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
