The Invention of Paris (7 page)

The Place Vendôme, for its part, has been endowed by the architects in charge of public buildings and national palaces with an indescribable paving scattered with sheets of brushed steel, and bunker entrances to its underground car park. The chauffeurs dusting their limousines outside Cartier, the Ritz, or Crédit Foncier wear dark suits and dark glasses, and have the appearance of bodyguards. Whenever I pass that way, I think fondly of the National Guards, canteen-women, Gavroches, armed civilians and gunners at their posts, posing in groups for the photographer in front of the debris of the column in May 1871.

Between the gardens of the Palais-Royal and the Boulevards, the district often known as the Bourse quarter is one of the most homogeneous and harmonious in old Paris. In these blocks that are called neoclassical for want of a better word, many buildings date from the reign of Louis XVI, others from the Revolutionary years – Rue des Colonnes, whose miniature neo-Grecian vocabulary, Doric columns without pediment, palm-leaf mouldings and strange windowed balustrades form such an original ensemble that great architects from all over Europe – Gilly, Soane, Schinkel – came to admire and draw it. Others in this style were constructed under the Empire, like Brongniart's Bourse. The paradox of so grandiose a building devoted to so mundane an activity did not escape his contemporaries:

I vex myself every time I enter the Bourse, the beautiful edifice of marble, built in the noblest Greek style, and consecrated to the most contemptible business – to swindling in the public funds . . . Here, in the vast space of the high-arched hall, here it is that the swindlers, with all their repulsive faces and disagreeable screams, sweep here and there, like the tossing of a sea of egotistic greed, and where, amid the wild billows of human beings, the great bankers dart up, snapping and devouring like sharks – one monster preying on another . . .
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The Bourse quarter is crossed by three parallel streets with a more or less north-south orientation – Rue Vivienne, Rue de Richelieu and Rue Sainte-Anne – and two transversals. One of these is very ancient, Rue des Petits-Champs, which links the two royal sites of Place des Victoires and Place Vendôme.
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The other is Rue du Quatre-Septembre, one of the least successful of Haussmann's cuttings. Under the Second Empire it went by the name of Rue du Dix-Décembre, commemorating the election of Louis Bonaparte as president of the Republic in 1848. The Society of 10 December, founded by the prince-president, recruited among the Paris lumpenproletariat caricatured by Daumier's character Ratapoil, playing a role comparable with that of the Gaullist Service d'Action Civique in the 1960s.

For a very long time this quarter has been devoted to three activities that have resisted pretty well the changes in fashion and luxury goods: books, finance, and music. ‘Since the reign of Henri IV,' Germain Brice tells us, the Bibliothèque Royale

had been maintained very negligently on a private house in Rue de la Harpe. In 1666 it was moved to another house on Rue Vivienne, on the orders of Jean-Baptiste Colbert . . . In 1722 it was decided to install it in the Hôtel de Nevers, or rather in the apartments that had been used for some time for the Bank, to which others had been added, built on neglected gardens that were close by, in such a way that the public would have the satisfaction of seeing it to better advantage than before, when it was scattered in a number of rooms in that shabby building on Rue Vivienne.
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From the Regency to the 1990s, the Bibliothèque – royal, imperial, or national – remained in this quadrilateral between Rue Vivienne and Rue de Richelieu. To sum up the spirit of this archaic institution, exasperating and blessed, I would choose Gisèle Freund's photograph of Walter Benjamin at work, with his glasses and his dishevelled hair, bent over a book that he holds open with his left elbow, and taking notes with a large black pen. And as caption I would cite a connoisseur of libraries:

It may well be that in having branches of trees painted high up on the very lofty walls of the Bibliothèque Nationale in Rue de Richelieu, Henri Labrouste, an architect with a literary bent, had an intuition of this connection between reading and nature. That is in any case what one may believe in reading the remark that Benjamin wrote about this room which he knew so well, and which was basically the only true ‘apartment' that he had in Paris: ‘When you leaf through pages below, you can hear a murmur above.'
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The quarter's links with finance also date from the eighteenth century. For Sébastien Mercier, ‘there is more money in this single street' – Rue Vivienne – ‘than in all the rest of the city; it is the capital's purse':

The major counting-houses have their offices there, in particular the Caisse d'Escompte. This is the stamping ground of the bankers, the money changers, the brokers, all who make a trade out of money . . . The whores are more financial here than in any other quarter, and never mistaken in marking out a henchman of the Bourse. These moneymen might have a greater need for reading than any others, so as not to completely lose the faculty of thought; but they don't read at all; they provide material for those who write . . . All the inhabitants of this street are men who literally work against their fellow citizens, without feeling any sense of remorse.

