Parisians: An Adventure History of Paris (13 page)

The letter was sufficiently disconcerting to bring the addressee to Vidocq’s office. It was written on the usual headed paper, with the Bureau’s motto beneath the address:

20 FRANCS A YEAR

Give protection from the wiles of the wiliest rogues.

It would be too much to hope that a case requiring such discretion should be transparent in all its details after so much time. The envelope has not survived, and the woman’s address is unknown. There is as much chance of identifying Vidocq’s client as there is of seeing Vidocq himself emerge from the offices of the historical preservation society that now occupies no. 13 Galerie Vivienne. However, the Bureau’s copy of the letter at least makes it possible to follow the progress of the case over the following week.

Several notes were scrawled across it. The first, in thick, clumsy characters suggesting a quill gripped by a fist, says: ‘She won’t pay more than
2
francs
a month
.’ Then, in another hand, ‘Wrote on 19 Feb. 1841 to pay’. Another note, in the first hand, says, ‘A note to find out the
lady
’s possition [
sic
].’ The final note says, ‘Made note on 23 February’.

No further information is available. The precise nature of the ‘unpleasantness’ to which the young woman was exposed must remain a mystery, and we shall never know whether or not her two francs a month were considered sufficient payment, nor in what manner the Bureau of Universal Intelligence intended to offer her protection from ‘the wiles of the wiliest rogues’…

5. The Case of the Bogus Revolution

6 June 1832, Île de la Cité, to 11 May 1857, Rue Saint-Pierre-Popincourt

O
NLY A MAN
who had hidden himself in piles of rubbish and watched the same door or alleyway for days on end would have known how many obscure dramas were wiped from the history of Paris by demolition and urban renewal. Street corners and crossroads were the synapses of a gigantic, convoluted brain, and when, in 1838, Prefect Rambuteau began to cut through the living tissue of ancient lanes to create the broad, hygienic street that bears his name, large parts of the city’s memory were lost without trace.

Since Vidocq was occasionally employed on special missions, even after the demise of his detective agency, he could certainly have written something more revealing than his ‘pocketbook for decent people’,
Thieves: A Physiology of Thievish Behaviour and Language
(1837). He might, for instance, have written a practical manual for army officers and would-be heads of state. He might have shown that anyone who wished to conquer France should first control the capital, and that, in order to control the capital, he should assemble at certain key points in the city the following items: two carts, some tables, chairs, bed-frames and doors, several mattresses, and some well-chosen rubbish untouched by rag-pickers. Since few streets were more than seven metres wide, a collection of such materials could quickly reach a first or a second floor. In this way, a whole battalion could be held at bay.

In a later chapter, he might have shown that in order to confirm the change of regime, and to damp down the fires that had forged the new administration, the head of state should provoke another revolution, and then repress it.

On 5 June 1832, one of the last victims of the cholera epidemic, the popular republican orator General Lamarque was being taken to his final resting-place by one of the largest funeral processions ever seen in Paris. Rumours had been spreading since the morning that the funeral would be the occasion of a royalist revolt. The liberal monarchy, which had been established by a three-day Revolution in July 1830, was threatened by discontented royalists on one side and disgruntled republicans on the other. Strangely, though, despite its fear of a further republican uprising or a royalist counter-revolution, the government did nothing to prevent the crowds from assembling, and when a colossal man appeared on a horse, waving a red flag and a Phrygian bonnet, no soldier or policeman intervened until panic had begun to spread.

Three hours later, half of Paris was choked with barricades, and a handful of intrepid men, dressed in the style of blood-red revolutionaries, were calling on citizens to resist the royalist revolt.

A cynic might have said that this chaotic revolt was a stroke of luck for the new regime. By dawn, many of the rioters had been killed or captured, and the rebellion was concentrated in the narrow streets around the church of Saint-Merri. It was there, as readers of Victor Hugo’s
Les Misérables
know, that the final scenes of that bloody drama were acted out. Order was restored by government troops, who fired cannon at the bulwarks of mattresses, and smashed their way through partition walls to fire on the barricades from upper windows. Any general would have realized that a battle concentrated in such a small area would not eradicate the threat for good. Many of the troublemakers slipped through the cordon and escaped across the rooftops. But there was no doubt that, after the events of 5–6 June 1832, Paris was safer for the monarchy than before.

