The Invention of Paris (19 page)

11
Mercier,
Tableau de Paris
.

12
Cited from Victor Champier and G.-Roger Sandoz,
Le Palais-Royal d'après des documents inédits
(Paris: Société de propagation des livres d'art, 1900).

13
Edmond and Jules de Goncourt,
La Société française pendant la Révolution
(1880). Gattey was a royalist bookstore.

14
Champier and Sandoz,
Le Palais-Royal
.

15
The Galerie d'Orléans was constructed by Fontaine, official architect of the Palais-Royal under the Restoration, after the Galeries de Bois were demolished in 1828.

16
Honoré de Balzac,
Lost Illusions
(trans. Marriage). Jules Janin reviewed Balzac's book in 1839, in the
Revue de Paris
: ‘We know how M. de Balzac excels in this kind of muddy description: the rotten wood, the stagnant water, the washed linen in basins hanging from ropes – a worthy treatment for vicious places. Nothing escapes him, not a wrinkle, not a sticky crust of this filthy plague. Despite the power that a writer must have to reach this point, we may wonder what pleasure the readers of M. de Balzac can derive from these horrific details.'

17
Honoré de Balzac,
The Two Brothers
(trans. Wormeley).

18
Gérard de Nerval,
Les Nuits d'octobre
(1852).

19
Honoré Blanc,
Le Guide des dîneurs, ou statistique des principaux restaurants de Paris
(1814).

20
Balzac,
Lost Illusions.

21
Blanc,
Le Guide des dîneurs
. In Balzac's
Lily of the Valley
, when Félix de Vandenesse as a boy dreams of Paris, he imagines that ‘the first day we were to dine in the Palais-Royal, so as to be near the Théâtre-Français', but, after being forced to admit a debt, ‘I was sent back to school in charge of my brother. I lost the dinner at the Frères Provençaux, and was deprived of seeing Talma in
Britannicus
' (trans. Wormeley).

22
Alfred Delvau,
Les Dessous de Paris
(Paris: Poulet-Malassis, 1862).

23
Jean-Marc Léri, for example, relates it in the following terms: ‘It seems that this sacrilege was committed on Easter Day, 2 April 1290, in the house of the Jew Jonathan, which was then given the name of the House of the Miracle' (in
Le Marais, mythe et réalité
, exhibition catalogue [Paris 1987]). In this text, ‘it seems' introduces doubt as to the date, but in no way as to the reality of the fact.

24
The marquise had the idea of placing the staircase on the side of the building, thus freeing the central space and permitting a continuous succession of rooms.

25
The familiars of the famous
chambre bleu
included Malherbe, La Rochefoucauld, Descartes, Saint-Amand, Mme de Lafayette, Mme de Sévigné, Scarron, Vaugelas, Corneille, Rotrou, Ménage, Racan, Voiture . . . For fifteen years, Catherine's daughter, Julie d'Angennes, was courted by Montausier, supposedly Molière's model for Alceste in
The Misanthropist
. Montausier had the idea of offering his beloved an album in which each page was devoted to a flower and each flower compared with Julie: sixty-one madrigals written by Montausier himself and seventeen other poets who were habitués of the hôtel, inscribed on vellum by Nicolas Jarry, the greatest calligrapher of his day, and illustrated by Nicolas Robert. This was the celebrated
Guirlande de Julie
, which she found one day deposited on her bed. It was still another four years before she agreed to marry Montausier.

26
Gérard de Nerval,
Petits Châteaux de Bohême
(1852).

27
It was between these barriers and Rue Saint-Nicaise that the little Place du Carrousel was located, ‘which still keeps this name' – wrote Germain Brice in the 1720s – ‘because this is where the superb tournament was held in 1662, to mark the birth of Monseigneur le Dauphin'. Under the Empire, the destruction had advanced to the point that at the start of Balzac's
A Woman of Thirty
, set just before the Russian campaign, ‘The magnificent review commanded for that day by the Emperor was to be the last of so many which had long drawn forth the admiration of Paris and of foreign visitors'.

