an eighteenth-century pavilion, a maison de santé—house of detention—where in 1786 St. Just was shut up for petty thefts committed in his own family. No. 10, a present-day maison de santé, is on the site of a hunting-lodge of Henri IV. At No. 35 we see the Oratoire de Picpus, where is the statuette of Notre-Dame, de la Paix, once on the door of the Capucine convent, Rue St-Honoré; and here, behind the convent garden, we find the cimetière Picpus and the railed pit where the bodies of the 1340 persons beheaded on the Place du Trône Renversé were cast in 1793, André Chenier among the number. Their burial-place was unknown until some years later, when a poor woman, the daughter of a servant of the duc de Brissac, who, stealthily watching from afar, had seen her father and her brother fall on the scaffold, pointed it out. The site was bought, walled in, an iron cross set up over it. Soon adjoining land was bought and the relatives of many of those who lay in the pit were brought to be in death near to the members of their family cut off from them in life by the Revolutionist axe. We see their tombs in the carefully kept cemetery to which, from time to time, descendants of the different families come to be laid in their last long sleep. In the corner closest up against the walls surrounding the pit we see the Stars and Stripes of the United States, the “star-spangled banner” keeping guard over the grave of La Fayette. The nuns of the convent have charge of this pathetically interesting cemetery. At No. 42 we see more convent walls stretching to Rue de Reuilly, now enclosing a carriage factory. At No. 61 the doors of yet another, put later to various secular uses. No. 76 is the Jewish hospital, founded by Rothschild in 1852. No. 73 is the Hospice des Vieillards, worked by the Petites Sœurs des Pauvres. On the wall at No. 88 we come upon an edict of Louis XV with the date 1727.
Running parallel with Rue Picpus is Rue de Reuilly, in long-gone days a country road leading to the Château at Romiliacum, the summer habitation of the early Merovingian kings. We see an ancient house at No. 12 and No. 11 was the historic brasserie owned by Santerre, commander-in-chief of the Paris Garde Nationale, its walls supposed to date from 1620. Santerre bought it in 1772. After the storming of the Bastille, two prisoners found within its walls, both mad, one aged, the other a noted criminal, were sheltered there: there the keys and chains of the broken fortress were deposited. The barracks at No. 20 are on the site of ruins of the old Merovingian castle. The church, modern, of St-Eloi at No. 36 has no historic interest save that of its name, and no architectural beauty.