The galleries surrounding the garden are brimful of historic associations. Besides the clubs, noted Revolutionary clubs which met in the cafés, notorious gambling-houses existed there.
Galerie Montpensier, Nos. 7-12, is the ancient Café Corazza, the famous rendezvous of the Jacobins, frequented later by Buonaparte, Talma, etc.; 36, once Café des Mille Colonnes, was so named from the multiple reflection in surrounding mirrors of its twenty pillars. At 50 we see the former Café Hollandais, which had as its sign a guillotine; at 57-60 the Café Foy, before the doors of which Desmoulins harangued the people crowding there.
Galerie Beaujolais, No. 103—now a bar and dancing-hall—is the ancient Café des Aveugles, where in the sous-sol an orchestra played, formed entirely of blind men from the Quinze-Vingts, the hospital at first close by then removed to Rue Charenton, while the Sans-Culottes met and plotted. The mural portraits of notable Revolutionists seen there is modern work.
Galerie de Valois, Nos. 119, 120, 121, Ombres Chinoises de Séraphin (1784-1855) and Café Mécanique formed practically the first Express-Bar. At 177, was formerly the cutler’s shop where Charlotte Corday bought the knife to slay Marat.
Of the three streets made by the mercantile-minded duc d’Orléans the walls of two still stand undisturbed. In Rue de Valois we see, at No. 1, the ancient pavilion and passage leading from the Place de Valois, formerly the Cour des Fontaines, where the inhabitants of Palais-Royal drew their water; at 6-8 the restaurant, Bœuf à la mode, built by Richelieu as hôtel Mélusine; at 10, the façade of hôtel de la Chancellerie d’Orléans; at 20, hôtel de la Fontaine-Martel, inhabited for a year by Voltaire, 1732-33. In Rue de Beaujolais we find the theatre which began as Théâtre des Beaujolais, was for several years towards the close of the eighteenth century a theatre of Marionnettes, and is now Théâtre Palais-Royal. Then Rue de Montpensier—1784—shows us interesting old windows, ironwork, etc.; Rue Montesquieu—1802—runs where the Collège des Bons-Enfants once stood. The Mother-house of the Restaurants Duval, so well known in every quarter of Paris, at No. 6, is on the site of the ancient Salle Montesquieu, once a popular dancing saloon, then a draper’s shop with the sign of “Le Pauvre Diable” where the founder of the world-known Bon Marché was in his youth a salesman.
Three notable churches stand in the immediate vicinity of these three palaces. The ancient St-Germain-l’Auxerrois, St-Roch, erewhile its chapel of ease, and the Oratoire. St-Germain opposite the Louvre was the Chapel Royal of past ages. Its bells pealed for royal weddings, announced the birth of princes, tolled for royal deaths, rang on every other occasion of great national importance. Its biggest bell sounded the death-knell of the Protestants on the fatal eve of St-Bartholomew’s Day, 1572. No part of the fine old church as its stands to-day dates back as a whole beyond the fifteenth century, but a chapel stood on the site as early as the year 560. A baptistery and a school were built close to the chapel about a century later, and this early foundation was the eldest daughter of Notre-Dame—the Paris Cathedral. After its destruction by the invading Normans, it was rebuilt as a fine church by Robert le Pieux, in the first years of the eleventh century, and no doubt many of its ancient stones found a place in the walls of successive rebuildings and restorations. The beautiful Gothic edifice is rich in ancient glass, marvellous woodwork, pictures, statuary and historic memorials.
L’ÉGLISE ST-GERMAIN-L’AUXERROIS
The first stone of St-Roch, in the Rue St-Honoré, was laid by Louis XIV, in 1653, but the church was not finished till nearly a century later. In the walls of its Renaissance façade we see marks of the grape-shot—the first ever used—that poured from the guns of the soldiers of the young Corsican officer, Napoléon Buonaparte, in the year 1795. Buonaparte had taken up his position opposite the church, facing the insurgent sectionnaires grouped on its broad steps. The fight that followed was the turning-point in the early career of the young officer fated to become for a time master of the city and of France. St-Roch is especially interesting on account of its many monuments of notable persons of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries and its groups of statuary. The Calvary of the Catechists’ Chapel, as seen through the opened shutters over the altar in the Chapel of the Adoration, is of striking effect.