The Invention of Paris (16 page)

Among those places that express in a clear and subtle fashion the swing of fashion from one bank to the other, there are the gardens that Paris owes to the two Florentine queens, Catherine and Marie de Médicis. During the greater part of the nineteenth century, the favoured shady haunt of dandies, lovers and writers was the Tuileries. In the flamboyant opening pages of Balzac's
The Girl With the Golden Eyes
(dedicated, we recall, to ‘Eugène Delacroix, painter'), it is quite naturally on the Terrasse des Feuillants that Henri de Marsay meets Paquita Valdès. But starting with Verlaine and symbolism, and continuing right through the twentieth century (even if the Tuileries fountain still plays a role in
Nadja
), youth and poetry migrate towards the Luxembourg. The
Journal
of Paul Léautaud, 4 May 1901: ‘Dusk gave the whole garden an endless depth, and a light mist was floating. I was on the terrace not far from the door to the greenhouses. In the lower part of the garden, the fountain rose and fell almost noiselessly. Soon the drum began to beat. They were about to close. I dreamed that I was facing a beautiful landscape of Baudelaire's . . .' Whether Jules Vallès, Léon Daudet, André Gide, Jules Romain, Jean-Paul Sartre, Michel Leiris or Jacques Roubaud, there is scarcely a Parisian novel or diary that does not feature the Luxembourg, central and symbolic site of a Left Bank that is seen as maternally welcoming students, writers, publishers and book-shops, art and experimental cinemas, avant-garde galleries and artists, not
to mention the foreigners who arrived in the wake of Oscar Wilde, James Joyce, Joseph Roth and Henry Miller. The fragility of this construction, in large part mythological, has been rather sadly demonstrated in recent years.

As a hall or a landing opens onto the successive rooms to which it gives access, so the Luxembourg opens onto all the central quarters of the Left Bank. Near the school of apiculture it touches Montparnasse; its main entrance is towards the Observatoire; on the side of the Orangerie and the monument to Delacroix it borders on Saint-Sulpice, and in this way communicates with Saint-Germain; only Rue de Vaugirard separates it from the Odéon. And it is above all else, as Léon Daudet says, ‘the respiratory centre, the vegetable lung, of the hard-working Latin Quarter'.

Along with Les Halles, the Latin Quarter is the region of Old Paris that has been most transformed from the time of Baudelaire's childhood and Rastignac's youth. Perrot's atlas, dating from 1834, shows the quarter as it was for Balzac, organized around the two main north-south arteries of Rue de la Harpe and Rue Saint-Jacques. The first of these starts – as it still does – from Rue Saint-Séverin, climbs alongside Cluny to reach the Place Saint-Michel (now Place Edmond-Rostand), then continues along Rue d'Enfer: this is almost the route of Boulevard Saint-Michel today. The parallels of Rue de la Harpe and Rue Saint-Jacques are linked by a number of transverse streets: Rue de la Parcheminerie, whose name comes from the illustrators and bookbinders who worked there since the twelfth century; Rue du Foin; Rue des Mathurins (now replaced by Rue du Sommerard); Rue des Grès, near the law faculty on the present course of Rue Cujas; Rue Saint-Hyacinth, which obliquely connects the Place Saint-Michel with Rue des Fossés-Saint-Jacques, crossing the route of the future Rue Soufflot. Between Rue de la Harpe and Rue Monsieur-le-Prince – another main artery of the quarter – the street layout on the 1834 map is not very different from today's, except for Boulevard Saint-Germain. On the other side of the hill, however, east of the Place Maubert, no one could recognize where they were, at least without a few landmarks that remain: the École Polytechnique, the church of Saint-Nicolas-du-Chardonnet, Rue d'Arras, Rue de Pontoise and Rue de Poissy.

The Luxembourg opens onto the Latin Quarter through Rue Soufflot. This is a ‘recent' street; when Père Goriot lived in Mme Vauquer's pension, it had been built only between the Panthéon and Rue Saint-Jacques, which caused problems for the gunners trying to dislodge the insurgents who had barricaded themselves in the monument in June 1848 – I shall return to
this later. On what for a long time was known as the Place Saint-Michel – changed to Place du Luxembourg when the present Place Saint-Michel was built by the bridge on the small arm of the Seine, then to Place Edmond-Rostand in the 1950s – the start of Rue Soufflot was formerly framed by two old cafés, the Capoulade on the left and the Mahieu on the right. Léautaud's
Journal
, 19 January 1933:

There was a whole period in my youth, reading the poets, reading Verlaine and often encountering him on his evening wanderings on Boulevard Saint-Michel, once also on Rue Monsieur-le-Prince at the junction with the little Rue de Vaugirard, badly dressed, limping, an infernal noise as he struck the pavement with his cane, another evening at the cellar of Le Soleil d'Or where I ventured (the café at the corner of Boulevard Saint-Michel and the quay, was that the Soleil d'Or?), one afternoon I saw him sitting, accompanied by Eugénie Krantz, on the terrace of the café on the corner of Rue Soufflot and Boulevard Saint-Michel (Café Mayeux, I believe), the side facing the boulevard, very close to the building that separates the café from the tobacconist's, and I got a child to take him a bunch of violets.

