CHAPTER XXXIX. ON TRAGIC GROUND

From end to end it shows us historic vestiges. It has played from earliest times an all-important part in French history, leading, when without the city walls, to Paris and the Bastille from the fortress of Vincennes and lands beyond, while from the time of its incorporation with Paris, popular political demonstrations unfailingly had their mise en scène in the Rue du Faubourg St-Antoine. In the seventeenth century it was a country road in its upper part, the Chaussée St-Antoine, and led to the fine Abbaye St-Antoine-des-Champs; the lower part was the "Chemin de Vincennes." Along this road, between Picpus and the Bastille, the Frondeurs played their war-games. Turenne's army fired from the heights of Charonne, while the Queen-Mother, her son, Louis XIII, and Mazarin watched from Père-la-Chaise. At No. 8 lived the regicide Pépin, Fieschis' accomplice. The sign, the "Pascal Lamb," at No. 18 dates from the eighteenth century. We see ancient signs all along the street. The Square Trousseau at No. 118 is on the site of the first "Hospice des Enfants Trouvés," built in 1674 on abbey land. In 1792 it became the "Hôpital des Enfants de la Patrie." The head of princesse de Lamballe was buried in the chapel graveyard there. What is supposed to beher skull was dug up here in 1904. In 1839 trie hospital was made an annexe of the hôtel-Dieu, in 1880 it was Hôpital Trousseau, then in the first years of this twentieth century razed to the ground. At No. 184 the hospital St-Antoine retains some vestiges of the royal abbey that stood there in long-gone days. Founded in 1198, it was like all the big abbeys of the age a small town in itself, surrounded by high fortified walls. At the Revolution it was sequestrated, the church demolished. Till the early years of the nineteenth century, one of the most popular of Paris fairs was held on the site of the old abbey, la Foire aux pains d'épices, which had its origin in an Easter week market held within the abbey precincts. The house No. 186 is on the site of the little chapel St-Pierre, razed in 1797, where of old kings of France lay in state after their death. Two daughters of Charles V were buried there. The fountain and butcher's shop opposite the hospital date from the time of Louis XV, built by the nuns of the abbey and called la Petite Halle. The nuns alone had the right to sell meat to the population of the district in those old days. Almost every house and courtyard and passage along the whole course of this ancient thoroughfare dates, as we see, from days long past. In the courts at Nos. 245 and 253 we find old wells.

So we reach Place de la Nation, of yore Place du Trône, styled in Revolution days Place du Trône Renversé, and the guillotine set up there "en permanence": there 1340 persons fell beneath its knife, 54 in one tragic day. The two pavilions on the eastern side of the place were the custom-houses of pre-Revolution days. The monument in the centre is modern (1899). Of the streets and avenues leading from the place, that of supreme interest is the old Rue Picpus, a curious name explained by some etymologists as a corruption of Pique-Pusse, and referring to a sixteenth-century monk of the neighbourhood who succeeded in curing a number of people of an epidemic which studded their arms with spots like flea-bites and who was called henceforth "le Père Pique-Pusse." In previous days the upper part of the road—it was a road then, not yet a street—had been known as Chemin de la Croix-Rouge. Nos. 4 and 6 are the remains of an eighteenth-century pavilion, a maison de santé—house of detention—where in 1786 St. Just was shut up for petty thefts committed in his own family. No. 10, a present-day maison de santé, is on the site of a hunting-lodge of Henri IV. At No. 35 we see the Oratoire de Picpus, where is the statuette of Notre-Dame, de la Paix, once on the door of the Capucine convent, Rue St-Honoré; and here, behind the convent garden, we find the cimetière Picpus and the railed pit where the bodies of the 1340 persons beheaded on the Place du Trône Renversé were cast in 1793, André Chenier among the number. Their burial-place was unknown until some years later, when a poor woman, the daughter of a servant of the duc de Brissac, who, stealthily watching from afar, had seen her father and her brother fall on the scaffold, pointed it out. The site was bought, walled in, an iron cross set up over it. Soon adjoining land was bought and the relatives of many of those who lay in the pit were brought to be in death near to the members of their family cut off from them in life by the Revolutionist axe. We see their tombs in the carefully kept cemetery to which, from time to time, descendants of the different families come to be laid in their last long sleep. In the corner closest up against the walls surrounding the pit we see the Stars and Stripes of the United States, the "star-spangled banner" keeping guard over the grave of La Fayette. The nuns of the convent have charge of this pathetically interesting cemetery. At No. 42 we see more convent walls stretching to Rue de Reuilly, now enclosing a carriage factory. At No. 61 the doors of yet another, put later to various secular uses. No. 76 is the Jewish hospital, founded by Rothschild in 1852. No. 73 is the Hospice des Vieillards, worked by the Petites Sœurs des Pauvres. On the wall at No. 88 we come upon an edict of Louis XV with the date 1727.

Running parallel with Rue Picpus is Rue de Reuilly, in long-gone days a country road leading to the Château at Romiliacum, the summer habitation of the early Merovingian kings. We see an ancient house at No. 12 and No. 11 was the historic brasserie owned by Santerre, commander-in-chief of the Paris Garde Nationale, its walls supposed to date from 1620. Santerre bought it in 1772. After the storming of the Bastille, two prisoners found within its walls, both mad, one aged, the other a noted criminal, were sheltered there: there the keys and chains of the broken fortress were deposited. The barracks at No. 20 are on the site of ruins of the old Merovingian castle. The church, modern, of St-Eloi at No. 36 has no historic interest save that of its name, and no architectural beauty.

Rue de Charenton is another ancient street. It runs through the whole of the arrondissement from Place de la Bastille to the Bois de Vincennes. From 1800-15 it went by the name Rue de Marengo, for through a gate on its course, at the barrier of the village of Charenton and along its line, Napoleon re-entered Paris after his Italian campaigns. In its upper part it was known in olden days as Vallée de Fécamp. Through the house at No, 2, with the sign "A la Tour d'Argent," Monseigneur Affre got on to the barricades in 1848, to be shot down by the mob a few moments later. No. 10 dates from the sixteenth century. The inn at No. 12 is ancient. At No. 26 we see the chapel of the Blind Hospital, the "Quinze-Vingts," formerly the parish church of the district. The Quinze-Vingts was founded by St. Louis for three hundred gentilshommes, i.e. men of gentle birth, on their return from the crusades; their quarters were till 1780 on land owned by the monks of the Cloître St-Honoré. Then this fine old hôtel and grounds, built in 1699 for the Mousquetaires Noirs, were bought for them. In the chapel crypt the tombstone of the first archbishop of Paris, Mgr de Gondi, was found a few years ago, and bits of broken sixteenth-century sculpture of excellent workmanship. The little Rue Moreau, which opens at No. 40, was known in the seventeenth century as Rue des Filles Anglaises, for English nuns had a convent where now we see the Passage du Chêne-Vert. We find characteristic old houses in Rue d'Aligre and an interesting old place of the same name, in Revolutionary days a hay and straw market. The short streets and passages of this neighbourhood date, with scarce an exception, from the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Rue de la Brèche-aux-loups recalls the age when, in wintry weather, hungry wolves came within the sight of the city. The statuette of Ste-Marguerite and the inscription of No. 277 date from 1745. Passage de la Grande Pinte at No. 295 records the days when drinking booths were a distinctive feature of the district. We see vestiges of an ancient cloister at No. 306, and at No. 312 an old farmyard.

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