Paris (France) -- Description and travel; Paris (France) -- History
Let us cross the Place de la Bastille and go down the Rue du
Faubourg-Saint-Antoine. There, at No. 115, in front of an old
eighteenth-century house, the Deputy Baudin was killed against a
barricade, on the 3rd of December 1851. At No. 303, in the reign of
Napoleon I., stood Dr. Dubuisson's private hospital, where General Malet
was confined. There he hatched the prodigious plot the disconcerting
history of which we intend shortly to relate. Farther on, near the Rue
de Montreuil, we pass by the remains of Réveillon's wall-paper stores,
pillaged on the 17th of April 1789; it was one of the preludes of the
Revolution.
Last of all, at No. 70, in the Rue de Charonne, Dr. Belhomme's private
hospital stood, which was used as a special prison under the Revolution.
Only those were admitted who could pay and pay well. The irrefutable
memoirs of Monsieur de Saint-Aulaine reveal to us a Belhomme familiar,
cynical, exacting his fees and thouing Duchesses short of money who
haggled with him on the question of their life. The most amiable of
historians, my excellent friend G. Lenôtre, whom it is always necessary
to quote when facts of the Revolutionary epoch are in question, has
reconstituted the terrible and surprising story of the Belhomme
institution where they laughed, danced, or even flirted under the dread
eye of Fouquier-Tinville; and has related, with his habitual
documentation, the bizarre liaison of the Duchess of Orléans, widow of
Louis-Philippe Egalité, with Rouzet, the Conventional, buried later at
Dreux under the name of the "Count de Folmon" in the Orléans family
vault.
Pursuing our way and passing by the Church of Sainte Marguerite, in
which Louis XVIII. was interred ... or his double, we reach the barrier
of the Throne (the Throne overthrown, people said in 1793). The
scaffold, which had temporarily quitted the Revolution Square, was put
up here during the most terrible period of the Terror, and the "great
batches" were executed upon it. In six weeks, 1300 victims perished,
among them, André Chénier, the Baron de Trenck, the Abbess of
Montmorency, Cécile Renaud, Madame de Sainte-Amaranthe, the poet
Roucher, and many others. The bodies of these unfortunate people,
stripped of their clothing, were loaded each evening on covered waggons,
with their severed heads between their legs; and the horrible vehicle,
dripping with blood along the road, was tipped into some pit dug at the
bottom of the Picpus Convent Gardens, where still exists the cemetery of
those that were executed during the Revolution.
Retracing our steps, we arrive at No. 9 of the Rue de Reuilly; here was
once the Hortensia Tavern, kept in 1789 by the famous Santerre, a major
in the National Guard. The house has not much changed; at present,
however, it is a girls' boarding-school which occupies the large rooms
where the thundering General organised those terrible descents on Paris
and launched those dreadful battalions of the faubourg that terrorised
even the Convention itself.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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