THREE ANCIENT FAUBOURGS
ARRONDISSEMENT X. (ENTREPÔT)
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 Laffitte
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 into 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, Napoléon’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. None of 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 found 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 Conféderation 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 Écluses 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 Hôpital 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 11th
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 _porcelaine_
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.