in front of these magic windows for twelve years until the day when, unable to stand it any more, he abandoned the Bourse for painting. Certain galleries were devoted to Boudin, to Corot, to Daumier; others showed the expensive paintings of Henner, Bouguereau and Meissonier. Close to Durand-Ruel’s revolutionary showroom was the respectable gallery of M. Beugnet, who permanently displayed Madeleine Lemaire’s bouquets of polished flowers. Every month, an admirer of this society artist came to spray on her violets, carnations and roses a light cloud of the corresponding perfume. ‘A poetic advertisement!’ said M. Beugnet. In 1895, Ambroise Vollard triggered a scandal when he showed fifty canvases by Cézanne in his new gallery at 39 Rue Laffitte (he had previously been at no. 8). Vollard invited guests for dinner in his cellar. As Apollinaire relates in Le Flâneur des deux rives, ‘Everyone had heard speak of this famous hypogeum . . . Bonnard did a painting of the cellar, and as far as I recall, Odilon Redon appears in it.’ In the same street could be found the offices of ‘the friendly, open-to-all’ Revue blanche, where diarists, illustrators and friends spent their days – Mallarmé and Jarry, Blum and Gide, Lautrec, Vallotton and Bonnard.
Two reasons explain the catastrophe that struck Boulevard des Italiens and its artistic life, turning the one into a centre of fast food and the other into a gloomy desert. The first was the proliferation of banks and insurance companies, which invaded the quarter at the turn of the century. From the construction of the ponderous building of the Crédit Lyonnais in the 1890s – which caught fire at a most timely moment, when scandal had thrust the bank into public obloquy – to the denaturing of the Maison Dorée in the 1970s by one of the first and worst examples of façadisation, each of the pavements on which these ‘strange and wonderful’ buildings were located was ravaged. The Banque Nationale de Paris, which owned the whole of the north of the Boulevard from Rue Laffitte to the Richelieu-Drouot intersection, was not content to disfigure the Maison Dorée; it offered there a concentrate of what has since spread to hundreds of Parisian streets and crossroads. Insurance companies divided up the streets of modern art and transformed them into grey canyons peopled by security guards and swept by torrents of cars. They were assisted – and this is the second reason – by the extension of Boulevard Haussmann in the 1920s, the only cutting in the centre of Paris carried out in the twentieth century, which led to demolition on a gigantic scale, in particular that of the famous Passage de l’Opéra:
‘Today, Boulevard Haussmann has reached Rue Laffitte’, remarked L’Intransigeant the other day. A few more paces by this giant rodent and, after it has devoured the block of houses separating it from Rue Le Peletier, it will inexorably gash open the thicket whose twin arcades run through the Passage de l’Opéra, before emerging diagonally on to Boulevard des Italiens. It will unite itself to that broad avenue somewhere near where the Café Louis XVI now stands, with a singular kind of kiss whose cumulative effect on the vast body of Paris is quite unpredictable.112
Boulevard des Italiens ends at Rue de Richelieu, that’s a fact. But didn’t elegant life continue beyond this, on Boulevard Montmartre? Did it not stretch to the crossroads formed by the intersection of Rue Montmartre, Boulevard Montmartre and Rue du Faubourg-Montmartre, such a dreadful crossing that it was known as the ‘crossroads of accidents’? Some people replied in the negative: ‘What was then called “the Boulevard” extended only from the Chaussée-d’Antin to the Passage de l’Opéra, perhaps up to Faubourg-Montmartre because of the Variétés, but it was very bad form to be seen any further up. It was rare for dandies to parade beyond the Café Anglais; the Variétés marked their outer limit.’113 For most people, however, it was Rue du Faubourg-Montmartre that formed the border between the elegant and the plebeian boulevards. For Balzac, ‘the heart of present-day Paris . . . beats between Rue de la Chaussée-d’Antin and Rue du Faubourg-Montmartre . . . From Rue Montmartre to Rue Saint-Denis, the physiognomy of the Boulevard changes completely.’114 If Boulevard Montmartre belonged more to artists and shopkeepers than to literary folk and dandies, it still remained for Julien Lemer a recommended promenade, and even the favourite of La Bédollière:
