Читать книгу The Invention of Paris - Eric Hazan - Страница 19

Once you cross Rue Saint-Martin – some would rather say Rue Beaubourg – you enter the Marais.⁶⁴ The appearance of this word to denote a region of Paris is relatively recent: it was not until the seventeenth century that only the zone of the Marais that was still really marshy was called by that name, around the present convergence of Rues de Turenne, Vieille-du-Temple, de Bretagne and des Filles-du-Calvaire, not far from the Cirque d’Hiver.⁶⁵ In referring to the Paris quarter, marais means a region of watered gardens (maraîchers) rather than an actual marsh. If there was such a marsh, if the battle of Lutetia between Camulogène and Caesar took place around here, the fortifications of Charles V subsequently served as a dyke, and its moats as a drainage canal. This arrangement is still very visible: Boulevard Beaumarchais, built on the line of the walls, is in such a raised position that Rue des Tournelles and Rue Saint-Gilles, coming from the Marais, have to rise quite steeply in their final stretch in order to meet it. And on the other side, to descend to Rue Amelot – formerly Rue des Fossés-du-Temple – it was necessary to install a stairway.

It is strange, and has no other equivalent in Paris, how the physiognomy of the Marais today is haunted by the phantoms of three great domains, which have left their names and yet not a single stone: the Temple, the Hôtel Saint-Pol and the Hôtel des Tournelles.

The mother house of the order of Knights Templar, founded in Jerusalem in the twelfth century, was located at the far end of the region’s major north-south axis, on Rue du Temple.⁶⁶ Its lands fell into two distinct sections. The heart was the enclos, a fortified quadrilateral whose boundaries would now be Rues du Temple, de Bretagne, Charlot and Béranger. At the centre of this enclosure was the keep, used as a prison for Louis XVI and his family after 10 August 1792, and later for Babeuf and Cadoudal. A large part of the enclosure was rented out to artisans, exempt here from tax as in all the religious precincts of the city.

To the south and east of the enclosure, the Templars possessed large tracts of agricultural land: this was the censive, whose limits defined a further quadrilateral, extending to Rue du Roi-de-Sicile and thus corresponding to a large section of the Marais today. The wall of Philippe Auguste cut through this censive, along the line of Rue des Francs-Bourgeois.⁶⁷ On the side facing the city, these lands were gradually populated along the axes, particularly along Rue Vieille-du-Temple, which was then called Rue de la Couture-du-Temple [couture = cultivation], but on the outward side there was nothing but market gardens until the sixteenth century.

The other major axis of the Marais, its east-west orientation, was Rue Saint-Antoine, as it still is today. At the end of this, the outer limit of Paris, two royal dwellings stood face to face, the Hôtel Saint-Pol and the Hôtel des Tournelles. Saint-Pol was the creation of the Dauphin, the future Charles V. Tired of the old Palais de la Cité, where he had been forced to confront popular insurrection and Étienne Marcel, he decided to establish himself somewhere more calm. He bought buildings and gardens from the Comte d’Étampes, the archbishop of Sens, and the abbés of Saint-Maur, ending up with all of the land between Rue Saint-Antoine and the Seine, and from Rue Saint-Paul right through to Rue du Petit-Musc. Saint-Pol was not a single building, an hôtel in the usual sense, but rather a group of buildings surrounded by gardens, and linked by covered galleries that framed a succession of courtyards, a cherry orchard, a vineyard, a sauvoir for raising salmon, aviaries, and a menagerie where lions were kept, pensioners of the hotel down to its final days. (In his Vies des dames galantes, Brantôme recalled how ‘one day when François I was amusing himself by watching his lions fighting, a lady who had let her glove fall said to de Lorges: if you want me to believe that you love me as much as you swear every day, go and pick up my glove. De Lorges went down into the lions’ den, picked up the glove from among these fearsome animals, came up, threw it in the lady’s face, and since then, despite all the troubles and pains that she took towards him, never wanted to see her again.’)