Rue Soufflot climbs towards Rue Saint-Jacques, which is the real highway of the Latin Quarter – more than Boulevard Saint-Michel, conceived in order to neutralize the old streets with their riots and barricades, and which I have always experienced as a corridor of noise and ugliness. Between the river and Rue des Écoles, a number of old bookshops-cum-publishers remain to remind you that until the end of the ancien régime, Rue Saint-Jacques had a virtual monopoly of printing – from the time that the three Gering brothers, who came from Konstanz, established their presses at the sign of the Soleil d'Or in 1473 – as well as of publishing and bookselling, activities that were then combined. The establishments listed in the
Catalogue chronologique des librairies et librairies-imprimeurs de Paris depuis l'an 1470, époque de l'établissement de l'Imprimerie dans cette capitale jusqu'à présent
(1789)
¹⁴³
are almost all grouped on Rue Saint-Jacques and its immediate neighbours – Rue des Poitevins, Rue des Anglais, Rue Galande, Rue Serpente and Place de la Sorbonne. The Estiennes, printers from father to son, starting with the great Robert Estienne whose workshop was visited by François I in person, were on Rue Saint-Jacques, and the Didots on Rue Saint-André-des-Arts. ‘There is nothing more comic than the timid and conceited beginnings of a poet who, burning
with impatience to appear before the public, approaches for the first time a typographer in Rue Saint-Jacques, who in turn gives himself airs and comes to appreciate literary merit', writes Sébastien Mercier. In the early nineteenth century, before the book world crossed the Seine to lay siege to the Palais-Royal, it spilled over onto the Quai des Grands-Augustins, where there was to be found, among others, ‘the firm of Fendant and Cavalier [which] had started in business without any capital whatsoever. A great many publishing houses were established at that time in the same way, and are likely to be established so long as papermakers and printers will give credit for the time required to play some seven or eight of the games of chance called “new publications”.'
¹⁴⁴
On such matters as games of chance, credit and bankruptcy, Balzac was of course in his element.

Between Rue des Écoles and Rue Soufflot, Rue Saint-Jacques was completely rebuilt in the 1860s, but it is still possible to admire the setting formed by the little sloping garden in front of the Collège de France, where chestnut and plane trees, limes and acacias (no doubt planted when Claude Bernard held the chair of medicine) have reached gigantic size, the Lycée Louis-le-Grand (my own
lycée
), and the Sorbonne crowned by its observatory tower with the silhouette of a minaret – and in the background, at the top of the hill, the Jansenist bell tower of Saint-Jacques-du-Haut-Pas.

To the left of Rue Saint-Jacques, or the east if you prefer, Rue des Écoles separates two different regions. The lower one, modern and active, stretches towards the Jussieu University and the Jardin des Plantes. Its centre is the Place Maubert. In 1862, Delvau could still write that this was

perhaps the only part of Paris that has kept its former physiognomy. Ten steps away, Paris has dressed itself from head to foot in fresh stone and plaster: only the Place Maubert cynically vaunts its old rags! It is not a square, but a vast puddle of mud . . . It is like a living tradition of medieval Paris. If you blink your eyes, you might believe you were still seeing and hearing its population from the time of Isabel of Bavaria and Louis XI! A prolific and tenacious breed, which resisted all efforts to destroy or even civilize it – as M. Joseph Prudhomme said. Nothing did the trick, not guns, or plague, or famine, or starvation, or debauchery – not even mutual education!
¹⁴⁵

The property speculation of the 1960s succeeded where guns and plague had failed.

