The Invention of Paris (8 page)

a perfect stream of brilliancy emanated from white globes, red lanterns, blue transparencies, lines of gas jets, gigantic watches and fans, outlined in flame and burning in the open. And the motley displays in the shops, the gold ornaments of the jeweller's, the glass ornaments of the confectioner's, the light-coloured silks of the modiste's, seemed to shine again in the crude light of the reflectors behind the clear plate-glass windows, while among the bright-coloured, disorderly array of shop signs a huge purple glove loomed in the distance like a bleeding hand which had been severed from an arm and fastened to a yellow cuff.

The melancholy beauty of the Passage des Panoramas extends across Boulevard Montparnasse, through Passage Jouffroy and Passage Verdeau, as far as Rue de Provence, a long walk completely out of the rain. This was indeed the main reason behind the fashion for these arcades, from the Directory to the end of the Second Empire: you could stroll there without stepping into the famous Parisian mud, or the risk of being run down by carriages. (At the start of the twentieth century: ‘Gourmont explained to me that when he was at the Bibliothèque Nationale, he lived on Rue Richer and in bad weather could walk to the Bibliothèque, almost without experiencing it, via the Passages Verdeau, Jouffroy and des Panoramas, Rue des Colonnes, etc.'
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) In 1800, Paris only had three streets provided with sidewalks: Rues de l'Odéon, Louvois, and de la Chausée-d'Antin. Elsewhere, the gutter was most commonly in the centre of the road, as in the Middle Ages. ‘With the least shower', wrote Sébastien Mercier, ‘rickety bridges have to be put down', in other words, boards on which street children helped pedestrians to cross in return for payment. Frochot, prefect of the Seine department under the Empire, could still lament: ‘The capital of France, adorned with admirable monuments and possessing so many useful establishments, offers those who cross it on foot only an excessively difficult and even dangerous way, which seems to have been exclusively designed for the movement of carriages.'
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Fifty years later, the picture had scarcely changed. Baudelaire wrote in his little prose poem ‘Loss of a Halo':
‘My dear, you know my terror of horses and carriages. Just a little while ago, as I was crossing the boulevard very hastily and jumping about in the mud, through that moving chaos in which death comes galloping towards you from all sides at once . . .' The decline in these arcades coincided with the completion of Haussmann's first great cuttings: ‘Our wider streets and more spacious pavements have made easy the sweet flânerie impossible for our fathers except in the arcades.'
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By the end of the century the arcades were already being spoken of in the past tense: ‘The arcade, which for Parisians was a kind of walking saloon where you could smoke or chat, is now no more than a kind of shelter which you suddenly remember when it rains. Certain arcades keep a certain attraction because of this or that famous shop that is still to be found there. But it is the renown of the tenant that keeps the fashion going, or rather the death agony.'
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Though abandoned and down-at-heel, the Paris arcades are still present in twentieth-century literature – the Passage de l'Opéra in Aragon's
Paris Peasant
, which gave Walter Benjamin the idea for his
Passagenwerk
, the extraordinary Passage des Bérésinas – actually Choiseul – described in Céline's
Death on the Installment Plan
as ‘a kind of sewer'. What is stranger is that scarcely a trace of them can be found in books written in the age of their glory. To my knowledge, there is no mention of the arcades either in
La Comédie humaine
or in such other texts of Balzac's as ‘Histoire et physiologie des boulevards de Paris', nor in Nerval, nor in Baudelaire's
Tableaux parisiens
or his prose poems, even though Poulet-Malassis, the publisher of
Les Fleurs du mal
, had his offices in the Passage Mirès (later Passage des Princes, before its recent demolition), nor in
Les Misérables
or Eugène Sue's
Mysteries of Paris
. Perhaps the arcade, such a poetic place today, was for its contemporaries simply an urban detail that, however convenient, had little intrinsic interest, any more than shopping centres, multiplex cinemas or underground car parks have for us today.

To pass from the Palais-Royal to Les Halles is to pass from the newest quarter of old Paris, as well as the most elegant and best preserved, to a quarter that is quite the opposite. The most visible border between them is Rue du Louvre, a widened version of the very ancient Rue des Poulies. Another frontier, perhaps more precise as it follows the trace of the walls of Philippe Auguste, is Rue Jean-Jacques-Rousseau, which went under the

name of Rue Plâtrière when Jean-Jacques lived here, earning his living as a music copyist. ‘His imagination', wrote Sébastien Mercier, ‘dwelt only in the meadows, waters and woods, with their animated solitude. Yet as he approached the age of sixty, he came to live in Paris, in Rue Plâtrière, in other words the most noisy, uncomfortable, crowded and diseased of bad places.'

The destruction of the market halls in the 1970s was such a trauma that the demolitions of Baltard at the start of the Second Empire were almost forgotten.
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Yet close to four hundred buildings had been razed to make way for the new market: the central street which became Rue Baltard continued Rue du Pont-Neuf towards the Pointe Saint-Eustache; Rue des Halles, which came obliquely from the Châtelet, and Rue Rambuteau, already opened up under Louis-Philippe, but which had to be widened. The land was cleared to construct the ten metal pavilions designed by Baltard, six to the east and four to the west of the central axis.
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This was a brutal intervention right at the heart of the city, but – unlike the disaster of 1970 – it did no more than perpetuate an old tradition, by which this quarter was periodically transformed without ever losing its role or its spirit.

The first halls dated from Philippe Auguste, who had two great buildings constructed to cover a market that was already held there, in the open air, on a little hillock called Les Champeaux. These halls were surrounded by walls, and the gates closed at night; it was like entering a town. The surrounding buildings had a recessed ground floor and upper storeys supported by pillars, forming a gallery that housed shops. The
grands piliers
of Rue de la Tonnellerie [barrel-making] – in the line of the future Pont-Neuf – were differentiated from the
petits piliers
, those of the pewterers, which faced a small triangular place in front of the original small church of Saint-Eustache. This open-air market where three streets converged – Coquillière, Montmartre and Montorgeuil – was known as the Carreau des Halles, and wheat and fresh fish arrived here from the west and north. At the centre stood a fountain and a pillory that was like an inverted Bentham panopticon, ‘an old octagonal stone tower with large windows at all sides of its upper level. In the middle of this tower was a rotating wooden device pierced with holes, for placing the head and arms of fraudulent bankrupts, extortionists and other condemned criminals of this kind. They were exposed there for three market days, two hours each day; and each half hour they were made to turn round in the pillory, exposed to the insults of the people.'
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The Innocents cemetery, the largest in Paris for a number of centuries, occupied the corner between Rue Saint-Denis and Rue de la Ferronnerie.
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Philippe Auguste also had this surrounded by a wall with four gates. The dead were cast into common graves several metres deep, which could accommodate up to a thousand bodies. When one grave was full, it was closed and a new one dug. In the fifteenth century, the interior of the surrounding wall was supplemented by arched galleries with spaces above, a charnel house where bones from earlier graves were piled up to make room. On the side of Rue de la Ferronnerie, the walls of the gallery were decorated with a
danse macabre
, a motive found throughout France in these years. In an age when people were only too familiar with death, the cemetery was one of the most frequented places in Paris, just as the Galerie Mercière of the Palace of Justice and the gardens of the Palais-Royal were later on. It was a place to find linen-maids, public scribes, clothes merchants, sellers of books and pictures, and various kinds of charlatans.

The market had been somewhat disorderly ever since the time of Louis IX, who had authorized ‘poor women' to retail sea fish close to the main fish market, a privilege retained until its final destruction: these are the women with their large red umbrellas that the young Haussmann encountered on his way to the Faculty of Law. Along the cemetery wall, linen-maids and old-clothes dealers were also able to present their wares free of charge. To the north of the Innocents, near the church of Saint-Leu-Saint-Gilles, Rue de la Grande-Truanderie well justified its name for a number of centuries: Sauval wrote that ‘it took its name from the rogues who formerly lived here, and was not just a court of miracles, but perhaps the earliest and largest one in Paris'.

The first great ‘reformation' of the Halles was conducted under Henri II in the early 1550s, at the same time as construction started on the church of Saint-Eustache. ‘In 1551', wrote Gilles Corozet, ‘the Halles of Paris were entirely knocked down and rebuilt, equipped with finely worked buildings, hotels and sumptuous houses for those townspeople who took
the old sites.'
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The old wall of the Halles was then demolished, and future access was through regular streets. The allocation of space was more clearly defined. On the south side, where Rues des Bourdonnais, Sainte-Opportune, des Deux-Boules and des Lavandières now run, was the hall for linen and cloth. Butchers were also to be found there, though the greater part of their activity was in the quarter of Saint-Jacques-de-la-Boucherie – the Saint-Jacques tower is a vestige of this large church – where flocks were brought to the slaughterhouses on the hoof.

To the northwest, close to where the Bourse du Commerce now stands, was the Halle aux Blés, close to the hotel that Catherine de Médicis had built by Philibert de l'Orme (‘A modern writer', stated Germain Brice two centuries later, ‘whom one can follow on this occasion, says that, after the Louvre, there is no more noble building in the kingdom than this hotel.') On the northeast side, towards the Pointe Saint-Eustache, was the Carreau des Halles, extending to the market for
poirées
: ‘Throughout the year, and every day, all kinds of vegetables and herbs are sold here, including medicinal ones, and all kinds of fruit and flowers, so that this place is a real garden, where the flowers and fruits of all seasons can be seen.'
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This arrangement – textiles and meat to the south, grain, fish and vegetables to the north – would last until Baltard's time.

At the end of the ancien régime, the Halles were once again transformed from top to bottom. The hotel of Catherine de Médicis – Hôtel de Soissons – was demolished, and in its place Le Camus des Mézières built a new Halle aux Blés, a large circular building that Molinos covered in the 1780s with an immense wooden dome, an innovation new to Paris. The halls dating from the Renaissance were replaced by new buildings. And above all, the buildings surrounding the Innocents cemetery were pulled down, on Rues aux Fers
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(now Berger), de la Lingerie and Saint-Denis.

This destruction did away with the church of Les Saints-Innocents, but spared the adjacent fountain, a monument much admired: ‘Signor G. L. Bernini, one of the most renowned architects of the last several centuries, always very sparing with his praise, and who affected to think nothing of all the beautiful things that he saw in this city, could not prevent himself from exclaiming when he inspected this incomparable work, and declaring
that he had not noticed anything like it in France.'
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The fountain of the Innocents was then given a fourth arch, completing those that Jean Goujon had already sculpted, so that it no longer had to stand against a wall, but could be placed at the centre of the new Marché des Innocents. The cemetery, in fact, was closed. In an ecological vein, Mercier wrote that ‘in this narrowly enclosed space, infections attacked the life and health of the inhabitants. The knowledge newly acquired about the nature of air [Lavoisier!] had cast light on the danger of this mephitism . . . The danger was imminent; soup and milk spoiled in a few hours in the houses close to the cemetery; wine turned acid when it was poured; and the miasmas from the corpses threatened to poison the atmosphere.' The skeletons were then removed to the quarries to the south of Paris that became the Catacombes: ‘We can only imagine the lit torches, this immense grave opened for the first time, the many beds of corpses suddenly stirred, the debris of skeletons, the sparse lights fuelled by the planks of coffins, the moving shadows of funeral crosses, this fearsome precinct suddenly lit up in the silence of the night.'
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