S
URVEYING
P
ARIS
that morning from the Île de la Cité, a keen observer would have seen the clouds of gun-smoke and pulverized rubble rise over the impenetrable mass of roofs to the north. But he might also have heard sounds of fighting closer to hand. While the massacre was taking place across the river at Saint-Merri, barricades had appeared in the narrow lanes of the island, behind the Quai des Orfèvres. They were first noticed at about ten o’clock that morning, by which time, according to every history of the 1832 revolt, all resistance was confined to the Right Bank.

As they retreated from the massacre and fled across the river, several bands of rioters were alerted to the presence of barricades on the Île de la Cité by men who seemed to have a precise knowledge of the ebb and flow of the battle. Since the barricades occupied a position of clear strategic importance between the government buildings on the Right Bank and the army of starving workers and seditious students in the Latin Quarter, the insurrection was quickly reignited in the heart of the old city.

If any of the men and women who rushed to defend those barricades had paused to examine them, they might have noticed something odd about their architecture and composition. The barricades had firm foundations, as though the builders had manoeuvred the carts into position according to some unwritten principle of barricade construction. There was an unusual preponderance of desks and file cabinets forming neat courses with bridged joins and buttresses, and, running along the top, a row of cartwheels and chairs that served as coping-stones and battlements. If the battle had been long in coming, the insurgents might have realized that a barricade in a maze of alleyways could be attacked from several directions at once, or isolated from the neighbouring barricades by a handful of troops. They might have flushed out the occupants of the houses that looked down on the barricades, and picked off any snipers who squatted behind the chimneys and the mansards. Any such precautions would, of course, have been futile if some of the rebels defending the barricades had turned out to be soldiers or policemen in disguise.

In the absence of detailed records, it is hard to say exactly what happened that morning under the shadow of the Sainte-Chapelle. The most explicit document is a letter drafted by an unknown hand and signed by two hundred and fifty inhabitants of the neighbouring streets (Rue de la Licorne, Rue de la Calandre and Rue de la Juiverie). This testimonial, which was later produced by Vidocq in support of his application for a government pension, praised ‘the zeal and courage of M. Vidocq’, who, though no longer officially employed by the Sûreté, had somehow managed to capture the ‘malefactors’, and ‘cleaned up’ the
quartier
by ‘sweeping away the rabble’.

The notion that the barricades on the Île de la Cité had been constructed under Vidocq’s direction and manned by his agents provocateurs was expressed, long after the events, by some of the revolutionaries who were captured that day on the barricades, and then tortured and imprisoned. Some of the survivors later made attempts on Vidocq’s life, and their testimony has always been considered unreliable.

S
O MANY MURKY TALES
are attached to Vidocq’s name that he seems to hover over nineteenth-century Paris like a phantom. Governments that were increasingly sensitive to public opinion, and inclined to farm their policing out to criminals, were bound to find a man like Vidocq indispensable. There were probably few political pies in which he did not have a finger. In 1846, Louis-Napoléon Bonaparte (the future Napoleon III), who had been imprisoned after bungling a coup d’état, escaped from the fortress of Ham with the benefit of Vidocq’s advice. He fled to London, where Vidocq was sent to spy on him, and where Vidocq also took the opportunity to advise him on his next coup d’état. After the Revolution of 1848, and before Louis-Napoléon’s successful coup d’état of 1851, he served Lamartine as a secret agent. Lamartine himself paid tribute to the ex-convict, saying that he would have ‘mastered the situation with only Vidocq to help’.

