In this shot I'm going to give the Avenue de Friedland (running east north east) a little love since in the previous shot I spoke mostly about the things that you'll find lying beyond it. (Especially the Église Saint-Augustin de Paris (Church of St. Augustine) whose dome will be (intentionally) seen at the end of the street, and the Basilica of Sacré-Cœur, which sits on the hill to the left.)

Apparently the Avenue de Friedland is one of the older streets, long predating the Second Empire rebuild under Baron Haussmann. It existed (perhaps not quite in its current form) as early as 1814 as the Boulevard Beaujon after Nicolas Beaujon (1718-1786), a financier and courtier who was in no small part responsible for developing the area.

In 1864 it was renamed after... let me just check here... oh. A Napoleonic battle. Offffff course it was. (The battle was against the Russians in 1807, about 43km south east of what was at the time Königsberg in East Prussia. After World War II this became Kaliningrad in the Soviet Union, and after the Soviet Union broke up it became a strange little cut off part of Russia which was surrounded by Poland to the south and Lithuania to the east and north, with the west on the coast of the Baltic.)

The age may account for why this avenue SEEMS to have one of the densest growths of trees of any of the avenues, but that's just the way it looks to me; I haven't done a more scientific analysis of it.

The avenue has had its usual share of company headquarters, financiers, and minor nobility. It has also been home to poets, novelists and playwrights that nobody who was born in the last 100 years has ever heard of unless they did a degree in obscure literature.

There WAS one place that had a curious history though. Apparently the original owner of number 28 was one Lola Montez (1821-1861), a seemingly exotic dancer and actress who was also a very industrious courtesan. She was bestowed the title of Countess of Landsfeld by a grateful King Ludwig I of Bavaria in exchange for, uhm, services rendered.

There's an Australian connection too; she toured Australia in 1855, though her Melbourne season was cut short when The Argus, a local paper, declared her performance to be "utterly subversive to all ideas of public morality" and "respectable" audiences stopped going. She had a problem with bad reviews; when The Ballarat Times wrote one, she reportedly attacked the editor with a whip as you would expect from a fiery blooded exotic.

Just one thing, though... she was in fact an Irish woman with sloppy impulse control named Eliza Rosanna Gilbert who was born in a place no more exotic than Connacht, Ireland. Though she burnt bright she flamed out early, dying somewhere between 39 and 42 (her date of birth is a little unclear) of the side effects of syphilis.

After she left Paris, the place was taken over by Duke Charles II of Brunswick (1804-1873), who had been booted out of his duchy in in 1830. Despite that he apparently retained quite a lot of wealth, and he turned the place into a fortress with some bizarre features like a blue satin armchair built into a wall. If you were granted admission, the wall panel rotated and transported you, in the chair, into the Duke's antechamber. It's a pity it doesn't still exist.

Still, we'll always have the trees.