The place of sand was much smaller in olden times, and from 1310, when Philip the Fair burned three heretics, to July 1830, when the last murderer was hung there, has soaked up the blood of many a famous enemy of State and Church and of innumerable notorious and obscure criminals. A permanent gibbet stood there and a market cross. Every St. John’s eve—the church and cloister of St. Jean stood behind the Hôtel de Ville—a great bonfire was lighted in the Place de Grève, fireworks were let off, and a salvo of artillery celebrated the festival. When the relations between Crown and Commune were felicitous the king himself would take part in the fête and fired the pile with a torch of white wax which was decorated with crimson velvet. A royal supper and ball in the Grande Salle concluded the revels. Not infrequently the ashes at the stake where a poor wretch had met his doom were scarcely cool before the joyous flames and fireworks of the Feu de St. Jean burst forth. The very day after the execution of the Count of Bouteville the people were dancing round the fires of St. John. The Place was often flooded by the Seine until the embankment was built in 1675. The present Hôtel de Ville, completed in 1882, is one of the finest modern edifices in Europe.
To the east of the hotel stands the church of St. Gervais, whose façade by Debrosse (1617) “is regarded,” says Félibien (1725), “as a masterpiece of art by the best architectural authorities” (“les plus intelligens en architecture”). The church, which has been several times rebuilt, occupies the site of the old sixth-century building, near which stood the elm tree where suitors waited for justice to be done by the early kings. “Attendre sous l’orme” (“To wait under the elm”) is still a proverbial expression for waiting till Doomsday. To the east of the Rue St. Martin is the quarter of the Marais (marsh) at whose eastern limit a group of street names recalls the royal palace-city of St. Paul. At the south of the Rue du Figuier, on the Place de l’Ave Maria, stands the Hôtel of the Archbishops of Sens, and near by, in the Passage Charlemagne, is the Hôtel of the royal Provost of Paris. As we cross the Rue St. Antoine to the old Place Royale (des Vosges), we may note at No. 21 the Hôtel de Mayenne—where the chamber still exists in which the leaders of the League met and decided to assassinate Henry III.—and at No. 62, the Hôtel de Sully, where Henry the Fourth’s great minister and, later, Turgot dwelt. The Place Royale occupies the site of the palace of the Tournelles built for the Duke of Bedford during the English occupation, near which Henry II. lost his life in the fatal tournament. The palace became hateful to Catherine de’ Medici, and she had it demolished. The site was subsequently used as a horse market, and there three mignons of Henry III. fought their bloody duel with three bullies of the Duke of Guise. The architecture of Henry IV. Place is little changed; the king’s and queen’s pavilions stood south and north; Richelieu occupied the present No. 21, and at No. 6 dwelt Marshal Lavardin, who was sitting in the coach when his royal master, Henry IV., was stabbed. Later this house was occupied by Victor Hugo, and is now maintained as a museum of much interest to lovers of the darling poet of nineteenth-century Paris. A little to the west, in the Rue des Francs Bourgeois, is the Hôtel Carnarvalet, built in 1544 by Jean Bullant, the architect of the Tuileries, to the design of Pierre Lescot. Jean Goujon carved, among other decorative works, the fine reliefs of the four Seasons in the quadrangle where now stands a bronze statue of Louis XIV. by Coyzevox, brought from the old Hôtel de Ville. In this noble Renaissance mansion, enlarged by F. Mansard and others, lived for twenty years Madame de Sévigné, queen of letter writers, and her Carnarvalette, as she lovingly called it, is now the civic museum of Paris, devoted to objects illustrating the history of the city. It is especially rich in exhibits bearing on the Great Revolution. Passing along the Rue des Francs Bourgeois we may note (No. 38) an old inscription which marks the scene of the assassination of the Duke of Orleans by Jean sans Peur. At the north corner of the Rue des Archives is the entrance to the National Archives, housed in the fine pseudo-classical Hôtel de Soubise, constructed in 1704 on the site of the Hôtel of the Constable de Clisson, of which the old Gothic (restored) portal exists in the Rue des Archives. It was at the Hôtel de Clisson that Charles VI., after his terrible vengeance on the revolted burgesses, agreed to remit further punishment, and for a time the mansion was known as the Hôtel des Grâces.