Читать книгу The Invention of Paris - Eric Hazan - Страница 20

‘The life of Paris, its physiognomy, was in 1500 on Rue Saint-Antoine; in 1600 on the Place Royale; in 1700 on the Pont-Neuf; in 1800 in the Palais-Royal. All these places were the Boulevards of their day! The earth was impassioned there, as the asphalt is today under the feet of the stockbrokers on the steps of Café Tortoni.’ When Balzac wrote his ‘Histoire et physiologie des boulevards de Paris’ in 1844, it was nearly ten years since the Palais-Royal had gone out of fashion, ten years since the Paris of Manon Lescaut, Adolphe, and Henri de Marsay had disappeared, along with its Argand lamps, half-pay officers, the vogue for Cherubini and the successes of Byron, Walter Scott and Fenimore Cooper. In a movement of taste that accompanied dandies, whores, journalists and gourmets in their migration to the Boulevards, a new romanticism made its appearance, that of Berlioz, Frédérick Lemaître and La Fanfarlo. But in one of the thousand and one ways that facts have of messing up the categories of art history, it so happens that the Boulevards, the great stage of Parisian Romanticism, are a long procession of neoclassical architecture – a paradox to match that which the clever Lousteau explained to Lucien de Rubempré around 1830:

[O]ur great men are ranged in two hostile camps. The Royalists are ‘romantics’, the Liberals are ‘classics’. The divergence of taste in matters literary and divergence of political opinion coincide; and the result is a war with weapons of every sort, double-edged witticisms, subtle calumnies and nicknames à outrance, between the rising and the waning glory, and ink is shed in torrents. The odd part of it is that the Royalist-romantics are all for liberty in literature, and for repealing laws and conventions; while the Liberal-classics are for maintaining the unities, the Alexandrine, and the classical theme.⁹⁴

From the Madeleine to the Bastille, there remain none of the legendary dwellings built on the ramparts at the end of the ancien régime, with their view over the city on one side and across market gardens on the other: nothing of Beaumarchais’ house and its garden designed by Belanger, where Mme de Genlis came to witness the demolition of the Bastille along with the children of the Duc d’Orléans, nothing of the Pavillon de Hanovre built for the fine suppers of the Maréchal de Richelieu – ‘the fairy pavilion’, Voltaire called it – nothing of the hôtel built by Ledoux for the Prince de Montmorency on the corner of the Chaussée-d’Antin, whose entablature bore, as a homage to Palladio, the statues of eight high officials of the Montmorency family, ‘heroic virtues that vandalism has destroyed, a deep impression that time does not wipe out’.⁹⁵ On Boulevard de la Madeleine it was still possible until recently to admire the two rotundas framing the beginning of Rue Caumartin, one of the hôtel of the Duc d’Aumont, and the other of the hôtel of the Farmer-General Marin de la Haye – its roof formerly boasting a hanging garden in which, according to Hillairet, two small Chinese bridges crossed a stream that, after forming an island, supplied water to the dining rooms and baths of the building. They have just been newly ‘façadisés’, which is perhaps worse than being demolished.⁹⁶

But despite the destruction, the length of the Boulevards remains a great walking catalogue of Parisian neoclassical architecture from Louis XVI to Louis-Philippe, especially on the inner side, that of the odd numbers (the southern side, if you prefer), whose owners had front seats on the promenade. Many even had terraces built that overlooked the Boulevards’ animation.⁹⁷ By turns you have pure Louis XVI (Hôtel Montholon on Boulevard Poissonière, with its six colossal Ionic columns supporting the third-storey balcony), the style of the Empire and Restoration, more severe and archaeological, and that of the July monarchy, decorated and smiling, with its great apartment blocks built for investment, looking like Italian palaces, where you can smell the eclecticism that lurked behind the taste for antiquity.⁹⁸

