PLACE DE LA GRÈVE
The present-day Quai de l’Hôtel de Ville is the successor of the Quai des Ormes, which dates from the fourteenth century, and the Quai de la Grève, which existed as early as 1254, and which descended by an easy slope to the strand from which it took its name.
Adjoining the quai was the Place de la Grève, which approximates the present Place de l’Hôtel de Ville.
A near neighbour of the Hôtel de Ville is the Tour de St. Jacques la Boucherie, where sits to-day Paris’s clerk of the weather.
It was here that Marguerite de Valois, in company with the Duchesse de Nevers, repaired from their pilgrimage to the Cimetière des Innocents, to view the results of the Huguenot massacre of the preceding night.
“‘And where are you two going?’ inquired Catherine, the queen’s mother. ‘To see some rare and curious Greek books found at an old Protestant pastor’s, and which have been taken to the Tour de St. Jacques la Boucherie,’ replied the inquisitive and erudite Marguerite. For, be it recalled, her knowledge and liking of classical literature was most profound.”
This fine Gothic tower, which is still a notable landmark, is the only relique of the Church of St. Jacques. A bull of Pope Calixtus II., dated 1119, first makes mention of it, and François I. made it a royal parish church.
The tower itself was not built until 1508, having alone cost 1,350 livres. It has often been pictured and painted, and to-day it is a willing or unwilling sitter to most snap-shot camerists who come within focus of it, but no one has perceived the spirit of its genuine old-time flavour as did Méryon, in his wonderful etching—so sought for by collectors—called “Le Stryge.”
The artist’s view-point, taken from the gallery of Nôtre Dame,—though in the early nineteenth century,—with the grotesque head and shoulders of one of those monstrous figures, half-man, half-beast, with which the galleries of Nôtre Dame are peopled, preserves, with its very simplicity and directness, an impression of Vieux Paris which is impossible to duplicate to-day.
The Place de la Grève was for a time, at least, the most famous or infamous of all the places of execution in Paris. One reads of it largely in “Marguerite de Valois” in this connection, and in “Le Vicomte de Bragelonne” it again crops up, but in a much more pleasant manner.