From the main gate of the Hôtel Saint-Pol you could see on the other side of Rue Saint-Antoine the gateway of the Hôtel des Tournelles, which, according to Piganiol de La Force, ‘took its name from the number of towers by which it was surrounded’. In the 1420s, under the English occupation, the Duke of Bedford, acting as regent, made his residence in a small hotel that was situated between Rue de Birague and the Impasse Guéménée. ‘John, Duke of Bedford, stayed there during the disturbances of the Bourguignons and the Armagnacs’, wrote Sauval. ‘He extended it and had it magnificently built, so that it has since been a royal residence, which our kings have preferred to Saint-Pol, and where Charles VII, Louis XI, Charles VIII, Louis XII and François I all stayed for long periods.’ Piganiol de La Force relates that ‘this palace counted several courtyards, a number of chapels, twelve galleries, two parks and six large gardens, as well as a labyrinth known as the Daedalus, and a further garden or park of nine acres, which the Duke of Bedford had his gardener plough up’.⁶⁸ After its return to the French crown, the hotel was surrounded by a large park, where François I raised camels and ostriches, and which gave its name to Rue du Parc-Royal. The park was also used for equestrian sports, but tournaments as such were held on Rue Saint-Antoine, which was widened between the two hôtels, a layout that still exists alongside the statue of Beaumarchais.

The way in which these three groups of buildings disappeared goes a long way to explain the contemporary Marais. The Hôtel Saint-Pol was the first to go: François I, always short of money and wanting to renovate the Louvre and make his residence there, decided to sell it off as building plots. ‘There is no longer anything remaining of these buildings, which included a large number of hôtels, such as the Hôtel de La Pissotte, the Hôtel de Beautreillis, the Hôtel-de-la-Reine, the Hôtel Neuf (known as the Hôtel d’Étampes), etc. And it is on their ruins that the streets were laid out that are now those of the Saint-Paul quarter as far as the ditches of the Arsenal, and preserve the names of the buildings that were there at the time of the Hôtel Saint-Pol, such as Rues de Beautreillis, des Lions, du Petit-Musc and de la Cerisaie.’⁶⁹ Like all of the Marais that was built in the Renaissance, this part of the Saint-Paul quarter, despite the street names that seem taken from an illuminated manuscript, was designed in a modern fashion: the plots are regular, and the streets laid out in a grid, in contrast with the medieval lattice beside the Hôtel de Sens, Rue des Nonnains-d’Hyères and Rue de l’Ave-Maria.

The destruction of the Hôtel des Tournelles was not provoked by financial difficulties but by an accident: in 1559, while a tournament was being held in Rue Saint-Antoine to celebrate the marriage of the princesses, Henri II was mortally wounded in front of the palace by the blow of a lance wielded by Gabriel de Montgomery, ‘the fairest man and the best man-at-arms of that time’, according to Sauval. Catherine de Médicis, his widow, decided to raze the hotel to the ground, and moved into her new hotel close to the Halles. The abandoned park was for many years the site of a horse market.

During this time, however, in the more central part of the Marais, a new quarter was constructed between the two fortifications – the wall of Philippe Auguste around the central and denser part of the city, and the wall of Charles V, which ran through open fields. Once the ‘false gates’ of the old fortifications were crossed, you entered a region where gardeners peacefully cultivated their cabbages and leeks. This was a paradise for property developers, as demand was strong in the first half of the sixteenth century, before the Wars of Religion. François I set the example by dividing up the Hôtel de Tancarville, whose lands were located on each side of the wall of Phillipe Auguste, at the corner of Rue Vieille-du-Temple and Rue des Rosiers. The religious communities – in particular Saint-Catherine-du-Val-des-Écoliers, which owned the wide fields of Sainte-Catherine, towards Rue Payenne – likewise sold off their lands for building.⁷⁰ The movement extended along Rue Barbette and Rue Elzévir. A modern quarter was built there, much influenced by the new taste that came in from Italy, the Hôtel Carnavalet being a sumptuous example among the buildings that remain.

