The Invention of Paris (33 page)

76
Marcel Proust,
Within a Budding Grove
,
Remembrance of Things Past
, vol. 1, p. 694.

77
Marcel Proust,
The Guermantes Way
,
Remembrance of Things Past
, vol. 2, p. 443.

78
Girault de Saint-Fargeau,
Les 48 quartiers de Paris
.

79
Ibid.

80
Pinon,
Paris, biographie d'une capitale
.

81
La Bourbe was the popular name for the maternity hospital of Port-Royal, which, before the opening of the boulevard of that name, opened onto the little Rue de la Bourbe. The Enfants-Trouvés (Foundlings) was on Rue d'Enfer (originally
via infera
, now Denfert-Rochereau, having added the name of the colonel in command of the Belfort garrison in 1870–1, through a kind of municipal pun), where the hospital of Saint-Vincent-de-Paul now stands. This was in fact one of three Enfants-Trouvés in Paris, along with that on Rue du Faubourg-Saint-Antoine, now the site of Square Trousseau, and that on the Île de la Cité, opposite the Hôtel-Dieu. The Marie-Thérèse infirmary had been founded by Chateaubriand and his wife for aged and needy priests.

82
Du Camp,
Paris, ses organs
. The Barrière d'Italie (or de Fontainebleau, they were one and the same) was at what is now the Place d'Italie. The Barrière des Deux-Moulins was behind the Salpêtrière, on what is now Boulevard Vincent-Auriol (the
octroi
wall originally left the Salpêtrière outside of the city, but its course was altered later on to include it). The Barrière de Mont-Parnasse was at the end of Rue du Montparnasse, on what is now Boulevard Edgar-Quinet; and the Barrière du Maine was at the end of the Chausée de Maine, very close to where Avenue du Maine passes under the esplanade of the Gare Montparnasse.

83
Honoré de Balzac,
The Commision in Lunacy
(1836). The gate or ‘tower' of the Enfants-Trouvés was a mechanism of the kind used to deposit parcels in post offices: it enabled a mother to abandon her baby without giving her name.

84
La Pitié was not as it is today an extension of the Salpêtrière, but more or less where the mosque now stands; Sainte-Pélagie was on Rue de la Clef; Sainte-Marthe-de-Scipion was the hôtel of Scipion Sardini, on Rue Scipion, which served as the hospitals' central bakery right up to the 1980s; the Savonnerie was, according to Hurtaut and Magny, ‘a large old building constructed close to Chaillot, after the railings that enclose the Cours de la Reine'. It had previously been converted from a soap factory into the ‘Royal manufacture of works
à la turque
', in other words carpets. Around the chapel, built by Marie de Médicis in 1615, there was a place of charity ‘for the reception, feeding, maintenance and instruction of children taken from the hospitals for the sick poor'.

85
‘Bicêtre, a dreadful ulcer on the body politic, wide, deep, and pus-filled, which you can only imagine by turning your gaze away. Even the air of the place can be smelled four hundred yards off, everything about it says that you are approaching a place where force is exercised, an asylum of misery, degradation and misfortune' (Mercier,
Tableau de Paris
).

86
Hurtaut and Magny,
Dictionnaire historique de la ville de Paris.

87
‘L'Hôpital général', an anonymous pamphlet of 1676, published as Annex 1 to Michel Foucault's
Madness and Civilisation
. Almost a century later, ‘it is impossible to admire too highly the strict order that reigns in this establishment, and that keep in subordination several thousands of poor of both sexes and every age, the majority of whom are impossible to discipline, either because of the wantonness that led to their enclosure, or for lack of education'.

88
You may recall that the ‘old man' got the better of the hoodlum, and gave him a long lecture, which concluded: ‘Now go, and think over what I have said to you. By the bye, what did you want of me? My purse? Here it is' (Hugo,
Les Misérables
, Volume IV, book 4,
chapter 2
).

89
Delvau,
Les Dessous de Paris
. The streets referred to here are Rue des Deux-Moulins, the main Rue d'Austerlitz, and Rue de la Barrière-des-Gobelins, which were absorbed by the new hospital of La Pitié, adjacent to the Salpêtrière.

