CHAPTER XXXIX

ON TRAGIC GROUND Rue du Faubourg St-Antoine forms the boundary between the arrondissements XI and XII. From end to end it shows us historic vestiges. It has played from earliest times an all-important part in French history, leading, when without the city walls, to Paris and the Bastille from the fortress of Vincennes and lands beyond, while from the time of its incorporation with Paris, popular political demonstrations unfailingly had their _mise en scène_ in the Rue du Faubourg St-Antoine. In the seventeenth century it was a country road in its upper part, the Chaussée St-Antoine, and led to the fine Abbaye St-Antoine-des-Champs; the lower part was the “Chemin de Vincennes.” Along this road, between Picpus and the Bastille, the Frondeurs played their war-games. Turenne’s army fired from the heights of Charonne, while the Queen-Mother, her son, Louis XIII, and Mazarin watched from Père-la-Chaise. At No. 8 lived the regicide Pépin, Fieschis’ accomplice. The sign, the “Pascal Lamb,” at No. 18 dates from the eighteenth century. We see ancient signs all along the street. The Square Trousseau at No. 118 is on the site of the first “Hospice des Enfants Trouvés,” built in 1674 on abbey land. In 1792 it became the “Hôpital des Enfants de la Patrie.” The head of princesse de Lamballe was buried in the chapel graveyard there. What is supposed to be her skull was dug up here in 1904. In 1839 the hospital was made an _annexe_ of the hôtel-Dieu, in 1880 it was Hôpital Trousseau, then in the first years of this twentieth century razed to the ground. At No. 184 the hospital St-Antoine retains some vestiges of the royal abbey that stood there in long-gone days. Founded in 1198, it was like all the big abbeys of the age a small town in itself, surrounded by high fortified walls. At the Revolution it was sequestrated, the church demolished. Till the early years of the nineteenth century, one of the most popular of Paris fairs was held on the site of the old abbey, la Foire aux pains d’épices, which had its origin in an Easter week market held within the abbey precincts. The house No. 186 is on the site of the little chapel St-Pierre, razed in 1797, where of old kings of France lay in state after their death. Two daughters of Charles V were buried there. The fountain and butcher’s shop opposite the hospital date from the time of Louis XV, built by the nuns of the abbey and called la Petite Halle. The nuns alone had the right to sell meat to the population of the district in those old days. Almost every house and courtyard and passage along the whole course of this ancient thoroughfare dates, as we see, from days long past. In the courts at Nos. 245 and 253 we find old wells. So we reach Place de la Nation, of yore Place du Trône, styled in Revolution days Place du Trône Renversé, and the guillotine set up there “_en permanence_”: there 1340 persons fell beneath its knife, 54 in one tragic day. The two pavilions on the eastern side of the _place_ were the custom-houses of pre-Revolution days. The monument in the centre is modern (1899). Of the streets and avenues leading from the _place_, that of supreme interest is the old Rue Picpus, a curious name explained by some etymologists as a corruption of Pique-Pusse, and referring to a sixteenth-century monk of the neighbourhood who succeeded in curing a number of people of an epidemic which studded their arms with spots like flea-bites and who was called henceforth “le Père Pique-Pusse.” In previous days the upper part of the road--it was a road then, not yet a street--had been known as Chemin de la Croix-Rouge. Nos. 4 and 6 are the remains of an eighteenth-century pavilion, a _maison de santé_--house of detention--where in 1786 St. Just was shut up for petty thefts committed in his own family. No. 10, a present-day _maison de santé_, is on the site of a hunting-lodge of Henri IV. At No. 35 we see the Oratoire de Picpus, where is the statuette of Notre-Dame, de la Paix, once on the door of the Capucine convent, Rue St-Honoré; and here, behind the convent garden, we find the cimetière Picpus and the railed pit where the bodies of the 1340 persons beheaded on the Place du Trône Renversé were cast in 1793, André Chenier among the number. Their burial-place was unknown until some years later, when a poor woman, the daughter of a servant of the duc de Brissac, who, stealthily watching from afar, had seen her father and her brother fall on the scaffold, pointed it out. The site was bought, walled in, an iron cross set up over it. Soon adjoining land was bought and the relatives of many of those who lay in the pit were brought to be in death near to the members of their family cut off from them in life by the Revolutionist axe. We see their tombs in the carefully kept cemetery to which, from time to time, descendants of the different families come to be laid in their last long sleep. In the corner closest up against the walls surrounding the pit we see the Stars and Stripes of the United States, the “star-spangled banner” keeping guard over the grave of La Fayette. The nuns of the convent have charge of this pathetically interesting cemetery. At No. 42 we see more convent walls stretching to Rue de Reuilly, now enclosing a carriage factory. At No. 61 the doors of yet another, put later to various secular uses. No. 76 is the Jewish hospital, founded by Rothschild in