The Invention of Paris (42 page)

37
For those who may have forgotten them: Hotchkiss, Panhard and Levassor (whose factories were in the 13
^th
arrondissement), Talbot, Rosengart, Salmson, Bugatti, Delahaye, Simca and Delage, without going all the way back to Voisin, De Dion-Bouton or Hispano-Suiza. On the other side of the Porte d'Asnières, Levallois-Perret was a district of garages, repair shops, and secondhand car dealers.

38
‘At the bottom of our street, on the square, we had the statue of Serpollet. This was a fine stone monument; the breeze blew through the windshield, giving an effect of speed: individuals of both sexes saluted the man who had conceived the flash boiler as he stirred his stew, and was the first to ride from Paris to Saint-Germain at the wheel of a steam tricycle: Serpollet. A gentleman with a beard and stiff collar nervously hastened in front of the vehicle, at the risk of being run over by the monster whose driver seemed no longer to be in control' (Calet,
Le Tout sur le tout
).

39
Fargue,
Refuges
. The famous Batignolles tunnel was replaced in the 1920s by a cutting, after a train had caught fire in it.

40
Maupassant himself lived just a couple of steps away when he was writing this, on Rue Dulong.

41
Père-Lathuille was on the site that is now no. 7, and Guerbois at no. 9 (now the Cinéma des Cinéastes).

42
Delvau,
Histoire anecdotique des barrières de Paris
.

43
The Tour des Dames, incidentally, was the abbey's dovecote.

44
Halévy,
Pays parisiens
.

45
George Moore,
Modern Painting
(London, 1893). The Rat-Mort was a tavern frequented among others by Courbet, Vallès and Manet (who painted George Moore at the Nouvelle-Athènes). It was located on the site that is now 7 Place Pigalle, and the Nouvelle-Athènes was at no. 9 – the building still stands, but is undoubtedly under serious threat.

46
Goudeau, a friend of Salis, the landlord of the Rat-Mort, in
Le Courrier français
, 24 October 1886. Cited by Chevalier in
Montmartre du plaisir et du crime
.

47
Cited by Chevalier in
Montmartre du plaisir et du crime.

48
‘What seduced me in this little space sheltered by the big trees of the Château des Brouillards was above all this remnant of vineyards . . . and the neighbouring watering-trough which is enlivened in the evenings by the spectacle of the horses and dogs that are washed there, and a fountain built in the antique style, in which women chat and sing while they do their washing, as in one of the early chapters of
Werther
' (Gérard de Nerval, ‘Promenades et Souvenirs',
L'Illustration
, December 1854 to February 1855).

49
I exclude here the
mairies
of the 5
^th
and 6
^th
arrondissements, as the Panthéon and Saint-Sulpice are scarcely equivalent.

50
La Bédollière,
Le Nouveau Paris
.

51
Edmond and Jules Goncourt,
Germinie Lacerteux
(New York; Grove, 1955), p. 52ff. To my mind this is one of the finest ‘descents' in the nineteenth-century Parisian novel, along with that of Gavroche, from Ménilmontant to the barricade on Rue de la Chanverie, and that of Guillaume and Pierre, from the Sacré-Coeur to La Roquette for the execution of Salvat, at the end of Zola's
Paris
.

52
Maurice Culot, in
La Goutte d'Or, faubourg de Paris
, with a preface by Louis Chevalier (Paris/Brussels: AAM and Hazan, 1988).

53
Carco,
De Montparnasse au Quartier Latin
.

54
L. Chevalier, preface to
La Goutte d'Or, faubourg de Paris
.

55
In Joanne,
Paris illustré en 1870
, this is described as ‘a charming construction that dates from the reign of Henri IV'. For Hillairet, it was a folly dating from 1780. La Chope du Château-Rouge, where Rue de Clignancourt goes over the hill, keeps its memory.

56
Dabit,
Faubourgs de Paris
. The Marcadet bridge is where Rues Marcadet and Ordener merge and cross the tracks of the Nord railway.

57
La Bédollière,
Le Nouveau Paris
.

58
The other statues are that by Frémiet on Rue des Pyramides, and those on Rue Jeanne d'Arc, the esplanade of the Sacré-Coeur, and the parvis of Saint-Augustin, not counting the head of the Maid of Orleans on Rue Saint-Honoré, where a plaque commemorates her being wounded by an English arrow in front of the Porte Saint-Honoré.

