Barrière d'Enfer (Gate of Hell)

Last Wednesday, while most of you had your morning class, I went for a roughly 5k jog/run. My route started at my home, near the Saint-Jaques stop on line 6, went around la Place Denfert-Rochereau, up well-known Bvd Raspail, down a smaller street called Rue Boissonade, etc until I reached le Jardin de Luxembourg, ran up to the Palais and retraced my path home. Here's a map of my route more or less. The run was beautiful, and I really felt like I was a part of the Parisian jogging crowd. It would have gone better had I not gone the wrong way a couple times and if I wasn't constantly wary of traffic, but C'est la vie.

Anyway, while I was running around la Place Denfert-Rochereau trying to get to Raspail (which seemed to take a while to find since the place is bigger than you'd think), I encountered this guy:

(picture from Wikipedia, I couldn't take pictures while running)

The lion is called the Lion of Belfort (a larger version of which is located in the town of Belfort) and was built in honor Pierre Denfert-Rochereau who defended the town during the Franco-Prussian war.

I also saw these:

(see previous caption)

These buildings obstructed my view of all of the cross streets in the Place, making it difficult to tell where to turn. So I thought I would start doing some digging here. Turns out, the two buildings above form something that was known as "Barrière d'Enfer" or "Gate of Hell" Cool stuff. 

If you open up your awesome Plans de Paris that Bob gave you to Arr. 14 (est), you might notice that the entrance to the famous Catacombs is located in this Place. It seems fitting that the "Gate of Hell" would also be the entrance to a sort of underworld of sorts. But that's not the real reason for the creepy name.

In fact, there are a couple theories as to why the two buildings have such a cool title. It could be a corruption of the latin "via inferior". Or it could come from "en fer" (of iron) that refers to the oldest city wall in Paris. Or it could be a reference to the sinful people of the area, which I think sounds a lot cooler. 

In truth, the buildings served as tollhouses for a gate in the Wall of the Ferme-générale. Farmers who wished to bring goods into the city would have to stop here to pay a tax. In the opening of the 3rd act of Puccini's amazing La Bohème, the curtain opens on this gate as seen in the picture below:

It was also mentioned in Victor Hugo's famous Les Misérables. I would have to actually finish reading the book to know if it was really an important part of the story.

Next time I go for a run, I will be thinking of this little piece of Parisian history.