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 re-organized 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.