Historic Paris by Jetta Sophia Wolff

Sœurs des Pauvres. On the wall at No. 88 we come upon an edict of Louis XV with the date 1727. Running parallel with Rue Picpus is Rue de Reuilly, in long-gone days a country road leading to the Château at Romiliacum, the summer habitation of the early Merovingian kings. We see an ancient house at No. 12 and No. 11 was the historic _brasserie_ owned by Santerre, commander-in-chief of the Paris Garde Nationale, its walls supposed to date from 1620. Santerre bought it in 1772. After the storming of the Bastille, two prisoners found within its walls, both mad, one aged, the other a noted criminal, were sheltered there: there the keys and chains of the broken fortress were deposited. The barracks at No. 20 are on the site of ruins of the old Merovingian castle. The church, modern, of St-Eloi at No. 36 has no historic interest save that of its name, and no architectural beauty. Rue de Charenton is another ancient street. It runs through the whole of the arrondissement from Place de la Bastille to the Bois de Vincennes. From 1800-15 it went by the name Rue de Marengo, for through a gate on its course, at the barrier of the village of Charenton and along its line, Napoléon re-entered Paris after his Italian campaigns. In its upper part it was known in olden days as Vallée de Fécamp. Through the house at No. 2, with the sign “A la Tour d’Argent,” Monseigneur Affre got on to the barricades in 1848, to be shot down by the mob a few moments later. No. 10 dates from the sixteenth century. The inn at No. 12 is ancient. At No. 26 we see the chapel of the Blind Hospital, the “Quinze-Vingts,” formerly the parish church of the district. The Quinze-Vingts was founded by St. Louis for three hundred _gentilshommes_, i.e. men of gentle birth, on their return from the crusades; their quarters were till 1780 on land owned by the monks of the Cloître St-Honoré. Then this fine old _hôtel_ and grounds, built in 1699 for the Mousquetaires Noirs, were bought for them. In the chapel crypt the tombstone of the first archbishop of Paris, Mgr de Gondi, was found a few years ago, and bits of broken sixteenth-century sculpture of excellent workmanship. The little Rue Moreau, which opens at No. 40, was known in the seventeenth century as Rue des Filles Anglaises, for English nuns had a convent where now we see the Passage du Chêne-Vert. We find characteristic old houses in Rue d’Aligre and an interesting old _place_ of the same name, in Revolutionary days a hay and straw market. The short streets and passages of this neighbourhood date, with scarce an exception, from the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Rue de la Brèche-aux-loups recalls the age when, in wintry weather, hungry wolves came within the sight of the city. The statuette of Ste-Marguerite and the inscription of No. 277 date from 1745. Passage de la Grande Pinte at No. 295 records the days when drinking booths were a distinctive feature of the district. We see vestiges of an ancient cloister at No. 306, and at No. 312 an old farmyard.