The Invention of Paris (60 page)

And moreover, what forms the connecting tissue of
La Comédie humaine
, far more than the return of the main characters in their favoured locations, is the wealth of its secondary ties, ‘those indications of kinship, neighbourly relations and friendship, references to business deals and clients, records of addresses that seem borrowed from the registers of civil status or commercial directories, in the dryness and barrenness of which history seeks its most intense and surest evocations'.
¹²

As far as Balzac's personal and physical relationship with Paris is concerned, what is always quoted is the beginning of
Facino Cane
, where the narrator follows a couple of workers coming back from the Ambigu-Comique: ‘As I listened, I could make their lives mine, I felt their rags on my back, I walked with their gaping shoes on my feet; their cravings, their needs, had all passed into my soul, or my soul had passed into theirs. It was the dream of a waking man.' I don't think that Balzac really ever did proceed in this way. The fact that he cites in this passage Rue Lesdiguières where he had lived, and uses the first person singular, is not enough to make this autobiographical information. It is a prelude like any other of Balzac's, and he never began without a kind of tuning-up. He was either unable or unwilling to start
in media res
, like the beginning of Stendhal's
Lucien Leuwen
that we cited in the previous chapter, or the clash of cymbals that opens
The Charterhouse of Parma
.

A Balzac who slept by day and worked by night, the dressing gown, the cut goose-quills, the coffee pot – that legend certainly contains an element of truth. But Balzac was not a recluse like Proust in his final years. He spent a great deal of time out and about, seeking out a residence worthy of the ‘Foreigner', buying his particular mixture of coffees –
bourbon
on Rue de la Chausée-d'Antin,
martinique
on Rue des Haudriettes, and
moka
on Rue de l'Université. Théophile Gautier, who often accompanied him, wrote:

How he loved and knew this modern Paris, at a time when lovers of local colour and the picturesque still failed to appreciated its beauty! He crossed it in every direction, by night and by day . . . He knew everything about his beloved city; it was for him an enormous monster, hybrid and formidable, an octopus with a hundred thousand arms that he heard and saw living, and which in his eyes had a kind of immense individuality. You could often have seen him, especially in the mornings, when he rushed to the printer's to take in copy and collect his proofs. You would remember his green hunting jacket, his black-and-grey check trousers . . . he walked buried in large shoes with flaps, a red scarf drawn in a knot
around his neck. Despite the disorder and poverty of this attire, no one could have been tempted to take this great man whom they passed as a common unknown, swept as he was by his dream like a whirlwind.
¹³

Gozlan was a companion of Balzac with whom he rambled the centre of Paris in all directions, seeking a name on a shop sign to use for the hero of his latest novel. They walked for hours. ‘Let's just continue as far as Saint-Eustache', Balzac asked Gozlan:

That was only a pretext to get me to measure the whole length of Rues du Mail, de Cléry, du Cadran, du Faubourg-Montmartre and the Place des Victoires, peppered with magnificent Alsatian names that conjure up the taste of the Rhine. Until in Rue du Bouloi – and this I shall never forget in my whole life – after raising his gaze above a poorly marked gate in the wall, an oblong, narrow, dilapidated gate opening into a damp and dark alley, he suddenly changed his tone and, with a shiver that passed from his arm to mine, uttered a cry and said: ‘There! There! There! Read it, read it!' His voice broke with emotion. And I saw the name MARCAS.

‘Marcas! What do you think? Marcas! What a name! Marcas!'

‘I don't see . . .'

‘Stop it! Marcas!' ‘But . . .' ‘Stop it, I tell you. It's the name of names! We won't look for another. Marcas can be a philosopher, a writer, a great politician, an unknown poet, everything. Marcas, and I'll call him Z. Marcas, to add a certain flame, a sparkle, a star!'
¹⁴

