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 a Revolutionists’
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 Laborde 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 Porcherons, and the district was
known as that of la Petite-Pologne, a reference to the habitation there
of the duc 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 Napoléon III. All other streets in the
neighbourhood are modern.