of building, many examples of which are still to be seen. In the details, their vocabulary is that of neoclassicism, but what is unusual, and gives Rue de Cléry, Rue d’Aboukir and Rue d’Alexandre their particular physiognomy, is the density of buildings and their great height: the same building had to house the shop, the warehouse on the courtyard, the production workshops on the upper floors, as well as family accommodation. This combination of density and height is a characteristic of immigrant quarters in big cities everywhere: the Sentier’s buildings recall those of the Venice Ghetto, as well as those of another historical textile district, La Croix-Rousse in Lyon.
In the twentieth century, each historical period saw the arrival of new immigrants here. In the last twenty years, it has been Turks (often Kurds), Serbs, Southeast Asians and Chinese, Pakistanis, Sri Lankans, Bangladeshis, Senegalese and Malians who have come to offer their labour-power as packers or finishers, when they are not simply employed by the hour or the day to unload a lorry or clear a warehouse.
The Sentier is shaped like a square, its boundaries being Rues Réaumur and Saint-Denis, Boulevard de Bonne-Nouvelle and Rue du Sentier. It is divided in two by the diagonal of Rue de Cléry and Rue d’Aboukir, stretching between the Porte Saint-Denis and the Place des Victoires along a segment of the walls of Charles V whose traces are still very clear: Rue de Cléry is built on the counterscarp of the wall, and Rue d’Aboukir, very clearly lower, takes the line of the moat (it was formerly known as Rue du Milieu-du-Fossé, before being changed to Rue de Bourbon-Villeneuve, then to Aboukir in 1848).
Of the two triangles divided by this diagonal, the more frenetic is on the side of Rue Réaumur and Rue Saint-Denis. This is Paris’s ‘return from Egypt’ quarter.56 The street names (Rue du Nil, Rue d’Alexandrie, Rue de Damiette, Rue du Caire), and above all the extraordinary façade that frames the entrance to the arcade from the Place du Caire – columns with lotus capitals, incised frieze in the Egyptian style, the three heads of the goddess Hathor – are evidence of the enthusiasm of Parisians for Egypt at the time of Bonaparte’s expedition, an enthusiasm that remains today.
The Place du Caire, where Pakistanis and Malians wait with their trolleys throughout the day, occupies the former site of the city’s largest court of miracles.57 As Sauval put it:
A place of very considerable size, and a very large cul-de-sac – stinking, muddy, irregular and devoid of any paving. Previously confined to the outer limits of Paris, it is now located in one of the most badly built, dirty and out-of-the-way quarters of the city . . . like another world . . . When the ditches and ramparts of the Porte Saint-Denis were removed to the place where we see them now,58 the commissioners conducting this undertaking resolved to cut through this court of miracles with a street that would ascend from Rue Saint-Sauveur to Rue Neuve-Saint-Sauveur; but whatever they might do, they found it impossible to bring this to completion: the builders who started work on the street were beaten by the ruffians there, and these rogues threatened those in charge with an even worse fate.
What a time!
At the heart of the quarter, in the Passage du Caire which is the oldest of Paris arcades (1798), several shops, including the finest of their number, exhibit material for shop windows – mannequins, busts, gilded price-tags, plastic trees and paper fur. This activity continues the oldest tradition of this arcade, specialized from its origins in lithography for calicots, which were the streamers with which shops announced their wares.59
The opposite triangle – opposite in every sense of the word – is the section of the Sentier bordering on Boulevard de Bonne-Nouvelle, built on an artificial hillock made up of rubble, mud and filth of all kinds that accumulated over the centuries and was called the Butte-aux-Gravois.60 Under the League, the windmills and the small church that crowned this hill were razed in order to fortify the rampart. And it is still with the air of a wall that buildings overlook the boulevard on the side of Rue de la Lune or Rue Notre-Dame-de-Bonne-Nouvelle, while Rue Beauregard recalls the view it once offered over the country to the north, with the windmills of Montmartre in the distance.
You climb from the Porte Saint-Denis to the Butte-aux-Gravois past the strangely sharp edges of the buildings at the end of Rues de la Lune, Beauregard, and de Cléry. Further up the quarter, Rues Notre-Dame-de-Recouvrance, de la Ville-Neuve and Thorel are old streets where certain walls have low openings that are neither doors nor windows, but the displays of former shops. In Egypt, bakeries still open onto the street through small basement windows with grills that are opened when the bread is cooked.
Of the church of Notre-Dame-de-Bonne-Nouvelle, built in the seventeenth century, there only remains the bell tower, whose inclination towards Rue Beauregard denotes an unstable subsoil.61 The rest of the present building dates from the 1820s, so that it was in a nearly new church that the funeral of gentle Coralie took place in Lost Illusions, after she had been forced by Lucien de Rubempré’s escapades to leave her dwelling on Rue de Vendôme (now Béranger) for a fourth-floor apartment on Rue de la Lune.
The border between Les Halles and the Sentier on one side, and the Marais on the other, is formed by three north-south axes in close parallel: Rue Saint-Denis and Rue Saint-Martin, which are old Roman roads, and, in the middle, Haussmann’s cutting par excellence, the Boulevard de Sébastopol. The contrast between Rue Saint-Denis with its metered sex, bloody memories, and nighttime brawls, and the chaste and peaceful Rue Saint-Martin, can already be read from the boulevard, on the two gates that the Paris burgesses dedicated to ‘Ludovico Magno’ (Louis XIV). The Porte Saint-Martin with its vermicular embossage and calm bas-reliefs is as modest as a triumphal arch can be. The ‘very fine and very useless Porte Saint-Denis,’ as André Breton calls it in Nadja, presents on the contrary the political-decorative programme of absolute monarchy at its apogee:
Its main gate stands between two pyramids set into the body of the arch and decorated with falling weapons as trophies, ending with two globes with the arms of France . . . At the base of these pyramids are two colossal statues, one of which represents Holland in the figure of a woman in dismay seated on a crouched and dying lion, which holds in its paws seven arrows denoting the United Provinces. The other symmetrical statue is that of a river, holding a cornucopia and representing the Rhine. In the tympani are two Fames, one of which, by the sound of its trumpet, announces to the whole earth that the king’s army has just crossed the Rhine in the presence of his enemies . . . The bas-relief on the face of the gate facing the faubourg represents the taking of Maastricht.62
There is an interesting parallel with the ceiling of the Painted Hall at the Royal Naval College in Greenwich, where the defeated Louis XIV drags himself wretchedly at the feet of William III.
Though Rue Saint-Denis is pretty down-at-heel, and not all its shops brilliant, it keeps the unity and noble vestiges of a royal road. To cite Sauval again:
In olden times Rue Saint-Denis was known for a long while simply as the Grand’Rue, as if for its excellence. In 1273, it was still referred to as magnus vicus . . . This was very fitting, for not only was it for many centuries the only main road in the quarter that we call the Ville, but also the only road leading to the Cité, which made up the whole of Paris at this time. Subsequently, it served as another triumphal way by which our kings generally made their magnificent entrances when they came to the throne, after their coronation, on their marriages, or on their victorious return from defeating their enemies; and finally, for more than three hundred years, it was the route they were carried after their death to Saint-Denis, where their mausoleums are.
The buildings bordering the street are very old, rickety and irregular towards Les Halles, with a proliferation of sex shops and peep shows, shading to fine neoclassical residences as you approach the Porte Saint-Denis.
Rue Saint-Martin, by comparison, is almost village-like. This is not just a matter of toponymy, running as it does past Saint-Martin-des-Champs
