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The Fountain of the Innocents and its place in the Paris cityscape, 1549–1788

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  23 January 2017

DAVID GILKS
DAVID GILKS*
Affiliation:
School of History, University of East Anglia, Norwich NR4 7TJ, UK
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Abstract

This article analyses how the Fountain of the Innocents appeared and also how it was used and perceived as part of the Paris cityscape. In the 1780s, the plan to transform the Holy Innocents’ Cemetery into a market cast doubt on the Fountain's future; earlier perceptions now shaped discussions over reusing it as part of the transformed quarter. The article documents how the Fountain was dismantled in 1787 and re-created the following year according to a new design, explaining why it was created in this form. Finally, the article considers what contemporary reactions to the remade Fountain reveal about attitudes toward the authenticity of urban monuments before the establishment of heritage institutions and societies.

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Type
Research Article
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Urban History , Volume 45 , Issue 1 , February 2018 , pp. 49 - 73
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Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2017 

The Fountain of the Innocents was one of the most iconic features in the Paris cityscape for over three centuries. But, rather than providing a focus for incremental incrustations of collective memory, its past fame now contrasts its present-day obscurity. Just as this obscurity makes it difficult to imagine why the Fountain once mattered, its present-day appearance belies its earlier forms and urban connections. This article therefore aims to reconstruct and analyse how the Fountain appeared, but also how it was perceived, represented and used between its creation in 1549 and its re-creation in 1788. My contention is that the Fountain provides a lens through which to observe wider cultural and intellectual trends and larger developments in and about Paris. The article will thus explore how changing social practices, administrative structures and stylistic expectations shaped efforts to integrate monuments of artistic, symbolic and historical meaning into urban improvement plans. Historicizing a particular monument in this way can sharpen our understanding of early modern urban monumentality.

The Fountain delineates the scope of the article, but research was prompted by and directed toward answering the broader question of how inhabitants of changing cities reconcile the city of the past with that of the future. This question can be asked of many cities and periods – real and imagined – because in most times and places remnants of the distant past conferred prestige and legitimacy, just as their loss prompted efforts to conserve what remained. The newly affluent inhabitants of Clarice show off ‘what remains of the ancient Clarices’ precisely because neither they nor their city have any connection with the city's former incarnations.Footnote 1

The Claricians are far from alone, but asking this question of early modern Paris yields especially curious and surprising results. Since Paris possessed few Roman remains, Renaissance monuments such as the Fountain carried a relatively greater symbolic freight, representing the classical style in the city and the start of a distinctive French artistic tradition. Though admired, during the eighteenth century Renaissance architecture seemed peculiar and, alongside other historic vestiges, was threatened with destruction. Before the mid-eighteenth century, most new buildings in Paris were simply created alongside the old. But between the 1750s and 1780s, a private-sector building boom and crown-led urban improvements transformed much of the city in ways that required destroying existing urban fabric. As a result, many inconveniently placed hotels, gates, convents, churches, cemeteries and medieval houses were destroyed. Decades before the establishment of national monuments commissions, heritage laws and local societies for the conservation of historic buildings, these destructive changes made informed contemporaries acutely aware of the dilemma that urban improvements posed. In these contexts of cultural and urban change, the example of the Fountain provides a striking study of how successive generations of inhabitants of Paris tried to understand, reuse and eventually ensure that the past remained visible through making intelligible and conspicuous a monument that had become incomprehensible and inconspicuous. Threats to the city's historic identity thus prompted efforts to conserve evidence of its historic grandeur.Footnote 2

The approach adopted here is inspired by theoretical insights from different disciplines and authors. While taking a single built structure and asking how it has been interpreted over time follows the example of Bruno Latour's reflections on the Pont Neuf, the idea of scrutinizing the layers of existence of an urban space and showing how these interacted follows Henri Lefebvre.Footnote 3 In describing the culture in which the Fountain was formed, used and re-formed, the article takes its cue from archaeology and anthropology, recognizing that even a simple form such as a stick can be used in diverse ways.Footnote 4 Rather than thinking of the Fountain merely as the recipient of interventions, the article considers how it informed these and other interventions because human-object relations not only change objects, but can also change how humans think about and use objects.Footnote 5 Applied to architecture and design, the study of these relations explores the contentious connection between form and function.Footnote 6

The Fountain of the Innocents in 1549

The Fountain of the Innocents was created between 1547 and 1549 by the architect Pierre Lescot and the sculptor Jean Goujon.Footnote 7 It replaced an early fountain and stood in the heart of the Right Bank at the intersection of the rue St Denis and rue aux Fers, alongside the Church and Cemetery of the Holy Innocents, near Les Halles market.Footnote 8 It formed part of the spectacular decorative scheme commissioned by the city representatives and organized by Jean Martin and Thomas Sébillet for the ‘joyous entry’ of Henri II in June 1549. They spared little expense glorifying their king while reminding him that Paris was ‘the kingdom's first city’ with the fiscal and cultural clout to stage an entry surpassing those into Lyon and Rouen. An ideal cityscape created inside Paris using ephemeral architecture showcased their mastery of the fashionable antique style.Footnote 9 The Fountain was a station where Henri II paused and the corporation accompanying him changed from the spice-sellers to goldsmiths; it was decorated with foliage and, according to a contemporary account, its beauty was enhanced by the gentry and finely dressed ladies behind an ornate balustrade in its loggia.Footnote 10 The Fountain's design thus enabled them to see Henri II and be seen by him, thereby embodying the symbolism of the entry – an enactment in which the new monarch renewed urban privileges and cities promised obeisance.

The entry provided the occasion to replace a medieval fountain with an ornate new one, but the Fountain was above all intended as an urban embellishment to improve the area and its water supply.Footnote 11 This urban theme explains why contemporary accounts said less about the Fountain than decorations created solely for the entry and why it alone was a permanent structure made from limestone and designed to fit into existing urban tissue.Footnote 12

The Fountain thus served two functions – the one short term and ceremonial, the other long term and civic – that determined its location and unusual form. Pictorial representations (Figures 1 and 2) show an ornate structure on a rectangular plan that squared-off a street corner, meaning that it had just two visible sides. Its base contained the cistern; water sourced from Belleville was discharged through two lion-head mascaron taps under each arcade. Upon the base was a covered loggia-cum-grandstand, formed by three arcades, two facing the rue aux Fers and one facing the rue St Denis, each framed by double fluted-Corinthian pilasters and capitals. This unusual structure adapted the Roman triumphal arch; it partly resembled ephemeral fountains created elsewhere for joyous entries, but differed from earlier fountains in Paris.

