The Invention of Paris (5 page)

‘No matter what the weather, rain or shine', Diderot's narrator explains at the beginning of
Rameau's Nephew
, ‘it's my habit every evening at about five o'clock to take a walk around the Palais-Royal. I'm the one you see dreaming on the bench in the Argenson avenue, all alone.' This was written in the 1760s, so it is still the old Palais-Royal that is referred to here. Cardinal Richelieu had bought a series of buildings and plots at the end of Rue Saint-Honoré, grouping them into a single quadrilateral that is today bordered by Rues Saint-Honoré, des Petits-Champs, de Richelieu and des Bons-Enfants.
⁹
The Palais-Cardinal constructed by Lemercier stood close to where the Conseil d'État is today. The rest of the land formed a garden: the Argenson avenue that Diderot mentions was to the right, alongside what would become the Galerie de Valois; the avenue opposite took its name from the Café de Foy, the first of those establishments that would be the glory of the Palais-Royal. (The Caveau was founded a little later. Diderot in his old age wrote to his daughter on 28 June 1781: ‘I get bored at home. I go out and get bored even more. The sole and supreme happiness I can enjoy is to go regularly each day at five o'clock to have an ice at the Petit-Caveau.') In the same year, the Duc de Chartres, future Philippe-Égalité, commissioned Victor Louis to construct the buildings that today surround the garden on three sides.
¹⁰
Endowed with its hundred and eighty arcades, the Palais-Royal enjoyed an immediate success:

A unique point on the globe. Visit London, Amsterdam, Madrid or Vienna, you will see nothing like it: a prisoner could live there without getting bored, and it would be years before he even dreamed of freedom . . . It is called the capital of Paris. Everything is to be found there: and for a young man of twenty, with fifty thousand livres invested in government stock, there could be nothing else wanting in life, and he would never even emerge from this fairyland . . . This enchanted abode is a small town of luxury enclosed in a greater one; it is the temple of pleasure, from where scintillating vices have banished even the phantom of shame; no tavern in the world is more graciously depraved.
¹¹

Towards the end of Louis XVI's reign, the Palais-Royal saw a proliferation of clubs. By July 1789 the agitation was constant, and the Palais became what Hugo called ‘the nucleus of the comet Revolution'. Camille Desmoulins relates the date of 13 July as follows:

It was half past two, and I had gauged the mood of the people. My anger against the despots had turned to despair. I could not see any groups ready for an uprising, however strongly affected they were. Three young men, standing hand in hand, struck me as inspired by a more resolute courage. I could see that they had come to the Palais-Royal with the same intention as myself. A number of passive citizens followed them. ‘Messieurs,' I said, ‘here is the beginning of a civic force: one of us must take the initiative and stand on a table to harangue the people.' ‘Get up, then.' I agreed. Rather than climbing, I was immediately hoisted up on the table [in the Café de Foy]. Right away I found myself surrounded by an immense crowd. Here is my speech, which I shall never forget: ‘Citizens, there is not a moment to lose. I have come from Versailles. Necker has been dismissed; his dismissal is the signal for a St Bartholemew's Night of patriots. This evening, the Swiss and German battalions will come out of the Champ-du-Mars to
massacre us. Just one single recourse remains, to seize arms and choose a rosette by which to recognize one another.'
¹²

In the course of the Revolution, however, the Palais-Royal, rechristened Palais-Égalité, rapidly became a rallying place for royalists, moderates, Feuillants, all those whom Robespierre called
fripons
(rogues). At the Mafs restaurant, the contributors to the royalist newspaper
Les Actes des apôtres
– Abbé Maury, Montlausier, Rivarol – held their ‘evangelical dinner' each week. They wrote up their discussions at a corner of the table, and ‘the issue composed in this way was left on the Mafs menu, and from Mafs went to Gattey, the famous shop in the Palais' Galeries de Bois'.
¹³
On 20 January 1793, the day that the Convention voted to send Louis Capet to the guillotine, it was in a modest restaurant – chez Février – in the Galerie de Valois that the bodyguard Pâris assassinated Le Peletier de Saint-Fargeau. At the Convention, on 19 Nivôse of year II, ‘the revolutionary committee of the Montagne denounced the restaurant owners and caterers of the Palais de l'Égalité, which had merely changed its name and could still bear that of Palais-Royal from the insolent luxury displayed there'.
¹⁴
Barras – who lived in the Palais-Royal, above Véfour's – and his friends prepared the coup of 9 Thermidor at a table in the Corazza's ice-cream parlour, and under the Directory the
incroyables
pursued republicans in the gardens, white cockade in hat and bludgeon in hand.

