CHAPTER XXXVII. THREE ANCIENT FAUBOURGS
ARRONDISSEMENT X. (ENTREPOT)
THE chief thoroughfares of historic interest in this arrondissement
are the two ancient streets which stretch through its whole length: Rue
du Faubourg St-Denis and Rue du Faubourg St-Martin, and the odd-number
side of Rue du Faubourg du Temple.
Rue du Faubourg St-Denis, the ancient road to the abbey St-Denis,
known in earlier days in part as Faubourg St-Lazare, then as
Faubourg-de-Gloire, has still many characteristic old-time buildings.
The Passage du Bois-de-Boulogne Was the starting-place for the St-Denis
coaches. At No. 14 we find an interesting old court; over Nos. 21-44
and at 33 of the little Rue d'Enghein old signs; No. 48 was the Fiacre office
in the time of the Directoire, then the famous commercial firm LafRtte
and Caillard. Where we see the Cour des Petites-Écuries, the
courtesan Ninon de Lenclos had a country house. Félix Faure,
Président of the French Republic from 1895 to 1899, was born at
No. 65 in 1841. The old house No. 71 formed part of the convent des
Filles Dieu. The houses Nos. 99 to 105 were dependencies of St-Lazare,
now the Paris Prison for Women, which we come to at No. 107, originally
a leper-house, founded in the thirteenth century by the hospitaliers de
St-Lazare. It was an extensive foundation, possessing the right of
administering justice and had its own prison and gallows. The Lazarists
united with the priests of the Mission organized by St-Vincent-de-Paul,
and in their day the area covered by the cow-houses, the stables, the
various buildings sheltering or storing whatever was needed for the
missioners, stretched from the Faubourg St-Denis to the Rues de
Paradis, de Dunkerque and du Faubourg Poissonnière. At one time,
when leprosy had ceased to be rife in Paris, the hospital was used as a
prison for erring sons of good family. In 1793 it became one of the
numerous revolutionary prisons; André Chenier, Marie Louise de
Montmorency-Laval, the last abbess of Montmartre, were among the suspects shut
up there; and the Rue du Faubourg St-Denis was renamed Rue Franciade.
St-Lazare was specially obnoxious to Revolutionists, for there the
Kings of France had been wont to make a brief stay on each State entry
into the city, and there, on their last journey out of it, they had
halted in their coffin, on the way to St-Denis. The remains of an
ancient crypt were discovered in 1898 below the pavement.
Rue de l'Échiquier was opened in 1772, cut through convent
lands. Stretching behind No. 43, till far info the nineteenth century,
was the graveyard of the parish Notre-Dame-de-Bonne-Nouvelle. No. 48
was the well-known dancing-hall, Pavillon de l'Échiquier, before
and under the Directoire. Rue du Paradis, in the seventeenth century
Rue St-Lazare, is noted for its pottery shops. At No. 58 Corot, the
great landscape painter who lived hard by, had his studio. The
capitulation of Paris in 1814 was signed at No. 51, the abode of the
duc de Raguse. Leading out of Rue de Chabrol at No. 7 we find the
old-world Passage de la Ferme-St-Lazare and a courtyard, relics of
the Lazarists farm. Rue d'Hauteville, so called from the title of
a Prévôt des Marchands, comte d'Hauteville, was known in
earlier times as Rue la Michodière, his family name. In the
court at No. 58 we come upon a hôtel which was the abode
of Bourrienne, Napoleon's secretary; its rooms are an interesting
example of the style of the period. The pillared pavilion at No. 6 bis, Passage Violet, dates only from 1840.
Rue de Strasbourg, where the courtyard of the Gare de l'Est now
stretches, was the site in olden days of one of the great Paris fairs,
the Foire St-Laurent, held annually, lasting two months, a privilege of
the Lazarist monks. It was at this fair that the first
café-concerts were opened. The Comédie-Italienne, too,
first played there. Rue de la Fidélité, on the eastern
side of the Faubourg St-Denis, records the name given to the church
St-Laurent in Revolution days; it lies across the site of the couvent
des Filles-de-la-Charité founded by St-Vincent-de-Paul and
Louise de Marillac, of which we find some traces at No. 9.
The northern end of Rue du Faubourg St-Martin was long known as Rue
du Faubourg St-Laurent; zealously stamping out all names recording
saints, the Revolutionists called this long thoroughfare Faubourg du
Nord. We find ancient houses, vestiges of past ages, at every step, and
the modern structures seen at intervals are on sites of historic
interest. The baker's shop at No. 44, "A l'Industrie," claims to have
existed from the year 1679. No. 59 is the site of the first Old
Catholic church, founded in 1831 by abbé Chatel. The Mairie at
No. 76 covers the site of an ancient barracks, and of a bridge which
once spanned the brook Ménilmontant. An ancient arch was found
beneath the soil in 1896. Rue des Marais, which opens at No. 86, dates
from the seventeenth century. Here till 1860 stood the dwelling of the
famous public headsman Sanson and of his descendants, painted red! At No. 119 we see the chevet of
the church St-Laurent, the only ancient part of the church as we know
it. In the little Rue Sibour, opening at No. 121, recording the name of
the archbishop of Paris who died in 1857, we find an ancient house, now
a bathing establishment. No. 160 covers land once the graveyard of les
Récollets. The short Rue Chaudron records the name of a fountain
once there. The bulky fountains higher up are modern (1849), built by
public subscription.
