Rue Saint-Denis

“ At court, as in the town, there are the same passions, the same pettinesses, the same caprices, the same quarrels in families and between friends, the same jealousies, the same antipathies: everywhere there are daughters-in-law and mothers-in-law, husbands and wives, divorces, ruptures, and ineffectual reconciliations; everywhere eccentricity, anger, preferences, tattling, and tale-bearing. With good eyes it is easy to see town life, the Rue Saint Denis transported to Versailles or Fontainebleau. ”

“ On the northern shore, it followed for some distance nearly the course of the present Rue Saint-Denis, and then forked,—one branch continuing in a general northerly direction toward Senlis, and the other turning off to the northwest, in the direction of the Bourse, toward Clichy, Saint-Ouen, Saint-Denis, and, finally, Rouen by the valley of the Montmorency. ”

“ Plunged in a restless sleep, my adolescence embodied in one uniform vision the whole of the quarter through which it might be strolling, and I had never dreamed that there could be an eighteenth century building in the Rue Royale, just as I should have been astonished to learn that the Porte-Saint-Martin and the Porte-Saint-Denis, those glories of the age of Louis XIV, were not contemporary with the most recently built tenements in the sordid regions that bore their names. Once only one of Gabriel's palaces made me stop for more than a moment ”

“ There is more of colour, of light and shade, of picturesque, fantastic outline, in a hundred yards of the Rue St Denis, than in all the line from Piccadilly to Whitechapel; a painter can pick up more food for his easel in this queer, old street—an antiquarian can find there more tales and crusts for his noddle, than in all Regent Street and Portland Place. We love a ramshackle place like this; it does one good to get out of the associations of the present century, and to retrograde a bit ”

“ Leading out of Rue Cléry, we find Rue des Degrés, six mètres in length, the smallest street in Paris, a mere flight of steps.
Rue St-Sauveur (thirteenth century) memorizes the church once there. From end to end we see ancient houses, fine old balconies, curious signs, architectural features of interest. In Rue des Petits-Carreaux, running on from this end of Rue Montorgueil (see p. 40) we see at No. 16 the house where, till recent days, musicians assembled for hire each Sunday. Now they meet at the Café de la Chartreuse, 24, Boulevard St-Denis. In a house in a court where the house No. ”

“ In 1793 it became one of the numerous revolutionary prisons; André Chenier, Marie Louise de Montmorency-Laval, the last abbess of Montmartre, were among the suspects shut up there; and the Rue du Faubourg St-Denis was renamed Rue Franciade. St-Lazare was specially obnoxious to Revolutionists, for there the Kings of France had been wont to make a brief stay on each State entry into the city, and there, on their last journey out of it, they had halted in their coffin, on the way to St-Denis. ”

“ In the pages of the venerable historians of the French capital, and in ancient maps, it is always called "La Grande Rue de Sainct Denys," being, no doubt, at one time the ne plus ultra of all that was considered wide and commodious. Now its appellation is curtailed into the Rue St D'nis, and it is avoided by the polite inhabitants of Paris as containing nothing but the bourgeoisie and the canaille. Once it was the Regent Street of Paris—a sort of Rue de la Paix—lounged along by the gallants of the days of Henri IV., and not unvisited by the red-heeled marquises of the Regent d'Orleans's time ”

“ Denis, the gateway which lay between the faubourg, the plain, and the ville, performed a function quite different from that of the Renaissance gateway which exists to-day; [Pg 221] in just what manner will be readily inferred when it is recalled that, with the Porte St. Antoine, the Porte St. Denis was the scene of much riot and bloodshed in the early history of Paris.
109 RUE DU FAUBOURG ST. DENIS (DÉSCAMPS’ STUDIO)
There are no tram-cars or omnibuses passing through its arch, as through the Place du Carrousel, or the courtyards of the Louvre, to take away the sentiment of romance ”

