The Invention of Paris (14 page)

Elegant cafés and restaurants were more numerous on Boulevard des Italiens than anywhere else (‘Are there still
gandins
, those men of severe dress, at table in the Café du Helder? Do you not notice on the forehead of most of them traces of the sun of Algeria, Cochin-China or Mexico?'
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): the Café de Foy at the corner of the Chaussée-d'Antin, the Café Anglais with its twenty-two private rooms, including the famous Grand-Seize, the Grand-Balcon between Rue Favart and Rue Marivaux, the Café Riche, Café Hardy, Frascati's patisserie on the site of the celebrated gambling house closed in 1837, the Bains-Chinois on the corner of Rue de La Michodière, the Maison Dorée restaurant at the corner of Rue Laffitte, etc. The epicentre was located precisely between Rue Le Peletier and Rue Taitbout, framed at one end by two mythical establishments: on the left, the Café de Paris, and on the right, Tortoni, whose terrace, with three steps leading up to it, was one of the most famous places in the world for all of half a century. Tortoni was frequented by dandies and artists – Manet spent every evening there – as well as financiers: ‘You leave the battlefield of the Bourse to go to the restaurants, passing from one digestion to another. Is Tortoni not both the preface and the dénouement of the Bourse?' And two of the finest villains in
La Comédie humaine
naturally meet here: ‘About one o'clock, Maxime [de Trailles] was chewing a toothpick and talking with
Du Tiller on Tortoni's portico, where speculation held a little Bourse, a sort of prelude to the great one.'
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The main entrance to the Opéra was two steps away, on Rue Le Peletier, and the Passage de l'Opéra with its two galleries – du Thermomètre and du Baromètre – afforded direct access from the Boulevard.

In the sections of Rue Laffitte and Rue Le Peletier adjacent to the Boulevards, there formed in the 1870s something that had never been seen before in Paris, a gathering of art dealers on the same pavement. In 1867, Paul Durand-Ruel moved his gallery from Rue de la Paix to 16 Rue Laffitte, with a branch on Rue Le Peletier.
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At no. 8 on the same street there was already the gallery of Alexandre Bernheim, son of a paint-seller from Besançon, who sold the canvases of his friend Courbet, as well as Corot, d'Harpignies and Rousseau. Despite well-known sarcasms (Albert Wolff in
Le Figaro
, 1876: ‘Rue Le Peletier is having a bad time. After the fire at the Opéra, here is a new disaster that has struck the quarter. Durand-Ruel has just opened an exhibition of what is said to be painting . . .') others followed, and in a short while these few metres had become the key territory of art in Paris. Baudelaire wrote to Nadar: ‘If you were an angel, you'd go and pay homage to a certain Moreau, a picture-seller, Rue Laffitte . . . And you'd get from him permission to make a beautiful double photographic copy of
The Duchess of Alba
, by Goya (vintage Goya, utterly authentic).' Manet often said that ‘it's good to go to Rue Laffitte'. Degas, who came down from Pigalle by bus, often visited there as a client. ‘He contemplated Bernheim's Corots,' said Romi, ‘criticized the Fantin-Latours at Tempelaere's, and presented himself with a Delacroix that he had delivered to his house, like a great lord.' Gauguin, who worked at a broker's on the same Rue Laffitte, stopped in front of these magic windows for twelve years until the day when, unable to stand it any more, he abandoned the Bourse for painting. Certain galleries were devoted to Boudin, to Corot, to Daumier; others showed the expensive paintings of Henner, Bouguereau and Meissonier. Close to Durand-Ruel's revolutionary showroom was the respectable gallery of M. Beugnet, who permanently displayed Madeleine Lemaire's bouquets of polished flowers. Every month, an admirer of this society artist came to spray on her violets, carnations and roses a light
cloud of the corresponding perfume. ‘A poetic advertisement!' said M. Beugnet. In 1895, Ambroise Vollard triggered a scandal when he showed fifty canvases by Cézanne in his new gallery at 39 Rue Laffitte (he had previously been at no. 8). Vollard invited guests for dinner in his cellar. As Apollinaire relates in
Le Flâneur des deux rives
, ‘Everyone had heard speak of this famous hypogeum . . . Bonnard did a painting of the cellar, and as far as I recall, Odilon Redon appears in it.' In the same street could be found the offices of ‘the friendly, open-to-all'
Revue blanche
, where diarists, illustrators and friends spent their days – Mallarmé and Jarry, Blum and Gide, Lautrec, Vallotton and Bonnard.