The banks have now left Rue Vivienne for the Boulevards, but there are still several shops that sell coins, where gold is changed just as in Balzac's time.

Rue de la Banque leads from the Bourse to the quarter's other financial institution, the Banque de France. The Hôtel de La Vrillière, designed by François Mansart, was confiscated during the Revolution and the Imprimerie Nationale established there. Robespierre's speeches were printed in runs of 400,000, and Marat needed three presses in the courtyard to print
L'Ami du peuple
. The famous Galerie Dorée – whose paintings by Pietro da Cortona, Tintoretto and Veronese had been transferred to the Louvre to make them accessible to the people – was used as a paper warehouse. The Banque de France took over the building from the Imprimerie in 1808,
³³
and like all banks, it destroyed the marvel that had been entrusted
to it. Mansart's doorway disappeared, which, according to Germain Brice, ‘was seen as his masterpiece because he had been able to preserve the regularity of the Ionic order despite the pairing of columns, which had previously been viewed as very difficult'. The gardens likewise disappeared, on which Sauval had written that they ‘offered two admirable vistas: on the one hand a large parterre surrounded by mock privets, and accompanied by a great number of statues and busts, both ancient and modern, of bronze and marble; on the other, the length of Rue des Fossés-Montmartre [now d'Aboukir], receding towards Rue Montmartre . . . Of all the palaces that Paris contains, only the Palais d'Orléans [Palais-Royal] and this possess such a long avenue, and enjoy such a rare perspective.' In 1870 the Galerie Dorée was likewise demolished, ‘the most perfect in Paris and perhaps in the whole of France', according to Sauval; its fifty metres ended in an overhang supported by a pendentive above Rue Radziwill.

This quarter, with only a single church (Notre-Dame-des-Victoires, where the moneymen met while the new Bourse was being constructed), has had three opera houses – without counting the Opéra Garnier, which is no distance at all as the crow flies. On the square facing the main entrance to the Bibliothèque Nationale, the site of the former Hôtel Louvois, where three streets dedicated to great ministers of the ancien régime – Richelieu, Colbert and Louvois – converge, Victor Louis built a theatre for the great actress Mme Montansier. Its entrance was a peristyle with thirteen arches and a balcony onto the street. The vestibule was supported by two ranks of Doric columns; four monumental staircases painted in white and gold served the five levels. Under a quite fallacious pretext – Chaumette to the Commune, 14 November 1793: ‘I denounce Citoyenne Montansier for having had her theatre built on Rue de la Loi [now Richelieu] in order to set fire to the Bibliothèque Nationale; English money made a large contribution to the construction of this building, and the
ci-devant
queen provided 50,000 écus' – the Convention confiscated the hall and decided to move the Opéra National there, which was done on 20 Thermidor, eleven days after the fall of Robespierre. It was after attending the French premiere of Haydn's
Creation
here that Bonaparte nearly met his end in Rue Saint-Nicaise, and on 13 February 1820, the Duc de Berry was struck by a dagger while coming out of a show. Just as the Château des Tournelles had been razed after Montgomery killed Henri II there with an unfortunate blow of his lance, so Mme Montansier's hall was demolished after the death of the heir to the throne. There was a plan to erect an expiatory monument on the site, but Louis-Philippe preferred to have Visconti construct the graceful Fontaine des Fleuves. All that remains of the opera here are the names of the streets bordering the square – Cherubini, Rameau, and Lully,
whose house is not far off, at the corner of Rue Sainte-Anne and Rue des Petits-Champs, ‘decorated outside with tall pilasters of a mixed order, and a few sculptures that are not badly conceived'.
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After this catastrophe, the Opéra shifted for a few months to the Salle Favart, built in the 1780s on the lands of the Duc de Choiseul, which had up to then been devoted to Italian comedy. Its odd position, with its back turned to Boulevard des Italiens and opening into the little Place Boieldieu, is explained by the desire of the actors not to be mistaken for the mountebanks of Boulevard du Temple.
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In 1821, the Opéra was moved a few metres, crossing Boulevard des Italiens to settle at the corner of Rue Le Peletier. This was the grand Opéra of the nineteenth century, the mythical hall of Rossini, Boieldieu, Meyerbeer, Donizetti and Berlioz, as well as of Balzac and Manet. It also burned down in 1873, and the Opéra spent a few months in the Bourse quarter, at the Salle Ventadour,
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before it moved into the new hall built by Garnier, inaugurated in 1875 with
La Juive
by Scribe and Halévy.

