The Invention of Paris (26 page)

Bordering the wall of the Farmers-General, between Rue du Faubourg-Saint-Denis and Rue du Faubourg-Poissonière, descending southward towards Rue de Paradis, the quadrilateral of the Saint-Lazare enclosure belonged to the priests of the Mission throughout the ancien régime. This was the largest enclosure in Paris, even more extensive than that of the Temple. After being nationalized by the Revolution, it was ceded in 1821 to a group of financiers led by the banker Lafitte, and its land used to construct the finest monumental ensemble of the 1830s and '40s. This is where Hittorff built his two masterpieces: the façade of the Gare du Nord, with ‘its central pavilion with wide and luminous bays, its bold columns,
its statues proudly displaying themselves nude, and the two surrounding pavilions',
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and the church of Saint-Vincent-de-Paul, whose stairways and curved ramps form an ideal theatrical backdrop along with the fine buildings of the Place Franz-Liszt. This is also the site of the most harmonious of the Paris hospitals from the nineteenth century, the Lariboisière, adjacent to the Gare du Nord:

In 1846, when construction was begun under the direction of the architect Gauthier, the building was going to bear the name of King Louis-Philippe. The square where it was built was wasteland, bumpy and stony, known as the Clos Saint-Lazare. A few elderly Parisians still remember the lively aspect it had by day, thanks to the crowds of children who met there to play with kites, though in the deep solitude of the night.
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I will describe later on the terrible battles that took place on the hospital building site during the June days of 1848. The establishment was then called the Hôpital de la République, later Hôpital du Nord after the coup d'état of 1851, and took its present name when Countess Lariboisière, who died childless, gave her whole fortune to the city of Paris, which used it to complete the work in 1854.

Along the plebeian faubourgs to the north and east, the wall of the Farmers-General, over the eighty years of its existence, stimulated a very particular kind of urban development, which still leaves its traces in stones as well as minds. This was not the case on the inside of the wall; the raised walkway between the last houses and the wall was a gloomy one. That is where Nerval collapsed on the edge of madness at the end of
Aurélia
(‘I wander, prey to despair, over the abandoned ground that divides the faubourg from the barrier'), also where the Goncourts' Germinie Lacerteux, another poor wanderer, ‘covered the whole space where the mob gets drunk and satisfies its lust on Mondays, between a hospital, a butchery, and a cemetery – Lariboisière, the Abattoir, and Montmartre'.

It was rather outside the wall, on the wide boulevard surrounding it, that a new kind of activity developed:

Once you crossed the wall erected by the Farmers-General, you reached a kind of relative paradise, where barriers and customs posts were
unknown, where the unchallengeable advantages of an independent and unrestrained life were combined with the benefits of civilization. Many emigrants upped sticks and set out for this zone free from duties on meat, wine, cider, beer, vinegar, coal, firewood, gypsum, etc. This is how those villages were formed; their real founder was the Paris
octroi
.
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This zone, with aspect of both a court of miracles and an oriental bazaar,

was in former times still occupied exclusively by outlets for
vin bleu
with burlesque shop signs, with dealers in bric-a-brac, old shoes, old linen, rags and scrap metal; then there were shady hotels, a good number of anonymous business houses, shacks that exhibited sequined phenomena and savant dogs, impossible fish and sword-swallowers; and then again dealers in patched-up suits, who, mounted on trestles, would display their wares in the evenings by the light of smoky torches, thrashing about as if possessed.

The demolition of the wall led to the disappearance of this picturesque fauna, but the present flea markets along the ‘boulevards of the marshals' (Saint-Ouen, Montreuil, Vanves . . .) can be seen as the direct heirs of the stalls of the Romantic era.

It was not just taverns and old-clothes dealers that nestled against the wall, but theatres as well. To reward the Seveste brothers, who had found for him the remains of his brother and Marie-Antoinette, Louis XVIII granted them a monopoly over theatres in this ‘zone'.
⁵⁸
They began with the construction of the Belleville theatre – now a Chinese supermarket, after having first been converted into a cinema in the 1950s. Other stages followed, at Montmartre, Grenelle, and Montparnasse. These theatres enjoyed an exceptionally advantageous position, in terms of repertory, cast, and public. Situated outside the wall, they were treated as provincial theatres, which gave them the freedom to perform plays from other theatres forty days after their premiere. The proximity of the capital brought them a guaranteed audience, delighted at being able on the same evening to see plays from the Odéon, the Gymnase and the Palais-Royal. Finally, they could choose from the best provincial actors, for whom the suburban theatre was the final step before reaching Paris itself.

