Carrousel
For Diderot or Camille Desmoulins, it was quite easy to pass from the Palais-Royal to the Tuileries. Thirty years later, however, Géricault, Henri de Marsay or Stendhal would have had to cross the new main road through the quarter, Rue de Rivoli, though not yet confront the Avenue de l’Opéra or bypass the enormous mass of Napoleon III’s extensions to the Louvre. The Palais-Royal was not hemmed in as it is today, but connected with the Tuileries-Saint-Honoré quarter. A direct connection, or almost direct, as it was still necessary to cross obliquely a quarter that – unlike any other in the centre of Paris – has disappeared without leaving the slightest trace, even in memory: the Carrousel. The verse from Baudelaire’s ‘The Swan’: ‘Once a menagerie was set up there;/There, one morning, at the hour when Labour awakens,/Beneath the clear, cold sky when the dismal hubbub/Of street cleaners and scavengers breaks the silence,/I saw a swan that had escaped from his cage . . .’ is not a purely poetic vision like his ‘Albatross’. Alfred Delvau, rambler and chronicler of street life under the Second Empire, recalled:
It used to be charming, the Place du Carrousel – today populated with great men in stone from Saint-Leu. Charming like disorder, and picturesque like ruins! It was a forest, with its inextricable tangle of wooden stalls and mud-walled shacks, occupied by a crowd of petty trades. I often strolled among this caravanserai of bric-a-brac, amid this labyrinth of planks and zigzags of tiny shops, and I knew its denizens almost intimately – men and animals, rabbits and parrots, pictures and cheap ornaments.22
The Joanne guidebook of 1870 also uses Baudelaire’s magic word baraque (‘I see only in memory that camp of stalls’), and laments the disappearance of ‘this plethora of little stalls, like a perpetual fair of curiosities, old iron and live birds, that used to stretch from the Musée to Rue de Chartres’.
The extraordinary quarter of the Carrousel lay between the Horloge pavilion of the Louvre and the avenues of the Tuileries. It was bordered on the south, along the Seine, by the Grande Galerie that had linked the two palaces from the time of Henri IV. The inner side of this gallery was adjacent to a street with the name Rue des Orties [Nettles]. To the north, the boundary of the Carrousel was Rue Saint-Honoré. Three streets perpendicular to the river connected Rue des Orties with Rue Saint-Honoré: Saint-Nicaise, Saint-Thomas-du-Louvre and Fromenteau.
The Rue Saint-Nicaise, continuing the line of Rue de Richelieu, would today coincide with the Louvre’s ticket offices. On the side of Rue Saint-Honoré it bordered onto a large hospital, the Quinze-Vingts, founded by Louis IX to care – so legend goes – for three hundred knights who had returned blind from the Crusades, the Saracens having put out their eyes. (Curiously, most historians of old Paris relate this story as if it were an established fact, just as they do that of the Jew Jonathan who, around the same time, supposedly boiled a host from the church of the Billettes, which emitted blood – for which crime he was burned alive, as can be seen on Paolo Uccello’s predella in Urbino.23) The hospital precinct sheltered a whole population of craftsmen, exempt from taxation as they also were at the Temple. In 1780, the Quinze-Vingts was transferred to the former barracks of the Black Musketeers in Rue de Charenton, where it remains today.
