The Invention of Paris (13 page)

‘The life of Paris, its physiognomy, was in 1500 on Rue Saint-Antoine; in 1600 on the Place Royale; in 1700 on the Pont-Neuf; in 1800 in the Palais-Royal. All these places were the Boulevards of their day! The earth was impassioned there, as the asphalt is today under the feet of the stockbrokers on the steps of Café Tortoni.' When Balzac wrote his ‘Histoire et physiologie des boulevards de Paris' in 1844, it was nearly ten years since the Palais-Royal had gone out of fashion, ten years since the Paris of Manon Lescaut, Adolphe, and Henri de Marsay had disappeared, along with its Argand lamps, half-pay officers, the vogue for Cherubini and the successes of Byron, Walter Scott and Fenimore Cooper. In a movement of taste that accompanied dandies, whores, journalists and gourmets in their migration to the Boulevards, a new romanticism made its appearance, that of Berlioz, Frédérick Lemaître and La Fanfarlo. But in one of the thousand and one ways that facts have of messing up the categories of art history, it so happens that the Boulevards, the great stage of Parisian Romanticism, are a long procession of neoclassical architecture – a paradox to match that which the clever Lousteau explained to Lucien de Rubempré around 1830:

[O]ur great men are ranged in two hostile camps. The Royalists are ‘romantics', the Liberals are ‘classics'. The divergence of taste in matters literary and divergence of political opinion coincide; and the result is a war with weapons of every sort, double-edged witticisms, subtle calumnies and nicknames
à outrance
, between the rising and the waning glory, and ink is shed in torrents. The odd part of it is that the Royalist-romantics are all for liberty in literature, and for repealing laws and conventions; while the Liberal-classics are for maintaining the unities, the Alexandrine, and the classical theme.
⁹⁴

From the Madeleine to the Bastille, there remain none of the legendary dwellings built on the ramparts at the end of the ancien régime, with their view over the city on one side and across market gardens on the other:
nothing of Beaumarchais' house and its garden designed by Belanger, where Mme de Genlis came to witness the demolition of the Bastille along with the children of the Duc d'Orléans, nothing of the Pavillon de Hanovre built for the fine suppers of the Maréchal de Richelieu – ‘the fairy pavilion', Voltaire called it – nothing of the hôtel built by Ledoux for the Prince de Montmorency on the corner of the Chaussée-d'Antin, whose entablature bore, as a homage to Palladio, the statues of eight high officials of the Montmorency family, ‘heroic virtues that vandalism has destroyed, a deep impression that time does not wipe out'.
⁹⁵
On Boulevard de la Madeleine it was still possible until recently to admire the two rotundas framing the beginning of Rue Caumartin, one of the hôtel of the Duc d'Aumont, and the other of the hôtel of the Farmer-General Marin de la Haye – its roof formerly boasting a hanging garden in which, according to Hillairet, two small Chinese bridges crossed a stream that, after forming an island, supplied water to the dining rooms and baths of the building. They have just been newly ‘
façadisés
', which is perhaps worse than being demolished.
⁹⁶

But despite the destruction, the length of the Boulevards remains a great walking catalogue of Parisian neoclassical architecture from Louis XVI to Louis-Philippe, especially on the inner side, that of the odd numbers (the southern side, if you prefer), whose owners had front seats on the promenade. Many even had terraces built that overlooked the Boulevards' animation.
⁹⁷
By turns you have pure Louis XVI (Hôtel Montholon on
Boulevard Poissonière, with its six colossal Ionic columns supporting the third-storey balcony), the style of the Empire and Restoration, more severe and archaeological, and that of the July monarchy, decorated and smiling, with its great apartment blocks built for investment, looking like Italian palaces, where you can smell the eclecticism that lurked behind the taste for antiquity.
⁹⁸

If it is hard to imagine the seductive power of the Boulevards in the time of their splendour, this is because their sequence was then one of unbroken rhythmic scansion. Despite their length, they had a continuity, something of an enclosed space, that had made for the success of the Place Royale and the Palais-Royal. They were like the succession of rooms in an immense palace, each with its décor, timetable, and habits. But from Haussmann through to Poincaré this urban intimacy was hollowed out. The Opéra Garnier and its roundabout, the junction of Boulevards Haussmann and Montmartre creating the shapeless ‘Richelieu-Drouot' intersection, and the brutal implantation of the Place de la République where the Faubourg du Temple and the Boulevard du Crime meet, replaced these subtle caesuras with gaping empty spaces. When the father of Lucien Leuwen, that exquisite patron of the Opéra dancers, ‘strolled on the boulevard, his lackey gave him a cloak to pass in front of Rue de la Chaussée-d'Antin'. What precautions would he have had to take to cross the Place de la République!

The segmentation of the Boulevards has become very sharp. Between the Madeleine and the Opéra you have the big hotels and travel agencies; from the Opéra to Richelieu-Drouot the banks. Then, until the République, a portion that, whilst rather the worse for wear, is certainly the closest in spirit to the original Boulevards. Finally, the stretch between République and Bastille is the domain of motor scooters, photography and music, which may well have its charm and its special places, but is no longer really part of the Boulevards.

As a point of inflection in time, the beginning of the Boulevards' long downward descent, the image that comes to me is that of the death of Nana in a room of the Grand-Hôtel, on Boulevard des Capucines:

‘Come, it's time we were off,' said Clarisse. ‘We shan't bring her to life again. Are you coming, Simonne?' They all looked at the bed out of the corners of their eyes, but they did not budge an inch. Nevertheless, they began getting ready and gave their skirts various little pats. Lucy was again
leaning out of the window. She was alone now, and a sorrowful feeling began little by little to overpower her, as though an intense wave of melancholy had mounted up from the howling mob. Torches still kept passing, shaking out clouds of sparks, and far away in the distance the various bands stretched into the shadows, surging unquietly to and fro like flocks being driven to the slaughterhouse at night. A dizzy feeling emanated from these confused masses as the human flood rolled them along – a dizzy feeling, a sense of terror and all the pity of the massacres to come. The people were going wild; their voices broke; they were drunk with a fever of excitement which sent them rushing toward the unknown ‘out there' beyond the dark wall of the horizon.
‘À Berlin! à Berlin! à Berlin!'

The Boulevards was where the novelties of the modern city appeared one by one: the first Paris public transport line – the famous Madeleine-Bastille – the urinals, the cab ranks, the newspaper kiosks, the Morris columns. But the great transformation that had its birth in the Passage des Panoramas in 1817 and spread out along the Boulevards in the 1840s was gas lighting. We can grasp in Baudelaire the change from
Les Fleurs du mal
, lit by unsteady oil lamps (‘By the light of lamps flickering in the wind/ Prostitution lights up in the streets') to
Paris Spleen
, illuminated by gas (‘The café was sparkling. The gaslight itself sent forth all the ardour of a debut and lit with all its force walls blinding in their whiteness . . .').
⁹⁹
It was gas that made it possible to live the darkest hours of the night. ‘Cross the line that marks the axis of Rue de la Chaussée-d'Antin and Rue Louis-le-Grand, and you've entered the domain of the crowd. Along this Boulevard, on the right side especially, it's all sparkling shops, impressive displays, gilded cafés, permanent illumination. From Rue Louis-le-Grand to Rue de Richelieu the flood of light that shines from the shops enables you to read a newspaper while walking along', wrote Julien Lemer in
Paris au gaz
, published by Le Dentu in 1861.
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At closing time, ‘on the Boulevards, inside the cafés, the
gas mantles of the chandeliers very quickly blow out into darkness. Outside you hear the brouhaha of chairs being stacked in fours on the marble tables.'
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But thanks to gas, nocturnal life carried on uninterrupted. Alfred Delvau, a professional noctambulist, offered a guide for the late bedder to the Boulevards of the Second Empire:

After midnight one may withdraw to the Café Leblond; its entrance on Boulevard des Italiens closes at midnight, but the exit on the Passage de l'Opéra remains open until two in the morning. The Café des Variétés [in the Passage des Panoramas], which has a licence until half past one, receives a large number for supper after the theatres close. At the Café Wolf, 10 Rue du Faubourg-Montmartre, the noctambulists of the Breda quarter congregate around midnight . . . to drink beer and eat onion sausages, until it's time to close. At two o'clock the Brabant, at the corner of the Boulevard and Faubourg Montmartre, is still open, as well as Bignon, on the corner of the Chaussée-d'Antin, and especially Hill's Tavern, on Boulevard des Capucines, where the fashionable crowd mingles with the carefree bohème.

