‘a fine chabanais’.
The Arcades
The majority of the great Paris arcades are found between Avenue de l’Opéra, the Place des Victoires, Rue des Petits-Champs and the Grands Boulevards. Some have been renovated, or frozen into museums, like the Passage Colbert. Others have become commercial galleries of semiluxury, like the Galerie Vivienne. But certain of them, however changed from their day of splendour, still keep a particular charm: the Galerie Véro-Dodat – where Mlle Rachel lived, and which housed the offices of Philipon’s La Caricature – with its dark woodwork and checkerboard paving;37 the Passage Choiseul, where Lemerre published the Parnassians and whose bustle still offers unexpected surprises; and especially the ancestor of them all, the Passage des Panoramas. This took its name from the two wooden turrets framing its sentry on Boulevard Montmartre. A group of painters, including Daguerre, executed panoramic views of Toulon, Tilsit, Napoleon’s camp at Boulogne, and the battle of Navarino, on immense canvases close to a hundred metres in circumference and twenty metres tall. At the centre of the rotunda, spectators were immersed in a spectacle lit up from above. Chateaubriand, in his Itinerary from Paris to Jersualem, wrote: ‘The illusion was complete, I recognized at first glance the monuments that I had indicated. No traveller was ever confronted with so rude a test; I could not wait for Jerusalem and Athens to be transported to Paris in order to convince myself of the truth or otherwise.’ The rotundas have disappeared, but the Théâtre des Variétés remains, where Offenbach had his triumphs, succeeded by Meilhac and Halévy, Lavedan, Capus, de Flers and Caillavet. It was in front of the entrance that poor Count Muffat waited for Nana, where
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.’38) 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.’39 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.’40 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.’41
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.
Les Halles
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.42 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.43 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 –
