The Invention of Paris (21 page)

129
Balzac, ‘Histoire et physiologie des Boulevards de Paris'.

130
Georges Cain,
Promenades dans Paris
(Paris: Flammarion, 1907).

131
Cited by Jacques Rancière,
The Nights of Labor
(Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1989).

132
On the site of a wretched café,
L'Épi-Scié
, Alexandre Dumas established the Théâtre-Historique to produce his own works, and legend has it that on the theatre's opening the public queued for three days and nights at the box office for the premier of
La Reine Margot
. Haussmann, in his
Mémoires
, explains that ‘the city did not have to concern itself with the more or less desirable position of these latter establishments' (the ‘dives'). The Théâtre-Lyrique and the Cirque-Olympique were reconstructed opposite one another on the Place du Châtelet. The Gaîté was moved to the Square des Arts-et-Métiers, until it was destroyed while Chirac was mayor to make way for a mechanical billiards hall. The Folies was situated on Rue de Bondy, and the Funambules on Boulevard de Strasbourg.

133
Lemer,
Paris au gaz
. These ‘pass-out tickets' were pieces of card given to the audience when they went out at the interval.

134
Ibid.

135
De Kock, ‘Les Boulevards de la porte Saint-Martin à la Bastille'.

136
Ibid.

137
Lemer,
Paris au gaz
.

138
André Breton, ‘Refus d'inhumer', October 1924.

139
‘We are finally beginning to build one [a pavement] on both sides of the new road of the Théâtre-Français; but the fault committed is to have badly positioned posts that prevent coachmen from bringing the wheels of their carriages on to the sidewalk' (Mercier,
Tableau de Paris
). For the residential developments, see Pierre Pinon,
Paris, biographie d'une capitale
(Paris: Hazan, 1988).

140
A report to the Convention on 14 Thermidor of year II declared that the sale of national goods was suspended because ‘a commission of artists is occupied at this time with a plan for the embellishment of Paris' (Lavedan,
Histoire de l'urbanisme à Paris
). The Commission's role tends to be underestimated, in the general movement of devaluing the Revolution, at least from 1793. Do people realize that such efforts were made to beautify Paris during the Terror?

141
Honoré de Balzac,
The Wrong Side of Paris
(1848).

142
Delvau,
Les Dessous de Paris
.

143
‘Chez Jean-Roch Lottin de Saint-Germain, Imprimeur-libraire ordinaire de la ville, Rue Saint-André-des-Arts, no. 27, 1789.'

144
Balzac,
Lost Illusions
.

145
Delvau,
Les Dessous de Paris
.

146
Jean-François Bories and the three other sergeants, who were members of a republican secret society, were executed on the Place de Grève on 21 September 1822 (some say they were shot, which would have been ‘normal' for soldiers, but the Place de Grève was the site of the guillotine . . .). ‘The quays were thick with people. Despite a formidable military and police presence, the condemned received the sympathy of an immense number.' Those are the words of a seventeen-year-old witness, Auguste Blanqui, who was marked forever by this execution (Jeanne Gilmore,
La République clandestine, 1818–1848
[Paris: Aubier, 1997]).

147
‘Le quartier Latin', in La Bédollière et al,
Paris Guide
.

148
Article ‘Quartier Latin', in
Dictionnaire de Paris
(Paris: Hazan 1964).

149
A. Lepage,
Cafés littéraires et politiques de Paris
(Paris: Dentu, 1874).

150
[Editorial note: now replaced by a men's casual clothing store.]

151
Balzac,
Lost Illusions
.

152
Daudet,
Paris vécu
.

153
Carco,
De Montmartre au Quartier Latin
.

154
Alfred Delvau,
Histoire anecdotique des cafés et cabarets de Paris
(Paris: Dentu, 1862).

155
Ibid. Poulet-Malassis, whom Baudelaire called Coco-Malperché, was the publisher of
Les Fleurs du mal
.

156
Ibid. Hippolyte Babou was the friend of Baudelaire who suggested to him the title for
Les Fleurs du mal
.

157
Carco,
De Montparnasse au Quartier Latin
.

158
Daudet,
Paris vécu
.

159
Paul Fargue, ‘La Classe de Mallarmé', in
Refuges
(Paris: Émile-Paul Frères, 1942; republished Paris: Gallimard, 1998).

