Читать книгу Historic Paris - Jetta Sophia Wolff - Страница 14

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THE legend telling us the great Paris Market was first called “les Alles”—no “H”—because everybody y allait, i.e. went there, need not be taken seriously. Even in remote mediæval times the markets had some covered premises or “Halles.” The earliest Paris market of which we have record takes us back to the year 1000, that momentous year predicted by sooth-sayers for the end of the world; few sowings, therefore, had been made the preceding season. The market stalls of that year were but scantily furnished. That ancient market lying along the banks of the Seine in the vicinity of the present Place St-Michel, and its successor on what was then Place de Grève (see p. 95) went by the curious name Palu. In ancient days, under Louis-le-Gros, the site of the immense erection and market-square we see now was known of old as le terrain des champeaux—the territory of little fields—land owned in part by the King, in part by ecclesiastical authorities, and bought for the great market in the twelfth century. The sale of herrings, wholesale and retail, goes on to-day on the very site set apart for fishmongers in the time of St. Louis. Rue Baltard, running through the centre of the pavilions, records the name of the architect of the present structure, which dates from 1856. Rue Antoine-Carême records the name of Napoléon I’s cook. Ancient streets surround us here on every side, old houses, curious old signs. Rue Berger is made up of several ancient streets united. The part of Rue Rambuteau bordering les Halles lies along the line of four thirteenth-century streets known of yore by old-world names. Rue des Halles, leading up to the Markets from the Rue Rivoli, a modern thoroughfare (1854), made along the course of ancient streets, has curious old streets leading into it: Rue des Déchargeurs, a characteristic name, was opened in 1310. The short Rue du Plat d’Étain opening out of it dates from 1300, when it was Rue Raoul Tavernier. Rue de la Ferronnerie, extremely narrow at that period, is noted as the scene of the assassination of Henri IV in front of a house on the site of No. 11 (14 May, 1610). From the days of Louis IX the street was, as its name implies, the resort of ironmongers. Good old ironwork is still seen on several of the houses. Rue Courtalon (thirteenth century) is entirely made up of ancient houses. Rue de la Lingerie, formerly Rue des Gantiers, was a well-built street in the time of Henri II, but most of the houses seen there now are modern. Rue Prouvaires—from provoire, old French for prêtres—thirteenth century, is referred to in the time of Louis IX as one of the finest streets of Paris. It extended formerly to the church St-Eustache. Of the old streets once along the course of the modern Rue du Pont-Neuf all traces have been swept away.

PORTAIL DE ST-EUSTACHE

To the north side of Les Halles, we find Rue Mondétour, dating from 1292, but many of its ancient houses have been razed; modern ones occupy their site. A dancing-hall in this old street was the meeting-place of French Protestants before the passing of the Edict of Nantes. No. 14 has cellars in two stories.

The church St-Eustache is often familiarly referred to by the market women as Notre-Dame des Halles. The crypt, once the chapel Ste-Agnes, the nucleus of the grand old church, dating from 1200, secularized but still forming one with the sacred building, is a fruiterer’s shop—truly St-Eustache is the church of the Markets. The edifice as it stands dates as a whole from the seventeenth century. Gothic in its grand lines, very strikingly impressive, it has a Jesuit frontage, substituted for the Gothic façade originally planned, and Renaissance ornamentation within. The church was mercilessly truncated in the eighteenth century to allow for the making and widening of surrounding streets.

Rue du Jour under other names has existed from the early years of the thirteenth century, but was then close up against the city wall of Philippe-Auguste. Nos. 3, 4, 5, 7, 11 are ancient, and No. 25, with its traces of bygone ages, is believed to be on the site of the house where Charles V made from time to time a séjour, hence the name, truncated, of the street.

