Parisians: An Adventure History of Paris (3 page)

On the night in question, the lieutenant had spent almost two weeks in Paris, far from his family and comrades. He was no further advanced with the subsidy for the mulberry groves, though he had acquired some useful ideas on the subject of administrative reform. He felt the need of some distraction. He walked past the Palais-Royal and the Bibliothèque du Roi towards the tree-lined boulevards and the theatre where the actors of the Comédie Italienne performed their comic operas. The ‘Italiens’ was popular with lovers of light music and humorous innuendo, but also with gentlemen in search of a companion for the night, who appreciated the convenience of finding the ladies already arranged by price, from the expensive
balcons
to the cheap
amphithéâtres
.

On the bill that night was a historical operetta called
Berthe et Pépin
. It was a subject to stir the imagination of an ambitious young officer. By acts of astounding bravery, the diminutive Pépin le Bref impressed the soldiers who dubbed him ‘the Short’. Such was his political skill that he had himself crowned King of the Franks by the Pope at Saint-Denis. After imprisoning his brother in a monastery, King Pépin subdued the Goths, the Saxons and the Arabs, and marched victoriously across the Alps into Italy. Pépin, rather than his son Charlemagne, was the first ruler of a European empire.

The operetta was based on an amorous interlude in Pépin’s life. Having inadvertently married a tyrannical woman pretending to be Berthe of Laon, Pépin happens upon the real Berthe in the forest of Le Mans. ‘Big-Footed Berthe’ (so called because of her club foot) has sworn never to reveal her true identity, except to save her virginity. By threatening her maidenhood, Pépin discovers her to be his true queen, and the pair return in triumph to Paris. The main dramatic interest, to an audience chiefly preoccupied with sex, was the pursuit of a club-footed maid by a short and lusting king.

By the end of the performance, the young lieutenant was in a state of agitation that can easily be imagined. The evening was far from over, and all around him people were talking excitedly about the night ahead. He had no desire for cheery company, yet the thought of dining alone at the Hôtel de Cherbourg was repellent. He left the theatre and pulled his coat about him as the winter wind blew down the boulevard. People and carriages were rushing about as though the day had just begun. Impelled by a sudden resolution, he set off down the Rue de Richelieu towards the galleries and arcades where a thousand lamp-lit dramas were acted out every night.

An hour or so later, he returned to room nine in the Hôtel de Cherbourg. This time, he was not alone. When his visitor had gone, he sat down to record his observations in a large notebook. He never completed his account, but he kept the notebook, perhaps because it recorded an event of such importance in his young life.

Years later, when his life was in danger, he placed the notebook in a cardboard box covered with grey paper, and had it sent to his uncle for safe-keeping. It is fortunate that the manuscript has survived. So many people visited the Palais-Royal, yet so few left any honest account of their dealings there, that the value of the manuscript as a historical document far outweighs its biographical significance.

Thursday, 22 November 1787. Paris, Hôtel de Cherbourg.

At this point, the lieutenant laid down his pen. No doubt the rest of the evening’s adventure scarcely lent itself to the style of prose he had learned in sentimental novels. And perhaps, as he wrote and became entangled in his phrases, he realized that he was not the principal actor in his play, and that there was more to that arduous profession than he had supposed.

The observer had been observed and analysed long before he made his first approach. She had seen him walking in the crowd in his blue uniform, self-conscious and proud, not quite as elegant as he would have liked, and clearly not from Paris. He wore his virginity like an advertising board. Such a man would appreciate a shy young whore who was dignified in her predicament–and prepared to hold a conversation in the cold. He needed a woman skilled in the art of love who would make him feel that he was leading the dance and teaching her the steps.

The lieutenant shifted uncomfortably in his chair. There was indeed much to be learned at the Palais-Royal. He had shown by his actions more than by his words that he could profit from the lessons: too much time refining tactics and preparing the ground. He had turned the loss of his virginity into a campaign, when all it took was a few sous and five minutes of his time.

H
E STAYED ON
at the Hôtel de Cherbourg for another few weeks. In one sense, it was a wasted journey. He failed to secure a subsidy for the mulberry groves, which seemed to him a predictable outcome in a city of shopkeepers and libertines. He wrote a few letters and the first paragraph of a history of Corsica: ‘Though I have scarce reached the age [here, there is a gap in the manuscript], I have the enthusiasm that a more mature study of men often eradicates from the heart.’ Doubtless he became better acquainted with the sights of Paris, but he left no other record of his observations. If he returned to the Théâtre des Italiens in December, he would have seen
The Lover Put to the Test, or The Invisible Woman
, but not
The English Prisoner
, which was premiered two days after he boarded the boat for Montereau on Christmas Eve. He may also have returned to the Palais-Royal, but the crowds were so dense, and an engaging girl from Brittany was rarely short of customers. It is unlikely that he ever saw his first lover again.