This arrangement explains the geography of Paris theatres today, most of which are still located on two concentric circles. The inner circle is on the Grands Boulevards, as we have seen (the association of ‘theatre' and ‘boulevard' has not always had the connotation of bourgeois vulgarity). The outer one is the circle of theatres along the wall of the Farmers-General: the Bouffes du Nord, Dullin's Atelier which is the former Montmartre theatre, the Européen behind the Place de Clichy, the Hébertot which was formerly the Batignolles, the Ranelagh, the Grenelle at the corner of Rue du Théâtre and Rue de la Croix-Nivert, the Gaîté-Montparnasse, the Saint-Marcel on Rue Pascal. You can make a circuit of Paris in this way, including all the old cinemas that were onetime theatres.

Because of this zone beyond the wall of the Farmers-General, the northeastern boulevards, from Clichy to Ménilmontant, have been forever marked with the sign of entertainment and pleasure. Sex shops, porno theatres, shops selling X-rated videos, down-at-heel nightclubs, the whole ‘diamantiferous mud' of our time is the lineal descendant of the circuses, music halls, balls, taverns and
maisons de passe
of the Paris of Vidocq and Eugène Sue, and later of Maupassant, Lautrec and Atget.
⁵⁹

If the frontier between the plebeian and the patrician sections of Paris were to be traced through the ring of Right Bank faubourgs, one might hesitate between Rue du Faubourg-Saint-Denis and Rue du Faubourg-Poisssonière, and not without reason: south of the Saint-Lazare enclosure, the region between Rue du Faubourg-Saint-Denis and Rue de Clichy – i.e., the major part of the 9
^th
arrondissement – cannot be read as clearly as the old parts of the eastern and northern faubourgs. This broad zone is indeed crossed by two streets that have the name of faubourgs – Poissonière and Montmartre – but these did not act as the structuring matrix that this status would imply, in the time when thousands of carts rolled over beaten earth and later on cobbles, when the market gardens on either side were slowly transformed into courtyards, barns for animal feed, stables and workshops, when the lands of religious houses and aristocratic parks were sold off or confiscated, divided up and built on. It is only over a timescale of centuries that a faubourg can stimulate and govern the growth of a quarter. Now, if Rue du Faubourg-Saint-Martin was already a major route
in the time of Emperor Julian, and the road that was to become Rue du Faubourg-Saint-Antoine played a major role in Paris at the time of the Crusades, Rues du Faubourg-Montmartre and du Faubourg-Poissonière were not really developed until the late eighteenth century. Moreover, this whole region underwent transformations that were both radical and compact in time. Rue de la Chaussée-d'Antin for example:

In the past [seventeenth] century this was simply a road that began at the Porte de Gaillon and led to the Porcherons, with an open sewer running along it. It was known as the Chemin des Porcherons, the Rue de l'Égout de Gaillon, the Chaussée d'Antin, and finally the Chemin de la Grande Pinte, on account of the tavern that is now run by the famous Ramponeau.
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In the 1770s, when, according to Mercier, the three classes that made money were bankers, notaries and builders, Rue de la Chaussée-d'Antin and those adjacent to it were taken over by financiers. These were Swiss such as Necker, or Mme Thélusson who commissioned from Ledoux the most remarkable hotel of the day – on Rue de Provence, ‘composed of an immense hemispherical arcade, across which could be seen the colonnade of a rotunda, raised on bosses of jagged rock, mingled with bushes'
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– or indeed Farmers-General such as Grimod de La Reynière or Jean-Jacques de Laborde, banker to Louis XVI, who divided up his fief of La Grange-Batelière and had the great sewer covered up at his own expense in order to add value to this land.
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The best architects of the day, Ledoux, Brongniart, Boullée, Célérier and
Vestier, all built houses there for the bankers' lady friends. For Mlle Guimard, the prima ballerina of the Opéra, protégée of the bishop of Orléans, the Farmer-General Laborde, and the Maréchal de Soubise, Ledoux conceived an hôtel with a theatre for private performances and an oval surrounded by a colonnade, after the model of Palladio's Olympic theatre. Decorated by Fragonard and David, this was ‘the happiest and most brilliant assemblage of all the arts . . . The apartments suggested the interior of the palace of Eros embellished by the Graces . . . A warm conservatory within the apartment took the place of a garden in winter. The landscape there is tender without damaging the effect, the trellises are subject to the rules of fine architecture, the arabesques are in no way fanciful . . . You will see a small and delightful bathroom, perhaps unique in the style of its ornaments.'
⁶³