The quarters of Paris where the characters of
La Comédie humaine
live were chosen with the same care as their names, and the same goes for their clothing and their domestic surroundings. The Left Bank, apart from the Faubourg Saint-Germain, was the realm of déclassés,
marginaux
, victims of life – or of those who made a business of living among them, such as the good judge Popinot in
The Commission in Lunacy
(his house was on Rue du Fouarre, ‘always damp, from the stream that carried towards the Seine the dark waters of some dye-works'), or else troublesome policemen such as Peyrade, who lived with his daughter on Rue des Marais-Saint-Germain (now Visconti), where Balzac had his printing press, and Corentin
who lived on Rue Cassette, where Carlos Herrera established himself with Lucien de Rubempré. Also in
The Commission in Lunacy
, the poor Marquis d'Espard, stripped of everything by his wife, who pretended he was spoiled, lived with his two sons on the Montagne Saint-Geneviève, ‘in an apartment whose destitution was unworthy of his name and social position'. At the start of
The Black Sheep
, Mme Bridau, an elderly widow without a penny, comes to live in ‘one of the most horrible corners of Paris', ‘that portion of Rue Mazarine which runs from Rue Guénégaud to the point at which it joins Rue de Seine'. Rue des Quatre-Vents (also ‘one of the worst streets in Paris', according to
The Atheist's Mass
), in the shadow of Saint-Sulpice, successively housed – in one of those buildings ‘of which the narrow door opens into a passage with a winding staircase at the end, with windows appropriately termed “borrowed lights”' – two young people at the time still poor and unknown: Arthez, the great writer of the Cénacle, one of Balzac's ‘doubles', and Desplein, who ended up as surgeon-in-chief at the Hôtel-Dieu, like his model the great Dupuytren.

Further out, in the Faubourg Saint-Marceau, the poverty was still worse. Colonel Chabert, the hero of the battle of Eylau, who was taken for dead and had no legal existence, lodged in Rue du Petit-Banquier (now Watteau), and the good Derville, the lawyer who visits him, was forced to go on foot, as his coachman refused to enter an unpaved street whose ruts were too deep for the wheels of a cabriolet.

On the Right Bank, the Marais, then at its nadir, was a quarter of characters who were humble but worthy. Cousin Pons, leader of an orchestra in a little theatre on the Boulevards, who gave music lessons in a few boarding schools for girls so as not to die of hunger, lived, as we have seen, on Rue de Normandie. In
The Wrong Side of Paris
, Mme de la Chanterie, at the age of seventeen, ‘found herself obliged to live, along with the little girl that she cared for, from the work of her hands, in an obscure quarter to which she had retreated'; during the Revolution this ruined noblewoman exercised the demanding profession of corset-marker in Rue de la Corderie-du-Temple.

Very different from these fallen nobles, the characters whom Balzac places around the Place Vendôme, Rue Saint-Honoré and Les Halles belong to the world of business. When he was in Paris, the illustrious Gaudissart, ‘one of those profound dealers who speak in the name of calicots, jewellery, cloth and wine, and are often more clever than ambassadors, who generally know only conventions', lived in the Hôtel de Commerce, at the end of Rue des Deux-Écus. ‘La Reine des Roses', the perfumery where César Birotteau perfected his ‘Double Paste of Sultans' and ‘Carminative Balm', was on Rue Saint-Honoré, close to the church of Saint-Roch where he
had been wounded on 13 Vendémiaire (which enabled him to make ‘solid reflections on the absurdity of an alliance between politics and perfumery'). Popinot, his former clerk who was now his son-in-law, set up home on Rue des Cinq-Diamants (now Quincampoix). Gobseck's colleague, the usurer Gigonnet who plays a role in Birotteau's financial collapse (many writers have stressed how meticulously this is described, with fraudulent manoeuvres at the Tribunal of Commerce – in matters of bankruptcy Balzac was of course in his element), lived on Rue Greneta, ‘on the third floor of a house whose window-sashes, with small and very dirty panes, swung by the middle, on pivots . . . The stairs were covered with filth. Each landing of this noisome stairway bore the names of the occupants in gilt letters on a metal plate, painted red and varnished, to which were attached specimens of their craft.'

But the most Balzacian quarter of all was the Nouveau Paris beyond the Boulevards, the arc between the Faubourg Saint-Martin and the Champs-Élysées.
¹⁵
When Balzac was attempting to buy a house, this was the region that he explored. On 4 December 1845, he wrote to the ‘Foreigner':

Tomorrow I am going to see in Rue des Petits-Hôtels, Place Lafayette [now Franz Liszt] as you know, a little hôtel for sale, just beside the church of Saint-Vincent-de-Paul that we went to see . . . Rue des Petits-Hôtels opens into Rue Hauteville, which comes down to the boulevard by the Gymnase, and into the Place Lafayette, which reaches Rue Saint-Lazare and Rue de la Pépinère via Rue Montholon. You are at the heart of that part of Paris known as the Right Bank, where all the theatres, boulevards, etc. are; it's the quarter of the big banks.

And indeed, Keller's bank in
La Comédie humaine
is on Rue Taitbout – also where the painter Théodore de Sommervieux
¹⁶
lived, and for a while Rastignac as well. Claparon's bank is on Rue de Provence, and Mongenod's bank on Rue de la Victoire, in a magnificent hotel with courtyard and garden. Of Old Goriot's two daughters, Mme de Restaud lived on Rue de Helder, and Delphine de Nucingen on Rue Saint-Lazare, in ‘one of
those many-windowed houses with a mean-looking portico and slender columns, which are considered the thing in Paris, a typical banker's house, decorated in the most ostentatious fashion; the walls lined with fine stucco, the landings of marble mosaic'. Her garden bordered that of the Hôtel de Saint-Réal, where the Marquise hides away the Girl With the Golden Eyes. On Rue de la Chausée-d'Antin, Camille Maupin ‘purchased for one hundred and thirty thousand francs one of the finest houses in the street'.
¹⁷
Rue Saint-Georges was less elegant: this was the street of the
lorettes
, the world of ‘Fanny Beaupré, Suzanne du Val-Noble, Mariette, Florentine, Jenny Cadine, and their kind'. It was here that the Baron de Nucingen installed poor Esther, and that later Du Tillet – the little thief who had become a big banker and a centre-left deputy – would lodge ‘the illustrious Carabine, whose lively mind, cavalier manners, and brilliant lack of shame formed a counterweight to the works of his domestic, political, and financial life'.
¹⁸

Another region of venal love, the Quartier de l'Europe, was still under construction:

Without the Aspasias of the Notre-Dame de Lorette quarter, far fewer houses would be built in Paris. Pioneers in fresh stucco, they have gone, towed by speculation, along the heights of Montmartre, pitching their tents in those solitudes of carved free-stone, the like of which adorns the European streets of Amsterdam, Milan, Stockholm, London, and Moscow . . . The situation of these dames is determined by their location in these apocryphal regions. If the house is near the line traced by Rue de Provence, the woman has an income, her budget prospers; but if she approaches the farther line of the
boulevards extérieurs
or rises towards the horrid town of Batignolles, she is without resources. When Monsieur de Rochefide first encountered Madame Schontz, she lived on the third floor of the only house that remained in Rue de Berlin; thus she was camping on the borderland between misery and its reverse.
¹⁹

The Faubourg Saint-Honoré and the Champs-Élysées were clearly the realm of the aristocracy – along with the Faubourg Saint-Germain, but we have seen how Balzac, as later also Proust, drew the borders of this more in terms of symbolism than geography. The Marquise d'Espard, former wife of Colonel Chabert, lived close to the Élysée, and the beautiful Duchesse de
Maufrigneuse, one of the queens of Parisian society, occupied the immense Hôtel de Cadignan, right at the top of the quarter. But in these parts one could also meet more recent fortunes, and not always well acquired: ‘Though without a family, a parvenu, Du Tillet had married in 1831 – God knows how! – the youngest daughter of the Comte de Granville, one of the most famous names in the French judiciary.' This enabled him to live ‘in one of the finest hôtels on Rue Neuve-des-Mathurins'.
²⁰

Thus the links of the chain cast across the city both host and connect the Paris episodes of
La Comédie humaine
. Balzac's extraordinary innovation of using the ties in this network to construct the ‘themes' of his characters would become one of the hallmarks of French narrative, from Eugène Sue to Georges Simenon, with
Les Misérables
and Zola's Paris novels as steps on the way. And if Proust most frequently has the key locations for his characters away from Paris, if Oriane brings in the Vivonne and its water lilies, and Albertine the Balbec seawall, his procedure is the same, and this is not the least of the borrowings that
À la recherche du temps perdu
makes from
La Comédie humaine.

‘The Paris Prowler', ‘The Solitary Walker' and ‘Glows and Smoke' were among the titles Baudelaire had considered before Banville and Asselineau judiciously chose
Le Spleen de Paris
for the original posthumous edition of his ‘little prose poems'. It needed the combination of a poet's unhappiness and a great unsteadiness of the city itself for the elaboration ‘with fury and patience' of a work that is complex to the point of sometimes being perceived, either as ‘this buried temple . . . in which he wildly illuminates an immortal pubis', as ‘the work that bends the curve stretching from the
taedium vitae
of the Romans to the “modern style”', or again as ‘the transfiguration of absolute commodification'.
²¹
His contradictions and divergences, which for so long were criticized, are precisely what brings him so close to us, contributing to establish that ‘sudden coincidence' in which nineteenth-century Paris focuses on itself and gathers itself up before erupting anew. In the allegories that Baudelaire reprises, radically transforming their character with the help of the same ‘cruel demon' that he saw at work in the etchings of Meryon, he combines and goes beyond the visions of the big city that Nerval, Balzac or Poe had, and on 19 February 1859 he could with all justice write to Poulet-Malassis: ‘Finished
Nouvelles Fleurs
. It will break everything, like a gas explosion in a glazier's.'