The woman herself is known to us only from the lieutenant’s account. Even that small amount of detail is unusual. Official statistics show that of twelve thousand seven hundred prostitutes in Paris who knew their place of birth, fifty-three came from her part of Brittany, but no names are attached to the figures–other than the usual
noms de guerre
: Jasmine, Abricote, Serpentine, Ingénue, etc.–and there is nothing to corroborate her tale of disgrace and abandonment. Perhaps her companion, if he existed, returned from London and rescued her from the Palais-Royal. Or perhaps, like the wife of Balzac’s Colonel Chabert, she was picked up in the galleries ‘like a hackney cab’, and installed in an elegant
hôtel
. Two years after the young lieutenant’s visit, when the Palais-Royal became a centre of revolutionary activity, she might have joined her sisters-in-arms in the historic meeting around the fountain, when ‘the demoiselles of the Palais-Royal’ vowed to publish their grievances and to demand fair remuneration for their patriotic labours:

She was better placed than prostitutes in other parts of the city to survive those difficult years. When François-René de Chateaubriand returned from English exile in 1800, after passing through a ravaged landscape of silent churches and blackened figures in neglected fields, he was amazed to find the Palais-Royal still ringing with sounds of jollity. A little hunchback was standing on a table, playing a fiddle and singing a hymn to General Bonaparte, the young First Consul of the French Republic:

If she was eighteen when she met Lieutenant Bonaparte, she would then have been nearing the end of her professional life. (Most prostitutes in Paris were aged between eighteen and thirty-two.) After the Revolution, life became harder. Whenever General Bonaparte attended the Théâtre Français and parked his carriage near the Palais-Royal, soldiers were sent to ‘purge’ the brothels, lest the First Consul be exposed to embarrassing overtures. Later still, when the young lieutenant had conquered half of Europe, married an Austrian princess and made his mother the richest widow in France, the whores of the Palais-Royal were fined, imprisoned, medically inspected or sent back in disgrace to their native provinces.

But even Napoleon Bonaparte had little effect on ‘the capital of Paris’. According to an English traveller, it remained ‘a vortex of dissipation where many a youth is engulfed’. Its fame spread throughout the empire and beyond. In the depths of Russia, Cossacks talked of it as a place of legend, and when armies from the east crossed the frontiers of the crumbling empire, officers inspired their troops with tales of the Palais-Royal, insisting that, until he had seen that palace of debauchery and tasted its civilized delights, no man could call himself a man, or consider his education complete.

1

T
HOUGH THEY
took place in a city whose every twisted street and shuttered window had a tale to tell, one might have expected the sequence of catastrophic events that began on 17 December 1774 to have left some lasting trace in the history of Paris. For several years, they threatened to overshadow all the wars, revolutions, plagues and massacres that ever blackened the thirteen square miles that lie between Montmartre and the Montagne Sainte-Geneviève. Yet almost two hundred years have passed since any historian has even mentioned them. Perhaps this will turn out to be the lesson of the tale: so many people chose to live in a city that poets habitually described as Hell because it offered the priceless blessing of oblivion. The perpetual turmoil of Paris carried everything away, like the rain that rushed the sweepings of a hundred thousand households into the Seine.

The first sign of something untoward came on a Saturday afternoon, a week before Christmas Day in 1774. The main customs gate on the southern edge of the city was clogged up with the usual heavy traffic. Paris was filling its markets and shops for the holiday ahead, and even that late in the year, travellers had to expect long delays before they could enter the pandemonium and begin the final descent towards the smoke-shrouded steeples.

Customs officers exacted payment on everything that entered the city. Every vehicle, passenger and piece of luggage had to be searched for ‘any article contrary to the King’s orders’. Pedlars and milkmaids, foot-weary peasants pulling handcarts stacked with winter vegetables, mud-caked passengers from the north-bound diligence were all forced to wait in each other’s company.

Some of them sat in the garden of a nearby windmill drinking excise-free wine; others stood at the barrier exchanging news and gossip. That afternoon, a group had gathered to watch wine barrels being unloaded from a cart. A wheelwright was heating up his forge to repair a broken axle. The carter, who had left Orléans before dawn, had run into a large hole on the last stretch of road before Paris. Anywhere else in France, a pot-hole–even one deep enough to drown a horse–would have passed without comment, but this hole had appeared without warning in the great road south to Orléans. In the distant days when Paris was a town of huts on an island in the river Sequana, the road had been plied by the high-speed chariots of the Gauls, and it was along the same magnificent avenue that the legions of Labienus had launched a devastating attack on the armies of the Parisii tribe in 52
BC
. Now, in 1774, it was the busiest stretch of highway in the kingdom. Sometimes, when the traffic wasn’t held up by livestock, more than ten vehicles passed through the customs gate in an hour.

