Historic Paris by Jetta Sophia Wolff

LES CHAMPS-ÉLYSÉES This wonderful avenue stretching through the whole length of the arrondissement reached in olden days only to the rural district of Chaillot, and was known as the Grande Allée-du-Roule, later as Avenue des Tuileries. Colbert, Louis XIV’s great minister, first made it a tree-planted avenue. The gardens bordering it on either side between Place de la Concorde and Avenue d’Antin, were laid out by Le Nôtre, 1670, as Crown land. Cafés, restaurants, toy-stalls, etc., were set up there from the first. The Palais de Glace is on the site of a Panorama which existed till its destruction by fire in 1855. The far-famed Café des Ambassadeurs, set up in the eighteenth century, was rebuilt in 1841. The no less famous cirque de l’Impératrice was razed in 1900. The Rond-Point des Champs-Élysées was first laid out in 1670, but the houses we see there now are all modern. Avenue d’Antin stretching on either side of it, old only in the part leading from Cours-la-Reine, was planted in 1723 by the duc d’Orléans. Marguerite Gauthier (la Dame aux Camélias) lived at No. 9. At No. 3 Avenue Matignon Heine died in his room on the fifth story (1856). Avenue Montaigne was known in 1731 as Allée des Veuves. It remained an alley--Allée Montaigne--till 1852. The thatched dwelling of Mme Tallien stood at its starting-point, near the Seine. There her divorced and destitute husband was forced to accept a shelter at the hands of his ex-wife, become princesse de Chimay; there the Revolutionist died in 1820. We see only modern houses along the Avenue of to-day. Rue Matignon was opened across the ancient Jardin d’hiver where fine tropical plants erewhile had flourished. No. 12 was the Vénerie Impériale. Avenue des Champs-Élysées is bordered on both sides by modern mansions. No. 25, hôtel de la Païve, of late years the Traveller’s Club, during the war an ambulance, represents the style of the Second Empire. Avenue Gabriel with its grand mansions was formed in 1818 on the Marais-des-Gourdes--marshy land. The Rue Marbeuf was in the eighteenth century Ruelle des Marais, then Rue des Gourdes. Its present name recalls the Louis XV Folie Marbœuf once there. Few and far between are the ancient vestiges to be found among the modern structures we see on every side around us here. Rue Chaillot, in bygone days the chief street of the village of Chaillot, was taken within the Paris bounds in