Figure 1:

Jacques Androuet du Cerceau, Fontaine des Saints Innocents à Paris, c. 1560. Etching on paper, 27.5 × 40.3cm. Reproduced with the permission of the Bibliothèque nationale de France.

Figure 2:

Israel Silvestre, Veue de la fontaine Sainct Innocent a Paris, c. 1639–91. Etching on paper, 7.6 × 12cm. Reproduced with the permission of The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York.

Goujon's carved limestone bas-reliefs underlined the Fountain's special status and enlivened its exterior, compensating for the modest discharge of water through conjuring up the illusion of an aquatic cornucopia. The five standing nymphs between the pilasters collectively conveyed movement and provided a rhythmic succession of variations. Goujon's other bas-reliefs were allegories of Fame for the spandrels (copied from the Arch of Titus), scenes of playful genie for the attic panels and groups of nymphs, genie, sea-monsters and a solitary adult male figure (Triton, messenger god of the sea) for the stylobate panels.Footnote 13

The Fountain's form and iconography corresponded to its functions. At first glance, they show how the Fountain was created for the entry and suggest that Lescot and Goujon co-ordinated their designs with the organizers and other contributors. Just as several carved decorations conveyed the city (symbolized by the ship) meeting the crown (symbolized by the fleur-de-lis, the ‘H’ and dolphins), other features and sculptures (mostly fecund females and jovial infants) alluded to several prominent themes in the entry: fertility, ‘abundance’ and mastery of fortune.Footnote 14 More generally, the Fountain echoed forms – triumphal arches, fountains, allegories of water and nymphs refilling their vessels – that appeared elsewhere in the entry.

Upon closer inspection, however, the Fountain's form and iconography above all underscored the extent to which its creation was an assertion of municipal pride and confidence. Other decorations referenced France's mythical origins, evoked ‘Force’ and represented Henri II through major deities, but Lescot and Goujon eschewed this repertoire. For its architecture, Lescot avoided the Doric and Roman Composite, which, according to Serlio, respectively evoked regal-masculine and military-triumphal themes; Lescot instead used the Corinthian order, appropriate for ‘divine worship’, because, as the inscription ‘Fontium nymphis’ implied, he wished to create a temple for the nymphs. These minor divinities of the water evoked a Parisian or at least regional theme, rather than a royal one, because elsewhere in the entry's programme nymphs were described as ‘daughters of the Seine’.Footnote 15 Forms thus followed functions, but the Fountain's civic purpose prevailed both in the entry and in the context of urban improvements.

The afterlife of the Fountain

Between the Fountain's creation in 1549 and its deconstruction in 1787, it was perceived, represented, used and materially altered in different ways that reflected the real and imagined Paris cityscape, the availability of water and stylistic norms. Continuities and discontinuities in these layers of its existence require dividing this eventful ‘afterlife’ into three periods.Footnote 16

The first spanned from 1549 to c. 1660. Though acclaimed as ‘one of the most beautiful [fountains] in Paris’ and even ‘one of the masterpieces of the world as a work of masonry and architecture’, there were few textual references to the Fountain because authors refrained from describing ‘that which one could still see’.Footnote 17 Moreover, these authors provided few details – the fullest commentary simply mentioned the Fountain's antique style, quality and sculptural richness – because their descriptions were in books about Paris ‘antiquities’ that treated monuments as products of reigns rather than subjects of stylistic analysis.Footnote 18

Visual representations show artists saw the Fountain as part of the cityscape. While Cerceau included the houses to which the Fountain was attached (see Figure 1), Silvestre went further in critically exploring the Fountain's place in Paris.Footnote 19 His first etching juxtaposed the new ‘antique’ Fountain to the decrepit Gothic Church of the Innocents (Figure 2); though this notionally showed the Fountain as it stood, Silvestre's representation of the surrounding area as ruinous wasteland was fictitious. His second transformed the Fountain into a freestanding edifice and transplanted it into an idealized Paris cityscape alongside an imagined pendant and the city's other great monuments.Footnote 20 Taken together, Silvestre's prints suggest that he lamented the Fountain's real location and believed that it merited being disengaged and relocated. Jean Marot – one of Silvestre's collaborators – also articulated this urban theme in his drawing of the Fountain, which was anchored in real space through houses, bollards and the road.Footnote 21

The Fountain's functions evolved during this period. After 1549, the Fountain was never again used in an entry.Footnote 22 During the Wars of Religion, it fell into disrepair and ceased to function as an urban embellishment and source of water. In the early 1600s, tradesmen created stalls inside and against the redundant structure; some even purchased leases and one candle seller attached iron hooks to create his own boutique. However, this opportunistic reuse ended in 1622 when the municipal government evicted the tradesmen and ordered the master of works to ‘repair’ the site to its original state. The authorities thus reasserted the Fountain's function as a public monument ‘as much for the decoration of the city as the convenience (commodité) of the quarter’.Footnote 23 Just as artists and writers admired the Fountain, then, the Paris administrative elites considered it a source of civic pride meriting protection.

The second period in the Fountain's afterlife spanned from c. 1660 to c. 1740, during which perceptions changed in two ways. First, the Fountain became famous and was fulsomely praised: one authority admired its elegant proportions and masterful use of the Corinthian order; another compared Goujon's sculptures to the Medici Venus, the most celebrated representation of female beauty. Santeul's distich, inscribed in 1689, eulogized Goujon's ability to create the illusion of waves.Footnote 24 This fame resulted from Bernini's reputed belief that it was ‘the finest thing in all France’ and was amplified by the concurrent invention of the urban guidebook, the revived fortunes of Paris and France's dominance in Europe.Footnote 25

Second, printed descriptions conceptualized the Fountain as Goujon's creation rather than a monument created under Henri II.Footnote 26 This reflected a larger development in cultural appreciation through which the artist's identity became more important than their patron or subject matter. But in this instance, the change was reinforced by misunderstandings surrounding the circumstances of its creation, which were difficult to imagine after the representational cultural politics of absolutism replaced the pseudo-constitutional ideology underpinning joyous entries. Ignorance of the historical record thus severed the Fountain's connection with Henri II and left it synonymous with Goujon alone.