The Rue Saint-Thomas-du-Louvre would today pass through Ieoh Ming Pei’s pyramid. As well as the Hôtel de Chevreuse, it served a building of unparalleled importance in French literature, the Hôtel de Rambouillet. ‘I need not say that it is the most famous in the kingdom,’ wrote Sauval, who was a regular there,
as no one has any doubt on this score. The entire beau monde has read its praise and description in Le Grand Cyrus, and in the works of the most refined minds of the century. Perhaps there is not even any need to recall that in Cyrus it is known as the palace of Cléomire, and elsewhere it is always called the palace of Arthénice, an anagram of Catherine, the baptismal name of Catherine de Vivonne, Marquise de Rambouillet, the mansion having been devised by Malherbe. Illustrious figures have all published the name of this heroine to their heart’s content, leaving me almost nothing to say about her hôtel . . . And as well as this, they have also told us that she devised it and gave it its design, that she alone undertook, conducted and completed it. Her fine and elegant taste revealed to our architects conveniences and perfections unknown even to the Ancients, and which they have since extended to all proud and prestigious dwellings.24 By the discoveries that Arthénice made in architecture, by way of a pleasant diversion, it is possible to judge those that she made in literature, where she occupied a pinnacle. The virtue and merit of Catherine de Vivonne attracted to her house, for many years, all fine minds of the court and the century. In her blue chamber a circle of illustrious figures gathered each day, indeed we should say the Academy; for this is where the Académie Française had its origin; and it is from the great minds who attended here that the most noble section of this very considerable body was composed. This is the reason why the Hôtel de Rambouillet was long known as the French Parnassus . . . Those who were not known there were seen simply as ordinary persons, and it was enough to have entered there to be ranked among the illustrious figures of the century.25
Rue Fromenteau followed the moat of the Louvre along the Horloge pavilion, ending up at Rue Saint-Honoré close to Rue de Valois. It always had a bad reputation: ‘Is not Rue Fromenteau both murderous and profligate?’, Balzac asks at the start of Ferragus. Connecting Rue Fromenteau with Rue Saint-Thomas-du-Louvre, the little Rue du Doyenné hosted a street market where, in the Romantic epoch, eighteenth-century French canvases could be bought at a low price. This is where Cousine Bette lived at the beginning of the eponymous novel: ‘As we drive in a hackney cab past this dead-alive spot, and chance to look down the little Rue du Doyenné, a shudder freezes the soul, and we wonder who can lie there, and what things may be done there at night, at an hour when the alley is a cut-throat pit, and the vices of Paris run riot there under the cloak of night.’ In the 1830s, a group of young writers still little known established themselves in Rue du Doyenné in a kind of squat, their number including Gérard de Nerval:
It was in our common lodgings in Rue du Doyenné that we came to recognize one another as brothers . . . in a corner of the old Louvre des Médicis, very close to the spot where the former Hôtel de Rambouillet stood . . . Good old Rogier would smile into his beard, from the top of a ladder, where he was painting on one of the three mirror frames a Neptune – who looked like himself! Then the two swing doors opened abruptly: it was Théophile [Gautier]. We hurried to offer him a Louis XIII armchair, and he read in his turn his first verses, while Cydalise I, or Lorry, or Victorine, swung nonchalantly in blonde Sarah’s hammock, stretched across the enormous salon . . . What happy days! We gave balls, suppers, costumed parties . . . We were young, always gay, and often rich . . . But now I come to the sad note: our palace was demolished. I rummaged through its debris last autumn. Even the ruins of the chapel [of the Doyennés, which was part of Saint-Thomas-du-Louvre], which so gracefully stood out against the green of the trees . . . were not respected. Around that time, I found myself, one day, rich enough to buy back from the demolishers two lots of woodwork from the salon, painted by our friends. I have the two Nanteuil architraves; Vattier’s signed Watteau, Corot’s two long panels representing Provençal landscapes; Châtillon’s Red Monk, reading the Bible on the curved haunches of a naked sleeping woman; Chassériau’s Bacchantes, who have tigers on a leash like dogs . . . As for the Renaissance bed, the Médicis dresser, the two sideboards, the Ribera, the tapestries of the Four Elements, all that was scattered a long time ago. ‘Where did you lose so many fine things?’ Balzac asked me one day. – ‘In misfortune,’ I replied, citing one of his favourite phrases.26
Rue Saint-Nicaise was where royalist plotters exploded a bomb on 24 December 1800, while the First Consul was proceeding from the Tuileries to the opera in Rue de Richelieu. The attack killed
