The Invention of Paris (32 page)

18
Ibid.

19
The Allée des Veuves, perpendicular to the Champs-Élysées, is now on one side Avenue Matignon and on the other Avenue Montaigne.

20
This was demolished in 1935 and replaced by the US embassy, supposedly symmetrical to La Vrillière's hôtel built by Chalgrin on the corner of Rue Saint-Florentin.

21
In the first few days of January 1870, ‘Blanqui conducted his review, without anyone suspecting the strange spectacle. Leaning against a tree, upright in the crowd among those who watched as he did, the attentive old man saw his friends arrive, soldiers among the throng of people, silent amid murmurs that from one moment to the next rose into shouts' (Gustave Geffroy,
L'Enfermé
[Paris, 1926]).

22
Victor Fournel,
Ce qu' on voit dans les rues de Paris
(Paris, 1858).

23
Joanne,
Paris illustré en 1870
. See also François Gasnault,
Guinguettes et lorettes, bals public à Paris au XIXe siècle
(Paris: Aubier, 1986).

24
D'Ariste and Arrivetz,
Les Champs-Élysées
(Paris, 1913).

25
The Convention turned this into a hospital, and in 1936 it was transferred to Clichy.

26
25 September 1846: ‘I have corrected the whole of
Cousine Bette
, and am working on the end of the manuscript; in six days from now, on 3
^rd
October, it will be finished, and
Cousin Pons
will be finished on the 12
^th
. . . Santi, the architect, is working like a slave, and on Sunday I shall know the sum of his quotation for the repairs and constructions, as the front wall has to be taken back, this being obligatory in the Beaujon quarter . . . I have reason to believe that the repairs will come to 15,000 francs. Thus the property would cost a total of 67,000 francs, made up of 50,000 the purchase price, 2,000 expenses, and 15,000 on repairs and embellishments. That is nothing in the present conditions of Paris, and we would not have had for 12,000 francs this home that I shall have the pleasure of presenting to you.'

27
A. Delvau,
Histoire anecdotique des barrières de Paris
(Paris: Dentu, 1865).

28
Ibid.

29
Under Henri II, the Porte Saint-Antoine was embellished with a triumphal arch designed by Jean Goujon. Located alongside the Bastille, this was demolished in 1777 to ease the flow of traffic. The Saint-Antoine-des-Champs abbey was situated where the Saint-Antoine hospital now stands.

30
Le Faubourg Saint-Antoine, architecture et métiers d'art
(Paris: Action artistique de la Ville de Paris, 1998). Boulevard Richard-Lenoir is named after this factory.

31
Sigmund Engländer,
Geschichte der französischer Arbeiterassociationen
(Hamburg, 1864), vol. 3, p. 126; cited by Walter Benjamin in
The Arcades Project
, p. 521.

32
Daniel Halévy,
Pays parisiens
(Paris: Grasset, 1932; republished in Les Cahiers rouges, 2000).

33
The name of Baudin has been given to a graceless little street giving on to Rue Saint-Sébastien. There is also a Hôtel Baudin on Avenue Ledru-Rollin. This is not very much for a man to whom republicans wanted to erect a monument at the end of the Second Empire; the collection gave rise to incidents throughout the country and a trial with strong political echoes.

34
Fortunately there remains the magnificent Durand-Dessert gallery.

35
Named after a president of the Paris parlement under Charles VI, who had his country house there.

36
Delvau,
Histoire anecdotique des barrières de Paris
. On
calicots
, see above, p. 52, note 59.

37
Privat d'Anglemont,
Paris anecdote
. This arrangement was not invented here, there were pictures of it in the technical magazines of the time. Certain of these driving belts even cut through the ceilings to reach the upper floors.

38
Baudelaire, ‘Salon de 1846'. Macready was an English actor, contemporary with Lemaître, famous in particular for his interpretation of
Richard III
.

39
I.e., the procession down from the hillside taverns of what is now known as Belleville. [Tr.]

40
Privat d'Anglemont,
Paris anecdote
.

41
Benjamin Gastineau,
Le Carnaval
(Paris, 1854). Cited from Jacques Rancière, ‘Le bon temps ou la barrière des plaisirs', in
Les Révoltes Logiques
, 7, spring-summer 1978.

42
Baudelaire wrote about Musset: ‘I've never been able to bear
this master of foppery
with his spoiled-child impudence, calling on heaven and hell for matters concerning his bed and board, his muddy torrent of grammatical and prosodic errors, finally his complete inability to understand the work that transforms reverie into art' (letter to Armand Fraisse, 18 February 1860,
Selected Letters of Charles Baudelaire
[London: Weidenfeld & Nicholson, 1986], p. 117; translation modified). Rimbaud wrote: ‘Musset is fourteen times loathsome to us, suffering generations obsessed by visions – insulted by his angelic sloth! . . . It is all French, namely detestable to the highest degree' (letter to Paul Demeny, 15 May 1871, Arthur Rimbaud,
Complete Works and Selected Letters
[Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005], p. 379).

43
The
barrière
at the end of Rue de l'Orillon was eventually known as the
barrière Ramponeau
. The present Rue Ramponeau continues Rue de l'Orillon on the other side of Boulevard de Belleville. The Tambour-Royal disappeared under the Consulate.

44
Legrand d'Aussy,
Vie publique et privée des Français
(Paris, 1826). Desnoyers was on the corner of Rue de Belleville and the street that today bears his modernized name, Desnoyez.

45
E. Vidocq,
Mémoires
(1828).

46
At the time of the 1851 coup d'état: ‘The corner where we were standing was lonely. On the left there was the Place de la Bastille, dark and gloomy; you could see nothing there, but you could sense a crowd; regiments were out in battle array; they were not bivouacking, they were ready to march; the muffled sound of breathing could be heard; the square was full of that glistening shower of pale sparks which bayonets give forth at night time. Above this abyss of shadows rose up black and stark the Column of July' (Victor Hugo,
History of a Crime
[trans. Joyce and Locker], 1877).

47
Louis Veuillot,
Odeurs de Paris
(Paris, 1867).

48
Since 1945, the Place du Colonel-Fabien.

49
Delvau,
Histoire anecdotique des barrières de Paris
. The Combat was finally closed in 1833.

50
Léon-Paul Fargue,
Le Piéton de Paris
(Paris: Gallimard, 1932).

51
I long believed that the name of Samson here, often spelled as Sanson, was because the great public executioner of this name lived close by, in Rue des Marais-du-Temple, in a building ‘protected by an iron railing, which was entered through a small gate; in the middle was a metal slot like a letterbox, in which were posted the missives from the Procureur-Général to alert the executioner that his services would be required' (Eusèbe Girault de Saint-Fargeau,
Les 48 Quartiers de Paris
[Paris: Blanchard, 1850]). Gavroche wrote to the two children he had taken under his protection: ‘And then we'll go to see the guillotine work. I'll show you the executioner. He lives in Rue des Marais. Monsieur Sanson. He has a letterbox at the gate' (
Les Misérables
, Volume IV, book 6,
chapter 2
). But the etymology is wrong; this Samson was a local property owner.

52
Girault de Saint-Fargeau,
Les 48 Quartiers de Paris
.

53
In his
Madness and Civilisation
(London: Routledge, 2001), Michel Foucault shows the role of former leper colonies – become useless, like TB sanatoriums in the 1960s – in the organization of repression in the seventeenth century.

54
Alexis Martin,
Promenades dans les vingt arrondissments de Paris
(Paris: Hennuyer, 1890). The Maison Dubois, which bore the name of the surgeon who founded it, is today the Fernand-Widal hospital.

55
Ibid.

56
Ibid.

57
Émile de La Bédollière,
Le Nouveau Paris. Histoire de ses vingt arrondissements
(Paris: Barba, 1860).

58
Pierre Seveste was the grandson of the gravedigger at the Madeleine cemetery, where Louis XVI and Marie-Antoinette were buried along with many others. Louis XVIII had the Chapelle Expiatoire built on the site, designed by Percier and Fontaine.

59
‘And no one would make you turn your eyes away from the diamantiferous mud of the Place de Clichy' (André Breton,
Ode to Charles Fourier
[London: Cape Goliard, 1969]). The plinth of the statue of Fourier is still there, in the middle of the boulevard in front of the Lycée Jules-Ferry.

60
Hurteau and Magny,
Dictionnaire historique de la ville de Paris
. In 1760, Ramponeau left the Tambour-Royal on Rue du Faubourg du Temple to his son, and established himself at the Grande Pinte – the church of La Trinité would later be built on this site. The saloon there could accommodate six hundred people at table.

