I bet he doesn’t show up at the party.
Charing (not Charring) derives straightforwardly from Old English, and is simply the name of the village that once stood there - one of the first villages to be swallowed up by the expansion of London. Charing is a straightforward Anglo-Saxon place name, probably meaning “bend” as it stands on a bend in the River Thames. “Chere reine” is romantic, but not to be taken seriously. The “Cross” refers to the memorial cross erected there in memory of Queen Eleanor of Castile. The original cross no longer exists, but a replacement monument stands outside Charing Cross Station.
The word orangutan (also written orang-utan, orang utan and orangutang) is derived from the Malay and Indonesian words orang meaning “person” and hutan meaning “forest”,[4] thus “person of the forest”. Orang Hutan is the common term in these two national languages, although local peoples may also refer to them by local languages.
I suspect that a map that late isn’t going to help. Taking Poe’s references to Rue Richelieu and Rue St. Roch at face value, we’re dealing with a relatively small neighbourhood. The snag is that the Avenue de l’Opéra runs straight through it and it didn’t exist during Poe’s lifetime. This whole area was at the heart of Haussmann’s redevelopment of the city and much - though not all - of the old streetplan in the neighbourhood was swept away in the late 1850s and everything rebuilt without the old tangle of small streets.
Pierre Pinon’s Atlas du Paris haussmannien (Parigramme, 2002, p146-7) has a series of very detailed maps of the changes in exactly this neighbourhood around the new avenue, but annoyingly for present purposes only labels the larger streets.
If the Rue Morgue ever existed, it thus probably disappeared in about 1857. But I suspect Poe simply made the name up.
Incidentally, in the mid-19th century the infamous Paris Morgue was over on the Ile-de-la-Cité.
And there doesn’t appear to be a Rue Trianon in central Paris these days either, so he may have made that one up as well.
Mason County Hospital in Shelton, WA is on what used to be called Slaughterhouse Rd.
Your knowledge of old Paris is admirable. I was surprised to find that the map actually dates from 1865. It does not show the Avenue de l’Opéra but there are a pair of faint lines that may indicate where it was planned (or was constructed but they didn’t modify the map). In its place are such streets as Rue de Orties, de Montheaux (? – print is small) and Rue l’Evegue. Rue Molière had the longer name of Rue de la Fontaine Molière. There are a few other streets but no Rue Morgue in the area between Rue St. Roch and Rue de Richelieu. I also suspect Poe made it up.
Unfortunately I’ve leant out my copy of The Beautiful Cigar Girl and so can’t check that for information.
If anyone wants to see images of the stamps Chez referenced, they can be seen here.
We still have a Slaughter House Lane here in Newark. Now (amongst other things) it’s the location of a supermarket. We also have a road called Beast Market Hill.
There also appears to be at least five “Dead Lanes” in the UK.
Actually I realised this morning that I was wrong above and that most of the neighbourhood survived a bit past 1857. The Avenue de l’Opéra is the odd case out: the most obvious example of Haussmannisation, yet it isn’t actually built until under the Third Republic.
The demolitions in the 1850s only cleared the northern end of the area indicated by Poe. This was to create all the space needed for the opera house, the new surrounding streets and the square in front. It was already part of the conception that there’d be the grand avenue cut through to the Palais Royal to create the view back up to that square and the completed Opéra. However, there was little progress at that stage in creating the new avenue; building the Opéra took forever and I’d guess that that deprioritised the need to provide the view of it.
A start however was made and about a block of the new avenue was built, down to the intersection with Rue Louis-le-Grand. Pinon (p149) reproduces an interesting 1870 photo looking south down the truncated street and out over the roofs of the neighbourhood in question, taken from the top of the Opéra.
It’s only in 1876 that there’s the big argument about whether to complete Haussmann’s scheme by finally building the whole length of the Avenue de l’Opéra. Agreement on this quickly leads to the extensive demolitions through the heart of the neighbourhood.
Thus most of the streets on an 1865 map of this area will still be as they were as in Poe’s day. The new avenue will be shown dotted because it is planned, but as yet incomplete.
There are quite a few photos of the neighbourhood being demolished, mainly taken by Charles Marville, such as this one. But I’m not sure I trust many of the dates people assign to them, precisely because it is easy to get confused about what was demolished when.
Very interesting. I love reading accounts of how various cities changed over the years. I’m more familiar with some of the redevelopment of London, so to read up on Paris is great. Thanks!
Reconnecting to the OP, I wonder if the area actually was a slum in 1840/41 when Poe wrote it. If there were plans to tear it down and rebuild were in the works in the 1850s, that is likely. If it was a slum, was it widely known and that is why Poe chose that area (from a distance), or was it more a matter of sticking a pin in a Paris map to choose a location and he got lucky? Could he have imagined 160+ years later people would be wondering about his motivation?
If you search for “Rue Morgue” using Google books, and limit it to 1840-1850, you get a very interesting hit. Graham's American Monthly Magazine of Literature, Art, and Fashion - Google Books This is Graham’s American Monthly Magazine of LIterature, Art and Fashion, June 1846-January 1847.
Poe was a writer(and editor?) for the Magazine. In this commentary(Marginalia) by Poe, Poe’s discussing a French novel of the past year which seems to have taken the liberty of having a murdering ape in it. Poe generously allowed as how the French author came upon the idea independently and didn’t steal from Poe.
The interesting part is Poe’s comment
Now, Poe leaves it a bit open whether there WAS such a street, but if the Paris magazine couldn’t find it at that point, it was probably made up. Poe was enough of an egoist, IMHO, that he would have told them flat out that they were wrong.
I drove past Burned Church Road once- I think it was on Hilton Head Island… not good. :eek:
This would make a good project for Google.
Historic city maps. Put in a city and year and see what the street map was.
samclem would seem to have found something close to a smoking gun (or snarling orangutan).
The southern end, at least, had long been a notorious slum. And the fact that this was next to the Palais Royal meant that it was associated with prostitution. As a result, it was recognised as a place where high and low jostled together, the jumble of insalubrious backstreets up against the grand Palais Royal and the Rue de Rivoli. This end got tidied up relatively early, with the creation of a short street on the axis of what becomes the Avenue de l’Opéra from the square outside the Comédie Francaise to the Butte des Moulins (where the Rue des Moulins is now). That then gets incorporated into the conception of a new avenue up to the new opera house.
I’m less certain about the northern half of the neighbourhood. (There’s no handy Paris equivalent to Charles Booth’s map of London.)
People had long been complaining about the slums in central Paris and there were precedents for clearing them to create new major avenues. But in 1841 Haussmannisation as such was still to come and there was no particular reason to anticipate that this neighbourhood would be transformed so dramatically.
But the association of the Palais Royal and its surroundings with prostitution was widely known and it really wouldn’t surprise me if Poe did know of the area’s low reputation and chose it for that reason. (A London parallel for the period would be choosing somewhere near Covent Garden.)
My lithograph of Paris, dated 1739, shows no Rue Morgue anywhere between
Rue neuee Saint Roch and Rue de Richelieu.
There are zombies walking down the rue Morgue :eek:
Doesn’t Paris have a reputation for graphic street names? I don’t know any specific names off the top of my head, but things like “large-breasted, juicy-twatted prostitute’s street,” “stinky crap-smeared unwashed asshole street,” “vomit-soaked, disease-ridden corpses street,” and the like?
Not really. Even though you could find a couple such examples (none comes to my mind at the moment), almost all current street names are relatively recent, and are generally the name of someone famous, or of a previously existing landmark/village/monastery/path/whatever. And amongst the few really old remaining names, dating back to the midle-age or renaissance, most are quite innofensive (“fishing cat street”, for instance).
My* Baedecker’s Paris Guide *of 1907 lists the “Morgue (closed to the public)” (on the Ile de la Cite’) as an (apparent) place of interest.
I believe **DudleyGarret **was making fun of Koxinga’s antipodean antecedants - all the extra "U"s in our version of English.
At least, that’s why *I *laughed at it.