This change meant that descriptions and representations treated the Fountain more as an artwork and downplayed the urban theme. Some writers now called it ‘the fountain of the nymphs’ rather than ‘the Innocents’ in order to dissociate it from the shocking sight and smell of the Cemetery and emphasize its formal qualities above its geographical location.Footnote 27 Scotin and Pérelle framed their representations of the Fountain with empty spaces, deviating from earlier artists’ attempts to treat it as an urban monument anchored in a concrete or an imagined cityscape.Footnote 28 For artists and writers alike, then, the idea of the Fountain was preferred to the actual Fountain grounded in the city: it became what Voltaire described as ‘that admirable fountain that one sees so little’.Footnote 29

The Fountain's functions also evolved. In 1696, the municipal government transformed its loggia to make it ‘inhabitable’ as a residence that could be rented out – in the first instance on a thirty-year lease to Jeanne Carbon, the widow of a ‘bourgeois of Paris’. Detailed records of work undertaken show that to this end Jean Beausire – the inspector of municipal buildings – made extensive internal changes, installing three fireplaces, creating windows by glazing over the Fountain's arcades, erecting multiple partitions over three floors; he also altered its roof and gutters to improve drainage. Although the government was prepared to alter the structure, unwritten heritage norms imposed limits on their extent. Beausire was therefore keen to report that he had made it ‘comfortable . . . without damaging anything’. In the same vein, the tenant was instructed not to ‘break, demolish, change or innovate anything through trying to make [the residence] more comfortable’. The loggia remained in this form until the Fountain was dismantled; in the mid-eighteenth century, it was rented to a marchand-mercier, presumably for a boutique.Footnote 30

In the early eighteenth century, new inscriptions commemorated improvements to the Fountain as a water source: one stated that it had been ‘improved to benefit inhabitants furthest from the river’ and the other celebrated its ‘sweet Naiad water’. This improvement was partly a matter of perception, since in Paris as a whole growing demand outstripped increased supply and worsened shortages, but it was also real because the Fountain's output increased after its cistern was enlarged and water arrived via the new pump on the Pont Notre-Dame thanks to the ‘technical mini-revolution’ in hydraulics. Water now poured from all three mascaron taps on each side, although before long the increasing number of horse-drawn carriages led the municipality to close off the taps on the rue aux Fers side (Figure 3).Footnote 31

Figure 3:

Jean-Nicolas Sobre, Fontaine des S.S.tts Innocents, située à l'angle des rues St Denis et aux Fers, avant la démolition ordonnée en 1787 par M. de Crosne, lieut.t g.al de police, sous la direction de J. G. Legrand et F. Molinos, architects, 1787. Pen and ink drawing with light watercolour highlights and ink wash, 26 × 42.5cm. Reproduced with the permission of the Bibliothèque nationale de France.

Among inhabitants of Paris, the Fountain now functioned, to a greater extent than before, as a spatial landmark. Contracts between the municipal government and rubbish removers show that it was even a marker for dividing work.Footnote 32 As a famous monument and site of socialization and news exchange at a busy junction, it punctuated Parisians’ mental map in a growing city with an increasingly mobile populace in which few owned paper maps, houses were not numbered and, until the 1730s, there were no signs for street names.Footnote 33 If few locals saw the Fountain through the rarefied language of art, they must nevertheless have recognized that it was uniquely ornate compared to recent austere fountains and that it was a rare secular public monument containing few allusions to the monarchy. Indeed, such was local pride in the Fountain as a popular landmark that, until 1791, the municipal government was untroubled by the prospect of stone or metal being pilfered.Footnote 34

These developments during the second period of the Fountain's afterlife changed attitudes toward its material state. Previously, the Fountain had been repaired without fuss and for most of the seventeenth century commentators wrote nothing about its state beyond describing its sculptures being as good as new.Footnote 35 But, in the 1690s, its ruination and the municipal government's ‘criminal negligence’ became tropes.Footnote 36 Since complaints continued even after repairs in 1708, these tropes probably resulted less from its actual ruination and more from sensitivity to signs of degradation once artists and writers perceived the Fountain as an irreplaceable artwork.Footnote 37 Equally, the tropes were a proxy for criticizing the municipal government and crown after the former abandoned Paris for Versailles and the latter converted the Fountain's loggia into a residence. The municipality previously chastised traders for damaging the Fountain; now enlightened public opinion chastised the municipality and refused to accept its monopoly over deciding upon alterations of famous public monuments.

During the final period of the Fountain's afterlife, between c. 1740 and 1787, perceptions became more critical and contradictory.Footnote 38 Almost all accounts now acknowledged Lescot's role and the perceived division of labour led authorities to consider separately its sculpture and architecture.Footnote 39 While Goujon's sculptures became canonical masterpieces, that helped promote him to the paper pantheon of great Frenchmen, Lescot's design was criticized in ways that were characteristic of mid-eighteenth-century neo-classical architects’ intolerance of their Renaissance predecessors.Footnote 40 Critics compared the Fountain unfavourably to spectacular seventeenth-century fountains in Rome and Versailles and new examples in Paris by Bouchardon and Soufflot. Lescot's design fell short of new norms for public fountains, which were expected to use strong orders and superabundant water for aesthetic effect, embellish open spaces and combine architecture and sculpture harmoniously.Footnote 41 By these standards, it was no fountain, merely ‘a square tower with windows between the pilasters’.Footnote 42 For Blondel, the Fountain's greatest critic, it ‘sinned against convenance’ because it failed to announce its purpose: its use of water, the Corinthian order and modest, delicate and affected sculptures was inappropriate for a public fountain.Footnote 43

However, attitudes toward the Fountain were not simply more critical than before; they also became more divided. If authorities agreed that Goujon's sculptures were the Fountain's greatest attribute, there was no consensus whether or not they complemented its architecture. Some artists and writers considered its sculptures independent artwork to be described, copied and imitated while they ignored or criticized the rest of the Fountain.Footnote 44 Others considered the Fountain one unified artwork, a ‘beautiful piece of sculpture’, or a monument meriting a finer location, praising the ‘agreement’ of its sculptures and architecture, its ‘beautiful form’ and ‘elegant simplicity’.Footnote 45 The critique of those who admired the sculptures as discrete masterpieces was appositely captured in a satirical print that showed a connoisseur inspecting through a lorgnette the buttocks of the reclining nymph bas-relief, oblivious to the Fountain as a whole and its urban surroundings. Conventionally interpreted as an attack on La Font de Saint-Yenne, the print also poked fun at the tendency to inspect art created for open public places as though it had been created for close inspection in a cabinet.Footnote 46

The trend toward seeing the Fountain as an artwork or series of masterpieces revised attitudes toward preserving its materiality. Repairs were previously dictated by the need to ensure its stability, water output, ‘newness value’ and the general legibility of its sculptures and inscriptions, but, in the mid-eighteenth century, there was a shift toward ‘conserving’ and sensitively restoring the Fountain. Symptomatic of this, in 1741, plans for further repairing the Fountain were aborted: since it was feared that resurfacing the Fountain would diminish ‘the beauty of the sculpture’, it was instead decided to ‘preserve for posterity this magnificent work without any alteration’.Footnote 47 Even those who considered the Fountain itself one integrated artwork agreed that its sculptures should be prioritized over its architecture ‘if one must preserve one at the expense of the other’.Footnote 48 The authenticity of the sculptures, measured through un-retouched traces of Goujon's handiwork, was therefore now more important than their ‘newness’ and the overall integrity of the Fountain.