It was a fact of tremendous significance to those who witnessed the event that this part of the road was called the Rue d’Enfer. No one knows how the street acquired its sinister name. It may originally have been a Gaulish word for ‘fair’, or the verbal remnant of something made of iron–perhaps a gate that had marked the limits of the city. Many people said that the street was known as Hell because so much shouting and swearing was heard in the
quartier
, but, as others pointed out, that would have to have been the name of almost every street in Paris. Others still, believing that names were clues to the future as well as to the past, associated it with an ancient prophecy which said that, one day, all the temples, taverns, convents and heretical schools of the Latin Quarter would be swallowed up by an infernal abyss. Educated people, however, preferred a more scholarly derivation:

At about three o’clock that afternoon, the crowd at the customs barrier saw a sight that might have settled the matter once and for all: the roofs of the buildings on the Paris side changed their angle slightly in relation to the skyline. A second later, there was the sound of a giant heaving a great sigh and stretching his limbs. The cattle that had passed through the gate panicked and backed into the barrier. A man was seen running with a hood pulled over his head. Behind him, a cloud was billowing up from the road, and the buildings on the street beyond the Rue d’Enfer suddenly came into view. Along the eastern side of the Rue d’Enfer itself, extending towards the centre of Paris for what proved to be one quarter of a mile, a gaping trench had opened up and swallowed all the houses.

Predictably, the chasm was identified as ‘the Mouth of Hell’, and, in view of what had happened, only the most pedantic etymologist could have doubted the true, satanic origin of the street’s name.

2

A
LITTLE MORE
than two years after the incident in the Rue d’Enfer, a luxuriously upholstered sedan chair was bobbing and weaving along the Rue de Grenelle through the heart of the Faubourg Saint-Germain. A light rain had fallen in the night and turned the sandy streets to mud. The new Inspector of Quarries was on his way to his first appointment. He stared out of the mud-flecked window of the sedan, remembering the days when he had roamed the noble Faubourg on foot. He had studied those grand facades, pausing to sketch a frieze or an
œil-de-bœuf
window, wondering how the architect had managed to fold the stables and the service quarters into a rhomboidal plot and still create a courtyard wide enough for any visitor to lose his nerve before he reached the front door. He had made jottings of corbels and porticos, spattered by the water that flowed from the mouths of copper dolphins, under the insolent scrutiny of doorkeepers dressed like kings.

To Charles-Axel Guillaumot, whose views are known to us from his many pamphlets, and whose character is in some respects a key to the following events, Paris had always been a city of closed doors. Its coat of arms–a ship and a motto borrowed from the ancient corporation of Seine boatmen:
Fluctuat nec mergitur
(‘Buffeted but not about to sink’)–might as well have been a
porte cochère
instead of a ship: a solid barrier of oak and iron, with the motto from Dante’s
Inferno
, ‘All hope abandon, ye who enter here!’

More than once, as a young architect in Rome, he had been dragged in from the street by a nobleman who wanted to expose to an artist’s enlightened gaze the treasures that lay behind his crumbling facade. In Paris, a man who begged admittance to a masterpiece of domestic architecture but who lacked the necessary qualifications–a title and a pair of white cuffs–would invariably be turned away by a snooty servant with the blessing of his master. Sometimes, he had seen the ridiculous mask of rouge and white lead sneering from an upper window.

Italy had proved its superiority by opening its artistic competitions to all the nations of Europe, and by awarding him, Charles-Axel Guillaumot, the architectural Prix de Rome when he was only twenty years old. Though his parents were French, the accident of his birth in Stockholm, where his father had been a merchant, had disqualified him from every scholarship that was open to Frenchmen. He had been forced to fight his way out of obscurity with nothing but genius and determination. His foreign origin had at least preserved him from the preposterous arrogance that enabled a Frenchman to believe that a cathedral that had to be propped up like a decaying hovel was the equal of a Greek temple. It was no coincidence that his architectural studies had been best appreciated by a man who was forced to live in exile. ‘Your observations are as enjoyable as they are instructive’, Voltaire had told him in a letter.

