Paris (France) -- Description and travel; Paris (France) -- History
Place Dauphine dates from 1607. It was built as a triangular _place_,
its name referring to the son of Henri IV. In earlier ages, the site
formed two islets, on one of which, l’îlot des Juifs, Jacques de Morlay,
Grand Master of the Templars, suffered death by burning in 1314. A
fountain stood on the Place to the memory of General Desaix, erected by
public subscription, carted away in the time of the first Republic, and
set up at Riom. Painters excluded from the Salon used to exhibit their
work here each year, in the open air, on Corpus Christi day. Some of the
houses still show seventeenth-and eighteenth-century vestiges. No. 28,
now much restored, was Madame Roland’s early home. The writer Halévy
died at 26 (1908).
The Quays of the island bordering the Palais north and south both date
from the sixteenth century. Both have been curtailed by the enlargement
of the Palais. On Quai des Orfèvres, the goldsmith’s quay, from the
first the jewellers’ quarter, still stands the shop once owned by the
jewellers implicated in the affair of the “_Collier de la Reine_.” The
Quai de l’Horloge is still the optician’s quarter and was known in olden
days as Quai des Morfondus, on account of the blasting winds which swept
along it--and do so still in winter-time. The palace clock in the fine
old tower built in the thirteenth century, restored after the ravages of
the Revolution in the nineteenth, from which the quay takes its present
name, is a successor of the first clock seen in France, set up there
about the year 1370. There, too, hung in olden days a great bell rung as
a signal on official occasions, and which perhaps rang out the
death-knell of the Huguenots even before the sounding of the bell at
St-Germain l’Auxerrois, on the eve of St. Bartholomew’s Day, 1572.
CHAPTER V
THE NEIGHBOURHOOD OF THE BIBLIOTHÈQUE NATIONALE
ARRONDISSEMENT II. (BOURSE)
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