The Invention of Paris (27 page)

Nouvelle-France was close to the Poissonière
barrière
(now the Barbès-Rochechouart intersection). This part of the Faubourg Poissonière was for a long time called the Chemin de la Nouvelle-France, the name relating to the young offenders who were parked in a nearby barracks after their arrest, before being deported to Canada. In the eighteenth century, a number of great lords had follies built in the midst of the fields, country taverns and windmills of Nouvelle-France:

The Comte de Charolais, a peer of France, governor of Touraine and prince of the blood: to all appearances, he lived in the Hôtel de Condé, but for the girls of the Opéra and a few fellow debauchees he had his real home in a little house with courtyard and garden towards the top of the Chemin de la Nouvelle-France. It was only in the Hôtel de Condé that he was called the Comte de Charolais; in the faubourg he was familiarly called ‘prince Charles', and addressed as ‘
tu
'.
⁶⁸

As for the Breda quarter, this was the upper end of the Faubourg-Montmartre around the then new church of Notre-Dame-de-Lorette, thus a more recent quarter, contemporary with the Boulevards coming into vogue:
⁶⁹

So many kept women, those of the demimonde and its still lower depths, lived in the Breda quarter around Notre-Dame-de-Lorette, that they acquired the popular name of
lorettes
; the term
biche
[literally ‘doe'] was hardly in use until 1852 . . . The property-owners of the Breda quarter, gallant despite themselves, gave hospitality to these outcast women, who, braving rheumatism, were keen to become the first tenants of the new houses. Once they were in possession of the new quarter, from which their turbulence repelled the peaceable and well-behaved bourgeois, they never abandoned it. A joyous, careless, disorderly colony perpetuated itself in this fashion, paying its rent with the most regular irregularity.
⁷⁰

Around 1825, between
The Raft of the Medusa
and
Liberty Guiding the People
, New Paris, which had previously remained in the river basin, crossed Rue Saint-Lazare, surrounded the Porcherons, and climbed the lower slopes of Montmartre, following ‘this steady movement by which the Paris population has abandoned the Left Bank and made its way up the heights of the Right Bank'.
⁷¹
Historians make careful distinctions between the Saint-Georges development, that of the Tour-des-Dames, and Nouvelle-Athènes, and it is true that as you climb from Notre-Dame-de-Lorette to the former Barrière Montmartre (now Place Pigalle), the architecture changes from a polite neoclassicism to the beginnings of Art Nouveau. But the dominant style on these slopes, what created the dazzling city of Balzac, Chopin and Delacroix, was the architecture of the late Restoration and the July monarchy, tastefully picturesque, homogeneous but not to the point of boredom, ornate without being finicky, noble without ostentation, sometimes melancholy like the end of an era, sometimes joyous like a new adventure. And against this calm and regular backdrop, certain masterpieces stand out, whether monumental like the Hôtel de la Païva on Place Saint-Georges, or modest, like the building on Rue Henri-Monnier opposite the Villa Frochot where Lautrec had his studio.

In this new quarter – the taste for living in old buildings scarcely goes back a century – there formed a kind of colony of writers and artists. It all began with theatre folk, already celebrated under the Empire. On Rue de la Tour-des-Dames, Mlle Mars established herself at no. 1, Mlle
Duchesnois at no. 3, and the great Talma at no. 9. Then Chopin and George Sand came to live on the Square d'Orléans,
⁷²
and, to be closer to them, Delacroix moved to Rue Notre-Dame-de-Lorette. It was at this time that he painted his double portrait of the pair. On Rue Saint-Georges, where Balzac's Nucingen installed poor Esther in a ‘leetle balace', the aging tenor Manuel Garcia gave singing lessons. His two daughters, Pauline Viardot and Malibran, would soon reach a fame that is perhaps only comparable with that of Maria Callas in recent times.
⁷³
The magic of this quarter attracted Victor Hugo (on Rue de La Rochefoucauld), as well as Henri Monnier, Gavarni (who would later have his monument on the Place Saint-Georges), Alexandre Dumas, Auber, Boieldieu, and Émile de Girardin – whose salon, hosted by Delphine Gay, had Hugo, Musset, Balzac and Lamartine among its regulars. Later on, Barrès, Wagner and Gounod settled there, as well as the Goncourt brothers before they moved to Auteuil; Murger, whose father was a concierge in Montmartre; Millet; Lautrec; Gustave Moreau; and Villiers de L'Isle-Adam, who died at 45 Rue Fontaine, almost opposite the building where André Breton lived.

In
Le Petit Ami
, a marvellous little book, Paul Léautaud recalled his childhood in this quarter at the turn of the century:

The region that was most familiar to me, where my eyes filled with images that I would always keep, was that between Rue Notre-Dame-de-Lorette and Rue Fontaine, Boulevard de Clichy and Boulevard de Rochechouart, and between Rue Rochechouart and Rue Lamartine . . . I spent whole afternoons playing with a flock of charming little girls at the top of Rue Milton, which was then bordered on either side by waste ground surrounded by wooden fences. Each morning, for several years, I accompanied my father to his barber on Rue Lamartine, at the corner with Rue Rochechouart . . . On Rue des Martyrs was the paint dealer with his multicoloured shop front; the
lavoir
with its metal flag; the little bazaar on the corner of Rue Hippolyte-Lebas (Rue Haute-Lebas, as women new to the quarter said, because of the abbreviation on the nameplate) . . . On Rue Clauzel was the girls' school, as well as the house of an artist with its elaborate façade . . . and on Rue Rodier, opposite our own, a house where women with thick face powder sang the whole day long.

When you cross the 9
^th
arrondissement from east to west, you eventually come to Rue de Clichy, across which begins a region as different from La Nouvelle-Athènes as Nana was from Coralie, Manet from Géricault, or Gounod from Cherubini: this is the Quartier de l'Europe. The faded elegance of Rue de Clichy is unmistakable, and yet the Maréchal de Richelieu, before having the Pavillon de Hanovre built, owned a folly there which extended as far as Rue Blanche, and which Louis XV often visited with Mme de Pompadour. A little further up was the debtors' prison, which replaced Sainte-Pélagie (Rue de la Clef, on the Left Bank) in 1826. Creditors who requested the incarceration of a debtor were required to pay thirty francs a month for the prisoner's maintenance. Close to the Barrière (now Place) de Clichy, the Folie-Bouxière – from the name of a Farmer-General – became a celebrated pleasure-ground in the mid 1820s, the Tivoli gardens, where pigeon-shooting first took off in France. Later, it was across these gardens that Rue Ventimille and Rue de Bruxelles were built, as well as the peaceful Square Berlioz where Vuillard had his studio, and which he depicted in his series of
Jardins publiques
.

The plan of the Quartier de l'Europe is a simple one, like that of the Plaine Monceau that followed it. These were the last additions to the quarters in the old ring of faubourgs, and they have been very little altered since their construction – the former under the Restoration and the July monarchy, the latter under Napoleon III.

When the Gare Saint-Lazare and the Quartier de l'Europe arose between 1825 and 1840, this was still almost in the countryside. Up till then, the present site of Rue du Rocher and Rue de la Bienfaisance was known above all for its windmills. Where the Square Henri-Bergson is now, close to the Saint-Augustin church, the land was used for a
voirie
, in other words a refuse dump, and known as Les Grésillons, meaning ‘bad flour'. Between Rue du Rocher and Rue de Clichy there were still fields, some growing potatoes or cereals, others fallow.

Lower down Rue du Rocher was Petite-Pologne.
⁷⁴
‘Porte Saint-Jacques, Porte Paris, the Barrière des Sergents, the Porcherons, the Galiote, the Célestins, the Capucins, the Mail, the Bourge, the Arbre-de-Cracovie, the Petite-Pologne, the Petit-Picpus, these are names of old Paris that float into the new. The memory of the people floats on these wrecks of the past', wrote Hugo in
the fifth book of Part Two of
Les Misérables
. At the end of
Cousine Bette
, when the Baroness Hulot joins Mme de la Chanterie in her pious works,

One of the Baroness's first efforts in this cause was made in the ominous-looking district, formerly known as la Petite-Pologne – Little Poland – bounded by Rue du Rocher, Rue de la Pépinière, and Rue de Miromesnil. There exists there a sort of offshoot of the Faubourg Saint-Marceau. To give an idea of this part of the town, it is enough to say that the landlords of some of the houses tenanted by working men without work, by dangerous characters, and by the very poor employed in unhealthy toil, dare not demand their rents, and can find no bailiffs bold enough to evict insolvent lodgers. At the present time speculating builders, who are fast changing the aspect of this corner of Paris, and covering the waste ground lying between Rue d'Amsterdam and Rue Faubourg-du-Roule, will no doubt alter the character of the inhabitants; for the trowel is a more civilizing agent than is generally supposed.