This surge, held back for a long while by the Wars of Religion, the League, and the terrible siege, got under way again when Henri IV entered Paris in 1594. Through the voice of the provost marshal, he proclaimed that ‘his intention is to spend years in this city, and live there like a true patriot, to make this city beautiful, tranquil, and full of all the conveniences and ornaments that will be possible, desiring the completion of the Pont-Neuf and the restoration of fountains . . . even desiring to make a whole world of this city and a wonder of the world, in which respect he displays towards us a love that is more than fatherly’.⁷¹

What was then lacking in the Marais – and in Paris more generally – was a large square ‘for the inhabitants of our city, who are most tightly pressed in their houses owing to the multitude of people who arrive from all directions’.⁷² Henri IV and Sully had the idea of constructing this Place Royale (now the Place des Vosges) on the Parc des Tournelles, which had been neglected, being far from the centre. And to kill two birds with one stone, the king decided to establish on the north side of the square a manufactory for silk sheets embroidered with gold and silver thread, a luxury product that had up till then been imported from Milan:

And indeed in 1605 those who were to undertake these manufactories had put up a large building that occupied all of one side. The king for his part marked out there a large place some seventy-two yards square which he desired to be known as the Place Royale, and he gave sites on the three other sides for one gold écu in tax (cens), in return for covering them with pavilions according to the elevations to be supplied to them. As well as this, he had the streets leading to them widened and began at his own expense both the royal pavilion, placed at the end of Rue Royale [now de Birague], and the pavilion of the queen, placed at the end of Rue du Parc-Royal . . . Each pavilion consisted of three storeys, all built in brick, with stone arches, piers, embrasures, entablatures and pillars, all covered with a slate roof in two sections, ending in a ridge garnished with lead. The red of the brick, the white of the stone and the black of the slate and the lead made such an agreeable mixture or shading of colours . . . that it has since been used even for the houses of the bourgeois.⁷³

Elegant shops were established under the arches, but there were also bawdy houses (tripots), as later at the Palais-Royal, and it became a favourite place for prostitutes.⁷⁴ The centre of the square, inaugurated by Louis XIII at the great festival of 1612, was flat, sandy, and clear; it was used as a ground for equestrian events, tournaments, tilting, and sometimes also for duels, some of which have remained famous.⁷⁵

Not far from here, Henri IV and Sully had conceived another great site, a kind of administrative complex that would house the Grand Conseil as well as other bodies. There was an opportunity to be had, as the grand prior of the Temple was dividing up his censive. The projected ‘Place de France’ was a semicircle whose diameter – close to two hundred metres – would coincide with the fortifications. A new royal gate, between Rue du Pont-aux-Choux and Rue des Filles-du-Calvaire, opened towards the road to Meaux and Germany. Six streets radiated from the place in the direction of the city, bearing the names of those provinces that were seats of sovereign courts – the first example, Sauval says, of streets named geographically. The design of diverging roads from a city gate was fashionable at the time, after the trident from the Porta del Popolo in Rome.⁷⁶ The project came to an end with the death of Henri IV, but it persists in the name of certain streets (Poitou, Picardie, Saintonge, Perche, Normandie . . .), which, even if they do not correspond to the original plan, perpetuate its toponomy. The initial design is also recalled by the radial course of Rue de Bretagne, and especially the semicircle formed by Rue Debelleyme. There also remains the market of Les Enfants-Rouges,⁷⁷ intended to supply these large establishments. Ravaillac had a greater influence than is generally imagined on the Paris cityscape, for if this great project had been concluded, the centre of gravity would have been permanently shifted eastward.

