The Invention of Paris (35 page)

Grenelle and Vaugirard developed in opposite directions. Vaugirard – today as formerly the region between Rue de la Croix-Nivert and the wall of the Farmers-General (Boulevards de Grenelle, Garibaldi and Pasteur) – became steadily more bourgeois. A guide of 1890 notes that the Saint-Lambert quarter, the old village of Vaugirard, was daily losing its original aspect, and taking on a Parisian look without any particular character. The same source indicates that two of the quarters in the 15
^th
arrondissement, Grenelle and Javel, were covered with factories and chemical plants.
¹⁸
The chemical industry had long been present on the banks of the Seine: at the end of the ancien régime, industrialists supported by the Comte d'Artois had obtained authorization to establish a vitriol factory close to the Javelle mill. This was where the technique for manufacturing sodium
thiosulphate was perfected, the famous
eau de Javel
. In 1792, Chaptal had an immense gunpowder plant built on the deserted plain, viewed as ‘one of the bulwarks of the Republic'. Soon after 9 Thermidor, the plant exploded. The Jacobins were accused, and this was one of the arguments for closing their club and demolishing its premises. In 1796, it was the regiments stationed on the Grenelle plain that the remnant of the Montagnards tried to raise against the Directory. The plotters met at the inn of Le Soleil d'Or, in a house that still stands.
¹⁹
The attempt failed, and ten of its leaders were shot against the wall of the Farmers-General, where the Dupleix Métro station is now.

There was a lot of shooting on the Grenelle plain and against this wall. Under the Directory and the Consulate this was particularly the fate of émigrés, such as Armand de Chateaubriand, a cousin of François-René, who explains in his
Memoirs
: ‘The day of the execution, I wanted to accompany my comrade to his last battlefield; I could not find a carriage, and hastened to the Grenelle plain on foot. I arrived in a sweat, a second too late. Armand was shot against the city wall of Paris. His head was broken, and a butcher's dog was licking his blood and his brains.' Under the Empire, it was the turn of General Malet, and later Louis XVIII had La Bédoyère shot in the same place, after he had rallied to Napoleon during the Hundred Days. His young widow had to pay the soldiers of the firing squad the sum of 36 francs – 3 francs per man. After the white terror, modern Grenelle was founded by an unusual developer, Léonard Violet, who in the 1820s bought and parcelled out a large quadrilateral bordered by what are now Rue de la Croix-Nivert, Rue Javel, Boulevard de Grenelle, the Quai de Grenelle and the Quai de Javel. He built a riverboat station and a wooden bridge that crossed the Île des Cygnes to link the new quarter to the Right Bank. It was at this time that the checkerboard pattern there was established, with street names – Rue du Commerce, Rue des Enterpreneurs – that reflect the optimism of the era. On the square that now bears his name, Violet built a mansion that still survives within the precinct of the fire station, but the new Grenelle was deliberately industrial and working-class. The bourgeois of Vaugirard, disturbed by these neighbours, asked to secede, and their request was granted by prefect Chabrol in 1830, a few days before the Trois Glorieuses.

Grenelle developed rapidly under the July monarchy. The Cail works, on the corner of the Quai and the Boulevard de Grenelle, with a dock on the Seine and a rail connection to the Ouest network, became one of the
main French locomotive works. (When the company left Paris in 1909, the Vel d'Hiv' took over this site,
²⁰
for the better – the Six Jours cycle race, Cerdan, Piaf, and Yvette Horner's accordion – and eventually for the worse – Doriot's rallies, the roundup of Jews in July 1942 organized by the French police on the orders of René Bousquet.) It was also at Grenelle, and more particularly on Rue des Entrepreneurs, that the French aeronautics industry was born. Trials were conducted on a field close to Issy, and in the 1930s André Lurçat even proposed to transform the Île des Cygnes, widening it like an aircraft-carrier runway to make an aerodrome that he called Aéroparis. Meanwhile, André Citroën had converted the shell factory he had established during the First World War on the Quai de Javel into one of the most inventive brands in automobile history.

