usuriers

We set forth northwards from the Place du Châtelet, at the foot of the Pont au Change, where stood the massive pile of the Grande Châtelet, originally built to defend the bridge from the Norman pirates as the Petit Châtelet was to defend the Petit Pont. It subsequently became the official seat and prison of the Provost of Paris, where he held his criminal court and organised the City Watch, and was demolished in 1802. Below this festered an irregular maze of slums, the aggregation of seven centuries, the most fetid, insanitary and criminal quarter of Paris, known as the Vallée de Misère, which only disappeared in 1855. On our R. soars the beautiful flamboyant Gothic tower, all that remains of the great church of St. Jacques de la Boucherie. This fine monument was saved by the good sense of the architect Giraud who, when the church was sold to the housebreakers during the Revolution, inserted a clause in the warrant exempting the tower from demolition. It was afterwards used as a lead foundry and twice narrowly escaped destruction by fire. Purchased by the Ville, it seemed safe at last, but again it was threatened in 1853 by the prolongation of the Rue de Rivoli: luckily, however, the new street just passed by on the north. The statue of Pascal under the vaulting reminds the traveller that the great thinker conducted some barometrical experiments on the summit, and the statues of the patron saints of craftsmen in the niches, that under its shadow the industrial arts were practised. We ascend the Rue St. Martin from the N.E. corner of the Square, and on our R. find the late Gothic church of St. Merri, built on the site of the seventh-century Chapel of St. Pierre, where Odo Falconarius, one of the defenders of Paris in the siege of 886, is known to have been buried. We enter for the sake of the beautiful sixteenth-century glass in the choir and a curious old painting of the same epoch in the first chapel beyond the entrance to the sacristy, Ste. Geneviève and her Flock, with a view of Paris in the background. We continue to ascend the street, noting No. 122, an old fountain and some reliefs, and soon reach, R. and L., the quaint and narrow mediæval Rue de Venise, formerly the Ruelle des Usuriers, home of the Law speculators (p. 242). At No. 27, L. of the Rue St. Martin and corner of the Rue Quincampoix, is the old inn of the Epée de Bois (now

Thomas Okey - The Story of Paris