59
An amazement that ‘no longer knew any bounds, when she deigned to invite me to accompany her to a neighbouring
charcuterie
where she wanted to buy some gherkins' (Breton,
Communicating Vessels
).

60
‘Relevé d'ambiances urbaines au moyen de la dérive', in
Les Lèvres nues
, 9, November 1956.

61
Benjamin,
The Arcades Project
, p. 518. Benjamin has the Place du Maroc in Belleville, which is not correct, but clearly doesn't matter.

62
Chevalier,
Classes laborieuses et classes dangereuses
. The
voirie
and the knacker's yard was removed in 1849 to the Bondy forest. On the rats: ‘In a book by Théophile Gautier,
Caprices et zigzags
, I find a curious page. “A great danger threatens us,” it says. “The modern Babylon will not be smashed like the tower of Lylak; it will not be lost in a sea of asphalt like Pentapolis, or buried under the sand like Thebes. It will simply be depopulated and ravaged by the rats of Montfaucon.” . . . The rats of Montfaucon . . . have not endangered Paris; Haussmann's arts of embellishment have driven them off . . . But from the heights of Montfaucon the proletariat have descended, and with gunpowder and petroleum they have begun the destruction of Paris which Gautier foresaw' (Max Nordau,
Aus dem wahren Milliardenlande: Pariser Studien und Bilder
[Leipzig, 1878], vol. 1, pp. 75–6; cited by Benjamin,
The Arcades Project
, p. 91).

63
La Bédollière,
Le Nouveau Paris
. He repeats the idea that this ‘Amérique' took its name because ‘production from it was exported far away: a large part was embarked on the canal, then transshipped at Le Havre for the other side of the Atlantic'. But this seems to be simply a legend, ‘Amérique' being no more than a place name.

64
Mémoires de M. Claude
, commissioner of police for the quarter, cited in Simone Delattre,
Les Douze Heures noires
.

65
Ibid.

66
‘Paris is growing, and faubourgs have been heedlessly built over old quarries; with the result that everything you see above the ground basically lacks the foundations of a town in the earth. . . . A matter for reflection, considering how this great city is formed and supported by absolutely contrary means! These church towers, these temples, are so many signs that say clearly: what we see in the air is lacking under our feet' (Mercier,
Tableau de Paris
).

67
Félix Nadar,
Quand j'étais photographe
(Paris: Flammarion, 1900).

68
Benjamin,
The Arcades Project
, p. 84.

69
On all these questions, see Loyer's incomparable
Paris XIXe siècle, l'immeuble et la rue
.

70
Delvau,
Histoire anecdotique des barrières de Paris
.

71
On this subject, a friend of mine recently pointed out to me a magnificent passage from Guy Debord's
Panégyrique
: ‘I believe that this town was ravaged somewhat before others because its ever recurring revolutions disrupted and shocked the world all too greatly; and because they unfortunately always failed. So we were eventually punished by a destruction as complete as that which the Brunswick manifesto had formerly threatened, or the speech of the Girondin Isnard: with a view to burying so many fearsome memories, and the great name of Paris.'

72
Raymond Queneau,
Courir les rues
(Paris: Gallimard, 1967).

73
The only one who does not have a street here is Marshal Marmont, despite the fact that he fought valiantly on that day. But history has condemned him for signing the capitulation of Paris, and no doubt also for commanding the royal forces in July 1830.

74
Fieschi and his accomplices tried out their explosive device in a meadow in Ménilmontant, close to what is now Rue d'Annam.

75
And in the other direction, from Rue du Surmelin to Rue de Romainville, whose curious bend is due precisely to its circling this domain.

76
Rue Le Peletier, which comes out on Boulevard des Italiens, is named after Claude Le Peletier, provost of merchants under Louis XIV. The illustrious Louis Le Peletier de Saint-Fargeau, a deputy for the nobility to the Estates-General, then a member of the Convention who voted for the death of the king and was assassinated for this reason on 20 January 1793, had a daughter who was made a ward of the nation. It was she who started to divide up the estate for development, and sold the old château. By the 1850s there was nothing left of the domain except perhaps a few trees in the Belleville cemetery.

