RUE DE PASSY, the ancient Grande Rue, the village High Street before the district was included within the Paris boundary-line, dates from fifteenth-century days, when it was a fief, owned by Jeanne de Paillard, known as La Dame de Passy; it reverted to the Crown under Louis XI, and was bestowed on successive nobles. At the carrefour—the cross roads—where the tramcars now stop for Rue de la Tour, stood the seignorial gallows. The seignorial habitation, a chÂteau with extensive grounds, was built in 1678; in 1826 the whole domain was sold and cut up. The district was known far and wide in past days on account of its mineral springs. Here and there along the street we see an ancient house still standing. The narrow impasse at No. 24 is ancient. The nineteenth-century poet Gustave Nadaud died at No. 63 in 1893. No. 84, now razed, showed, until a few years ago, an interesting Louis XV faÇade in the courtyard, once a dependency of the ChÂteau de la Muette. Rue de la Pompe, named from the pump which supplied the ChÂteau de la Muette with water, a country road in the eighteenth century, shows few vestiges of the past. No. 53 is part of an old Carmelite convent.

ChaussÉe de la Muette is a nineteenth-century prolongation of Rue de Passy. The chÂteau from which it takes its name was originally a hunting-lodge, stags and birds were carefully enclosed here during the time of moulting (la mue, hence the name) in the days of Charles IX. Margaret de Valois, the notorious Reine Margot, was its first regular inhabitant. She gave the mansion to King Louis XIII when he came of age in 1615. It was rebuilt by the Regent in 1716 and became the favourite abode of his daughter the duchesse de Berri. There she died three years later. It was the home of Louis XV during his minority. Mme de Pompadour lived there and had the doors beautifully painted. It was again rebuilt in 1764, Marie-Antoinette and the Dauphin, soon to be Louis XVI, spent the first months of their married life there. It was from the Park de la Muette that the first balloon was sent up in 1783. The property was cut up in 1791, and in 1820 bought by Sebastien Érard of pianoforte fame, and once more rebuilt. Thus it came by the spindle-side to the comte de Franqueville; a big slice has been cut off in recent years for the making of a new street named after its present owner.[G]

RUE DES EAUX, PASSY
RUE DES EAUX, PASSY
enlarge-image

Avenue du Ranelagh records the existence, in the latter years of the eighteenth century, of the fashionable dancing hall and grounds opened here in imitation of the Rotonde built in London by Lord Ranelagh. Marie-Antoinette was among the great ladies who danced there. The hall was closed at the Revolution but was reopened and again the vogue under the Directoire and until 1830, when it became a public dancing saloon. It was demolished in 1858, the lawns were left to form a promenade. The statue of La Fontaine dates from 1891. Rue du Ranelagh is wholly modern. Rue Raynouard crossing it dates from the seventeenth century, when it was the Grande Rue, later the Haute Rue of the quarter, to become later still Rue Basse. Florian, the charming fable-writer, was wont to stay at No. 75. We see a fine old hÔtel at No. 69, and an old-world street, Rue Guillou, close by. Rue des Vignes opening at No. 72 reminds us of the vineyards once on these sunny slopes. No. 66 was the site of the hÔtel Valentinois, where Franklin lived for several years and where he put up the first lightning conductor in France. No. 51 is ancient, and No. 47 is known as la Maison de Balzac. In a pavilion in the garden sloping to the Seine he lived from 1842-48, lived and wrote, wrote incessantly there as elsewhere and always. There, carefully preserved, may be seen the chair he sat in, the table he wrote at, the pen he used, and a hundred other personal relics. Lectures about the great novelist and subjects connected with his life and work are given there from time to time. We see ancient houses on to the end of this quaint street. Marie-Antoinette stayed from time to time at No. 42 to be within easy reach of her confessor, the Vicar of Passy; so tradition says. The second story of this house sheltered BÉranger, 1833-35. The man of letters who gave his name to the street died at No. 36, in 1836. At No. 21, the warrior, la Tour d’Auvergne, passed the years 1776-1800. Jean Jacques Rousseau stayed with friends here and wrote his “Devin du Village.” Mineral waters, such as made the springs of Passy renowned in bygone days, still bubble up in this fine park. The modern erection, No. 19, is on the site of the ancient hÔtel Lauzun, where the duc de Saint-Simon used to stay, and where the first steps were taken for the marriage of NapolÉon III. At No. 11 we turn for an instant into the quaint old Rue des Eaux, strikingly reminiscent of a past age, when the tonifying waters of Passy were drunk in a pavilion on the site of No. 20. Rue de l’Annonciation began in the early years of the eighteenth century as Rue des Moulins. Here we see the church Notre-Dame-de-GrÂce, built as a chapel of ease for Auteuil by the Lord of Passy in 1660, to become a parish church, a few years later. It was restored and enlarged at subsequent dates. The ancient Passy cemetery lay across Rue Lekain. Rue de Boulainvilliers stretches through what were once the grounds of the Passy ChÂteau. Rue des Bauches, opening out of it, still narrow and quaint, was in olden days a lane through the Bauches, a word signifying a marshy tract or used to designate hut-like dwellings on waste, perhaps marshy land. Passy had within its bounds the Hautes Bauches, and the Basses Bauches. We of the 16th arrondissement know the street nowadays more especially as that of the tax-paying office.

