The Invention of Paris (66 page)

Women on café terraces, customers and waitresses, musicians in the pit at the new Garnier opera, whom Degas catches against the light in an unprecedented framing, Manet's
Masked Ball at the Opera
– which could be an illustration for the start of Balzac's
Scenes from a Courtesan's Life
– music-hall singers, brothel scenes, the Cirque Fernando where Degas painted Mademoiselle Lala on her flying trapeze, and barefacedly claimed to be rivalling Tiepolo's ceilings: in more than ten years there are hundreds of sketches, pastels, canvases. But there is no joy in this world of pleasure. Degas's studies of the effects of electric light – which had now replaced gas for the illumination of stage performances – however subtle they are as an urban nocturnal counterpart to Monet's effects of sunlight on Rouen
cathedral, accentuate the ‘ugliness' of the café-concert singers. The dumpy waitresses of Manet's brasseries, the tired bar-girls, the customers in their suits or work clothes, all look elsewhere, ordinary and distant. Nothing like the orgies at Les Flamands or the lighthearted melancholy of
fêtes galantes
. Certainly neither Manet nor the reactionary, misogynist, and anti-Semitic Degas deliberately used the theme of pleasure in Paris to reveal the seamy side of society, but they were so striking in an elliptical sense, so strong in showing without describing, that the attitudes, looks, and groupings bring out the truth of the time. Without coal porters or famished beggars, they can tell the reign of money (Degas's masterpiece
La Bourse
). They show the loneliness of the city, a loneliness
à deux
in Degas's
Absinthe
, an unqualified loneliness in Manet's
La Prune
. They show the exploitation of women, the thin
gamines
of the Opéra's corps de ballet, the aging prostitutes waiting for custom on the boulevard terraces – and those poor little Olympias, those unripe Nanas whose confusion is scarcely indicated with a few pencil lines, in the shadow of the top hats.

It is by the theme of nocturnal entertainment, following
A Bar at the Folies-Bergère
and Manet's death soon after, that the connection is made with the following generation: the generation of Seurat, whose most disturbing drawings in Conté crayon were devoted to the café-concerts, and whose
Chahut
is a dissonant painting of a scandalous dance; of Lautrec, who spent his nights drawing in a brothel or music-hall; and of Bonnard, whose
France-Champagne
, the first lithograph poster, covered the Paris walls. All three painters were connected with
La Revue blanche
, and it was in the offices of the magazine, on Rue Lafitte, that Fénéon would put on the first Seurat retrospective a few months after the painter's death. Bonnard's
Place Clichy
series, and Vuillard's
Public Gardens
, were the last great moments of Paris painting, which came to an end at the same time as
La Revue blanche
, in the years 1900–05.

The transformation that took place then came out of symbolism, which had no place for either the aesthetics or the political poetics of the big city. At the turn of the century Paris ceased almost suddenly to be what it had been from the time of
La Comédie humaine
,
Les Misérables
and
Les Fleurs du mal
, from the beginnings of photography, from
Olympia
and
Women on a Café Terrace, Evening
– the great modern subject. The new paradigm that emerged and took its place was built around inventions that relegated the steam engine to archaeology, and which had in common the thing that would be the distinguishing mark of the new century, constantly redefined: speed. No other capital came to take the place of Paris, as it was the very imaginary of the city that changed. In Apollinaire's ‘Zone',
placed strategically at the start of
Alcools
, the city he describes (‘You've had enough of living in Greek and Roman antiquity/Here even the cars appear to be old') is close to the projects drawn by Sant'Elia, El Lissitzky, Le Corbusier – imaginary cities, aerodromes hanging from the top of immense towers, power stations like cathedrals, great deserted avenues like those of De Chirico's Turin. At the same time a follower of Verlaine and a futurist, Apollinaire – the ‘
flâneur des deux rives
' – was well placed to theorize, from his own great gap between two worlds, and it was his friend Sonia Delaunay who marked what was perhaps the end point of Paris painting with
Le Bal Bullier
, where she herself so often went dancing and which she shows as a shower of multicoloured balls in the night, a magnificent painting between Degas's
Ambassadors
and the first Kandinsky.
²⁷