The sedan chair had skirted the slime-green walls of Saint-Sulpice, and was climbing the Rue de Tournon towards the Luxembourg. This was not a part of Paris to which he himself had made a noticeable contribution, and he might reasonably have felt a twinge of resentment at the obvious defects of certain monuments. At this late stage in his career, his most profitable work had been his wooing of Mlle Le Blanc, whose undisputed charms included the fact that she was the daughter of the city’s chief architect. Even as the son-in-law of M. Le Blanc, Guillaumot had struggled to make a name for himself. He had built some châteaux in the provinces, and an abbey on the ruins of a monastery at Vézelay, but in Paris, he was known chiefly as an architect of barracks. His talent for shoring up other men’s shoddy work had brought him some lucrative but inglorious commissions.

He had married Mlle Le Blanc sixteen years before. Now, in his late forties, he was a tall, stony-faced man with a head that could easily be pictured as a skull. He wore his wig a long way back on his scalp, perhaps in order to expose the full elevation of his brow. The effect was slightly forbidding, but in certain lights there were hints of timidity and gloominess suggestive of profound and frequent meditation, and even a certain generosity of spirit that wanted only recognition to flourish. His passions ran too deep to be visible, and he rarely expressed them, except in print. He had two daughters, several protégés and powerful connections, and saw no professional need for friends.

Even on this day of a new beginning, Charles-Axel Guillaumot was more thoughtful than excited. He fully expected his designs to be stunted by small-minded people and miserly budgets. ‘Unhappy is the Artist,’ he had written, ‘for even before his idea achieves perfection, it is warped by ignorance and envy.’ He was already planning a devastating pamphlet,
On the Harm that is Done to Architecture by Ill-Informed and Exaggerated Attacks on the Expenditure Occasioned by the Construction of Public Monuments
, and he was not entirely optimistic about the post that he was about to take up. Ominously, the sedan was lowered to the ground at the end of the Rue de Vaugirard. Something was blocking the road ahead. The King had appointed him to the post on 4 April. Thanks to the incredible slowness of the Ministry, it was now the 24th, and he was obviously destined to be late for his first meeting.

His intention was to inspect the site of the 1774 collapse, and to gauge the solidity of the work carried out by one of the King’s architects, M. Dupont. On the day after ‘the Mouth of Hell’ had opened in the Rue d’Enfer, Dupont had had himself lowered into the trench to a depth of eighty-four feet. By the light of a flaming torch, he had seen a gallery extending north along the line of the street towards the Seine. It appeared to be an ancient quarry, dug by miners who had known nothing of the art of excavation. At several points, the gallery was obstructed by the peculiar formations known as
fontis
. A
fontis
is a cavity that develops when the roof of a subterranean gallery caves in. An arched void forms, and, as rocks tumble in, the cone of rubble migrates upwards. The rounded top of the rubble pile, known as the
cloche
, is usually seen only when the sinkhole has broken through, and when whatever structures had enjoyed the illusion of solidity abruptly vanish from the face of the earth.

The walls of rubble had been consolidated by masons dangling on the end of long cables. Only one man had fallen in, but after spending three hours in the darkness, imagining things that could not possibly exist, he had been winched to safety and recovered after a few days. The street was reopened to traffic in a surprisingly short time, and Dupont had been congratulated on his swift and effective operation. The new
Dictionnaire Historique de la Ville de Paris
had devoted a special section to him, using terms that some might have found a little extravagant:

Beyond the end of the Rue de Vaugirard, the square where the Rue de La Harpe came up from the Seine was filled with carriages. The Rue d’Enfer had been closed off by the Highways and Buildings Police, and even a sedan would have been unable to get through. Charles-Axel levered himself out of the chair and squeezed through the crowd. At the junction of the Rue Saint-Hiacinte and the Rue d’Enfer, he showed the gendarme his copy of the King’s decree. It stated that ‘le Sieur Guillaumot’ was to ‘visit and reconnoitre the quarries dug in the City of Paris and adjacent plains so as to determine the encroachments and excavations that might injure the solidity of its foundations’. The agent ascertained that the gentleman possessed the proper credentials–he wore an embroidered coat and gave off a pleasant smell of flowers–and ushered him through the barrier.

Some people had gathered on the eastern side of the street, just before the convent of the Feuillans des Anges Gardiens. A man of Guillaumot’s experience had no need to ask what had happened. A faint odour hung in the air, which he recognized immediately. It was as though a cellar door had just been opened for the first time in centuries. The walls along the street appeared to be intact, but on the other side of a
porte cochère
, the slumped elevations of a stable block were an unmistakeable sign. He entered the courtyard and saw a neatly defined sinkhole with a diameter of about twenty feet. Placing one foot on the rim, he peered down into the pit. He estimated the distance from street-level to the top of the
cloche
to be fifteen feet. The
fontis
itself might extend another seventy or eighty feet.