This past of smoke and steel has left only memories. The name of André Citroën has been given to a garden – undoubtedly the best thing built in the arrondissement in the twentieth century, compensating to some extent for the disaster of the Front de Seine. Vaugirard-Grenelle has become one of the most petty-bourgeois and provincial quarters of Paris. Its heteroclite fabric is a mixture of a few village houses, a few Art Nouveau gems, a good many characterless apartment blocks of the 1880s, and several groups of tower blocks from the 1960s and '70s. In this context of anonymity, Rue Santos-Dumont stands out all the more, with its individual houses with courtyards and gardens, likewise the little Village de l'Avenir at the end of Rue Castagnary – hurry there before they demolish it – the Lebaudy workers' housing estate on Rue de la Saïda, the artists' studios on Rue Pierre-Mille, the end of the Place du Commerce close by the old Grenelle
mairie
, the cedars of the Square Violet, and the apse of the Saint-Lambert church built on the site of a gigantic gasworks. Not forgetting the official celebrities of the quarter: the Objets Trouvés on Rue des Morillons, the Institut Pasteur, the artists' residence La Ruche on the Passage Dantzig, and L'Oiseau Lunaire, quite lost at the end of the little Square Blomet, where Miró and Masson had their studios, and where Artaud, Bataille and Limbour crossed paths with the young Dubuffet.

The 15
^th
arrondissement is separated from the 14
^th
– or, to put it another way, Vaugirard is separated from Plaisance – by the tracks of the Gare
Montparnasse, a fundamental element of the quarter until the construction of the new station in the late 1960s. Désirée and Céline, Huysmans's Vatard sisters, lived on the corner of Rue Vandamme and Rue du Château:
²¹

Their own room was situated at the back of the house overlooking the tracks of the Ouest rail line. A suspension bridge with a six-foot grillwork cut across the tracks at this particular spot. Beneath the bridge there was a passageway for vehicles, topped with a wooden tower ornamented with clocks . . . Bellowing and whistling piercingly, two locomotives manoeuvred on the tracks, searching their way . . . From time to time, a trumpet-like blast sounded, echoed, grew weak, and then once again blared. The gateman closed the barriers. An express train was approaching in the distance . . . The earth shook and in a white haze sprinkled with flashes of flame, a shower of dust and ashes, a gush of sparks, the long train shot into the railyard with a frightful din of clanking metal, shrieking boilers, and moving pistons. It filed past the window, its thundering gradually diminishing until only the three red lights of the caboose could be seen and only the jerky noise of freight cars jumping over rail switches could be heard.

Rue du Château and Rue de l'Ouest are the two original axes of the Plaisance development in the angle formed by Avenue du Maine and Rue Vercingétorix.
²²
This was a wretched development, patched together without any overall plan, and carried out by petty speculators who had the idea of calling it Plaisance to attract clients whom the unpaved streets, which lacked lighting, drainage, and water hydrants, might have put off in the 1840s.
²³
Though severely damaged by Ricardo Bofill (Place de Catalogne)
and the ravages at the beginning of Rue de l'Ouest, Plaisance still remains a plebeian quarter whose charm owes a great deal to its isolation: it is hardly connected to Avenue du Maine, and on the other side the roads are almost impossible to cross. On the transversal streets – Rue de la Sablière, Rue de Plaisance, Rue Pernety – the buildings are those of the original development: narrow, low, homogeneous and poor beneath their plaster rendering. The houses, workshops, little gardens and hydrangeas of Rue des Thermopyles – named on account of its narrowness that evokes the gorge in Thessaly – are a threatened rarity (Rue Léonidas, a few steps to the east, was disfigured in the 1970s). This is a quarter where individuals seeking quiet formerly took refuge – Marcel Duhamel, Jacques Prévert or Yves Tanguy, and Raymond Queneau at 54 Rue du Château, which in the 1920s formed the third apex of the surrealist triangle, along with Rue Blomet and Rue Fontaine.
²⁴
In the 1950s, Alberto Giacometti had his studio on Rue Hippolyte-Maindron, and, among the hundreds of photographs taken of him, my favourite is that in which Cartier-Bresson captured him crossing the corner of Rue d'Alésia in the rain, with his raincoat pulled over his head.

During these days of public-transport strike we have been forced, whether we like it or not, to retreat into ourselves rather more than we generally do . . . It is in circumstances such as these that you notice how the arrondissement forms a little town of its own, quite complete within the city, a twentieth of the capital possessing its own
mairie
, its church, its markets and its cinemas. For my part, I have known for a long time that it is possible to live without leaving the
quatorzième
. . . And by chance, this was the festival of the Lion of Belfort. We never failed to visit it on this occasion; we were very fond of it; it was our great fetish, and a kind of virility symbol for the surrounding inhabitants. In its paw it crushes an arrow, which may have a number of symbolic meanings.

