Historic Paris by Jetta Sophia Wolff
CHAPTER XLV
343 words | Chapter 65
LES TERNES
ARRONDISSEMENT XVII. (BATIGNOLLES-MONCEAU)
A number of small dwellings lying without the city bounds to the north,
in the commune of Clichy, were known in the fifteenth century as “les
Batignolles,” i.e. the little buildings. Separated from Clichy in the
nineteenth century, the district of les Batignolles was joined to
Monceau. New streets were built, old erections swept away: Avenue de
Clichy, in part the Grande Rue of the district, was first planted with
trees in 1705. At intervals along its course, and in the short streets
connected with it, we find eighteenth-century houses, none of special
interest. At No. 3, the Taverne de Paris is decorated with paintings by
modern artists. A famous restaurant, dating from 1793, stood till 1906
at No. 7. At No. 52 of Rue Balagny, opening out of the Avenue, we see
the sign “Aux travailleurs,” and on the façade, words to the effect that
the house was built during the war years 1870-71. At No. 154 of the
Avenue, we find the quiet leafy Cité des Fleurs. Rue des Dames was a
road leading to the abbey “des dames de Montmartre” in the seventeenth
century. Rue de Lévis was in long-gone ages a road leading to what was
then the village of Monceaux, its name derived perhaps from the Latin
_Muxcellum_, a mossy place, more probably from _Monticellum_, a mound,
or from Mons calvas, the bald or bare mount. The Château de Monceaux was
on the site of Place Lévis. The official palace of the Papal Nuncio was
in Rue Legendre, No. 11 bis. The modern church St-Charles we see here,
built in 1907, was previously a Barnabite chapel. Rue Léon-Cosnard dates
from the seventeenth century, when it was Rue du Bac d’Asnières. In the
old Rue des Moines we find one of the few French protestant churches of
Paris.
Avenue de Villiers, leading of old to the village of Villiers, now
incorporated with Levallois-Perret, was, from its formation in 1858 to
the year 1873, Avenue de Neuilly. Puvis de Chavannes died at No. 89, in
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