90
Privat d'Anglemont,
Paris anecdote
. This is rather like old Mabeuf in
Les Misérables
, growing indigo in the same part of the faubourg.

91
Mercier,
Tableau de Paris
. The cemetery was situated where the gardens of the former Hôtel de Clamart stood.

92
Ibid. [‘By order of the king, God is forbidden to perform miracles on this site' – one of the most celebrated graffiti in history, which appeared on the wall of the cemetery soon after it was closed' – Tr.]

93
Adresse des habitants des faubourgs Saint-Antoine et Saint-Marceau à la Convention nationale
, printed by order of the National Convention.

94
Sauval,
Histoire et recherches
.

95
Martin,
Promenades dans les vingt arrondissements de Paris
.

96
These four hospitals would presumably have been the Val-de-Grâce, the Cochin hospital, the Port-Royal maternity hospital, and the hospital of Saint-Vincent-de-Paul. But Broca, Tarnier, Sainte-Anne and others could also have been added.

97
Benjamin,
The Arcades Project
, p. 86.

98
Balzac noted in ‘Le Dictionnaire des enseignes': ‘
Aux bons enfants
. Louvet, wine-merchant, no. 9, Place de Grève. Lovers of tragedy, hasten to M. Louvet's, ask him for a litre and place yourself at one of the tables in his saloon; four o'clock strikes, the crowd gets agitated; the climax is approaching; you see the patient mount the fatal steps . . . There are so many sensitive people nowadays, that on days of executions on the Place de Grève, the rooms of wineshops, even if they were as big as the Louvre galleries, would be unable to contain them all.'

99
105 AN, BB18 1123. Cited by Louis Chevalier,
Classes laborieuses et classes dangereuses à Paris pendant la première moitié du XIXe siècle
(Paris: Plon, 1958).

100
Victor Hugo,
The Last Day of a Condemned
(trans. Eugenia de B.).

101
Maxime Du Camp,
Les Convulsions de Paris
(Paris, 1878–80). For Du Camp, who received the cross of the Légion d'Honneur for his role in the repression of the June days of 1848, this crowd was a prefiguration of the Commune.

102
Ivan Turgenev, ‘The Execution of Troppmann'.

103
Balzac,
The Wrong Side of Paris
.

104
The Douanier himself lived at various times on the Chaussée du Maine, Rue Vercingétorix, Rue Gassendi and Rue Daguerre, before settling at Plaisance on Rue Perrel.

105
André Salmon,
Montparnasse
(Paris: André Bonne, 1950).

106
J.-K. Huysmans,
Le Drageoir aux épices
(1874).

107
Salmon,
Montparnasse
.

108
In 1933 a film was made of this book, with Jean-Pierre Aumont and Madeleine Ozeray.

109
Edmond Texier,
Tableau de Paris
(Paris, 1850).

110
Cited in François Gasnault,
Guinguettes et lorettes
.

111
The name seems to have been taken from that of an inn on the Orléans road, where Chateaubriand sometimes stopped for refreshment. The Bullier dance hall was where the Centre des Oeuvres Universitaires now stands.

112
Alexandre Privat d'Anglemont,
La Closerie des Lilas, quadrille en prose
(Paris, 1848), cited in Gasnault,
Guinguettes et lorettes
. The name Closerie des Lilas later passed to the establishment on the other side of Avenue de l'Observatoire, which still remains. The statue of Marshal Ney, which was next to the Bullier dance hall, was moved to make way for the railway station of the RER line to Sceaux.

113
Charles-Ferdinand Ramuz,
Notes d'un Vaudois
(Paris: Gallimard, 1938). Ramuz lived in a passage between Rues Boissonnade and Campagne-Première.

114
Carco,
De Montparnasse au Quartier Latin
.

115
Cited by Salmon,
Montparnasse
.

116
Benjamin,
The Arcades Project
, p. 516.

I go astray and lose myself in this immense city, even I no longer recognize the new quarters. Now we have Chaillot, Passy and Auteuil quite linked to the capital; a bit more of this, and Sèvres will touch it as well; and in a hundred years' time it will extend to Versailles on the one hand, Saint-Denis on the other, and from the Picpus side to Vincennes will all be a maze of confusion.