Since the timescale of places is neither continuous nor homogeneous, a quarter can suddenly gather speed, so that events that previously took two centuries now happen in twenty years. With the Place Royale and its surroundings, this was the first time that a Paris quarter was specifically designed for what was not yet called flânerie, a ‘promenade’ for a society that was reviving after the nightmare of the Wars of Religion. There was no peace as yet: in 1636, the very time when the fashion for Spain was at its height and Le Cid was having its premiere in Paris, the Spanish army had reached Corbie, three days’ march from the city; it was a good while yet until the danger was allayed, after the battle of Rocroi. Nor was there religious tolerance: in 1614, in a memorandum from the Ville de Paris to the États Généraux, the desire was expressed that Jews, Anabaptists and others not professing the Catholic faith, or the reformed religion ‘tolerated by the edicts’, should be put to death.⁷⁸ All the same, a kind of love affair developed between the new quarter and a certain cultivated aristocracy, an open-minded haute bourgeoisie, and an intellectual and artistic milieu that was rapidly expanding. One of Corneille’s first plays was La Place Royale (1635); it did not actually deal with the place itself, but it is revealing that he chose this title for a play about fashionable youth.⁷⁹ Ten years later, when the valet of Dorante, Corneille’s eponymous Liar, is charged with inquiring about a pleasant encounter in the street: ‘The coachman’s tongue has done its duty well/The fairest of the two, he says, is my mistress,/She lives on the place, and her name is Lucrèce.’/ ‘What place?’ ‘Royale, and the other lives there too.’ Paul Scarron, leaving the quarter, said his Adieux aux Marets et à la place Royale: ‘Farewell then until after the fair/When you shall see me return/For who can stand living for long /So far from the Place Royale?/Farewell fine place where only live/Persons of true elite,/And farewell such illustrious place/The lustre of an illustrious city.’

It was in the Marais that the intelligentsia of baroque Paris held their gatherings. In Rue de Béarn, behind the Place Royale, the new convent of the Minimes had just been completed, with a chapel decorated by Vouet, La Hyre and Champaigne, and a doorway that was seen as François Mansart’s masterpiece. Père Mersenne – ‘a savant in whom there was more than in all the universities together’, as Hobbes said of him in his own Paris exile – gave hospitality to Descartes for a number of months, before his move to Holland. Mersenne also received Gérard Desargues, a geometer who specialized in the design of staircases, along with his young student, Blaise Pascal, who lived not far away on Rue de Touraine. This was a curious establishment, in the lead not just in the struggle against misguided thinkers – the ‘confrérie des bouteilles’, Théophile de Viau, Saint-Amant, Guez de Balzac – but also in scientific research, with a library of 25,000 volumes. At the Hôtel de Montmort, on Rue du Temple, you could meet Huygens, Gassendi (who bequeathed Galileo’s personal telescope to Hubert de Montmort, counsellor to the Parlement), or Claude Tardy, the doctor who introduced into France William Harvey’s new ideas on the circulation of the blood and the role of the heart: there was a passionate controversy in the salons between the ‘circulationists’ and the ‘anti-circulationists’ who defended Galien’s system. Every Monday, Lamoignon de Malesherbes would invite writers to his hôtel on Rue Pavée⁸⁰ – Racine, Bouleau, La Rochefoucauld, Bourdaloue – often also joined by Guy Patin, doctor to the king and professor at the Collège de France.

Women held salons as well. Some of them were what would later be called demi-mondaines: Marion Delorme, whose salon was on the Place Royale, and Ninon de Lenclos, whose residence on Rue des Tournelles was the rendezvous of the ‘libertines’, i.e., freethinkers, though this did not prevent her from having among her regulars La Rochefoucauld and Mme de Lafayette, Boileau, Mignard, and Lully. Legend has it that Molière read his Tartuffe here for the first time, before La Fontaine and Racine, who had come with the actress La Champmeslé. Mme de Sévigné wrote to her daughter on 1 April 1671, concerned about her son: ‘This Ninon is a real danger! If you knew how dogmatic she was about religion, it would horrify you . . . we are making every effort, Mme de la Fayette and I, to extricate him from such a dangerous commitment.’ Virtuous intellectuals could also be found: Mlle de Scudéry, a précieuse if ever there was one, was at home every Saturday in her small hôtel on Rue de Beauce, its courtyard adorned with an acacia – still rare – and an aviary. This was where she wrote, along with her brother, Le Grand Cyrus and Clélie, illustrated with the famous Carte du Tendre. Mme de Sévigné spent her entire Parisian life in the Marais. She was born in the house of her grandfather, on the corner of the Place Royale and Rue de Birague. As an orphan, she lived at her uncle’s, first on Rue Barbette and then on Rue des Francs-Bourgeois. After her marriage to Saint-Gervais, she established herself on Rue des Lions. Soon widowed, she moved with her two children to Rue de Thorigny, opposite the Venetian embassy, then to Rue des Trois-Pavillons (now Elzévir), and finally to the Hôtel Carnavalet: ‘It is an admirable affair, we shall all stay here and enjoy the fine air. Since it is impossible to have everything, we shall have to dispense with parquet floors and fashionable little stoves; but at least we have a fine courtyard, a beautiful garden, and nice little blue girls who are most convenient.’⁸¹

