The Invention of Paris (39 page)

There is a further consequence of the abundance of chalk in the hills north of Paris, and one not at all in the realm of the imaginary. Under Philippe le Bel, a decree was promulgated that obliged every new house built in Paris to be covered with plaster. As an excellent fire-resistant and insulator, plaster certainly saved Paris from burning as London did, and it was this measure, enforced for several hundred years, that gave the city its unity of material and colour. Descending from the Place des Fêtes to the Hôtel de Ville through Rue de Belleville, Rue du Faubourg-du-Temple and Rue du Temple, or leaving Barbès-Rochechouart and taking Rue du Faubourg-Poissonière, Rue Poissonière, Rue des Petits-Carreaux and Rue Montorgeuil to reach Les Halles, you pass monuments and large buildings made of cut stone, brick, concrete, glass, plastic and metal. But the connecting tissue, which does not strike the eye but whose great importance is recognized as soon as it is missing, is plaster-covered frontages, in which the close repetition of tall and narrow windows creates a continuous vertical rhythm. No ornaments, no balconies, no shutters, and windowsills scarcely visible in the frames, no relief apart from the thin string-courses on the lower edges of windows, often protected from the rain by a thin zinc strip – also a very Parisian material, both on bistro counters and on roofs to which it gives a grey tint and a very particular ribbing.

These modest façades are an essential part of older buildings in the working-class districts on the periphery. In the centre they accompany aristocratic dwellings in the same way as the left hand on the piano supports the melody. They were certainly applied to constructions that differed according to time and place: in Old Paris, these are houses on narrow plots – eight metres wide, allowing for just two rooms. As you go through the front door, you almost immediately reach the far end of the corridor, and a little courtyard with dustbins is shared with a building giving onto the next street. In the villages of the crown, on the other hand, frontages were wider, up to five or six spans, and behind the buildings facing the street could be a long succession of courtyards, reproducing the outside arrangement on a simpler scale.
⁶⁹
But the construction process was the same: a timber frame, rubble filler, and plaster rendering. This technique was used until much later in the plebeian quarters (‘Cut stone is too heavy and too dear! Plaster, if you please! Tell me about it! It looks good, it's light, it's suited for all kinds of decoration – and besides, it's not expensive!'
⁷⁰
) Just as the Gothic style was still used in Paris in the seventeenth century (Saint-Eustache), and neoclassicism marks many features in the most Haussmannian of constructions (Place Saint-Michel), so buildings in the outlying districts were made of timber framing covered with plaster until the end of the nineteenth century, when the
beaux quartiers
were already into Art Nouveau. It is amazing how the plaster tradition was handed down by the builders who constructed Paris and continue to do so – formerly from the Creuse or Italians, today Portuguese or Malians – preserving the shades of grey that are so particular to the city, varying sometimes towards a very light yellow-pink, and sometimes towards colder and almost bluish tones, but always very discreet and in keeping with the general harmony of the street.

In the late 1860s there still stretched between the Buttes-Chaumont and the boulevards separating Paris from Le Pré-Saint-Gervais a wide and unpopulated zone fissured with ravines. After the old quarry workings were filled in, a horse market was established around the Place du Danube (Rhin-et-Danube since Liberation), which very quickly collapsed. On this land, between Rue David-d'Angers, Rue de la Mouzaïa and Rue de Bellevue, little flowery streets were built, bordered with suburban villas, shacks, and workers' allotments. These bear the names Égalité, Liberté, Solidarité and Prévoyance, resuscitated for the centenary of 1789 on the occasion of an
Exposition Universelle famous for its inauguration, at the other end of Paris, of the Eiffel Tower. These streets fall sharply down towards Boulevard Sérurier and Boulevard d'Algérie, whose curves surround the Square de la Butte-du-Chapeau-Rouge, a magnificent promontory that overlooks the whole of the eastern suburbs, from Pantin to Les Lilas, with the hills of Romainville behind.