Finance and opera were not mutually exclusive activities. West of Rue de Richelieu (‘street of business and pleasure' in the words of Alfred Delvau), and overspilling the line of what would later be Avenue de l'Opéra, was a mound of rubble, the result among other things of the demolition of the old wall of Charles V and the Porte Saint-Honoré. This Butte des Moulins was one of the high places of Parisian prostitution. At the start of
Scenes from a Courtesan's Life
, the touching character of Esther lives in Rue Langlade, a tiny alley between Rue de Richelieu and Rue Traversière-Saint-Honoré (now Molière):

These narrow streets, dark and muddy, where such industries are carried on as care little for appearances, wear at night an aspect of mystery full of contrasts. On coming from the well-lighted regions of Rue Saint-Honoré, Rue Neuve-des-Petits-Champs, and Rue de Richelieu, where the crowd is constantly pushing, where glitter the masterpieces of industry, fashion, and art, every man to whom Paris by night is unknown would feel a sense of dread and melancholy, on finding himself in the labyrinth of little streets which lie round that blaze of light reflected even from the sky . . . Passing through them by day, it is impossible to imagine what they become by night; they are pervaded by strange creatures of no
known world; white, half-naked forms cling to the walls – the darkness is alive. Between the passenger and the wall a dress steals by – a dress that moves and speaks. Half-open doors suddenly shout with laughter . . . Snatches of songs come up from the pavement . . . This medley of things makes you giddy.

The Butte des Moulins was cleared to allow Avenue de l'Opéra to connect with Rue Saint-Honoré. A photograph by Marville shows the gigantic work this involved, with the new Opéra glimpsed in the background through the dust. But the tradition of love for sale long survived in Rue des Moulins, depicted in Toulouse-Lautrec's famous
Salon
, as well as Rue Chabanais, which before the Second World War still contained one of the most select brothels in Paris – hence the expression that was once very common in
Le Canard enchaîné
: ‘a fine
chabanais
'.

The majority of the great Paris arcades are found between Avenue de l'Opéra, the Place des Victoires, Rue des Petits-Champs and the Grands Boulevards. Some have been renovated, or frozen into museums, like the Passage Colbert. Others have become commercial galleries of semiluxury, like the Galerie Vivienne. But certain of them, however changed from their day of splendour, still keep a particular charm: the Galerie Véro-Dodat – where Mlle Rachel lived, and which housed the offices of Philipon's
La Caricature
– with its dark woodwork and checkerboard paving;
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the Passage Choiseul, where Lemerre published the Parnassians and whose bustle still offers unexpected surprises; and especially the ancestor of them all, the Passage des Panoramas. This took its name from the two wooden turrets framing its sentry on Boulevard Montmartre. A group of painters, including Daguerre, executed panoramic views of Toulon, Tilsit, Napoleon's camp at Boulogne, and the battle of Navarino, on immense canvases close to a hundred metres in circumference and twenty metres tall. At the centre of the rotunda, spectators were immersed in a spectacle lit up from above. Chateaubriand, in his
Itinerary from Paris to Jersualem
, wrote: ‘The illusion was complete, I recognized at first glance the monuments that I had indicated. No traveller was ever confronted with so rude a test; I could not wait for Jerusalem and Athens to be transported to Paris in order
to convince myself of the truth or otherwise.' The rotundas have disappeared, but the Théâtre des Variétés remains, where Offenbach had his triumphs, succeeded by Meilhac and Halévy, Lavedan, Capus, de Flers and Caillavet. It was in front of the entrance that poor Count Muffat waited for Nana, where