28
Adolphe Joanne,
Paris illustré en 1870. Guide de l'étranger et du Parisien
. An anonymous daguerreotype from 1850 shows the Hôtel de Nantes, a building of six storeys in the middle of the empty esplanade, surrounded by cabs and carriages. The caption notes that it was demolished on 1 October 1850 ‘in order to clear the approaches to the Louvre and the Tuileries'. Reproduced in
Paris et le daguerréotype
, Musée Carnavelet exhibition catalogue (Paris-Musées, 1989).

29
Heinrich Heine,
French Affairs: Letters from Paris
(trans. Leland), 27 May 1832. And almost the same year, Victor Hugo wrote in
Notre-Dame de Paris
: ‘If it is according to rule that the architecture of a building should be adapted to its purpose in such a manner that this purpose shall be immediately apparent from the mere aspect of the building, one cannot be too much amazed at a structure which might be indifferently – the palace of a king, a house of commons, a town hall, a college, a riding school, an academy, a warehouse, a courthouse, a museum, a barracks, a sepulchre, a temple, or a theatre. However, it is an Exchange.'

30
After the Liberation, the name of a proletarian heroine, Danielle Casanova, was given to the section of Rue des Petits-Champs above Avenue de l'Opéra.

31
Germain Brice,
Nouvelle Description de la ville de Paris et de tout ce qu'elle contient de plus remarquable
(Paris, 1725).

32
Jean-Christophe Bailly,
Panoramiques. La tâche du lecteur
(Paris: Christian Bourgois, 2000).

33
The Imprimerie then left for an outbuilding of the Hôtel de Rohan, in Rue Vieille-du-Temple, where it remained until it was moved to Rue de la Convention in 1925.

34
Brice,
Nouvelle Description de la ville de Paris
.

35
Since the nineteenth century this building, redesigned in the wake of two fires, has been the venue of the Opéra-Comique.

36
This building is today occupied by the Banque de France's welfare services, but here again the adjoining streets – Monsigny, Méhul – recall its musical past.

37
Its name derives from two rich sausage makers, Messrs Véro and Dodat, who undertook the work in 1823, giving rise to the adage that this arcade was ‘a fine piece of art between two quarters'.

38
Paul Léautaud,
Journal
, 23 January 1906.

39
Cited by Henry Bidou,
Paris
(Paris: Gallimard, 1937).

40
Edmond Beaurepaire,
Paris d'hier et d'aujourd'hui
(Paris: Sevin & Rey, 1900).

41
Jules Clarette,
La Vie à Paris
(Paris, 1895).

42
See Jean-Pierre Babelon, ‘Les revelés d'architecture du quartier des Halles avant les destructions de 1852–1854',
Gazette des Beaux-Arts
, July–August 1967. This article reproduces the drawings commissioned by Davioud, with the object of keeping a record of the buildings that would be destroyed.

43
Baltard had begun by constructing a heavy stone pavilion, which Parisians soon came to call the ‘fortress' of the Halles, and which was rejected and demolished.

44
Jean-Aymar Piganiol de la Force,
Description historique de la ville de Paris et de ses environs
(Paris, 1765).

45
This section of Rue de la Ferronnerie is now known as Rue de La Reynie, after the first official to hold the post of lieutenant-general of police, in the latter years of the seventeenth century.

46
Cited in Jean-Pierre Babelon, ‘Le XVIe siècle',
Nouvelle Histoire de Paris
(Paris: Association pour la publication d'une histoire de Paris, 1986).

47
Piganiol de La Force,
Description historique de la ville de Paris.

48
‘Rue aux Fers, running like a river that carries fruit, flowers and vegetables, between the hundred booths on its right and the thousand little shops on its left . . .' Alexandre Dumas,
The Mohicans of Paris
(1854).

49
Brice,
Nouvelle Description de la ville de Paris
. One of the fountain's great champions was Quatremère de Quincy.

50
Mercier,
Tableau de Paris
.

51
Louis Chevalier,
L'Assassinat de Paris
(Paris: Calmann-Lévy, 1977).

52
Ibid.

53
Balzac,
Lost Illusions
.

54
Léon Daudet,
Paris vécu
(Paris, 1929).

55
The very origin of the name is unclear: whether a
sentier
or path leading to the rampart, or a corruption of
chantier
(works), building here having started on the site of a large woodyard. Two books recently published are Werner Szambien and Simona Talenti (eds),
Le-Sentier-Bonne-Nouvelle, de l'architecture à la mode
(Paris: Action artistique de la Ville de Paris, 1999), and Nancy Green,
Du Sentier à la 7e avenue, la confection et les immigrés, Paris-New York 1880–1980
(Paris: Le Seuil, 1998). Nadine Vasseur,
Il était une fois le Sentier
(Paris: Liana Levi, 2000), has some interesting material on the economic activity of the quarter today.

