In the short Rue Monsieur (the Monsieur of the day was the brother of Louis XVI), we find at No. 12 the _hôtel_ built for Mademoiselle de Bourbon-Condé, aunt of the duc d’Enghien, abbesse de Remiremont, who lies buried beneath the pavement of the Benedictine convent at No. 20. No. 5 shows us remains of the _hôtel_ of duc de Saint-Simon, the famous diarist-historian. Passing up Rue Barbet de Jouy, cut in 1838 across the site of an ancient mansion, we come to Rue de Varennes, a long line of splendid dwellings dating from a past age. CHAPTER XXVIII OLD-TIME MANSIONS OF THE RIVE GAUCHE ARRONDISSEMENT VII. PALAIS-BOURBON The word Varennes is a corruption of Garennes: in English the Rue de Varennes would be Warren Street, a name leading us back in thought to the remote age when the district was wild, uncultivated land full of rabbit-warrens. Another street joined to Rue de Varennes in 1850, and losing thus its own name, made it the long street we enter. No. 77 is the handsome mansion and park built early in the eighteenth century by Gabriel for a parvenu wig-maker. Later it was l’hôtel de Maine, then hôtel Biron, to become in 1807 the well-known convent of the Sacré-Cœur. From its convent-days dates the chapel--now the Musée Rodin. Other dependencies of the same date, built to house the nuns, were razed after their evacuation in 1904, when educational congregations were suppressed. The State, in possession of the domain, let it out for a time in _logements_, used it for a brief period as a National School, then let the whole property to the great sculptor, Rodin, who always had his eye on fine old buildings threatened with degradation or destruction. “I could weep,” he once said to me, “when I see fine historic walls ruthlessly razed to the ground.” The disaffected chapel became his studio and he set about maturing the plan, faithfully carried out after his death, of organizing there a national museum. He offered the whole of his own works and all the precious works of art he had collected to the State for this purpose. A clause in the treaty stipulates that in the possible but unlikely event of the restitution of the chapel building, after a lapse of years, to religious authorities, it be replaced as a museum by a new structure in the grounds. No. 73 is hôtel de Broglie, 1775. No. 69 hôtel de Clermont, 1714. No. 80 is the Ministère du Commerce. No. 78 the Ministère de l’Agriculture, built in 1712 as the habitation of an _actrice_. No. 65 began as l’hôtel de la Marquise de la Suze, 1787, to become l’hôtel Rochefoucauld-Doudeauville. No. 72 l’hôtel de Dufour, 1700. No. 64 was an eighteenth-century inn. No. 57, l’hôtel de Matignon, made over by the duchesse de Galliera after her husband’s death to the Emperor of Austria, became the Austrian Embassy--till 1914. Numerous have been the persons of historic name and note who stayed or lived at this grand old mansion. It was owned at one time by Talleyrand, whose home was next door at No.