As far as the change in the population goes, we can say that Balzac's prediction was justified. The cutting of Boulevard Malesherbes led to the disappearance of Petite-Pologne in the 1860s (there was a scent in this region of the expiation of regicide: Malesherbes, Tronche and de Sèze, the three defenders of Louis XVI, each have their street here, and Louis XVIII had the Chapelle Expiatoire constructed by Percier and Fontaine). But the development of the quarter had already begun earlier: in 1826 a finance company had traced the plan of a quarter whose largest square would be known as the Place de l'Europe, with the streets having the names of various capitals. This development took off once Émile Pereire obtained the concession for the railway from Paris to Saint-Germain. Its station was built on Rue de Stockholm with an exit on Rue de Londres, thus right against the Place de l'Europe, under which a tunnel had to be dug.
⁷⁵

And yet in the 1840s success was not guaranteed. Balzac could still evoke in his
Beatrix
‘those solitudes of carved free-stone, the like of which adorns the European streets of Amsterdam, Milan, Stockholm, London, and Moscow, architectural steppes where the wind rustles innumerable papers on which a void is divulged by the words, “Apartments to let”. . . When Monsieur de Rochefide first encountered Madame Schontz, she lived on the third floor of the only house that remained in Rue de Berlin.' It was only under the Second Empire that the Lycée Bonaparte (now Condorcet) became the lycée of the Parisian ‘elite', and the quarter that of the haute bourgeoisie. Many lamented the invasion of metal and coal. As La Bédollière wrote in 1860, ‘the proposal is to throw metal bridges across the Place de l'Europe, and so destroy the garden at its centre. What is constant nowadays?' What distressed him then was precisely what enchants us today, the encounter between the railway and the city, so well seen by Proust: ‘. . . those vast, glass-roofed sheds, like that of Saint-Lazare into which I went to find the train for Balbec, and which extended over the eviscerated city one of those bleak and boundless skies, heavy with an accumulation of dramatic menace, like certain skies painted with an almost Parisian modernity by Mantegna or Veronese, beneath which only some terrible and solemn act could be in process, such as a departure by train or the erection of the Cross.'
⁷⁶

This quarter is still centred on the hexagonal Place de l'Europe, whose particular beauty derives from the contrast between the decreed heaviness of the buildings – colossal pilasters, triangular façades, raised lofts – and the aerial situation, suspended above the rails, open to the winds, bordered by lattices, posts, fences, trees of exotic species in little gardens that are always empty. The cast-iron balustrades and large riveted struts, essential motifs in masterpieces by Monet and Caillebotte, disappeared in 1930. In order to see them, you have to climb Rue de Rome and observe, opposite the Lycée Chaptal, the premises of the former Messageries depot now converted into a garage, whose metal and brick architecture, overlooking the railway, stretches from the Place de l'Europe through to the Boulevard des Batignolles.

If the heavy cast iron has disappeared from the square, the railings are still there, the same as can be seen in the background of two famous pictures – Manet's
Le Chemin de fer
in which Victorine Meurent, wearing round her neck the same black ribbon that was her only garment in
Olympia
, casts her unfathomable gaze against the smoke, and
Derrière la gare Saint-Lazare
, a photograph by Cartier-Bresson that dates from 1932, in which a shadow,
wearing a soft hat, crosses an immense puddle with an improbable leap, while a poster stuck to the railings announces a forthcoming concert by Brailowsky. The streets of the Quartier de l'Europe are full of such ghosts, but for me they rather conjure up the Princesse de Parme as evoked by Proust, ‘as little Stendhalian as is, for example, the Rue de Parme, which bears far less resemblance to the name of Parma than to any or all of the other neighbouring streets, and reminds one not nearly so much of the Charterhouse in which Fabrice ends his days as of the waiting room in the Gare Saint-Lazare'.
⁷⁷

The Plaine Monceau, if we remain strictly within the ‘ring of faubourgs', is bordered by Rue du Faubourg-Saint-Honoré and Boulevard de Courcelles – the frontier with the Quartier de l'Europe being Boulevard Malesherbes. But here the wall of the Farmers-General was very far from the area then built up, and does not play its bordering role as clearly as it does elsewhere, all the less so as it was lowered in a ditch so as not to spoil the view of the rich property owners of the district, just as the Boulevard Périphérique is today where it crosses the Bois de Boulogne. So it is quite legitimate to see the Plaine Monceau as extending across Boulevard de Courcelles through to Boulevard Pereire.