If it is hard to imagine the seductive power of the Boulevards in the time of their splendour, this is because their sequence was then one of unbroken rhythmic scansion. Despite their length, they had a continuity, something of an enclosed space, that had made for the success of the Place Royale and the Palais-Royal. They were like the succession of rooms in an immense palace, each with its décor, timetable, and habits. But from Haussmann through to Poincaré this urban intimacy was hollowed out. The Opéra Garnier and its roundabout, the junction of Boulevards Haussmann and Montmartre creating the shapeless ‘Richelieu-Drouot’ intersection, and the brutal implantation of the Place de la République where the Faubourg du Temple and the Boulevard du Crime meet, replaced these subtle caesuras with gaping empty spaces. When the father of Lucien Leuwen, that exquisite patron of the Opéra dancers, ‘strolled on the boulevard, his lackey gave him a cloak to pass in front of Rue de la Chaussée-d’Antin’. What precautions would he have had to take to cross the Place de la République!

The segmentation of the Boulevards has become very sharp. Between the Madeleine and the Opéra you have the big hotels and travel agencies; from the Opéra to Richelieu-Drouot the banks. Then, until the République, a portion that, whilst rather the worse for wear, is certainly the closest in spirit to the original Boulevards. Finally, the stretch between République and Bastille is the domain of motor scooters, photography and music, which may well have its charm and its special places, but is no longer really part of the Boulevards.

As a point of inflection in time, the beginning of the Boulevards’ long downward descent, the image that comes to me is that of the death of Nana in a room of the Grand-Hôtel, on Boulevard des Capucines:

‘Come, it’s time we were off,’ said Clarisse. ‘We shan’t bring her to life again. Are you coming, Simonne?’ They all looked at the bed out of the corners of their eyes, but they did not budge an inch. Nevertheless, they began getting ready and gave their skirts various little pats. Lucy was again leaning out of the window. She was alone now, and a sorrowful feeling began little by little to overpower her, as though an intense wave of melancholy had mounted up from the howling mob. Torches still kept passing, shaking out clouds of sparks, and far away in the distance the various bands stretched into the shadows, surging unquietly to and fro like flocks being driven to the slaughterhouse at night. A dizzy feeling emanated from these confused masses as the human flood rolled them along – a dizzy feeling, a sense of terror and all the pity of the massacres to come. The people were going wild; their voices broke; they were drunk with a fever of excitement which sent them rushing toward the unknown ‘out there’ beyond the dark wall of the horizon. ‘À Berlin! à Berlin! à Berlin!’

The Boulevards was where the novelties of the modern city appeared one by one: the first Paris public transport line – the famous Madeleine-Bastille – the urinals, the cab ranks, the newspaper kiosks, the Morris columns. But the great transformation that had its birth in the Passage des Panoramas in 1817 and spread out along the Boulevards in the 1840s was gas lighting. We can grasp in Baudelaire the change from Les Fleurs du mal, lit by unsteady oil lamps (‘By the light of lamps flickering in the wind/ Prostitution lights up in the streets’) to Paris Spleen, illuminated by gas (‘The café was sparkling. The gaslight itself sent forth all the ardour of a debut and lit with all its force walls blinding in their whiteness . . .’).⁹⁹ It was gas that made it possible to live the darkest hours of the night. ‘Cross the line that marks the axis of Rue de la Chaussée-d’Antin and Rue Louis-le-Grand, and you’ve entered the domain of the crowd. Along this Boulevard, on the right side especially, it’s all sparkling shops, impressive displays, gilded cafés, permanent illumination. From Rue Louis-le-Grand to Rue de Richelieu the flood of light that shines from the shops enables you to read a newspaper while walking along’, wrote Julien Lemer in Paris au gaz, published by Le Dentu in 1861.¹⁰⁰ At closing time, ‘on the Boulevards, inside the cafés, the gas mantles of the chandeliers very quickly blow out into darkness. Outside you hear the brouhaha of chairs being stacked in fours on the marble tables.’¹⁰¹ But thanks to gas, nocturnal life carried on uninterrupted. Alfred Delvau, a professional noctambulist, offered a guide for the late bedder to the Boulevards of the Second Empire:

After midnight one may withdraw to the Café Leblond; its entrance on Boulevard des Italiens closes at midnight, but the exit on the Passage de l’Opéra remains open until two in the morning. The Café des Variétés [in the Passage des Panoramas], which has a licence until half past one, receives a large number for supper after the theatres close. At the Café Wolf, 10 Rue du Faubourg-Montmartre, the noctambulists of the Breda quarter congregate around midnight . . . to drink beer and eat onion sausages, until it’s time to close. At two o’clock the Brabant, at the corner of the Boulevard and Faubourg Montmartre, is still open, as well as Bignon, on the corner of the Chaussée-d’Antin, and especially Hill’s Tavern, on Boulevard des Capucines, where the fashionable crowd mingles with the carefree bohème.