Two reasons explain the catastrophe that struck Boulevard des Italiens and its artistic life, turning the one into a centre of fast food and the other into a gloomy desert. The first was the proliferation of banks and insurance companies, which invaded the quarter at the turn of the century. From the construction of the ponderous building of the Crédit Lyonnais in the 1890s – which caught fire at a most timely moment, when scandal had thrust the bank into public obloquy – to the denaturing of the Maison Dorée in the 1970s by one of the first and worst examples of
façadisation
, each of the pavements on which these ‘strange and wonderful' buildings were located was ravaged. The Banque Nationale de Paris, which owned the whole of the north of the Boulevard from Rue Laffitte to the Richelieu-Drouot intersection, was not content to disfigure the Maison Dorée; it offered there a concentrate of what has since spread to hundreds of Parisian streets and crossroads. Insurance companies divided up the streets of modern art and transformed them into grey canyons peopled by security guards and swept by torrents of cars. They were assisted – and this is the second reason – by the extension of Boulevard Haussmann in the 1920s, the only cutting in the centre of Paris carried out in the twentieth century, which led to demolition on a gigantic scale, in particular that of the famous Passage de l'Opéra:

‘Today, Boulevard Haussmann has reached Rue Laffitte', remarked
L'Intransigeant
the other day. A few more paces by this giant rodent and, after it has devoured the block of houses separating it from Rue Le Peletier, it will inexorably gash open the thicket whose twin arcades run through the Passage de l'Opéra, before emerging diagonally on to Boulevard des Italiens. It will unite itself to that broad avenue somewhere near where the Café Louis XVI now stands, with a singular kind of kiss whose cumulative effect on the vast body of Paris is quite unpredictable.
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Boulevard des Italiens ends at Rue de Richelieu, that's a fact. But didn't elegant life continue beyond this, on Boulevard Montmartre? Did it not stretch to the crossroads formed by the intersection of Rue Montmartre, Boulevard Montmartre and Rue du Faubourg-Montmartre, such a dreadful crossing that it was known as the ‘crossroads of accidents'? Some people replied in the negative: ‘What was then called “the Boulevard” extended only from the Chaussée-d'Antin to the Passage de l'Opéra, perhaps up to Faubourg-Montmartre because of the Variétés, but it was very bad form to be seen any further up. It was rare for dandies to parade beyond the Café Anglais; the Variétés marked their outer limit.'
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For most people, however, it was Rue du Faubourg-Montmartre that formed the border between the elegant and the plebeian boulevards. For Balzac, ‘the heart of present-day Paris . . . beats between Rue de la Chaussée-d'Antin and Rue du Faubourg-Montmartre . . . From Rue Montmartre to Rue Saint-Denis, the physiognomy of the Boulevard changes completely.'
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If Boulevard Montmartre belonged more to artists and shopkeepers than to literary folk and dandies, it still remained for Julien Lemer a recommended promenade, and even the favourite of La Bédollière:

The raging stream we have just crossed [Rue du Faubourg-Montmartre] is a kind of Bidassoa separating two countries, and we are now in the realm of literature. Here are journalists, novelists, diarists, satirists, dramatists, even lecturers . . . It is not without reason that great literary salons and an international bookshop have established themselves on Boulevard Montmartre . . . And all of them, like bees, buzz around the Théâtre des Variétés and the doors of cafés, especially at the absinthe hour . . . The arcades – Jouffroy, Verdeau, the Passage des Panoramas – are what the Palais-Royal used to be. They are silent in the mornings, only disturbed by the steps of apprentices, clerks and shopgirls on their way to work . . . Around eleven o'clock the habitués of the Dîner de Paris, the Dîner du Rocher, and the Dîner du Passage Jouffroy make their appearance . . . At five p.m. sharp, the evening papers are sold from the boulevard kiosks . . . At six o'clock, a great hustle and bustle, the faubourg is on its way down! The inhabitants of the Bréda and Notre-Dame-de-Lorette quarters advance to conquer the Boulevards. The region
is signalled from a distance by the clicking of jade, the scent of musk, the rustling of silk.
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To cross the Montmartre intersection, and proceed along Boulevard Poissonière and Boulevard de Bonne-Nouvelle, meant passing from elegance to commerce, from literature to cottons, from the avant-garde of art to the most traditional crafts:

Le Gymnase vainly displays its charming little façade there; further on, the Bonne-Nouvelle bazaar, as fine as a Venetian palace, has arisen from the earth as if at the stroke of a fairy wand:
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but the effort is completely wasted! The passersby here are no longer elegant, fine dresses would be out of place, the artist and the literary lion no longer venture into these parts . . . One single boulevard in between produces this total change.
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During the daytime, however, Boulevard Poissonière was lively enough:

Enter Baurain's restaurant and you will find a good many representatives of commerce, here to buy and sell velvet, linen, raw or printed cloth, spun or twisted cotton. Enter the Théâtre du Gymnase and you will recognize in the audience leading lights of novelty and calico, applauding Sardou or Alexandre Dumas
fils
as they used to applaud Scribe and Mélesville. Take a turn on the little overlapping promenade, shaded by thin sycamores, on the corner of Rue d'Hauteville. The boys and girls playing there and eating their biscuits were born in the midst of tulle, barege, blond-lace, woollens and silks. They've known since an early age the meaning of Tarare, Saint-Quentin, and A.G. goods.
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The building of Le Pont-de-Fer was located on Boulevard Poissonière, a kind of commercial centre under an immense double metal arcade; also the Dock du Campement that specialized in travel goods, and the house
of Barbedienne, ‘which sells antique models in bronze, reproduced by the Colas process, and medals of David [d'Angers] . . . A little further on are the rooms of the Brébant restaurant . . . the carpet shops of M. Roncier, and, two houses further, the Industrie Française store, with two floors displaying the most varied riches.'
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The section of the Boulevards between Rue du Faubourg-Montmartre and the Porte Saint-Denis is that which has changed least since the nineteenth century, despite the Grand Rex and the rather unfortunate post office on Rue de Mazagran. This is perhaps the reason why the Surrealists made this segment their particular boulevard, even if they also frequented the Passage de l'Opéra and in particular Café Certa – ‘the place where, one afternoon towards the end of 1919, André Breton and I decided to start meeting our friends there, detesting as we did Montparnasse and Montmartre, as well as from a taste for the ambiguity of the arcades' – and the Théâtre-Moderne – ‘that hall with great worn-out mirrors, decorated at the bottom with grey swans slipping through yellow reeds, with enclosed stalls quite deprived of air and light, not at all reassuring'.
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These few metres, which for want of a better name were known as Strasbourg-Saint-Denis, exercised on Breton an attraction that he explained by ‘the isolation of the two gates you see there, which owe their touching aspect to the fact that they used to be part of the Paris city wall, giving these two vessels, as if they were carried along by the centrifugal force of the town, a totally lost look'.
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For him, however, the centre of the world in those years was Boulevard de Bonne-Nouvelle: ‘Meanwhile, you can be sure of meeting me in Paris, of not spending more than three days without seeing me pass, toward the end of the afternoon, along the Boulevard Bonne-Nouvelle between the
Le Matin
building and the Boulevard de Strasbourg. I don't know why it should be precisely here that my feet take me, here that I almost invariably go without specific purpose, without anything to induce me but this obscure clue: namely that it (?) will happen here.'
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Beyond the Porte, Boulevard Saint-Martin played a transition role between the boulevard that was still a little bit bourgeois and the genuinely plebeian boulevard, ‘as the jacket is a transition between the suit and
the overall'.
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What was most striking here in the nineteenth century was its canyon-like aspect: Rambuteau's levelling work had only affected the carriageway, which was subsequently ‘lowered, and so much so, that from the Porte Saint-Martin to the Théâtre de l'Ambigu-Comique it was necessary to install a railing on each side, with steps every now and then. In this place, therefore, the carriageway was set down like a railway . . . When the return of the troops under Marshal Canrobert from the Italian war of 1859 was announced, on the previous evening this part of the boulevard was invaded, the places against the railing were taken, and people spent the whole night there.'

This was the site of some of the great romantic theatres: the Théâtre de la Porte-Saint-Martin, built by Lenoir in forty days on the orders of Marie-Antoinette, where Frédérick Lemaître and Marie Dorval were hailed in
Marion Delorme
, and Mlle George in
Lucrèce Borgia
; the Ambigu, devoted to serious drama (‘this is where you must go, lovers of great plays, dark and mysterious, but in which innocence always triumphs in the end, between eleven o'clock and midnight'
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); the Folies-Dramatiques in Rue de Bondy (now René-Boulanger), ‘where vaudeville is generally played, drama mixed with song, and finally the
Fantaisie
'. For Heine, this is where theatre was at its best, and it steadily declined as one went further east, towards the ‘Boulevard du Crime', finally reaching ‘Franconi's, where the stage scarcely counts as such, as the plays performed there are more fit for horses than for men'.
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