The Invention of Paris (20 page)

72
‘Lettres patentes pour la place Royale' (1605), reproduced in Babelon, ‘Henri IV urbaniste'.

73
Sauval,
Histoires et recherches des antiquités de la ville de Paris.
The manufactory soon went into decline, and the fourth side of the square was then built up to match the other three.

74
As Babelon notes, the word
tripot
originally denoted a tennis court. But it soon came to have its later sense.

75
Somewhat later, in 1639, Richelieu had the equestrian statue of Louis XIII erected in the centre of the square, hoping that it would intimidate duellists. The railings were installed towards the end of that century.

76
The details of this project have been preserved thanks to an engraving after Claude Chastillon, the engineer in charge, already at work on the alignments of the Place Royale. In the foreground of this bird's-eye view, on a wide canal parallel to the lower edge of the image (the ditch of the fortification), are barges carrying barrels. Right at the bottom, across the canal on the far side (this is the land of the convent of the Filles du Calvaire), are carriages, horsemen and walkers. There is a bridge over the canal, with a triumphal arch in the Italian style with embossments, niches and statues. On the bank facing the city, a long building parallel to the canal is breached at the centre by an imposing gate that gives access to the Place. Bordered by seven identical pavilions, this is a kind of archaic version of the Place Royale, with corner turrets and high pointed roofs with skylights. Between the pavilions, six diverging streets point towards the Louvre, Notre-Dame, Saint-Paul, and the distant hills, crowned with churches and windmills.

77
Les Enfants-Rouge was an orphanage founded by François I, whose young wards were dressed in red.

78
Marcel Poëte,
Une vie de cité, Paris de sa naissance à nos jours
, vol. 3 (Paris: Auguste Picard, 1931).

79
Alidor, the ‘extravagant lover' of the play's subtitle, when he meets his friend Cléandre, expresses his surprise: ‘To meet you in the Place Royale/Alone and so close to your sweet cell/Well shows that Philis is not at home.'

80
Now the Bibliothèque Historique de la Ville de Paris.

81
These nuns, whose convent was situated between the Hôtel Carnavalet and the Hôtel Le Peletier on Rue Sainte-Catherine (now de Sévigné), where the Lycée Victor-Hugo now stands, ‘wear a blue habit, a blue cloak and scapular, which has led to their being known as Heavenly Annonciades or Blue Girls' (Jaillot,
Recherches critiques, historiques et topographiques
).

82
Roland Fréart de Chambray,
Idée de la perfection de la peinture démontrée par les principles de l'art
(Le Mans, 1662).

83
At what is now no. 34 – and not in the splendid small hôtel that he built on the corner of Rue de la Perle and Rue des Trois-Pavillons (now Elzévir), where Peronnet would establish the École des Ponts et Chaussées in the 1770s.

84
The site of what is now no. 90. In the meantime, the troupe had occupied two other tennis courts, one of these also being on Rue Vieille-du-Temple, and the other on Rue Michel-le-Comte. For more on matters theatrical, see Babelon, ‘Henri IV urbaniste de Paris'.

85
Cited in Jacques Wilhelm,
La Vie quotidienne au Marais au XVIIe siècle
(Paris: Hachette, 1966).

86
Honoré de Balzac,
The Duchesse de Langeais
(1833–4), trans. Wormeley.

87
Honoré de Balzac,
Cousin Pons
(trans. Marriage).

88
‘In this bazaar, any kind of new merchandise is generally forbidden; but the tiniest scrap of any kind of old material . . . finds a seller and a buyer. There are dealers in bits of cloth of all colours and patterns, all qualities and all ages, destined for the patches that are applied to torn or worn-out garments . . . Further along, at the sign of
Le Goût du jour
you can see hanging like ex-voto offerings myriads of clothes of all colours and shapes, in still more extravagant styles' (Eugène Sue,
The Mysteries of Paris
, 1842–3).

89
Roland Gotlib, ‘Les Gravilliers, plate-forme des Enragés', in Michel Vovelle (ed.),
Paris et la Révolution
(Paris: Publications de la Sorbonne, 1989).

90
There used to be the dome of the Petits-Augustins (now the École des Beaux-Arts), ‘the first church', wrote Félibien, ‘that Paris had seen built in this form', also that of Saint-Joseph-des-Carmes (now the Institut Catholique), but both of these were small and rudimentary.

91
Within a few dozen metres from each other are the Musées Carnavalet, de l'Histoire de France, Victor-Hugo, Picasso, de la Chasse et de la Nature, de la Serrurerie, Cognacq-Jay and du Judaïsme.

92
R. P. Jacques Du Breuil,
Le Théâtre des Antiquités de Paris
(1639).

93
The Bund was the revolutionary-syndicalist movement of Jewish workers in Yiddishland. See Henri Minczeles,
Histoire générale du Bund
(Paris: Austral, 1995), and visit the fine Medem library at 52 Rue René-Boulanger.

94
Balzac,
Lost Illusions
.

95
Claude-Nicolas Ledoux,
L'Architecture considérée sous le rapport de l'art, des moeurs et de la legislation
(Paris, 1804). The gardens of the Beaumarchais residence – which gave its name to the former Boulevard Saint-Antoine – stretched widely over the Saint-Antoine bastion, i.e., a triangle now bounded by Boulevard Richard-Lenoir, Boulevard Beaumarchais, and Rue du Pasteur-Wagner. The house was demolished to make way for the Saint-Martin canal. In the 1930s the Pavillon de Hanovre was removed to the Parc de Sceaux, and the Palais Berlitz was constructed in its place.

96
‘
Façadisation
' consists in preserving (more or less) the façade of a building whilst gutting it like a fowl to install office floors. A façadized building is to the original building what a stuffed animal is to its living form. See on this subject F. Laisney, ‘Crimes et façadisme', in
Les Grands Boulevards, un parcours d'innovation et de modernité
, exhibition catalogue (Paris: Action artistique de la Ville de Paris, 2000).

97
Opposite, on the outer side, urbanization was later, as the line of the Boulevards was disrupted by the triangles of the old bastions – see the angular course of Rue de Bondy (now René-Boulanger). Besides, the Boulevard was often doubled at a lower level by outside streets along the former ditches. Rue Amelot – formerly Rue des Fossés-du-Temple – is one of these ‘low roads', the most famous being Rue Basse-du-Rempart where, as we shall see, the decisive shot in the revolution of February 1848 was fired.

98
For the ancien régime, as well as the Hôtel Montholon, see also 41 Boulevard Saint-Martin; 39 Boulevard de Bonne-Nouvelle; and the Hôtel Cousin de Méricourt at 19 Boulevard Poissonière.

99
Charles Baudelaire, ‘Evening Twilight' and ‘The Eyes of the Poor',
Les Fleurs du mal
. [I have used throughout the translation of
Les Fleurs du mal
made by William Aggeler (published as
The Flowers of Evil
, Fresno, CA: Academic Literary Guild, 1954) – Tr.]

100
See the excellent book by Simone Delattre,
Les Douze heures noires, la nuit à Paris au XIXe siècle
(Paris: Albin Michel, 2000). Lemer was himself a publisher, of Baudelaire in particular. ‘You often pass along Boulevard des Italiens. If you meet Julien Lemer, let him know my state of mind; tell him that I have worked out: – that I will never again be able to have anything printed, – that I will never be able to earn a sou – that I will never again see my mother or my friends, – and that finally if he has disastrous news to tell me, he should let me know rather than leaving me in uncertainty' (letter to Champfleury, Brussels, 13 November 1865).

101
Villiers de L'Isle-Adam,
Contes cruels
, ‘Le désir d'être un homme', published in
L'Étoile de France
(1882).

102
Lemer,
Paris au gaz
.

103
‘Histoire et physiologie des Boulevards de Paris', in
Le Diable à Paris
(1844); reissued in Honoré de Balzac,
À Paris!
(Brussels: Complexe, 1993).

104
Lemer,
Paris au gaz
.

105
La Bédollière, ‘Les Boulevards de la porte Saint-Martin à la Madeleine', in
Paris Guide
.

106
Joanne,
Paris illustré en 1870
.

107
Balzac, ‘Histoire et physiologie des Boulevards de Paris'.

108
Honoré de Balzac,
The Unconscious Comedians
(trans. Wormeley).

109
É. de La Bédollière, ‘Les Boulevards', in
Paris Guide
.

110
Balzac, ‘Histoire et physiologie des boulevards de Paris', and
Beatrix
(trans. Wormeley).

111
His father, a stationer on Rue Saint-Jacques under the Empire, had the idea of supplementing his section of artists' materials with a few paintings. He moved to Rue des Petits-Champs, where he showed paintings by Delacroix, Decamps and Diaz. Paul subsequently transferred the gallery to 1 Rue de la Paix, then to Rue Laffitte.

112
Louis Aragon,
The Paris Peasant
(London: J. Cape, 1971), p. 29.

113
Paul d'Ariste,
La Vie et le monde du Boulevard (1830–1870)
(Paris: Tallandier, 1930). Cited by Jean-Claude Yon, ‘Le théâtre aux boulevards', in Laisney,
Les Grands Boulevards
.

114
Balzac, ‘Histoire et physiologie des boulevards de Paris'.

115
La Bédollière, ‘Les Boulevards de la porte Saint-Martin à la Madeleine', in
Paris Guide
.

116
It was in this Bazar, normally occupied by the shops of La Ménagère, that an exhibition was held in 1846 which Baudelaire reported in a short masterpiece: ‘The Museum of Classics at Bazar Bonne-Nouvelle', in which he particularly describes David's
Marat
– ‘There is something at once both tender and poignant about this work; in the icy air of that room, on those chilly walls, about that cold and funereal bath, hovers a soul' (Charles Baudelaire,
Art in Paris, 1845–1862
[London: Phaidon 1965]), p. 35.

117
Balzac, ‘Histoire et Physiologie des Boulevards de Paris'.

118
La Bédollière, ‘Les Boulevards de la porte Saint-Martin à la Madeleine'.

119
Joanne,
Paris illustré en 1870.
Le Brébant still exists today, on the corner of Rue du Faubourg-Montmartre and Boulevard Poissonière.

120
Aragon,
The Paris Peasant
, p. 87, and André Breton,
Nadja
(New York: Grove, 1960), p. 38.

121
André Breton,
Communicating Vessels
(Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska Press, 1990), p. 98.

122
Breton,
Nadja
, p. 32; the question mark is Breton's own. The building of
Le Matin
was on the corner of Boulevard Poissonière and Rue du Faubourg-Poissonière.

123
Lemer,
Paris au gaz
.

124
Paul de Kock, ‘Les Boulevards de la porte Saint-Martin à la Bastille', in La Bédollière et al,
Paris Guide.
The Ambigu, at the acute angle formed by Rue de Bondy and the boulevard, was one of the finest halls in the city, built by Hittorff. It was destroyed in the 1960s by an insurance company, with the blessing of André Malraux, and replaced by a particularly frightful block of flats that breaks the alignment, the scale, and the harmony of tones of the boulevard.

125
Heine,
French Affairs
, letter 8, 1837.

126
The succession of waterworks on this site is quite complicated. In the early nineteenth century the original ‘Château d'Eau' was located on the open space that still separates Rue de Bondy (now René-Boulanger) from Boulevard Saint-Martin. ‘Leaving the Ambigu,' La Bédollière wrote in
Le Nouveau Paris
(1860), ‘we pass in front of the Château d'Eau, erected in 1811 after the design of M. Girard.' This was ‘a superb fountain, whose waters came from the basin of La Villette, composed of three circular plinths in the middle of which is a double bowl in bronze, surrounded by four figures of lions that spout water from their jaws. It is distressing that such a fine monument is not surrounded by a square worthy of it.' In the 1860s one could read in various texts that this fountain was out of proportion with the immense Place de la République. On many maps of the time it is shown in the square, in front of the Prince-Eugène barracks. It was then removed to La Villette, where it can still be seen in front of the Great Hall. In 1867, Davioud installed a more impressive fountain in the middle of the new square. In 1883, the République monument replaced this second fountain, which today stands, also decorated with lions, in the middle of Place Daumesnil. ‘The new Château d'Eau, which recalls the old one, had been placed right opposite the barracks and in the line of Boulevard du Prince-Eugène, at the point where one now sees this enormous statue of the République, a bit too massive. Leaving aside any political purpose, it produced there a happier effect, and a freshness that was much appreciated in summer' (Haussmann,
Mémoires
).

127
Joanne,
Paris illustré en 1870.
These are the few metres referred to in the famous song by Désaugiers: ‘The only worthwhile promenade/The only one that holds me/The only one I take with a laugh/Is the Boulevard du Temple in Paris.'

128
Félix and Louis Lazare,
Dictionnaire des rues et monuments de Paris
(Paris, 1855).