A popular fair, la Foire de Lendit, instituted by Dagobert, was held during centuries at the extreme end of the ancient thoroughfare. No. 122, built, tradition tells us, by Henri IV and given to his minister Sully, became in the seventeenth century the Cabaret de la Rose Blanche. At No. 1 Rue Boucry we see an ancient chapel now used as a public hall.
CHAPTER XLVII
AMONG THE COALYARDS AND THE MEAT-MARKETS
ARRONDISSEMENT XIX. (BUTTES-CHAUMONT)
IN this essentially workaday district we see many houses old and quaint, but without architectural beauty or special historic interest. Round the park des Buttes-Chaumont, a large expanse of greenswards and shady alleys, dull, squalid streets branch out amid coal-yards and factories. Beneath the park are the ancient quarries which erewhile gave so much white stone and plaster of Paris to the city builders. The name Chaumont is derived, perhaps, from mons calvus, mont chauve, i.e. bald mountain. In Rue de Flandres, formerly Grande Rue de la Villette, we see a Jewish cemetery. Nos. 61 to 65 are on the site where the well-known institution Ste-Perine, come hither from Compiègne, was first established in Paris as a convent community in the seventeenth century, removed to Chaillot in 1742, then to Auteuil, its present site. We find ancient houses, some old signs, along the course of this old street, and at No. 152 an interesting door, pavilion and bas-relief.
Rue de Belleville marks the bounds of the arrondissement. Along its course and in the adjacent streets we see many vestiges of the past. Rue des Bois shows us some fine old gardens as yet undisturbed. In Rue de l’Orme, Elm Road, opening out of it, we find the remains of an ancient park. Rue Pré-St-Gervais was a country road till 1837. From the top of the steps in the picturesque Rue des Lilas we have a fine view across the neighbouring banlieue. In the grounds of No. 40 we come upon three benches formed of gravestones. Rue Compans was in the eighteenth century and onwards Rue St-Denis. The church of St-Jean-Baptiste, quite modern, is of excellent style and workmanship. The lower end of Rue de Belleville leads us into arrondissement XX.
CHAPTER XLVIII
PÈRE-LACHAISE
ARRONDISSEMENT XX. (MÉNILMONTANT)
THE lower end of the long Rue de Belleville, its odd-number side in arrondissement XIX, went in olden days by the name Rue des Courtilles—Inn Street. Inns, cabarets, popular places of amusement stood door by door all along its course. Here, as in arrondissement XIX, we find on every side old houses and vestiges of the past, but of no particular interest beyond the quaintness of their aspect. Rue Pelleport began in the eighteenth century as an avenue encircling the park of Ménilmontant. In the grounds surrounding the reservoirs we come upon a tomb, a modern gravestone, covering the remains of a municipal functionary whose dying wish was to be buried on his own estate.
Rue Haxo, crossing Rue Belleville at No. 278 and running up into arrondissement XIX, is of tragic memory. Opening out of it at No. 85 we see the Villa des Otages. There the Commune sat in 1871, there the fate of the hostages was decided; there on the 26th May, 1871, fifty-two of those unhappy prisoners were slain. The Jesuits owned the property till its sale a few years ago. They bought and carried away the grilles and whatever else was transportable from the cells where the victims had been shut up.
Rue Ménilmontant, running parallel to Rue de Belleville, dates from the seventeenth century, when it was a country road leading to the thirteenth-century hamlet Mesnil Mantems, later Mesnil Montant. The land there belonged in great part to the abbey St-Antoine and to the priory of Ste-Croix de la Bretonnerie; a château de Ménilmontant was built, under Louis XIV, where in the wide-stretching grounds we see the reservoirs. At Nos. 155 and 157 we see old pavilions surrounded by gardens. The eighteenth-century house, No. 145, was in the nineteenth century taken by a society calling itself the St-Simoniens—some forty men who had decided to live together and have all things in common. They did not remain together long. No. 119 is the school directed by the Sœurs St-Vincent de Paul. At No. 101 we look down Rue des Cascades which till the middle of last century was a country lane: leading out of it is the old Rue de Savies, recording the ancient name of the district—Savies, i.e. montagne sauvage—wild mountain—a name changed later to Portronville (rather a mouthful), then to its euphonious present name Belleville. At its summit is an ancient fountain set there in long-past ages for the use of the monks of St-Martin of Cluny, and for the Knights-Templar; another may be seen in the grounds of No. 17.