Parisians: An Adventure History of Paris (5 page)

Guillaumot waited for the dead millions to arrive before completing his masterpiece. At Montrouge, beyond the Place d’Enfer, the skeletons were tipped into a hole. A dangling chain scattered the bones as they fell, and prevented them from blocking up the shaft. At the bottom, they were arranged in columns and courses. There were walls of tibias and femurs, decorative friezes of skulls, ‘and other ornamental arrangements in keeping with the character of the place’. Such was the architectural splendour of the necropolis that the horror of death was stifled by the multitude.

A
FEW YEARS AFTER
that great procession of the dead, when the Revolution had turned Paris into a hell on earth, the Catacombs received the anonymous bones of aristocrats who had perished in the great upheaval. Guillaumot himself spent that chaotic period in a prison cell, a victim of slander, disgruntled workers and his close association with the former regime. But he had the imperishable joy of knowing that his achievements would last forever. He was freed from prison in 1794 and continued as Inspector of Quarries and as Director of the Gobelins Tapestry Works until his death in 1807. Half his adult life had been devoted to the salvation of Paris.

He was buried in the Cimetière Sainte-Catherine, in the east of the city, between the Gobelins and the Rue d’Enfer, but when the remaining cemeteries of Paris were excavated in 1883, Guillaumot’s gravestone disappeared. His bones were gathered up with all the others, carried to the ossuary he had built, and incorporated into the walls. Somewhere now in that vast cathedral of calcium and phosphate, Charles-Axel Guillaumot is still helping to prevent Paris from vanishing into the void.

5

T
HE MAN WHO SAVED
Paris died two hundred years ago. It is almost as long since he was mentioned in any history of Paris. Men who demolished or caused the destruction of large parts of the city are commemorated in street names and statues, but there are no memorials to the work of Charles-Axel Guillaumot. A side-street near the Gare de Lyon is called the Rue Guillaumot, but it was named after a local landowner, and has no connection with Charles-Axel.

He might have seen this as ingratitude, or as tacit recognition that the debt could never be repaid. But perhaps it is simply that the City of Paris is reluctant to remind its citizens and visitors of what lies beneath their feet.

The section of the Rue d’Enfer that collapsed in 1777 on Guillaumot’s first day at work was incorporated in 1859 into the new Boulevard Saint-Michel. In 1879, the remainder of the street was renamed Rue Denfert-Rochereau, after the colonel who defended Belfort against the Prussians. No doubt the naming committee felt that the railway terminus should bear a less forbidding name than ‘Paris-d’Enfer’. Or perhaps the pun, d’Enfer/Denfert, was an attempt to hide the traces of the old Street of Hell without entirely denying the Devil his share.

When the Rue d’Enfer was renamed in 1879, no one had any reason to fear a recurrence of those infernal disasters. The cracks that damaged three houses that year, near the site of the 1774 collapse, were blamed on the railway trains that rumbled in and out of the Denfert terminus. Further down the street, towards the centre of Paris, geologists and mineralogists had shown their confidence in the work of consolidation by moving the École des Mines to the edge of the Jardin du Luxembourg, opposite the site of the 1777 collapse.

One day the following April (1879), at six o’clock in the evening, lecturers and students leaving the School were surprised to see the barber who lived across the boulevard sitting in his dining room, exposed to the passers-by. He was holding his knife and fork, looking down at his dinner, which was perched on a
cloche de fontis
that had just completed its long journey up from the depths. The house-fronts of numbers 77, 79, and 81 Boulevard Saint-Michel had detached themselves from the rest of the block and disappeared. This time, citizens were more inclined to blame the accident on the Highways and Bridges Department than on the Devil.

Such incidents are now comparatively rare. The public streets, and any building that belongs to the City of Paris, have little to fear from subsidence. Only about ten sinkholes appear each year. Most of them are quite small, and few people have died as a result. The larger holes are dealt with according to modern techniques, and the people affected are re-housed at the expense of the city. The vast cavity that appeared under the Gare du Nord in 1975 was promptly filled with two thousand five hundred cubic metres of cement. Practically all of Paris, apart from Montmartre and certain
quartier
s to the east of the Place Denfert-Rochereau, is now officially deemed to be safe.