Certain quarters of Paris have a character that owes most to history and architecture, others to their economic activity, and others again to geography. None of these criteria, however, is quite suitable for characterizing the hills stretching from Buttes-Chaumont to Père-Lachaise, and defining what makes Belleville and Ménilmontant unique. For my part, I am convinced that these are quarters whose identity is largely an emotional one. I don't mean by this the debut of Maurice Chevalier at the Élysées-Montmartre, nor the plaque on 72 Rue de Belleville indicating that ‘it was on the steps of this building, on 19 December 1915, in the greatest destitution, that Édith Piaf was born, whose voice would later shake the world'. By ‘emotional', I mean – misguidedly, perhaps – ‘arousing the emotions'. Here these are emotions of affection for many people, but there are others as well. If you climb Rue des Solitaires, and reach on foot the immense tower blocks constructed on what was once the Place des Fêtes, it is clear that the managers of domination had a score to settle with Belleville. Architectural aberration and the concern for profit are not enough to explain this brutality; they must have felt towards the quarter the same emotion as those who, a century earlier, wiped the Faubourg Saint-Marceau off the map.
⁷¹
Fortunately, as Raymond Queneau predicted, ‘one day these lovely modern buildings will be demolished/their plexiglass windows broken/their boilers designed at the polytechnique dismantled/ their collective tv aerials severed/their lifts unscrewed/their water-heaters crunched/their fridges crushed/when these blocks grow old/with the infinite weight of the sadness of things.'
⁷²

Belleville and Ménilmontant have a western slope that looks towards Paris, and an eastern one, less steep and shorter, that looks to the outer suburbs. The north-south line of the ridge that divides them follows Rue Pelleport, which, like Rue Compans, Rue Rébeval, and Avenue Secrétan, bears the name of one of the officers who commanded the Paris National Guard, the students of the École Polytechnique and what remained of the regular forces against the Prussian royal guard in the battle of Paris, on 30 March 1814.
⁷³
Rue Pelleport begins from Rue de Belleville close to the Télégraphe Métro station, the culminating point of the eastern hills, where Chappe installed the optical telegraph that brought Parisians news of the victories of Fleurus and Jemmapes. Later on, the third – and present – cemetery of the village was located there, and the reservoirs accompanied by twin water towers whose silhouette is part of the Belleville landscape.

Between Rue Pelleport and the ‘boulevards of the marshals' – here called after Mortier, another hero of the battle of Paris, who ended up as one of the victims in Fieschi's attempted assassination of Louis-Phillipe on Boulevard du Temple
⁷⁴
– there is an undifferentiated band in which it is impossible to distinguish the part belonging to Belleville from that belonging to Ménilmontant. This was formerly an immense estate, from Rue Pelleport to the far side of Boulevard Mortier.
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The château and the park, which encroached substantially on both villages, belonged to a family of the
noblesse de robe
, Le Peletier, also known as de Saint-Fargeau as they owned a domain of that name close to Auxerre.
⁷⁶
This great aristocratic fiefdom corresponds today to the most deprived part of the hill, where the brick public housing of the 1920s alternates with the tower blocks of the 1960s,
cités
as they are termed, using this ancient word with its sense of common
life to denote a world of disintegration of the public space. You can find a certain charm around the reservoirs of Ménilmontant, at the pretty Art Déco stations of the 3
bis
Métro line – it actually has only two stations of its own, Pelleport and Saint-Fargeau – and Rue du Groupe-Manouchian, both in its name and its little houses, but there is nothing really worth visiting in the long rectangle that stretches from the proletarian shacks along Rue Mouzaïa to the little English-style quarter around Rue Étienne-Marey near the Porte de Bagnolet.

It is rather on the western slope of the hill, the Paris side, that Belleville and Ménilmontant display themselves. The boundary between them used to be marked by a place called the Haute-Borne, where the famous tavern of Le Galant-Jardinier was located. It is said that Cartouche was arrested at the Haute-Borne, and it was here on Thursday, 24 October 1776 that Jean-Jacques Rousseau was knocked over by a huge Great Dane, with the terrible results that are well known. (‘It was almost night when I regained consciousness . . . They asked me where I lived; it was impossible for me to say. I asked where I was; they told me: “at the Haute-Borne”. They might just as well have said: “on Mount Atlas”.'
⁷⁷
) Even if Rue des Couronnes is still a plausible border, the division of the hill between Belleville and Ménilmontant is a shifting one, and old inhabitants have different opinions on this subject. Some give the Belleville limits as ‘Boulevard de Belleville, Rue de Belleville, Rue des Pyrénées, Rue de Ménilmontant . . . you see, it's a quadrilateral. The heart was Rue de Tourtille, Rue Ramponeau, Rue de Pali-Kao, Rue des Couronnes'. An old lady says: ‘We were born in Ménilmontant, you know, it's a part of Belleville.' And another man: ‘Everyone has their own Belleville. Mine is bounded by Rue Rébeval, it climbs up in a bend to Rue de Belleville, and then on the other side of the street towards Rue Vilin, and down towards Rue des Couronnes.'
⁷⁸

