The Invention of Paris (28 page)

Its geographical and historical centre is the Parc Monceau. In 1778, Grimod de La Reynière sold this land to the future Philippe-Égalité. Carmontelle, a writer and amateur architect, advised the duke to create an extraordinary English garden, which was known as the Folies de Chartres (Philippe being Duc de Chartres at that time):

You could see there every kind of wonder that the imagination might create: Greek and Gothic ruins, tombs, an old crenellated fortress, obelisks, pagodas, kiosks, warm greenhouses forming a pleasant winter garden, lit up in the evenings by crystal lamps hung from the branches of trees; grottos, rocks, a stream with an island, a mill with the miller's rustic dwelling, waterfalls, a dairy, swings, a game of Chinese quoits, etc.
⁷⁸

Nationalized by the Revolution, and presented by Napoleon to Cambacérès, the park was restored to the Orléans family – i.e., to Louis-Philippe – by the Restoration:

The park is the property of His Majesty King Louis-Philippe I, who allows entrance every Thursday in the summer months on presentation of a ticket, which is rarely refused for societies that make such a request to the superintendent of the king's domains at the Palais-Royal.
⁷⁹

Whether there was a charge for the ticket is not stated, but what is clear is that this land was a speculation for the ‘king of the French'. Balzac, always on the hunt for a ‘good deal', thought of buying a plot in the park. On 6 March 1845 he wrote to Mme Hanska: ‘Finally, I've not said anything more about Monceaux because it is an excellent deal, and concluded I hope. Plon [who was acting for Balzac here] can only settle it by a payment to L-Philippe.' Of course the deal did not come off.

Under the Second Empire, what remained of the park, now much reduced in size, was improved by Alphand, and the surrounding land developed by the Pereire brothers. Without intending to do so, they continued the operation that Philippe d'Orléans had already begun with the Palais-Royal, constructing houses that faced the park and were served by new peripheral roads.
⁸⁰
The quarter was now on the up, and the time was long past when Delacroix could lose his way there (
Journal
, 26 November 1852: ‘Long walk with Jenny along the outer boulevards, Monceau, the Barrière de Courcelles and the Place de l'Europe, where we almost lost ourselves'). Spectacular hotels arose on all sides, like the neo-Gothic extravaganza that Février built on the Place Malesherbes (now Place du Général-Catroux), or that of Saccard in Zola's
The Kill
, who ‘had taken advantage of his good understanding with the Hôtel de Ville to have a key given him of a little gate in the gardens . . . It was a display, a profusion, a crush of riches. The mansion disappeared under sculptures. Around the windows, along the sills, were branches and flowers; there were balconies parallel to baskets of greenery, which supported large naked women with twisted hips, their breasts pointing forward.'

The population of the Plaine Monceau was not entirely made up of scum like Saccard. For many years Manet had his studio on Rue Guyot (now Médéric). Other serious and respected artists and writers also lived there – Gervex, Puvis de Chavannes, Gounod, Debussy, Reynaldo Hahn, Fauré, Messager, Chausson, Dumas
fils
, Edmond Rostand, Henry Bernstein – and it was clearly the focal quarter for Marcel Proust and Oriane de Guermantes.

It is by its faubourgs that the Left Bank as it is today differs most from the Right Bank. Between Rue du Cherche-Midi, the Daguerre market, the Observatoire and the Salpêtrière, apartment prices are sky-high, private educational establishments are most expensive as well as mainly secular, the grocers are Arab and the street sweepers Black. Everything has the good order of a prosperous provincial town, and a certain attention is needed – to texts, to certain streets, to a few high walls – to perceive that these were once the most wretched and dangerous faubourgs, haunted by the sinister couples of crime and punishment, suffering and imprisonment, sickness and death.

This can be shown by citing three texts. The first is from the end of the ancien régime, and depicts the Faubourg Saint-Marceau (also known as Saint-Marcel at this time) as seen by Sébastien Mercier:

This is the quarter where the poorest part of the Paris population live, the most shifty and most refractory to discipline. There is more money in a single house in the Faubourg Saint-Honoré than in the entire Faubourg Saint-Marcel taken together. It is in these dwellings, far from the motion of the centre, that ruined men, misanthropists, alchemists, maniacs and pensioners of limited means hide away, as well as a few studious sages who genuinely do seek solitude, and wish to live completely ignored and cut off from the spectacles of the noisy quarters. No one will ever come to seek them out in this extremity of the city . . . this is a people who lack any relationship with Parisians, the polite dwellers on the banks of the Seine . . . There is in this faubourg more mischief, more inflammable and quarrelsome material, more readiness for mutiny, than in the other quarters. The police fear to press them too hard; they are handled with kid gloves, as they are capable of breaking out in the greatest excesses.

