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]