The Guimard hotel was presented by Napoleon to the tsar as an embassy, which did not prevent it from being demolished in 1826 in order ‘to build plastered houses there, which made all Parisians of heart and soul tremble'. In this quarter of the Chaussée-d'Antin, whose splendour it is hard to recapture today, as soon as financial speculation was again at its peak in the mid 1820s (viz. the vexations of César Birotteau), a start was made on demolishing wonderful buildings that were not yet fifty years old. Very soon the big cuttings began: Rue La Fayette was started under Charles X, whose name it bore until 1830. The construction of the Opéra Garnier, the department stores, and eventually Boulevard Haussmann, brought the coup de grâce to this quarter of actresses and dancers, so that today only a few scholars are aware of its remnants, scattered among the traffic jams and perfumeries, shop-windows with Christmas toys and post-Christmas sales.

Between Rue de Trévise, which climbs towards Rue de Montholon, and Rue d'Hauteville, which climbs to Rue Saint-Vincent-de-Paul, this section of the faubourg that was at one time very elegant still keeps its noble aspect, even if it is now basically devoted to the wholesale fur trade. Where Rue du Conservatoire now runs, there was in the eighteenth century the Hôtel des Menus-Plaisirs, a kind of ministry of the arts – people said ‘les Menus' as they say today ‘le Quai d'Orsay' or ‘la Place Beauvau' – where the organization of big public festivals was conceived, as well as the design of the royal furniture.
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The music Conservatoire was founded in these
buildings by a decision of the Committee of Public Safety on 7 Floréal of year II (26 April 1794). Gossec, Méhul and Cherubini were among its first professors. For Sarrette, the director, ‘the gap left by the suppression of the rituals of fanaticism must be filled by the songs of Liberty, and the people must augment with its voice the solemnity of the festivals consecrated to the virtues that the Republic honours'. The stage sets for the festival of the Supreme Being were produced in the workshops of the Menus-Plaisirs from the drawings of David.

In the nineteenth century, other music could be heard in this quarter: at the Alcazar d'Hiver on Rue du Faubourg-Poissonière, the Concert-Parisien on Rue de l'Échiquier, whose star was Yvette Guilbert, and above all at the Folies-Bergère. Young Léautaud, who may have met Manet there, visited the Folies for the first time with his mother:

I had already been to the Boule-Noire, the Élysée-Montmartre and the Comédie-Française; the lighting and costumes were nothing new for me. But what I saw now seemed incomparably more brilliant and coloured, more elaborate and rhythmical, and the women also struck me as more beautiful, compared with those of the Boule-Noire and the Élysée-Montmartre, often rather familiar, and those of the Comédie, always so stiff.
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And Huysmans, before being touched by divine grace:

They are outrageous and they are magnificent as they march two by two round the semicircular floor of the auditorium, powdered and painted, eyes drowned in a smudge of pale blue, lips ringed in startling red, their breasts thrust out over laced corsets . . . You watched, entranced, as this gaggle of whores passes rhythmically by, against a dull red backdrop broken only by windows, like wooden merry-go-round horses that twirl in slow motion to the sound of an organ around a bit of scarlet curtain embellished with mirrors and lamps.
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Between the end of the ancien régime and the fall of the Second Empire, the continual great transformations in what is today the bottom of the 9
^th
arrondissement have wiped three small quarters off the map: Porcherons, Nouvelle-France, and Breda. Very much present in accounts, novels, and
songs of the period, they have disappeared without leaving a trace, not even a street name. ‘The Porcherons', Hurtaut and Magny wrote in their dictionary of 1779, is ‘a particular quarter within that of Montmartre, filled only with taverns in which people consume large quantities of wine, the same as at the Grande Pinte, because it is cheaper here'.
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A rhyme from 1750 says that ‘To see Rome without seeing the Courtille/Where rejoicing crowds swarm/Without visiting the Porcherons/The gathering place of lively lads/Is like seeing Rome without the pope'. In the early nineteenth century, the Porcherons gave way to the housing development of La Tour-des-Dames, and the ‘gathering place of lively lads' became one of the most fashionable quarters of Paris.