It was on the Boulevards in the 1850s that a custom spread, so rooted now in Paris life that it is hard to imagine the city without it: cafés set tables out on a terrace. ‘All the cafés have provided seating on the pavement outside their premises: there is a notable group of these between Rue Laffitte and Rue La Peletier, and it is not uncommon to see, in the heat of summer, wilting promenaders linger until one in the morning outside the café doors, sipping ices, beer, lemonade and soda water.’¹⁰² When Georges Duroy, the eponymous Bel-Ami – ‘empty pockets and boiling blood’ – cruised Boulevard des Italiens on a stifling evening, ‘the big cafés, full of people, spilled out onto the pavement, displaying their clientele of drinkers under the sharp and rough light of the illuminated windows. In front of them, on little tables square or round, glasses contained red, yellow, green and brown liquids of all shades; and within the carafes you could see the big transparent cylinders of ice that chilled the fine clear water.’

‘Nothing is easier or more agreeable than a promenade of this kind. The ways reserved for pedestrians are tiled or asphalted, shaded with trees and furnished with seats. The cafés are at frequent intervals. Every now and then cabs are stationed on the roadway. Finally, omnibuses constantly run from the Bastille to the Madeleine.’ In the opposite direction from that proposed by the Joanne guide of 1870, the promenade began with Boulevard de la Madeleine and Boulevard des Capucines. For a long time the whole of this segment, as far as the break at Rue de la Chausséed’Antin, remained outside the life of the Boulevards. ‘From the Madeleine to Rue Caumartin,’ wrote Balzac, ‘there is no flânerie. This is a stretch dominated by our imitation of the Parthenon, a large and fine thing, whatever may be said of it, but spoiled by the hideous café sculptures that dishonour its lateral friezes . . . This whole zone is sacrificed. You cross it, but do not stroll on it.’¹⁰³

A decade and half later, a sense of greater liveliness can be felt: ‘Coming from the Madeleine, there is still only one pavement that is really alive, the right-hand side; the other is occupied by a street, Rue Basse-du-Rempart, currently being ravaged by demolition to make way for the future opera house.’¹⁰⁴ And by 1867, the year of the Exposition Universelle, everything seems to have changed, to judge from the Paris Guide:

In our day, the most monumental section of the Boulevards is that stretching from Rue de la Chaussée-d’Antin to the Madeleine. The new Opéra is surrounded by palaces. The richness and comfort of the interior fittings of the Grand Hôtel, the hotel that the Jockey Club has moved into, match the magnificence of the outside. There remain only remnants of the damp Rue Basse that was filled with the dead and wounded of the shooting of 23 February [1848]. The buildings and shops rival each other in their sumptuousness.

But the picture ends in a singular conclusion in which La Bédollière repeats words straight from Balzac: ‘And yet, on Boulevard des Capucines and Boulevard de la Madeleine, it seems that an arctic cold can be felt. People cross them without lingering; they live there but don’t stop there. The lines of carriages returning from Vincennes, in the afternoons of racing days, turn off and leave the Boulevards at Rue de la Paix. When all is said and done, to use a typically Parisian expression: ça n’est plus ça!’¹⁰⁵

