CHAPTER XXXI. LES CHAMPS-ELYSÉES

THIS wonderful avenue stretching through the whole length of the arrondissement reached in olden days only to the rural district of Chaillot, and was known as the Grande Allée-du-Roule, later as Avenue des Tuileries. Colbert, Louis XIV's great minister, first made it a tree-planted avenue. The gardens bordering it on either side between Place de la Concorde and Avenue d'Antin, were laid out by Le Nôtre, 1670, as Crown land. Cafés, restaurants, toy-stalls, etc., were set up there from the first. The Palais de Glace is on the site of a Panorama which existed till its destruction by fire in 1855. The far-famed Café des Ambassadeurs, set up in the eighteenth century, was rebuilt in 1841. The no less famous cirque de l'Impératrice was razed in 1900.

The Rond-Point des Champs-Elysées was first laid out in 1670, but the houses we see there now are all modern. Avenue d'Antin stretching on either side of it, old only in the part leading from Cours-la-Reine, was planted in 1723 by the due d'Orléans. Marguerite Gauthier (la Dame aux Camélias) lived at No. 9. At No. 3 Avenue Matignon Heine died in his room on the fifth story (1856). Avenue Montaigne was known in 1731 as Allée des Veuves. It remained an alley—Allée Montaigne—till 1852. The thatched dwelling of Mme Tallien stood at its starting-point, near the Seine. There her divorced and destitute husband was forced to accept a shelter at the hands of his ex-wife, become princesse de Chimay; there the Revolutionist died in 1820. We see only modern houses along the Avenue of to-day. Rue Matignon was opened across the ancient Jardin d'hiver where fine tropical plants ere-while had flourished. No. 12 was the Vénerie Impériale.

Avenue des Champs-Elysées is bordered on both sides by modern mansions. No. 25, hôtel de la Païve, of late years the Traveller's Club, during the war an ambulance, represents the style of the Second Empire. Avenue Gabriel with its grand mansions was formed in 1818 on the Marais-des-Gourdes—marshy land. The Rue Marbeuf was in the eighteenth century Ruelle des Marais, then Rue des Gourdes. Its present name recalls the Louis XV Folie Marboeuf once there. Few and far between are the ancient vestiges to be found among the modern structures we see on every side around us here. Rue Chaillot, in bygone days the chief street of the village of Chaillot, was taken within the Paris bounds in 1860. It was a favourite street for residence in the nineteenth century. Rue Bassano, entirely modern now, existed in part as Ruelle des Jardins in the early years of the eighteenth century. Rue Galilée was Chemin des Bouchers in 1790, then Rue du Banquet.

So we come to la Place de l'Étoile, the high ground known in long-gone times as "la Montagne du Roule." Till far into the eighteenth century it was without the city bounds and beyond the Avenue des Champs-Elysées which ended at Rue de Chaillot, a tree-studded, unlevelled, grass-grown octagonal stretch of land. Then it was made round and even, and became a favourite and fashionable promenade, known as l'Étoile de Chaillot, or the Rond-Point de Neuilly. The site had long been marked out for the erection of an important monument when Napoleon decreed the construction there of the Arc de Triomphe. The first stone of the arch was laid by Chalgrin in 1806, the Emperor and his new wife, on their wedding-day passed beneath a temporary Arc de Triomphe made of cloth, as the stone structure was not yet finished. Of the statuary which decorate the arch, the most noted group is the Départ, by Rude. The frieze shows the going forth to battle and the return of Napoleon's armies, with the names of his generals engraved beneath. (On July 14th, 1919, the French Army and contingents from the armies of the Allies, victorious after the dread war which had raged since August, 1914, passed in triumphal procession beneath the Arch, and the chains which, since 1871, had barred its passage, were taken away for good. On November nth, when the "unknown soldier" was buried in Westminster Abbey, the "poilu inconnu" was laid beneath the Arc de Triomphe, and is now buried there.)

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