The apogee of the Palais-Royal, the time when it became a myth with no counterpart anywhere in modern Europe, was the twenty years following the entry of the Allies into Paris in 1815. The arrival of Russian, Austrian, Prussian and English soldiers and officers gave a new impulse to the two most profitable activities of the site, prostitution and gambling. This was when the Galeries de Bois, wooden buildings lined up transversally where the double colonnade of the Galerie d'Orléans now stands, had their moment of glory:
¹⁵

The Wooden Galleries of the Palais-Royal used to be one of the most famous sights of Paris. Some description of the squalid bazaar will not be
out of place; for there are few men of forty who will not take an interest in recollections of a state of things which will seem incredible to a younger generation. The great dreary, spacious Galerie d'Orléans, that flowerless hothouse, as yet was not; the space upon which it now stands was covered with booths; or, to be more precise, with small, wooden dens, pervious to the weather, and dimly illuminated on the side of the court and the garden by borrowed lights – styled windows by courtesy but more like the filthiest arrangements for obscuring daylight to be found in little wineshops in the suburbs. The Galleries, parallel passages about twelve feet in height, were formed by a triple row of shops. The centre row, giving back and front upon the Galleries, was filled with the fetid atmosphere of the place, and derived a dubious daylight through the invariably dirty windows of the roof . . . The treacherous mud-heaps . . . were in keeping with the seething traffic of various kinds carried on within it; for here in this shameless, unblushing haunt, amid wild mirth and a babel of talk, an immense amount of business was transacted between the Revolution of 1789 and the Revolution of 1830. For twenty years the Bourse stood just opposite, on the ground floor of the Palais . . . People made appointments to meet in the Galleries before or after 'Change; on showery days the Palais-Royal was often crowded with weather-bound capitalists and men of business . . . Here dwelt poetry, politics, and prose, new books and classics, the glories of ancient and modern literature side by side with political intrigue and the tricks of the bookseller's trade.
¹⁶

In this blessed age, when the trades of bookseller and publisher were still combined (sometimes indeed with that of printer as well), the Galeries de Bois saw the beginnings of certain publishing houses that were marked out for a fine future: Stock, Garnier, Le Dentu – supposedly the model for Dauriat in
Lost Illusions
, to whom Lucien de Rubempré tries to sell his sonnets on ‘Easter Daisies' (‘For me the question is not whether you are a great poet, I know that you have a great deal, a very great deal of merit; if I were only just starting in business, I should make the mistake of publishing your book. But in the first place, my sleeping partners and those at the back of me are cutting off my supplies').

The colonnades were not a place for reading but rather for gambling, at
creps
,
passe-dix
,
trente-et-un
and
biribi
. Stall number 9 (which occupied spaces 9 to 12 of the colonnade) offered two tables of
trente-et-quarante
, a table for
creps
, and the gamblers could drink punch flambé. At the beginning of Balzac's
The Magic Skin
, the unfortunate Raphael climbs the staircase of number 36 (‘As you enter a gaming-house the law despoils you of your hat at the outset. Is it by way of a parable, a divine revelation?'). But the most famous establishment was undoubtedly number 113: eight saloons, with six roulette tables. Marshal Blücher, the victor of Waterloo, hardly left this gambling den. He ran through six million livres during his stay in Paris, and left the city with his estates all mortgaged. Mortgage agents actually stationed themselves close at hand, and in the evening, readily available girls mingled with the gamblers. Those who strolled beneath the Wooden Galleries and in the little avenues of the gardens were known as ‘semi-beavers', those in the Galleries themselves as ‘beavers', and those on the Caveau terrace as ‘complete beavers'.

