the Regency to the 1990s, the Bibliothèque – royal, imperial, or national – remained in this quadrilateral between Rue Vivienne and Rue de Richelieu. To sum up the spirit of this archaic institution, exasperating and blessed, I would choose Gisèle Freund’s photograph of Walter Benjamin at work, with his glasses and his dishevelled hair, bent over a book that he holds open with his left elbow, and taking notes with a large black pen. And as caption I would cite a connoisseur of libraries:
It may well be that in having branches of trees painted high up on the very lofty walls of the Bibliothèque Nationale in Rue de Richelieu, Henri Labrouste, an architect with a literary bent, had an intuition of this connection between reading and nature. That is in any case what one may believe in reading the remark that Benjamin wrote about this room which he knew so well, and which was basically the only true ‘apartment’ that he had in Paris: ‘When you leaf through pages below, you can hear a murmur above.’32
The quarter’s links with finance also date from the eighteenth century. For Sébastien Mercier, ‘there is more money in this single street’ – Rue Vivienne – ‘than in all the rest of the city; it is the capital’s purse’:
The major counting-houses have their offices there, in particular the Caisse d’Escompte. This is the stamping ground of the bankers, the money changers, the brokers, all who make a trade out of money . . . The whores are more financial here than in any other quarter, and never mistaken in marking out a henchman of the Bourse. These moneymen might have a greater need for reading than any others, so as not to completely lose the faculty of thought; but they don’t read at all; they provide material for those who write . . . All the inhabitants of this street are men who literally work against their fellow citizens, without feeling any sense of remorse.
The banks have now left Rue Vivienne for the Boulevards, but there are still several shops that sell coins, where gold is changed just as in Balzac’s time.
Rue de la Banque leads from the Bourse to the quarter’s other financial institution, the Banque de France. The Hôtel de La Vrillière, designed by François Mansart, was confiscated during the Revolution and the Imprimerie Nationale established there. Robespierre’s speeches were printed in runs of 400,000, and Marat needed three presses in the courtyard to print L’Ami du peuple. The famous Galerie Dorée – whose paintings by Pietro da Cortona, Tintoretto and Veronese had been transferred to the Louvre to make them accessible to the people – was used as a paper warehouse. The Banque de France took over the building from the Imprimerie in 1808,33 and like all banks, it destroyed the marvel that had been entrusted to it. Mansart’s doorway disappeared, which, according to Germain Brice, ‘was seen as his masterpiece because he had been able to preserve the regularity of the Ionic order despite the pairing of columns, which had previously been viewed as very difficult’. The gardens likewise disappeared, on which Sauval had written that they ‘offered two admirable vistas: on the one hand a large parterre surrounded by mock privets, and accompanied by a great number of statues and busts, both ancient and modern, of bronze and marble; on the other, the length of Rue des Fossés-Montmartre [now d’Aboukir], receding towards Rue Montmartre . . . Of all the palaces that Paris contains, only the Palais d’Orléans [Palais-Royal] and this possess such a long avenue, and enjoy such a rare perspective.’ In 1870 the Galerie Dorée was likewise demolished, ‘the most perfect in Paris and perhaps in the whole of France’, according to Sauval; its fifty metres ended in an overhang supported by a pendentive above Rue Radziwill.
This quarter, with only a single church (Notre-Dame-des-Victoires, where the moneymen met while the new Bourse was being constructed), has had three opera houses – without counting the Opéra Garnier, which is no distance at all as the crow flies. On the square facing the main entrance to the Bibliothèque Nationale, the site of the former Hôtel Louvois, where three streets dedicated to great ministers of the ancien régime – Richelieu, Colbert and Louvois – converge, Victor Louis built a theatre for the great actress Mme Montansier. Its entrance was a peristyle with thirteen arches and a balcony onto the street. The vestibule was supported by two ranks of Doric columns; four monumental staircases painted in white and gold served the five levels. Under a quite fallacious pretext – Chaumette to the Commune, 14 November 1793: ‘I denounce Citoyenne Montansier for having had her theatre built on Rue de la Loi [now Richelieu] in order to set fire to the Bibliothèque Nationale; English money made a large contribution to the construction of this building, and the ci-devant queen provided 50,000 écus’ – the Convention confiscated the hall and decided to move the Opéra National there, which was done on 20 Thermidor, eleven days after the fall of Robespierre. It was after attending the French premiere of Haydn’s Creation here that Bonaparte nearly met his end in Rue Saint-Nicaise, and on 13 February 1820, the Duc de Berry was struck by a dagger while coming out of a show. Just as the Château des Tournelles had been razed after Montgomery killed Henri II there with an unfortunate blow of his lance, so Mme Montansier’s hall was demolished after the death of the heir to the throne. There was a plan to erect an expiatory monument on the site, but Louis-Philippe preferred to have Visconti construct the graceful Fontaine des Fleuves. All that remains of the opera here are the names of the streets bordering the square – Cherubini, Rameau, and Lully, whose house is not far off, at the corner of Rue Sainte-Anne and Rue des Petits-Champs, ‘decorated outside with tall pilasters of a mixed order, and a few sculptures that are not badly conceived’.34
After this catastrophe, the Opéra shifted for a few months to the Salle Favart, built in the 1780s on the lands of the Duc de Choiseul, which had up to then been devoted to Italian comedy. Its odd position, with its back turned to Boulevard des Italiens and opening into the little Place Boieldieu, is explained by the desire of the actors not to be mistaken for the mountebanks of Boulevard du Temple.35 In 1821, the Opéra was moved a few metres, crossing Boulevard des Italiens to settle at the corner of Rue Le Peletier. This was the grand Opéra of the nineteenth century, the mythical hall of Rossini, Boieldieu, Meyerbeer, Donizetti and Berlioz, as well as of Balzac and Manet. It also burned down in 1873, and the Opéra spent a few months in the Bourse quarter, at the Salle Ventadour,36 before it moved into the new hall built by Garnier, inaugurated in 1875 with La Juive by Scribe and Halévy.
Finance and opera were not mutually exclusive activities. West of Rue de Richelieu (‘street of business and pleasure’ in the words of Alfred Delvau), and overspilling the line of what would later be Avenue de l’Opéra, was a mound of rubble, the result among other things of the demolition of the old wall of Charles V and the Porte Saint-Honoré. This Butte des Moulins was one of the high places of Parisian prostitution. At the start of Scenes from a Courtesan’s Life, the touching character of Esther lives in Rue Langlade, a tiny alley between Rue de Richelieu and Rue Traversière-Saint-Honoré (now Molière):
These narrow streets, dark and muddy, where such industries are carried on as care little for appearances, wear at night an aspect of mystery full of contrasts. On coming from the well-lighted regions of Rue Saint-Honoré, Rue Neuve-des-Petits-Champs, and Rue de Richelieu, where the crowd is constantly pushing, where glitter the masterpieces of industry, fashion, and art, every man to whom Paris by night is unknown would feel a sense of dread and melancholy, on finding himself in the labyrinth of little streets which lie round that blaze of light reflected even from the sky . . . Passing through them by day, it is impossible to imagine what they become by night; they are pervaded by strange creatures of no known world; white, half-naked forms cling to the walls – the darkness is alive. Between the passenger and the wall a dress steals by – a dress that moves and speaks. Half-open doors suddenly shout with laughter . . . Snatches of songs come up from the pavement . . . This medley of things makes you giddy.
The Butte des Moulins was cleared to allow Avenue de l’Opéra to connect with Rue Saint-Honoré. A photograph by Marville shows the gigantic work this involved, with the new Opéra glimpsed in the background through the dust. But the tradition of love for sale long survived in Rue des Moulins, depicted in Toulouse-Lautrec’s famous Salon, as well as Rue Chabanais, which before the Second World