– Sébastien Mercier

On 15 July 1840, twenty-five years after Waterloo, Britain, Prussia and Russia signed a treaty of alliance in London. They committed themselves to supporting the Ottoman Empire against the ambitions of the Egyptian khedive, Muhammad Ali, who was supported by France. There was talk of war. Thiers, as prime minister, was inclined to a show of strength, and the fortification plans for Paris that had been under discussion for over ten years rose suddenly to the top of the agenda. Champions of a continuous wall came to agreement with those who preferred detached fortresses: a continuous rampart would be constructed, reinforced by seventeen separate fortresses outside of the wall. The spokesmen of the liberal opposition, François Arago and Lamartine, denounced this operation as one that could be turned against the people of Paris, evoking the recent examples of the Russians in Warsaw and the Bourbons in Barcelona. Even Chateaubriand emerged from his silence to write a
‘
Lettre sur les fortifications': ‘Internally, the peace of the barracks; outside these ravelins the silence of the desert . . . What a result of our Revolution!' Not to worry, the ‘monstrous gnome', as Marx would call him, replied from the tribune of the Chamber of Deputies: ‘What! To fancy that any works of fortification could ever endanger liberty! And first of all you calumniate any possible government in supposing that it could some day attempt to maintain itself by bombarding the capital . . . but
that government would be a hundred times more impossible after its victory than before.'
¹
The army, the department of bridges and roads, and private contractors mobilized twenty-five thousand workers on this construction more than thirty kilometres long, and by 1843 the new Paris fortifications were completed.
²

The route of the new wall corresponded to what are now known as the ‘boulevards of the marshals', their names actually being taken from those of the military road that ran on the inner side of the fortifications. It was dictated by strategic considerations, in other words by the contours of the land. To the north of the city, on the Saint-Denis plain, the wall ran in a straight line from the Porte de La Villette to the Porte de Clichy, beyond the line of the heights between Charonne and Montmartre. It then turned to run parallel to the bend of the Seine, to take in Monceau, Passy and Auteuil. Crossing the river at the Point du Jour, it circled Vaugirard and Grenelle, then cut across the communes of Issy, Montrouge, Gentilly and Ivry in a wide curve.
³
Back on the other bank it ran due north, from the Porte de Charenton to the Porte des Lilas and across the communes of Bercy and Saint-Mandé. Finally, it swung between the final heights of Belleville and the Pré-Saint-Gervais. This was its most hilly section, and today the most picturesque part of the ‘boulevards of the marshals', its hairpin bends overlooking the broad plain of the northern suburbs.

Among the villages surrounding Paris, some were thus entirely included within the wall, and others cut in two with one section remaining outside the fortifications.
⁴
The communes that were totally or partially included were thus within the fortifications but outside Paris itself, its official limit remaining the wall of the Farmers-General. The
octroi
was now levied at the new gates, the wall of the Farmers-General was demolished, the number of arrondissements increased from twelve to twenty, with boundaries that remain today.

The ‘villages' that Paris swallowed at this time were no longer hamlets reached by long roads across fields, as when Rousseau went to botanize at Gentilly on the banks of the Bièvre or by Ménilmontant.
⁵
At the time of their annexation, the
banlieue
– this was when the word entered general usage – was already populated, urbanized, and partly even industrialized, to the point that Haussmann and Louis-Napoleon were concerned at the concentration of factories and workers to the north and east of Paris.

Nostalgia for the happy time when the countryside began at the city gates and filtered in through all interstices, the sense of a lost paradise and the deploring of nature destroyed – all these themes that emerged in the late eighteenth century spread greatly when Paris was expanded. You can find them in Privat d'Anglemont:

The Romaineville woods with their donkey rides, the park of Saint-Fargeau so popular with the
grisettes
, the Saint-Gervais meadows that delight the petty bourgeois, have all been turned into streets, squares and crossroads; houses have sprung up in the place of green swards, hundred-year-old trees and flowering lilac. The Île d'Amour, that enchanted spot where so many ephemeral ties were made, has in a singular irony become a
mairie
; you get married there for real, no laughing matter. The Sauvage, that dance hall that defined a whole era in the memory of Parisians, has become a good, worthy and honest bourgeois house.
⁶