If Silvestre and Voltaire previously hinted that the Fountain merited a finer location, during this period of its afterlife there were more concrete proposals for its future. While Blondel's critique implied that the Fountain could be demolished and its sculptures removed to a collection, Guillaume Poncet de la Grave – a lawyer and royal administrator who arrived in the capital in the early 1750s and wrote about its history and reform – recommended dismantling and rebuilding the Fountain in an area where it would function more effectively as an urban embellishment.Footnote 49 Although the first to advocate moving the Fountain, Poncet's thinking was urbanist rather than artistic or conservationist. Far from being entirely original, he repeated familiar demands for more fountains and for disengaging and even moving monuments so that they would be more effective as urban embellishments and roads could be widened.Footnote 50

Dismantling and reusing the Fountain

Between 1549 and 1787, perceptions and representations of the Fountain thus changed considerably in ways that influenced how it was used, adapted and repaired. There was little scope for radical changes, however, until 1785 when the Council of State ordered the creation of the market of the Innocents on the site of the Church and Cemetery. From this moment until its eventual reconstruction, the Fountain's future was shaped by discourse about its qualities and flaws, norms for markets and fountains and expectations for preserving material remains that connected the city of the present to that of the past.

The decree was intended to increase space for markets and prevent traders from obstructing traffic with their street stalls, but it was also a successful conclusion to century-long demands to remove insalubrious cemeteries from the city centre.Footnote 51 Clearing the area posed obstacles: indemnifications, opposition to dissolving the parish of the Holy Innocents, the exhumation and transfer of human remains to a disused mine, the destruction of charnels, houses, most tomb monuments and the Church and the transfer of moveable religious artefacts to nearby churches and other sites.Footnote 52 Once the destruction of the Church and houses became inevitable, rumours circulated about the Fountain. While one contemporary observer speculated in June 1786 that the plan must be ‘to conserve and pull it from the ruins of the church that it is backed up against’ because it ‘is one of the most beautiful pieces of sculpture in this capital’, another observer reported rumours in early 1787 that the authorities planned to remove Goujon's sculptures and destroy what remained along with the ‘Gothic catacombs’.Footnote 53

This last rumour was quite likely the default plan given recent criticism that the Fountain was merely a flawed frame for discrete masterpieces and given recent examples of removing sculptures from the Porte Saint-Antoine and Louis XIV monument on the Pont-au-Change. This rumoured plan was publicly criticized by ‘men of taste’ and artists. In one of several letters on the subject received by the editors of the city's daily newspaper, the architectural theorist Quatremère de Quincy voiced his fear that ‘the authority overseeing improvements’ could, in its zeal for ‘public well-being’, commit ‘a barbarous attack’. Dividing the Fountain by removing its sculptures, he warned, was akin to destroying it because they formed a seamless whole with its architecture, for which they had been proportioned, drawn and executed. For Quatremère, the Fountain must be preserved whole: if it could not remain in situ, it should be moved in its entirety. In defending the Fountain, Quatremère argued that its critics overlooked the constraints that Lescot and Goujon had faced and that they wrongly assumed these artists had intended to create a modern fountain – with a strong order and superabundant water – rather than ‘a temple to the Nymphs of Fountains’. Quatremère agreed that its architecture was flawed, but argued that it nevertheless merited preserving as a ‘repository of past genius’.Footnote 54

This opposition from Quatremère and others prompted the municipal government to scotch any plan to remove its sculptures but did not solve the dilemma of what to do with the Fountain. Once the Church and houses had been demolished it was left standing as an unsightly obstruction with two ‘unfinished’ sides, off-centred in the space intended for the market (see Figure 3).Footnote 55 Over the following months, architects and engineers therefore proposed solutions for incorporating the Fountain into the planned market. Some recommended leaving it in situ and completing its ‘unfinished’ sides; a variant on this idea was to create a pendant structure on the other side of the market. However, most proposals recommended dismantling and relocating the Fountain nearby. One such proposal was to reconstruct it against a building on the south side of the market, thereby minimizing additional work and preserving its character as a monument attached to buildings. A final proposal from both the architect-engineer Charles Joseph Six and Quatremère was to reconstruct it in the market's centre on a square plan, reusing its three arches and creating one for the fourth side. Quatremère recommended decorating this side through adapting comparable bas-reliefs executed by Goujon for the Old Louvre: this provided ‘the means to stand in for Jean Goujon through Jean Goujon’. He later reasoned that one should restore the Fountain to how it ought to have been and that Goujon must have originally intended a freestanding structure.Footnote 56

In order to assess these proposals, Breteuil, minister of the royal household with responsibility for Paris, assembled a commission of architects, engineers and artists. (Though technically a municipal prerogative, decisions concerning the Fountain were taken by the minister and executed by the lieutenant general of police.)Footnote 57 The commission – probably chaired by Bernard Poyet, the chief municipal architect and Breteuil's protégé – preferred Six and Quatremère's idea because its priorities were economy, traffic circulation and meeting expectations, normal since the 1760s, for a central fountain in the market.Footnote 58 However, the commission dismissed Quatremère's proposal to add new sculptures as expensive and insensitive to the originals, like adding ‘an act to one of Racine's finest tragedies’. Respect for the original, budget constraints and the need to transform an irregular obstruction into a useful, symmetrical embellishment for the market thus shaped the commission's thinking.Footnote 59 The solution squared contrary imperatives to preserve old monuments while making urban improvements, to respect the Fountain's original qualities while adapting it to meet modern expectations.

