The Saint-Honoré quarter had two countenances in the 19th century. Along the Rue du Faubourg Saint-Honoré were grand mansions built in the 17th century like those in the Faubourg Saint-Germain, but largely modernised after the Restoration, and almost all situated on the odd-numbered side of the street (their gardens reached to the Champs Elysees). Across the way, on the even-numbered side, were rental properties occupied by wealthy tradesmen and well-heeled bourgeois.
‘The Rue du Faubourg-Saint Honoré is today for the high aristocracy what the Quai de la Tournelle and Quai d’Anjou were under Charles IX, Henri III and Henri IV, the Place Royale and the Marais under Louis XIII and Louis XIV, the Faubourg Saint-Germain under Louis XV and the Restoration: here was elegance, the fashionable world; nothing there is outmoded or worn out; everything proclaims elegance, genuinely noble manners, propriety; this is where the charming politeness of the great reigns supreme; this is pure, unadulterated high society […]
And it is truly within this world that are found the lion’s share of the pleasures that can be enjoyed in this Parisian life, which is so fleeting, so questionable and so glum.’
Lotan de Laval, ‘Rue et faubourg Saint-Honoré’, in Louis Lurine (ed.), Les rues de Paris. Paris ancien et moderne: origines, histoire, monuments, costumes, moeurs, chroniques et traditions, vol. 1, Paris, Kugelmann, 1844
