The Invention of Paris (6 page)

For Diderot or Camille Desmoulins, it was quite easy to pass from the Palais-Royal to the Tuileries. Thirty years later, however, Géricault, Henri de Marsay or Stendhal would have had to cross the new main road through the quarter, Rue de Rivoli, though not yet confront the Avenue de l'Opéra or bypass the enormous mass of Napoleon III's extensions to the Louvre. The Palais-Royal was not hemmed in as it is today, but connected with the Tuileries-Saint-Honoré quarter. A direct connection, or almost direct, as it was still necessary to cross obliquely a quarter that – unlike any other in the centre of Paris – has disappeared without leaving the slightest trace, even in memory: the Carrousel. The verse from Baudelaire's ‘The Swan': ‘Once a menagerie was set up there;/There, one morning, at the hour when Labour awakens,/Beneath the clear, cold sky when the dismal hubbub/Of street cleaners and scavengers breaks the silence,/I saw a swan that had escaped from his cage . . .' is not a purely poetic vision like his ‘Albatross'. Alfred Delvau, rambler and chronicler of street life under the Second Empire, recalled:

It used to be charming, the Place du Carrousel – today populated with great men in stone from Saint-Leu. Charming like disorder, and picturesque like ruins! It was a forest, with its inextricable tangle of wooden stalls and mud-walled shacks, occupied by a crowd of petty trades. I often strolled among this caravanserai of bric-a-brac, amid this labyrinth of planks and zigzags of tiny shops, and I knew its denizens almost intimately – men and animals, rabbits and parrots, pictures and cheap ornaments.
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The Joanne guidebook of 1870 also uses Baudelaire's magic word
baraque
(‘I see only in memory that camp of stalls'), and laments the disappearance of ‘this plethora of little stalls, like a perpetual fair of curiosities, old iron and live birds, that used to stretch from the Musée to Rue de Chartres'.

The extraordinary quarter of the Carrousel lay between the Horloge pavilion of the Louvre and the avenues of the Tuileries. It was bordered on the south, along the Seine, by the Grande Galerie that had linked the two palaces from the time of Henri IV. The inner side of this gallery was adjacent to a street with the name Rue des Orties [Nettles]. To the north, the boundary of the Carrousel was Rue Saint-Honoré. Three streets perpendicular to the river connected Rue des Orties with Rue Saint-Honoré: Saint-Nicaise, Saint-Thomas-du-Louvre and Fromenteau.

The Rue Saint-Nicaise, continuing the line of Rue de Richelieu, would today coincide with the Louvre's ticket offices. On the side of Rue Saint-Honoré it bordered onto a large hospital, the Quinze-Vingts, founded by Louis IX to care – so legend goes – for three hundred knights who had returned blind from the Crusades, the Saracens having put out their eyes. (Curiously, most historians of old Paris relate this story as if it were an established fact, just as they do that of the Jew Jonathan who, around the same time, supposedly boiled a host from the church of the Billettes, which emitted blood – for which crime he was burned alive, as can be seen on Paolo Uccello's predella in Urbino.
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) The hospital precinct sheltered a whole population of craftsmen, exempt from taxation as they also were at the Temple. In 1780, the Quinze-Vingts was transferred to the former barracks of the Black Musketeers in Rue de Charenton, where it remains today.

The Rue Saint-Thomas-du-Louvre would today pass through Ieoh Ming Pei's pyramid. As well as the Hôtel de Chevreuse, it served a building of unparalleled importance in French literature, the Hôtel de Rambouillet. ‘I need not say that it is the most famous in the kingdom,' wrote Sauval, who was a regular there,

as no one has any doubt on this score. The entire
beau monde
has read its praise and description in
Le Grand Cyrus
, and in the works of the most refined minds of the century. Perhaps there is not even any need to recall that in
Cyrus
it is known as the palace of Cléomire, and elsewhere it is always called the palace of Arthénice, an anagram of Catherine, the baptismal name of Catherine de Vivonne, Marquise de Rambouillet, the mansion having been devised by Malherbe. Illustrious figures have all published the name of this heroine to their heart's content, leaving me
almost nothing to say about her hôtel . . . And as well as this, they have also told us that she devised it and gave it its design, that she alone undertook, conducted and completed it. Her fine and elegant taste revealed to our architects conveniences and perfections unknown even to the Ancients, and which they have since extended to all proud and prestigious dwellings.
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By the discoveries that Arthénice made in architecture, by way of a pleasant diversion, it is possible to judge those that she made in literature, where she occupied a pinnacle. The virtue and merit of Catherine de Vivonne attracted to her house, for many years, all fine minds of the court and the century. In her blue chamber a circle of illustrious figures gathered each day, indeed we should say the Academy; for this is where the Académie Française had its origin; and it is from the great minds who attended here that the most noble section of this very considerable body was composed. This is the reason why the Hôtel de Rambouillet was long known as the French Parnassus . . . Those who were not known there were seen simply as ordinary persons, and it was enough to have entered there to be ranked among the illustrious figures of the century.
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Rue Fromenteau followed the moat of the Louvre along the Horloge pavilion, ending up at Rue Saint-Honoré close to Rue de Valois. It always had a bad reputation: ‘Is not Rue Fromenteau both murderous and profligate?', Balzac asks at the start of
Ferragus
. Connecting Rue Fromenteau with Rue Saint-Thomas-du-Louvre, the little Rue du Doyenné hosted a street market where, in the Romantic epoch, eighteenth-century French canvases could be bought at a low price. This is where Cousine Bette lived at the beginning of the eponymous novel: ‘As we drive in a hackney cab past this dead-alive spot, and chance to look down the little Rue du Doyenné, a shudder freezes the soul, and we wonder who can lie there,
and what things may be done there at night, at an hour when the alley is a cut-throat pit, and the vices of Paris run riot there under the cloak of night.' In the 1830s, a group of young writers still little known established themselves in Rue du Doyenné in a kind of squat, their number including Gérard de Nerval:

It was in our common lodgings in Rue du Doyenné that we came to recognize one another as brothers . . . in a corner of the old Louvre des Médicis, very close to the spot where the former Hôtel de Rambouillet stood . . . Good old Rogier would smile into his beard, from the top of a ladder, where he was painting on one of the three mirror frames a Neptune – who looked like himself! Then the two swing doors opened abruptly: it was Théophile [Gautier]. We hurried to offer him a Louis XIII armchair, and he read in his turn his first verses, while Cydalise I, or Lorry, or Victorine, swung nonchalantly in blonde Sarah's hammock, stretched across the enormous salon . . . What happy days! We gave balls, suppers, costumed parties . . . We were young, always gay, and often rich . . . But now I come to the sad note: our palace was demolished. I rummaged through its debris last autumn. Even the ruins of the chapel [of the Doyennés, which was part of Saint-Thomas-du-Louvre], which so gracefully stood out against the green of the trees . . . were not respected. Around that time, I found myself, one day, rich enough to buy back from the demolishers two lots of woodwork from the salon, painted by our friends. I have the two Nanteuil architraves; Vattier's signed
Watteau
, Corot's two long panels representing Provençal landscapes; Châtillon's
Red Monk
, reading the Bible on the curved haunches of a naked sleeping woman; Chassériau's
Bacchantes
, who have tigers on a leash like dogs . . . As for the Renaissance bed, the Médicis dresser, the two sideboards, the Ribera, the tapestries of the
Four Elements
, all that was scattered a long time ago. ‘Where did you lose so many fine things?' Balzac asked me one day. – ‘In misfortune,' I replied, citing one of his favourite phrases.
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Rue Saint-Nicaise was where royalist plotters exploded a bomb on 24 December 1800, while the First Consul was proceeding from the Tuileries to the opera in Rue de Richelieu. The attack killed eight people, and marked the beginning of the end for the Carrousel quarter. Bonaparte realized the danger of having cutthroats like these so close to his residence, and had the damaged houses pulled down as well as a number of others. He
later demolished the stalls and wooden barriers that closed off the Tuileries avenues,
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and had the triumphal arch of the Carrousel constructed as a gateway of honour to the palace. Demolition continued slowly until 1848, when the pace accelerated in order to make work for the National Workshops. ‘Three-quarters of the square was cleared in 1850. There only remained [on Rue Saint-Nicaise] the former building of the royal stables . . . and right in the middle of the new esplanade, the Hôtel de Nantes, which had resisted until the end all the offers of the expropriation assessors. The hôtel has since been demolished, and the royal stables as well.'
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The Carrousel today is a dusty steppe between the Louvre pyramid and the railings of the Tuileries gardens, crossed by a stream of cars – required by some odd notion to navigate a one-way roundabout – and by an underground tunnel whose concrete entrances give a final touch to the whole ensemble. As the triumphal arch makes no sense in the middle of this desert, the idea was conceived of linking it to the Tuileries gardens and the Napoleon III wings of the Louvre by little fan-shaped plantations over which the heads or thighs of Maillol's fat ladies emerge: there are academic gardens just as there are academic painters. Happily, some very fine chestnut trees have been saved, which in summertime provide shade for the ice-cream and postcard sellers around Percier and Fontaine's monument.

In 1946, the Place du Marché-Saint-Honoré was renamed Place Robespierre, a decision reversed in 1950 when the French bourgeoisie raised its head again. Their hatred towards Robespierre had never diminished since Thermidor. Beside the Incorruptible himself – who lodged with his sister Charlotte and brother Augustin in carpenter Duplay's house
at the end of Rue Saint-Honoré – other actors in the Revolution also lived in the Tuileries-Saint-Honoré quarter: Sièyes, Olympe de Gouges, Héron, and Barère whom Robespierre praised in the ambiguous words: ‘He knows everything and everyone, he is ready for anything.' Not that this was a particularly revolutionary quarter, but Rue Saint-Honoré was the geographical axis of political life. Between 1789 and 1791, the club of La Fayette and the Moderates held its sessions in the former convent of the Feuillants, where Rue de Castiglione now runs. The Society of the Friends of Liberty and Equality was remembered in history under the name of the Jacobins club, the buildings of the Dominican order (known as Jacobins in France) having occupied what is now the Place du Marché-Saint-Honoré as far as Rue Gomboust. The Constituent Assembly, the Legislative Assembly, and initially also the Convention, sat in the Salle du Manège in the Tuileries gardens, close to where Rue Saint-Roch comes out into Rue de Rivoli. After 10 August 1792, the Convention moved to the Salle des Machines, which Soufflot had transformed and where Sophie Arnould had previously triumphed in Rameau's
Castor et Pollux
. The Convention tribune, which according to the specifications was a low construction painted in antique green, decorated with yellow pillars with bronzed capitals and three crowns in faux porphyry, was situated close to the present Marsan pavilion. The Committee of Public Safety met in the opposite wing, the south end of the palace.

After Thermidor, the Convention had the Jacobins' premises demolished – Merlin de Thionville having denounced it as a ‘bandits' lair' – and the gap this created was known for a while as the Place du Neuf-Thermidor. But when royalist pressure became worrying, Barras secured the services of a young officer who was seen as a Robespierrist, Napoleon Bonaparte, and made arrangements to protect the Assembly during the royalist uprising of 13 Vendémaire in year IV (5 October 1795); the insurgents were crushed on the steps of the church of Saint-Roch, by grapeshot from an eight-pounder set up at the end of the Cul-de-sac Dauphin, today the part of Rue Saint-Roch between Rue Saint-Honoré and the Tuileries.

The two main squares in the Saint-Honoré quarter are the Place du Marché-Saint-Honoré and the Place Vendôme, and though quite different from one another, they have both experienced similar disfigurement in recent times. The former already suffered a town-planning assault in the late 1950s, when the market that Molinos had built under the Empire was demolished – four halls, and in the middle a fountain supplied by Chaillot's steam pump – and in its place a concrete block constructed that doubles as a fire station and police precint. More recently, the Paribas bank commissioned Bofill to construct a new building there. Aware that his
hollow columns and pseudoclassical fronts were beginning to look tired, the architect conceived a pseudo high-tech building, badly proportioned and completely foreign to the spirit of the place, with a chilling effect that the proliferation of restaurants fails to conceal.