Known in 1815 as the Petit-Coblenz, after the town that had symbolized the emigration, Boulevard de Gand (Ghent where Louis XVIII found refuge during the Hundred Days) only later acquired its definitive name, Boulevard des Italiens, from the former theatre of the Comédiens-Italiens in the Salle Favart – though, as we have seen, this turned its back on the Boulevard. Between Rue de la Chaussée-d’Antin and Rue de Richelieu was the Boulevard par excellence for ‘those who have been called in turn refined, fine, marvellous, incroyables, dandies, fashionable, lions, gandins, mashers, fops’.¹⁰⁶ Here, writes Balzac, ‘begin those strange and marvellous buildings that seem to be drawn from a fairy tale or the pages of The Thousand and One Nights . . . Once you have set foot here, your day is lost if you are a man of thought. It is a gilded dream and an unbeatable distraction. The engravings of the print sellers, the daily entertainments, the tidbits of the cafés, the gems in the jewellers’ shops, all is set to intoxicate and overexcite you.’¹⁰⁷ When Bixiou and Léon de Lora want to show Paris to their provincial cousin, this is where they take him, ‘from one end to the other of that sheet of asphalt on which, between the hours of one and three, it is difficult to avoid seeing some of the personages in honour of whom Fame puts one or the other of her trumpets to her lips’.¹⁰⁸

Elegant cafés and restaurants were more numerous on Boulevard des Italiens than anywhere else (‘Are there still gandins, those men of severe dress, at table in the Café du Helder? Do you not notice on the forehead of most of them traces of the sun of Algeria, Cochin-China or Mexico?’¹⁰⁹): the Café de Foy at the corner of the Chaussée-d’Antin, the Café Anglais with its twenty-two private rooms, including the famous Grand-Seize, the Grand-Balcon between Rue Favart and Rue Marivaux, the Café Riche, Café Hardy, Frascati’s patisserie on the site of the celebrated gambling house closed in 1837, the Bains-Chinois on the corner of Rue de La Michodière, the Maison Dorée restaurant at the corner of Rue Laffitte, etc. The epicentre was located precisely between Rue Le Peletier and Rue Taitbout, framed at one end by two mythical establishments: on the left, the Café de Paris, and on the right, Tortoni, whose terrace, with three steps leading up to it, was one of the most famous places in the world for all of half a century. Tortoni was frequented by dandies and artists – Manet spent every evening there – as well as financiers: ‘You leave the battlefield of the Bourse to go to the restaurants, passing from one digestion to another. Is Tortoni not both the preface and the dénouement of the Bourse?’ And two of the finest villains in La Comédie humaine naturally meet here: ‘About one o’clock, Maxime [de Trailles] was chewing a toothpick and talking with Du Tiller on Tortoni’s portico, where speculation held a little Bourse, a sort of prelude to the great one.’¹¹⁰ The main entrance to the Opéra was two steps away, on Rue Le Peletier, and the Passage de l’Opéra with its two galleries – du Thermomètre and du Baromètre – afforded direct access from the Boulevard.

In the sections of Rue Laffitte and Rue Le Peletier adjacent to the Boulevards, there formed in the 1870s something that had never been seen before in Paris, a gathering of art dealers on the same pavement. In 1867, Paul Durand-Ruel moved his gallery from Rue de la Paix to 16 Rue Laffitte, with a branch on Rue Le Peletier.¹¹¹ At no. 8 on the same street there was already the gallery of Alexandre Bernheim, son of a paint-seller from Besançon, who sold the canvases of his friend Courbet, as well as Corot, d’Harpignies and Rousseau. Despite well-known sarcasms (Albert Wolff in Le Figaro, 1876: ‘Rue Le Peletier is having a bad time. After the fire at the Opéra, here is a new disaster that has struck the quarter. Durand-Ruel has just opened an exhibition of what is said to be painting . . .’) others followed, and in a short while these few metres had become the key territory of art in Paris. Baudelaire wrote to Nadar: ‘If you were an angel, you’d go and pay homage to a certain Moreau, a picture-seller, Rue Laffitte . . . And you’d get from him permission to make a beautiful double photographic copy of The Duchess of Alba, by Goya (vintage Goya, utterly authentic).’ Manet often said that ‘it’s good to go to Rue Laffitte’. Degas, who came down from Pigalle by bus, often visited there as a client. ‘He contemplated Bernheim’s Corots,’ said Romi, ‘criticized the Fantin-Latours at Tempelaere’s, and presented himself with a Delacroix that he had delivered to his house, like a great lord.’ Gauguin, who worked at a broker’s on the same Rue Laffitte, stopped in front of these magic windows for twelve years until the day when, unable to stand it any more, he abandoned the Bourse for painting. Certain galleries were devoted to Boudin, to Corot, to Daumier; others showed the expensive paintings of Henner, Bouguereau and Meissonier. Close to Durand-Ruel’s revolutionary showroom was the respectable gallery of M. Beugnet, who permanently displayed Madeleine Lemaire’s bouquets of polished flowers. Every month, an admirer of this society artist came to spray on her violets, carnations and roses a light cloud of the corresponding perfume. ‘A poetic advertisement!’ said M. Beugnet. In 1895, Ambroise Vollard triggered a scandal when he showed fifty canvases by Cézanne in his new gallery at 39 Rue Laffitte (he had previously been at no. 8). Vollard invited guests for dinner in his cellar. As Apollinaire relates in Le Flâneur des deux rives, ‘Everyone had heard speak of this famous hypogeum . . . Bonnard did a painting of the cellar, and as far as I recall, Odilon Redon appears in it.’ In the same street could be found the offices of ‘the friendly, open-to-all’ Revue blanche, where diarists, illustrators and friends spent their days – Mallarmé and Jarry, Blum and Gide, Lautrec, Vallotton and Bonnard.