56
Apart from the modest Palmier fountain on Rue de Sèvres, however, close to Métro Vaneau, I can see no other architectural evidence of the Egyptomania of that time.

57
There were a number of these, particularly on the Rue de la Truanderie, as already mentioned, Rue des Tournelles, Rue Saint-Denis, Rue de la Jussienne, and on the Butte Saint-Roche, which specialized in prostitution.

58
This is the wall ‘des Fossés jaunes'; see above, p 20, n.9.

59
By extension, the word came to denote shop workers: ‘I do not at all hesitate to write – monstrous as this may seem to serious writers on art – that it was the sales clerk [
calicot
] who launched lithography', Henri Bouchot,
La Lithographie
(Paris, 1895), cited by Benjamin,
The Arcades Project
, p. 57.

60
There existed – and still do – several mounds of the same kind in Paris: the labyrinth in the Jardin des Plantes on which Verniquet constructed his belvedere, La Butte des Moulins whose terrible nighttime fauna has already been noted, and the promontory above Rue Meslay and the pavements of Boulevard Saint-Martin, close to the Place de la République.

61
Hillairet notes that ‘the excavations carried out in 1824 for the foundations of the new church showed successive stratifications over the original ground to a height of nearly 16 metres. The site had been a vineyard, and still intact stocks were recovered from it' (
Connaissance du Vieux Paris
[Paris: Éditions Princesse, 1956]).

62
Piganiol de La Force,
Description historique de la ville de Paris.

63
‘In the evening, people carrying bags and demanding paper notes had to be driven away. There were those with millions in their pocket; some believed they had twelve, twenty, or thirty million. There was the hunchback who lent his hump to speculators as a kind of platform, making himself rich in a matter of days; the lackey who bought his master's carriage. The demon of greed brought the philosopher out of his study, and you could see him mingle in the crowd of gamblers and purchase the paper he wanted' (Mercier,
Tableau de Paris
).

64
Except to the north, near the Boulevards, where the triangle of Arts-et-Métiers and the magnificent parallels of Rues Meslay, Notre-Dame-de-Nazareth and du Vertbois intersect between Rue Saint-Martin and Rue de Turbigo, forming a transition between the Sentier and the Marais.

65
This marsh was the remains of the ancient course of the Seine, which then followed the line of Rues du Château-d'Eau, de Provence, Saint-Lazare and La Boétie, rejoining the present river at the Pont de l'Alma. It thus described a wide meander at the foot of the hills of Belleville, Montmartre and Chaillot.

66
Until the twentieth century, the present Rue du Temple, heading north, went successively under the names of Rue Barre-du-Bec and Rue Saint-Avoye, becoming Rue du Temple at the junction with Rue Michel-le-Comte.

67
On the present site of the Hôtel d'Almeyras, there was in the fifteenth century a ‘house of alms'. ‘It was this asylum that gave the street the name Francs-Bourgeois, since those who stayed in this hospital were “
francs
”, i.e., exempt from all taxes and charges' (Jaillot,
Recherches critiques, historiques et topographique sur la ville de Paris
[Paris, 1782; reissued Paris: Berger-Levrault, 1977]).

68
Piganiol was writing after the destruction, but he had access to archives that have since disappeared. Bedford had acquired lands to the west, as far as what is now Rue de Turenne (at that time still an open sewer). Rue des Tournelles ran between Bedford's lands and the wall.

69
Hurtaut and Magny,
Dictionnaire historique de la ville de Paris et de ses environs
(Paris: Moutard, 1779; reissued Geneva: Reprint Minkoff, 1973).

70
Many religious communities have left their names to Marais streets: the Blancs-Manteaux, the Guillemites, the Hospitalière de Saint-Gervais, the Minimes, the Haudriettes, the Célestins . . .

71
Cited in Jean-Pierre Babelon, ‘Henri IV urbaniste de Paris', in
Festival du Marais
, exhibition catalogue (Paris, 1966).