TOWARDS THE WESTERN BOUNDARY
Rue de Passy, the ancient Grande Rue, the village High Street before the
district was included within the Paris boundary-line, dates from
fifteenth-century days, when it was a fief, owned by Jeanne de Paillard,
known as La Dame de Passy; it reverted to the Crown under Louis XI, and
was bestowed on successive nobles. At the _carrefour_--the cross
roads--where the tramcars now stop for Rue de la Tour, stood the
seignorial gallows. The seignorial habitation, a château with extensive
grounds, was built in 1678; in 1826 the whole domain was sold and cut
up. The district was known far and wide in past days on account of its
mineral springs. Here and there along the street we see an ancient house
still standing. The narrow _impasse_ at No. 24 is ancient. The
nineteenth-century poet Gustave Nadaud died at No. 63 in 1893. No. 84,
now razed, showed, until a few years ago, an interesting Louis XV façade
in the courtyard, once a dependency of the Château de la Muette. Rue de
la Pompe, named from the pump which supplied the Château de la Muette
with water, a country road in the eighteenth century, shows few vestiges
of the past. No. 53 is part of an old Carmelite convent.
Chaussée de la Muette is a nineteenth-century prolongation of Rue de
Passy. The château from which it takes its name was originally a
hunting-lodge, stags and birds were carefully enclosed here during the
time of moulting (_la mue_, hence the name) in the days of Charles IX.
Margaret de Valois, the notorious Reine Margot, was its first regular
inhabitant. She gave the mansion to King Louis XIII when he came of age
in 1615. It was rebuilt by the Regent in 1716 and became the favourite
abode of his daughter the duchesse de Berri. There she died three years
later. It was the home of Louis XV during his minority. Mme de Pompadour
lived there and had the doors beautifully painted. It was again rebuilt
in 1764, Marie-Antoinette and the Dauphin, soon to be Louis XVI, spent
the first months of their married life there. It was from the Park de la
Muette that the first balloon was sent up in 1783. The property was cut
up in 1791, and in 1820 bought by Sebastien Érard of pianoforte fame,
and once more rebuilt. Thus it came by the spindle-side to the comte de
Franqueville; a big slice has been cut off in recent years for the
making of a new street named after its present owner.[G]
[Illustration: RUE DES EAUX, PASSY]
Avenue du Ranelagh records the existence, in the latter years of the
eighteenth century, of the fashionable dancing hall and grounds opened
here in imitation of the Rotonde built in London by Lord Ranelagh.
Marie-Antoinette was among the great ladies who danced there. The hall
was closed at the Revolution but was reopened and again the vogue under
the Directoire and until 1830, when it became a public dancing saloon.
It was demolished in 1858, the lawns were left to form a promenade. The
statue of La Fontaine dates from 1891. Rue du Ranelagh is wholly modern.
Rue Raynouard crossing it dates from the seventeenth century, when it
was the Grande Rue, later the Haute Rue of the quarter, to become later
still Rue Basse. Florian, the charming fable-writer, was wont to stay
at No. 75. We see a fine old _hôtel_ at No. 69, and an old-world street,
Rue Guillou, close by. Rue des Vignes opening at No. 72 reminds us of
the vineyards once on these sunny slopes. No. 66 was the site of the
hôtel Valentinois, where Franklin lived for several years and where he
put up the first lightning conductor in France. No. 51 is ancient, and
No. 47 is known as la Maison de Balzac. In a pavilion in the garden
sloping to the Seine he lived from 1842-48, lived and wrote, wrote
incessantly there as elsewhere and always. There, carefully preserved,
may be seen the chair he sat in, the table he wrote at, the pen he used,
and a hundred other personal relics. Lectures about the great novelist
and subjects connected with his life and work are given there from time
to time. We see ancient houses on to the end of this quaint street.
Marie-Antoinette stayed from time to time at No. 42 to be within easy
reach of her confessor, the Vicar of Passy; so tradition says. The
second story of this house sheltered Béranger, 1833-35. The man of
letters who gave his name to the street died at No. 36, in 1836. At No.
21, the warrior, la Tour d’Auvergne, passed the years 1776-1800. Jean
Jacques Rousseau stayed with friends here and wrote his “Devin du
Village.” Mineral waters, such as made the springs of Passy renowned in
bygone days, still bubble up in this fine park. The modern erection, No.
19, is on the site of the ancient hôtel Lauzun, where the duc de
Saint-Simon used to stay, and where the first steps were taken for the
marriage of Napoléon III. At No. 11 we turn for an instant into the
quaint old Rue des Eaux, strikingly reminiscent of a past age, when the
tonifying waters of Passy were drunk in a pavilion on the site of No.
20. Rue de l’Annonciation began in the early years of the eighteenth
century as Rue des Moulins. Here we see the church Notre-Dame-de-Grâce,
built as a chapel of ease for Auteuil by the Lord of Passy in 1660, to
become a parish church, a few years later. It was restored and enlarged
at subsequent dates. The ancient Passy cemetery lay across Rue Lekain.
