CHAPTER XXII. LES CARMES

THE tragic story of "les Carmes" has been repeatedly told. The convent was founded in 1613 by Princesse de Conti and la Maréchale d'Ancre for the Carmes Déchaussés, who hailed from Rome. The first stone of their chapel here, dedicated to St. Joseph, was laid by Marie de' Medici; its dome was the first dome built in Paris; Italian masters painted frescoes on its walls. The Order became very popular among Parisians who liked the eau de Mélisse, which it was the nuns' business, in the secular line, to make and sell, and they were respected for their goodness to the poor. When the horrors of the Revolution were filling the city with blood, the Carmes were left unmolested, some even hidden away in secret corners of the convent with the connivance of Revolutionary chiefs. Then priests who refused to take the oath of allegiance were shut up there and to-day we see, in the old crypt, the bones of more than a hundred of them, slain by a band led by a revolutionist known as "Tape-dur"—strike-hard, A prison during the Terror, Mme Tallien, Joséphine de Beauharnais, and more than seven hundred others were shut up there, led forth thence, many of them, to execution. These tragic scenes overpast, the convent was let to a manager of public fêtes: its big hall became a ballroom, "le bal des Marronniers." That wonderful woman Camille de Soyecourt, Sœur Camille, who had previously reorganized the convent, bought it back in 1797. The garden-shed where the bodies of the murdered priests had lain was made into a memorial-chapel, razed in 1867. Then the priests' bones were carried to the crypt where we now see them. Every year in the first week of September, anniversary of the Massacre, the convent, the crypt and the ancient garden, little changed from Revolution days, are thrown open to the public, where besides the bones of the massacred priests many interesting tombs and relics are reverently cared for. It was at the Institut Catholique in the old Carmelite buildings that the principle of wireless telegraphy was discovered, in 1890.

The ancient burial-ground of St-Sulpice lies beneath the buildings Nos. 100-102 of the long Rue Vaugirard. No. 104, the Salle Montalembert, is the ancient convent of the Pères Maristes. At No. 85 we see an old-time boundary-stone and bas-reliefs.

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