The exact truth of these and other tales is almost impossible to separate from the mass of rumour and misinformation. In a city as large and as volatile as Paris, where ministries came and went like commuter trains, and whole
quartier
s disappeared from one year to the next, a historian is reduced to sifting through piles of suspect evidence like a rag-picker. Most of the documents have long since vanished, and many were probably destroyed. Within minutes of Vidocq’s death in 1857, a squad of policemen rushed to his house in the Marais and removed his files, leaving not a single clue by which to solve the penultimate mystery: when news of his death reached the newspapers, eleven women turned up at his home, each carrying a signed will that made her the sole heir to his fortune.

The old convict had remained slippery to the end. Some of the people who attended his quiet funeral at Saint-Denys-du-Saint-Sacrement in the Marais might have been forgiven for wondering whose body was in the coffin. The grave in Saint-Mandé cemetery, marked with the half-erased inscription, ‘Vidocq, 18—’, is now known to contain the body of a woman. It is most unlikely that Vidocq’s final resting-place will ever be known, and there will probably never be a monument or even a street name to commemorate the part he played in making Paris safe.

I

Théâtre des Variétés, Thursday, 22 November 1849

T
HE SHADOWS DREW IN
, until only her lily-white hands and her pale face could be seen. Figures dressed in black stood around her: they might have been angelic undertakers, waiting to bear her flimsy body to the grave. The silence was almost complete. The only sounds were the hissing of the gas-jets and the murmur of a thousand people barely breathing. Then a voice cried out, ‘
O my youth! It is you they are burying!
’

Darkness engulfed the scene, and furious applause cascaded down from the upper circle and the
amphithéâtre
. As the shabby section of the audience rose to its feet, waving its hats and food-wrappers, a rich, stale smell wafted through the auditorium. It had something of the fog on the boulevard outside, where the pavements were sticky with rain, but also something more intimate: it suggested old stew and coarse tobacco, the coat-racks and bookshelves of a pawnshop, and damp straw mattresses impregnated with urine and patchouli. It was–as though the set-designer had intended some ironical epilogue–the smell of the real Latin Quarter.

A denizen of that world walked stiffly onto the stage to shouts of ‘Author!’ He went to stand between the lovely white creature, now back from the dead like a sheet from the laundress, and his ideal alter ego, the elegantly disconsolate Rodolphe. A few smiles broke out among the
parterre
, which was still savouring the novelty of seeing garret-room revolutionaries portrayed as considerate young men. Liberties had obviously been taken with the truth…Someone must have kidnapped M. Murger and delivered him to a tailor. His body was still making the acquaintance of a perfectly black jacket and an unventilated pair of shoes; the handkerchief he clutched was unmistakeably white. His ‘knee’, as he called his balding brow, looked almost distinguished, and a fearless barber had ventured into the virgin forest of his beard and turned it into a tidy hedge. No one would see the fear and the sarcasm in those big, gloomy eyes, but the footlights might catch the tear that ran endlessly down his cheek–for the master of pathos was blessed with a defective lachrymal gland.

Beyond the footlights, he could make out the faces of famous critics who were about to crown him King of Bohemia. They had shown him their reviews of
La Vie de Bohème
before the performance and implicated him in the conspiracy of praise: ‘
It positively rains witticisms.
’ ‘
Never has the public been so moved…those penniless young men and women have won our hearts.
’ ‘
One can tell that this work was lived before it was written.
’

He saw the new President, Louis-Napoléon, smiling approval from his box, the living assurance that the revolutions of 1848–in which Henry Murger himself had played a small and only slightly shameful part–now belonged to history. The dishevelled originals of the stage Bohemians were hard to distinguish beyond the chandelier and the red velvet of the upper circle: they were a dark mass of heads and caps, just below the rotunda and the gilt cherubs made grubby by the gas-light. But he knew them well enough–the lank hair, the old men’s teeth, the humorous foibles that had hardened into vices. It should have been obvious to everyone that
La Vie de Bohème
was a highly selective version of the truth.

