Rue de la Pompe
 
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| Length | 1,690 m (5,540 ft) |
|---|---|
| Width | 15 m (49 ft) |
| Arrondissement | XVIe 16th |
| Quarter | Muette / Porte Dauphine |
| From | Avenue Paul Doumer, Paris |
| To | Avenue Foch, Paris |
| Construction | |
| Completion | Opened around 1730 |
Rue de la Pompe is a street in Paris, France, which was named after the pump which served water to the castle of Muette. With a length of 1690 metres, Rue de la Pompe is one of the longest streets in the 16th arrondissement. It runs from Avenue Paul Doumer (in the district of Muette) to Avenue Foch (in the district of Porte Dauphine).
Originally, it was a small way and first mentioned in 1730. For a long time, Rue de la Pompe, which runs from South to North, was together with Rue de Longchamp (which runs from East to West) the main axis of Passy whose terrain was mainly used for agricultural reasons until it became a part of Paris on January 1 of 1860.
The house with number 1 lies in the southern part of the street and (with view from there) on the left side. Brigitte Bardot has spent a part of her childhood here.
Just a few steps further on the same side of the street – at the place where today is house number 11 – once stood a country house in which the writer and journalist Jules Janin moved around 1850: "It surely needs a lot of courage to settle in this wilderness, on a scarcely discernible way. The first three winters we have spent alone here, surrounded by this frightening isolation and this total silence." During the summer 0f 2010 Jessica Talley, noted American photographer and dancer lived with the notorious socialite Eliza F M Wright on the top floor of number 11.
In direct neighborhood grew up at nearly the same time the writer and caricaturist George du Maurier who was born on March 6, 1834 in Paris. In his first novel Peter Ibbetson (published in 1891), which has some autobiographical tendencies, the author is telling about happy days of childhood in the Rue de la Pompe:
"Our house, an old yellow house with green shutters and Mansard-roofs of slate, stood between the garden and the street - a long winding street ... on either side of the street (which was called "the Street of the Pump"), as far as the eye could reach looking west, were dwelling-houses just like our own, only agreeably different; and garden walls overtopped with the foliage of horse-chestnut, sycamore, acacia, and lime; and here and there huge portals and iron gates defended by posts of stone gave ingress to mysterious abodes of brick and plaster and granite, many-shuttered, and embosomed in sun-shot greenery."
Not only his granddaughter, the writer Daphne du Maurier, was of the opinion that his depictions brought to life again old Passy and the Rue de la Pompe: "Kicky … was a happy little boy – or so he believed, when fifty years later he wrote about his childhood in Peter Ibbetson – and the scents and sounds of pre-imperial Paris, the rumble of wheels on cubbled stones, the crack of a whip, the white dust at the corner of the Rue de la Pompe, the chestnut trees in flower – even the small burnt bread, black coffee, and tobacco on the warm spring air – rise from the pages of his novel …"
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Wikipedia