Each major residence on the Place Royale, wrote Scarron, hid ‘its sumptuous interior, its wondrous panelling, its rich ornaments and priceless paintings, its rare cabinets, canopies and balustrades’. The Duc de Richelieu, great-nephew of the cardinal, built up in his hôtel (now no. 21) a collection with more than ten paintings by Poussin, including Eliezer and Rebecca – subject of a famous lecture that Philippe de Champaigne gave to the Académie – and Moses Rescued from the Waters, which was later bought by Louis XIV and is now in the Louvre. Bernini, a great admirer of Poussin, visited the duke during his stay in Paris, as he would visit Chantelou to see the Seven Sacraments. After selling the Poussins, the duke bought several works by Rubens, including The Massacre of the Innocents and The Lion Hunt which is now in Munich. President Amelot de Gournay lived at no. 10. His son’s tutor was Roger de Piles, whose theoretical writings lay at the origin of a famous controversy between the supporters of Poussin – the majority of the Académie – and those of Rubens, defenders of colouring who were denounced as corruptors of the visual arts, as they had ‘introduced by their plotting all kinds of libertine painting that were quite released from all the constraints that formerly rendered this art so admirable and difficult’.⁸²

Many artists chose to live in the Marais, close to their secular or religious patrons. There were painters such as Quentin Varin, whose workshop was on Rue Saint-Antoine at the corner with Rue de Birague; Claude Vignon, on the same street near the Visitation; La Hyre, who lived on Rue d’Angoumois (now Charlot) and painted a Nativity for the church of his neighbours, the Marais Capuchins, at the corner of his street and Rue du Perche. A little later, all the great names of French architecture were concentrated in the Marais: François Mansart, who had a very simple house built on Rue Payenne (now no. 5); his nephew by marriage, Jules Hardouin-Mansart, who lived on Rue des Tournelles in an hôtel decorated by Mignard, Le Brun et La Fosse; Libéral Bruant, on Rue Saint-Louis (now de Turenne);⁸³ Le Vau in the same street, and Jacques II Gabriel on Rue Saint-Antoine.

The Marais quarter had its theatre, the most popular in Paris, challenging the Comédiens du Roi of the Hôtel de Bourgogne. It was inaugurated in 1629 in a tennis court on the Impasse Berthaud – behind the Centre Beaubourg – with Mélite ou les Fausses Lettres, the work of a young and unknown provincial, Pierre Corneille. The success was immediate, thanks to the talent of the troupe’s leading actor, Montdory. When the theatre moved to another tennis court, the Maretz on Rue Vieille-du-Temple,⁸⁴ Montdory would interpret the title role of Le Cid. After the first few performances, he wrote to Guez de Balzac: ‘Le Cid has charmed the whole city. He is so good-looking that the most well-mannered ladies have fallen in love with him, their passion breaking out several times in the public theatre . . . The crowd at our doors was so large that the nooks and crannies of the theatre that usually served as places for pages became favoured spots for blue-ribonned guests, and the stage has regularly been bedecked with knights of the Order.’⁸⁵

In the second half of the seventeenth century, the momentum of baroque Paris quietened down, and the great hôtels in cut stone that were subsequently constructed in the Marais, with courtyard in front and garden behind, no longer followed Italian fantasies. The Hôtel d’Aumont on Rue de Jouy (architect: Le Vau), the Hôtel Guénégaud de Brosses on Rue des Archives (François Mansart), the Hôtel de Beauvais on Rue Saint-Antoine (Le Pautre), the Hôtel Amelot de Bisseuil on Rue Vieille-du-Temple (Cottard), the Hôtel d’Avaux on Rue du Temple (Le Muet), the Hôtel Salé on Rue de Thorigny (de Bourges): everything here now represented the classical French hôtel.

