Paris (France) -- Description and travel; Paris (France) -- History
Crossing the Seine we come to the boulevard St-Germain, beginning at
boulevard Sully in arrondissement V, stretching right through
arrondissement VI and ending at the Quai d’Orsay near the Chambre des
Députés in arrondissement VII. Though in name so historic and running
across interesting ground, the boulevard is of modern formation. It has
swept away a whole district of ancient streets. The Nos. 61 to 49 are
ancient, all that remains of Rue des Noyers erewhile there. At No. 67
Alfred de Musset was born (1810). The théâtre de Cluny is on the site of
part of the vanished couvent des Mathurins. The firm Hachette stands
where was once a Jews’ cemetery. No. 160 was the restaurant now razed
where Thackeray, when a young student at the Beaux-Arts, took his meals.
A sign-board he painted long hung there. We see some old houses of the
ancient Rue des Boucheries between Nos. 162 and 148. At No. 166 we turn
for an instant into Rue de l’Échaudé, dating from the fourteenth
century, when it was a _chemin_ along the abbey moat, a street of
ancient houses. The word _échaudé_, a confectioner’s term used for a
certain kind of three-cornered cake, signifies in topographical language
a triangle formed by the junction of three streets. The pavement-stones
before Nos. 137 to 135 cover the site of the ancient abbey prison. Rue
des Ciseaux bordered in olden days the Collège des Écossais. The statue
of Diderot at No. 170 was set up on his centenary as close as could be
to the house he dwelt in, in Rue de l’Égout. The hôtel Taranne records
the name of the thirteenth-century street of which some vestiges remain
on the odd-number side of the boulevard between No. 175 and Place
St-Germain-des-Prés, where Saint-Simon lived and wrote. The little
grassy square round the house at No. 186 was originally a leper’s
burial-ground, then, from 1576 to 1604, a Protestant cemetery. Looking
into the Rue St-Thomas-d’Aquin, once passage des Jacobins, we see the
church which began early in the years of the eighteenth century as a
Jacobin convent. At the Revolution it was made into a Temple of Peace!
The frescoes of the ceiling are by Lemoine.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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