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.