Historic Paris by Jetta Sophia Wolff

Sévigné were buried. No. 20 is l’hôtel de Mayenne et d’Ormesson, sixteenth or seventeenth century, on the site of an older _hôtel_ sold to Charles V to enlarge his palace St-Pol. It passed through many hands, royal hands for the most part, and the building as we see it, or the previous structure, was for a time the hôtel de Diane de Poitiers. In modern times it became the Pension Favart, then in 1870, l’École des Francs-Bourgeois under the direction of les Frères de la doctrine chrétienne. At No. 28 Impasse Guénémée, known in its fifteenth-century days as Cul-de-Sac du Ha! Ha! a passage connected with the hôtel Rohan-Guénémée in Place Royale. In the seventeenth century a convent was built here, a sort of reformatory for erring girls and women of the upper classes who were shut up here in consequence of _lettres de cachet_. At No. 62 stands the hôtel de Sully. Its first owner staked the mansion at the gambling table and lost. At No. 101 we are before the Lycée Charlemagne, built in 1804 on the site of two ancient mansions and of the old city wall, of which some traces still remain. At No. 133 we see the Maison Séguier, with its fine old door, balcony and staircase; another old house at No. 137; then this ancient thoroughfare becomes in these modern days, Rue François-Miron (_see_ p. 104). [Illustration: RUE DE BIRAGUE, PLACE DES VOSGES] Rue des Tournelles in this earlier part of its course is chiefly interesting for the fine _hôtel_ at No. 28, built in 1690, decorated with frescoes by Lebrun and Mignard, where the famous courtesan, Ninon de Lenclos, lived and died.