CHAPTER XXXIII. PARC MONCEAU

WE have already referred to Avenue Wagram. Modern buildings stretch along the whole course of the other eleven avenues branching from Place de l'Étoile. Avenue Hoche leads us to Parc Monceau, laid out on lands belonging in past days to the Manor of Clichy, sold to the prince d'Orléans in 1778, arranged as a smart jardin anglais for Philippe-Égalité in 1785, the property of the nation in 1794, restored to the Orléans by Louis XVIII, bought by the State in 1852, given to the city authorities in 1870. The Renaissance arcade is a relic of the ancient hôtel de Ville, burnt down in 1871 The oval bassin, called "la Naumachie," with its Corinthian columns, came from an old church at St-Denis, Notre-Dame de la Rotonde, built as the burial-place of, the Valois, razed in 1814. Avenue Friedland was opened in 1719, across the site of a famous eighteenth-century public garden and several demolished hôtels, and lengthened to its present extent some fifty years later. Avenue Marceau was of yore Avenue Joséphine.

Rue de Monceau, opened in 1801, lies along the line of the old road to the vanished village of Monceau or Musseau. Rue du Rocher, along the course of a Roman road, has gone by different names in its different parts. Its upper end, waste ground until well into the nineteenth century, at the close of the eighteenth century was aRevolutionists' meeting-place, and there in the tragic months of 1794 many guillotinés were buried, among them the two Robespierres. In later years a dancing saloon was set up on the spot. It was a district of windmills. The Moulin de la Marmite, Moulin Boute-à-Feu, Moulin-des-Prés, stood on the high ground above Gare St-Lazare until a century ago. Few vestiges of the past remain. Rue de Labor de was known in 1788 as Rue des Grésillons, i.e. Flour Street (grésillons, the flour in its third stage of grinding). Then it became Chemin des Por-cherons, and the district was known as that of la Petite-Pologne, a reference to the habitation there of the due d'Anjou, who was King of Poland. In the courtyard of No. 4 we find an ancient boundary-stone, once in Rue de l'Arcade, where it marked the bounds of the city under Louis XV.

Rue de la Pépinière, its name and that of the barracks there so well known of late to British soldiers, recording the site of the royal nursery grounds of a past age, was marked out as early as 1555, but opened only in 1782. The barracks, first built in 1763 for the Gardes Françaises, was rebuilt under Napoleon III. All other streets in the neighbourhood are modern.

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