La rue du Moulin-des-Prés

The rue du Moulin-des-Prés was a street in the 13th arrondissement near the vanishing Bièvre river, where Bonneton conducted his systematic documentation of pre-modern Paris as it was finally being erased. By 1900 the city's modernization projects had left scattered pockets of older street patterns and architecture particularly on the Left Bank's edge, attracting both nostalgia and archaeological interest. Bonneton's street-level views function as social documents: working-class pedestrians, small shops, and the irregular architecture of a neighborhood that had changed little since the Second Empire populate his compositions. The Musée Carnavalet holds this alongside other Bonneton views as part of its systematic collection of Parisian topography.

The street view is constructed with a confident sense of perspectival recession anchored by paving stones and building facades leading to a distant vanishing point. Figures are loosely but specifically rendered, their working clothes and postures identifying them as inhabitants rather than visitors to this quarter of Paris.