Rue de l’Assomption marking the boundary between Passy and Auteuil began as Rue des Tombereaux. The convent of the Assomption is a modern building (1858), in an ancient park. The old chÂteau there, so secluded on its tree-surrounded site as to go by the name of l’Invisible, rebuilt in 1782, was for a time the home of Talleyrand, later of the actress Rachel, of Thiers, the statesman, of the comtesse de Montijo, mother of the Empress EugÉnie; the nuns came here from Rue de Chaillot in 1855. No. 88 is an old convent-chapel used as chapel of ease for Passy.

In Avenue de Mozart we see modern structures only, but old-time streets open out of it at intervals. It was in a house in Rue Bois-le-Vent, near the chÂteau de la Muette, that AndrÉ Chenier was arrested in 1794. Behind No. 13, of Rue Davioud we find traces of an old farmyard and a well. Rue de la Cure refers by its name to the iron springs once there. Rue de RibÉra is the ancient Rue de la Croix. Rue de la Source, was in old days Sente des Vignes. Benedictine nuns from St-Maur settled there in 1899 to be banished or laicized a few years later. Rue Raffet dates from the eighteenth century as Rue de la Grande Fontaine. Rue du Docteur Blanche, named to memorize the organizer of the well-known private asylum in the hÔtel once the dwelling of princesse de Lamballe, is the ancient Fontis Road. Rue Poussin, and the short streets connected with it, all date from the middle of the nineteenth century, opened by the railway company of the Ceinture line in the vicinity of their station at Auteuil. Rue des Perchamps, once Pares Campi, crosses the site of the ancient cemetery of the district. In Rue la Fontaine, in olden days known for its fountain of pure water, we find here and there an eighteenth-century building among the garden-surrounded houses. In Rue ThÉophile Gautier, a tennis-court and tall houses let in flats cover the ground where till 1908 stood the ChÂteau de Choiseul-Praslin, in its latter years, till 1904, a convent of Dominican nuns. Rue de Remusat runs along the course of the ancient Grande Rue; Rue FÉlicien-David was the first street flooded in the great inundation of 1910.[H] The street became a river three mÈtres deep. Rue Wilhem, of so commonplace an aspect to-day, dates from the eighteenth century, when it was Sentier des Arches, then Rue Ste-GeneviÈve. Place d’Auteuil, until 1867 Place d’Aguesseau, is on the site of the churchyard of past days. The monument we see there was set up to the memory of D’Aguesseau and his wife by command of Louis XV, in 1753. This is the highest point in the district, altus locus—the origin, maybe, of the name Auteuil, unless the name refers rather to the Druidical altars erected on a clearing here in the days when the forest of Rouvray, spreading over the whole of what is now the Bois de Boulogne, sheltered the venerable pagan priests. A church was first built on the spot in the early years of the fourteenth century. At the Revolution the church was profaned, the tombs violated. The present edifice dates from the latter years of the nineteenth century; its tower, in the form of a pontifical tiara, is an exact copy of the ancient tower. Rue d’Auteuil was in fifteenth-century days the single village street, la Grande Rue; the house at No. 2 is said to be on the site of MoliÈre’s country dwelling, but there is no authentic record of the exact site of the house at Auteuil, near the church, where the great dramatist so often went for rest and country air. Auteuil was the retreat for quiet and recuperation of the most noted men of letters and of art of the eighteenth century: Racine, Boileau, etc. No. 59 is on the site of the house, burnt to the ground in 1871, wherein Victor Noir was shot dead by Prince Pierre NapolÉon. Where at the upper end of the street we see now houses of commonplace aspect and small shops, stood until the middle of the nineteenth century the ChÂteau du Coq, inhabited by Louis XV in his childhood, and surrounded later by a horticulturist’s garden.

Avenue de Versailles, in the south of the arrondissement, shows us along its line, and in the short streets leading out of it, many old-time vestiges. The Auteuil cemetery in Rue Chardon-Lagache dates from 1800. The house of retreat, Ste-Perine, transferred here from Chaillot in 1850, is on land once part of the estate of the abbots of the old monastery Ste-GeneviÈve, away on the high ground across the Seine at the other end of the city. Rue Molitor has at No. 18 a group of modern houses named Villa Boileau, property once owned by the poet. Boileau’s Auteuil house was on the site of No. 26, in the quaint picturesque old Rue Boileau, where his gardener’s cottage still stands. Rue de Musset, opening out of the street at No. 67, reminds us that the friend of George Sand dwelt here with his parents in the early years of the nineteenth century.