In July and August, necessary legal measures were fulfilled, the crown agreed to bear costs and the operation was entrusted to Poyet under the general direction of Legrand and Molinos, the architects responsible for overseeing the quarter's transformation. The municipal government approved Poyet's design and the lieutenant general of police instructed him ‘to undertake. . .all necessary work for the translation of the fountain of the innocents to the centre of the new market’, namely dismantling the existing structure (taking care to ‘conserve the bas reliefs and precious sculptures’), laying foundations, creating the new base and reconstructing the modified Fountain.Footnote 60 Independent building experts first numbered each stone in chalk to facilitate its reconstruction and cast the sculptures to guide repairs before they set about carefully dismantling the Fountain at the end of September. The operation was largely successful, though the nymphs’ feet were slightly damaged.Footnote 61

Until March 1788, components from the original Fountain were stored while work was undertaken to prepare the site and ornamental sculptors created features for the new design.Footnote 62 Although the commission had opposed adding new bas-reliefs, Poyet now persuaded Breteuil that new pieces were necessary. Just as he probably now realized that the fourth side would appear monotonous with only inscriptions and coats of arms, he also belatedly grasped that the remaining three sides required six standing nymphs when the original Fountain only needed five. They therefore asked Auguste Pajou to produce four pieces: for the new, south side, a bas-relief panel for its attic and two copies of Goujon's Fame figures for the spandrels; for the west side, a standing nymph to stand alongside one of Goujon's, which, they insisted, must conform ‘to the style of Goujon’ and respect the Fountain's ‘harmony’. Pajou sought permission to erect scaffolding against the Old Louvre so that he could cast and adapt Goujon's Peace.Footnote 63

When the Fountain was assembled between March and August 1788, new and old stones were alternated in order to disguise their tonal difference. But this gave the new structure a peculiar speckled appearance and led to it being painted in 1791 to make it seem tonally uniform.Footnote 64 During its assemblage, Poyet and Breteuil commissioned two additional standing nymphs for the south side, perhaps because of the quality of Pajou's first works or because the south side appeared incongruous without them. Over spring 1788, Pajou therefore quickly executed pastiches, combining features and reversing poses from Goujon's originals.Footnote 65 In summer, the inscription was confirmed and these last bas-reliefs were inserted.Footnote 66 A visual representation dated 1788 implies that it discharged water – that, as before, came from the Seine – before the end of the year and certainly before the market opened in February 1789.Footnote 67

The operation's cost was not documented, partly because Poyet and others involved received an annual stipend for their services, but the overall cost was undoubtedly substantial. Known costs included 9,000 livres promised to Pajou for his bas-reliefs and 4,000 livres to Lhuillier and Daujon for two bronze medusa heads – by comparison, David received 6,000 livres for The Oath of the Horatii (1784).Footnote 68 Given the fiscal crisis, the crown's willingness to fund a satisfactory urban and heritage solution betrays the importance that it attached to the Fountain.

The new Fountain of the Innocents

The new Fountain (Figure 4) functioned differently to the old. Some functions were novel; others modified its earlier functions. At the most tangible levels, the Fountain continued to function as an urban embellishment that beautified the city and discharged water, but unlike the original, it was also a château d'eau, providing a reservoir for surrounding fountains.Footnote 69 And, unlike the original that was compromised by existing urban tissue, the new Fountain dominated the market and dictated the design of its stalls.Footnote 70 While equestrian or monumental statues of kings provided a central focus for the traditional Paris place, the new Fountain provided a comparable yet more useful and politically expedient alternative for the market square. The new structure also fulfilled a heritage function of sorts: it selectively reused the original and ensured that the Fountain, albeit much altered, remained in the open and satisfied demands that such ‘inalienable property’ of the Paris public must exist for ‘the decoration of the city’.Footnote 71 For the crown, this presented an opportunity to demonstrate the regime's competence when its purported neglect of famous monuments provided a convenient proxy for attacking political misrule. In this respect, the new Fountain demonstrated the crown's custodianship over what had hitherto been a famous Paris rather than national monument. It was overseen and underwritten by the crown as part of its cultural programme to present the monarch as the custodian of the patrie who fostered, rather than personally embodied, national greatness and who collected and protected signs of France's illustrious past. Finding a solution for the Fountain reflected the crown's interests both in protecting certain historic monuments – at this time, it also contributed toward disengaging and restoring the Arènes in Nîmes – and in collecting French Renaissance artwork for the planned national museum.Footnote 72

Figure 4:

Durand and J. Janinet, Ancienne Fontaine des Innocens: Replacée au milieu du marché, 1807. Engraving, 24.5 × 32.3cm. Reproduced with the permission of Brown University Library.

An unintended and yet important function of the new Fountain was for ceremonies. The original Fountain was created for a ceremonial occasion, but never reused for one. By contrast, the Fountain of 1788, created for no particular ceremony, was used for a diverse range of ceremonies from the Revolution to the Second Empire. Its broad appeal lay partly in its location, but also in the fact that it carried few discernible iconographic messages and was associated with Goujon and the nation rather than any particular regime. Revealingly, during the Commune, the Fountain was protected while the Vendôme Column and Tuileries Palace were destroyed.Footnote 73

The new Fountain thus served different functions, which determined its location and shaped its form. Poyet and his co-creators were innovative in using new bas-reliefs and decorative features, but much about the new Fountain's form was predictable, responding to criticism of the original, norms for modern fountains and expectations that great urban monuments should be disengaged highlights in the cityscape. An alternative design (Figure 5), probably by Sobre, helps distinguish what in Poyet's design was pre-determined by his brief and what was his own visual choice. This design also anticipated later criticism of Poyet's design: it suggested a shorter and simpler Fountain, without any cupola roof or additional ornamental sculptures, that prioritized displaying Goujon's sculptures without distraction.Footnote 74

Figure 5:

Jean-Nicholas Sobre (?), Projet pour la Fontaine des Innocents, c. 1787. Pen and ink drawing with ink wash and watercolour, 37.5 × 32.3cm. Reproduced with the permission of the Bibliothèque nationale de France.