Towards the end of Louis XIV’s reign, however, Farmers-General and councillors of the Parlement, marshals, dukes and peers of France, felt hemmed in by the dense construction of the Marais and began to spread out into the Faubourg Saint-Honoré and especially the Faubourg Saint-Germain, where there was still a great deal of land to build on. This migration had definite consequences on the city’s physiognomy, with the elegant residential sector shifting in the space of a few years from east to west, where it would remain. Balzac was aware of this change many years later: ‘The noblesse began to find themselves out of their element among shopkeepers, left the Place Royale and the centre of Paris for good, and crossed the river to breathe freely in the Faubourg Saint-Germain, where palaces arose already around the great hôtel built by Louis XIV for the Duc de Maine – the Benjamin among his legitimate offspring.’⁸⁶ The decline of the Marais was completed by the end of the ancien régime, by which time Mercier could write in Le Tableau de Paris:

Here at least you rediscover the century of Louis XIII, both in its manners and in its outdated opinions. The Marais is to the brilliant quarter of the Palais-Royal what Vienna is to London. It is not poverty that holds sway there, but the full complement of old prejudices: those with a modest fortune take refuge there. That is where you find grumbling old men, gloomy enemies of all new ideas, and highly imperious ladies who denounce without having read them those authors whose names they have heard of: the philosophes are referred to here as ‘people to be burned’.

During the Revolution, emigration emptied this quarter of such aristocracy as still remained. In La Comédie humaine this is where Balzac situates the déclassés, the worthy, isolated and humble misfits. As early as the ‘Prolegomena’ to his Treatise on Elegant Life, he explains how ‘the petty retailer, the second lieutenant, the sub-editor . . . if they do not save like casual workers in order to ensure their board and lodging in old age, the hope of their bee-like life scarcely goes beyond this: possession of a very cold room on the fourth floor, in Rue Boucherat’ (now de Turenne). Comte Octave, in Honorine, who ‘occupied one of the highest legal appointments’, led a life of ‘hermit-like simplicity’, as ‘his house was in the Marais, on Rue Payenne, and he hardly entertained’. Cousin Pons, Balzac’s most important Marais figure, whose character and condition were identified with the quarter, lived on Rue de Normandie, ‘one of the old-fashioned streets that slope towards the middle; the municipal authorities of Paris as yet have laid on no water supply to flush the central channel which drains the houses on either side, and as a result a stream of filthy ooze meanders among the cobblestones, filters into the soil, and produces the mud peculiar to the city’.⁸⁷

Fortunate to escape Haussmann’s demolitions – by a hair: the baron planned to extend Rue Étienne-Marcel as far as Boulevard Beaumarchais – the Marais remained out of fashion until the mid twentieth century. In the immediate postwar years it was still a poor quarter, the courtyards of its great hôtels clogged up with vans, lean-tos with galvanized metal roofs, piles of pallets, and carts with iron-trimmed wooden wheels. The years of de Gaulle, Malraux and Pompidou soon put paid to this anachronism. Property developers realized the profit they could make on these edifices – so historical, so down-at-heel, and inhabited by a population so little able to defend itself. In the space of twenty years the Marais became unrecognizable, and the old hôtels – façades scrubbed down, outlines tidied up, door frames plasticized, security and parking assured – are now in the hands of a well-off bourgeoisie, an opposite change to that which saw their forerunners emigrate west en masse some two centuries earlier.

The boundaries assigned to the Marais have fluctuated over the years. In the eighteenth century, it stretched as far as the city limits of the time. For Piganiol de la Force, it was ‘bordered on the east by the ramparts and Rue du Mesnil-Montant [now Oberkampf], to the north by the further reaches of the Temple quarter and the Courtille [Boulevard de Belleville], to the west by the main street of the same faubourgs [Rue du Faubourg-du-Temple]’, and thus included a large part of what is now the 11^th arrondissement. Today, what is known as the Marais denotes everything between the Boulevards, Rue Beaubourg and the Seine, with a little inset along Rue de la Verrerie for what remains of the Hôtel de Ville quarter. But the dual origin of the Marais – the artisanal north around the Temple enclosure, the aristocratic south around the royal hôtels – has left such deep traces that it is almost an abuse of language to call both by the same name. Though the quarter dates almost entirely from the same short epoch, it includes so many local particularities that it can only be read as an archipelago.

Artisanal Marais begins to the north of the axis formed by the sequence of Rues Saint-Gilles, du Parc-Royal, de la Perle, des Quatre-Fils, des Haudriettes and Michel-le-Comte. It is divided in three by the ‘T’ formed by Rue de Bretagne and Rue du Temple. First, between Rue de Bretagne and the Place de la République, on the site of the Temple enclosure, there is the typical municipal equipment of the Third Republic: mairie, police station, square and market, represented here both by the Enfants-Rouges and the Carreau du Temple, with a very old tradition as an old-clothes market.⁸⁸ Second, set amidst Rue de Bretagne, Rue du Temple and the boulevard is a labyrinth of short and narrow streets, running in all directions as if the abandonment of the projected Place de France had left chaos behind. Rue Charlot and Rue de Saintonge, parallel straight lines, are superimposed on this anarchic lattice. ‘Rue Charlot and all the surrounding streets,’ wrote Sauval, ‘were bordered with houses by Claude Charlot, a poor peasant from the Languedoc whom fortune nourished, fattened and stuffed until, as adjudicator-general of the gabelles and the five great tax-farms, and lord of the duchy of Fronta, he fell down and died in the mud out of which fortune had pulled him.’ The old metal trade, surviving alongside pleasant galleries of contemporary art, occupies these calm streets in which signs in gilded type proclaim the activities of another age – etching and embossing, hallmarking and stamping, plating, electrolysis, low-fusion porcelain, lost wax and polishing. Third, in one of those contrasts that make for the quarter’s charm, on the other side of Rue du Temple and through to Rue Beaubourg is the busy district of clocks and watches, jewellery, and leatherwork. Jews and Asians coexist peacefully on the territory of the Revolutionary section of the Gravilliers, fiefdom of the Enragés, ‘hot and vehement souls, men who enlighten, lead and subjugate’, as Jacques Roux wrote to Marat.⁸⁹ The courtyards of Rues Volta, au Maire, des Gravilliers and Chapon are still those of the old Marais: gates wide open, vans and trolleys, piles of boxes, bottlenecks and car horns, all the clinical signs of life.

The southern part of the quarter, the Marais of kings, business leaders, historians and tourists, is divided and organized by Rue Saint-Antoine, one of the finest in Paris – a genuine city of streets, which cannot be said of New York, Tokyo, or even Rome, which is rather made up of alleys and squares. Rue Saint-Antoine stands at the balancing point between regularity, in the alignment of its buildings, its width and its harmony of colours, and tension, in its double curve and the way it widens out at the end. (For streets, there is no beauty without regularity: Rue des Archives, broken up by constant variations in width, missing teeth and heteroclite additions, does not stand comparison with its contemporary neighbour, the very regular Rue du Temple. Conversely, regularity without tension can become boring if overly long, like the arcades on Rue de Rivoli or Boulevard Magenta. Beauty in strict modular repetition is a particular feature of short streets, such as – however different in style – Rues du Cirque, des Colonnes and de Marseilles, or Rue des Immeubles-Industriels which so intrigued Walter Benjamin.)

The curves of Rue Saint-Antoine (there is more than one curve, as Rue François-Miron is historically its initial segment) are punctuated by two domes that for me – and certainly many others – are not just mere silhouettes but old friends. That of Saint-Paul-Saint-Louis, the church of the Jesuits, is the oldest large dome in Paris, still a little clumsy, too small on a too large base, giving the church the charm of an adolescent run to seed, particularly its back view from Rue des Jardins-Saint-Paul.⁹⁰ The Visitation, designed by François Mansart, a remnant of the convent of the Visitandines that stretched right to the gate of the Bastille, is on the contrary the most perfect cupola on a centred plan that can be found in Paris, along with Libéral Bruant’s chapel of the Salpêtrière.

The Marais archipelago extends on either side of Rue Saint-Antoine. On the river side are the silent streets of the Saint-Paul quarter. The other side has, from east to west, the Place des Vosges, the great museum island⁹¹ and the Jewish island. ‘The Rue de la Juiverie [since 1900 Rue Ferdinand-Duval] is thus called because in former times the Jews lived here, before they were expelled from France by Philippe Auguste for their excessive usury, and the execrable impieties and crimes they committed against Christians’, wrote Abbé Du Breuil.⁹² Sauval was of a different opinion, noting that ‘as regards the streets of this Jewish quarter, some are very narrow, crooked and dark . . . All the houses bordering on them are tiny, tall, poorly built, and similar to the Jewish quarters in Rome, Metz or Avignon.’ The Jewish quarter today is prosperous and lively, despite the pressure of fashionable boutiques on the one hand and gay bars on the other. And the inevitable disappearance of the old Bundists with their caps has not prevented the civilization of pickelfleish and gefiltefish from resisting as best it can that of the falafel.⁹³

On the Right Bank, Old Paris forms an approximate semicircle. Its circumference is defined by the arc of the Boulevards, and its diameter by a narrow band along the Seine, between Rue de Rivoli and the quais, from the colonnade of the Louvre to the Hôtel de Ville – or, if you like, from the flamboyant Gothic of Saint-Germain-l’Auxerrois to the classical façade of Saint-Gervais. This band is a special case, where the successive layers, instead of resonating together like harmonics, as they do elsewhere, form a discordant and confused ensemble. This is not for want of fine buildings, picturesque details, or historic memories, but these are lost in such a heteroclite patchwork that the general sense is no longer legible. You have a hotchpotch of Haussmannian cuttings that are unfinished (Avenue Victoria) or ravaged by the feeders and entries of underground roads (Rue du Pont-Neuf, Rue des Halles), squares that have been gutted (the Place du Châtelet, still ravishing in 1860 on a Marville photograph – quite small, and almost closed around its fountain) or ‘improved’ in a ridiculous fashion (the Place de l’Hôtel-de-Ville, the Square de la Tour Saint-Jacques), old streets massacred by renovation (Rue Bertin-Poirée) or by car traffic (Rue des Lavandières-Sainte-Opportune, where a roundabout disguised as a Zen garden draws in all the traffic from Rue Saint-Honoré). Even Haussmann, generally rather content with himself, confusedly felt there was something wrong, which he attributed to the difficulties of the terrain: ‘The difference in level across the whole quarter around the Place du Châtelet, caused by the slope to the east of the hill crowned by the Tour Saint-Jacques, and by the rise to the west of the Quai de la Mégisseries and its surroundings, required the demolition of all the houses from Rue des Lavandières to Rue des Arcis [now Saint-Martin], between the line of the quais and Rue de Rivoli’, a manner of justification that is unusual in the Mémoires of a man who called himself an ‘artist of demolition’.

Yet the worst was avoided: there was a real threat that the extension to Rue de Rivoli would start from the middle of the Louvre colonnade. ‘War on the demolishers!’ cried Hugo in La Revue des Deux Mondes on 1 March 1832: ‘The vandals have their own characteristic idea. They want to run a great, great, great road right across Paris. A road of a whole league! What magnificent devastation they could wreak! Saint-Germain-l’Auxerrois would be in the way, the admirable tower of Saint-Jacques-de-la-Boucherie perhaps too. But no matter! A road of a league! . . . a straight line from the Louvre to the Barrière du Trône!’ Haussmann, being a Protestant, rejected the project, fearing that the destruction of Saint-Germain-l’Auxerrois would be interpreted as a revenge for Saint Bartholemew’s Night, the signal for which, it is said, was given by the bells of that church.