Rue du Château d'Eau was formed of two old streets: Rue Neuve
St-Nicolas-St-Martin and Rue Neuve St-Jean, joined in 1851 and named
after a fountain formerly in the centre of the what is now Place de la
République. At No. 39 we see the house said to be the smallest
in the city—its breadth one mètre. In the walls of the
tobacconist's shop at No. 55, "la Carotte Percée," we see holes
made by the bullets of the Communards in 1871. At No. 6 of the modern
Rue Pierre-Bullet, now a gimp factory, we find a house of remarkable
interest, beautifully decorated by its builder and owner, the artist
Gonthière, who had invented the process of dead-gilding. Ruin
fell on the unhappy artist. His house was seized in 1781 and he died in
great poverty in 1813.
Crossing the whole northern length of the arrondissement is the busy
commercial Rue Lafayette, its one point of interest for us the church
St-Vincent-de-Paul, built in the form of a Roman basilica between the
years 1824-44, on the site of a Lazariste structure known as the
Belvédère. Within we see fine statuary; and glorious
frescoes, the work of Flandrin, cover the walls on every side. Noneof
the streets in the vicinity of the church show points of historic
interest.
Rue Louis-Blanc, existing in its upper part in the eighteenth
century under another name, prolonged in the nineteenth, has one
tragically historic spot, that where it meets Rue Grange-aux-Belles. On
that spot from the year 1230, or thereabouts, to 1761, on land owned by
comte Fulcon or Faulcon, stood the famous gibet de Montfaucon. It was
of prodigious size, a great Square frame with pillars and iron-chains,
sixteen pendus could hang there at one time. The most noted
criminals, real or supposed, many bearing the noblest names of France,
were hung there, left to swing for days in public view— the noblesse from the Court and the peuple from the sordid streets around crowding together to see the sight. The ghastly remains fell into a pit beneath the gibet and
so 1found burial. Later a more orderly place of interment was arranged
on that hill-top. The church of St-Georges now stands on the site.
Rue de la Grange-aux-Belles, so well known nowadays as the seat at
No. 33 of the C.G.T.—the Confederation du Travail, where all
Labour questions are discussed, and where in these days of great
strikes, the Paris Opera on strike gave gala performances, was
originally Rue de la Grange-aux-Pelles, a pelle or pellée being
a standard measure of wood. The finance minister Clavière,
Roland's associate, lived here and the authorities borrowed from him
the green wooden cart which bore Louis XVI to the scaffold. The painter
Abel de Payol lived at No. 13 (1822). A Protestant cemetery once
stretched across the land in the centre of the street down to Rue des
Fxluses-St-Martin. There, in 1905, were found the remains of the famous
corsaire Paul Jones, transported in solemn state to America
shortly afterwards. Turning into Rue Bichat we come to the Hopital
St-Louis, founded by Henri IV. The King had been one of many sufferers
from an epidemic which had raged in Paris in the year 1606. On his
recovery the bon Roi commanded the building of a hospital to be
called by the name of the saint-king, Louis IX, who had died of the
plague some three hundred years before. The quaint old edifice with
red-tiled roofs, old-world windows, fine archways surrounding a court
bright with flowers and shaded by venerable trees, carries us back in
mind to the age of the bon Roi to whom the hospital was due. No. 21 was the hospital farm. In Rue Alibert, erewhile an impasse, we
see one or two ancient houses, at the corner a pavilion of the time of
Henri IV, the property of the hospital. Rue St-Maur runs on into the
nth arrondissement, a street formed in the nineteenth century by three
seventeenth-century roads, one of which was Rue Maur or des Morts. We
notice old houses and ancient vestiges here and there.
Rue du Faubourg du Temple marks the boundary between arrondissement
X and XI, an ancient thoroughfare climbing to the heights of Belleville
with many old houses and courts, mostly squalid, and some curious old
signs. On the site of No. 18 Astley's circus was set up in 1780.
The Rue de la Fontaine au Roi (seventeenth century), in 1792 Rue Fontaine-Nationale, shows us at No. 13 a house with porcelains decorations
set up here in 1773. Beneath the pavement of Rue Pierre-Levée a
druidical stone was unearthed in 1782. Rue de Malte refers by its name
to the Knights Templar of Malta, across whose land it was cut. We see
an ancient cabaret at No. 57. Rue Darboy records the name of
the archbishop of Paris, shot by the Communards in 1871; Rue Deguerry
that of the vicar of the Madeleine who shared his fate. The church of
St-Joseph is quite modern, 1860, despite its blackened walls. Avenue
Parmentier running up into the 10th arrondissement is entirely modern,
recording the name of the man who made the potato known to France.
Rue des Trois-Bornes shows us several old-time houses and at No. 39
a characteristic old court. We find some characteristic vestiges also
in Rue d'Angoulême. In Rue St-Ambroise we see the handsome modern
church built on the site of the ancient church des Annociades. The
monastery of the Annociades was sold in lots, and became in part by
turns a barracks, a military hospital, a hospital for incurables, and
was razed to the ground in 1864. At Musée Carnavalet we may see
bas-reliefs taken from the fountain once on the space before the
church. Rue Popincourt, which gives its name to the arrondissement,
records the existence in past days of a sire Jean de Popincourt whose
manor-house was here, and a sixteenth-century village, which became
later part of Faubourg St-Antoine. Rue du Chemin-Vert dates from 1650,
but has few interesting features. Parmentier died at No. 68 in 1813.
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