The Gare Montparnasse at No. 66 is a modern structure on the site of an older railway station. Impasse Robiquet at No. 81 dates from the fifteenth century. No. 87 is an old hunting-lodge, inhabited in more modern days by Pierre Leroux, who was associated with George Sand in founding the Revue Indépendante. Rue du Montparnasse, opening out of the boulevard, is a seventeenth-century street cut across land belonging in part to the church St-Laurent de Vaugirard, in part to the Hôtel-Dieu. The church Notre-Dame-des-Champs is modern (1867-75). Rue Stanislas, opening by the church at No. 91, was cut across the grounds of the hôtel Terray, in the early years of the nineteenth century, where the Collège Stanislas, named after Louis XVIII, was first instituted. At No. 28 of the Rue Vavin, opening at No. 99, stood, till last year, the ancient Pavillon de l’Horloge, a vestige of the old hôtel Traversière. The short Rue de la Grande Chaumière, opened in 1830 as Rue Chamon, memorizes by its present name a famous Latin quarter dancing-hall close by. Here artists’ models gather for hire at midday each Monday. Rue de Chevreuse, opening at No. 125, was a thoroughfare as early as the year 1210, bordering an hôtel de Chevreuse et Rohan-Guéménée. A famous eighteenth-century porcelaine factory stood close here.
Boulevard de Port-Royal: here at No. 119 we see the abbey built during the first half of the seventeenth century. Hither came the good nuns of Port-Royal-des-Champs in the valley of the Chevreuse, a convent founded in the early years of the thirteenth century by Mathieu de Montmorency and his wife Mathilde de Garlande and given to the Order of the Bernardines. In the sixteenth century learned men desiring solitude found it in that remote convent. Pascal made frequent sojourns there. Quarrels between Jesuits and Jansenists brought about the destruction of the convent of Port-Royal-des-Champs in 1710. The Paris Port-Royal went on until 1790. Then the abbey became a prison, like so many other important buildings, religious and secular; its name was changed to Port-Libre, and numerous prisoners of note, Couthon among the rest, were shut up there. In the year IV of the Convention, it became what it is on a more complete scale to-day, a Maternity Hospital. Women-students sleep in the ancient nuns’ cells. Most of the old abbey buildings are still intact. The tombstone of the recluse, Arnauld of Andilly, which we see in the sacristy, was found beneath the pavement some years ago. The portal is modern. The annexe of the hospital Cochin at No. 111 is an ancient Capucine convent; its chapel serves as the hospital lecture-room.
Rue Pierre-Nicole, opening out of the boulevard at No. 90, was cut in modern days across the grounds of the ancient Carmelite convent Val-de-Grâce. In the prolongation of the street we see some remains of the convent. Here in ages long gone by was a Roman cemetery, where earth burial as well as cremation was the rule. At No. 17 bis of this street we see the house once the oratory of Mademoiselle de la Vallière, who as Sœur Louise de la Miséricorde passed the last thirty-six years of her life in pénitence here. The Marine barracks, Caserne Lourcine, at No. 37 of the boulevard, are on the site of ancient barracks of the Gardes Françaises, and record the former name of the Rue Broca, which we look into here, a street of ancient dwellings. The hospital Broca, so named after the famous doctor, was formed of part of the old convent of the Cordelières, founded in 1259 by Margaret de Provence, wife of Louis XI. The convent was pillaged in the sixteenth century by the Béarnais troops, sequestrated and sold in Revolution days, to become in 1836 Hôpital Lourcine and in 1892 Broca.
REMAINS OF THE CONVENT DES CAPUCINES
The two great latter-day Paris boulevards are boulevard Haussmann and boulevard Malesherbes. The first, planned and partially built by the Préfet de la Seine whose name it bears, running through the 8th arrondissement and into the 9th, begun in 1857, is wholly modern save for one single house, No. 173, at the juncture of Rue du Faubourg St-Honoré, dating from the eighteenth century; boulevard Malesherbes dates from about the same period. Joining this boulevard at No. 11 is Avenue Velasquez, where, at No. 7, we find the hôtel Cernuschi bequeathed by its owner to Paris as an Oriental Museum. The handsome church St-Augustin is of recent erection. Besides these stately boulevards and some few others devoid of historic interest, there are boulevards encircling Paris on every side, along the boundary-lines of the city, with at intervals the city gates. The boulevards in the vicinity of the Bois de Boulogne are studded with villas and mansions, many of them very luxurious. There are modern mansions, modern dwellings of various categories along the course of all the other boulevards of this wide circumference bordering the fortifications, but with few associations of the least historic interest, beyond that of their nomenclature memorizing, in many instances, Napoléon’s greatest generals.
Boulevard de la Villette is formed of several ancient boulevards, and the name records the existence there in past days of the “petite ville,” a series of small buildings, dependencies of the leper-house St-Lazare, first erected on a site known in the twelfth century as the district of Rouvray. The black-walled Rotonde we see was the Custom House first built in 1789, burnt down in 1871, and rebuilt on the old plan. The Meaux barrier was there, bounding the highway to the north, a point of great military interest. Louis XVI returned this way to Paris after the flight to Varennes. The Imperial Guard passed here in triumph in 1807, after their successful campaigns in Germany. Louis XVIII came through the barrier gate here in 1814. The inn where the armistice was signed in 1814 was on the Rond-Point opposite the barrier. At No. 130 of the boulevard we come to Place du Combat, a name referring to no military struggle, but to bull-fights, perhaps to cock-fights, which took place here till into the nineteenth century. Close by is the site of the great city gallows, the gibet de Maufaucon of bygone days (see [p. 240]). And here in its vicinity, in the little Rue Vicq d’Azir, dating from the early years of last century, died the former Paris public executioner Deibler in 1904.
On the opposite side of Paris, in the boulevard Kellermann, the Porte de Bicêtre recalls the English occupation of long-past ages or may be an English colonization of later date, for Bicêtre is a corruption of the name Winchester. These boulevards of the 13th arrondissement are ragman’s quarters, the district of the Paris chiffonniers. Here at the poterne des Peupliers the Bièvre enters Paris to be entirely lost to view nowadays in its course through the city beneath the pavements.
The boulevards in the vicinity of Père Lachaise, Belleville, Ménilmontant, Charonne, date from 1789. The short Rue des Panoyaux, opening out of the boulevard Ménilmontant is said to owe its name to the days when vines grew here, one bearing a seedless grape: “pas noyau”—no kernel. Mention of the village of Charonne is found in documents dating from the first years of the eleventh century. The territory was church land, for the most part, owned by the old abbey St-Magliore and the Paris Cathedral.