Nothing better shows this change of paradigm than
À la recherche du temps perdu
, which despite its great ancestry in Balzac, basically has very little to say about Paris. The countless passages in which the Narrator talks about painting deal mainly with landscapes, sometimes portraits, but never Paris. Very often, by the play of comparisons (which for some reason, I don't know why, critics call metaphors), Proust slips into other cities more colourful and propitious to the unfurling of his images: ‘It is of the poorer quarters [of Venice] that certain poor quarters of Paris remind one, in the morning, with their tall, splayed chimneys to which the sun imparts the most vivid pinks, the brightest reds – like a garden flowering above the houses, and flowering in such a variety of tints as to suggest the garden of a tulip-fancier of Delft or Haarlem.'
²⁸
Proust's temperament was not that of a flâneur. Perhaps his asthma was partly responsible for this, but in reality the very motive of the
Recherche
makes the streets of the big city unsuited to nourishing his story.
²⁹
It was through his bedroom window that Proust heard the noises of Paris (the start of
The Captive
in which the awakening Narrator makes out what time it is from the first sounds, ‘according to whether they came to my ears deadened and distorted by the moisture of the atmosphere or quivering like arrows in the resonant, empty expanses of
a spacious, frosty, pure morning' (p. 1), and observed its spectacle: ‘if, on rising from my bed, I went to the window and drew the curtain aside for a moment, it was . . . also to catch a glimpse of some laundress carrying her linen-basket, a baker-woman in a blue apron, a dairymaid with a tucker and white linen sleeves, carrying the yoke from which her milk-churns are suspended, some haughty fair-haired girl escorted by her governess . . .' (p. 20). Only rarely does Proust cite the name of a Paris street, or precisely localize an encounter or an event. Even the Guermantes hôtel, the Narrator's domicile and the central location of the work, is not clearly situated: it often appears to be in the 7
^th
arrondissement, whereas it is actually close to the Parc Monceau, so that the description of the duchess's salon as ‘the first in the Faubourg Saint-Germain' really is metaphorical on this occasion. The temporal gaps in the
Recherche
– in comparison with which the gap Proust admired in
A Sentimental Education
would be a ‘very shallow stream'
³⁰
– make for an alternation between passages that are chronologically indeterminate and moments that are perfectly dated and characterized: the
Recherche
is unequalled on the Dreyfus affair as seen by the aristocracy and haute bourgeoisie, and on the atmosphere in Paris during the First World War nothing comes close to the passage in
Time Regained
that begins, in supreme irony, with a description of women's fashions: ‘As if by the germination of a tiny quantity of yeast, apparently of spontaneous generation, young women now went about all day with tall cylindrical turbans on their heads, as a contemporary of Mme Tallien's might have done, and from a sense of patriotic duty wore Egyptian tunics, straight and dark and very “war”, over very short skirts . . .' (p. 743). Proust's subtle manipulation of time might well have been impeded by too precise a localization of the characters and events in the city, and the topographical looseness backs up the chronological haze in which it is so delightful to wander.

Like Marville for Baudelaire, Atget is often called on to illustrate Proust's Paris. An odd idea, given that Atget's and Proust's locations do not match each other at all. Proust spent all his life in the new quarters of the Right Bank – Rue de Courcelles, Boulevard Malesherbes, Rue Hamelin. This is where he locates the Guermantes hôtel, as we have seen, and when his characters have an exact address, it is most often in the elegant quarters between the Opéra and the Étoile.
³¹
Atget almost never photographed
these districts, as he devoted his work to pre-Haussmann Paris, and the little tradespeople he shows in front of the church of Saint-Médard certainly have little in common with those of Boulevard Malesherbes, whose cries the Narrator hears from his bed in
The Captive
.
³²

A long career, an enormous and disparate work – over ten thousand photographs whose numbering and classification are a labyrinth within a labyrinth – a solitary life which has left only a few discordant traces, everything conspires to make Atget one of the ‘artists of Paris' who is hardest to understand properly.
³³
If there is a work of literature with which he should be associated, it would clearly be
La Comédie humaine
: Pons on Rue de la Perle, Rastignac and de Marsay on Rue Montorgueil at Le Rocher de Cancale, Birotteau at the corner of Rues Pirouette and Mondétour, Esther on Rue Sainte-Foy by Rue d'Alexandrie – one could almost find a photo for each episode, so true it is that the Paris of Atget, despite Haussmann, was closer to Balzac than to our own day. But even if neither Charlus, nor his cousin Oriane, nor M. de Norpois, would have been pillars of Atget's bars – whose names and addresses already bear the magic of Parisian toponomy:
À l'Homme Armé
on Rue des Blancs-Manteaux;
À la Biche
on Rue Geoffroy-Saint-Hilaire;
Au Réveil-Matin
on Rue Amelot;
Au Soleil d'Or
on Rue Saint-Sauveur – let alone familiar with the ragpickers' camps on Boulevard Masséna, there is a deep affinity between Atget and Proust in that both are advanced promontories – in every sense of the term – of the nineteenth century within the twentieth. It matters little that Proust appears today as the dazzling end to a literature born more than two centuries earlier with the favourite authors of the Narrator's grandmother,
Saint-Simon and Mme de Sévigné, whereas Atget on the other hand is viewed as a link between pictorial photography and Surrealism – a role that he did not actually play, and the invention of which derives from the need to manufacture a linear history, even one with discontinuities and unevenness. Atget's work and that of Proust are the last two great efforts in France to reach a totality, not in the sense of the ‘total work of art', but that of the total exploration of a world.