The second text is from Balzac, familiar with this area as in 1829 he lived at 1 Rue Cassini, i.e., at the corner of Rue du Faubourg-Saint-Jacques, which he evoked as follows in
Ferragus
:

Around this spot without a name stand the Foundling hospital, the Bourbe, the Cochin hospital, the Capucines, the La Rochefoucauld hospital, the Deaf and Dumb Asylum, the hospital of the Val-de-Grâce; in short, all the vices and all the misfortunes of Paris find their asylum
there. And (that nothing may lack in this philanthropic centre) Science there studies the tides and longitudes, Monsieur de Chateaubriand has erected the Marie-Therese infirmary, and the Carmelites have founded a convent. The great events of life are represented by bells which ring incessantly through this desert – for the mother giving birth, for the babe that is born, for the vice that succumbs, for the toiler who dies, for the virgin who prays, for the old man shaking with cold, for genius self-deluded. And a few steps off is the cemetery of Mont-Parnasse, where, hour after hour, the sorry funerals of the Faubourg Saint-Marceau wend their way.
⁸¹

The third quotation is from Maxime Du Camp's great work on Paris, written just after the demolition of the
octroi
wall:

The world of thieves . . . has shifted en masse towards the former
barrières
, in these quarters that have been newly annexed to the city, and whose attachment to Old Paris still seems to be no more than purely administrative. Here they get together in taverns where they are certain of not being arrested, but are able to meet up and make arrangements for the dirty tricks they have in mind. It is around the Barrières d'Italie, des Deux-Moulins, de Fontainebleau, du Mont-Parnasse, du Maine, and de l'École-Militaire that these dives open their hospitable doors to all bandits.
⁸²

The common stigmata of the three southern faubourgs did not prevent there from being major differences between them – between Saint-Marceau with
its ragpickers, Saint-Jacques with its sisters of mercy, and Montparnasse with its ruffians. (In
Les Misérables
, you may recall, one of the members of the terrible quartet who ‘governed the lowest depths of Paris between 1830 and 1835' is called Montparnasse: ‘They generally met at nightfall, the hour when they awoke, on the plains that border the Salpêtrière. There they conferred, and, as they had the twelve dark hours before them, they settled their employment accordingly.')

The Faubourg Saint-Marceau has at least one point in common with the Faubourg Saint-Germain: it is a faubourg without a central street. If there is no longer a Rue du Faubourg-Saint-Marceau, any more than there is a Rue du Faubourg-Saint-Germain, it is for precisely the same reason: neither of the two was formed by a radial and centrifugal expansion of Old Paris. These were both very old towns on the periphery, with an independent life outside the city. The Faubourg Saint-Marceau, to be sure, was crossed through its entire length by Rue Mouffetard, which extended to the Barrière (now Place) d'Italie. But it was not this that gave birth to it, or around which it was structured. In
Une vie de cité
, Marcel Poëte explains that the traveller arriving from Lyon or Italy via Villejuif found himself faced with a choice, just outside the Barrière d'Italie. The main branch led towards Place Maubert, through Rue Mouffetard, Rue Bordelle (now Descartes) and Rue de la Montagne-Saint-Geneviève. The other had the same final destination, but by way of Rue du Marché-aux-Chevaux (now Geoffroy-Saint-Hilaire), Rue du Jardin-du-Roi (now Linné) and Rue Saint-Victor. At the point where the two branches forked, the traveller coming into Paris crossed what was known as the town of Saint-Marcel, which in 1612 Du Breuil could still describe as enclosed ‘by high walls that distinguish and divide it from the faubourg of Paris that is also named after the same Saint Marcel'.

