The Théâtre de la Porte Saint-Martin, on the Boulevard Saint-Martin in the 10th arrondissement of Paris, is recorded here in the immediate aftermath of its destruction by fire during the Paris Commune. The photograph is an albumen print mounted on a cabinet card, its mount bordered with a red-ruled line, and dates to 1871. No photographer's imprint appears on the mount.

The image presents the theatre's gutted multi-story facade head-on from the street, its window surrounds intact but every interior floor collapsed into a deep field of rubble and debris that spills to the wrought-iron fence lining the pavement below. Vines or creeping vegetation cling to the lower left of the ruined facade, and a gas lamp standard rises from the debris field at center. The exposed party walls of adjoining structures loom at right, their surfaces scorched and stripped bare, while more distant rooflines and chimneys of undamaged buildings appear at the far left edge of the frame.

The theatre was destroyed by fire during the Paris Commune of 1871 and replaced in 1873 with a building designed by architect Oscar de la Chardonnière. Having reopened on 27 September 1873 with a revival of Victor Hugo's *Mary Tudor*, the theatre subsequently underwent many changes to conform with safety regulations. Photographs documenting the ruins, taken in the weeks immediately following the fall of the Commune at the end of May 1871, form a well-known documentary corpus held today in the Musée Carnavalet and the Bibliothèque historique de la Ville de Paris.

Inscribed in ink on the reverse in a period hand: "Théâtre de la porte S[ain]t Martin" (Theatre of the Porte Saint-Martin). Additional pencil notations at the lower margin read "5&10," "10/13/07," "AOCBDX," and "Eb."