That was the inimitable Henri Calet in
Combat
, on 28 October 1946. His own
quatorzième
fell into two parts: one sad and administrative, to the left as you come from the Lion de Belfort; the other, to the right, lived-in and busy, the dividing line being Avenue d'Orléans, ‘formerly Rue d'Enfer, which was our open-air market hall, our Grands Boulevards,
our Champs-Élysées, our Broadway'.
²⁵
Curiously enough, the 14
^th
has not changed a great deal since 1945:

I took the no. 8 bus, now known as the 38, the day it was brought back in service . . . We had a pleasant ride, on pneumatic tyres, from one end of the line to the other. It seemed like a trip back in time; the Lion of Belfort, the Closerie des Lilas, Maréchal Ney who had also made his return (modern wars do not interest him; what he likes is the cavalry charge), the Tarnier clinic, the Luxembourg.
²⁶

From Rue Daguerre to the flea market of Vanves, from the Villa Seurat to the provincial Rues du Commandeur, Hallé, Ducouëdic and Sophie-Germain, nothing in his arrondissement escaped Calet. The reservoirs of the Vanne and the miraculously elevated streets that surround them (Rue Saint-Yves, Rue Gauguet, Rue des Artistes), the Montsouris park, the artists' villas on Rue Nansouty, the Cité Universitaire – he was at home everywhere, even at the hospital where he would happily end his days:

I think I shall be in my place here. From the Tarnier clinic to the hospital of La Rochefoucauld, passing the Asile Maternel on Avenue du Maine, takes scarcely fifteen minutes. I have taken about forty years to make this journey; I have dawdled from one asylum to another . . . To grow old on Avenue d'Orléans, then die without pain, simply putting a farewell letter in the post, is not asking the impossible, after all.

The 14
^th
arrondissement, as a residential overflow from the very bourgeois Faubourg Saint-Jacques, escaped massive destruction. The 13
^th
, on the other hand, the proletarian extension of the Faubourg Saint-Marceau, was one of the first to undergo the disasters of the postwar era, even before the bulldozers went to work on the heights of Belleville. As early as the 1950s, a start was made on destroying the Glacière quarter, then that of Maison-Blanche. This was followed by the Italie quarter, stretching broadly along Boulevard Vincent-Auriol. Today, demolition along the Seine is almost complete, where gloomy bistrots used to welcome bargemen and warehouse workers. (One of these on the Quai de la Gare, called La Maison Rouge, remained for many years standing alone like the Hôtel de Nantes on the Place du Carrousel).

There remain in the 13
^th
arrondissement, scattered in a dislocated fabric, some fortunate islands such as the Place des Peupliers (now de l'Abbé-Hénocque) and the streets radiating out from it, bordered with little houses with pointed roofs, some half-timbered and others in brick, regularly arranged and showing great individual imagination. But among the microquarters of this arrondissement, the most famous is the Butte-aux-Cailles. You can reach this from Boulevard Blanqui, by steps that very properly bear the name of Eugène Atget. Or else from Place Paul-Verlaine, where Louis Bonnier built a swimming pool in the 1920s that could have been designed by Gaudí, filled from an artesian well. Or again climb along the side of Sainte-Anne's church to reach the Place de la Commune-de-Paris. With its fashionable restaurants and neo-Haussmannian street lights, the summit of the Butte-aux-Cailles lacks the guilelessness of the Plaisance quarter, but on its gentle slopes, fine paved passages bordered by low houses and gardens bring you down towards Rue Barrault, Rue Martin-Bernard or Rue Bobillot, named after a sergeant killed in Tonkin during the conquest of Indochina.

The Italie quarter escaped disaster by becoming the main Chinatown of Paris (it might be better to say Indochinatown, as the first Asian immigrants to settle there in the 1970s were ‘boat people' from South Vietnam, though the majority of those now arriving from Southeast Asia are Chinese of the diaspora). Its limits – currently Rue de Tolbiac and the ‘boulevards of the marshals', Avenue d'Italie and Rue Nationale – are slowly and steadily advancing, but the density of restaurants and shops is greatest at the corner of Avenues de Choisy and d'Ivry. There is nothing picturesque in the architecture or décor, unlike the large Chinatowns of New York, San Francisco or Singapore, whether because the ugliness of the tower blocks was seen as irremediable, or because of a preference to avoid difference that might have been due to our famous French hospitality. What is exotic is simply the population, and for anyone who likes not knowing where he has ended up, nothing can rival even the poorest supermarkets, where the shopkeepers do not speak French and the tins of preserves, videocassettes, vegetables and cakes are magnificently coloured but almost impossible to identify.