chestnut trees of the square facing the high wall of the Conservatoire des Arts et Métiers. Towards the centre, you still have the narrowness of a medieval street, but greatly deteriorated. It is better to take Rue Quincampoix, which has hardly changed since John Law established his central bank there, and ‘crowds rushed into this narrow street to convert coin into paper’.63
Marais
Once you cross Rue Saint-Martin – some would rather say Rue Beaubourg – you enter the Marais.64 The appearance of this word to denote a region of Paris is relatively recent: it was not until the seventeenth century that only the zone of the Marais that was still really marshy was called by that name, around the present convergence of Rues de Turenne, Vieille-du-Temple, de Bretagne and des Filles-du-Calvaire, not far from the Cirque d’Hiver.65 In referring to the Paris quarter, marais means a region of watered gardens (maraîchers) rather than an actual marsh. If there was such a marsh, if the battle of Lutetia between Camulogène and Caesar took place around here, the fortifications of Charles V subsequently served as a dyke, and its moats as a drainage canal. This arrangement is still very visible: Boulevard Beaumarchais, built on the line of the walls, is in such a raised position that Rue des Tournelles and Rue Saint-Gilles, coming from the Marais, have to rise quite steeply in their final stretch in order to meet it. And on the other side, to descend to Rue Amelot – formerly Rue des Fossés-du-Temple – it was necessary to install a stairway.
It is strange, and has no other equivalent in Paris, how the physiognomy of the Marais today is haunted by the phantoms of three great domains, which have left their names and yet not a single stone: the Temple, the Hôtel Saint-Pol and the Hôtel des Tournelles.
The mother house of the order of Knights Templar, founded in Jerusalem in the twelfth century, was located at the far end of the region’s major north-south axis, on Rue du Temple.66 Its lands fell into two distinct sections. The heart was the enclos, a fortified quadrilateral whose boundaries would now be Rues du Temple, de Bretagne, Charlot and Béranger. At the centre of this enclosure was the keep, used as a prison for Louis XVI and his family after 10 August 1792, and later for Babeuf and Cadoudal. A large part of the enclosure was rented out to artisans, exempt here from tax as in all the religious precincts of the city.
To the south and east of the enclosure, the Templars possessed large tracts of agricultural land: this was the censive, whose limits defined a further quadrilateral, extending to Rue du Roi-de-Sicile and thus corresponding to a large section of the Marais today. The wall of Philippe Auguste cut through this censive, along the line of Rue des Francs-Bourgeois.67 On the side facing the city, these lands were gradually populated along the axes, particularly along Rue Vieille-du-Temple, which was then called Rue de la Couture-du-Temple [couture = cultivation], but on the outward side there was nothing but market gardens until the sixteenth century.
The other major axis of the Marais, its east-west orientation, was Rue Saint-Antoine, as it still is today. At the end of this, the outer limit of Paris, two royal dwellings stood face to face, the Hôtel Saint-Pol and the Hôtel des Tournelles. Saint-Pol was the creation of the Dauphin, the future Charles V. Tired of the old Palais de la Cité, where he had been forced to confront popular insurrection and Étienne Marcel, he decided to establish himself somewhere more calm. He bought buildings and gardens from the Comte d’Étampes, the archbishop of Sens, and the abbés of Saint-Maur, ending up with all of the land between Rue Saint-Antoine and the Seine, and from Rue Saint-Paul right through to Rue du Petit-Musc. Saint-Pol was not a single building, an hôtel in the usual sense, but rather a group of buildings surrounded by gardens, and linked by covered galleries that framed a succession of courtyards, a cherry orchard, a vineyard, a sauvoir for raising salmon, aviaries, and a menagerie where lions were kept, pensioners of the hotel down to its final days. (In his Vies des dames galantes, Brantôme recalled how ‘one day when François I was amusing himself by watching his lions fighting, a lady who had let her glove fall said to de Lorges: if you want me to believe that you love me as much as you swear every day, go and pick up my glove. De Lorges went down into the lions’ den, picked up the glove from among these fearsome animals, came up, threw it in the lady’s face, and since then, despite all the troubles and pains that she took towards him, never wanted to see her again.’)
From the main gate of the Hôtel Saint-Pol you could see on the other side of Rue Saint-Antoine the gateway of the Hôtel des Tournelles, which, according to Piganiol de La Force, ‘took its name from the number of towers by which it was surrounded’. In the 1420s, under the English occupation, the Duke of Bedford, acting as regent, made his residence in a small hotel that was situated between Rue de Birague and the Impasse Guéménée. ‘John, Duke of Bedford, stayed there during the disturbances of the Bourguignons and the Armagnacs’, wrote Sauval. ‘He extended it and had it magnificently built, so that it has since been a royal residence, which our kings have preferred to Saint-Pol, and where Charles VII, Louis XI, Charles VIII, Louis XII and François I all stayed for long periods.’ Piganiol de La Force relates that ‘this palace counted several courtyards, a number of chapels, twelve galleries, two parks and six large gardens, as well as a labyrinth known as the Daedalus, and a further garden or park of nine acres, which the Duke of Bedford had his gardener plough up’.68 After its return to the French crown, the hotel was surrounded by a large park, where François I raised camels and ostriches, and which gave its name to Rue du Parc-Royal. The park was also used for equestrian sports, but tournaments as such were held on Rue Saint-Antoine, which was widened between the two hôtels, a layout that still exists alongside the statue of Beaumarchais.
The way in which these three groups of buildings disappeared goes a long way to explain the contemporary Marais. The Hôtel Saint-Pol was the first to go: François I, always short of money and wanting to renovate the Louvre and make his residence there, decided to sell it off as building plots. ‘There is no longer anything remaining of these buildings, which included a large number of hôtels, such as the Hôtel de La Pissotte, the Hôtel de Beautreillis, the Hôtel-de-la-Reine, the Hôtel Neuf (known as the Hôtel d’Étampes), etc. And it is on their ruins that the streets were laid out that are now those of the Saint-Paul quarter as far as the ditches of the Arsenal, and preserve the names of the buildings that were there at the time of the Hôtel Saint-Pol, such as Rues de Beautreillis, des Lions, du Petit-Musc and de la Cerisaie.’69 Like all of the Marais that was built in the Renaissance, this part of the Saint-Paul quarter, despite the street names that seem taken from an illuminated manuscript, was designed in a modern fashion: the plots are regular, and the streets laid out in a grid, in contrast with the medieval lattice beside the Hôtel de Sens, Rue des Nonnains-d’Hyères and Rue de l’Ave-Maria.
The destruction of the Hôtel des Tournelles was not provoked by financial difficulties but by an accident: in 1559, while a tournament was being held in Rue Saint-Antoine to celebrate the marriage of the princesses, Henri II was mortally wounded in front of the palace by the blow of a lance wielded by Gabriel de Montgomery, ‘the fairest man and the best man-at-arms of that time’, according to Sauval. Catherine de Médicis, his widow, decided to raze the hotel to the ground, and moved into her new hotel close to the Halles. The abandoned park was for many years the site of a horse market.
During this time, however, in the more central part of the Marais, a new quarter was constructed between the two fortifications – the wall of Philippe Auguste around the central and denser part of the city, and the wall of Charles V, which ran through open fields. Once the ‘false gates’ of the old fortifications were crossed, you entered a region where gardeners peacefully cultivated their cabbages and leeks. This was a paradise for property developers, as demand was strong in the first half of the sixteenth century, before the Wars of Religion. François I set the example by dividing up the Hôtel de Tancarville,