160
According to Joan Halperin, the impeccable biographer of Fénéon, it was he who placed the bomb, in a flower pot –
Félix Fénéon, Aesthete and Anarchist in Fin-de-Siècle Paris
(New Haven: Yale University Press, 1988). Laurent Tailhade lost an eye in the explosion.

161
Umberto Eco,
Six Walks in the Fictional Woods
(Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1994), p. 104.

162
Georges Perec,
Tentative d'épuisement d'un lieu parisien
(Paris: Christian Bourgois, 1975).

163
Honoré de Balzac,
Scenes from a Courtesan's Life
(1838), trans. Waring.

164
Only one building was finished after his plans, no. 6, on the northeast corner of the square close to Rue des Canettes. This was the office of the publisher to which Perec alludes: Robert Laffont, bought up long ago now by the Presses de la Cité group, alias CEP, alias Havas, alias Vivendi.

165
Remnants of this are the old houses on the odd-numbered side of Boulevard Saint-Germain, between Rue des Saints-Pères and Rue de Rennes. Rue Gozlin is a fragment of Rue des Boucheries.

166
The modern market is a reconstruction, supposedly identical, of the neoclassical market designed by Blondel. It is the work of Olivier Cacoub, the favourite architect of Jacques Chirac, responsible for many other Parisian disasters, including the ‘Le Ponant' building overlooking the Parc André-Citroën.

167
Mercier,
Tableau de Paris.

168
Lettres missives d'Henri IV
, vol. 7 (Paris, 1858); cited by Pinon,
Paris, biographie d'une capitale
.

169
G. Lenôtre,
Secrets du vieux Paris
(Paris: Grasset, 1954).

170
Balzac,
The Duchess of Langeais
.

171
Marcel Proust,
The Guermantes Way
,
Remembrance of Things Past
(Penguin: Harmondsworth, 1983), vol. 2, p. 25.

172
The main entrance to this hôtel was close to 6 Rue de Seine.

173
‘At that time' (in the 1780s), ‘there was not a door that would not open at the slightest request of an unknown tourist; no reference was demanded, no recommendation . . . Anyone who possessed paintings, a collection of prints, a library, or simply fine furniture, freely offered their treasures to the admiration of all comers. It was in no way difficult to enter the home of the Duc d'Orléans at the Palais-Royal, the Prince de Condé, M. Beaujon whose apartments were famous, the Prince de Salm whose hôtel was scarcely finished, or the Duc de Praslin where one could inspect his sumptuous furniture . . . You could likewise go from door to door, visiting the picture galleries of the hôtels of Chabot, Luynes, Briassac and Vaudreuil, the natural-history collections of Chaulnes and La Rochefoucauld, or the gardens of M. de Biron or M. de Saint-James' (Lenôtre,
Secrets du vieux Paris.
)

174
There are still some independent houses in the quarter – Gallimard, Le Seuil, Minuit and Christian Bourgois, among others.

175
Those who deplore the invasion of this quarter by doner kebab can at least refer to Mercier's
Tableau de Paris
: ‘The Turks who arrived in the train of the last Ottoman ambassador found nothing more agreeable in the whole of Paris than Rue de la Huchette, on account of the rotisseries there and the succulent smoke they exhaled . . . Cooked fowl could be obtained there at any hour of the day; the spits were constantly on an ever-burning fire.'

176
Chevalier,
Montmartre du plaisir et du crime.

177
François Loyer,
Paris XIXe siècle, l'immeuble et la rue
(Paris: Hazan, 1987).

178
Charles Baudelaire, ‘Salon de 1859', on Meryon.

179
Victor Fournel,
Paris nouveau et Paris future
(Paris, 1868).

180
The two most recent books on Haussmann are quite instructive in this respect.
Haussmann le Grand
, by Georges Valance (Paris: Flammarion, 2000): ‘Why Haussmann? Because he has left us Paris, one of the finest, most liveable, most visited and most envied cities in the world.' In some 350 pages, this book devotes just ten lines to the baron's anti-revolutionary worries. And Michel Carmona, in his
Haussmann
(Paris: Fayard, 2000), describes the clearing of the Place de la République in these terms: ‘The little crooked square with its modest water tower (opposite the present Rue Léon-Jouhaux) was expanded into the fine quadrilateral that we know today.'

181
Paris nouveau jugé par un flâneur
(Paris: Dentu, 1868), cited by Benjamin in
The Arcades Project
, pp. 129–30.

182
Dolf Oehler,
1848. Le Spleen contre l'oubli
(Paris: Payot, 1996).

The word faubourg means the section of a town that is outside its gates and its precinct. But this definition has for a long time ceased to be appropriate for the faubourgs of Paris, which, being forced to expand, has ended up enclosing them all within its walls. This name, however, given the weight of long usage, has been preserved for them, and helps a topographical understanding of the capital.

– A. Béraud and P. Dufay,
Dictionnaire historique de Paris
(1832)

This inconceivable wall, fifteen feet high and nearly seven leagues round, which will soon surround the whole of Paris, is supposed to cost 12 million; but as it should bring in 2 million each year, it is clearly good business. Make the people pay for something that will only make them pay more, what could be better? . . . Battalions of workers will circulate in the shelter of this rampart. The Farmers-General would have liked to enclose the whole Île de France. Just imagine good king Henri IV seeing this wall! But what is revolting from every aspect is to see the lairs of the tax office transformed into colonnaded palaces that are genuine fortresses. These monuments are supported by colossal statues. There is one on the Passy side that holds chains in its hands, presenting them to those who arrive: it is the spirit of taxation in person under these genuine attributes. Oh, Monsieur Ledoux, you are a dreadful architect!
¹

Sébastien Mercier was not alone in this opinion: the condemnation of the wall was so general that its contractors were forced to begin their work at the most deserted point, alongside the Salpêtrière hospital. Through an
irony of fate, Lavoisier, a conspicuous Farmer-General, was held responsible for a project that the Parisians charged would prevent pure air from entering the city, and his discoveries – on the very subject of the composition of air – did not save his head from the Revolutionary tribunal.
²

The
octroi
system, however, predated the wall. Many years before, the Ferme-Générale had already established offices around Paris to collect entry charges on certain goods and commodities, including foodstuffs, wine, and firewood.
³
But the vagueness of the boundaries – certain streets were subject to
octroi
on one side only – permitted all kinds of fraud. Sébastien Mercier noted that ‘every day a countless number of lies are uttered by the most honest of people. It is a pleasure to deceive the tax office, and the conspiracy is general; people are proud of it and celebrate it.' In the 1780s, as the public finances went increasingly into deficit, Breteuil and Calonne decided to improve receipts by means of a wall. But what aroused public anger at this time was not just the greater difficulty of fraud. A bookseller wrote in his diary that ‘the Parisians had all the more reason to murmur and show their discontent in this circumstance, since all the enjoyment of an outdoor walk was removed and they were deprived of the sweet pleasure of being able to contemplate the green countryside, of breathing purer air on Sundays and holidays after having worked the whole week in dwellings that were often both gloomy and unhealthy'.
⁴

The wall was purely an instrument of taxation, without any military purpose. Its dimensions already demonstrate this: three metres high and less than one metre deep. Historians have given it the name of the ‘wall of the Farmers-General', but during the eighty years of its existence, Parisians called it the ‘
octroi
wall'. Thus the Clos Saint-Lazare, where the last insurgents of June 1848 held out on the building site of the Lariboisière hospital, was described by Marouk as ‘waste ground that stretched from the Poissonière barrier [now the Barbès-Rouchechouart
crossroads] to the Nord railway, from the church of Saint-Vincent-de-Paul to the
octroi
wall'.
⁵
Gervaise, from the window of the Hôtel Boncoeur, on Boulevard de la Chapelle, looked

to the right, towards Boulevard de Rochechouart, where groups of butchers, in aprons smeared with blood, were hanging about in front of the slaughterhouses; and the fresh breeze wafted occasionally a stench of slaughtered beasts. Looking to the left, she scanned a long avenue that ended nearly in front of her, where the white mass of the Lariboisière hospital was then in course of construction. Slowly, from one end of the horizon to the other, she followed the
octroi
wall, behind which she sometimes heard, during nighttime, the shrieks of persons being murdered; and she searchingly looked into the remote angles, the dark corners, black with humidity and filth, fearing to discern there Lantier's body, stabbed to death.
⁶