_altus locus_--the origin, maybe, of the name Auteuil, unless the name refers rather to the Druidical altars erected on a clearing here in the days when the forest of Rouvray, spreading over the whole of what is now the Bois de Boulogne, sheltered the venerable pagan priests. A church was first built on the spot in the early years of the fourteenth century. At the Revolution the church was profaned, the tombs violated. The present edifice dates from the latter years of the nineteenth century; its tower, in the form of a pontifical tiara, is an exact copy of the ancient tower. Rue d’Auteuil was in fifteenth-century days the single village street, la Grande Rue; the house at No. 2 is said to be on the site of Molière’s country dwelling, but there is no authentic record of the exact site of the house at Auteuil, near the church, where the great dramatist so often went for rest and country air. Auteuil was the retreat for quiet and recuperation of the most noted men of letters and of art of the eighteenth century: Racine, Boileau, etc. No. 59 is on the site of the house, burnt to the ground in 1871, wherein Victor Noir was shot dead by Prince Pierre Napoléon. Where at the upper end of the street we see now houses of commonplace aspect and small shops, stood until the middle of the nineteenth century the Château du Coq, inhabited by Louis XV in his childhood, and surrounded later by a horticulturist’s garden. Avenue de Versailles, in the south of the arrondissement, shows us along its line, and in the short streets leading out of it, many old-time vestiges. The Auteuil cemetery in Rue Chardon-Lagache dates from 1800. The house of retreat, Ste-Perine, transferred here from Chaillot in 1850, is on land once part of the estate of the abbots of the old monastery Ste-Geneviève, away on the high ground across the Seine at the other end of the city. Rue Molitor has at No. 18 a group of modern houses named Villa Boileau, property once owned by the poet. Boileau’s Auteuil house was on the site of No. 26, in the quaint picturesque old Rue Boileau, where his gardener’s cottage still stands. Rue de Musset, opening out of the street at No. 67, reminds us that the friend of George Sand dwelt here with his parents in the early years of the nineteenth century. CHAPTER XLV LES TERNES ARRONDISSEMENT XVII. (BATIGNOLLES-MONCEAU)