Rue du Bac is a street on the Rive Gauche, the left bank of the Seine in Paris (7th arrondissement). It is known for the apparitions of the Virgin Mary, which are said to have appeared here several times to the nun Catherine Labouré in 1830. Rue du Bac, like many other streets around Paris at the time, developed as a result of the settlement of religious communities.
Its name derives from the river ferry (French: bac) that began operating at the lower end of the street in 1550 and gained importance when Catherine de’ Medici commissioned the architect Philibert Delorme in 1564 to build the Palais des Tuileries on this side of the Seine. Instead of having to laboriously transport the building material from the quarries much further south – today’s catacombs under the Place Denfert-Rochereau – over the only bridges that existed at the time and the Ile de la Cité, i.e. through the city centre, the stones were transported across country meadows and pastures to take the ferry across.
The resulting grand chemin du bac (“Big Ferry Route”) only received its border development from 1620, initially very hesitantly, before the new suburb of Faubourg Saint-Germain came into fashion in the 18th century. Since then, the street has undergone numerous changes through widening and in particular the construction of the Boulevard Saint-Germain under Baron Haussmann. Instead of the ferry, a wooden bridge was built in 1634, which was replaced by the Pont Royal in 1689.
The grand chemin du bac followed the course of today’s Rue Notre-Dame-des-Champs, Rue Saint-Placide and Rue du Bac. Behind the chemin de la Maladrerie (today Rue de Sèvres) it led past the cemetery of the Hospitals Hospice des Petites Maisons. This replaced the old Maladrerie Saint-Germain, founded in 1497, from 1557, was later rebuilt several times and finally, after taking the name Hospice des Petits Ménages in 1801, demolished in 1868 and replaced by Square Boucicaut. Not far from there was later, from 1689 until its closure in 1747, a cemetery, the Cimetière de la Trinité of the parish of St-Sulpice de Paris.
[caption id="attachment_169452" align="aligncenter" width="590"] Cornelius Vanderbilt, the railroad tycoon, by J. C. Buttre[/caption][responsivevoice_button voice="UK English Female" buttontext="Listen to this Post"]Cornelius Vanderbilt (May 27, 1794 – January 4, 1877), also known informally as "C...
