CHAPTER LI
THE QUAYS
THE quays of the Seine in its course through Paris are picturesque in the extreme and show at almost every step points of historic interest. That interest is strongest, the aspect of the quays most quaint and entrancing, where they pass through the heart of the city.
Let us start from the Point-du-Jour, the “Dawn of Day,” at the point where the boundary-line of Paris touches the banlieue to the south-east. The name refers to a famous duel fought here at the break of day on a memorable morning in 1743. Taking the Rive Droite, the right bank, we follow the Quai d’Auteuil which, till the closing years of the nineteenth century, was a mere roadway along which the river boats were loaded and unloaded. The fine viaduct across the river was built in 1864-65. It was fiercely bombarded in the war of 1870. On Sundays and fête-days this quaint quay is gay with holiday-makers who crowd its popular cafés, drinking-booths and shows.
Quai de Passy was made in 1842 along that part of the old high road to Versailles. Some quaint old houses still stand there. At No. 26 we see a pavilion Louis XVI. No 32 is surrounded by a fine park wherein we find vestiges of the home of the abbé Ragois, Madame de Maintenon’s confessor, and ferruginous springs. Rue Berton, leading up from the Quai, is one of the most picturesque old streets of Paris. At No. 17 we find an extensive property and a Louis XV hôtel, once the home of successive families of the noblesse and of the unhappy princesse de Lamballe, now a Maison de Santé—a private asylum. The borne at No. 24 has been there since 1731, a boundary mark between the manors of Passy and Auteuil.
Quai de la Conférence, arrondissement VIII, dates from the latter years of the eighteenth century, its name referring to the middle of the previous century, when Spanish statesmen entered Paris by a great gate in its vicinity to confer concerning the marriage of Louis XIV and Marie-Thérèse.
Cours-la-Reine, bordering the Seine along this quay, was first planted by Marie de’ Medici in 1618, on market-garden ground. It was a favourite and fashionable promenade in the time of the Fronde; a moat surrounded it and iron gates closed it in. At No. 16 of Rue Bayard leading out of it, we see the Maison de François I, its sculptures the work of Jean Goujon, brought here, bit by bit, in 1826 from the quaint old village of Moret near Fontainebleau where it was first built. On its frontage we read an inscription in Latin.
Quai des Tuileries was formed under Louis XIV along the line of Charles V’s boundary wall razed in 1670. The walls of the Louvre bordering this quay, dating originally from the time of Henri IV, who wished to join the Louvre to the Tuileries, then without the city bounds, by a gallery, were rebuilt by Napoléon III (1863-68). Place du Carrousel behind this frontage, so named from a carrousel given there by Louis XIV, in the garden known then as the parterre de Mademoiselle, dates from 1662. At the Revolution it became for the time the soi-disant Place de la Fraternité. On this fraternal (?) place political prisoners were beheaded, while the conventionels looked on from the Tuileries windows. And it was the scene of the historic days June 20th and August 10th, 1792, later of the 24th July, 1830.
L’Arc de Triomphe du Carrousel dates from 1806, set up to commemorate the campaign of 1805. The large square, in the centre of which stands the colossal statue of Gambetta, known in the time of the Second Empire as the Cour Napoléon III, was covered in previous days by a number of short, narrow streets, interlacing. Several mansions, one or two chapels, a small burial-ground, and a theatre, were there among these streets and on beyond, and the grounds of the great hospital for the blind, the “Quinze-Vingts,” stretched along the banks of the Seine at this point, extending from the hospital, in Rue St-Honoré, its site from its foundation till its removal to Rue de Charenton in 1779 (see p. 250). Alongside the Quai we see the terrace “Bord de l’Eau,” of the Tuileries gardens. The Orangerie reconstructed in 1853 was in the seventeenth century a garden wherein was the famous Cabaret Regnard, forerunner of the modern Casino. From this terrace to the Tuileries Palace ran the subterranean passage made by Napoléon I for Marie Louise, and here was the Pont-tournant, built by a monk in 1716, across which Louis XVI was led back on his return from the flight to Varennes.
The Quai de Louvre is a union of several stretches of quay known of old by different names, the most ancient stretch, that between the Pont-Neuf and Rue du Louvre, dating from the thirteenth century. In the jardin de l’Infante, bordering the palace, here the old palace of the time of Catherine de’ Medici, we see statues of Velasquez, Raffet, Meissonnier, Boucher. Reaching the houses along the quay we see at No. 10 the ancient Café de Parnasse, now the Bouillon du Pont-Neuf, where Danton was wont to pass many hours of the day and ended by wedding Gabrielle Charpentier, its landlord’s daughter. At No. 8, built by Louis XVI’s dentist, we see a fine wrought-iron balcony. And now we come to the ancient Quai de la Mégisserie, dating from the time of Charles V, first as Quai de la Sannierie, “tools for saltmaking” quay, then as Quai de la Ferraille, “iron-instrument” quay. Its present name, too, denotes a Paris industry, the preparation of sheepskins. The cross-roads where it meets Quai du Louvre and the Pont-Neuf went in olden days by the name Carrefour des Trois-Maries, also by that of Place du Four.
The “Belle Jardinière” covers the site of the Forum Episcopi, the episcopal prison of the Middle Ages, later a royal prison rebuilt in 1656 by de Gondi, the first archbishop of Paris. Its prisoners were for the most part actors and actresses. Interesting old streets open on this ancient quay. At No. 12, we turn into Rue Bertin-Poirée, a thoroughfare in the earlier years of the thirteenth century, where at No. 5 we see a quaint, time-worn sign of the Tour d’Argent, and several black-walled houses. The thirteenth-century Rue Jean-Lantier, memorizing a Parisian of that long-gone age, lies, in its upper part, across what was the Place du Chevalier du Guet, from the hôtel built there for a Knight of the Guet (the Watch) of Louis IX’s time. Rue des Lavandières, of the same period, recalls the days when lavender growers and lavender dealers lived and plied their thriving trade here. At No. 13 we see a fine heraldic shield devoid of signs; at No. 6, old bas-reliefs. Rue des Deux-Boules dates under other names from the twelfth century. At No. 2 of this quay the great painter David was born in 1748.