Visual representations, photographs, printed descriptions and archival evidence allow us to analyse the new Fountain that until 1858 stood in the market. Poyet transformed the Fountain from a Renaissance grandstand with several water outlets into a freestanding monumental fountain. He placed this massive, symmetrical, four-sided structure in the centre of the new, trapezoid-shaped market. In response to criticism of the original, Poyet compensated for the lack of a strong or rustic order by creating a more archaic, monumental structure through other means. He made the new Fountain taller – 14 and a half metres to the original 12 – so that it towered over the market.Footnote 75 Its main body was raised upon a starkly simple, quasi-pyramidal three-tiered stone base that contained its plumbing and reservoir and gave it a more archaic appearance. Poyet reinforced this archaism with ornamental features created in Lhullier's studio: lead basins with lion-claw feet, adapted from ancient sarcophagi; lead lion-sculptures (after the Egyptian granite originals in the Acqua Felice, Rome) and two cast-bronze Medusa-head roundels. Other architectural features, supplied by Mézières, included a coffered rotunda dome for the space between the arcades, which evoked the interior of the Roman Pantheon, and a cupola roof covered in fish-scale tiles.Footnote 76 In response to criticism of the original, Poyet also placed water at the centre of his design. The new design still provided water for drinking and cleaning. But, in keeping with expectations for public fountains, the new Fountain also used water for audio-visual effect; water was thrust upward from the cistern through the lead font between the arcades; it then landed noisily into the small reservoir at the font's base. Water from this reservoir and the lions’ mouths then filled the basins.

There was obvious continuity in the new Fountain's use of bas-reliefs, but their appearance, meaning and place in the ensemble changed subtly. Although the new Fountain itself was much more conspicuous than the original, the bas-reliefs were further from the eye and now competed for viewers’ attention with other decorative features. In the original, all standing nymphs could be compared from a single viewpoint: they collectively provided a succession of variations that conveyed movement while they laboured to carry and pour water. But, in the new Fountain, it was impossible to see more than two sides from one viewpoint and all but one side juxtaposed an urn-carrying figure with an oar-carrying figure. Although superficially comparable, Pajou's nymphs were stationary and heroic guardians of the Fountain; they were designed for a monumental fountain with abundant water, whereas Goujon's fluid figures had been designed as allegories of abundance for a delicate loggia-cum-fountain. Pajou's finest contribution was for the south-facing attic: his amours and genies with shells and dolphins were more naturalistic and playful and his children were more plump and plastic than Goujon's.Footnote 77

The new Fountain was, on balance, an intelligent response to the functions that it was expected to fulfil. The chosen solution reflected the consensus that the only means to preserve the Fountain as a public monument was to remake it while its new monumental form and use of water meant that the new structure successfully functioned as an urban embellishment and a focal point for the market. However, its forms corresponded imperfectly with its new functions because it was an adaptation: the original contained an iconographic programme that we can decode, but its successor only conveyed muted messages alluding to water deities and Paris. Praise for the new Fountain and Goujon's sculptures over the next decades was therefore expressed in purely formal terms.Footnote 78 The new Fountain's form also did very little to convey the crown's interest in the project. Although the crown underwrote the project, it carried fewer royal connotations than the original. Poyet's design no longer conveyed a triumphal, regal arch and, rather than glorifying Louis XVI, the new inscription merely listed the principal magistrates and artists involved in its creation. The original royal decorative symbols remained until 1793, although they were less visible and there was no suggestion to update the ‘H’ to an ‘L’.Footnote 79

By the standards of the time, Poyet successfully balanced competing imperatives to respect the original while transforming it into a modern fountain for a new urban setting. This explains why opinion was entirely positive for the next 20 years.Footnote 80 Hubert Robert's caprice painting showed the new Fountain alongside the city's other finest monuments and throughout the Revolutionary-Napoleonic period administrators in Paris listed it among the monuments most meriting protection.Footnote 81 Published descriptions compared Pajou's sculptures to Goujon's and deemed Poyet's design ‘ingenious and economical’, ‘even more elegant’ than the original. None complained that displacing, reconfiguring and adding features undermined the original's authenticity.Footnote 82

However, attitudes changed after 1809 when the increased water supply transformed it into ‘a liquid mountain’.Footnote 83 The superabundance of water helped the Fountain become a popular picturesque favourite and Poyet claimed that the change corresponded to his original intention to ‘recall the beautiful cascades of Rome’.Footnote 84 But it also damaged the bas-reliefs and necessitated creating a square basin around the base. Critics now lamented not only its excessive water but also its colossal base and mixture of old and new sculptures.Footnote 85 The transformation of Les Halles during the Second Empire stimulated proposals for displacing and remaking the Fountain once again in ways that respected the original of 1549.Footnote 86 Gabrielle Davioud heeded much of this, but its perceived value nevertheless sank further. Set against new expectations for what constituted authenticity the twice-moved Fountain was considered ‘unrecognizable’, ‘completely reconstructed’, ‘disfigured’, ‘incongruous’ and ‘no longer anything but a modified monument’.Footnote 87

Conclusion

This article has shown how the Fountain's form and function changed and how these changes were intertwined with how it was perceived and altered. Between the 1550s and 1770s, uses and perceptions of the Fountain changed with limited ramifications for its form. The new circumstances of the 1780s meant, however, that these revised uses and perceptions were soon brought to bear on how the Fountain was saved and reconfigured. Latour's Pont Neuf experienced gradual, constant change and renewal, but monuments such as the Fountain changed in fits and starts. The layers of its existence evolved at different rates in ways that suggest that the historical relationship between the form and function of urban monuments is one of complex reciprocity. If form initially follows function, the afterlife of monuments such as the Fountain shows that the same form can be used for new functions and that these functions in turn can alter their form.

Through looking closely at a single example over an extended period, the article has suggested how the nature of early modern urban monumentality developed. This is apparent from how artists and authors of written commentaries imagined the Fountain's place in the Paris cityscape. As the first two sections showed, artists initially represented the Fountain anchored in physical space. But, between the mid-seventeenth century and the eve of its deconstruction, their successors shunned this approach and instead depicted the Fountain as a stand-alone artwork, framed by empty space and disconnected from any trace of the city. If the local populace regarded the Fountain as a tangible landmark and water source without perceiving it as Lescot and Goujon's masterpiece, enlightened public opinion during the eighteenth century perceived it more as an idea than an actual urban monument: this was partly because the cult of Goujon was as much about the ‘cult of the nation’ as real examples of his work, but above all because the conditions for viewing the Fountain and its sculptures were unappealing.Footnote 88 As an idea, the Fountain was less grounded in the quarter of the Innocents and it became easier to imagine and even propose moving it somewhere more visible in the city or destroying its structure and preserving its bas-reliefs. As parts three and four showed, reconfiguring the Fountain as a centre-point for the market refocused attention upon it as an urban monument in an imagined and then actual space. In this respect, at least, the new Fountain resembled the original Fountain during the first period of its afterlife. Revealingly, after 1787, almost all visual representations returned to the earlier tradition of depicting it as an integral part of the city.