Two reasons explain the catastrophe that struck Boulevard des Italiens and its artistic life, turning the one into a centre of fast food and the other into a gloomy desert. The first was the proliferation of banks and insurance companies, which invaded the quarter at the turn of the century. From the construction of the ponderous building of the Crédit Lyonnais in the 1890s – which caught fire at a most timely moment, when scandal had thrust the bank into public obloquy – to the denaturing of the Maison Dorée in the 1970s by one of the first and worst examples of façadisation, each of the pavements on which these ‘strange and wonderful’ buildings were located was ravaged. The Banque Nationale de Paris, which owned the whole of the north of the Boulevard from Rue Laffitte to the Richelieu-Drouot intersection, was not content to disfigure the Maison Dorée; it offered there a concentrate of what has since spread to hundreds of Parisian streets and crossroads. Insurance companies divided up the streets of modern art and transformed them into grey canyons peopled by security guards and swept by torrents of cars. They were assisted – and this is the second reason – by the extension of Boulevard Haussmann in the 1920s, the only cutting in the centre of Paris carried out in the twentieth century, which led to demolition on a gigantic scale, in particular that of the famous Passage de l’Opéra:

‘Today, Boulevard Haussmann has reached Rue Laffitte’, remarked L’Intransigeant the other day. A few more paces by this giant rodent and, after it has devoured the block of houses separating it from Rue Le Peletier, it will inexorably gash open the thicket whose twin arcades run through the Passage de l’Opéra, before emerging diagonally on to Boulevard des Italiens. It will unite itself to that broad avenue somewhere near where the Café Louis XVI now stands, with a singular kind of kiss whose cumulative effect on the vast body of Paris is quite unpredictable.¹¹²

Boulevard des Italiens ends at Rue de Richelieu, that’s a fact. But didn’t elegant life continue beyond this, on Boulevard Montmartre? Did it not stretch to the crossroads formed by the intersection of Rue Montmartre, Boulevard Montmartre and Rue du Faubourg-Montmartre, such a dreadful crossing that it was known as the ‘crossroads of accidents’? Some people replied in the negative: ‘What was then called “the Boulevard” extended only from the Chaussée-d’Antin to the Passage de l’Opéra, perhaps up to Faubourg-Montmartre because of the Variétés, but it was very bad form to be seen any further up. It was rare for dandies to parade beyond the Café Anglais; the Variétés marked their outer limit.’¹¹³ For most people, however, it was Rue du Faubourg-Montmartre that formed the border between the elegant and the plebeian boulevards. For Balzac, ‘the heart of present-day Paris . . . beats between Rue de la Chaussée-d’Antin and Rue du Faubourg-Montmartre . . . From Rue Montmartre to Rue Saint-Denis, the physiognomy of the Boulevard changes completely.’¹¹⁴ If Boulevard Montmartre belonged more to artists and shopkeepers than to literary folk and dandies, it still remained for Julien Lemer a recommended promenade, and even the favourite of La Bédollière:

The raging stream we have just crossed [Rue du Faubourg-Montmartre] is a kind of Bidassoa separating two countries, and we are now in the realm of literature. Here are journalists, novelists, diarists, satirists, dramatists, even lecturers . . . It is not without reason that great literary salons and an international bookshop have established themselves on Boulevard Montmartre . . . And all of them, like bees, buzz around the Théâtre des Variétés and the doors of cafés, especially at the absinthe hour . . . The arcades – Jouffroy, Verdeau, the Passage des Panoramas – are what the Palais-Royal used to be. They are silent in the mornings, only disturbed by the steps of apprentices, clerks and shopgirls on their way to work . . . Around eleven o’clock the habitués of the Dîner de Paris, the Dîner du Rocher, and the Dîner du Passage Jouffroy make their appearance . . . At five p.m. sharp, the evening papers are sold from the boulevard kiosks . . . At six o’clock, a great hustle and bustle, the faubourg is on its way down! The inhabitants of the Bréda and Notre-Dame-de-Lorette quarters advance to conquer the Boulevards. The region is signalled from a distance by the clicking of jade, the scent of musk, the rustling of silk.¹¹⁵

To cross the Montmartre intersection, and proceed along Boulevard Poissonière and Boulevard de Bonne-Nouvelle, meant passing from elegance to commerce, from literature to cottons, from the avant-garde of art to the most traditional crafts:

Le Gymnase vainly displays its charming little façade there; further on, the Bonne-Nouvelle bazaar, as fine as a Venetian palace, has arisen from the earth as if at the stroke of a fairy wand:¹¹⁶ but the effort is completely wasted! The passersby here are no longer elegant, fine dresses would be out of place, the artist and the literary lion no longer venture into these parts . . . One single boulevard in between produces this total change.¹¹⁷

During the daytime, however, Boulevard Poissonière was lively enough:

Enter Baurain’s restaurant and you will find a good many representatives of commerce, here to buy and sell velvet, linen, raw or printed cloth, spun or twisted cotton. Enter the Théâtre du Gymnase and you will recognize in the audience leading lights of novelty and calico, applauding Sardou or Alexandre Dumas fils as they used to applaud Scribe and Mélesville. Take a turn on the little overlapping promenade, shaded by thin sycamores, on the corner of Rue d’Hauteville. The boys and girls playing there and eating their biscuits were born in the midst of tulle, barege, blond-lace, woollens and silks. They’ve known since an early age the meaning of Tarare, Saint-Quentin, and A.G. goods.¹¹⁸

The building of Le Pont-de-Fer was located on Boulevard Poissonière, a kind of commercial centre under an immense double metal arcade; also the Dock du Campement that specialized in travel goods, and the house of Barbedienne, ‘which sells antique models in bronze, reproduced by the Colas process, and medals of David [d’Angers] . . . A little further on are the rooms of the Brébant restaurant . . . the carpet shops of M. Roncier, and, two houses further, the Industrie Française store, with two floors displaying the most varied riches.’¹¹⁹

The section of the Boulevards between Rue du Faubourg-Montmartre and the Porte Saint-Denis is that which has changed least since the nineteenth century, despite the Grand Rex and the rather unfortunate post office on Rue de Mazagran. This is perhaps the reason why the Surrealists made this segment their particular boulevard, even if they also frequented the Passage de l’Opéra and in particular Café Certa – ‘the place where, one afternoon towards the end of 1919, André Breton and I decided to start meeting our friends there, detesting as we did Montparnasse and Montmartre, as well as from a taste for the ambiguity of the arcades’ – and the Théâtre-Moderne – ‘that hall with great worn-out mirrors, decorated at the bottom with grey swans slipping through yellow reeds, with enclosed stalls quite deprived of air and light, not at all reassuring’.¹²⁰ These few metres, which for want of a better name were known as Strasbourg-Saint-Denis, exercised on Breton an attraction that he explained by ‘the isolation of the two gates you see there, which owe their touching aspect to the fact that they used to be part of the Paris city wall, giving these two vessels, as if they were carried along by the centrifugal force of the town, a totally lost look’.¹²¹ For him, however, the centre of the world in those years was Boulevard de Bonne-Nouvelle: ‘Meanwhile, you can be sure of meeting me in Paris, of not spending more than three days without seeing me pass, toward the end of the afternoon, along the Boulevard Bonne-Nouvelle between the Le Matin building and the Boulevard de Strasbourg. I don’t know why it should be precisely here that my feet take me, here that I almost invariably go without specific purpose, without anything to induce me but this obscure clue: namely that it (?) will happen here.’¹²²

