Rue des Arquebusiers, opening at No. 91, dates from 1720, when it was Rue du Harlay-au-Marais. Santerre lived here for a time. No. 2 stands on the site of the house where Beaumarchais died in 1790.
Boulevard Henri IV is modern (1866), cut across the site of two old convents. Rue Castex leads out of it where stood once the convent des Filles de Ste-Marie; its chapel, now a Protestant church, is entered at No. 5. The Caserne des Célestins was built in 1892 on the site of part of the large and celebrated convent of the Célestins, an Order founded in 1244 by the priest who became Pope Celestin V. The Carmelites who at first were established here, greatly disturbed by inundations from the Seine who overflowed her banks in those long-past ages, even as she does to-day, quitted their quarters on this site. The Célestins who came to Paris in 1352 and took over these abandoned dwellings were protected and enriched by Charles V, inhabiting the Palais St-Pol close by. The Order was suppressed in 1778, before the Revolution suppressed all Orders--for the time; and in 1785 the convent here was taken for the first deaf and dumb institution organized by abbé de l'Épée. The convent chapel with its numerous royal tombs, the bodies of some royal personages, the hearts of others, was razed in 1849. Some vestiges of the convent walls remained standing till 1904. Where the boulevard meets the Quai des Célestins, we see now a circular group of worn, ivy-grown stones; an inscription tells us these old stones once formed part of the Tour de la Liberté of the demolished Bastille. They were unearthed in making the Paris Metropolitan Railway a few years ago. The birds make the remnant of that old tower of liberty their own to-day and passers-by stop regularly to feed them.
Crossing the Seine we come to the boulevard St-Germain, beginning at boulevard Sully in arrondissement V, stretching right through arrondissement VI and ending at the Quai d'Orsay near the Chambre des Députés in arrondissement VII. Though in name so historic and running across interesting ground, the boulevard is of modern formation. It has swept away a whole district of ancient streets. The Nos. 61 to 49 are ancient, all that remains of Rue des Noyers erewhile there. At No. 67 Alfred de Musset was born (1810). The théâtre de Cluny is on the site of part of the vanished couvent des Mathurins. The firm Hachette stands where was once a Jews' cemetery. No. 160 was the restaurant now razed where Thackeray, when a young student at the Beaux-Arts, took his meals. A sign-board he painted long hung there. We see some old houses of the ancient Rue des Boucheries between Nos. 162 and 148. At No. 166 we turn for an instant into Rue de l'Échaudé, dating from the fourteenth century, when it was a _chemin_ along the abbey moat, a street of ancient houses. The word _échaudé_, a confectioner's term used for a certain kind of three-cornered cake, signifies in topographical language a triangle formed by the junction of three streets. The pavement-stones before Nos. 137 to 135 cover the site of the ancient abbey prison. Rue des Ciseaux bordered in olden days the Collège des Écossais. The statue of Diderot at No. 170 was set up on his centenary as close as could be to the house he dwelt in, in Rue de l'Égout. The hôtel Taranne records the name of the thirteenth-century street of which some vestiges remain on the odd-number side of the boulevard between No. 175 and Place St-Germain-des-Prés, where Saint-Simon lived and wrote. The little grassy square round the house at No. 186 was originally a leper's burial-ground, then, from 1576 to 1604, a Protestant cemetery. Looking into the Rue St-Thomas-d'Aquin, once passage des Jacobins, we see the church which began early in the years of the eighteenth century as a Jacobin convent. At the Revolution it was made into a Temple of Peace! The frescoes of the ceiling are by Lemoine.