“ Denis ended here, there were only two corners to choose from, and I looked at these with attention. The building on the right was a handsome edifice of four stories, extending down the Rue de Beauvais to the Rue Fromenteau, and along the Rue Jean St. Denis a corresponding distance. I reflected that Hérault would not be likely to choose the concierge of such an imposing edifice as a depository for his papers, and turned my attention to the opposite side. The corner house here was a small one, stuck in, as it were, to fill an angle left by the two adjoining buildings. ”

“ Paris, in the old parts of it, is, as the French express it, mal percée. The way to remedy this evil is obvious. I will venture to suggest one improvement,—that the Rue St. Honoré be continued, no matter whether in a straight or curved line, through the streets of St. Denis and St. Martin, by piercing these two streets, to the line of streets which lead to the Place de l'Elephant and the Rue du Fauxbourg St. Antoine.
I will also take the liberty of hinting that a populous city can well afford to keep its streets clean: the streets themselves pay this expense ”

“ We must not venture into this, the choicest preserve of Victor Hugo, whose [Pg 530] graphic description of its wonders in his Notre Dame needs hardly to be alluded to; but we may add, that there were several abodes of the same kind, all communicating with the Rue St Denis, and all equally infamous in their day, though now tenanted only by quiet button-makers and furniture-dealers. The real Puits d'Amour stood at the corner of the Rue de la Grande Truanderie, and took its name in sad truth from a crossing of true love. ”

“ When he has passed Portes Saint-Martin and Saint-Denis, through which the swarming overflow of the faubourgs streams at all hours of the day, the provincial character of the city becomes accentuated. The old beau no longer sees any one whom he knows and can boast of being a stranger to all.
The shopkeepers, who stare curiously at him, with his display of linen, his fine frock-coat, his erect figure, take him for some famous actor out for a little healthful exercise before the play, on the old boulevard, the scene of his earliest triumphs. ”

“ The readiest way into the Rue St Denis from the Isle de la Cité, the centre of Paris, has always been over the Pont-au-Change. This bridge, now the widest over the Seine, was once a narrow, ill-contrived structure of wood, covered with a row of houses on either side, that formed a dark and dirty street, so that you might pass through it a hundred times without once suspecting that you were crossing a river. These houses, built of stone and wood, overhung the edges of the bridge, and afforded their inhabitants an unsafe abode between the sky and the water. ”

“ Viollet-le-Duc’s new parish church for the suburb of St-Denis, Saint-Denys-de-l’Estrée in the Boulevard Jules Guesde, built in 1864-7, has considerable interest, however. Unlike most English High Victorian Gothic churches, it is vaulted throughout; but the vaulting does not have that look of a student exercise which characterizes Lassus’s at Saint-Jean-de-Belleville in Paris of the previous decade. ”

“ We may join the early-goers among these men, who make their way to another house, not far distant. There 220 are temptations to stop before, and explore within, the seventeenth-century mansions all along Rues Sévigné and du Parc-Royal, but we pass on into Rue Turenne—once Rue Saint-Louis, the longest and widest and foremost in fashion of Marais streets, now merely big and bustling, with little left of its ancient glory—until we come to its No. ”

“ But selfishness is always blind; and so the flood carried the poor thing away; and the skeletons, the lead, the gold and the silver, were all swept into their respective lime-strewn pits and melting pots. Here is the epilogue. In 1815 the "Sous-préfet et le maire de Saint-Denis firent élever un tertre couvert de gazon, de lis et de cyprès sur les deux fosses dans lesquelles avaient été jetés les restes des rois et des princes." (Gilbert, Description historique de l'église de Saint-Denis.) "On se proposait d'ériger en ce lieu un monument expiatoire ”

“ The interior is mostly pure Early Gothic.
The neighbourhood to Paris, the supremacy of the great saint, and the fact that St. Denis was especially the Royal Abbey, all combined to give it great importance. Under Suger’s influence, Louis VI adopted the oriflamme or standard of St. Denis as the royal banner of France. The Merovingian and Carlovingian kings, to be sure—Germans rather than French—had naturally been buried elsewhere, as at Aix-la-Chapelle, Rheims, and Soissons (though even of them a few were interred beside the great bishop martyr) . ”

“ They apply its threats to themselves, while their imagination, as usual, translates it into a specific legend:26132 all the inhabitants of Paris are to be led out on the plain of Saint-Denis, and there decimated; previous to this, the most notorious patriots will be singled out together with forty or fifty market-women and broken on the wheel. ”

“ In order to return thither, he took the Rue Saint-Louis, the Rue Culture-Sainte-Catherine, and the Blancs-Manteaux; it was a little longer, but it was the road through which, for the last three months, he had become accustomed to pass every day on his way from the Rue de l'Homme Arme to the Rue des Filles-du-Calvaire, in order to avoid the obstructions and the mud in the Rue Vielle-du-Temple. ”

“ Three or four years later the family moved to a cottage at the corner of Second avenue and Seneca street. In the early ’70s they moved to the large home at the corner of Dexter and Republican streets, where the children grew up. In 1890 the family took possession of the large house standing on Queen Anne avenue, known as the Denny home, which was occupied by the family until a few years ago, when they moved to Fremont and later to the house where Mr. Denny died, in Licton Park, some distance north of Green Lake. ”

“ Denis, presents a strange contrast to the dark uniformity of a London street, where everything, in the dingy and smoky atmosphere, looks as though it were painted in India-ink—black houses, black passengers, and black sky. Here, on the contrary, is a thousand times more life and colour. Before you, shining in the sun, is a long glistening line of gutter—not a very pleasing object in a city, but in a picture invaluable. On each side are houses of all dimensions and hues; some but of one story; some as high as the Tower of Babel. ”

“ Then the population, remembering that Ste-Geneviève had stopped to rest and pray in the church on her way to St-Denis, called their village La Chapelle-Ste-Geneviève. Later it was named la Chapelle-St-Denis. To the church at la Chapelle went Jeanne d’Arc in the fateful year 1425. We find ancient houses all along the course of this old thoroughfare, and at No. 96 the church dedicated to St-Denis, built by Maurice de Sully, the chancel of that thirteenth-century structure still intact, after going through two disastrous fires and suffering damage in times of war. ”

“ It is a peculiarity of women to never think of the future; it is not mine... ́ The minister was in Paris. His hotel was only a foot from rue Sainte-Marguerite. Tanié met with him there and was hired. He returned with eyes dry and heart wrung out. `Madame, ́ he said to her, `I saw M. de Maurepas; I have given him my word. I will go, I will go. And you will be satisfied. ́ `Oh! My love!... ́ Madame Reymer drops her line of work, throws herself on Tanié, tosses her arms around his neck, devastates him with kisses and sweet nothings. ”

“ To his surprise it yielded behind his weight; and though he turned in a moment, continued to swing back on oiled and noiseless hinges until it stood wide open on a black interior. When things fall out opportunely for the person concerned, he is not apt to be critical about the how or why, his own immediate personal convenience seeming a sufficient reason for the strangest oddities and revolutions in our sublunary things; and so Denis, without a moment's hesitation, stepped within and partly closed the door behind him to conceal his place of refuge. ”

“ The touch of cold window bars to the exploring hand startles the man like the touch of a toad; the inequalities of the pavement shake his heart into his mouth; a piece of denser darkness threatens an ambuscade or a chasm in the pathway; and where the air is brighter, the houses put on strange and bewildering appearances, as if to lead him farther from his way. For Denis, who had to regain his inn without attracting notice, there was real danger as well as mere discomfort in the walk; and he went warily and boldly at once, and at every corner paused to make an observation. ”

“ Modern necessities harmonize ill with ancient architecture. The interior is grand, and the illusion produced by the painting on the roof complete: you would swear they were bas-reliefs,—and very bad ones.
I remarked to-day for the first time how much the Boulevards are improved by the removal of several houses: the Portes St. Martin and St Dénis are seen to much greater advantage than before. Louis the Fourteenth deserves these monuments; for in truth, all that is grand and beautiful in Paris may be ascribed to him or to Napoleon. The rows of trees have been carefully preserved ”