Rue Vauvilliers, until 1864 Rue du Four St-Honoré, dates from the thirteenth century. Here, at No. 33, lodged young Buonaparte, the future Emperor, at the ancient hôtel de Cherbourg, in 1787. To-day it is a butcher’s shop. Several of the houses have curious signs and other vestiges of past days. The circular colonnaded street we come to now, Rue de Viarmes, was built in 1768 by the Prévôt des Marchands whose name it bears. It surrounds the Bourse de Commerce built in 1889 on the site of the Halles aux Blés erected in the first instance in 1767, twice burnt to the ground and twice subsequently rebuilt on the site of the famous hôtel de Nesle where la Reine Blanche, mother of St. Louis, is said to have died in 1252. L’hôtel de Nesle was inhabited later by the blind King of Bohemia, killed at Crécy, and subsequently by other persons of note, then was taken to form part of the Couvent des Filles Pénitentes, appropriated with several adjoining hôtels in after years by Catherine de’ Medici (see p. 9). After the Queen’s death, as the possession of the comte de Bourbon, it was known as l’hôtel de Soissons; in 1749 it was razed to the ground. One ancient pillar, la Colonne de l’Horoscope, with its interior flight of steps still stands.

Rue Jean-Jacques Rousseau, in the days when its upper part was the ancient Rue Platrière, the lower Rue Grenelle-St-Honoré, counted among its inhabitants Rousseau, Bossuet, Marat, Fragonard, Boucher, the duchesse de Valentinois, and other noted personages. Most of the ancient dwellings have been replaced by modern constructions. Where the General Post Office now stands, extending down Rue du Louvre, the comte de Flandre had a fine mansion in the thirteenth century. Destroyed in 1543, it was replaced by another fine hôtel, which became the Paris post office in 1757, rebuilt in 1880. We see interesting architectural traces of past days at Nos. 15, 18, 19, 20, 33, 56, 64, 68. This brings us to Rue Étienne-Marcel, its name recalling the stirring and tragic history of the Prévôt de Paris at the time of the Jacquerie-Marcel, in revolt against the Dauphin; Charles V had the two great nobles, Jean de Conflans and Robert de Clermont, killed in the King’s presence, and was himself struck down dead when on the point of giving Paris over to Charles-le-Mauvais in 1358. But the name only is ancient, the street is entirely modern, cut across the line where ancient streets once ran. Some few old-time vestiges remain here and there, notably the Tour de Jean Sans Peur at No. 20, all that is left of the hôtel de Bourgoyne, built in the thirteenth century, to which the tower was added in 1405; it was partially destroyed in the sixteenth century, while what still stood became a theatre, the chief Paris play-house, the cradle of the Comédie Française.

Rue Montmartre, crossing Rue Étienne-Marcel and going on into the arrondissement II, dates at this end—its commencement—from the close of the eleventh century. In Revolution days it was known as Rue Mont-Marat! As long as Paris had fortified boundary walls there was always a Porte Montmartre, moved northward three times, as the city bounds extended. The Porte of Philippe-Auguste was where the house No. 30 now stands, and this part of the street was known then as Rue Porte-Montmartre. The Passage de la Reine de Hongrie memorizes a certain dame de la Halle in whom Marie-Antoinette saw a remarkable likeness to her mother, the Queen of Hungary. The woman became for her generation “la Reine de Hongrie”—the alley where she dwelt was called by this name. She shared not only the title but the fate of royalty: was beheaded by the guillotine.

Rue Montorgueil, beginning here and leading to the higher ground called when the Romans ruled in Gaul “Mons Superbus,” now the levelled boulevard Bonne-Nouvelle and its surrounding streets, was known in the thirteenth century as Mont Orgueilleux. In bygone days, the Parisians strolled out to the Mont Orgueilleux to eat oysters. There was a famous oyster-bed on the site of the house now razed where, in 1780, was born that exquisite song and ballad writer, Béranger. The ancient house, No. 32, is said to have been the home of the architect, Jean Goujon. The little side-street Rue Mauconseil dates from 1250, and tradition says its name is due to the mauvais conseil given within the walls of the hôtel de Bourgoyne, close by, which led to the assassination of the duc d’Orléans by Jean Sans Peur. In Revolution days, therefore, it was promptly renamed for the nonce Rue du Bon Conseil! At No. 48 we find a famous tripe-eating house. No. 47 was once the Central Sedan Chair Office. At No. 51 we see interesting signs over the door, and painted panels signed by Paul Baudry within (1864). Nos. 64, 72 is the old sixteenth-century inn, the “Compas d’Or,” and the famous restaurant Philippe. The coachyard of the inn is little changed from the days when coaches plied between that starting-place and Dreux. The restaurant du Rocher de Cancale, at No. 78, dating from 1820, where the most celebrated men of letters and art of the nineteenth century met and dined, was at first “Le Petit Rocher,” then the successor of the ancient restaurant at No. 59 dating from the eighteenth century, where the dîners du Caveau and the dîners du Vaudeville were eaten by gay literary and artistic dîneurs of olden time.