Beyond the Porte, Boulevard Saint-Martin played a transition role between the boulevard that was still a little bit bourgeois and the genuinely plebeian boulevard, ‘as the jacket is a transition between the suit and the overall’.¹²³ What was most striking here in the nineteenth century was its canyon-like aspect: Rambuteau’s levelling work had only affected the carriageway, which was subsequently ‘lowered, and so much so, that from the Porte Saint-Martin to the Théâtre de l’Ambigu-Comique it was necessary to install a railing on each side, with steps every now and then. In this place, therefore, the carriageway was set down like a railway . . . When the return of the troops under Marshal Canrobert from the Italian war of 1859 was announced, on the previous evening this part of the boulevard was invaded, the places against the railing were taken, and people spent the whole night there.’

This was the site of some of the great romantic theatres: the Théâtre de la Porte-Saint-Martin, built by Lenoir in forty days on the orders of Marie-Antoinette, where Frédérick Lemaître and Marie Dorval were hailed in Marion Delorme, and Mlle George in Lucrèce Borgia; the Ambigu, devoted to serious drama (‘this is where you must go, lovers of great plays, dark and mysterious, but in which innocence always triumphs in the end, between eleven o’clock and midnight’¹²⁴); the Folies-Dramatiques in Rue de Bondy (now René-Boulanger), ‘where vaudeville is generally played, drama mixed with song, and finally the Fantaisie’. For Heine, this is where theatre was at its best, and it steadily declined as one went further east, towards the ‘Boulevard du Crime’, finally reaching ‘Franconi’s, where the stage scarcely counts as such, as the plays performed there are more fit for horses than for men’.¹²⁵

With Franconi, we cross from Boulevard Saint-Martin to Boulevard du Temple. At no. 52 – a plaque notes that Gustave Flaubert lived here from 1856 to 1869 – the line of buildings curves northward, to the right if you face the nearby Place de la République. The last of these out-of-phase buildings abuts an immense blind wall, perpendicular to the boulevard and replacing in the general alignment the few metres that precede the Place. This arrangement has a simple explanation: the curve of the staggered buildings indicates the course of the ‘original’ Boulevard du Temple, before the cutting of Boulevard du Prince-Eugène (now Boulevard Voltaire) and the Place du Château-d’Eau (now Place de la République). This first Boulevard du Temple reached Boulevard Saint-Martin close to the present site of the Garde Républicaine barracks. Rue du Temple and Rue du Faubourg-du-Temple were then continuous, on either side of the Boulevards. This slightly dilated crossroads formed a small square, with a fountain in the middle where a flower market was held on Tuesdays and Thursdays.¹²⁶

This is the most famous part of Boulevard du Temple, destroyed by the works of 1862: the Boulevard du Crime, thus named ‘not by the Imperial prosecutors, but by vaudeville artists jealous of their fame for melodrama’.¹²⁷ Its popular favour began under the last years of the ancien régime. In its heyday, under the Restoration and the July monarchy, ‘it was a Paris festival, a perpetual fair, an all-year carnival . . . You could see birds doing tricks, hares bowing, fleas pulling carts; Mlle Rose with her head down and feet in the air: the spatchcocked Mlle Malaga, jugglers, conjurors, dwarves, giants, skeleton-men, ugly customers, boiling oil. Finally, Munito, the savant dog, a great calculator who did not disdain to give performances and lessons to the domino players at the Café de la Régence.’¹²⁸ In 1844, Balzac could still write that ‘this is the only place in Paris where you hear the cries of Paris, you see the people thronging, rags to astonish a painter and looks to frighten a man of property. The late Bobèche was there, one of the local glories . . . His accomplice was called Galimafrée. Martainville wrote sketches for these two illustrious acrobats who made children, soldiers and maids laugh enormously, their costumes always dotting the crowd on this famous boulevard.’¹²⁹ Haussmann, as we saw, was set on removing as soon as possible ‘these unhealthy distractions that increasingly degrade and brutalize the popular masses’.