It was on the Boulevards in the 1850s that a custom spread, so rooted now in Paris life that it is hard to imagine the city without it: cafés set tables out on a terrace. ‘All the cafés have provided seating on the pavement outside their premises: there is a notable group of these between Rue Laffitte and Rue La Peletier, and it is not uncommon to see, in the heat of summer, wilting promenaders linger until one in the morning outside the café doors, sipping ices, beer, lemonade and soda water.'
¹⁰²
When Georges Duroy, the eponymous
Bel-Ami
– ‘empty pockets and boiling blood' – cruised Boulevard des Italiens on a stifling evening, ‘the big cafés, full of people, spilled out onto the pavement, displaying their clientele of drinkers under the sharp and rough light of the illuminated windows. In front of them, on little tables square or round, glasses contained red, yellow, green and brown liquids of all shades; and within the carafes you could see the big transparent cylinders of ice that chilled the fine clear water.'

‘Nothing is easier or more agreeable than a promenade of this kind. The ways reserved for pedestrians are tiled or asphalted, shaded with trees and furnished with seats. The cafés are at frequent intervals. Every now and
then cabs are stationed on the roadway. Finally, omnibuses constantly run from the Bastille to the Madeleine.' In the opposite direction from that proposed by the Joanne guide of 1870, the promenade began with Boulevard de la Madeleine and Boulevard des Capucines. For a long time the whole of this segment, as far as the break at Rue de la Chausséed'Antin, remained outside the life of the Boulevards. ‘From the Madeleine to Rue Caumartin,' wrote Balzac, ‘there is no flânerie. This is a stretch dominated by our imitation of the Parthenon, a large and fine thing, whatever may be said of it, but spoiled by the hideous café sculptures that dishonour its lateral friezes . . . This whole zone is sacrificed. You cross it, but do not stroll on it.'
¹⁰³

A decade and half later, a sense of greater liveliness can be felt: ‘Coming from the Madeleine, there is still only one pavement that is really alive, the right-hand side; the other is occupied by a street, Rue Basse-du-Rempart, currently being ravaged by demolition to make way for the future opera house.'
¹⁰⁴
And by 1867, the year of the Exposition Universelle, everything seems to have changed, to judge from the
Paris Guide
:

In our day, the most monumental section of the Boulevards is that stretching from Rue de la Chaussée-d'Antin to the Madeleine. The new Opéra is surrounded by palaces. The richness and comfort of the interior fittings of the Grand Hôtel, the hotel that the Jockey Club has moved into, match the magnificence of the outside. There remain only remnants of the damp Rue Basse that was filled with the dead and wounded of the shooting of 23 February [1848]. The buildings and shops rival each other in their sumptuousness.

But the picture ends in a singular conclusion in which La Bédollière repeats words straight from Balzac: ‘And yet, on Boulevard des Capucines and Boulevard de la Madeleine, it seems that an arctic cold can be felt. People cross them without lingering; they live there but don't stop there. The lines of carriages returning from Vincennes, in the afternoons of racing days, turn off and leave the Boulevards at Rue de la Paix. When all is said and done, to use a typically Parisian expression:
ça n'est plus ça!
'
¹⁰⁵

Known in 1815 as the Petit-Coblenz, after the town that had symbolized the emigration, Boulevard de Gand (Ghent where Louis XVIII found
refuge during the Hundred Days) only later acquired its definitive name, Boulevard des Italiens, from the former theatre of the Comédiens-Italiens in the Salle Favart – though, as we have seen, this turned its back on the Boulevard. Between Rue de la Chaussée-d'Antin and Rue de Richelieu was the Boulevard par excellence for ‘those who have been called in turn refined, fine, marvellous,
incroyables
, dandies, fashionable, lions,
gandins
, mashers, fops'.
¹⁰⁶
Here, writes Balzac, ‘begin those strange and marvellous buildings that seem to be drawn from a fairy tale or the pages of
The Thousand and One Nights
. . . Once you have set foot here, your day is lost if you are a man of thought. It is a gilded dream and an unbeatable distraction. The engravings of the print sellers, the daily entertainments, the tidbits of the cafés, the gems in the jewellers' shops, all is set to intoxicate and overexcite you.'
¹⁰⁷
When Bixiou and Léon de Lora want to show Paris to their provincial cousin, this is where they take him, ‘from one end to the other of that sheet of asphalt on which, between the hours of one and three, it is difficult to avoid seeing some of the personages in honour of whom Fame puts one or the other of her trumpets to her lips'.
¹⁰⁸