The Invention of Paris (59 page)

It was flâneurs who erected the metropolis into a theoretical object, an instrument of rupture with the forms of the past. The forerunners of this phenomenon that initiated modernity – the big city as raw material, roaming it as support for artistic creation – could already be found in the late eighteenth century.
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The elderly Rousseau, for example, setting out each
day from Rue Plâtrière (now Jean-Jacques Rousseau), crossing Paris on foot to go botanizing. ‘I could never do anything', he wrote in his
Confessions
, ‘sitting pen in hand at my table and paper'. And in his ‘Notes Written on Playing Cards', ‘My whole life has been just one long reverie divided into chapters by daily walks'. In his
Essai sur Jean-Jacques Rousseau
, Bernadin de Saint-Pierre describes him, impeccably dressed, when

at seventy years of age he would go to the Pré-Saint-Gervais in the afternoon, or take a turn in the Bois de Boulogne, without seeming tired at the end of this walk . . . He had two star-shaped holes cut in the soles of his shoes, because of the corns that troubled him . . . He dined at half past twelve. At half past one he would often take coffee at the Café des Champs-Élysées, where we would arrange to meet. He then went off botanizing in the countryside, his hat under his arm in the bright sunshine, even during a heat wave.

Rousseau was able to find the countryside even within Paris: ‘The weather being quite nice, though cold, I went for a walk all the way to the École Militaire, expecting to find some mosses in full bloom there.' Another day, ‘having gone for a walk in the vicinity of Nouvelle-France, I pressed further on; then veering left and wanting to circle Montmartre, I crossed the village of Clignancourt'. (This is followed, in the ‘Ninth Walk', by the famous passage on the ‘little child of five or six squeezing my knees with all his might while looking up at me in such a friendly and affectionate manner that I was inwardly moved'.) Or again: ‘One Sunday my wife and I had gone to dine at Porte Maillot. After dinner we crossed through the Bois de Boulogne as far as the Château de la Muette. There we sat down in the shade on the grass and waited for the sun to get lower so as to return quite easily through Passy afterwards.' (This is where the episode of the wafers offered to the little girls comes in, and ‘that afternoon was one of those of my life which I remember with the greatest satisfaction'.)

Rousseau stressed the harshness of the metropolis, and in his
Reveries of a Solitary Walker
you can hear as a background noise the terrible misery of pre-Revolutionary Paris. The little boy he meets close to the Barrière d'Enfer in the ‘Sixth Walk', ‘a very nice, but lame little boy who, hobbling along on his crutches, goes about quite graciously asking passersby for
alms', belonged to that population of abandoned or lost children who are so common in the police reports. On 19 October 1773, a police commissioner by the name of Mouricaud noted:

There appeared in court Jean Louis Paillard known as Larose dwelling at the Porte Saint-Paul with Madame Blin the wine-seller who stated that last Friday Savary an agent for wet nurses gave him on getting out of the coach from Sens around four o'clock two children returned from the nurse to be taken to their fathers and mothers, one of these being of male sex whose parents lived at La Courtille, and the other of female sex who according to the address given to him by Savary was to be taken to Monsieur Le Roi at the Porte Saint-Martin and that being unable to read various persons read the address to him; that having been unable to find the father of the child either at the Porte Saint-Martin or at the market, he took this child with the other to La Courtille, and after having returned the boy to his father took the girl home with him where she ate and slept.
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Rousseau's shadowy and dilapidated double, whom contemporaries nicknamed Jean-Jacques des Halles, the perverted and fetishistic Restif, was an informer for the police of Sartine and Lenoir, and it was his connections in high places and the blue suit under his overcoat that enabled him to explore the most dangerous places.
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‘Owl!' he exclaims at the start of the first of his three hundred and eighty-eight
Nuits de Paris
, subtitled ‘Le Spectateur nocturne', ‘how many times have your funereal cries made me shudder in the dark of the night! Sad and solitary like you, I wandered alone in the dark through this immense capital: the glow of lampposts cutting across the shadows does not destroy them, it makes them more clear: this is the chiaroscuro of great painters!' Restif lived in the wretched quarter between the Place Maubert and the Seine, on Rue de la Harpe, Rue de Bièvre, Rue des Bernadins and finally Rue de la Bûcherie. He had a little printing press there which enabled him to resume the trade of his youth and to publish
his own works: ‘He only typeset his own works, and he was so productive that he no longer took the trouble to write them first: standing before his type-case, the fire of enthusiasm in his eyes, he assembled letter by letter in his composing-stick these pages, inspired and full of mistakes, on whose bizarre spelling and calculated eccentricities everyone remarked.'
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Restif's field of action was above all the Marais and the Île Saint-Louis. Emotional ties attracted him to Rue de Saintonge and Rue Payenne (‘Very late in the evening – as I had been writing until a quarter past eleven, after my manual work – I went to Rue Payenne; I had taken the longest route: it was now half past twelve. The Marquise was at her window . . .') But he also haunted Les Halles and the Boulevards:

In the evening, after leaving work, I wandered in the surroundings of the Marquise's quarter, but it was not yet time to see her. I went as far as Rue de la Haute-Borne . . . I retraced my steps and entered a wretched beer hall on Rue Basse-du-Rempart, behind the Ambigu-Comique and the Danseurs de Corde: I asked for a light, a pot of wine, and six
échaudés
;
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I took out my paper and my writing case and I wrote
L'Homme de nuit
.

Ever ready to rescue young women in danger, especially if they were pretty, Restif was undoubtedly the first to describe the pleasure of nighttime wandering in this Paris populated by beggars, whores and thieves, the intoxication that takes hold of someone who has walked for a long while quite alone, and aimlessly, just following the streets.

It was Gérard de Nerval who carried this exploration of nocturnal Paris to an extreme, and Nerval had a very high opinion of Restif. ‘Rousseau's example', he wrote, ‘has no bolder imitator than Restif . . . No writer perhaps has ever before possessed to such a high degree the precious qualities of imagination. Diderot may well have been more correct, Beaumarchais more fluent, but did either of them have even half this wild and quivering
verve, which does not always produce masterpieces, but without which masterpieces would not exist?'
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Nerval's
Les Nuits d'octobre
, a more high-flown version of Restif's
Nuits
, begins with a realist profession of faith. His chapter on ‘The Halles' is the first precise description of the atmosphere of that quarter, which would remain unchanged until the 1970s: the arrival of produce early in the night (‘The little square of the markets begins to grow animated. The wagons of the market-gardeners, the fish merchants, the dairymen and greengrocers constantly cross one another. When the wagoners reach their destination, they refresh themselves in the cafés and bars, which remain open here the whole night'); the sales agents (‘ “These men in work clothes are richer than us”, my companion tells me. “They disguise themselves as peasants. Under their smocks or overalls they are perfectly dressed, and tomorrow will leave their blouse at the tavern and return home in a Tilbury”'); the saleswomen (‘One of them cries: “My little cabbages, make your ladies flower!” And, as it is only wholesale at this time, a large number of ladies would have to “flower” to buy so many bouquets. Another chants the song of her position: “Reinette and Lady apples!” “Red and white Calvilles!”'). Nerval and his friend enter an elegant restaurant (‘The custom here is to order Ostend oysters with a little stew of chopped shallots in vinegar and pepper . . . Then it is onion soup, which is cooked admirably at the Halles, and into which the more refined toss grated Parmesan'), then a wretched dive (‘An immense counter divides the room in two, and seven or eight women ragpickers, regulars in this place, make a display on a bench opposite the counter. The back is occupied by a fairly motley crowd, who often erupt in quarrels'). But Nerval does not stick to his ‘realism' for too long. Already, when his steps lead him to Montmartre, his other district of choice, it is the quarries that he depicts, a place of fantasy par excellence. And at the end he walks in his dream down ‘corridors, endless corridors', a nightmare that prefigures the hallucinated wandering at the end of
Aurélia
:

The stars shone in the firmament. Suddenly it seemed to me that they had just gone out, like the candles I had seen in the church. I believed the end of time had arrived, and we were coming to the end of the world heralded in the Apocalypse of St John. I thought I was seeing a black sun in the deserted sky, and a red globe of blood above the Tuileries. I said to myself: ‘Eternal night is beginning, and it will be terrible. What will happen when men perceive that there is no more sun?'

These first solitary explorers of the city night have a whole line of descendants: Villiers, Huysmans, Apollinaire, Breton – who preferred Restif to Rousseau, and ranked Nerval among those ‘who had heard the voice of Surrealism'.
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But alongside this dark and silent Paris still imbued with the feel of nature, a different city was emerging in the 1830s, a city in which ‘three thousand shop-fronts sparkle, and the great poem of display sings its strophes of colour from the Madeleine to the Porte Saint-Denis'.
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This brilliantly lit city, in which the flâneur swims with the crowd, in which vice, fashion and money display themselves on the Boulevards along with goods for sale, is that of Balzac. This attribution should be taken in the strong sense: the relationship between
La Comédie humaine
and the Paris of the July monarchy is not just one between a work of art and its model. The echo of the regime could not but influence the physiognomy of a work such as Balzac's, as reflected in the fact that certain Russian aristocrats are said to have divided up the roles of Balzac's
Scenes from a Courtesan's Life
and fashioned their lives after those of the characters they had selected. In his
Grand Dictionnaire universel du XIXe siècle
, Pierre Larousse, a Voltairean and republican, who hated Balzac as a defender of throne and altar, judged that ‘his influence on the literature of his time has been no less than his influence on manners in a certain class of society, and in many respects it has been no less deplorable'.

At first glance, Balzac is no less severe towards Paris than was Rousseau. In the preface to
Ferragus
the words ‘monster' and ‘monstrous' recur several times, and he notes how ‘every man, every fraction of a house is a lobe of the cellular tissue of that great courtesan', a metaphor that came very naturally to an admirer of Broussais and Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire. At the start of
The Girl With the Golden Eyes
, the motif of ‘gold and pleasure' is taken ‘for a lantern . . . to explore that great stucco cage, that hive with its black gutters', and the reader is warned: ‘it is not in mere sport that Paris has been
called a hell . . . There all is smoke and fire, everything gleams, crackles, flames, evaporates, dies out, then lights up again, with shooting sparks, and is consumed.' But right in the midst of such moralizing reflections, Balzac lets escape, like a confession, his love for the great city. The same is true in
Ferragus
, where he suddenly exclaims: ‘O Paris! he who has not admired your gloomy passages, your gleams and flashes of light, your deep and silent cul-de-sacs, who has not listened to your murmurings between midnight and two in the morning, knows nothing as yet of your true poesy, nor of your broad and fantastic contrasts.' And, after the long opening of
The Girl With the Golden Eyes
, in which the population of the city, ‘wan and colourless', is ‘like the faces of those houses upon which all kinds of dust and smoke have blown', we suddenly hear an elegiac note: ‘Upon one of those fine spring mornings, when the leaves, although unfolded, are not yet green, when the sun begins to gild the roofs, and the sky is blue, when the population of Paris issues from its cells to swarm along the Boulevards, glides like a serpent of a thousand coils through Rue de la Paix towards the Tuileries, saluting the hymeneal magnificence which the country puts on; on one of these joyous days, then . . .' It is then, in the broad avenue of the Tuileries, that Henri de Marsay catches the eye of an unknown girl, ‘whose rays seemed akin to those which the sun emits, and whose ardour set the seal upon that of her perfect body, in which all was delight'.

Several writers have described how, starting with
The History of the Thirteen
and
Old Goriot
, the stories that make up
La Comédie humaine
are interlinked, the principal and secondary characters reappearing from one book to another and giving the whole construction its unity. But this network or concatenation does not just link people, but also places, as Walter Benjamin noted:

Balzac has secured the mythic constitution of his world through precise topographic contours. Paris is the breeding ground of his mythology – Paris with its two or three great bankers (Nucingen, du Tillet), Paris with its great physician Horace Bianchon, with its entrepreneur César Birotteau, with its four or five great cocottes, with its usurer Gobseck . . . But above all, it is from the same streets and corners, the same little rooms and recesses, that the figures of this world step into the light. What else can this mean but that topography is the ground plan of this mythic space of tradition, as it is of every such space, and that it can become indeed its key.
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