The Invention of Paris (15 page)

With Franconi, we cross from Boulevard Saint-Martin to Boulevard du Temple. At no. 52 – a plaque notes that Gustave Flaubert lived here from 1856 to 1869 – the line of buildings curves northward, to the right if you face the nearby Place de la République. The last of these out-of-phase buildings abuts an immense blind wall, perpendicular to the boulevard and replacing in the general alignment the few metres that precede the Place. This arrangement has a simple explanation: the curve of the staggered buildings indicates the course of the ‘original' Boulevard du Temple, before the cutting of Boulevard du Prince-Eugène (now Boulevard Voltaire) and the Place du Château-d'Eau (now Place de la République).
This first Boulevard du Temple reached Boulevard Saint-Martin close to the present site of the Garde Républicaine barracks. Rue du Temple and Rue du Faubourg-du-Temple were then continuous, on either side of the Boulevards. This slightly dilated crossroads formed a small square, with a fountain in the middle where a flower market was held on Tuesdays and Thursdays.
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This is the most famous part of Boulevard du Temple, destroyed by the works of 1862: the Boulevard du Crime, thus named ‘not by the Imperial prosecutors, but by vaudeville artists jealous of their fame for melodrama'.
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Its popular favour began under the last years of the ancien régime. In its heyday, under the Restoration and the July monarchy, ‘it was a Paris festival, a perpetual fair, an all-year carnival . . . You could see birds doing tricks, hares bowing, fleas pulling carts; Mlle Rose with her head down and feet in the air: the spatchcocked Mlle Malaga, jugglers, conjurors, dwarves, giants, skeleton-men, ugly customers, boiling oil. Finally, Munito, the savant dog, a great calculator who did not disdain to give performances and lessons to the domino players at the Café de la Régence.'
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In 1844, Balzac could still write that ‘this is the only place in Paris where you hear the cries of Paris, you see the people thronging, rags to astonish a painter and looks
to frighten a man of property. The late Bobèche was there, one of the local glories . . . His accomplice was called Galimafrée. Martainville wrote sketches for these two illustrious acrobats who made children, soldiers and maids laugh enormously, their costumes always dotting the crowd on this famous boulevard.'
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Haussmann, as we saw, was set on removing as soon as possible ‘these unhealthy distractions that increasingly degrade and brutalize the popular masses'.

As reinscribed in collective memory by the joyful papier-mâché of
Les Enfants du Paradis
, seven theatres stood side by side on the left side of the boulevard, looking towards the Bastille. All these establishments had their stage door on Rue des Fossés-du-Temple (now Amelot), which formed a kind of common corridor. There was the Théâtre-Lyrique, which had ‘mistakenly strayed into these parts', according to Haussmann. Massenet, when a student at the Conservatoire, played the kettledrum there in the evening to earn his living. ‘I have to confess that I sometimes came in at the wrong place, but one day Berlioz complemented me for this, and said: “You're actually right, which is unusual!”'
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At the Cirque-Olympique, run by the Franconis, the alternating attractions were Indian jugglers, Chinese and Italian acrobats, and savant animals – as well as military parades that revived the epic of the Empire. Then there were the Folies-Dramatiques, the Gaîté, devoted despite its name to the gloomiest melodramas, and the Funambules, whose star was the mime Debureau, as played by Jean-Louis Barrault in
Les Enfants du Paradis
. The diarist for
Le Globe
, the Saint-Simonian newspaper, wrote on 28 October 1831:

There is in this man's comedy something intangibly bitter and sad: the laughter he provokes, this laughter that comes so freely from his breast, is painful at the end, when we see, after having been so well entertained in all these ways, poor Debureau – or rather poor people! – fall totally back into the state of subjection, abasement and servitude in which we found them at the start of the play, and from which they escaped only for a moment to delight us so much. Adieu Pierrot! Adieu Gilles! Adieu Debureau! Adieu people, till tomorrow!
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The line of theatres ended with the Délassements-Comiques and the Petit-Lazzari – which owed its name to an Italian mime of the eighteenth century – very close to the house where Fieschi exploded his bomb when
Louis-Philippe was approaching in 1835. After that, writes Haussmann, there were ‘other well-forgotten dives'.
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These theatres were the stimulus for a proliferation of small trades, ‘from the opener of carriage doors to the collector of cigar butts, and especially the seller of pass-out tickets, of whom there were few at the doors of other theatres'.
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If there were cigar butts to collect and doors to open, this betokens a fashionable clientele who came slumming on the Boulevard du Crime: ‘These ladies come into the little halls that in theatrical slang are called dives [
bouis-bouis
], in the same fashion that under the Regency the “impure” entertained themselves from time to time at the Théâtre de la Foire.'
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Haussmann's great works led to the disappearance of almost all these marvels. There remained the Théâtre Déjazet (‘The name alone brings a smile, reminding you of a charming actress whom you must have applauded a hundred times, and will applaud again. Déjazet is an eighth wonder of the world, and for my part, I prefer her by far to the colossus of Rhodes'
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), which owed its salvation to the fact that it was the only one on the opposite pavement from where demolition was taking place. There was also the Cirque d'Hiver, the former Cirque Napoléon built by Hittorff, where on Sunday afternoons the lions and clowns were replaced by concerts organized by Pasdeloup. ‘Works by Haydn, Beethoven, Mozart, Weber, etc. were played here. This was not the place for quadrilles or polkas, but rather for strict and serious music, great music indeed.'
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‘The rest of the Boulevard, from Rue d'Angoulême [now Jean-Pierre-Timbaud] through to the Bastille, has – we must confess – a sad scent of the Marais, which after nine in the evening is a kind of cemetery.'
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Balzac
shows scarcely any greater esteem for the two major establishments to be found there: ‘The famous Cadran Bleu has not a single window or floor which is evenly balanced. As for the Café Turc, it is to Fashion what the ruins of Thebes are to Civilization . . . Soon the deserted boulevards begin, those without walkers. The pensioner strolls in his dressing gown if he feels like it; and on fine days, you see blind people playing card games.
In piscem desinit elegantia
.'

In general, towns built on a river grow on one of the two banks, and the other forms a surburb – often plebeian, often picturesque, but a suburb all the same: Trastevere, Oltranto, Lambeth, Brooklyn. The Danube does not run through Vienna, and in Budapest it divides two cities that back away from one another. In Paris, on the contrary, the Right and Left Banks have been in symbiosis since the dawn of time, and despite the spreading concrete, the river itself – its quays, bridges, islands, branches – is at once origin, frontier, tie, scenery and structure. But this ‘great mirror of Paris, always alive', as Benjamin called it, is often veiled by a paraphernalia, a body of clichés that are among the most conventional of all that the city has given birth to. Songs, postcards, poems (even ‘Pont Mirabeau'), techni-color and fashion photos have ended up giving the Seine a washed-out and commercial image, when it has not been prettified in literature (a frequent case, which provoked a furious outburst from André Breton on the death of Anatole France: ‘To wrap up his corpse, we could empty out from the quays a box of those books
that he loved so much
, and throw the whole thing in the Seine. This man must not be allowed to go on making dust even when he's dead'
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). Sentimental drivel should not lead us to forget that the role of the Seine has not always been for the best; from the days when it was ‘covered with wounded and half-drowned people', as d'Aubigné put it, those massacred on St Bartholemew's Night, through to the Algerians murdered and thrown into the water in October 1961 by the police of Maurice Papon and Charles de Gaulle.

The asymmetry of the two banks – in both Old and New Paris – is not simply due to the shape of the meander that encircled the Left Bank and restricted its expansion. The difference today – six arrondissements on the Left Bank against fourteen on the Right – is essentially due to the
differing pace of development, the delayed urbanization on the left side. In the heyday of the ancien régime, while the Right Bank broke its official bounds, all empty spaces were filled, houses rose in height, and construction spilled over its authorized limits, the Left Bank seemed asleep in its colleges, convents and gardens, and did not even manage to fill up the space that regulation attributed to it. This uneven development can be seen on the very banks of the Seine: ‘What an eloquent contrast', wrote Sébastien Mercier, ‘between the magnificent Right Bank of the river, and the Left Bank which is not even paved, and still full of mud and filth! It is only covered by workshops and shacks inhabited by the dregs of the population.' Delagrive's map, dating from 1728, shows a zone of dense urbanization on the Left Bank in a semicircle centred on the Place Maubert. Its outer limits today would be the Pont-Neuf in one direction and the Jussieu University at the other, with its circumference passing through the Odéon intersection, the Luxembourg Métro station and the Place de l'Estrapade, or more or less the walls of Philippe Auguste. On this map, the Faubourg Saint-Germain appears as a quarter of gardens, which it indeed remained. Rue Saint-Jacques, the main route towards Orléans, very soon becomes a country road between the orchards and vegetable gardens of the Ursulines, the Feuillantines, the Carmelites, the Visitandines, the Chartreux, Port-Royal and the Capucines. The other arteries of the Left Bank – Rue de la Harpe, or the sequence of streets Rue Galande/Rue Saint-Geneviève/ Rue Mouffetard leading to the road to Italy – appear in Regency-era Paris as local paths, once the inner zone of greater density has been left behind.

