CHAPTER XLVIII. PERE-LACHAISE

ARRONDISSEMENT XX. (MENILMONTANT)

THE lower end of the long Rue de Belleville, its odd-number side in arrondissement XIX, went in olden days by the name Rue des Courtilles—Inn Street. Inns, cabarets, popular places of amusement stood door by door all along its course. Here, as in arrondissement XIX, we find on every side old houses and vestiges of the past, but of no particular interest beyond the quaintness of their aspect. Rue Pelleport began in the eighteenth century as an avenue encircling the park of Ménilmontant. In the grounds surrounding the reservoirs we come upon a tomb, a modern gravestone, covering the remains of a municipal functionary whose dying wish was to be buried on his own estate.

Rue Haxo, crossing Rue Belleville at No. 278 and running up into arrondissement XIX, is of tragic memory. Opening out of it at No. 85 we see the Villa des Otages. There the Commune sat in 1871, there the fate of the hostages was decided; there on the 26th May, 1871, fifty-two of those unhappy prisoners were slain. The Jesuits owned the property till its sale a few years ago. They bought and carried away the grilles and whatever else was transportable from the cells where the victims had been shut up.

Rue Ménilmontant, running parallel to Rue de Belleville, dates from the seventeenth century, when it was a country road leading to the thirteenth-century hamlet Mesnil Mantems, later Mesnil Montant. The land there belonged in great part to the abbey St-Antoine and to the priory of Ste-Croix de la Bretonnerie; a château de Ménilmontant was built, under Louis XIV, where in the wide-stretching grounds we see the reservoirs. At Nos. 155 and 157 we see old pavilions surrounded by gardens. The eighteenth-century house, No. 145, was in the nineteenth century taken by a society calling itself the St-Simoniens—some forty men who had decided to live together and have all things in common. They did not remain together long. No. 119 is the school directed by the Sœurs St-Vincent de Paul. At No. 101 we look down Rue des Cascades which till the middle of last century was a country lane: leading out of it is the old Rue de Savies, recording the ancient name of the district—Savies, i.e. montagne sauvage—wild mountain— a name changed later to Portronville (rather a mouthful), then to its euphonius present name Belleville. At its summit is an ancient fountain set there in long-past ages for the use of the monks of St-Martin of Cluny, and for the Knights-Templar; another may be seen in the grounds of No. 17.

On the Place de Ménilmontant we see the well-built modern church Notre-Dame-de-la-Croix, on its northern side the old Rue and passage Eupatoria. The quaint Rue de la Mare, a country road in the seventeenth century, and Rue des Couronnes have interesting old passages running into them.

Passing down Rue des Pyrénées, connected on either side with short old-time streets and passages, we come to the Square Gambetta, often called Square Père-Lachaise, and the immense Paris cemetery, the great point of interest of the 20th arrondissement. The site was known in long-past days as the Champ de l'Eveque—the bishop's field. It was presently put to a very unecclesi-astical use, for a rich grocer bought the land and built thereon a folie, i.e. an extravagant mansion. In the seventeenth century the Jesuits bought the property and named it Mont-Louis. Louis XIV paid a visit to the Jesuits there and subsequently bought the estate and gave it to his confessor, Père Lachaise. When Père Lachaise died the Jesuits regained the property, held it till the Revolution, when it was seized by the State and became the possession of the Municipality. Passing along the avenues and alleys of this vast, silent city on the hill-side, we see tombs of every possible description and style, wonderful monuments and mortuary chapels, some very beautiful, others ...! and a huge crematorium. Men and women of many nations and of many varying creeds are gathered there. Seen on the eve of All Saints' Day or the day following, when fresh flowers are on every grave, lamps burning in almost every tombstone chapel, the relatives and the friends of the dead crowding in reverent attitude along its paths, the scene is singularly impressive.

On its north-east boundary we find the tragic Mur des Fédérés, the wall against which the insurgents were shot after the Commune in 1871. Blood-red scarves, blood-red wreaths mark the graves there, and we see the names of many who had no graves on that spot chalked up against that tragic wall.

On the south side of the cemetery, running eastward, we turn into the old Rue de Bagnolet, the road leading to the village of the name. Old houses line this street and the streets adjoining it, and half-way up its incline on the little Place St-Blaise we see the ancient church St-Germain de Charonne, dating from the eleventh century. An inscription on a wall within tells us Germain, the busy bishop of Auxerre, first met Genevieve of Nanterre here, and tradition says the future patron saint of Paris took her vows on the spot.

There was an oratory on the site in the fifth century or little later. The eleventh-century edifice was rebuilt in the fifteenth century, but we still see some of the blackened walls of the earlier structure. The chevet, i.e. the chancel-end, was destroyed in the wars of the Fronde. We see, distinctly traced, the space it occupied bounded by the Mur des Soeurs, against which in long-gone days were no doubt stalls for the nuns of a neighbouring convent. Some ancient tombstones, too, are there, once within the chancel. Mounting the broad steps we enter the old church to find curious old pillars, ancient inscriptions, coats of arms, and in one chapel a little good old glass.

Making our way to the little cemetery of Charonne behind, we find in its centre a grass-grown space once the fosse commune, one of the pits into which the guillotine's were flung in Revolution days. Beyond, near the boundary wall, we see a railed-in tomb, surmounted by the figure of a man in Louis XVIII costume—Begue, Robespierre's private secretary. The Revolution over, his chief dead, the man whose hand had prepared for signature so many tragic documents withdrew to the rural district of Charonne, beyond the Paris bounds, led a secluded, peaceful life, cultivated his bit of land and set about preparing for his exit from this earth by designing his own tomb. He sat for the bronze statue we see here, and had the iron railing made to show all the implements of Revolutionary torture with which he was familiar, the wheel that worked the guillotine, the tenailles, etc. ...!

Higher up towards Bagnolet we come to a vestige of the ancient Château, a pavilion Louis XV, forming part of the modern Hospice Debrousse.

Contents