Rue de Boulainvilliers stretches through what were once the grounds of
the Passy Château. Rue des Bauches, opening out of it, still narrow and
quaint, was in olden days a lane through the _Bauches_, a word
signifying a marshy tract or used to designate hut-like dwellings on
waste, perhaps marshy land. Passy had within its bounds the Hautes
Bauches, and the Basses Bauches. We of the 16th arrondissement know the
street nowadays more especially as that of the tax-paying office.
Rue de l’Assomption marking the boundary between Passy and Auteuil began
as Rue des Tombereaux. The convent of the Assomption is a modern
building (1858), in an ancient park. The old château there, so secluded
on its tree-surrounded site as to go by the name of l’Invisible, rebuilt
in 1782, was for a time the home of Talleyrand, later of the actress
Rachel, of Thiers, the statesman, of the comtesse de Montijo, mother of
the Empress Eugénie; the nuns came here from Rue de Chaillot in 1855.
No. 88 is an old convent-chapel used as chapel of ease for Passy.
In Avenue de Mozart we see modern structures only, but old-time streets
open out of it at intervals. It was in a house in Rue Bois-le-Vent, near
the château de la Muette, that André Chenier was arrested in 1794.
Behind No. 13, of Rue Davioud we find traces of an old farmyard and a
well. Rue de la Cure refers by its name to the iron springs once there.
Rue de Ribéra is the ancient Rue de la Croix. Rue de la Source, was in
old days Sente des Vignes. Benedictine nuns from St-Maur settled there
in 1899 to be banished or laicized a few years later. Rue Raffet dates
from the eighteenth century as Rue de la Grande Fontaine. Rue du Docteur
Blanche, named to memorize the organizer of the well-known private
asylum in the _hôtel_ once the dwelling of princesse de Lamballe, is the
ancient Fontis Road. Rue Poussin, and the short streets connected with
it, all date from the middle of the nineteenth century, opened by the
railway company of the Ceinture line in the vicinity of their station at
Auteuil. Rue des Perchamps, once Pares Campi, crosses the site of the
ancient cemetery of the district. In Rue la Fontaine, in olden days
known for its fountain of pure water, we find here and there an
eighteenth-century building among the garden-surrounded houses. In Rue
Théophile Gautier, a tennis-court and tall houses let in flats cover the
ground where till 1908 stood the Château de Choiseul-Praslin, in its
latter years, till 1904, a convent of Dominican nuns. Rue de Remusat
runs along the course of the ancient Grande Rue; Rue Félicien-David was
the first street flooded in the great inundation of 1910.[H] The street
became a river three mètres deep. Rue Wilhem, of so commonplace an
aspect to-day, dates from the eighteenth century, when it was Sentier
des Arches, then Rue Ste-Geneviève. Place d’Auteuil, until 1867 Place
d’Aguesseau, is on the site of the churchyard of past days. The monument
we see there was set up to the memory of D’Aguesseau and his wife by
command of Louis XV, in 1753. This is the highest point in the district,
_altus locus_--the origin, maybe, of the name Auteuil, unless the name
refers rather to the Druidical altars erected on a clearing here in the
days when the forest of Rouvray, spreading over the whole of what is now
the Bois de Boulogne, sheltered the venerable pagan priests. A church
was first built on the spot in the early years of the fourteenth
century. At the Revolution the church was profaned, the tombs violated.
The present edifice dates from the latter years of the nineteenth
century; its tower, in the form of a pontifical tiara, is an exact copy
of the ancient tower. Rue d’Auteuil was in fifteenth-century days the
single village street, la Grande Rue; the house at No. 2 is said to be
on the site of Molière’s country dwelling, but there is no authentic
record of the exact site of the house at Auteuil, near the church, where
the great dramatist so often went for rest and country air. Auteuil was
the retreat for quiet and recuperation of the most noted men of letters
and of art of the eighteenth century: Racine, Boileau, etc. No. 59 is on
the site of the house, burnt to the ground in 1871, wherein Victor Noir
was shot dead by Prince Pierre Napoléon. Where at the upper end of the
street we see now houses of commonplace aspect and small shops, stood
until the middle of the nineteenth century the Château du Coq, inhabited
by Louis XV in his childhood, and surrounded later by a horticulturist’s
garden.
Avenue de Versailles, in the south of the arrondissement, shows us along
its line, and in the short streets leading out of it, many old-time
vestiges. The Auteuil cemetery in Rue Chardon-Lagache dates from 1800.
The house of retreat, Ste-Perine, transferred here from Chaillot in
1850, is on land once part of the estate of the abbots of the old
monastery Ste-Geneviève, away on the high ground across the Seine at the
other end of the city. Rue Molitor has at No. 18 a group of modern
houses named Villa Boileau, property once owned by the poet. Boileau’s
Auteuil house was on the site of No. 26, in the quaint picturesque old
Rue Boileau, where his gardener’s cottage still stands. Rue de Musset,
opening out of the street at No. 67, reminds us that the friend of
George Sand dwelt here with his parents in the early years of the
nineteenth century.