The Invention of Paris (36 page)

On the Right Bank, from one extremity to the other of the Seine's meander, from the Point du Jour to Bercy, the arc of former villages is the most contrasting part of Old Paris. To pass from the
hameaux
of Auteuil to the
cités
at the top of Belleville, from Ranelagh to the Goutte d'Or, is to
change planets. In the 1980s, Christof Pruskovski, a Polish photographer living in Paris, took several series of shots of different faces, each with all the negatives superimposed. These vague images often gave a disconcerting impression. In the Métro, for example, Pruskovski took a cumulative portrait of ‘a hundred first-class travellers', and another of ‘a hundred second-class travellers', two ‘portraits' that could well have served to illustrate the morphological difference between the upper and lower classes in Lavater's
Physiognomie
. By combining in this way a hundred faces from Avenue Mozart with a hundred from Rue de Bagnolet, you certainly get two identikit portraits that are quite disturbing.

This contrast between the eastern and western villages, however, is not that old. In the early nineteenth century, both of them were characterized by vineyards, meadows, windmills, convents and lordly residences. But since the industrial revolution, the Commune, the arrival of foreign workers, the Resistance, and the massive demolitions of the 1960s, each step has deepened the gap between the favoured quarters and the rest. With the demolitions in particular, those who theorized them, decided on them and financed them kept them well away from their own districts.
²⁷
The architectural treasures of Passy and Auteuil are intact, including, very fortunately, the building on Rue Nungesser-et-Coli where Le Corbusier lived and worked. The sectarian followers of the Athens Charter built their slabs and blocks as far away as possible, around the Place des Fêtes, Avenue de Flandre and Boulevard Mortier.

Like Vaugirard and Grenelle, or Belleville and Ménilmontant, Passy and Auteuil today seem like an old-established pair. What is specific to each of them has been rather submerged in the generic
seizième
, the arrondissement most charged with meaning of all the twenty in Paris, conjuring up a world of subscribers to
Le Figaro
, religious colleges, idyllic hamlets and masterpieces of Art Nouveau and Art Déco. But this has not always been the case; in the early twentieth century, you could still distinguish an elegant Passy from a rustic Auteuil: ‘Auteuil is like the countryside of Passy, with its Boulevard de Montmorency, its quays, its viaduct, its Mouton-Blanc restaurant that is a historical curiosity, the former meeting-place of La Fontaine, Molière and Racine. People from Passy go to Auteuil on
Sunday as people from Rue Étienne-Marcel go to Brunoy.'
²⁸
The border between the two was – and still is – marked by the parallel streets of Rue de l'Assomption and Rue du Ranelagh, where the Passy hill meets the plain of Auteuil. According to Jacques-Émile Blanche, ‘the boundary post between the two communes was below the intersection of Rue Raynouard and Rue du Ranelagh, close to Rue de Boulainvilliers, below which was – as far as we can deduce – the park of Passy.'
²⁹
This post has clearly been replaced by the Maison de la Radio.

The charm of Passy lies especially in the long descent from the Place du Trocadéro to the Seine through Rue Benjamin Franklin and Rue Raynouard, across what was once the park of the Château de Passy. There is here a kind of tradition of splendid luxury. When the domain belonged to Samuel Bernard, banker to Louis XIV, you could see orangeries, glasshouses, aviaries with gold filigree, grottos carpeted in greenery and terraces embellished with statues. In the eighteenth century, this is where the Farmer-General La Pouplinière received Rousseau, Rameau whose
Hippolyte et Aricie
was performed there, and Marmontel, as well as Chardin and Pigalle, Mlle Clairon and the Maréchal de Richelieu. Balzac, seeking wherever he could in Paris a residence worthy of his Polish lady, wrote to her on 7 September 1845: ‘There is in Rue Benjamin Franklin, which is the road above the steep hill we so often climbed . . . a house that is admirable and solidly built, situated on the crest of this rock that overlooks Paris and even all of Passy . . . There is the most admirable view on all sides; first the whole of Paris, then the whole of the Seine basin.'
³⁰
You still get this view over the river from the terraces of the apartments on Rue Raynouard, where pergolas, statues, fountains and floral parterres adorn sumptuous gardens in the 1930s style, suspended in the air. Rue de l'Alboni overlooks the Passy station, hidden behind chestnut trees and roses, and the tracks leading towards the Pont de Bir-Hakeim between the domes of the apartment buildings on the corner, famous from
Last Tango in Paris
. Lower down are the great blind walls bordering the steps of the Passage des Eaux, then Balzac's house, whose main
entrance is on Rue Raynouard, but with an exit further down on Rue Berton, which has scarcely changed since the time of Atget or Apollinaire: ‘If you pass Rue Berton at the time when it is at its finest, shortly before dawn, you can hear a harmonious thrush give a marvellous concert here, which thousands of other birds accompany with their own music; and, before the war, the pale and trembling flames of a few kerosene lamps lit up the lampposts here and have not been replaced.'
³¹
Close by, the Turkish embassy occupies the site of the park of Lauzun and the Princesse de Lamballe, where Émile Blanche – son of Esprit-Sylvestre Blanche who treated Nerval, and father of Jacques-Émile – received in his clinic Berlioz, Liszt, Gounod, Rossini, Delacroix ‘and many others'.

