Lower down the Rue des Archives are the Rue de l’Homme Armé and the fifteenth-century cloisters of the monastery of the Billettes, founded at the end of the thirteenth century to commemorate the miracle of the sacred Host, which had defied the efforts of the Jew Jonathan to destroy it by steel, fire and boiling. The chapel, built in 1294 on the site of the Jew’s house, was rebuilt in 1754, and is now used as a Protestant church. The miraculous Host was preserved as late as Félibien’s time in St. Jean en Grève, and carried annually in procession on the octave of Corpus Christi. At the north end of the Rue des Archives is the site, now a square and a market, of the grisly old fortress of the Knights Templars, whose walls and towers and round church were still standing a century ago. The enclosure was a famous place of refuge for insolvent debtors and political offenders, and sheltered Rousseau in 1765 when a lettre de cachet was issued for his arrest. In the gloomy keep, which was not destroyed until 1811, were imprisoned the royal family of France after the abandonment of the Tuileries on 10th August 1792. The old market of the Temple, the centre of the petites industries of Paris, is being demolished as we write. West of this is the huge Museum of the Arts and Crafts (Conservatoire des Arts et Metiers), on the site of the abbatial buildings and lands of St. Martin of the Fields, still preserving in its structure the beautiful thirteenth-century church and refectory of the Abbey. As we turn southwards again by the Rue St. Martin we shall pass on our left one of the most curious remains of old Paris, the narrow Rue de Venise, a veritable mediæval street formerly known as the Ruelle des Usuriers, the home of the Law speculators where men almost rent each other in pieces in their mad scramble for fortune. At No. 27, the corner of the Rue Quincampoix, is the famous old inn of the Epée de Bois, now A l’Arrivée de Venise, where De Horn, a member of a princely German family, and two gentlemen assassinated and robbed a financier in open day, and were broken alive on the wheel in the Place de Grève. Marivaux and L. Racine are said, with other wits, to have frequented the old inn, and Mazarin granted letters-patent to a company of dancing masters, who met there under the management of the Roi des Violins. From these modest beginnings grew the National Academy of Dancing.
At the south end of the Rue St. Martin rises the beautiful flamboyant Gothic tower, all that remains of the great church of St. Jacques de la Boucherie. This fine monument of the past was saved by the good sense of the architect Giraud, who, when it was sold to the housebreakers during the Revolution, inserted a clause in the warrant of sale exempting the tower from demolition; it was used as a lead foundry, and twice narrowly escaped destruction by fire. Purchased later by the city it seemed safe at last, but in 1853 the prolongation of the Rue de Rivoli again threatened its existence; luckily, however, the line of the new street passed by on the north. The statue of Pascal, under the vaulting, reminds the traveller that the great thinker conducted some of his barometrical experiments on the summit, and the nineteen statues in the niches mostly represent the patron saints of the various crafts that settled under its shadow. On the Place du Châtelet, at the foot of the Pont au Change, stood the massive Grand Châtelet, originally built by Louis the Lusty near the site of the old fortress, which, during the Norman invasions defended the approach to the Grand Pont as the Petit Châtelet did the approach to the Petit Pont on the south. The Grand Châtelet, demolished in 1802, was the official seat and prison of the Provost of Paris, where he held his criminal court and organised the city watch. The Column and Fountain of Victory which now stand in the Place commemorate the victories of Napoleon in Egypt and Italy.
Nowhere in Paris has the housebreaker’s pick been plied with greater vigour than in the parallelogram enclosed by the Boulevard de Sebastopol, the Rues Etienne Marcel and du Louvre, and the Seine. The site of the immense necropolis of the Innocents[168] is now partly occupied by the Square des Innocents adorned by Lescot’s fountain.