Boulevard Auguste-Blanqui, in the eighteenth century in part of its length boulevard des Gobelins, shows us at No. 17 the last Fontaine-Marchande de Paris, now shut down. At No. 50 we see the little chapel Ste-Rosalie, with inscriptions recording the names of several victims of the fire which destroyed the bazar de la Charité in 1897. At No. 68 we used to see an eighteenth-century house of rustic aspect and pillared frontal, said to have served as a hunting-lodge for Napoléon I. Subsequently it was used as the Paris hospital laundry. In more recent times the great sculptor Rodin made the old house his studio and, when forced to evacuate, took away the interesting old woodwork and the statues of its façade.
Along boulevard St-Jacques (seventeenth century) we find several tumbledown old houses.
Boulevard Raspail is entirely modern, cut across streets of bygone ages, their houses of historic memory razed to make way for it. The recently erected No. 117 stands on the site of an old house where Victor Hugo dwelt and wrote for thirteen years and received the notable men of his day. Beneath the tree we see in the wall at No. 112 the poet loved to sit and read. Reaching the top of the boulevard we see the ancient Jesuit chapel, between Rue de Sèvres and Rue du Cherche-Midi.
Boulevard Edgar-Quinet began as boulevard de Montrouge. Its chief point of interest is the Montparnasse cemetery dating from 1826, with its numerous tombs of notable persons. There we see, too, an ivy-covered tower dating from the seventeenth century, known as la Tour-du-Moulin, once the possession of a community of monks.
Boulevard de Vaugirard (eighteenth century) included in past days the course of the modernized boulevard Pasteur. We see old houses at intervals here and in the Rue du Château which led formerly to the hunting-lodge of the duc de Maine. In Rue Dutot, leading out of boulevard Pasteur, we come to the great Institut Pasteur, built in 1900, with its wonderful laboratories, its perfect organization for its own special, invaluable branches of chemical study. The tomb of its founder is there, too, in a crypt built by his pupils, his disciples. Behind the central building we see a hospital for animals. The Lycée Buffon at No. 16 covers the site of the ancient Vaugirard cemetery. Boulevard Garibaldi began in 1789 as boulevard de Meudon, towards which it ran—at a long distance; then it took the name of Javel, its more immediate quarter, then of Grenelle through which it stretched. Some of the older houses along its course and in adjoining streets, as also along the course and adjoining streets of the present boulevard de Grenelle, its continuation, still stand, none of special interest. A famous barrier wall was in bygone days along the line where we see the Metropolitian railway. Up against its wall, just in front of the station Dupleix, many political prisoners of mark were shot in the years between 1797 and 1815.
The boulevards des Invalides, de Montparnasse and de Port-Royal make one long line. Boulevard des Invalides has its chief point of interest at No. 33, the old hôtel Biron, later the convent of the Sacré-Cœur, then Rodin’s studio, and Paris home—now in part the museum he bequeathed to Paris (see pp. 192, 194).
Boulevard Montparnasse, formed in 1760, shows us many fine eighteenth-century hôtels and some smaller structures of the same period. On the site of No. 25, the hôtel of the duc de Vendôme, grandson of Henri IV, was the home of the children of Louis XIV by Madame de Montespan.
CLOÎTRE DE L’ABBAYE DE PORT-ROYAL