N
OT LONG AGO
, in the old days, the place had served her well as a pied-á-terre. When she attended the Opera and the performance finished late, it had been a blessing to spend the night in Paris and to avoid the long ride home on a dusty road. Now that she had been forced to make it her permanent home, its disadvantages were obvious. Even when the tenants had been evicted and their apartments refurbished, it felt cramped and over-complicated. She occupied the ground floor and an entresol on one side of the building; her husband and the children were on the floor above. If things had been different, she and some of the ladies might have been pleased to be lodged in the city, but she rarely came home after dark these days, and had never much enjoyed the thought of her husband enthroned in his geography room, peering down through his telescope as her carriage entered the courtyard.

She was used to the inconvenience: all her homes had been building sites. Sometimes, she found herself envying the peasant who could put up his hovel in a day. There were rooms she had planned that she would never see, except as watercolour sketches and pasteboard models. After the wedding, her first bedroom had been strewn with the confetti of flaking plaster and gold paint. In her impatience to be settled she had ordered a plain white ceiling, but His Highness had insisted on a full restoration, with paintings of corpulent nymphs set in gilded stucco. As she came to know the ins and outs of family history and finance, this regime of endless renovation had at least allowed her to impose her own taste. Parts of the gardens were almost exactly as she had intended. The old labyrinth had been uprooted and replaced with an English grove in which she could almost imagine herself at home. But now, in the new residence, every ‘improvement’ was dictated by circumstance.

Carpenters had installed sliding doors behind the shelves in some of the wardrobes. A section of wood panelling behind a tapestry disguised another secret door that opened onto a small staircase. The false floors that had been added for forgotten purposes made it hard to form an impression of the building as a whole. Her home had been turned into a maze. To reach the courtyard, she would have to slip out of her apartments at the rear, walk along a corridor past an empty apartment, then descend another staircase. Nothing would ever have been straightforward in such a place, and she was not entirely unhappy to be leaving it behind.

Her apartments looked away from the courtyard, onto the gardens and the river to the left. When the wind blew from that direction and threw rain against the glass, she saw nothing but dim avenues of trees marching towards the Place de Louis XV. The gardens had been noisier in the daytime since soldiers, servants and poorly dressed people had been allowed in. At night, they were closed to the public and, presumably, empty, but there were sounds to which she had recently become attuned, a vast and blurry soundscape formed by distant walls and embankments that seemed to catch the whispers of the city.

Beyond the railings and the line of trees that were treated as though the terrace were the back-lane in a village, Parisians learned to swim in their river under wooden sheds, and engaged in other incomprehensible activities that involved shouting and waving long poles about. On the far bank, there was nothing much to see. She knew from some of her friends and her husband’s confessor that the people there enjoyed a finer prospect (her home was part of the vista), though they were disturbed by the wood yards that spoiled the appearance of the riverbank. If the piles of wood caught fire, her friends would be forced to flee by the servants’ quarters into the web of streets behind the grand facades of what was now the Quai Voltaire. Some of them, she knew, would be forced to flee in any case.

T
HOUGH ELABORATE
on paper, the plan would apparently be straightforward in the execution. She had organized the journey herself as far as Châlons, but her husband had shown a lively interest in the smallest details. After the horrendous exodus from Versailles, when the guardsmen’s heads were wigged and powdered and held aloft on pikes, it had been a consoling hobby. He was a man who liked to fiddle with simple but intricate mechanisms. More than once, he had been found kneeling at doors in various parts of the building, trying to pick the lock. He was thrilled by the thought of a modern house crammed with curious contraptions. A certain M. Guillaumot, a relative of her friend, M. de Fersen, who was to drive the coach, had been commissioned to design an underground fortress for the new home, which, she supposed, would hardly allow for much decorative fancy.

While she sat in her drawing room discussing the contents of the trunk (the diamonds, a warming pan, a silver basin, etc.), the King was talking to a group of men who were about to set off on a great expedition through France, from the Channel coast to the Mediterranean Sea. Their mission was to determine the exact line of the Paris meridian, which ran a few yards from where she sat, across the Place du Palais-Royal and the maze of alleyways that huddled between the Tuileries and the Louvre. Mathematical exactitude would force them to pass through wild regions south of the Loire that were untouched by civilization, and whose inhabitants had never heard of Paris. But once they had finished, they would be able to create maps of unprecedented accuracy, which, among other things, would keep His Highness happily engrossed for weeks on end.

