ON TRAGIC GROUND
Rue du Faubourg St-Antoine forms the boundary between the
arrondissements XI and XII. From end to end it shows us historic
vestiges. It has played from earliest times an all-important part in
French history, leading, when without the city walls, to Paris and the
Bastille from the fortress of Vincennes and lands beyond, while from the
time of its incorporation with Paris, popular political demonstrations
unfailingly had their _mise en scène_ in the Rue du Faubourg St-Antoine.
In the seventeenth century it was a country road in its upper part, the
Chaussée St-Antoine, and led to the fine Abbaye St-Antoine-des-Champs;
the lower part was the “Chemin de Vincennes.” Along this road, between
Picpus and the Bastille, the Frondeurs played their war-games. Turenne’s
army fired from the heights of Charonne, while the Queen-Mother, her
son, Louis XIII, and Mazarin watched from Père-la-Chaise. At No. 8 lived
the regicide Pépin, Fieschis’ accomplice. The sign, the “Pascal Lamb,”
at No. 18 dates from the eighteenth century. We see ancient signs all
along the street. The Square Trousseau at No. 118 is on the site of the
first “Hospice des Enfants Trouvés,” built in 1674 on abbey land. In
1792 it became the “Hôpital des Enfants de la Patrie.” The head of
princesse de Lamballe was buried in the chapel graveyard there. What is
supposed to be her skull was dug up here in 1904. In 1839 the hospital
was made an _annexe_ of the hôtel-Dieu, in 1880 it was Hôpital
Trousseau, then in the first years of this twentieth century razed to
the ground. At No. 184 the hospital St-Antoine retains some vestiges of
the royal abbey that stood there in long-gone days. Founded in 1198, it
was like all the big abbeys of the age a small town in itself,
surrounded by high fortified walls. At the Revolution it was
sequestrated, the church demolished. Till the early years of the
nineteenth century, one of the most popular of Paris fairs was held on
the site of the old abbey, la Foire aux pains d’épices, which had its
origin in an Easter week market held within the abbey precincts. The
house No. 186 is on the site of the little chapel St-Pierre, razed in
1797, where of old kings of France lay in state after their death. Two
daughters of Charles V were buried there. The fountain and butcher’s
shop opposite the hospital date from the time of Louis XV, built by the
nuns of the abbey and called la Petite Halle. The nuns alone had the
right to sell meat to the population of the district in those old days.
Almost every house and courtyard and passage along the whole course of
this ancient thoroughfare dates, as we see, from days long past. In the
courts at Nos. 245 and 253 we find old wells.
So we reach Place de la Nation, of yore Place du Trône, styled in
Revolution days Place du Trône Renversé, and the guillotine set up there
“_en permanence_”: there 1340 persons fell beneath its knife, 54 in one
tragic day. The two pavilions on the eastern side of the _place_ were
the custom-houses of pre-Revolution days. The monument in the centre is
modern (1899). Of the streets and avenues leading from the _place_, that
of supreme interest is the old Rue Picpus, a curious name explained by
some etymologists as a corruption of Pique-Pusse, and referring to a
sixteenth-century monk of the neighbourhood who succeeded in curing a
number of people of an epidemic which studded their arms with spots like
flea-bites and who was called henceforth “le Père Pique-Pusse.” In
previous days the upper part of the road--it was a road then, not yet a
street--had been known as Chemin de la Croix-Rouge. Nos. 4 and 6 are the
remains of an eighteenth-century pavilion, a _maison de santé_--house of
detention--where in 1786 St. Just was shut up for petty thefts committed
in his own family. No. 10, a present-day _maison de santé_, is on the
site of a hunting-lodge of Henri IV. At No. 35 we see the Oratoire de
Picpus, where is the statuette of Notre-Dame, de la Paix, once on the
door of the Capucine convent, Rue St-Honoré; and here, behind the
convent garden, we find the cimetière Picpus and the railed pit where
the bodies of the 1340 persons beheaded on the Place du Trône Renversé
were cast in 1793, André Chenier among the number. Their burial-place
was unknown until some years later, when a poor woman, the daughter of a
servant of the duc de Brissac, who, stealthily watching from afar, had
seen her father and her brother fall on the scaffold, pointed it out.