The starting point for this article was the question of how inhabitants of changing cities reconcile the city of the past with that of the future. The findings presented here have implications for the history of urban heritage and, in particular, how we understand the patrimonialization of Paris. Most obviously, they suggest that conservationist efforts predated the conventional ‘rise of heritage’ with the nineteenth-century European nation-state. The fact that the Fountain was spared from destruction in 1787 was, moreover, no isolated precursor to later heritage efforts. It was one of many manifestations of the sense of metropolitan heritage in Paris during the second half of the eighteenth century – a time when public opinion feared that ‘the destructive hammer’ of urban improvers and builders risked severing any connection between present-day Paris and the city of their ancestors.Footnote 89 If public construction of housing in Paris during the last decades of the ancien régime favoured ‘newness’ over ‘reuse’, interventions to save from destruction monuments such as the Fountain point to the appetite for reusing monuments and even the desire to move and adapt them.Footnote 90

Rather than merely backdating the start of ‘heritage’, however, the example of the Fountain suggests that there was no clear dividing line between pre- and post-heritage-minded societies. A more fruitful approach is to examine how built structures were used and altered over time and to ask what these changes reveal about attitudes toward their materiality.Footnote 91 During a period when many built structures were razed without any opposition on heritage grounds, this study of the Fountain shows that some were nevertheless deemed worth preserving. If there was little attempt during the early modern period to spell out the criteria for determining the worth of monuments or the conventions limiting their uses, the example of the Fountain suggests that criteria and conventions were nevertheless collectively articulated by enlightened public opinion and through the views and practices of the municipal government and crown. These criteria and conventions crystallized when controversy arose. During the seventeenth century, the municipal government dictated material interventions, first repairing the Fountain to its original state as an urban embellishment after decades of dereliction and then adapting its loggia while carefully respecting its exterior surface. But, during the eighteenth century, enlightened public opinion chastised the authorities, first for negligence, then for planning to resurface the Fountain and alter its sculptures and finally for the purported plan to remove its sculptures and destroy the remaining structure. Over the period studied, then, the nature of power relations for determining legitimate material inventions changed, just as these interventions moved from ‘repair’ toward ‘conserving’ and from prioritizing its functionality as a public fountain toward prioritizing its aesthetic-cultural functionality.

In the case of the Fountain, however, there was no straightforward progress from ‘improvement’ to ‘authenticity’.Footnote 92 Indeed, successive attitudes towards the Fountain's authenticity underline the extent to which authenticity itself is a historically conditioned concept. In 1787, the Fountain was spared because it had undergone few material alterations over its afterlife and was therefore considered an authentic original that documented the period of its creation. By contrast, the medieval Church of the Holy Innocents was destroyed without any opposition on historic or artistic grounds because it had been repeatedly changed, consolidated and repaired to the point that the senior hierarchy of the Church considered it a vile, bastard structure that belonged to no period in particular.Footnote 93 Poyet's redesign of the Fountain was initially praised as a means of preserving its authenticity as an open-air monument and the work of Lescot and Goujon. Conventions at the time dictated that it was acceptable to alter its design and add new features even if it was unacceptable to remove the sculptures and destroy the Fountain or add new bas-reliefs that might disrupt its ‘harmony’. This satisfied expectations for authenticity when thinking about urban heritage centred on individual urban monuments as highlights in the cityscape rather than treating the city itself as the subject of patrimonialization, but ceased to do so later in the nineteenth century when expectations changed. The reconfigured Fountain was therefore dismissed as inauthentic once authenticity included use of original building materials and respect for urban context.

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65 BHVP, MS 1212, fol. 15, Pajou letter to Bailly dated 15 Nov. 1789; Stein, Pajou, 371–83. The commission had two phases, contrary to Pajou's version of events when he demanded payment.

66 AN, O1 499, fols. 212 (Breteuil to Poyet, 11 Apr. 188), 320 (Breteul to Thiroux de Crosne, 7 Jun. 1788).

67 Tesson, ‘Matériaux’, 59; F. and Lazare, L., Dictionnaire administratif et historique des rues et monuments de Paris (Paris, [1855] 1994), 433 Google Scholar; P. Grégoire, Fontaine des Innocents (1788), BnF, département Estampes et photographie; AP, D12 59.

68 BHVP, MS 1212, fol. 15; AN, F13 212.

69 Tesson, ‘Matériaux’, 59.

70 Poyet's scheme was represented in a pen and ink drawing (‘Vue perspective de la fontaine des innocents, présentée à Monsieur de Villedeuil’ – Private collection, 36 × 51.5cm) that later appeared as an engraving in Borde, J. La et al. (eds.), Voyage pittoresque de la France, vol. X, livraison 56 (Paris, 1792)Google Scholar, no. 84. Stalls were only erected in 1811 and to a different design – AN, F13 1162, F13 942, no. 52; AP, 6AZ8, doss. 422. From 1789 to 1811, large umbrellas – shown in many visual representations (Figure 4) – provided some shelter for market sellers and their produce.

71 Journal de Paris, 50, 19 Feb. 1787, 217–18.

72 AN, H748 231, no. 18, H1023 17; Michel, P., ‘La politique d'acquisition des Batiments du Roi pour les collections royales dans la seconde moitie du XVIIIe siècle: modalities, choix et portee’, in Favreau, M. et al. (eds.), De l'usage de l'art en politique (Rennes, 2009), 45–61 Google Scholar.

73 G. Joudiou, ‘Le marché et le square des Innocents’, in Fleury and Leproux (eds.), Les Saints-Innocents, 163–75; Tesson, ‘Matériaux’, 59; Péridier, J., La commune et les artistes: Pottier, Courbet, Vallès, J.-B. Clément (Paris, 1980), 66 Google Scholar.

74 This same design – supplemented with the flagpole added to the Fountain in 1791 – reappeared in Sobre, Le marché des innocents vu de la Maison Batave (1804) – Musée Carnavalet.

75 These are calculated using the height – 2.29m – of the standing nymphs.

76 Nineteenth-century accounts named Mézières, Lhuillier and Daujon without specifying their division of labour, but this can be surmised from payment disputes and information about their areas of expertise. AN, F13 212, F13 1013; Negre, V., L'ornement en série (Paris, 2006), 87, 94–5Google Scholar, 133; Szambien, W., Le Musée d'architecture (Paris, 1988), 23, 44–5Google Scholar.