Their own expedition called for a similar degree of precision, but it would be considerably more dangerous. M. de Fersen had ordered a special long-distance coach that was to wait outside the city at the Barrière Saint-Martin. Meanwhile, General de Bouillé was positioning loyal troops at various key points along the route to the eastern frontier. Nothing had been left to chance. The coach contained a well-stocked larder, a cooker, and a false floor that could be turned into a dining table. Apart from this, and its great size, it was unremarkable. The King himself had selected the three guards who were to assist in the departure. He had been advised to employ men who were used to finding their way in difficult circumstances–a gendarme, a soldier, and a retired postmaster who was said to know ‘every road in the kingdom’–but His Majesty had wanted to demonstrate the high regard in which he held his
gardes du corps
, and had asked the commanding officer to provide three men, without revealing the nature of their mission.

To avoid arousing suspicion, they were to leave in four separate groups. The governess would take the dauphin and his sister to the nearby Rue de l’Échelle, where M. de Fersen would be waiting outside a busy hotel, disguised as a cab driver. Three-quarters of an hour later, they would be joined by the King’s sister Mme Élisabeth, and, when the ceremony of the Coucher du Roi was over and the King had been put to bed, by the King himself, dressed as a
valet de chambre
. (Every night for the last two weeks, a valet whose height and orb-like corporation gave him a remarkable resemblance to the King had left by the main door, and the sentries were used to seeing him pass.) The Queen would leave the palace last of all, with one of the trusted bodyguards, M. de Malden.

The route from her apartments to the corner of the Rue de l’Échelle was short enough to present no obvious difficulties. The Tuileries Palace formed what would have been the western edge of a great rectangle if the Louvre had ever been completed. It was separated from the Place du Carrousel and the warren of medieval slums that occupied most of the rectangle by three walled courtyards. The courtyard closest to the river and her apartments, and furthest from the Rue de l’Échelle, was the Cour des Princes. Once beyond the courtyards, one might be said to have left the palace. Then there was just the Place du Carrousel, a corner of the King’s stables, and the lozenge-shaped remnant of a square before the Rue de l’Échelle.

The total distance was less than five hundred yards.

The courtyards were always busy with lawyers, ambassadors, servants and, recently, rough-looking men whose business was known only to themselves. Cabs and carriages waited in line for their passengers to emerge from the palace and the neighbouring hotels. Few people believed the rumours spread by some hysterical journalists that the royal family was intending to escape, but M. de La Fayette had doubled the guard just in case, and ordered the palace to be lit as though for a grand occasion. The Queen was to wear a broad-brimmed hat to hide her face–a needless precaution, she thought, since some of her own friends had failed to recognize her after her hair had turned white. In the unlikely event that she was stopped by a sentry, she was to identify herself as Mme Bonnet, a governess. One day, the people of Paris, who had been led astray by ruffians, would say that their Queen had been well suited to the role.

A
S A FOREIGNER
in Paris, like herself, M. de Fersen, a Swedish nobleman, was probably better equipped for the task than a native. A French aristocrat would not have been able to sustain a casual conversation, as M. de Fersen did, in cab-drivers’ slang, nor would he have had the wit to provide himself with a cheap snuff-box from which to offer his bothersome interlocutor a pinch. Thanks to his skilful impersonation, he was able to stand his ground in front of the lodging inn, until Mme de Tourzel arrived with the King’s daughter and the sleeping dauphin dressed as a little girl. Without waiting for the King’s sister, Fersen set off with his precious cargo, drove along the quays, turned right across the Place de Louis XV and returned along the Rue Saint-Honoré to rejoin the line of cabs in the Rue de l’Échelle.

While they waited in fearful silence, a woman circled the cab. The door opened, and Mme Élisabeth clambered in, stepping on the little dauphin, who was hidden under Mme de Tourzel’s skirts. She explained in flustered tones that she had passed within a whisker of M. de La Fayette’s coach, which was taking him to attend the Coucher du Roi. Then they settled down to wait for Their Majesties to emerge from the palace.

