A colonel was shot after leading the Resistance

A colonel and an exiled statesman shared one street

At number 5 on the street beside you, a plaque marks where Colonel Touny lived before the Gestapo took him. He led the Organisation Civile et Militaire, one of the Resistance's largest underground networks, and was shot by German forces at Arras in April 1944. His body was later placed in the crypt at Mont Valérien, the fort outside Paris where hundreds of hostages and resistants were executed during the Occupation.

A few doors further along, another plaque records that Alimardan Bey Toptchibachi — the last president of the Azerbaijan Democratic Republic's parliament, exiled to Paris after the Bolshevik invasion ended his country's short-lived independence — lived in this building in 1920, a stateless statesman among the émigré diplomats who filled this quarter after 1918.

The apartment blocks that frame this stretch of street went up in 1895 and 1896, part of the wave of construction that turned this corner of the 16th arrondissement from village lanes into solid Belle Époque frontage — the kind of address, discreet and well-built, that would soon draw in the resistant colonels, the exiled presidents, and the students of the great lycée two streets over.

Just around the corner, the Lycée Janson-de-Sailly anchors the neighborhood — one of the largest schools in the region, its own war memorial standing barely 180 metres from where you are, listing the jansoniens who did not come home from 1914–18.

A poet died and a couple was seized nearby

A short walk northeast, at the site of a vanished hotel, a plaque notes: "Victor Hugo" — the poet died there in May 1885, and all of Paris turned out for the funeral that followed.

Closer, just past Rue Decamps, another plaque marks the arrest on 2 March 1942 of Charlotte Delbo and her husband Georges Dudach, seized by the special brigades of the Vichy police; he was shot, she survived deportation to write some of the starkest testimony to come out of the camps.

The Passy Cemetery, roughly 600 metres east, holds a denser accumulation of the quarter's dead, including the industrialist Marcel Dassault and two Renoir models, sisters known as Jane Henriot and Henriette Henriot — Jane died at twenty-one, suffocated trying to save her dog during a fire and explosion at the Comédie-Française in 1900.

The Rue de la Pompe métro station, an easy walk south, sits over a street first noted in archives back in 1730 as a path skirting the walls of the Château de la Muette — long before this became a fashionable street of embassies and academies.

Further west, past the treeline of the Bois de Boulogne, a plaque at the old château grounds recalls the first manned flight in a hot-air balloon, launched on 21 November 1783 by Pilâtre de Rozier and the Marquis d'Arlandes from the park of the Château de la Muette — a королевская hunting lodge turned royal residence, now the OECD's headquarters.

A demolished palace and an ancient seabed underlie it all

Two kilometres east, the hill of Chaillot carries the Trocadéro, Paris, a name inherited from an 1878 exhibition palace demolished in 1937 to raise the Palais de Chaillot in its place — the balcony from which all of Paris looks toward the Eiffel Tower across the river.

Underneath all of it — the balconies, the plaques, the cemetery gates — lies a shelf of Eocene-age clay, gypsum, and limestone laid down between about 56 and 34 million years ago, when a shallow sea and its evaporating lagoons covered the Paris basin. It is soft enough to tunnel and quarry, hard enough to build on, and it is the reason this whole quarter could rise as solid five- and six-storey stone the moment the money and the ambition arrived in the nineteenth century.