The Invention of Paris (10 page)

The Place du Caire, where Pakistanis and Malians wait with their trolleys throughout the day, occupies the former site of the city's largest court of miracles.
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As Sauval put it:

A place of very considerable size, and a very large cul-de-sac – stinking, muddy, irregular and devoid of any paving. Previously confined to the outer limits of Paris, it is now located in one of the most badly built, dirty and out-of-the-way quarters of the city . . . like another world . . . When the ditches and ramparts of the Porte Saint-Denis were removed to the place where we see them now,
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the commissioners conducting this undertaking resolved to cut through this court of miracles with a street that would ascend from Rue Saint-Sauveur to Rue Neuve-Saint-Sauveur; but whatever they might do, they found it impossible to bring this to completion: the builders who started work on the street were beaten by the ruffians there, and these rogues threatened those in charge with an even worse fate.

What a time!

At the heart of the quarter, in the Passage du Caire which is the oldest of Paris arcades (1798), several shops, including the finest of their number, exhibit material for shop windows – mannequins, busts, gilded price-tags, plastic trees and paper fur. This activity continues the oldest tradition of this arcade, specialized from its origins in lithography for
calicots
, which were the streamers with which shops announced their wares.
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The opposite triangle – opposite in every sense of the word – is the section of the Sentier bordering on Boulevard de Bonne-Nouvelle, built on an artificial hillock made up of rubble, mud and filth of all kinds that
accumulated over the centuries and was called the Butte-aux-Gravois.
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Under the League, the windmills and the small church that crowned this hill were razed in order to fortify the rampart. And it is still with the air of a wall that buildings overlook the boulevard on the side of Rue de la Lune or Rue Notre-Dame-de-Bonne-Nouvelle, while Rue Beauregard recalls the view it once offered over the country to the north, with the windmills of Montmartre in the distance.

You climb from the Porte Saint-Denis to the Butte-aux-Gravois past the strangely sharp edges of the buildings at the end of Rues de la Lune, Beauregard, and de Cléry. Further up the quarter, Rues Notre-Dame-de-Recouvrance, de la Ville-Neuve and Thorel are old streets where certain walls have low openings that are neither doors nor windows, but the displays of former shops. In Egypt, bakeries still open onto the street through small basement windows with grills that are opened when the bread is cooked.

Of the church of Notre-Dame-de-Bonne-Nouvelle, built in the seventeenth century, there only remains the bell tower, whose inclination towards Rue Beauregard denotes an unstable subsoil.
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The rest of the present building dates from the 1820s, so that it was in a nearly new church that the funeral of gentle Coralie took place in
Lost Illusions
, after she had been forced by Lucien de Rubempré's escapades to leave her dwelling on Rue de Vendôme (now Béranger) for a fourth-floor apartment on Rue de la Lune.

The border between Les Halles and the Sentier on one side, and the Marais on the other, is formed by three north-south axes in close parallel: Rue Saint-Denis and Rue Saint-Martin, which are old Roman roads, and, in the middle, Haussmann's cutting par excellence, the Boulevard de Sébastopol. The contrast between Rue Saint-Denis with its metered sex, bloody memories, and nighttime brawls, and the chaste and peaceful Rue Saint-Martin, can already be read from the boulevard, on the two gates that the Paris burgesses dedicated to ‘Ludovico Magno' (Louis XIV). The
Porte Saint-Martin with its vermicular embossage and calm bas-reliefs is as modest as a triumphal arch can be. The ‘very fine and very useless Porte Saint-Denis,' as André Breton calls it in
Nadja
, presents on the contrary the political-decorative programme of absolute monarchy at its apogee:

Its main gate stands between two pyramids set into the body of the arch and decorated with falling weapons as trophies, ending with two globes with the arms of France . . . At the base of these pyramids are two colossal statues, one of which represents Holland in the figure of a woman in dismay seated on a crouched and dying lion, which holds in its paws seven arrows denoting the United Provinces. The other symmetrical statue is that of a river, holding a cornucopia and representing the Rhine. In the tympani are two Fames, one of which, by the sound of its trumpet, announces to the whole earth that the king's army has just crossed the Rhine in the presence of his enemies . . . The bas-relief on the face of the gate facing the faubourg represents the taking of Maastricht.
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There is an interesting parallel with the ceiling of the Painted Hall at the Royal Naval College in Greenwich, where the defeated Louis XIV drags himself wretchedly at the feet of William III.