The top of the Montagne, a very ancient region that stretches across the Place du Panthéon towards the Mouffetard quarter, has been partly disfigured by the proliferation of restaurants and crêperies. The Place de la Contrescarpe and Rue Mouffetard, ‘a localized swarm, a kind of Villonesque survival' from the time of Léon Daudet, which the Situationists of the 1950s made into the ‘
continent Contrescarpe
', are now no more than shadows of their former selves. And yet, on the irregular territory bordered by Rues Tournefort, Lhomond, de l'Arbalète, Claude-Bernard, d'Ulm and de l'Estrapade, in a modest and almost village-like architectural setting, memories of Diderot and the four sergeants of La Rochelle (in 1970 there was still a café bearing their names on the corner of Rue Descartes and Rue Clovis, and it is right, I believe, that the memory of their republican martyrdom should have been cherished so long on this counter
¹⁴⁶
) merge with memories of Eugène Rastignac, still the naïve boarder at Mme Vauquer's, as well as those of another student – young Vingtras, alias Vallès.

‘No one knows why certain quarters become degraded and vulgarized, morally as well as materially; why, for instance, the ancient residence of the court and the church, the Luxembourg and the Latin Quarter, have become what they are today . . . why the elegance of life has left that region . . . why such mud and dirty trades and poverty should have fastened on a hilly piece of ground, instead of spreading out upon the flat land beyond the confines of the ancient city.' Such is Balzac's musing in
The Lesser Bourgeoisie
. Twenty years later, Théodore de Banville asked in similar vein:

How could the student of today insist on being what the student of an earlier age was, when the inevitable Duval restaurants, with their mouldings, gilt decoration and exotic wooden ceilings, have established themselves in a palace, on the very spot where modest eateries were formerly sited, and when you can see, right on Rue des Grès, where the Middle Ages left such a strong imprint, an English tavern offering its roast beef, York ham, pickles and sauces of ground-up cockchafer (see Balzac), washed down with pale ale, as in Rue Royale?
¹⁴⁷

And in 1964, Yvan Christ would not have believed he had hit the nail on the head quite so accurately in predicting that ‘in twenty years, new and tender greybeards will shed melancholy tears over the old Latin Quarter of the 1960s, the best years there ever were'.
¹⁴⁸

Ever since the time of Villon, the Latin Quarter, as the quarter of youth, was prey more than any other to nostalgia for the good old days. But however much one might distrust such feelings, it is impossible not to regret the profusion, variety and liveliness of the cafés of the quarter between 1850 and 1914 – not their physical setting, which was in no way comparable with the fairyland establishments on the Boulevards, but their atmosphere. Some of them were political first and foremost. Vallès relates that in 1850, in the Café du Vote Universel, ‘there were people said to have been leaders on the barricades of Saint-Merri, prisoners at Dullens, insurgents of June 1848'. Close by, in the Café de la Renaissance, opposite the Saint-Michel fountain, the public ‘had a particular physiognomy at the absinthe hour and in the evenings. Untidy students with their hair in disorder,
women students
. . . The masters of Paris under the Commune held their sessions there, preparing their sinister plan of campaign that would end up in fire and murder.'
¹⁴⁹
In Rue Saint-Séverin, where François Maspero's La Joie de Lire served as a political university for a whole generation, the Brasserie Saint-Séverin was one of the canteens for the leaders of the Commune. According to Lepage, who can hardly be suspected of objectivity, ‘Above them ruled Raoul Rigault . . . arriving on horseback, turning his mount on Boulevard Saint-Michel, and gazing arrogantly at the women from behind a double lorgnette.'

Other places were more prosaic. The immense d'Harcourt, on the corner of the Place de la Sorbonne and Boulevard Saint-Michel (the side opposite the present PUF bookstore
¹⁵⁰
) was a
café à femmes
. For poor students, the most welcoming restaurants were Flicoteaux and Pension Laveur. ‘In exceptional cases, you have Flicoteaux', Dumas explains in
The Mohicans of Paris
. You ate there on long tables, in two rooms at right angles, one of which overlooked the Place de la Sorbonne and the other Rue Neuve-de-Richelieu (now Champollion). When Lucien de Rubempré no longer had a sou, he dined at Flicoteaux, which is where he made the decisive acquaintance of Lousteau:

Few indeed were the students who lived in the Latin Quarter during the last twelve years of the Restoration and did not frequent that temple sacred to hunger and impecuniosity . . . Verily, the heart of more than one great man ought to wax warm with innumerable recollections of inexpressible enjoyment at the sight of the small, square window-panes that look upon the Place de la Sorbonne, and Rue Neuve-de-Richelieu. Flicoteaux II and Flicoteaux III respected the old exterior, maintaining the dingy hue and general air of a respectable, old-established house, showing thereby the depth of their contempt for the charlatanism of the shop-front, the kind of advertisement which feasts the eyes at the expense of the stomach, to which your modern restaurant almost always has recourse.
¹⁵¹