Rue Turbigo is modern and makes us think regretfully of ancient streets and of the apse of the church St-Elisabeth demolished to make way for it. Turning down Rue St-Denis, the famous “Grande Chaussée de Monsieur St-Denis” of ancient days, the road along which legend tells us the saint, coming from the heights above, walked carrying his head after decapitation, we find it, from this point to the vicinity of the Châtelet, rich in historic buildings and vestiges of a past age. Kings on their way to Notre-Dame entered Paris in state along this old road; it was connected more or less closely with every political event of bygone times, with Parisian pleasures too, for there of old the mystery plays went on. Curious old streets and passages open out of it: at 279 the quaint Rue Ste-Foy. In the court of No. 222 we see the hôtel St. Chaumont, its façade on boulevard Sebastopol, dating from 1630.

The church we come to at No. 92 dedicated to St. Leu and St. Gilles was built in the early years of the thirteenth century on the site of an earlier church, a dependent of the Abbaye St-Magloire close by, suppressed at the Revolution. Subsequent restorations, and the building in the eighteenth century of a subterranean chapel for the knights of the Holy Sépulcre, have resulted in an interesting old church of mingled Gothic and Renaissance style; its apse was lopped off to make way for the modern boulevard Sébastopol. The would-be assassin Cadoudal hid for three days crouched up against the figure of Christ in the chapel beneath the chancel (1804). Rue des Lombards dates from the thirteenth century, and at one or two of its houses, notably No. 62, we find an underground hall with vaulted roof and Gothic windows. At No. 56 we see an open corner. It is “ground accurst.” The house of two Protestant merchants who in 1579 were put to death for their “evil practices!” once stood there. Their dwelling was razed and a pyramid and crucifix were set up on the spot, soon afterwards removed to the cemetery des Innocents hard by.

The chemist’s shop at No. 44, “Au Mortier d’Or,” united now to its neighbour “A la Barbe d’Or,” dates, as regards its foundation, from the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. In the window we see an open volume printed in 1595 with the engraved portrait of the founder.

Rue des Innocents was opened in 1786 across the site of the graveyard of the church des Saints-Innocents, founded in 1150 and which stood till 1790. More than a million bodies are said to have been buried in that churchyard. In 1780 the cemetery was turned into a market-place. But it was again used as a burial ground for victims of the Revolution of 1830. Their bones lie now beneath the Colonne de Juillet on the Place de la Bastille. The market-place became a square: “Le Square des Innocents.” The fine old fountain dating from 1550, the work of the famous sculptors Pierre Lescot and Jean Goujon, was taken from its site in the Rue St-Denis, restored by the best sculptors of the day, and set up there in 1850. The beautiful portal of the ancient bureau des Marchandes-lingères was placed there in more recent times. The ground floor of most of the old houses of this street are ancient charniers, many of them built by one Nicolas Flamel. Therein were laid in past days the bones periodically gathered from the graveyard. The name “Cabaret du Caveau” at No. 15 tells its own tale. In Rue Berger, formed along the line of several demolished streets of old, we see some ancient signs, but little else of interest. Old signs too, in Rue de la Cossonnerie, so named from the cossonniers, i.e. poultry-merchants, whose market was here and which was known as early as 1182 as Via Cochonerie. Rue des Prêcheurs is another twelfth-century street and there we see many ancient houses: Nos. 6–8, etc. Rue Pirouette, one of the most ancient of Paris streets, recalls the days of the pilori des Halles, when its victims, forced to turn from side to side, made la pirouette. Here the duc d’Angoulême had his head cut off under Louis XI, and the duc de Nemours in 1477. At No. 5 we see the ancient doorway of the demolished hôtellerie du Haume (fourteenth century), at No. 9 was the cabaret de l’Ange Gabriel (now razed), at No. 13 vestiges of an ancient mansion. A few old houses still stand in the Rue de la Grande Truanderie (thirteenth century). Rue de la Petite Truanderie, of the same date, was once noted for its old well, “le Puits d’Amour,” in the small square half-way down the street, of old the truands’ quarter (see p. 56).