From Louis XIV to Louis-Philippe, or more accurately perhaps from La Reynie to Vidocq, the boundaries and topography of the Faubourg Saint-Marceau scarcely changed. It formed the south of what was then the 12
^th
and last arrondissement of Paris, described by Balzac as the poorest quarter of Paris, ‘that in which two-thirds of the population lack firing in winter, which leaves most brats at the gate of the Foundling hospital, which sends most beggars to the poorhouse, most ragpickers to the street corners, most decrepit old folks to bask against the walls on which the sun shines, most delinquents to the police courts'.
⁸³
(This passage, like a
number of others, shows the degree to which Balzac, despite his defence of throne and altar, differed from Tocqueville, Du Camp or Flaubert: you never find in him the least expression of contempt for ordinary people.) Starting from the Barrière de la Gare on the Quai d'Austerlitz (this
gare
being for river traffic), the boundary of the faubourg followed the wall of the Farmers-General (now Boulevards Vincent-Auriol, Blanqui, Saint-Jacques) as far as the Barrière de la Santé (now the corner of Rue de la Santé and Boulevard Saint-Jacques). It then turned towards the city centre, up to what is now the Gobelins intersection, included Sainte-Pélagie and the La Pitié hospital, and came down alongside the Jardin des Plantes to reach the Seine again by Rue Buffon. The Faubourg Saint-Marceau was thus located on the southern slope of the Montagne Sainte-Geneviève, on either side of Louis XIV's wall, represented here by Boulevard de l'Hôpital.

It was in these unwelcoming parts that the royal power decided to construct the Salpêtrière, on the site of a former arsenal. Entrusted to Le Vau, with Libéral Bruant responsible for the chapel, this was the central element in an ensemble known as the Hôpital Général. Hurtaut and Magny list the buildings involved in this: ‘Saint-Jean de Bicêtre, Saint-Louis de la Salpêtrière, Notre-Dame de la Pitié, Sainte-Pélagie, Sainte-Marthe de Scipion, the Enfants-Trouvés and Saint-Nicolas-de-la-Savonnerie'.
⁸⁴
Contrary to what the name may suggest, this Hôpital Général, entirely located in the Faubourg Saint-Marceau apart from the Savonnerie and Bicêtre,
⁸⁵
had nothing to do with medicine. It was rather an instrument for achieving the dream of all who have governed Paris, past and present, to rid the city of scum: ‘The large number of poor and beggars that flood Paris and inconvenience its inhabitants suggested the project of this hospital, for
which the king offered the Château de Bicêtre, several other plots of land, and the building of La Pitié.'
⁸⁶

The ‘great confinement' took place in the year of Pascal's
Provincial Letters
and Poussin's
Blind Orion
:

It was then announced in sermons and in all the Parishes of Paris that the Hôpital Général would open on 7 May 1657 for all the poor who wished to enter of their own accord, and the magistrates ordered the town criers to announce that it was henceforth illegal to beg for alms in Paris; and rarely was an order so well executed. On the 13
^th
, the high mass of the Holy Spirit was sung in the church of the Pitié, and on the 14
^th
the Confinement of the Poor was carried out without any emotion. On that day, Paris underwent a change of face; the vast majority of beggars returned to the Provinces, and the wisest of them thought of leaving of their own accord. Doubtless the protection of God smiled on these great works, for few would have believed that the operation would be executed with such ease, and that success would be so complete.
⁸⁷

Michel Foucault has described at length the population imprisoned in this ‘homeland and place of redemption for both sins against the flesh and offences to reason'. It mingled together ‘venereals', ‘sodomites', prostitutes, blasphemers and attempted suicides, as well as the actually mad, who were never more than a tenth of the total number: ‘It was between the walls of internment that Pinel and nineteenth-century psychiatry discovered the mad; it is here, we should not forget, that they left them, not without having claimed the glory of redeeming them.'

In 1818, the wall of the Farmers-General, which had until then passed in front of the Salpêtrière, was pushed back to its periphery on Boulevard de la Gare (now Vincent-Auriol). The buildings of the Salpêtrière were far less extensive than they are today, and the new course of the wall enclosed a large tract of open land that was for a long time the most obscure and sinister region of Paris. It was ‘in the deserted places beyond the Salpêtrière' that
Montparnasse tried to rob Jean Valjean.
⁸⁸
‘These few streets leading from Boulevard de l'Hôpital and ending at the Barrière des Deux-Moulins', writes Delvau, ‘are bordered by squat houses built with a little plaster and much mud. They resemble rabbit holes or the huts of the Lapps more than the houses of civilized people.'
⁸⁹
Just opposite, on Boulevard de l'Hôpital, was where Hugo located the Gorbeau house in
Les Misérables
: