The Invention of Paris (29 page)

Facing no. 50–52 there stood amid the trees on the boulevard a large elm that was three parts dead; almost opposite began Rue de la Barrière des Gobelins, a street that was then without houses and unpaved, planted with unsuitable trees, green or muddy according to the season, which ended up right at the surrounding wall of Paris . . . This barrier itself cast evil shadows in the mind. It was the road to Bicêtre. This was the way that, under the Empire and the Restoration, men condemned to death would return to Paris on the day of their execution.

It is in this disturbing setting, now covered by the railway tracks from the Gare d'Austerlitz, that one could see in the 1850s ‘something unbelievable, incomparable, curious, frightful, charming, desolate and admirable', a community of ragpickers known as the Cité Doré:

Not ironically [i.e., from
doré
meaning ‘golden'], but because M. Doré, a distinguished chemist, was the owner of this land . . . In 1848 he had the idea of dividing his property with the object of renting plots to the bourgeois of Paris, who, as is well known, have a particular passion for gardening. He expected to see at least some Némorin from Rue Saint-Denis or a Chloë from the Quartier du Temple, but who actually did appear was a ragpicker of the first water, a hood on his back and a hook in his hand . . . At dawn the next morning he was already at work, surrounded by a large family. They dug the foundations of their country villa, bought rubble from demolitions at 50 cents the barrow, and a few days later they bravely started to build . . . At the end of three months their house was finished, and its roof in place. They had made this roof out of
old tarpaulin, with beaten earth placed on top . . . This wonder was visited by fellow ragpickers, who all envied the good fortune of the owners, and each wished to have their own place here. A new town came into being.

When winter came, however, the experiment with earth and tarpaulin proved unsuccessful. The water soaked the earth, and the ensuing weight burst the cloth:

At this point one of the ragpickers had a sublime idea! Everything in Paris is sold except old tin . . . They set out to collect what others disdained, so that today the greater part of houses in this colony are covered in tin . . . The inhabitants are better off, they get on much better together, and scenes of savagery are no longer to be seen in the area, nor drunks falling into the streams, as happens so often in other parts of this unfortunate 12
^th
arrondissement.
⁹⁰

Opposite the gateway of the Salpêtrière, the horse market, another attraction of the faubourg, occupied a long rectangle between Boulevard de l'Hôpital and Rue du Marché-aux-Chevaux (there still exists, off Rue Geoffroy-Saint-Hilaire, an Impasse du Marché-aux-Chevaux, almost on the corner with Boulevard Saint-Marcel). This was specially devoted to carthorses, and to former luxury horses reduced to lower tasks. A semicircle made up of two tracks elevated in the middle, forming a rise and fall, was used to try out the horses – hence the name of Rue de l'Essai between the market and Rue Poliveau.

On the other side of Rue du Marché-aux-Chevaux, Rue Poliveau continued – and still continues – through Rue du Fer-à-Moulin, which was long known as Rue aux Morts. This was the way to the Clamart cemetery, the last resting place of executed criminals and those who died in hospital:

Those bodies that the Hôtel-Dieu vomits out each day are brought to Clamart: this is a large cemetery, whose mouth is always open. The corpses are not on biers, but simply covered with a cloth. They are hastily taken from their bed, and more than one sick person, supposedly dead, wakes up in the very cart that is taking him to the grave. This cart is pulled by twelve men; a dirty and encrusted priest, a bell, a cross, that is all the equipment that the poor can expect . . . This lugubrious carriage leaves the Hôtel-Dieu every day at four in the morning; it rolls in the
silence of the night . . . This soil, rich in burials, is the field where young surgeons come by night, climbing the wall, to take corpses to subject to their inexperienced scalpels: and so even after the poor person has passed away, his body can still be stolen.
⁹¹

Surprising as it may seem, this illegal practice ended up by giving its popular name to the place that, after the cemetery was closed in the early nineteenth century, became the anatomy theatre for the hospitals. I myself worked in the library there for many years, in the low buildings that had seen the passage of Larrey, Broussais, and Dupuytren. You would say ‘I'm going to Clamart', without anyone realizing where this strange expression came from. The entrance was under marvellous arbours of flowers, and in summer, with the windows open, a scent wafted into the lecture hall that I can still remember, the odour of roses mingling with that of formaldehyde.

The riotous tradition of the Faubourg Saint-Marceau goes back very far into the past. In the sixteenth century it was the main popular bastion of Protestantism in Paris, along with the Popincourt quarter on the Right Bank. On 27 December 1561, following an obscure business about bells spoiling a meeting held by the Calvinists on Rue Patriarche (now Rue Daubenton, opposite Saint-Médard), the latter sacked the Saint-Médard church. This affair, known as the ‘Saint-Médard disturbance', led to a number of deaths, and is often seen as a prelude to the wars of religion. It was also at Saint-Médard, in the little cemetery alongside, today a square, that one of the most celebrated disorders in the history of the faubourg took place, that of the ‘convulsionaries', in which ‘people danced on the grave of Deacon Pâris, and ate earth from his tomb, until the cemetery was closed:
De par le roi, défense à Dieu/De faire miracle en ce lieu
'.
⁹²

Later on, the Faubourg Saint-Marceau was involved in all the great Revolutionary
journées
. During the ‘subsistence troubles' of 1792, the people of Faubourgs Saint-Marceau and Saint-Denis went en masse to the wholesalers, knocking down their doors and forcing them to sell their goods at their previous price. In 1793, the Faubourgs Saint-Marceau and Saint-Antoine delivered a joint address to the Commune:

Legislators, it is the brave sans-culottes of 14 July and 10 August, whose blood marked the fall of a despicable throne, whose faubourgs
Saint-Antoine and Saint-Marceau are proud to address you today. In their breast they have been nourished in a hatred of tyranny and in the republican spirit. They ask you to let them form up in their companies to fly to the defence of the Fatherland . . . The children of the faubourgs Saint-Antoine and Saint-Marceau will carry these names to the banks of the Rhine. They will make Frédéric [Friedrich Wilhelm II of Prussia] and François [Franz II, the Holy Roman Emperor] see so closely the scars of 10 August that they tremble at being kings.
⁹³

Saint-Marceau had a far older industrial tradition than did Saint-Antoine. As far back as the 1440s, a Flemish manufacturer by the name of Gobelin established his business in a house on Rue Moffetard (now Avenue des Gobelins), backing onto the River Bièvre.

This became known as the River Gobelins after Jean Gobelin, an excellent dyer of wool and silk, in all kinds of colours, especially scarlet, came to live in a big house that he had built close to Saint-Hippolyte, the church of the Faubourg Saint-Marceau. This illustrious man did not just build up a great property there, but also . . . made such a name for himself in his art, that his house, his scarlet, his dye, and the river he used, were all given his name.
⁹⁴

The Gobelins thus started out as dyers, as Jean de Julienne, the friend of Watteau, still was in the eighteenth century, himself in the little Rue des Gobelins. Tapestry came long after carpets, when Colbert established the royal manufactory of furnishings and tapestries of the crown, its first director being Le Brun. Curriers and tanners could also be found on the Bièvre. An 1890 guide explains:

We are now in some quite outlying quarters; the penetrating smell of tannin rises to the nose; a fine red dust floats in the air, sometimes leaving a light deposit in which the feet of the rare passersby leave their traces . . . The tannery drying-rooms set up their great partitioned bays where the wind can blow through, and nearby are workshops making mats, their courtyards cluttered with immense heaps of screenings.
⁹⁵

A land of tumult and revolt, the Faubourg Saint-Marceau was destroyed like
Carthage, except that its eradication took place in two stages. The cuttings of the nineteenth century did the bulk of it. The Boulevard de Port-Royal, which followed the route of the former Rue de la Bourbe and Rue des Bourguignons, absorbed the fields of the Capucins, destroyed the old Saint-Marcel theatre, and transformed Rue Broca and Rue Pascal into canyons. Boulevard Saint-Marcel swallowed up the Place de la Collégiate, the horse market, and the little streets of Rue des Francs-Bourgeois and Rue du Cendrier that led there. Boulevard Arago was built where the Saint-Hippolyte church and street had stood. The narrow Rue Mouffetard, well suited for barricades, was hemmed in between the new Gobelins intersection and the Place d'Italie, and replaced by Avenue des Gobelins, more than forty metres wide. Rue Monge with its barracks, and the artery of Rue Claude-Bernard and Rue Gay-Lussac, made it possible to attack the quarter from the rear.

Yet despite this network of trenches, some parts of the ancient fabric remained until the 1950s. I remember making ‘
Les Misérables
walks' with my father, who led us on Sunday mornings to Rue du Banquier or Rue du Champ-de-l'Alouette, where Marius had gone to dream of Cosette. The destruction of the plebeian quarters after the war began here, in this Faubourg Saint-Marceau that never understood the new situation and continued to be
red
. In the 1950s and '60s, the cul-de-sacs, alleys, courtyards and workshops of the old ‘faubourg of suffering' were systematically destroyed, and no one today would conceive the idea of taking a walk through what has replaced them.

The Rue du Faubourg-Saint-Jacques, an extension of Rue Saint-Martin and Rue Saint-Jacques, formed for many years the southern segment of the ancient north-south route across Paris. But starting in the seventeenth century it was replaced in this role by Rue d'Enfer (now Boulevard Saint-Michel, Rue Henri-Barbusse, Avenue Denfert-Rochereau). ‘The Faubourg Saint-Jacques', Dumas wrote in
The Mohicans of Paris
, ‘is one of the most primitive in Paris. What is the reason for this? Is it because, surrounded by four hospitals like a citadel is by four bastions, these hospitals warn the tourist away from the quarter? Is it because, not leading to any major road, not ending up in any centre, in complete contrast to the larger Paris faubourgs, the passage of carriages there is very rare?'
⁹⁶

Thanks to owners who could not be dislodged – hospitals, ecclesiastical communities, the Observatory, the Société des Gens de Lettres – this faubourg escaped serious destruction. From Rue du Val-de-Grâce to Boulevard Saint-Jacques, between Rue de la Santé and Avenue Denfert-Rochereau, is today a calm quarter, airy and much visited. And yet in the 1930s, when Walter Benjamin lived for years at the edge of it, on Place Denfert-Rochereau and Rue Boulard, he could still describe it in terms close to those of Balzac:

For in [the 14
^th
arrondissment] are found, one after another, all the buildings of public misery, or proletarian indigence, in unbroken succession: the birthing clinic, the orphanage, the hospital (the famous Santé), and finally the great Paris jail with its scaffold. At night, one sees on the narrow unobtrusive benches – not, of course, the comfortable ones found in the squares – men stretched out asleep as if in the waiting room of a way station in the course of this terrible journey.
⁹⁷

The scaffold was the great spectre of the faubourg. Hugo wrote of the Place Saint-Jacques in
Les Misérables
that it was ‘almost predestined and has always been horrible'. Previously, apart from the Revolutionary years, executions had always been carried out on the Place de Grève, in full daylight. The windows of buildings on the route taken by condemned prisoners from the Conciergerie or Bicêtre were hired long in advance.
⁹⁸
But after the revolution of 1830 the Place de Grève was no longer appropriate. ‘The Place de Grève', wrote the prefect of the Seine department on 16 November 1831, ‘can no longer serve as a site for executions, after generous citizens so gloriously spilled their blood there for the national cause. Besides, the difficulty of traffic circulation in the tightly packed quarter around the Place de Grève has for a long time imposed the need to find a different place for capital executions.'
⁹⁹
This ‘different place' would now be the Place Saint-Jacques, at the corner of Rue du Faubourg-Saint-Jacques and Boulevard Saint-Jacques.

In 1832, in his preface to
The Last Day of a Condemned
, Victor Hugo wrote:
At Paris, we have come back to the time of secret executions; since July they no longer dare to decapitate in the Grève; as they are afraid, as they are cowardly, here is what they do. They took lately from the Bicêtre prison a man, under sentence of death, named Désandrieux, I think; they put him in a sort of basket on two wheels, closed on each side, bolted and padlocked: then, with a gendarme in front, and another at the back, without noise or crowd, they proceeded to the deserted Barrière Saint-Jacques. It was eight in the morning when they arrived, with but little light. There was a newly erected guillotine, and, for spectators, some dozens of little boys, grouped on the heaps of stones around the unexpected machine. Quickly they withdrew the man from the basket; and, without giving him time to breathe, they furtively, secretly, shamefully, deprived him of life! And that is called a public and solemn act of high justice! Infamous derision!
¹⁰⁰