77
Rousseau,
The Reveries of a Solitary Walker
, ‘Second Walk'. The quadrilateral of the Haute-Borne, bounded by Boulevard de Belleville, Rue Julien-Lacroix, Rue des Couronnes and Rue de Ménilmontant, was totally ravaged in the 1960s.

78
Françoise Morier (ed.),
Belleville, belle ville, visage d'une planète
(Paris: Creaphis, 1994). The old lady is right to say that Ménilmontant is a ‘part', as it belonged to the commune of Belleville when this was annexed to Paris, which explains the topographical uncertainties.

79
La Bédollière,
Le Nouveau Paris
.

80
Gustave Geffroy,
L'Apprentie
(Paris: Fasquelle, 1904). The outer boulevards here meant Boulevards de Belleville, Ménilmontant, etc.

81
Morier (ed.),
Belleville, belle ville
.

82
Dabit,
Faubourgs de Paris
.

83
Jules Vallès,
L'Insurgé
(1884).

84
Dabit,
Faubourgs de Paris
. In the late 1990s, the corner of Rue du Faubourgdu-Temple and Avenue Parmentier was occupied by a shoe shop, Au Funiculaire, since replaced by a mobile phone dealer.

85
Daudet,
Paris vécu
. The Folies-Belleville was at 8 Rue Belleville, and the theatre at no. 46. Geffroy described the theatre at length in
L'Apprentie
: ‘There were animosities, and insults sometimes exchanged between the different social classes of this little town. The noise of the upper galleries annoyed the peaceful occupants of the stalls and the boxes. Overly coquettish
toilettes
made everyone's flesh creep and were sometimes the object of a word or a projectile.'

86
Clément Lépidis, ‘Belleville mon village', in
Belleville
(Paris: Veyrier, 1975).

87
Jean Genet,
L'Atelier de Giacometti
(Paris: L'Arbelète, 1963).

88
Huysmans,
Parisian Sketches
, p. 102.

89
Jaillot,
Recherches critiques, historiques et topographiques.

90
La Bédollière,
Le Nouveau Paris
. The Château de Charonne, built in the seventeenth century, had a large park that was bounded, according to Hillairet, by Rue de Bagnolet from Rue de la Réunion to Rue des Prairies, then along this street, and by Rue Lisfranc and two lines that would continue Rue Lisfranc and Rue de la Réunion to meet inside Père-Lachaise by the Mur de Fédérés.

91
Queneau,
Courir les rues
.

92
Amédée Boinet,
Les Églises parisiennes
, vol. 1 (Paris: Minuit, 1958).

93
Huysmans,
Parisian Sketches
, pp. 101–2.

94
The fountain of the Place Daumesnil was, we may recall, the second fountain on the Place du Château-d'Eau (now Place de la République). Rue Claude-Decaen was formerly the Chemin de Reuilly.

95
It extended into Charenton proper, which was then known as Conflans. The park's boundaries were Rue de la Grange-aux-Mercier (now Nicoläi) and Rue de la Liberté at Charenton.

96
Hurtaut and Magny,
Dictionnaire historique de la ville de Paris
. But they are mistaken here: the château was by Louis Le Vau and not François Mansart. Bercy's links with finance are thus not just recent. The greed of the lords of Bercy was well-known, as attested by this verse from 1715: ‘Let Bercy satisfy its greed/ in melted gold/ and despite the horror of its suffering/ die after rendering it.'

97
Gustave Flaubert,
A Sentimental Education
(Oxford: OUP, 2000), p. 112.

Your metal domes fired by the sun,

Your theatre queens with enchanting voices,

Your bells, cannons, deafening orchestra,

Your magic cobbles erected into fortresses,

Your little orators with baroque turns of phrase

Preaching love, and then your sewers full with blood,

Pouring into hell like so many Orinocos.

– Baudelaire, projected epilogue to the
1861 edition of
Les Fleurs du Mal

The small building in Charonne, on the corner between Rues Saint-Blaise and Riblette, has an entrance like thousands of others, except for two marble plaques that face each other in the doorway. The one on the left reads: