The Invention of Paris (68 page)

Like any rupture, this dénouement can lead to nostalgia. If it is true, as Michelet put it, that each epoch dreams the following one, it is even more clear that each epoch lives in nostalgia for its predecessor, above all in a period when this sentiment, promoted like a washing-powder, fits marvellously into an ideological scaffolding, the strategy of ‘ends' – of history, of the book, of art, of utopias. Turbulent Paris is on this list of programmatic ‘ends', which does not prevent the necessary measures being taken to conjure away those spectres that some people fear, not without reason, will return to haunt their streets.

‘Each era does not just dream of its successor, but in dreaming it seeks to awaken', wrote Walter Benjamin in his ‘Theses on the Concept of History'. And at the present time, after thirty years of torpor, thirty years in which its centre has been renovated-museumified and its periphery ravaged in silence, Paris is seeking to awaken. The tacit understanding with past generations is beginning to be renewed, and another ‘new Paris' is taking
shape and growing before our eyes, which are not always fully open. It is leaving the west of the city to advertising executives and oil tycoons, and pressing as always towards the north and east. Supported by the
ramblas
, the Boulevards of La Chapelle, La Villette, Belleville and Ménilmontant, it is spilling over the line of hills from Montmartre to Charonne, crossing the terrible barrier of Boulevard Périphérique – in the expectation that this will disappear like its predecessors, be demolished and buried, transformed into a tree-lined promenade – and stretching towards what is already de facto the twenty-first arrondissement, towards Pantin, Le Pré-Saint-Gervais, Bagnolet, Montreuil and what remains of its peach-lined walls. As is the general rule, going back to Philippe Auguste, this expansion, with the disastrous exception of the ‘new towns', is not being effected by administrative measures or government decisions. What is precipitating it is the organism of a big city in perpetual growth, a youthfulness that once again feels itself confined in a Paris that might have seemed immutable and definitive, that of the twenty arrondissements within the concrete wall of Boulevard Périphérique.

One of the Paris walks that is most weighty with meaning and memory is the climb up the Montagne Saint-Geneviève from the Jardin de Plantes and the statue of Lamarck – can we imagine the genius needed to conceive the idea of evolution in the late eighteenth century? – or, if you like, from Cuvier's house, Jussieu's cedar tree, Verniquet's belvedere or Buffon's plane tree. The streets on this slope bear the names of naturalists and botanists, as they were called in this blessed age when science was still innocent. Linnaeus, the great Swede, Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire, the dedicatee of
Old Goriot
, as well as Cuvier, Jussier, Quatrefages, Thouin, Daubenton, Lacépède and Tournefort: certainly a magnificent bunch, whose names, celebrated or sometimes now rather obscure like those of the Latin authors cited by Montaigne, are flashes of light that shine here in the city – just as their counterparts shine in Montaigne's
Essays
. At the top, on a little square – once again shaped like a ‘Y', where Rue de la Montagne-Saint-Geneviève forks to let Rue Descartes go off towards Rue Mouffetard, towards Italy – is the main entrance to the old École Polytechnique. Above its side gates are two great scrolls symbolizing the careers of the school's first students, trained to defend the Republic against threatening tyrants: the symbols of artillery on the left and of the navy on the right. The central gateway is surmounted by five medallions in the antique style, representing the founders of the school. Their features have been eroded by time, and the inscription identifying them is hardly visible. In the middle, the place of honour is given to Monge, the school's first organizer as well as the
founder of descriptive geometry and the theory of surfaces. Beside him are Lagrange, professor at the Turin school of artillery at the age of nineteen, and the first to apply trigonometry to celestial mechanics; Berthollet, disciple and friend of Lavoisier; Fourcroy, whose chemistry lessons at the Jardin des Plantes recall what was noblest about antiquity: in Cuvier's words, ‘it was as if we rediscovered those assemblies in which a whole people hung on the words of a speaker', and the great amphitheatre of the Jardin des Plantes had to be enlarged twice over to make room for the crowd who came to hear this peerless professor. The fifth figure is Laplace, who has his street just opposite. His main claim to fame is his hypothesis on the formation of planets, which he explained to Napoleon. But he was also a physicist, and we owe to him the law defining the relationship between the tension of the walls of a sphere, the pressure within it, and the radius. By extrapolation, Laplace's law applies also to the cylinder, and by further extrapolation, it could be applied to Paris itself. It indicates that, at constant pressure, the tension increases with the radius. Those who think that the game is over in Paris, those who maintain they have never seen an explosion in a museum, those working each day to tidy up the façade of the old republican barracks, should reflect on the variations in the bursting force of Paris, which so regularly surprised all their predecessors over the course of centuries.

1
The barracks which now houses the Garde Républicaine was built on this site at the same time as the Place de République was cleared. Some authors maintain that Daguerre took this picture from the top floor of his house, which was just behind the diorama on Rue des Marais-du-Temple (now Yves-Toudic). The American Samuel Morse, in a letter to his brother dated 7 March 1839, described the picture as follows: ‘The boulevard, generally filled with a chaos of walkers and vehicles, was perfectly empty, except from one man having his boots shined. His feet, of course, could not move, one being on the polisher's box and the other on the ground. This is why his boots and his legs are so clear, while he lacks a head and a body, which moved' (Cited in Françoise Raynaud, ed.
Paris et le Daguerréotype
, exhibition catalogue [Paris-Musées, 1989]).

2
Advertisement for the invention, in 1838 (my emphasis). Fox Talbot, whom some people see as the true inventor of photography (and it was his friend the astronomer John Herschel who coined the word in 1844), titled his first album presenting the marvels of the process,
The Pencil of Nature
.

3
Some eighty years later, André Breton wrote in his preface to the catalogue for a Max Ernst exhibition: ‘Now that a blind instrument allowed them to reach with utter certainty the goal that they had hitherto set themselves, artists rashly claimed to be breaking with the imitation of appearances' (‘Max Ernst', in
The Lost Steps
[Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1996], p. 60).

4
In ‘grand' painting, the only exceptions I know are the fine canvases of Hubert Robert such as
The Demolition of Houses on the Pont-Neuf
(1786) or
The Removal of the Pont de Neuilly
(1772), and a superb
Quai des Orfèvres
by Corot that dates from 1833.

5
In the sixteenth and early seventeenth century,
vedute
of this kind were painted by Flemish artists (Abraham de Verwer, Pieter Bout, Theodor Matham and Hendrik Mommers, well represented in the Carnavelet museum). The French only appeared later in this field. In the second half of the seventeenth century, they included excellent artists such as Raguenet and Pierre-Antoine Demachy, who might have been members of the Académie and exhibited at the Salon, but not their views of Paris.

6
Félix Nadar,
Quand j'étais photographe
. Nadar had photographically copied an extraordinary daguerreotype of Balzac, which he had bought from Gavarni. He remarked that, given Balzac's corpulance, a couple of layers less would have done him no harm.

7
Fox Talbot, inventor of this system, which he called ‘calotype' (from
kalos
: beautiful), considered that this was the true invention of photography. Disputes over paternity are very prominent in the history of these early years. Despite being fed up with the French, Fox Talbot nevertheless visited Paris in the 1840s and took some wonderful photographs.

8
Charles Nègre had exhibited an
Embarkation for Cythera
in the Salon of 1845.

9
Nadar,
Quand j'étais photographe
. Baron James de Rothschild was Balzac's major model for Nucingen in
La Comédie humaine
.

10
Atget, on the contrary, tried to prevent the lower part of his images from being occupied by the pavement; with this object, he did not always pull the shutter fully open.

11
American art historians – the great Meyer Shapiro, T. J. Clark, Robert Herbert, Harry Rand, Michael Fried – have succeeded in thinking outside the frame of exhibition catalogues, crossing disciplines and bringing art out of its ghetto. Nineteenth-century French painting has thus become an American subject, whether we like it or not.

12
11 May 1865,
Selected Letters of Charles Baudelaire
, p. 175. Manet had written to him: ‘I would indeed like to have you here, my dear Baudelaire, insults are raining down on me like hail . . . I would have liked to have your healthy judgement on my pictures, for all these shouts are disturbing me, and it is clear that someone is mistaken.'

13
As we know, Baudelaire himself figures among the characters represented, several of whom are recognizable: Manet and his brother Eugène, Aurélien Scholl, Offenbach, Théophile Gautier . . .

14
T. J. Clark,
The Painting of Modern Life. Paris in the Art of Manet and His Followers
(Princeton University Press, 1984).

15
Thoré, a republican exiled under the Second Empire, was famous under the name of Thoré-Bürger for having ‘rediscovered' Vermeer during the years he spent in the Netherlands.

16
Gautier was a regular at the dinners organized by the Goncourts at Magny, along with Flaubert, Turgenev, Renan, Taine and Sainte-Beuve.

17
See above, p. 146.

18
Meyer Shapiro, ‘Review of Joseph C. Sloane's
French Painting Between the Past and the Present: Artists, Critics and Tradition from 1848 to 1870
',
Art Bulletin
, 36 (June 1954). Cited in Harry Rand,
Manet's Contemplation at the Gare Saint-Lazare
(Berkeley: University of California Press, 1987), p. 8. Shapiro continues by noting ‘the intense contemporaneity of so many of Manet's themes and his positive interest in the refractory, the independent, the marginal, and the artistic in life itself'.

19
In
La Revue blanche
, vol. 44, 1 and 15 February 1897.
The Street Singer
was the first of the several canvases in which Victorine Meurent posed for Manet.

20
When this picture was exhibited at the Salon of 1874, its title was
Le Chemin de Fer
. It had already been purchased by the great baritone Jean-Baptiste Faure, a regular buyer of Manet, who later portrayed him as Hamlet in Ambroise Thomas's opera. When Durand-Ruel took the picture to the United States, he changed its title to give it a ‘French touch'.

21
Le Sémaphore de Marseille
, 3–4 May 1874.

22
Juliet Wilson-Bareau has established after deep investigation, in
Manet, Monet, la gare Saint-Lazare
(exhibition catalogue, Réunions des Musées nationaux and Yale University Press), that the picture was painted, or at least largely sketched out, at the studio of a painter friend of Manet's, Albert Hirsch, whose daughter Suzanne posed for it. This studio was entered from 58 Rue de Rome, but on the other side of the building there existed – and still does – a small garden wedged between the building and the fences that border the railway cutting. This is the space of the picture's foreground, flat by the choice of the painter, but also in reality. Wilson-Bareau has also shown that the door of the building, which can be seen in the background above Victorine's hat, is that of Manet's own studio. Before the construction of the Messageries (now the Garage de l'Europe), the buildings of Rue de Rome could be seen from the bottom of Rue de Saint-Pétersbourg.

23
To keep a record of pictures he had sold, Manet generally made small watercolour or gouache copies on a photograph print.

24
Thadée Natanson,
Peints à leur tour
(Paris: Albin Michel, 1948).

25
Stéphane Mallarmé,
Quelques médaillons ou portraits en pied
. Manet and Mallarmé had become acquainted a year before
La Gare
. Mallarmé lived at that time on Rue de Moscou, a couple of steps away from Manet. He moved to 87 Rue de Rome in 1875. In 1885 he wrote to Verlaine: ‘For ten years I saw Manet every day, and I find his absence today inconceivable.'

26
Those ‘deported' were imprisoned in the territories to which they were sent: Guyana and New Caledonia, whereas those ‘transported' – including Louise Michel, and Rochefort whose
Escape
Manet painted in 1880 – were free in their movements.

27
There was certainly later on Robert Delaunay's
Eiffel Tower
and Matisse's
Notre-Dame
, but these are rather formal investigations of the famous silhouettes. There would also be Utrillo, Chagall, Dufy, de Staël, etc., but this is no longer the same kind of painting.

28
Proust,
The Guermantes Way
,
Remembrance of Things Past
, vol. 2, p. 394.

29
With the exception of the Champs-Élysées gardens and the Bois de Boulogne, descriptions of which are among the most famous passages in the
Recherche
. These are cutoff parts of the city that rather represent the ‘Lartigue's way' side of Proust, perhaps not his best side.