Paris (France) -- Description and travel; Paris (France) -- History
Most of the streets in its neighbourhood are modern, stretching across
the site of demolished buildings, important in their day, but of which
few traces now remain.
Rue des Mathurins lies across the grounds of the vanished convent, Ville
l’Évêque. Rue Tronchet runs where was once the Ferme des Mathurins
(_see_ p. 224).
Rue Caumartin, opened 1779, records the name of the Prévôt des Marchands
of the day. It was a short street then, lengthened later by the old
adjoining streets Ste-Croix and Thiroux, the site erewhile of the famed
_porcelaine_ factory of la Reine. (Marie-Antoinette). No. 1 dates from
1779 and was noted for its gardens arranged in Oriental style. No. 2,
to-day the Paris Sporting Club, dates from the same period. No. 2 _bis_
and most of the other houses have been restored or rebuilt. The butcher
Legendre, who set the phrygian cap on the head of Louis XVI, is said to
have lived at No. 52. No. 65 was built as a Capucine convent (1781-83).
Sequestered at the Revolution, it became a hospital, then a _lycée_, its
name changed and rechanged: Lycée Buonaparte, Collège Bourbon, Lycée
Fontanes, finally Lycée Condorcet, while the convent chapel, rebuilt,
became the church St-Louis d’Antin. Rue Vignon was, till 1881, Rue de la
Ferme des Mathurins, as an inscription on the walls of No. 1 reminds us.
Rue de Provence, named after the brother of Louis XVI, was opened in
1771, built over a drain which went from Place de la République to the
Seine near Pont de l’Alma. No. 22 is an ancient house restored. Berlioz
lived at No. 41. Meissonier at No. 43. Nos. 45 to 65 are on the site of
the mansion and grounds of the duc d’Orléans which extended to Rue
Taitbout. We see a fine old _hôtel_ at No. 59. Cité d’Antin, opening at
No. 61, was built in 1825, on the site of the ancient hôtel Montesson.
Liszt, the pianist, lived at No. 63. The Café du Trèfle claims existence
since the year 1555. The busy, bustling Rue de la Chaussée d’Antin was
an important roadway in the twelfth century, as Chemin des Porcherons.
The houses we see there are mostly of eighteenth-century date, others
occupy the site of ancient demolished buildings. Many notable persons
lived here. No. 1, where we see the Vaudeville theatre (there since
1867), was of old the site of two historic mansions. No. 2, now a
fashionable restaurant, dates from 1792, built as Dépôt des Gardes
Françaises. Rossini lived there for one year--1857-58. Where Rue
Meyerbeer was opened in 1860 stood, in other days, the _hôtel_ of Mme
d’Épinay, whose walls had sheltered Grimm, and for a time Mozart. A
neighbouring house was the home of Necker, where his daughter, Mme de
Staël, grew up and which became later the possession of Mme Récamier.
The graveyard of St-Roch stretched, till the end of the eighteenth
century, across the site of Nos. 20-22. No. 42 belonged to Mme Talma.
There Mirabeau died in 1791; his widow in 1800. Joséphine de
Beauharnais, not yet Empress, dwelt at No. 62. Gambetta at No. 55. No.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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