You could also eat and drink in the galleries of the Palais-Royal. The Café de Foy was the only one that served in a garden pavilion. On the first floor, its chess club, whose members included Talleyrand and David, competed with that in the Café de la Régence, the setting of
Rameau's Nephew
. The Café des Mille Colonnes, run by a famous beauty, was Balzac's particular preference. The Café de la Rotonde, close to the Passage du Perron, had been during the Revolution the headquarters of the Brissotins (who were not known in their time as Girondins), after being the site under Louis XVI of the quarrels between the champions of Gluck and those of Piccini. Café Lemblin was frequented by those nostalgic for the Empire. Philippe Brideau ‘was one of the faithful Bonapartes of the Café Lemblin, that constitutional Boeotia; he acquired the habits, manners, style, and life of a half-pay officer.'
¹⁷
Behind the counter, the waiters had swords wrapped in green serge, ready to hand to their customers for duels. Some evenings there was such a demand that they had to excuse themselves: ‘Messieurs, they're in use.' Among the establishments specializing in prostitution, the most famous was the Café des Aveugles, which took its name from the composition of its orchestra. (‘Why blind men, you will say, just in this café, which is scarcely more than a cupboard under the stairs? It's because in its early days, which went back to the time of the Revolution, things happened that would have shocked the decency of an orchestra.'
¹⁸
)

Of the three great restaurants featured in
La Comédie humaine
, two were in the Palais-Royal, the third being Le Rocher de Cancale, on Rue
Montorgeuil. ‘Is it a dinner for foreigners or provincials whom you want to give an exalted idea of the capital? Then you must take them to Véry's . . . This is the most expensive caterer, which allows us to conclude that he must be number one in the hierarchy of worth of his profession, one of the most enlightened artists among those who see to the preservation of good taste, and opposed to the invasions of middle-class cuisine.'
¹⁹
When Lucien de Rubempré arrived from Angoulême, unhappy and humiliated, he made his way towards the Palais-Royal:

He did not know the topography of his quarter yet, and was obliged to ask his way. Then he went to Véry's and ordered dinner by way of an initiation into the pleasures of Paris, and a solace for his discouragement. A bottle of Bordeaux, oysters from Ostend, a dish of fish, a partridge, a dish of macaroni and dessert – this was the
ne plus ultra
of his desire. He enjoyed this little debauch, studying the while how to give the Marquise d'Espard proof of his wit, and redeem the shabbiness of his grotesque accoutrements by the display of intellectual riches. The total of the bill drew him down from these dreams, and left him the poorer by fifty of the francs which were to have gone such a long way in Paris. He could have lived in Angoulême for a month on the price of that dinner.
²⁰

Véry's was eventually taken over by its neighbour Véfour, the former Café de Chartres where Alexander von Humboldt, on return from Central America, very often dined under the Empire. In 1815, Rostopchin, the man who had given the order to burn Moscow, frequently caroused there with his French teacher Flore, a lovely actress from the Thêatre des Variétés: ‘There was not a foreigner, an elegant lady, or even a bourgeois from the Place Royale who did not know these three young people from the Durance, who had arrived in Paris with nothing to support themselves except the secret of
brandades de morue
[cod pounded with garlic, oil and cream], which eventually led to their receiving tribute from the whole of civilized Europe, from the mouth of the Tagus to the shores of the Neva.'
²¹

The heyday of the Palais-Royal ended on a precise date: at midnight on 31 December 1836, when games of chance were banned in Paris. The decline was rapid. The dandies, gawpers, bon viveurs and call girls migrated a few hundred metres, and the Boulevards became the new
promenade enchantée
.

In those days, when quarters went out of style, they fell into a kind of lethargy that could last a very long while. They had not suffered in their heyday the accelerated commercial metabolism that since the 1960s has ravaged quarters such as Saint-Séverin, Mouffetard, the Bastille and the Marais, and is now at work on the Butte-aux-Cailles, or the Saint-Blaise quarter around the Place Charonne, Rue Montorgeuil and Rue Oberkampf. The Palais-Royal, for its part, has remained as it was when the crowds left and moved further north. Its essential charms, however, did not withstand Victor Louis's bays, the monotony of which is reinforced by the impeccable alignment of the four avenues of lime trees. What still does have its surprises is the way in which the Palais-Royal, an enclosed space, communicates with the surrounding streets. Certain passages have a monumental beauty, with statues, candelabras and gilded railings – such as that which leads via the Place de Valois towards the entrance of the Galerie Véro-Dodat; or the two covered colonnades by which you leave the bottom of the gardens for Rue de Beaujolais, the one on the left passing Véfour's restaurant, the one on the right towards the Passage des Deux-Pavillons, Passage Colbert and the Bibliothèque Nationale. Others, on the contrary, slip along in an almost clandestine fashion, like the Passage du Perron with its outlet opening on Rue Vivienne between antique dolls and musical boxes, or the three graceful stairways that lead from Rue de Montpensier towards Rue de Richelieu.