Boulevard St-Martin (seventeenth century). Its course was marked out, its trees planted a few years earlier than that of boulevard St-Denis. On its handsome blackened Porte, built in 1674-75, we read the words: “A Louis-le-Grand pour avoir pris deux fois Besançon et vaincu les Armées allemandes, espagnoles et hollandaises.” Like Porte St-Denis, it has been three times restored. The Allies passed beneath it on entering Paris in 1814. The first théâtre de la Porte St-Martin was built in the short period of seventy-five days to replace, with the least delay possible, the Opera-house near the Palais-Royal, burnt down in 1781. It was the Opera until 1793. The structure we see was erected in 1873, after the disastrous conflagration caused by the Communards two years previously. We see theatres and concert-halls along the whole course of the boulevard. The Ambigu at No. 2 dating from 1828 was founded sixty years earlier as a marionnette show on the site of the present Folies Dramatiques. This part of the boulevard was formerly on a steep incline, with steps up to the théâtre Porte St-Martin. Its ground was levelled in 1850. The novelist Paul de Kock lived at No 8. No. 17 was the abode of the great painter Meissonnier. The théâtre de la Renaissance is modern (1872), built on the site of the famous restaurant Deffieux which had flourished there for 133 years. It was for several years Sarah Bernhardt’s theatre.
Boulevard du Temple, its trees first planted in the year 1668 when it was a road stretching right across the area now known as Place de la République, was at that particular point a centre of places of amusement of every description—theatres, music-halls, marionnette-shows. All were closed, razed to the ground, to make way for the grand new place laid out there in 1862. Of the old walls within which Parisians had for long years previously found so much distraction and merriment, vestiges remain only at Nos. 48, 46, 44, 42 of the boulevard. No. 42 is on the site of the house where Fieschi’s infernal machine was placed in 1835. The restaurant at No. 29 is on the site of the once widely known Café du Jardin Turc. The théâtre Dejazet records the name of the famous actrice. The two short streets, Rue de Crussol and Rue du Grand Prieuré, were cut across the grounds of the Grand Prieuré de France in the latter years of the eighteenth century.
Boulevard Filles-du-Calvaire, named from the ancient convent, dates only from 1870. The streets connected with it are older. Rue des Filles-du-Calvaire was a thoroughfare in the last years of the seventeenth century, and at No. 13 we find traces of the ancient convent. Rue Froissard and Rue des Commines, memorizing the two old French chroniclers, were opened in 1804 right across the site of the convent and its grounds. Rue St-Sébastien dates back to the early years of the seventeenth century, and we see there many interesting old houses. No. 19, with its Gothic vaulting, is probably the hôtel d’Ormesson de Noyseau, a distinguished nobleman, guillotined at the Revolution. Rue du Pont-aux-Choux, made in the sixteenth century across market gardens, got its name from an old bridge which spanned a drain there.
Boulevard Beaumarchais began in 1670 as boulevard St-Antoine. No. 113, a sixteenth-century structure, was known till 1850 as the Château. The words we see engraved on its walls—“A la Petite Chaise”—refer to a tragic incident. The head of the princesse de Lamballe, carried by the Revolutionists on a pike, was plunged into a pail of water set on a low chair placed up against this wall to clear it of the dribbling blood. No. 99, its big doors brought here from the Temple palace, is the hôtel de Cagliostro, the famous sorcerer.
Rue des Arquebusiers, opening at No. 91, dates from 1720, when it was Rue du Harlay-au-Marais. Santerre lived here for a time. No. 2 stands on the site of the house where Beaumarchais died in 1790.
Boulevard Henri IV is modern (1866), cut across the site of two old convents. Rue Castex leads out of it where stood once the convent des Filles de Ste-Marie; its chapel, now a Protestant church, is entered at No. 5. The Caserne des Célestins was built in 1892 on the site of part of the large and celebrated convent of the Célestins, an Order founded in 1244 by the priest who became Pope Celestin V. The Carmelites who at first were established here, greatly disturbed by inundations from the Seine who overflowed her banks in those long-past ages, even as she does to-day, quitted their quarters on this site. The Célestins who came to Paris in 1352 and took over these abandoned dwellings were protected and enriched by Charles V, inhabiting the Palais St-Pol close by. The Order was suppressed in 1778, before the Revolution suppressed all Orders—for the time; and in 1785 the convent here was taken for the first deaf and dumb institution organized by abbé de l’Épée. The convent chapel with its numerous royal tombs, the bodies of some royal personages, the hearts of others, was razed in 1849. Some vestiges of the convent walls remained standing till 1904. Where the boulevard meets the Quai des Célestins, we see now a circular group of worn, ivy-grown stones; an inscription tells us these old stones once formed part of the Tour de la Liberté of the demolished Bastille. They were unearthed in making the Paris Metropolitan Railway a few years ago. The birds make the remnant of that old tower of liberty their own to-day and passers-by stop regularly to feed them.
Crossing the Seine we come to the boulevard St-Germain, beginning at boulevard Sully in arrondissement V, stretching right through arrondissement VI and ending at the Quai d’Orsay near the Chambre des Députés in arrondissement VII. Though in name so historic and running across interesting ground, the boulevard is of modern formation. It has swept away a whole district of ancient streets. The Nos. 61 to 49 are ancient, all that remains of Rue des Noyers erewhile there. At No. 67 Alfred de Musset was born (1810). The théâtre de Cluny is on the site of part of the vanished couvent des Mathurins. The firm Hachette stands where was once a Jews’ cemetery. No. 160 was the restaurant now razed where Thackeray, when a young student at the Beaux-Arts, took his meals. A sign-board he painted long hung there. We see some old houses of the ancient Rue des Boucheries between Nos. 162 and 148. At No. 166 we turn for an instant into Rue de l’Échaudé, dating from the fourteenth century, when it was a chemin along the abbey moat, a street of ancient houses. The word échaudé, a confectioner’s term used for a certain kind of three-cornered cake, signifies in topographical language a triangle formed by the junction of three streets. The pavement-stones before Nos. 137 to 135 cover the site of the ancient abbey prison. Rue des Ciseaux bordered in olden days the Collège des Écossais. The statue of Diderot at No. 170 was set up on his centenary as close as could be to the house he dwelt in, in Rue de l’Égout. The hôtel Taranne records the name of the thirteenth-century street of which some vestiges remain on the odd-number side of the boulevard between No. 175 and Place St-Germain-des-Prés, where Saint-Simon lived and wrote. The little grassy square round the house at No. 186 was originally a leper’s burial-ground, then, from 1576 to 1604, a Protestant cemetery. Looking into the Rue St-Thomas-d’Aquin, once passage des Jacobins, we see the church which began early in the years of the eighteenth century as a Jacobin convent. At the Revolution it was made into a Temple of Peace! The frescoes of the ceiling are by Lemoine.
The modern boulevard Raspail opening at No. 103 brought about the destruction of several ancient streets; where the boulevard St-Germain meets Rue St-Dominique three or four fine old mansions were razed to the ground and that old street, previously extending to Rue des Saints-Pères, cut short here. A fine eighteenth-century hôtel stood till 1861 on the site of the Bureaux du Ministère des Travaux Publics at No. 244. The minister’s official residence at No. 246, dating from 1722, is on the site of one still older, at one time the abode of the dowager duchess of Orleans. That portion of the Ministère de la Guerre which we see along this boulevard is a modern construction. We see modern structures also at Nos. 280, 282, 284, all on the site of fine old hôtels demolished at the making of the boulevard. At some points of boulevard Raspail, stretching from boulevard St-Germain to beyond the cemetery Montparnasse, we come upon vestiges of the ancient streets demolished to make way for it; here and there an old house, a fine doorway, and at No. 112 a lusty tree, its trunk protruding through the garden wall, said to be the tree beneath whose shade Victor Hugo sat and pondered or maybe wrote several of his best-known works, while living in an old house close by.
Starting now from the Place de la République, we pass up the busy modern boulevard Magenta without finding any point of special interest. The Cité du Wauxhall at No. 6 was opened in 1840 on the grounds of a more ancient Wauxhall. The big hospital Lariboisière in the adjoining Rue Ambroise-Parée was built from 1839 to 1848, on the clos St-Lazare and named at first Hôpital Louis-Philippe. Its present name is in memory of the countesse la Riboisière, who gave three million francs for the hospital. The boulevards Barbes and Ornano run on from boulevard Magenta to the district of Montmartre. They are of nineteenth-century formation and without historic interest. No. 10, boulevard Barbes, was once the dancing saloon “du Grand Turc.”
The bustling boulevard de Strasbourg which boulevard Magenta crosses, a continuation of the no less bustling boulevard Sébastopol, both great commercial thoroughfares, was formed in the middle of the nineteenth century across the lines of many ancient streets and courts. Ancient streets ran also where we now have the broad boulevard du Palais on l’Ile de la Cité, crossing the spot on the erewhile Place du Palais where of yore criminals were set out for public view and marked with a red-hot iron.