Paris (France) -- Description and travel; Paris (France) -- History
A hospital and a convent stretched along part of the _place_ and across
Passage du Caire in past days. Several houses there are ancient, as also
in Rue Alexandrie.
In Rue du Mail, at what is now hôtel de Metz, Buonaparte lodged in 1790.
We see many old houses. Spontini lived here, and No. 12 was inhabited by
Madame Récamier and also by Talma. The modern Rue du Quatre-Septembre
has swept away many an interesting old thoroughfare. At No. 100 the
Passage de la Cour des Miracles recalls the ancient _cour_ of the name,
done away with in 1656, of which some traces still remain--the scene in
olden days of feats of apparent healing and of physical transformation
whereby the _truands_, persons of no avowed or avowable occupation,
gained precarious _deniers_. Out of this long modern street we may turn
into many shorter ancient ones. Rue du Sentier, recalling by its name a
pathway through a wood--_sentier_, a corruption of _chantier_--has fine
old houses and knew in its time many inhabitants of mark. At No. 8 lived
Monsieur Lebrun, a famous picture dealer, husband of Madame Vigée
Lebrun. At No. 2 dwelt Madame de Staël, at Nos. 22-24, in rooms erewhile
decorated by Fragonard, Le Normand d’Étioles, husband of La Pompadour,
after his separation from her. No. 33 was the home of his wife in her
girlhood and at the time of her marriage. At No. 30 lived Sophie Gay.
Rue St-Joseph, so named from a seventeenth-century chapel knocked down
in 1800, of which we find some traces, was previously Rue du
Temps-Perdu; in the graveyard attached to St-Eustache--later a
market--La Fontaine and Molière were buried, their ashes transferred in
1818 to Père-Lachaise. At No. 10 Zola was born (1840). Rue du Croissant
(seventeenth century) is a street of ancient houses and the chief
newspaper street of the city. Paper hawkers crowd there at certain
hours each day, then rush away, vying with one another to call attention
to their stock-in-trade. At No. 22, Café du Croissant, at the corner
where this street meets the Rue Montmartre, journalists assemble, and
there the notable Socialist, Jaurès, was shot dead on the eve of the
outbreak of war, July 31st, 1914. The sign at No. 18 is said to date
from 1612. In Rue des Jeûneurs (1643)--the name a corruption from _des
Jeux-Neufs_--we see more ancient houses and leading out of it the old
Rue St-Fiacre, once Rue du Figuier. No. 19 was inhabited in recent years
by a lady left a widow after one year’s married life, who, owner of the
building, dismissed the tenants of its six large flats and shut herself
up in absolute solitude till her death at the age of eighty-nine. No. 23
was designed by Soufflot le Romain (1775). Rue Montmartre in its course
continued from arrondissement I, which it leaves at Rue Étienne-Marcel,
shows many interesting vestiges. At No. 178 we see a bas-relief of the
Porte Montmartre of past days. Within the modern _Brasserie du Coq_, a
copy of the automatic cock of Strasbourg Cathedral, dating from 1352. On
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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