Atget worked a good deal on commission, which may seem to contradict this ambition. But one of the features that you can be sure of with him is his independence of mind, his stubborn character: he interpreted the commissions in his own fashion, so that even what is apparently his most repetitive work – the series of door-knockers taken for maniacal decorators in search of ‘
grand siècle
' motifs, or the details of the buttresses and roofs of Saint-Séverin – do not form catalogues but genuine series, as one says of Monet's
Poplars on the Bank of the Epte
or Picasso's
Corridas
. It would be vain to seek a difference in quality between his personal work and his commissions.
³⁴
His
Nudes
, photographed in the brothels of the La Chapelle quarter, on floral bedspreads against floral wallpaper, smooth and with no relief, taken in all positions without the faces ever being seen – these monumental and mysterious bodies that make the more celebrated nudes of Weston or Irving Penn seem superficial, were the result of a commission from Dignimont, a theatre painter and designer who was quite famous in the interwar years.

Atget's own classifications and the studies devoted to him present his work either in terms of its themes (for example the
Albums
),
³⁵
or else by topography. The risk here is to fail to recognize the development of this work over time, to view it as homogeneous whereas it was spread over more than thirty years. During this whole period, it is true, Atget remained faithful to the material of his beginnings: the bellows camera, the heavy frames with 18
X
24 cm glass plates, the wooden tripod, the bag of lenses, this whole heavy bric-a-brac that he carried every morning from Rue Campagne-Première. And yet there is a whole world between his
Petits Métiers
photographed between 1898 and 1900 – baker's boy, woman bread-carrier, porcelain restorer, organ grinder, asphalters, teaselers, strong men from Les Halles, taken close up, frontally, and very posed – and the
Zoniers
of 1912–13, where he takes en masse, in the disorder of their trolleys, their wooden huts and their encampments, the ragpickers, their wives, their flocks of children, their gatherings, their dogs, their carts. In fifteen
years, Atget had moved from the ‘picturesque types' that are seen in nineteenth-century engravings to the representation of poverty at the gates of the big city.
³⁶

On the Place de la Bastille, close to the Arsenal basin, along a cast-iron railing that no longer exists, some thirty or so individuals grouped around a lamppost are observing the sky, all in the same direction, through small rectangles that they hold in their hands. This photograph of Atget's appeared on the cover of no. 7 of
La Révolution surréaliste
. The image is titled ‘Last-Minute Conversions'. The photographer's name is not mentioned, either because Atget did not appreciate this use of his picture (his own title was ‘The Eclipse, April 1912'), or rather because he refused to personalize what he always held to be documents. Leafing through the collection of the same magazine, three other photos are to be found, likewise uncredited but certainly by him: in the same no. 7, the window of a corset shop illustrating a dream of Marcel Noll's, and a prostitute awaiting a customer for René Crevel's ‘Le Pont de la mort'. In no. 8, a Louis XV stair-rail in wrought iron, undoubtedly reframed, was reproduced in Éluard's
Les Dessous d'une vie ou la pyramide humaine
(‘At first there came to me a great desire for solemnity and pomp . . .'). Atget's contacts with the Surrealists certainly did not go beyond this. They were due, as we know, to a neighbourly connection
³⁷
with Man Ray, who circulated Atget's work in the Montparnasse studios, and with Ray's companion of the time, Berenice Abbott, who occasionally bought one of his photographs. In 1927, the year of Atget's death, she made a striking portrait of him (a single portrait, even though it has two views, one full-face and the other in profile like an identity photo), showing his bright eyes, undoubtedly blue, the tiredness of age, and the cumulative effect of everything he had watched with such affectionate concentration for thirty years.