Though Rue Saint-Denis is pretty down-at-heel, and not all its shops brilliant, it keeps the unity and noble vestiges of a royal road. To cite Sauval again:

In olden times Rue Saint-Denis was known for a long while simply as the Grand'Rue, as if for its excellence. In 1273, it was still referred to as
magnus vicus
. . . This was very fitting, for not only was it for many centuries the only main road in the quarter that we call the Ville, but also the only road leading to the Cité, which made up the whole of Paris at this time. Subsequently, it served as another triumphal way by which our kings generally made their magnificent entrances when they came to the throne, after their coronation, on their marriages, or on their victorious return from defeating their enemies; and finally, for more than three hundred years, it was the route they were carried after their death to Saint-Denis, where their mausoleums are.

The buildings bordering the street are very old, rickety and irregular towards Les Halles, with a proliferation of sex shops and peep shows, shading to fine neoclassical residences as you approach the Porte Saint-Denis.

Rue Saint-Martin, by comparison, is almost village-like. This is not just a matter of toponymy, running as it does past Saint-Martin-des-Champs and Saint-Nicolas-des-Champs. It is wide and airy, with a fine place to pause under the chestnut trees of the square facing the high wall of the Conservatoire des Arts et Métiers. Towards the centre, you still have the narrowness of a medieval street, but greatly deteriorated. It is better to take Rue Quincampoix, which has hardly changed since John Law established his central bank there, and ‘crowds rushed into this narrow street to convert coin into paper'.
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Once you cross Rue Saint-Martin – some would rather say Rue Beaubourg – you enter the Marais.
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The appearance of this word to denote a region of Paris is relatively recent: it was not until the seventeenth century that only the zone of the Marais that was still really marshy was called by that name, around the present convergence of Rues de Turenne, Vieille-du-Temple, de Bretagne and des Filles-du-Calvaire, not far from the Cirque d'Hiver.
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In referring to the Paris quarter,
marais
means a region of watered gardens (
maraîchers
) rather than an actual marsh. If there was such a marsh, if the battle of Lutetia between Camulogène and Caesar took place around here, the fortifications of Charles V subsequently served as a dyke, and its moats as a drainage canal. This arrangement is still very visible: Boulevard Beaumarchais, built on the line of the walls, is in such a raised position that Rue des Tournelles and Rue Saint-Gilles, coming from the Marais, have to rise quite steeply in their final stretch in order to meet it. And on the other side, to descend to Rue Amelot – formerly Rue des Fossés-du-Temple – it was necessary to install a stairway.

It is strange, and has no other equivalent in Paris, how the physiognomy of the Marais today is haunted by the phantoms of three great domains, which have left their names and yet not a single stone: the Temple, the Hôtel Saint-Pol and the Hôtel des Tournelles.

The mother house of the order of Knights Templar, founded in Jerusalem in the twelfth century, was located at the far end of the region's
major north-south axis, on Rue du Temple.
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Its lands fell into two distinct sections. The heart was the
enclos
, a fortified quadrilateral whose boundaries would now be Rues du Temple, de Bretagne, Charlot and Béranger. At the centre of this enclosure was the keep, used as a prison for Louis XVI and his family after 10 August 1792, and later for Babeuf and Cadoudal. A large part of the enclosure was rented out to artisans, exempt here from tax as in all the religious precincts of the city.

To the south and east of the enclosure, the Templars possessed large tracts of agricultural land: this was the
censive
, whose limits defined a further quadrilateral, extending to Rue du Roi-de-Sicile and thus corresponding to a large section of the Marais today. The wall of Philippe Auguste cut through this
censive
, along the line of Rue des Francs-Bourgeois.
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On the side facing the city, these lands were gradually populated along the axes, particularly along Rue Vieille-du-Temple, which was then called Rue de la Couture-du-Temple [
couture
= cultivation], but on the outward side there was nothing but market gardens until the sixteenth century.

The other major axis of the Marais, its east-west orientation, was Rue Saint-Antoine, as it still is today. At the end of this, the outer limit of Paris, two royal dwellings stood face to face, the Hôtel Saint-Pol and the Hôtel des Tournelles. Saint-Pol was the creation of the Dauphin, the future Charles V. Tired of the old Palais de la Cité, where he had been forced to confront popular insurrection and Étienne Marcel, he decided to establish himself somewhere more calm. He bought buildings and gardens from the Comte d'Étampes, the archbishop of Sens, and the abbés of Saint-Maur, ending up with all of the land between Rue Saint-Antoine and the Seine, and from Rue Saint-Paul right through to Rue du Petit-Musc. Saint-Pol was not a single building, an
hôtel
in the usual sense, but rather a group of buildings surrounded by gardens, and linked by covered galleries that framed a succession of courtyards, a cherry orchard, a vineyard, a
sauvoir
for raising salmon, aviaries, and a menagerie where lions were kept, pensioners of the hotel down to its final days. (In his
Vies des dames galantes
, Brantôme recalled how ‘one day when François I was amusing himself by watching his lions fighting, a lady who had let her glove fall said to de Lorges: if you
want me to believe that you love me as much as you swear every day, go and pick up my glove. De Lorges went down into the lions' den, picked up the glove from among these fearsome animals, came up, threw it in the lady's face, and since then, despite all the troubles and pains that she took towards him, never wanted to see her again.')

From the main gate of the Hôtel Saint-Pol you could see on the other side of Rue Saint-Antoine the gateway of the Hôtel des Tournelles, which, according to Piganiol de La Force, ‘took its name from the number of towers by which it was surrounded'. In the 1420s, under the English occupation, the Duke of Bedford, acting as regent, made his residence in a small hotel that was situated between Rue de Birague and the Impasse Guéménée. ‘John, Duke of Bedford, stayed there during the disturbances of the Bourguignons and the Armagnacs', wrote Sauval. ‘He extended it and had it magnificently built, so that it has since been a royal residence, which our kings have preferred to Saint-Pol, and where Charles VII, Louis XI, Charles VIII, Louis XII and François I all stayed for long periods.' Piganiol de La Force relates that ‘this palace counted several courtyards, a number of chapels, twelve galleries, two parks and six large gardens, as well as a labyrinth known as the Daedalus, and a further garden or park of nine acres, which the Duke of Bedford had his gardener plough up'.
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After its return to the French crown, the hotel was surrounded by a large park, where François I raised camels and ostriches, and which gave its name to Rue du Parc-Royal. The park was also used for equestrian sports, but tournaments as such were held on Rue Saint-Antoine, which was widened between the two hôtels, a layout that still exists alongside the statue of Beaumarchais.

The way in which these three groups of buildings disappeared goes a long way to explain the contemporary Marais. The Hôtel Saint-Pol was the first to go: François I, always short of money and wanting to renovate the Louvre and make his residence there, decided to sell it off as building plots. ‘There is no longer anything remaining of these buildings, which included a large number of hôtels, such as the Hôtel de La Pissotte, the Hôtel de Beautreillis, the Hôtel-de-la-Reine, the Hôtel Neuf (known as the Hôtel d'Étampes), etc. And it is on their ruins that the streets were laid out that are now those of the Saint-Paul quarter as far as the ditches of the Arsenal, and preserve the names of the buildings that were there at the time of the Hôtel Saint-Pol, such as Rues de Beautreillis, des Lions, du Petit-Musc and
de la Cerisaie.'
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Like all of the Marais that was built in the Renaissance, this part of the Saint-Paul quarter, despite the street names that seem taken from an illuminated manuscript, was designed in a modern fashion: the plots are regular, and the streets laid out in a grid, in contrast with the medieval lattice beside the Hôtel de Sens, Rue des Nonnains-d'Hyères and Rue de l'Ave-Maria.