61
Mémoires
of the Marquise de Créquy. Sébastien Mercier, unable to pardon Ledoux for the wall of the Farmers-General, notes that ‘Mme Thélusson's house is a spiral shell; you need to be a snail to live there: circular lines predominate, to the point that the head turns . . . The most dangerous creature for the government is the architect, if he ever has a fit of delirium.'

62
On these divisions, and this quarter in particular, see Pinon,
Paris, biographie d'une capital
. This great sewer continued that of Rue de Turenne, passed beneath the theatres on the Boulevard du Temple and then followed the route of a number of present streets, some of which were built at the same time as it was covered, in the 1760s: Rue du Château-d'Eau, Rue des Petites-Écuries, Rue Richer, Rue de Provence, then Rue de la Pépinière, Rue La Boétie, Rue du Colisée and Rue Marbeuf. Its outlet to the Seine was near the present Place de l'Alma. This was the prehistoric course of the Seine.

63
Jacques-François Blondel,
L'Homme du monde éclairé par les arts
, vol. 2. Reproduced in J. Adamson,
Correspondance secrète
, vol. 8 (London, 1787).

64
Pascal Étienne,
La Faubourg Poissonière, architecture, élégance et décor
(Paris: Action artistique de la ville de Paris, 1986). The first two directors of the Menus were Michel-Ange Slodtz and Michel-Ange Challe, this succession marking the transition from rococo to neoclassical taste.

65
Paul Léautaud,
Le Petit Ami
(Paris: Mercure de France, 1903). Léautaud's father was a prompter at the Comédie-Française.

66
J.-K. Huysmans,
Parisian Sketches
[1880] (Sawtry: Daedalus, 2004), p. 34.

67
The invasion of the Chaussée-d'Antin by noble hotels pushed the market gardeners and taverners to the north, and they now established themselves in a part of the domain of the abbey of Montmartre, bordered by Rues des Porcherons (now Saint-Lazare), Blanche, La Bruyère and Notre-Dame-de-Lorette.

68
Delvau,
Histoire anecdotique des barrières de Paris
. The Nouvelle-France barracks, opposite the ends of Rue de Montholon and Rue de Bellefond, had been built at the turn of the century by the Maréchal de Biron. Legend has it that Hoche and Bernadotte had been sergeants there. No. 82 on Rue du Faubourg-Poissonière is still occupied by a barracks of the
garde républicaine
, the present buildings dating from the 1930s.

69
Rue Breda is today divided between Rue Henri-Monnier and Rue Clauzel.

70
La Bédollière,
Le Nouveau Paris
. ‘
Lorette
,' Balzac explains, ‘is a decent word to express the condition of a girl in a condition hard to name, and which, out of modesty, the Académie Française had neglected to define, given the age of its forty members' (‘Histoire et physiologie des Boulevards de Paris').

71
Balzac,
The Lesser Bourgeoisie
.

72
Miraculously intact, its entrance is at 80 Rue Taitbout.

73
Pauline Viardot lived on the Square d'Orléans, and la Malibran had her hôtel – still standing – not far away, on Rue de l'Élysée-des-Beaux-Arts (now André-Antoine).

74
Called after the shop sign ‘Au Roi de Pologne', a reference to the Duc d'Anjou, king of Poland and the future Henri III, who had a country house where the Gare Saint-Lazare now stands.

75
This was the first Gare Saint-Lazare. The station was moved to its present site in 1860, and entirely rebuilt in the 1880s. The original tunnel should not be confused with the Batignolles tunnel, which was much further north. Other sites had been envisaged for the station: ‘When the question of its building arose, the site that had been intended for it, on the Place de l'Europe, turned out to be so far from the business centre, and built-up Paris, that the option was seriously considered of locating the station at the southeastern corner of the Place de la Madeleine and Rue Tronchet. The rails, supported on “elegant cast-iron arches raised twenty feet above the ground, with a length of 615 metres”, according to the report, would have crossed Rue Saint-Lazare, Rue Saint-Nicolas, Rue des Mathurins and Rue de Castellane, each one of which would have had its particular station' (Maxime Du Camp,
Paris, ses organes, ses fonctions et sa vie dans la seconde moitié du XIXe siècle
[Paris: Hachette, 1869]).