The actress who had incarnated Mimi placed her hand in his and curtsied to the critics; then his collaborator, the professional playwright, joined him on stage and the applause grew louder. He had imagined his moment of triumph a thousand times and was surprised to find himself thinking about furniture–a pair of matching chairs, a mattress with springs, and a full-length mirror. He thought of doors that filled the doorway and windowpanes that would not be shattered by a gust of wind. He pictured an apartment that would not have been out of place on the stage of the Variétés, with a boudoir in which to hide a beautiful new admirer and an antechamber in which to detain her beautiful predecessor.

It was an understandable distraction. Henry Murger, the tailor’s son and penniless scribbler, was about to leave that suffering land of debts and dreams where ‘bold adventurers hunt from dawn to dusk that savage beast known as the five-franc piece’. The success of
La Vie de Bohème
was his passport to the Right Bank. Most of his friends had forgiven him his sentimental depiction of Bohemia. Some of them had even begged him to expunge that last, calculatedly selfish line, ‘
Omy youth! It is you they are burying!
’ But the professional playwright had already turned his little tales into a sugary fantasy. Something had to remain of the bitterness and the wasted time. If ‘they’ had not buried his youth, he would have butchered it himself and danced on its grave.

As they left the stage, he squeezed Mimi’s tiny hand and looked forward to the sequel.

II

The Latin Quarter, 1843–46

I
N THOSE DAYS
, long before, a view over the rooftops of Paris was an unaffordable luxury. The apartment he had shared with a mousy young writer from Laon had a view of the Jardin du Luxembourg–if he stuck his head out of the window as far as it would go and twisted it to the left, a smudge of green foliage appeared in the corner of one eye. That had been his best apartment to date. They had decorated it in the ‘Bohemian’ style of the 1830s: a few volumes of Shakespeare and Victor Hugo, a Phrygian cap, an Algerian hookah, a skull on a broomstick handle (from the brother of a friend, Charles Toubin, who was an intern at one of the big hospitals) and, of course, a window box of geraniums, which was not only pretty but also illegal. (Death by falling window box was always high up the official list of fatalities.) For a proper view of Paris, they visited Henry’s painter friends who lived in a warren of attic rooms near the Barrière d’Enfer and called themselves the Water-Drinkers. When the weather was fine and the smell of their own squalor became unbearable, they clambered onto the roof and sat on the gutters and ridges, sketching chimneyscapes, and sending up more smoke from their pipes than the fireplaces below.

Three of the Water-Drinkers had since died of various illnesses known collectively as ‘lack of money’. When the last of the three was buried, in the spring of 1844, Henry and the others had found themselves at the graveside without a sou to give the gravedigger. ‘Never mind,’ said he, ‘you can pay me next time,’ and then, to his colleague: ‘It’s all right–these gentlemen are regular customers.’

Four times a year, when leases expired, half the population of Paris took to the streets in a mass, short-distance migration. Few people owned more furniture than would fit on a hand-cart, and few were so enamoured of their dwelling that they wanted to stay for more than a year. Henry’s migrations had left him almost as far down the residential ladder as it was possible to go. After his latest move, he was living in the Hôtel Merciol near Saint-Sulpice, in a dingy little room on the third floor (‘for the excellent reason that there isn’t a fourth’).

The Hôtel Merciol was one of those grudgingly furnished hotels where so many people came and went–hiding from creditors, borrowing a bed, staying drunk as long as their friends’ generosity allowed–that it could hardly be called home. Working girls in search of more congenial employment sometimes brightened the place with their chatter and their imitation of domestic respectability, until the police raided the hotel in the name of public morality and sent the girls to be hygienically inspected and registered as prostitutes.