The site was bought, walled in, an iron cross set up over it. Soon
adjoining land was bought and the relatives of many of those who lay in
the pit were brought to be in death near to the members of their family
cut off from them in life by the Revolutionist axe. We see their tombs
in the carefully kept cemetery to which, from time to time, descendants
of the different families come to be laid in their last long sleep. In
the corner closest up against the walls surrounding the pit we see the
Stars and Stripes of the United States, the “star-spangled banner”
keeping guard over the grave of La Fayette. The nuns of the convent have
charge of this pathetically interesting cemetery. At No. 42 we see more
convent walls stretching to Rue de Reuilly, now enclosing a carriage
factory. At No. 61 the doors of yet another, put later to various
secular uses. No. 76 is the Jewish hospital, founded by Rothschild in
1852. No. 73 is the Hospice des Vieillards, worked by the Petites
Sœurs des Pauvres. On the wall at No. 88 we come upon an edict of
Louis XV with the date 1727.
Running parallel with Rue Picpus is Rue de Reuilly, in long-gone days a
country road leading to the Château at Romiliacum, the summer habitation
of the early Merovingian kings. We see an ancient house at No. 12 and
No. 11 was the historic _brasserie_ owned by Santerre, commander-in-chief
of the Paris Garde Nationale, its walls supposed to date from 1620.
Santerre bought it in 1772. After the storming of the Bastille, two
prisoners found within its walls, both mad, one aged, the other a noted
criminal, were sheltered there: there the keys and chains of the broken
fortress were deposited. The barracks at No. 20 are on the site of ruins
of the old Merovingian castle. The church, modern, of St-Eloi at No. 36
has no historic interest save that of its name, and no architectural
beauty.
Rue de Charenton is another ancient street. It runs through the whole of
the arrondissement from Place de la Bastille to the Bois de Vincennes.
From 1800-15 it went by the name Rue de Marengo, for through a gate on
its course, at the barrier of the village of Charenton and along its
line, Napoléon re-entered Paris after his Italian campaigns. In its
upper part it was known in olden days as Vallée de Fécamp. Through the
house at No. 2, with the sign “A la Tour d’Argent,” Monseigneur Affre
got on to the barricades in 1848, to be shot down by the mob a few
moments later. No. 10 dates from the sixteenth century. The inn at No.
12 is ancient. At No. 26 we see the chapel of the Blind Hospital, the
“Quinze-Vingts,” formerly the parish church of the district. The
Quinze-Vingts was founded by St. Louis for three hundred
_gentilshommes_, i.e. men of gentle birth, on their return from the
crusades; their quarters were till 1780 on land owned by the monks of
the Cloître St-Honoré. Then this fine old _hôtel_ and grounds, built in
1699 for the Mousquetaires Noirs, were bought for them. In the chapel
crypt the tombstone of the first archbishop of Paris, Mgr de Gondi, was
found a few years ago, and bits of broken sixteenth-century sculpture of
excellent workmanship. The little Rue Moreau, which opens at No. 40, was
known in the seventeenth century as Rue des Filles Anglaises, for
English nuns had a convent where now we see the Passage du Chêne-Vert.
We find characteristic old houses in Rue d’Aligre and an interesting old
_place_ of the same name, in Revolutionary days a hay and straw market.
The short streets and passages of this neighbourhood date, with scarce
an exception, from the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Rue de la
Brèche-aux-loups recalls the age when, in wintry weather, hungry wolves
came within the sight of the city. The statuette of Ste-Marguerite and
the inscription of No. 277 date from 1745. Passage de la Grande Pinte at
No. 295 records the days when drinking booths were a distinctive feature
of the district. We see vestiges of an ancient cloister at No. 306, and
at No. 312 an old farmyard.