The Invention of Paris (63 page)

10
H. de Balzac, ‘Histoire et physiologie des boulevards de Paris'.

11
Benjamin,
The Arcades Project
, p. 83.

12
Chevalier,
Classes laborieuses et classes dangereuses
.

13
Théophile Gautier,
Honoré de Balzac
(Paris: Poulet-Malassis, 1859).

14
Léon Gozlan,
Balzac en pantoufles
(Paris: Michel Lévy, 1862).

15
No major character in
La Comédie humaine
lives in the east of Paris. If the Faubourg Saint-Antoine is often mentioned, this is only in a metaphorical sense (as when Madame Madou ‘bore down like an insurrectionary wave from the Faubourg Saint-Antoine'). The Faubourg du Temple only makes an appearance because Birroteau ‘hired some sheds, with the ground about them, in the Faubourg du Temple, and painted upon them in big letters, “Manufactory of César Birotteau”'.

16
Honoré de Balzac,
At the Sign of the Cat and Racket
.

17
Balzac,
Beatrix
.

18
Balzac,
The Unconsicous Comedians
.

19
Balzac,
Beatrix.

20
Honoré de Balzac,
A Daughter of Eve
.

21
Stéphane Mallarmé,
Le Tombeau de Charles Baudelaire
; Benjamin,
The Arcades Project
; Giorgio Agamben,
Stanze
(Paris: Christian Bourgois, 1981).

22
Baudelaire, ‘Anywhere Out of the World',
Paris Spleen
.

23
He was working on his translation of Edgar Allan Poe.

24
Benjamin, ‘Charles Baudelaire, a Lyric Poet in the Era of High Capitalism'.

25
Charles Baudelaire,
Edgar Poe, His Life and Works.
In 1864, in a letter to Thoré who had accused Manet of imitating Spanish painting, Baudelaire wrote: ‘Well, I myself am accused of imitating Edgar Poe! Do you know why I've translated Poe so patiently? Because he was like me. The first time I opened one of his books, I saw, with horror and delight, not only topics I'd dreamed of, but
sentences
I'd thought of, and that he had written twenty years before' (
Selected Letters
, p. 204).

26
This photograph, taken by Charles Neyt, is reproduced in the catalogue
Baudelaire Paris
, with a preface by Yves Bonnefoy and texts by Claude Pichois and Jean-Paul Avice (Paris: Paris-Musées, 1993). The Proust quotation is from ‘À propos de Baudelaire',
Nouvelle Revue française
, 1 June 1921: ‘Perhaps it is necessary to have experienced the mortal fatigue that precedes death, in order to be able to write about it the enchanting line that Victor Hugo would never have found: “And who makes the bed of the poor and the naked”.' Proust died on 18 November 1922, and had already long been familiar with this ‘mortal fatigue'.

27
Cited in François Porché,
Baudelaire, histoire d'une âme
(Paris: Flammarion, 1944).

28
Firmin Maillard,
La Cité des intellectuels
(Paris: 1905), cited in Benjamin,
The Arcades Project
, p. 230.

29
Charles Asselineau,
Charles Baudelaire
(Paris: Lemerre, 1869; republished Paris: Cognac, 1990).

30
Ibid.

31
Charles Baudelaire,
My Heart Laid Bare and Other Prose Writings
(London: Soho Book Company, 1986), pp. 176–80 (translation modified).

32
Charles Baudelaire,
The Painter of Modern Life and Other Essays
(London: Phaidon Press, 1964).

33
Selected Letters of Charles Baudelaire
, p. 31.

34
‘Reflections on Some of My Contemporaries', in
Baudelaire as a Literary Critic
(Pennsylvania State Univ. Press, 1964), p. 235.

35
Baudelaire,
The Painter of Modern Life
, pp. 9–10.

36
Théodore de Banville,
Mes souvenirs
(1882).

37
Selected Letters of Charles Baudelaire
, pp. 47–8.

38
Charles Baudelaire, ‘
Madame Bovary
par Gustave Flaubert', published in
L'Artiste
, 18 October 1857.

39
Charles Baudelaire, ‘Le Vin', in
Du vin et du haschisch
.

40
Alphonse Séché,
La Vie des Fleurs du mal
(Amines, 1928), cited by Benjamin,
The Arcades Project
, p. 231; Asselineau,
Charles Baudelaire
.

41
In ‘À propos de Baudelaire', where he cites several verses, Proust inserts a note: ‘When I wrote this letter to Jacques Rivière, I did not have a single book beside my sick-bed. You will therefore excuse the possible inexactness, which is easy to correct.'

42
Proust,
Time Regained
,
Remembrance of Things Past
, vol. 3, pp. 899–900.

43
Ibid., p. 959.

44
Baudelaire,
My Heart Laid Bare
, p. 185.

45
In ‘Against Saint-Beuve', Proust, addressing his mother who did not like Baudelaire, wrote: ‘Certainly, in a sublime poem like “Les Petites vieilles” not one of their sufferings eludes him. It is not only their immense sorrows: he is inside their bodies, he shudders with their nerves, shivers with their debilities' (Marcel Proust,
Against Saint-Beuve
[Harmondsworth: Penguin 1988], pp. 40–1).

46
‘The Old Acrobat',
Paris Spleen
(University of Georgia Press, 1997), p. 29, trans. Kaplan.

47
Charles Baudelaire,
Notes nouvelles sur Edgar Poe
.

48
Baudelaire,
My Heart Laid Bare
, p. 178.

49
Benjamin, ‘Charles Baudelaire: A Lyric Poet in the Era of High Capitalism', pp. 98–100.

Paris is striped: the thin tall chimneys that rise above the flat chimneys, all the little chimneys shaped like flower pots, the old gas candelabras that are completely silent, the horizontal stripes of the blinds . . . the little chairs that you see out in the open and the little café tables whose legs are lines, the public gardens whose railings have gilded points.

– Franz Kafka,
Diaries

Paris is the city of mirrors. The asphalt of its roadways smooth as glass, and at the entrance to all bistros glass partitions. A profusion of windowpanes and mirrors in cafés, so as to make the inside brighter and to give all the tiny nooks and crannies, into which Parisian taverns separate, a pleasing amplitude. Women here look at themselves more than elsewhere, and from this comes the distinctive beauty of the Parisienne.

– Walter Benjamin,
The Arcades Project

A striped city, a city of mirrors, a black-and-white city in any case: it is perhaps in this direction that we should seek the reasons for the particular connection between Paris and photography, so close that it could almost be said to be a family tie. Not simply because photography began in Paris, with Niepce's
La Table de Déjeuner
as its prehistory by the Saône. But also because there are moments in the city's history for which photography, almost single-handedly, can restore reality with the precision of poetry. Neither novels (despite Calet), nor cinema despite the news, nor songs despite Prévert and Kosma, give a real idea of the era that followed Liberation in 1945. The last bus lines denoted by letters, with their solid tyres, the dark winter of 1946, the queues in the snow, the bread tickets, the American soldiers, the poor children without shoes, the barges caught in the ice on the Canal Saint-Martin, the steam engines on the Petite Ceinture, the Renault Juvaquatre, the
zazous
[hep cats], the copper of the
percolators, the return of travelling fairs – you have to go to Doisneau to find the trace of these things, far more exact than history books that focus on the sinister clowns of tripartism.

The first picture of a human being taken in Paris dates from 1838, the year that Balzac began
Scenes from a Courtesan's Life
. To capture this image, Daguerre climbed to the top of his diorama, on Boulevard du Temple.
¹
Since this mythical view was taken from this particular building, and by a landscape painter and theatre designer, it can be seen as a condensation of the relationship between the new invention, painting, and literature, an anticipation of what Baudelaire would write in ‘The Salon of 1859', at the end of the section on ‘Landscape':

I would rather go back to the diorama, whose brutal and enormous magic has the power to impose a genuine illusion upon me! I would rather go to the theatre and feast my eyes on the scenery, in which I find my dearest dreams artistically expressed, and tragically concentrated! These things, because they are false, are infinitely closer to the truth; whereas the majority of our landscape-painters are liars, precisely because they have neglected to lie.