Despite the boredom, the discomfort and the constant anxiety, Henry had decided to live by his pen. Since his mother’s death, his father had behaved like a typical bourgeois, which was particularly irritating in a man who earned his living as a tailor and a concierge. He refused to subsidize his son’s career as France’s future greatest poet. He scoffed at Henry’s ragged clothes and suggested that he find work as a domestic servant. Henry was forced, as he put it, to ‘prostitute his muse’. He wrote for a bath-house journal that was printed on waterproof paper, and for two children’s magazines, whose editors found his sentimental style well suited to the junior reader. He wrote verse for
Le Palamède
, which printed chess problems and gave the solutions in rhyming couplets. As ‘Viscountess X’, he wrote a fashion column for
Le Moniteur de la Mode
. (‘Everyone this season is wearing periwinkle blue’, he wrote, dressed in his mouse-brown overcoat.) He had even penned a few sarcastic editorials for the organ of his father’s trade,
Le Coupeur
:

David, Girodet or Horace Vernet, ‘I, too, am an artist!…’ No, a thousand times no. He should say no such thing, or run the risk of bringing a smile to every lip.

At the age of twenty-three, he saw his dreams of poetic glory turn to dust. His longest poem had been written for Mr Rogers, whose name appeared on walls and buses all over Paris. Mr Rogers liked to advertise his product in Romantic verse and paid one franc per couplet. Henry’s ode was supposedly written by a countess to her friend, who could now face the world again thanks to a mouthful of hippopotamus ivory. It was by far his most widely read publication:

Since the muse was beginning to lose her appetite for doggerel like this, it was just as well that her poet had another source of income. A certain Count Tolstoy employed him as a secretary on a small but regular wage. Though the young man was often ill and lying idle in a hospital bed, Count Tolstoy found that with his intimate knowledge of political clubs and underground journalism in the Latin Quarter, Henry Murger made an excellent informant for the Tsarist spy network.

A
T THE TIME
the great event occurred, Henry’s personal life was in a similarly wretched state. The Danish ‘sylph-in-velvet’ who had spent two nights sleeping in his chair had flown away, complaining to a mutual friend that he was physically unambitious (‘which only goes to show that I’m a fool’). The overweight
soubrette
(‘two hundred pounds, not including petticoats’) had frightened him off with talk of weddings and babies. The search for a ‘legitimate mistress’ who would marry him ‘in the thirteenth
arrondissement
’–as they said when there were only twelve of them in Paris–had been long and fruitless. Even his most ingenious plan had come to naught: the principal of the girls’ orphanage at Saint-Étienne-du-Mont had not received his application for a wife with undisguised delight.

It was, therefore, with a mixture of ecstasy and relief that, in the spring of 1846, he discovered a creature sent from heaven via the Faubourg Saint-Denis who seemed destined to fill his heart with joy and his pockets with money.

III

A newspaper office, 1846

O
N
T
UESDAY
5 M
AY
, slightly later than he had intended, Henry Murger crossed the river to the Right Bank and turned into a busy street between the Passage des Panoramas and the Stock Exchange. At no. 36, Rue Vivienne, the index finger of a disembodied hand pointed up a staircase to something called ‘
Le Corsaire-Satan
’.

His heart was pounding even before he began to climb the stairs. That Sunday, he had returned to Paris on a cloud, accompanied by his friends, who travelled more mundanely on the number 9 bus. They had been taking the air at Bougival by the Seine, where shopgirls and factory workers went to remind themselves of the sun, and where the riverbanks bristled with painters’ easels.

Champfleury–the mousy young writer with a cat’s-whiskers moustache–had brought along his girlfriend, Mariette. Their fellow Bohemian, Alexandre Schanne, who was known to a handful of fellow artists and several hundred exasperated neighbours as the composer of a symphony ‘On the Influence of Blue in the Arts’, had brought his mistress, Louisette. She was, according to Henry, a typical
grisette
(the name given to working girls because of the cheap grey cloth they wore). She got about the city by hanging on to the back of carriages and supplemented her wages as a flower-girl by attaching herself to cheerful young men until their money ran out. She was known to have seduced her married landlord in lieu of a month’s rent, and then to have blackmailed him for a further month. Like most girls at her factory, she had green hands–from the arsenic dye that was used on the artificial petals. It was monotonous work and poorly paid. Each girl performed a single task and never saw the finished flowers that adorned the tables and ball-gowns of the ladies whose husbands flirted with the flower-girls.