From the corner of the Rue de l’Échelle, it was possible to see some of the upper windows of the palace, brilliantly lit from the outside, as though a great spectacle were about to begin. The bells of neighbouring churches began to strike midnight, but there was still no sign of the King. It was not until the dignitaries had departed–somewhat later than expected–and the
valet de chambre
had seen His Majesty washed, disrobed and laid between the sheets, that a portly servant who would have answered to the name Durand walked calmly down the steps of the main entrance and passed through the sentry-box of the Cour des Tuileries. As the servant began to cross the Place du Carrousel, the sentry’s attention was drawn by the sound of a brass shoe-buckle clattering across the cobbles. He saw the servant retrieve his buckle, kneel down and deftly make the necessary repair, before setting off again in the direction of the Rue de l’Échelle.

Though the unforeseen delay had made the occupants of the cab almost sick with apprehension, the King, as he settled into his seat opposite the ladies, expressed the view that these small setbacks were just the sort of contretemps that proved the soundness of the plot. Even a clockwork mechanism contained imperfect pieces, which, by compensating for one another’s failings, in a well-regulated system of balances and escapements, coaxed the whole machine into a satisfactory semblance of accuracy. He was not, therefore, unduly troubled by the non-appearance of the Queen.

B
Y THEN, AS PLANNED
, the Queen had left the palace on foot with M. de Malden. They had passed, unchallenged, through the guard-post of the Cour des Princes, and were about to cross the Place du Carrousel when a blaze of light approached from the side. Just in time, they squeezed into the narrow
guichet
that led out of the square, and, as the carriage thundered by, she saw quite distinctly, framed by its window, the features of M. de La Fayette. An impulse stronger than the instinct for survival made her try to hit the carriage with her stick. According to one of the other bodyguards, M. de Malden tried to reassure the Queen, though it seems more likely that the Queen had to reassure her escort, and that she tried to instil in him the courage that comes with a sense of destiny and duty. In a few moments, they would be sitting safely in M. de Fersen’s cab, well on their way to meeting the coach at the Barrière Saint-Martin.

It was then that something apparently extraordinary but in fact quite normal occurred. It was described in the years to come by several of the people involved, including General de Bouillé. The most detailed account, and the closest in time to the incident itself, was written by her chaplain, M. de Fontanges, who recorded his later conversations with the Queen. Some modern historians have doubted that such a thing could ever have happened, but they live in an age when cities are filled with aids to navigation, when there are enough signposts to obliterate the sights they indicate, and when the streets of Paris could be carpeted several times over with street-maps of Paris.

As the coach disappeared into the night, the Queen and her bodyguard left the Tuileries through the
guichet
in which they had taken cover. They knew, from the King’s instructions, that they were to turn left on leaving the palace. They also knew that it was impossible to go wrong, and that despite the momentary confusion caused by the appearance of La Fayette’s coach, they were only a few hundred yards from the meeting point.

In front of them, beyond the parapet, was the river, and, a little to the right, clearly delineated by the reflector lamps, the Pont Royal, which led to the Left Bank. A few lights were burning in the tall houses on the opposite bank, but the quays were deserted, and so, without wasting any more time, they crossed the Pont Royal, and hurried into the street that opened on the far side of the bridge.

No one knows for certain whether it was M. de Malden who led the way, or whether, out of deference to the Queen, he simply followed in her wake. The other two guards left personal accounts of the night’s adventure: François-Melchior de Moustier remembered only that the Queen had been frightened by the sight of La Fayette and became separated from her guide; François de Valory wrote a more detailed account, but his notes were lost, and when he came to retell the story in 1815, he found that his memories had faded. However, he did recall being told that the Queen ‘at once left the arm of her guide and began to flee in the opposite direction, with the guide following her as closely as he could’. The third bodyguard, who might have settled the matter, never wrote his memoirs, for a reason that might be guessed. The Queen herself, in conversations with her chaplain, graciously shared the blame: ‘Her guide knew Paris even less than she…They turned right instead of left, and crossed the Pont Royal.’