On the Place de Ménilmontant we see the well-built modern church Notre-Dame-de-la-Croix, on its northern side the old Rue and passage Eupatoria. The quaint Rue de la Mare, a country road in the seventeenth century, and Rue des Couronnes have interesting old passages running into them.
Passing down Rue des Pyrénées, connected on either side with short old-time streets and passages, we come to the Square Gambetta, often called Square Père-Lachaise, and the immense Paris cemetery, the great point of interest of the 20th arrondissement. The site was known in long-past days as the Champ de l’Evêque—the bishop’s field. It was presently put to a very unecclesiastical use, for a rich grocer bought the land and built thereon a folie, i.e. an extravagant mansion. In the seventeenth century the Jesuits bought the property and named it Mont-Louis. Louis XIV paid a visit to the Jesuits there and subsequently bought the estate and gave it to his confessor, Père Lachaise. When Père Lachaise died the Jesuits regained the property, held it till the Revolution, when it was seized by the State and became the possession of the Municipality. Passing along the avenues and alleys of this vast, silent city on the hill-side, we see tombs of every possible description and style, wonderful monuments and mortuary chapels, some very beautiful, others ...! and a huge crematorium. Men and women of many nations and of many varying creeds are gathered there. Seen on the eve of All Saints’ Day or the day following, when fresh flowers are on every grave, lamps burning in almost every tombstone chapel, the relatives and the friends of the dead crowding in reverent attitude along its paths, the scene is singularly impressive.
On its north-east boundary we find the tragic Mur des Fédérés, the wall against which the insurgents were shot after the Commune in 1871. Blood-red scarves, blood-red wreaths mark the graves there, and we see the names of many who had no graves on that spot chalked up against that tragic wall.
LE MUR DES FÉDÉRÉS
On the south side of the cemetery, running eastward, we turn into the old Rue de Bagnolet, the road leading to the village of the name. Old houses line this street and the streets adjoining it, and half-way up its incline on the little Place St-Blaise we see the ancient church St-Germain de Charonne, dating from the eleventh century. An inscription on a wall within tells us Germain, the busy bishop of Auxerre, first met Geneviève of Nanterre here, and tradition says the future patron saint of Paris took her vows on the spot. There was an oratory on the site in the fifth century or little later. The eleventh-century edifice was rebuilt in the fifteenth century, but we still see some of the blackened walls of the earlier structure. The chevet, i.e. the chancel-end, was destroyed in the wars of the Fronde. We see, distinctly traced, the space it occupied bounded by the Mur des Sœurs, against which in long-gone days were no doubt stalls for the nuns of a neighbouring convent. Some ancient tombstones, too, are there, once within the chancel. Mounting the broad steps we enter the old church to find curious old pillars, ancient inscriptions, coats of arms, and in one chapel a little good old glass.
Making our way to the little cemetery of Charonne behind, we find in its centre a grass-grown space once the fosse commune of the pits into which the guillotinés were flung in Revolution days. Beyond, near the boundary wall, we see a railed-in tomb, surmounted by the figure of a man in Louis XVIII costume—Bègue, Robespierre’s private secretary. The Revolution over, his chief dead, the man whose hand had prepared for signature so many tragic documents withdrew to the rural district of Charonne, beyond the Paris bounds, led a secluded, peaceful life, cultivated his bit of land and set about preparing for his exit from this earth by designing his own tomb. He sat for the bronze statue we see here, and had the iron railing made to show all the implements of Revolutionary torture with which he was familiar, the wheel that worked the guillotine, the tenailles, etc....!
Higher up towards Bagnolet we come to a vestige of the ancient Château, a pavilion Louis XV, forming part of the modern Hospice Debrousse.