Boulevard St-Martin (seventeenth century). Its course was marked out, its trees planted a few years earlier than that of boulevard St-Denis. On its handsome blackened Porte, built in 1674-75, we read the words: “A Louis-le-Grand pour avoir pris deux fois Besançon et vaincu les Armées allemandes, espagnoles et hollandaises.” Like Porte St-Denis, it has been three times restored. The Allies passed beneath it on entering Paris in 1814. The first théâtre de la Porte St-Martin was built in the short period of seventy-five days to replace, with the least delay possible, the Opera-house near the Palais-Royal, burnt down in 1781. It was the Opera until 1793. The structure we see was erected in 1873, after the disastrous conflagration caused by the Communards two years previously. We see theatres and concert-halls along the whole course of the boulevard. The Ambigu at No. 2 dating from 1828 was founded sixty years earlier as a marionnette show on the site of the present Folies Dramatiques. This part of the boulevard was formerly on a steep incline, with steps up to the théâtre Porte St-Martin. Its ground was levelled in 1850. The novelist Paul de Kock lived at No 8. No. 17 was the abode of the great painter Meissonnier. The théâtre de la Renaissance is modern (1872), built on the site of the famous restaurant Deffieux which had flourished there for 133 years. It was for several years Sarah Bernhardt’s theatre. Boulevard du Temple, its trees first planted in the year 1668 when it was a road stretching right across the area now known as Place de la République, was at that particular point a centre of places of amusement of every description--theatres, music-halls, marionnette-shows. All were closed, razed to the ground, to make way for the grand new _place_ laid out there in 1862. Of the old walls within which Parisians had for long years previously found so much distraction and merriment, vestiges remain only at Nos. 48, 46, 44, 42 of the boulevard. No. 42 is on the site of the house where Fieschi’s infernal machine was placed in 1835. The restaurant at No. 29 is on the site of the once widely known Café du Jardin Turc. The théâtre Dejazet records the name of the famous _actrice_. The two short streets, Rue de Crussol and Rue du Grand Prieuré, were cut across the grounds of the Grand Prieuré de France in the latter years of the eighteenth century.