The Left Bank did not really wake up until the late eighteenth century. On the site of the Hôtel de Condé, acquired by Louis XVI to house the Comédiens-Français, Peyre and Wailly designed the Théâtre de l'Odéon – inaugurated in 1782 with Racine's
Iphigénie
– the semicircular space facing it, and the diverging streets Rue de l'Odéon, Rue Crébillon and Rue Voltaire (now Casimir-Delavigne). This was one of the first modern residential developments in Paris, with pavements like those in London.
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The two buildings that still frame the end of Rue de l'Odéon opposite the theatre, with a certain nobility, served as a shopwindow for this operation.

Around the same time, the Comte de Provence, the king's brother and future Louis XVIII, sold off a section of the Luxembourg, where Chalgrin designed the development of Rue de Fleurus, Rue Jean-Bart, and
Rue Duguay-Trouin, though these were not built until later, under the Restoration and the July monarchy. During the Revolution, one of the proposals of the Commission des Artistes was to open up the Chartreux enclosure.
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(‘The Charterhouse garden has a deserted character; the soil of the avenues is unturned; the trees do not bear signs of the sickle, they are puny and bent like the monks who greet you without looking at you', wrote Sébastien Mercier.) This is the origin of the crow's foot whose middle branch is Avenue de l'Observatoire, locating the Paris meridian between Rue de l'Est (now Boulevard Saint-Michel) and Rue de l'Ouest (now Rue d'Assas).

Despite these beginnings, the Left Bank was still very empty in the early nineteenth century. At the time in which
Les Misérables
was set, Montparnasse was counted as one ‘those singular places' with which ‘almost no one is familiar', in the company of La Glacière, Mont-Souris and La Tombe-Issoire. In
The Mysteries of Paris
, when the Chourineur follows the diabolical Tom and Sarah, their cab stops in a night so black that, in order to get his bearings, ‘he drew his knife, and made a gash in one of the trees near which the carriage had stopped': this sinister place was Avenue de l'Observatoire. In 1836, at the corner of Rue Notre-Dame-des-Champs and Rue de l'Ouest, ‘neither of which was paved at this point in time . . . it was only possible to walk beside the wooden fences that enclosed the market gardens, or alongside the houses, on narrow paths that were soon flooded by stagnant water that converted them into streams'.
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At the beginning of
The Mohicans of Paris
, Alexandre Dumas remarks that ‘Paris's Left Bank is naturally stationary, and tends rather to lose people than to gain them', and, as the only new constructions on the Left Bank between 1827 and 1854, he cites ‘the Cuvier place and fountain, Rue Guy-Labrosse, Rue de Jussieu, Rue de l'École-Polytechnique, Rue de l'Ouest, Rue Bonaparte, the Orléans embankment [Gare d'Austerlitz] and the barrier of the Maine [Gare Montparnasse]'.

This gap of nearly a century is explained by the fact that there was nothing on the Left Bank that was in any way equivalent to the Grands Boulevards. Bullet and Blondel did indeed intend the new route to surround the whole city. But on the Right Bank it had the whole of the past to support it, the
ancient course of the Seine, the stones of medieval walls, monuments as solid as the Bastille and the Temple, whereas the ‘boulevards du Midi' were traced amid quarries, fields and windmills, leaving outside them the most important contemporary buildings such as the Invalides, the Observatoire, and the Hôpital Général or Salpêtrière. It was not until much later that the belt of the southern boulevards was completed, in the second half of the nineteenth century, with two consequences that are still evident today: on the one hand, they do not coincide with the actual limit of Old Paris, which did not extend this far, and remains separated from them by a strip of ‘modern' building; on the other hand they were – and remain – above all a route for traffic. The only sector suited for promenading, Boulevard Montparnasse between Avenue de l'Observatoire and Boulevard d'Enfer (now Raspail), was a world away from Boulevard des Italiens: ‘This pavement is not asphalted, but planted with century-old lime trees, full of shade and joie de vivre in the spring . . . In the morning it is invaded by gardeners from the cemetery; in the evening, the silence is broken from time to time by the songs of drunkards coming back from the
barrière
or by the kisses of lovers returning from the radiant country of love.'
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