Around St-Georges
From Paris Hotels Reviews
Around St-Georges
The heart of the 9e arrondissement was first developed in the nineteenth century as a fashionable suburb. It was soon dubbed the Nouvelle Athenès, or New Athens, after the Romantic artists and writers who came to live here made it the centre of a minor artistic boom. The handsome centerpiece of the quartier is the circular place St. Georges. At its centre, the fountain – still with its horse through – is topped by a bust of Paul Gavarni, a nineteenth-century cartoonist who made a specialty of lampooning the mistresses that were de rigueur for bourgeois males of the time. This was the mistresses’ quarter – they were known as lorettes, after the nearby church of Notre-Dame de Lorette, built in the 1820s in the Neoclassical style. On the east side of place St-Georges, the Hôtel de la Païva was built in the 1840s in the extravagant French Renaissance style for Thérèse Lachman, a famous Second Empire courtesan who married a Marquis. On the west side, the Hôtel Thiers was destroyed by the Communards in 1871 but quickly rebuilt; it now houses the Dosne-Thiers foundation, with a huge library specializing in the nineteenth-century French history.
In the immediate vicinity of the square, place Toudouze and rues Clauzel, Milton and Rodier are worth wandering along for their elegantly ornamented facades. A short distant southwest of St-Georges, the serene square d’ Orléans is an 1829 development that aped the designs of Regency London. The project was a great success, attracting Chopin, Alexandre Dumas fils and George Sand as early residents. Some of the hôtels, or fine town houses of the original Nouvelle Athenès scheme can still be spotted just to the west, along the south side of rue de la Tour des Dames.
Rue St.-Lazare is the welcome swathe of activity amid the residential calm, winding its way towards the Gare St-Lazare, passing the bulbous church of La Sainte-Trinité, whose single, over-size French Renaissance-style tower is it’s the most exciting feature. Inside, the vast space under the barrel vault feels cold and sterile – hard to imagine that the deeply spiritual composer Oliver Messiaen was organist here for the best part of half a century.
