Paris, Paris: Journey Into the City of Light (41 page)

You would not have had to look far to find the city’s sprawling slums. Work was still under way on January 1, 1900, to clear the gypsy encampments and shantytowns from the Champ-de-Mars at the Eiffel Tower’s base. The undesirables had to be removed in haste, en masse. The areas in the shadow of Eiffel’s freshly re-gilt tower were being landscaped and beautified, part of that greatest of turn-of-the-century Paris events, the Exposition Universelle 1900.

Indeed anyone glancing down from the Eiffel Tower—symbol of that other great world’s fair, of 1889—would probably have concentrated his attention not on the damp, wintry city but on the vast work sites of the Exposition Universelle.

Paris had not wanted to host the exposition until a rival plan was put forth by the Germans. But national pride soon prevailed over common sense. By the mid-1890s Paris was piled end to end with rubble and pocked, over an area two and a half miles wide, with holes.

The holes had been dug to build the foundations for dozens of new buildings and fair pavilions, most of which were soon to disappear, with the notable exceptions of the heavily gilded Pont Alexandre III, and the Grand Palais and Petit Palais, the Exposition’s centerpieces.

But the most spectacular holes had been burrowed lengthwise to accommodate the new, electrified
Métropolitain
. The city’s first subway line linked Porte-Maillot in the west to Place de la Bastille on Paris’s eastern edge, and was considered one of the marvels of the civilized world. “What an age! What a century! What a triumph of engineering!
Nom de Dieu!
” exclaimed English chronicler John F. MacDonald, tongue firmly in cheek. “What miracle could compare to this one
—le Métropolitain?”

Electricity was still a novelty in 1900, a metaphor for the positive elements of modernity, and it became the theme of the Exposition, which drew 50.8 million visitors over a period of six months. The fair’s lighting and machinery were powered entirely by dynamos housed in the wildly gaudy Palais de l’Electricité. The huge colonnaded building glowed with five thousand multicolored fairy lights. Its crown was the Fée de l’Électricité (the Spirit of Electricty) riding in a chariot that showered colored sparks and flames. La Ville Lumière, the City of Light, was born, both as Paris’s nickname, and as a self-conscious word-concept meaning “the spiritual and material beacon to the world.”

“The city was at that moment,” wrote Nigel Gosling in
Paris 1900–1914: The Miraculous Years
, “the vessel which held the whole of western civilization within its twenty arrondissements.”

On this drizzly dawn of the twentieth century, Paris did not know it was living in the Belle Époque. That nostalgic name was coined later, once the years of the Third Republic, stretching without a European conflict from the end of the Franco-Prussian War and the Commune (1870–71) to the beginning of the World War I (1913), were over. The Third Republic was an “empire without an emperor,” as the saying then went, for the vast majority of Frenchmen a suffocating, hidebound, class-conscious world on the brink of profound change.

In the year 1900 no one yet spoke of Art Nouveau, either. Originally the term designated the avant-garde fabrics and furnishings designed by William Morris and others in what people called the Arts and Crafts or the Liberty Style. Many were displayed in Paris by Siegfried Bing in his celebrated boutique, Salon de l’Art Nouveau, which gave the style its French name.

Even the term
fin de siècle
meant just that—“end of the century.” Still to be invented—by later generations—were the compound adjective’s iffy connotations: delirious decadence, tortuous mores and manners, an attitude and worldview that matched the riotous, creeping tendrils of the period’s politics, social strictures, art, architecture, and literature.

On that cool January morning of 1900 most Parisians were simply too busy staying alive in their own age to worry about what
fin de siècle
might mean. Even the writer whose work now exemplifies the period for us, Proust, was then only twenty-eight and had barely begun writing his elegantly sinuous, fin-de-siècle prose.

Then as now, everything and its opposite were possible. Paris at the turn of the last century, as writer Hubert Juin notes in
Le Livre de Paris 1900
, was a “Janus city.” Like the twin-headed Roman god of thresholds, of beginnings, it looked backward to the nineteenth century and forward to something it vaguely and uneasily thought of as
la modernité
.

Today’s living memory stretches back to the 1920s, perhaps as far back as World War I, but even a centenarian could not remember for us the mood and events of the year 1900. So while much of the physical city of fin-de-siècle Paris remains, in this twenty-first century of ours we are cut off from personal recollections. We must rely on documents to usher us into this recent past.

To try to get a feel for what it was like to wake up on January 1, 1900, and to throw open the shutters on this strangely familiar city, I headed to the Bibliothèque Historique de la Ville de Paris, the city’s historical library, housed in the sixteenth-century Hôtel de Lamoignon in the Marais. After the ritual to-and-fro, I convinced the head librarian to allow me to peruse several newspapers printed that New Year’s day more than eleven decades ago. Alas,
Le Temps
had disappeared and
Le Petit Journal
was too fragile to touch. But if I was very careful I could have a look at
Le Figaro
.

The leather spine of the huge volume containing the year’s
Figaro
had crumbled. The brittle newsprint had an orange cast and reeked of antique dust. Fittingly, that first day of a workaday century was a Monday. The paper’s front page featured six columns. Two on the left were occupied by “Le Soldat-Labourer,” an editorial on France’s colonial empire. The empire stretched then from Africa to Asia. The editorialist asked, “Will we be able to administer our domain so that our growing wealth and power will not, in future, occasion our ruin?”

A small item in the fourth column titled “Hors Paris” gave news of the steamboats sailing from Marseilles to Sudan or Tonkin. “Les Échos” informed Parisians that the high-pressure weather system would continue, with temperatures in the capital of five degrees Centigrade, sixteen degrees Centigrade in Biarritz, and minus fourteen degrees Centigrade in Moscow. “A Travers Paris” announced the successful crossing of the Sahara by Foureau-Lamy, recounted the prime minister’s Christmas shopping spree; and listed the heads of Paris’s five academies. Finally, the Automobile Club de France, recently formed, made a membership appeal to owners of
voitures sans chevaux
—horseless carriages.

Much of the paper’s far right column concerned the latest discoveries at the Institut Pasteur in the field of blood cells, aging, and sclerosis.

At last my eye fell upon the half-page, column-five piece titled “L’an 1 du XX
^ème
siècle.” The writer’s principal concern was to determine whether this was the first year of the twentieth or last year of the nineteenth century. His reasoning was as follows: if you count from the birth of Jesus Christ, the last year of the first century was 100, not 99, so that
AD
101 (and not
AD
100) was the first year of the second century. Therefore 1900 was the last year of the nineteenth century. “To say the contrary is as absurd as saying the thirty-first of December is the first day of the next year,” he concluded. “If only it were true that 99 was 100, then 2 times 99 = 198 and not 200, and so forth, so that at the end of 1,000 years the world would be 10 years younger!”

Amusingly, in John F. MacDonald’s
Paris of the Parisians
(published in 1900), which I came across later that day, the essay “Nouvelle Affaire!” detailed this same debate raging in Latin Quarter cafés throughout early 1900. Habitués were divided into two hostile camps, “new-century men” versus “old-century men.” All discussions began with the challenge “What’s your age, sir?” If you stated you were thirty, one group would agree while the others would shout, “Ah no, you’re twenty-nine!”

I flipped to the January 2, 1900, issue of
Le Figaro
and discovered a report on a mathematician who, at an unnamed café, calmly demonstrated that the old-century, new-century debate was simply a question of
arithmetic
or
chronology
. The article ended, “and the two men came to blows …”

Pure silliness? Probably not. Old-century men were inclined to look back with horror or delight to the Dreyfus Affair; the Panama Canal scandal that ruined countless French shareholders; the loss of Alsace and Lorraine to Prussia; the Commune (seventeen thousand dead in Paris in a matter of weeks, most of them rebellious poor); the fall of the Divine Right of Kings and the end of Enlightened Emperors; the rise of organized labor; the composition of salons and café-society rivalries; the death of Delacroix and Victor Hugo.

New-century men spoke of the Exposition, of electricity, of horseless carriages, of the Lumière Brothers’ moving pictures, of further colonial domination and economic expansion, of Cézanne, Caillebotte, and Jules Verne.

But that is too neat a picture. These were the anything-goes days of
le parti opportuniste
—a political party whose credo was to leap at every opportunity that arose (only later was the term “opportunist” freighted with negatives). Some monarchists were in fact progressive, and some progressives were anti-Semites and distrusted democracy. Then as now the political left and right blurred.

In the same way that many Parisians of 1900 looked back fondly on the days of the Ancien Régime or the First and Second Empires, conveniently forgetting the misery and bloodshed, today the distorting lens of nostalgia does not encourage us to look clearly at the disconcerting complexity of that 1900, turn-of-the-century, fin-de-siècle Paris.

Belle Époque? Yes, for the happy few, most of them men: the world was a man’s place. Even rich or noble women could not vote. A single woman lawyer, the first in France, was admitted to the Paris bar in 1900. Working women, men, and children alike were lucky if they spent only sixty to seventy hours a week in sweatshops and factories. Newspapers and popular magazines gave advice to the middle classes on how to manage their servants, how to keep them from stealing, moonlighting, or indulging in prostitution.

Prostitution was a way of life for servants, dancers, models, and seamstresses—the quaint figures of all those Degas canvases we now love—because with their salaries they could not feed, house, and clothe themselves. Today most people have forgotten that in 1900
le mal du siècle
was not some philosophical unease. It referred to syphilis, incurable then, the scourge of everyone from Émile Zola’s fictional heroine Nana, to countless real-life men and women of all classes, including Gustave Flaubert and Friedrich Nietszche (both died of it). Sexual repression and licentiousness literally went hand-in-glove: some titillating 1900 models for object-women reached above the elbow, with thirty-two buttons on each glove.

It was in the Belle Époque that the upper classes in particular, frustrated by the stifling customs of the Second Empire and Third Republic, began experimenting openly with their sexuality. Orgies, Sapphism, pederasty, and cross-dressing became fashionable not only with the so-called
hors nature
but also among heterosexual women and men. Absinthe, ether, and alcohol—as captured by Toulouse-Lautrec, Picasso, and others—were the drugs of choice both in private and at the city’s cafés, bars, and music halls.

As regards the quality of life in what we now think of as the quiet, genteel Belle Époque, Hubert Juin provides a fascinating statistic. On a single day in 1900 some 60,000 vehicles, 70,000 horses, and 400,000 pedestrians crossed Place de l’Opéra. In the course of the year, 150 people were killed and 12,000 injured by horses and streetcars in Paris alone. Readers of Proust will recall how in
Swann in Love
the desperate Swann wishes his debauched demimonde lover Odette de Crécy (mistress of men and women alike) would conveniently die in a traffic accident, so dangerous was it merely to step down from her carriage. Street cobbles were made of wood not for aesthetics or safety but in a mostly unsuccessful attempt to attenuate the nightmarish noise of metal-rimmed carriage wheels.

The Seine? A picturesque river dotted with sailboats, indeed, but also an open sewer: garbage collectors dumped their loads into the river from the Pont des Arts, and the untreated effluent of millions flowed into the river’s brown currents.

It was this mixture of wealth and misery, of forward-looking optimism and retrograde nostalgia, that somehow transformed Paris in 1900 into a crucible of creativity and a magnet for the world’s greatest talents.

With that thought in mind I resolved to revisit a handful of my favorite 1900 Paris locales. Near a café called Le Paris-London, on Place de la Madeleine, I took the spiraling staircase down to the famous subterranean Art Nouveau
toilettes publiques
, a lavish cavern of carved wood, brass, and mirrors, with floral frescoes and stained-glass windows in each
cabinet
. I awoke the sleeping
Madame Pipì
, as the French still coyly call bathroom attendants, and once I’d tidied up as a fin-de-siècle gentleman would’ve, I set off for one of my regular Paris haunts, the Musée Gustave Moreau.

Built in the mid-1800s, this house-atelier of the enigmatic Symbolist painter (much admired by everyone from Klimt to Picasso) has remained largely unaltered since Moreau’s death in 1898. Prominently displayed was the jewel-like, gold-embossed rendition of the temptress Salomé—perhaps Moreau’s most famous painting, an icon of what fin-de-siècle men thought of dangerous, Siren women.

A half-mile away from the museum, in Rue du Faubourg-Montmartre, I peeked into Chartier, surely one of Paris’s most handsome turn-of-the-century restaurants, specifically designed for a working-class clientele. Beneath an immense skylight hang brass chandeliers with white glass globes. There are brass coat racks and carved panels, bentwood chairs, vast mirrors, and kitsch paintings. More than a century after it opened, the same kind of food is still on the handwritten menu, presumably because Parisians and visitors still like it.