For the
daguerréotypistes
, taking a picture from the top of a building was one of the most common practices: portraits and interior views were difficult for reasons of lighting, and the cameras, heavy and fragile, were awkward to take out into the street. Hence the images of streets seen from above, which painting would take up thirty years later (Monet's
Boulevard des Capucines
series, Pissarro's
Place du Theâtre-Français
, Caillebotte's perspectives towards Boulevard Malesherbes from his apartment on Rue de Miromesnil). On the Pont-Neuf, in the top floor of the house on the corner with the Quai de l'Horloge, the optician Lerebours, a specialist in the manufacture of lenses and plates, established a glass pavilion from which his customers could take views, including panoramic ones, in the
direction of the Pont des Arts, the Louvre colonnade and the Institut de France.

It was doubtless inevitable that a procedure of such novelty should be misunderstood, considered as a means of automatically and exactly restoring the ‘real' – an opinion upheld by Daguerre himself, for whom ‘the daguerreotype is not an instrument to be used for drawing nature, but a chemical and physical procedure which gives nature the ability to
reproduce itself
'.
²
But viewed in this way, photography had the result of hastening the demise of an aesthetic – already rather outworn – based on imitation as the essence of art. The existence of a machine able to satisfy mechanically the demands of the reproduction of reality forced other purposes to be found for artistic activity. This idea found its way into the public domain with amazing speed. You could read in
Le Charivari
for 10 September 1839:

When you have the Tuileries pavilions, the Montmartre hills or the Montfaucon plain before you with an infinitesimal fidelity, not drawn but automatically traced, do you really believe that this will be art? Do you believe that this is how genuine artists proceed? There will be those who take such pictures on commission, but not artists. The artist selects, arranges, idealizes. The daguerreotype brutally copies nature – or rather, plagiarizes it.
³

As soon as it arrived, photography thus found itself pushed outside the borders of art and forbidden to encroach on its territory. On the door of Atget's studio, at the end of the century, a plaque informed the visitor that his trade was to supply ‘documents for artists'. This was not simply a sign of modesty (as certainly was, around the same time, Douanier Rousseau's sign, in Rue Perrel at Plaisance: ‘Drawing, painting, music. Lessons at home, moderate prices'). Atget probably wanted to show that he had not lost sight of Baudelaire's injunction, in ‘The Salon of 1859' and repeated in many other texts, that:

It is time, then, for [photography] to return to its true duty, which is to be the servant of the sciences and arts – but the very humble servant, like printing or shorthand, which neither created nor supplemented literature. . . let it be the secretary and clerk of whoever needs an absolute exactitude in his profession – up to that point nothing could be better . . . But if it be allowed to encroach upon the domain of the impalpable and the imaginary, upon anything whose value depends solely upon the addition of something of a man's soul, then it will be so much the worse for us!

In the unending controversies as to the respective territory and role of painting and the new medium, Parisian photography occupies a special place, privileged by virtue of having no competition. In the era of the invention's first flight, from 1840 to 1870, there was not really any painting of Paris as such. This was certainly a major period for engraving: Granville, Daumier, Meryon, Nanteuil, Potémont and Bracquemond continue a lineage of illustrators and engravers of Paris that goes back to the sixteenth century. Nor was there a shortage of good artists, such as Eugène Lami or Constantin Guys, who ‘captured' – with techniques such as watercolour, tinted drawing or gouache, generally held to be minor – lively and colourful street scenes. But in the reports of the Salons of this period when Paris photographers were creating so many masterpieces, there was not to my knowledge a single canvas whose subject was a Parisian townscape. This absence was nothing new. In the work of the great painters who had worked in Paris since the seventeenth century, from Le Sueur to Géricault, from Philippe de Champaigne and Simon Vouet to Ingres and Delacroix, you can count the paintings with Paris as their subject on the fingers of one hand.
⁴
When Watteau painted
The Sign
for his dealer and friend Gersaint, who had his premises on the Pont-Neuf, all he showed of the city were four sets of paving-stones parallel to the threshold of the shop, which a woman dressed in pink is crossing with great elegance. Chardin, who spent almost his whole life on Rue de Seine, and only left it to cross the river and settle in the Louvre quarter, never made the slightest sketch of these places so familiar to him. And it was only in exceptional circumstances that David, expecting the guillotine after Thermidor, painted from his cell a view of the Luxembourg gardens as fine as
The Gardens of the Villa Medici
by Velasquez – who had advised his pupils to go out into the landscape and draw on the motif.