77 Thirion, ‘La Fontaine des Nymphes’, 141–2; Stein, Pajou, 234–9; J. Draper and G. Sherf, Augustin Pajou, Royal Sculptor (New York, 1998), 80–2.

78 Emeric-David, T., Recherches sur l'art statuaire (Paris, [1805] 1863), 299–302 Google Scholar, 308; Quincy, A. Quatremère de, Letters to Miranda and Canova on the Abduction of Antiquities from Rome and Athens, trans. C. Miller and D. Gilks (Los Angeles, 2012), 156 Google Scholar; Planche, G., Portraits d'artistes, vol. I (Paris, 1853), 146–72Google Scholar, 178.

79 AN, O1 499, fols. 181–2, 192, 212, 319–20, F13 212.

80 La Borde et al. (eds.), Voyage pittoresque, vol. X, livraison 56, 2–3; Pujoulx, J., Paris a la fin du XVIIIe siècle (Paris, 1801), 28 Google Scholar; Lenoir, A., Histoire des arts en France, prouvée par les monuments (Paris, 1811), 290 Google Scholar; Landon (ed.), Annales, 91–3, 111–12; Landon, C. and Legrand, J., Description de Paris, vol. II (Paris, 1809), 71–3Google Scholar; Victoire, J. de Saint, Tableau historique et pittoresque de Paris, vol. II (Paris, 1809), 256 Google Scholar.

81 Faroult, G., Hubert Robert (1733–1808). Un peintre visionnaire (Paris, 2016), 386–7Google Scholar; AN, AFIII, 48, no. 167, F21*2470, doss. 211, 76–7, and doss. 372, 142, F21*2471, doss. 167, 150–1, F14 2152, F14 2180/2, F21*2473, 282–7.

82 Anon., Le Voyageur (Paris, 1797), 130; Saint Victoire, Tableau historique, vol. II, 256; Pujoulx, Paris, 28; Landon (ed.), Annales, 91–3.

83 Journal de Paris, 229, 17 Aug. 1809, 1698; L. de Belan, ‘Aux rédacteurs’, Journal de Paris, 234, 23 Aug. 1809, 1736; AP, VO3/655 and 4AZ 6, no. 309; Joudiou, ‘Le marché’, 164, 169.

84 Poyet, ‘Aux rédacteurs’, Journal de Paris, 262, 9 Sep. 1809, 1868.

85 Diezmann, A., Malerische Wanderungen durch Paris oder Schilderungen der denkwürdigsten (Leipzig, 1816), 204–6Google Scholar; Kolloff, E., Paris: Reisehandbuch (Leipzig, 1849), 152 Google Scholar; Quatremère, ‘Goujon’, 476; Quincy, A. Quatremère de, ‘Goujon’, in Dictionnaire historique d'architecture, vol. I (Paris, 1832), 679Google Scholar; Planche, Portraits d'artistes, vol. I (Paris, 1853), 170.

86 AN, F21*2542/12, doss. 52; Procès-verbaux. Commission municipale du vieux Paris (Paris, 1918), 84; Baltard, V., Agrandissement et construction des halles centrales d'approvisionnement. Rapport fait au Conseil municipal (Paris, 1845), 74 Google Scholar.

87 C. Daly, Revue generale de l'architecture et des travaux publics, 18 (1860), 155; Lepine, P. et al., Gabriel Davioud, architecte 1824–1881 (Paris, 1981), 41Google Scholar; Moniteur de la mode, 1 (1860), 203; Correspondant, 61 (1863), 893; Baedeker, K., Paris and its Environs (Leipzig, 1878), 180 Google Scholar; Stanford, E., Stanford's Paris Guide (London, 1862), 113–14Google Scholar; Procès-verbaux. Commission de vieux Paris (Paris, 1901), 136.

88 Bell, D., The Cult of the Nation in France. Inventing Nationalism, 1680–1800 (Cambridge, MA, 2003)Google Scholar.

89 Journal de Paris, 14 Mar. 1787.

90 Potofosky, A., ‘Recycling the city: Paris, 1760s–1800’, in Fennetaux, A. et al., The Afterlife of Used Things: Recycling in the Long Eighteenth Century (New York, 2015), 71–2Google Scholar.

91 Karmon, D., The Ruins of the Eternal City: Antiquity and Preservation in Renaissance Rome (Oxford, 2011), 6–10 CrossRefGoogle Scholar; idem, ‘Preserving antiquity in a Protestant city: the Maison Carrée in sixteenth-century Nimes’, in Raguin, V. Chieffo (ed.), Art, Piety, and Destruction in European Religion, 1500–1700 (Farnham, 2010), 113–35Google Scholar.

92 Podany, G., ‘Lessons from the past’, in Grossman, J. Burnett et al. (eds.), History of Restoration of Ancient Stone Sculptures (Los Angeles, 2003), 17 Google Scholar.

93 AN, L656, doss. 53, archbishop of Paris orders the demolition of the Church of the Holy Innocents, 31 Nov. 1786.

Figure 0

Figure 1: Jacques Androuet du Cerceau, Fontaine des Saints Innocents à Paris, c. 1560. Etching on paper, 27.5 × 40.3cm. Reproduced with the permission of the Bibliothèque nationale de France.

Figure 1

Figure 2: Israel Silvestre, Veue de la fontaine Sainct Innocent a Paris, c. 1639–91. Etching on paper, 7.6 × 12cm. Reproduced with the permission of The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York.

Figure 2

Figure 3: Jean-Nicolas Sobre, Fontaine des S.S.tts Innocents, située à l'angle des rues St Denis et aux Fers, avant la démolition ordonnée en 1787 par M. de Crosne, lieut.t g.al de police, sous la direction de J. G. Legrand et F. Molinos, architects, 1787. Pen and ink drawing with light watercolour highlights and ink wash, 26 × 42.5cm. Reproduced with the permission of the Bibliothèque nationale de France.

Figure 3

Figure 4: Durand and J. Janinet, Ancienne Fontaine des Innocens: Replacée au milieu du marché, 1807. Engraving, 24.5 × 32.3cm. Reproduced with the permission of Brown University Library.

Figure 4

Figure 5: Jean-Nicholas Sobre (?), Projet pour la Fontaine des Innocents, c. 1787. Pen and ink drawing with ink wash and watercolour, 37.5 × 32.3cm. Reproduced with the permission of the Bibliothèque nationale de France.