As reinscribed in collective memory by the joyful papier-mâché of Les Enfants du Paradis, seven theatres stood side by side on the left side of the boulevard, looking towards the Bastille. All these establishments had their stage door on Rue des Fossés-du-Temple (now Amelot), which formed a kind of common corridor. There was the Théâtre-Lyrique, which had ‘mistakenly strayed into these parts’, according to Haussmann. Massenet, when a student at the Conservatoire, played the kettledrum there in the evening to earn his living. ‘I have to confess that I sometimes came in at the wrong place, but one day Berlioz complemented me for this, and said: “You’re actually right, which is unusual!”’¹³⁰ At the Cirque-Olympique, run by the Franconis, the alternating attractions were Indian jugglers, Chinese and Italian acrobats, and savant animals – as well as military parades that revived the epic of the Empire. Then there were the Folies-Dramatiques, the Gaîté, devoted despite its name to the gloomiest melodramas, and the Funambules, whose star was the mime Debureau, as played by Jean-Louis Barrault in Les Enfants du Paradis. The diarist for Le Globe, the Saint-Simonian newspaper, wrote on 28 October 1831:

There is in this man’s comedy something intangibly bitter and sad: the laughter he provokes, this laughter that comes so freely from his breast, is painful at the end, when we see, after having been so well entertained in all these ways, poor Debureau – or rather poor people! – fall totally back into the state of subjection, abasement and servitude in which we found them at the start of the play, and from which they escaped only for a moment to delight us so much. Adieu Pierrot! Adieu Gilles! Adieu Debureau! Adieu people, till tomorrow!¹³¹

The line of theatres ended with the Délassements-Comiques and the Petit-Lazzari – which owed its name to an Italian mime of the eighteenth century – very close to the house where Fieschi exploded his bomb when Louis-Philippe was approaching in 1835. After that, writes Haussmann, there were ‘other well-forgotten dives’.¹³²

These theatres were the stimulus for a proliferation of small trades, ‘from the opener of carriage doors to the collector of cigar butts, and especially the seller of pass-out tickets, of whom there were few at the doors of other theatres’.¹³³ If there were cigar butts to collect and doors to open, this betokens a fashionable clientele who came slumming on the Boulevard du Crime: ‘These ladies come into the little halls that in theatrical slang are called dives [bouis-bouis], in the same fashion that under the Regency the “impure” entertained themselves from time to time at the Théâtre de la Foire.’¹³⁴

Haussmann’s great works led to the disappearance of almost all these marvels. There remained the Théâtre Déjazet (‘The name alone brings a smile, reminding you of a charming actress whom you must have applauded a hundred times, and will applaud again. Déjazet is an eighth wonder of the world, and for my part, I prefer her by far to the colossus of Rhodes’¹³⁵), which owed its salvation to the fact that it was the only one on the opposite pavement from where demolition was taking place. There was also the Cirque d’Hiver, the former Cirque Napoléon built by Hittorff, where on Sunday afternoons the lions and clowns were replaced by concerts organized by Pasdeloup. ‘Works by Haydn, Beethoven, Mozart, Weber, etc. were played here. This was not the place for quadrilles or polkas, but rather for strict and serious music, great music indeed.’¹³⁶

‘The rest of the Boulevard, from Rue d’Angoulême [now Jean-Pierre-Timbaud] through to the Bastille, has – we must confess – a sad scent of the Marais, which after nine in the evening is a kind of cemetery.’¹³⁷ Balzac shows scarcely any greater esteem for the two major establishments to be found there: ‘The famous Cadran Bleu has not a single window or floor which is evenly balanced. As for the Café Turc, it is to Fashion what the ruins of Thebes are to Civilization . . . Soon the deserted boulevards begin, those without walkers. The pensioner strolls in his dressing gown if he feels like it; and on fine days, you see blind people playing card games. In piscem desinit elegantia.’