LES CHAMPS-ÉLYSÉES
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-Élysées 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 duc 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 erewhile had flourished. No. 12 was
the Vénerie Impériale.
Avenue des Champs-Élysées 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 Marbœuf 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-Élysées
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 Napoléon 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 Napoléon’s armies, with the names of
his generals engraved beneath.[F]