The raging stream we have just crossed [Rue du Faubourg-Montmartre] is a kind of Bidassoa separating two countries, and we are now in the realm of literature. Here are journalists, novelists, diarists, satirists, dramatists, even lecturers . . . It is not without reason that great literary salons and an international bookshop have established themselves on Boulevard Montmartre . . . And all of them, like bees, buzz around the Théâtre des Variétés and the doors of cafés, especially at the absinthe hour . . . The arcades – Jouffroy, Verdeau, the Passage des Panoramas – are what the Palais-Royal used to be. They are silent in the mornings, only disturbed by the steps of apprentices, clerks and shopgirls on their way to work . . . Around eleven o’clock the habitués of the Dîner de Paris, the Dîner du Rocher, and the Dîner du Passage Jouffroy make their appearance . . . At five p.m. sharp, the evening papers are sold from the boulevard kiosks . . . At six o’clock, a great hustle and bustle, the faubourg is on its way down! The inhabitants of the Bréda and Notre-Dame-de-Lorette quarters advance to conquer the Boulevards. The region is signalled from a distance by the clicking of jade, the scent of musk, the rustling of silk.115
To cross the Montmartre intersection, and proceed along Boulevard Poissonière and Boulevard de Bonne-Nouvelle, meant passing from elegance to commerce, from literature to cottons, from the avant-garde of art to the most traditional crafts:
Le Gymnase vainly displays its charming little façade there; further on, the Bonne-Nouvelle bazaar, as fine as a Venetian palace, has arisen from the earth as if at the stroke of a fairy wand:116 but the effort is completely wasted! The passersby here are no longer elegant, fine dresses would be out of place, the artist and the literary lion no longer venture into these parts . . . One single boulevard in between produces this total change.117
During the daytime, however, Boulevard Poissonière was lively enough:
Enter Baurain’s restaurant and you will find a good many representatives of commerce, here to buy and sell velvet, linen, raw or printed cloth, spun or twisted cotton. Enter the Théâtre du Gymnase and you will recognize in the audience leading lights of novelty and calico, applauding Sardou or Alexandre Dumas fils as they used to applaud Scribe and Mélesville. Take a turn on the little overlapping promenade, shaded by thin sycamores, on the corner of Rue d’Hauteville. The boys and girls playing there and eating their biscuits were born in the midst of tulle, barege, blond-lace, woollens and silks. They’ve known since an early age the meaning of Tarare, Saint-Quentin, and A.G. goods.118
The building of Le Pont-de-Fer was located on Boulevard Poissonière, a kind of commercial centre under an immense double metal arcade; also the Dock du Campement that specialized in travel goods, and the house of Barbedienne, ‘which sells antique models in bronze, reproduced by the Colas process, and medals of David [d’Angers] . . . A little further on are the rooms of the Brébant restaurant . . . the carpet shops of M. Roncier, and, two houses further, the Industrie Française store, with two floors displaying the most varied riches.’119
The section of the Boulevards between Rue du Faubourg-Montmartre and the Porte Saint-Denis is that which has changed least since the nineteenth century, despite the Grand Rex and the rather unfortunate post office on Rue de Mazagran. This is perhaps the reason why the Surrealists made this segment their particular boulevard, even if they also frequented the Passage de l’Opéra and in particular Café Certa – ‘the place where, one afternoon towards the end of 1919, André Breton and I decided to start meeting our friends there, detesting as we did Montparnasse and Montmartre, as well as from a taste for the ambiguity of the arcades’ – and the Théâtre-Moderne – ‘that hall with great worn-out mirrors, decorated at the bottom with grey swans slipping through yellow reeds, with enclosed stalls quite deprived of air and light, not at all reassuring’.120 These few metres, which for want of a better name were known as Strasbourg-Saint-Denis, exercised on Breton an attraction that he explained by ‘the isolation of the two gates you see there, which owe their touching aspect to the fact that they
