Note 215 — Chapter III · 1642 to 1644.

The hôtel of the Dukes de Longueville is not at all the one which, after the death of her husband, Madame de Longueville bought of the Epernons, on the Rue Saint Thomas-du-Louvre, near the hôtel de Rambouillet, where she resided with her children, and which bore her name from 1664 till the close of the seventeenth century. The dwelling of the Longuevilles was the old hôtel d’Alençon. (See Sauval, vol. i., pp. 65 and 70, especially p. 119.) It was situated on the Rue des Poulies, among the rich hôtels which line the right side of that street from the Rue Saint Honoré to the Seine, and which, with their dependencies and their gardens, extend to the Louvre. It was almost opposite to the Rue des Fossés-Saint-Germain-l’Auxerrois. Upon its right, towards the Seine, was the Petit-Bourbon, which, having served as a residence and a stronghold in Paris to the eldest of the house of Bourbon, became a royal building, a sort of appendage to the Louvre, where the young king, Louis XIV., gave several great balls, and the theatre of which was lent to Molière, for the performance of his comedies, upon his arrival in Paris. Upon the left, on the same line, after the hôtel de Longueville, came the hôtels de Villequier and d’Aumont; and a little nearer to the church and house of l’Oratoire, the hôtels de La Force and de Créqui. When, in 1663, Louis XIV., having entered into full possession of royal authority, and wishing to signalize his reign by great monuments, undertook to finish the Louvre and to give it a façade worthy of the rest of the edifice, it was necessary for him to pull down, with the Petit-Bourbon, a part of the hôtels of the Rue des Poulies, and among others that of Longueville. This was the most ancient and most considerable. It was composed of a large front building, of a vast court, of the hôtel proper, with immense gardens. Those of our readers who desire to be sure of the correctness of these details, have only to cast their eyes upon the excellent plan of Gomboust, which gives an admirable view of Paris in the seventeenth century, in 1652.