The opposition between the two quarters is an old one:

There was a great difference between the clientele of the taverns of Courtille and the regulars of the taverns of Ménilmontant; in the latter, in fact, families would come to spend Sundays, and the artisan of the last century would get to know his intended at the dances of the Galant
Jardinier or the Barreaux Verts. At Courtille, on the other hand, the dance halls of the Boeuf Rouge, the Sauvage and the Carotte Filandreuse were frequented mainly by drunkards and girls of easy virtue. At Ménilmontant, therefore, modest lovers and well-behaved diners under the arbour; at the Belleville dances, orgies and battles, with people using knives and biting each other like bulldogs.
⁷⁹

In
L'Apprentie,
a novel by Gustave Geffroy set in Belleville in the wake of the Commune, old Pommier takes his daughters, Céline and Cécile

as far as the lake of Saint-Fargeau, where splendid poplars shade the peaceful waters of a pond . . . and to the dance halls of their old quarter [i.e., Ménilmontant], the Barreaux Verts on the Chausée and the Élysée-Ménilmontant on Rue Julien-Lacroix. The latter place was quite special: a garden with fine chestnut trees, and an almost family welcome. Traditions were kept up there, the clientele and their behaviour were not at all like that in the dance halls of the outer boulevards. Young girls who went down to Paris were nostalgic for this greenery, this music, this décor of first confessions and first revelations.
⁸⁰

In the 1950s you could still hear almost the same words: ‘For me, Belleville and Ménilmontant were two different quarters. If you said at the time that you were from Belleville, you were seen as a bit rough . . . While if you were from Ménilmontant, that was better . . . That's how it was.'
⁸¹

Rue de Belleville begins at the former
barrière
, now the meeting point of four arrondissements. Haussmann had cut Belleville in two, so that the 10
^th
, 11
^th
, 19
^th
and 20
^th
arrondissements touch each other here – like New Mexico, Arizona, Colorado and Utah on the San Juan River. In
L'Apprentie
, it is

a busy quarter, noisy and working-class, commercial during the daytime. It was hard to move between the throng of cabs and buses, trolleys and carts . . . The pavement was just as cluttered. The crowd moved, stopped, chatted and made their purchases between the shops and the vegetable stalls . . . The high street of Belleville was not like Montrouge or Montmartre, the Faubourg Saint-Antoine or even nearby Ménilmontant. The first houses, with their wine-merchants' saloons
filled with enormous counters, their concerts and dances, their hotels with transparent screens brightly lit up by gas – these first houses did not suggest a neighbourhood of work, but conjured up the night-time underworld of prostitution and gangsters, and the memory of Milord l'Arsouille and the ‘descent from the Courtille'.

At the beginning of the century, Dabit saw there ‘a provincial shop, a bespoke tailor, the Cocorico cinema, cafés: the Point du Jour, the Vielleuse with its ten billiard tables, surrounded from six in the morning by players in their shirtsleeves. Hawkers unpacked their wares, street urchins cried the morning papers; sometimes a giant with a tattooed body juggled with 20-kilo weights. You got off at this crossroads as if at a port.'
⁸²

Everything has changed today except the spirit of the place, so that at bottom it is all still the same. Le Point du Jour has been removed along with the left side of Rue de Belleville. La Vielleuse is still in existence, but in a modern building that has taken the place of the house that Vallès/Vingtras depicts on the night of Saturday-Sunday 27–28 May 1871: ‘We responded with musket and cannon to the terrible fire directed against us. At the windows of the Vielleuse, and of all the houses on the corner, our people put up mattresses, whose stuffing smoked under the hail of projectiles.'
⁸³
These two cafés are nicely depicted on one of the itinerant stalls on the central reservation of the boulevard. Three days each week the market reaches up to the Métro station. Every day, the horns, the merry-go-rounds, the crowd around the Métro entrance, the chants of Arab beggars, the sellers of grilled maize, chestnuts, flowers, mechanical toys running around on the pavement, plastic covers for identity papers, and double lines of vans unloading boxes outside Chinese supermarkets: the great port of Belleville is still very active.