Around and About Paris – Secret Neighborhoods

In her internationally acclaimed series,
Around and About Paris, author Thirza Vallois takes you on a walk to
the area round the Gobelins tapestry workshops, a poor area till
recently, as revealed in Victor Hugo’s Les Misérables. Following is a
section of this walk. You will find the complete walk and the full
story of the neighborhood – including the astonishing history of Les
Gobelins – in Around and About Paris/ Volume III, in the chapter on the
13th arrondissement.

Start from Place
d’Italie and take the Boulevard Auguste-Blanqui to the west. Its
picturesque kiosk, motley, cheerful flowerbeds and boules players
create a touch of small-town provincialism. A market is held along the
Boulevard on Sunday, Tuesday and Friday mornings, adding extra color to
the place. If you are interested in the sculptor Rodin, you may wish to
walk down to no 68, the site of the studio where he set up Camille
Claudel during their passionate love affair. It was located in a
charming 18th-century folie, which had been built for one of the King’s
councilors, but has unfortunately been demolished, like the other
folies that embellished these once bucolic parts.

Turn right
into rue Abel Hovelacque and left into the dismal rue des Reculettes,
whose winding course will take you to rue Croulebarbe, where you will
turn right. The windmill of the Croulebarbe family (whose picturesque
name probably referred to the overblown beard of an ancestor) is
mentioned way back in 1214 and appears on all the maps of
pre-Revolution Paris. The street ran along the river Bièvre, an obvious
location for the family’s windmill, which disappeared only in 1840. By
1243, this prosperous family is known also to have owned a substantial,
profitable vineyard and, by the following century, another property
that was located “along the road that leads from Saint-Marcel to
Gentilly.” Nobody knows, though, how it came into the hands of the
Order of Saint-Martin-des-Champs a few years later, all the stranger
since their domain was situated at the other end of town. It still
belonged to the Order at the time of Louis-Philippe, which explains why
Fieschi, who, on 28 July 1835 had made an attempt on the latter’s life
on Boulevard du Temple (see Volume 2, the 11th arrondissement), went
into hiding here – he was the concierge of Saint-Martin! In 1827 rue
Croulebarbe made the headlines when the goat girl of Ivry, Aimée
Millot, was stabbed to death by the mentally unbalanced Honoré Ulbach
in the middle of a thunderstorm – an appropriate setting for a
melodrama. Aimée would come here every day with her goats and sit
reading a book, looking lovely in her straw hat. Her murder aroused
outraged compassion all over Paris: even the sensational arrival of the
first giraffe in the Jardin des Plantes (see Volume 1, the 5th
arrondissement) – the first ever to tread French soil – was
overshadowed by the crime. Ulbach was among the last convicts to be put
to death on Place de Grève (now Hôtel-de-Ville), the traditional place
of public executions in Paris up to the reign of Louis-Philippe.
However, after the three-day riots of July 1830 that brought
Louis-Philippe to the throne, the new King vowed never again to carry
out executions on Place de Grève as a token of gratitude to the people
of Paris, who had supported him heroically on that site. Rue
Croulebarbe runs along Square René Le Gall. At the back of the garden a
row of poplar trees denotes the subterranean course of the Bièvre. The
street and the garden make for a peaceful, provincial atmosphere, a
blessed retreat on a hot summer day, just off the busy main arteries of
the arrondissement, a villagey atmosphere enhanced by the presence of
the Basque restaurant Etchegorry, at no. 41, a well-known old-timer. In
the 19th century this was a cabaret that belonged to Madame Grégoire
and was a favorite with the Romantic writers, especially Victor Hugo.
At no. 33 stands Paris’s first skyscraper (see photo), 21 story’s high.
Square René Le Gall was opened in 1938 on land that used to belong to
the Gobelins workshops, situated to the northeast, and was divided up
as kitchen gardens among its craftsmen. It is now named after a member
of the Resistance who was shot by the Germans.

Rue
Barbier-du-Metz branches off rue Croulebarbe to the left and follows
the meandering course of the Bièvre, running parallel to the curved
back of the Gobelins annex, a building of reinforced concrete put up by
Auguste Perret in 1935. A neat, modern building across the street,
surrounded by a green stretch of lawn, houses the new Gobelins
workshops, which face the north so as to enjoy a better quality of
light. A pile of stones lying round in the garden by the street is all
that remains of the exquisite 18th-century folie of Jean de Julienne,
shamefully demolished recently for no good reason. Julienne’s uncle was
a famous dyer, Jean Gluck, who helped Julienne develop his workshop.
The painter Watteau, a close friend of Julienne’s, used the place as a
base for his walks in the neighboring countryside, a source of
inspiration for his paintings.

Rue Gustave Geoffroy on your
right will lead you to rue des Gobelins. An unexpected sight awaited
you at nos. 17 and 19, where, until recently, amidst a medley of shabby
workshops and rickety offices at the back of a drab courtyard, rose a
genuine medieval manor, dilapidated and blackened by age, a stunning
apparition from a fairytale book, and one of the most moving, if not
the most moving, secrets of Paris. Alas! No more! The manor is still
standing, but it has been cleaned spruced up and is part of a new
luxury residence. The stones stand, the soul has left these parts….
And
the stones have an astonishing story to tell: this was the Domaine de
la Reine Blanche, though no one knows for sure who the Queen was. It
might have been Blanche de Castille, the mother of Saint Louis, but
there are other candidates, for, up until the 16th century, when
Catherine de Medici introduced black from Spain as the color of
mourning, it had been the custom for the widowed queens of France to
wear white and several queens were known as Blanche. Be that as it may,
in all likelihood the manor belonged to the royal family and was the
site of the tragic scene of the Bal des Ardents, a fancy-dress ball
held here on 28 January 1393. The feeble-minded Charles VI and five of
his friends turned up dressed as savages. The Duc d’Orléans,
purportedly curious to identify his brother the king, held a torch
close to the faces of the “savages” and (accidentally?) set their
costumes aflame. Four of the unfortunate party perished in the fire,
while one survived by jumping into a tub of water. The king was saved
by the presence of mind of his aunt, the Duchesse de Berry, who rolled
him in her coat; yet, while he did not lose his life, he lost the last
remnants of his sanity after this traumatic experience. The mansion was
promptly razed to the ground and for the next hundred years a market
was held on its site every Monday as well as a fair twice a year. The
present house was built some hundred years later. It is this house, or
the one at no 19, or both, that may correspond to ‘la Follie-Goubelin’,
mentioned by Rabelais in Pantagruel.

Thirza Vallois is the
author of Around and About Paris, Vol. 1, 2, and 3.Her video, “Three
Perfect Days in Paris,” aired on all United Airlines international
flights throughout September 1998 and on scores of television channels
throughout the year. She is an agrégée of the Sorbonne (the most
prestigious of French university degrees) and made excellent use of her
academic background during her eight years of research dedicated to
Paris, which has culminated in her books. For more information and
Thirza’s appearance schedule, please visit her website at http://www.wfi.fr/vallois/