Passy is more than just this enchanted hillside: in 1825 a new quarter baptised Élysée-Charles X was parcelled out and developed in the northern part, on the plain around the intersection that would become the Place Victor-Hugo. This was an immense quadrilateral whose limits today would be Avenue de la Grande-Armée, Avenue Kléber, Rue de Longchamp and Rues Spontini and Pergolèse.
³²
The north of the 16
^th
arrondissement, overlapping Chaillot, Passy and La Muette, has been given by extension the name of Passy, but its true inhabitants are not deceived:

Those who live beyond Rue Scheffer and the Trocadéro cemetery, or indeed on the even-numbered side of Avenue Henri-Martin – let us say, as far as the Square Lamartine – still boast of belonging to Passy, but we laugh at them: they are joking! The Passy of timid and sedentary bourgeois, the true, the unique, the incomparable, abdicated on this northern side its prerogative of an old village, and tried to ignore the zone in which such undesirables camped, i.e., beyond the Porte Dauphine, beyond the romantic shadows where the poet of
Jocelyn
meditated in his chalet, and where Jules Janin ended his career.
³³

Passy was already completely built up at the end of the nineteenth century, and there was scarcely any room for new architecture.
³⁴
In Auteuil, on
the other hand, this ‘charming village of 1,040 souls, half an hour from the
barrière
, between the Bois de Boulogne and the road to Versailles'
³⁵
– though summer residences certainly proliferated in the 1830s, when the Boileau and Boulainvilliers hamlets were developed – was not yet the city in 1868, when the Goncourts settled on Boulevard de Montmorency: ‘We are not even sure that we are not dreaming. This great tasteful toy for ourselves, the two drawing-rooms, the sun in the leaves, this bouquet of trees above, this corner of earth below, with birds flying overhead!' (Journal, 16 September 1868).
³⁶

In this Auteuil, which had only three streets at the time of its annexation – the Grand-Rue which became Rue d'Auteuil, Rue Molière (now Rémusat), and Rue La Fontaine which linked it to Passy – there was both free space and money, so that between the 1890s and the 1930s this was where masterpieces of Parisian Art Nouveau and Art Déco were constructed, as if arranged for today's visitor. From the Métro Jasmin, for example, Rue Henri-Heine is close at hand, with a late 1930 work by Guimard at no. 18, which I prefer to his more famous buildings, as the hesitation between the curves and countercurves of the two lower floors and the ‘modernism' of the upper storeys creates a tension that is unusual in his work, and there is something rather moving in this doubt appearing in an old architect basking in his former glory. Two steps away, on Rue du Docteur-Blanche, there are two villas by Le Corbusier, and on Rue Mallet-Stevens – no. 5 here was published in the magazine
De Stijl
, along with projects from Van Doesburg and Van Eesteren, even a design by Malevitch – there is Patout's building of artists' studios, whose façade is covered with a material imitating sharkskin, not to mention the ten concrete storeys of the Ginsberg building, which together form an ensemble unique in Paris. Not far away, at 65 Rue La Fontaine, is the
Studiobuilding
by Henri Sauvage, an ensemble of studio residences for artists that is covered in grey and gold ceramic. And lower down again, at 42 Avenue de Versailles is another building by Ginsberg, ‘brutalist' before the label (1933), the corner of which is topped by a glazed half-dome that serves as a foil to the play of curves of the entrance. But towards the later 1930s, creative architecture abandoned Auteuil. The promoters of apartment blocks of ‘
grand standing
' would from now on resort to mediocre architects, docile and interchangeable.

In the days when there were not just two French marques, but still ten
or more, Avenue de la Grande-Armée was devoted to the automobile.
³⁷
Today it is rather motorbike showrooms that you find here, but it still divides the 16
^th
from the 17
^th
arrondissement, an administrative border and also a sociological one: to the south, in the direction of Avenue Foch, Rue des Belles-Feuilles, and Avenue Bugeaud, the international bourgeoisie, corporate headquarters, and embassies; to the north, the more diverse population of Rue des Acacias, Rue du Colonel-Moll and the Place Saint-Ferdinand.
³⁸

Beyond Rue de Courcelle begins the part of the 17
^th
that continues along the Plaine Monceau towards the periphery, towards Place Wagram with its fine layouts, and the heavy apartment blocks on Boulevard Pereire that face each other above the tracks of the Ceinture railway, now converted into a flowery walk. Continuing east, you enter the sad and monotonous streets of the Batignolles, which acquire their real character around the tracks of Saint-Lazare, as is only to be expected for a quarter born along with the train. Les Ateliers des Batignolles on Avenue de Clichy, and Spies-Batignolles, the rival company to Eiffel, were the first factories – along with Cail at Grenelle – to manufacture railway locomotives in France. Léon-Paul Fargue, a student of Mallarmé's at the Collège Rollin, and later invited to the poet's Tuesdays, described ‘the house chosen or suffered by him, opposite the metal fences of the railway, at the exit of the horrible Batignolles tunnel, whose diseased mouth blew catastrophes'.
³⁹
On the other side of the tracks, on Rue Boursault, the room of Georges Duroy,
Bel-Ami
, ‘on the fifth floor, looked down, as if
over a deep abyss, onto the immense cutting of the railway of the Ouest, just above the exit from the tunnel, close to the Batignolles station . . . At every moment, long or short blows of the whistle passed in the night, some of them close, others hardly perceptible, coming from down there on the Asnières side.'
⁴⁰
Tastes change, and today one would find more to admire in the landscape formed by the final curve of Boulevard Pereire, the immense spread of the tracks of the Ouest expanded by the Gare des Batignolles, the station of Pont Cardinet whose ogives and mosaics are evocative of Otto Wagner, and the chestnut trees of the Square des Batignolles.

The former commune of Les Batignolles continued along the east side of Avenue de Clichy, forming a little quarter extending to Rues Cavallotti and Forest, i.e., to the old Hippodrome so dear to Lautrec, which then became the Gaumont-Palace, a great cinematic temple, before ending up as an Ibis hotel and a Castorama. In this block, around an immense brick garage dating from the 1930s, there are a number of winding passages – the Impasses des Deux-Néthes and de la Défense, Rue Capon, Passage Lathuille, Passage de Clichy – badly paved, bordered with shacks, leading into courtyards cluttered with metal sheds and piles of pallets: a disorder that is unlikely in the heart of Paris, and indeed seriously threatened.

Passage Lathuille, Impasse de la Défense: these names evoke two glorious moments for these few metres of Avenue de Clichy. Manet, in order to paint
Chez le père Lathuille
– seduction under the barrels – got Louis, the son of the tavern landlord, to pose with the actress Ellen André. On the same pavement, almost adjacent, the Café Guerbois was the rendezvous of the friends who were still known as the Batignolles group.
⁴¹
Many years previously, far more dramatic events had occurred at Père-Lathuille's: on 20 March 1814 this was Moncey's command post, directing the defence of the Clichy barrier against the Cossacks:

Paris hastened to take up arms, in an enthusiasm shared by bourgeois and people, children and old men – truly resolved, despite the defection of its natural protectors, to fight to the death. And this was a spectacle whose memory our fathers preserved, this frivolous city transformed into a camp in which women prepared bandages for the wounded, and invalids cast cannon balls to greet the invaders of their native soil. It was from
hearing tales of that day – glorious despite the defeat – that I learned to hate oppression.
⁴²