For him, however, the centre of the world in those years was Boulevard de Bonne-Nouvelle: ‘Meanwhile, you can be sure of meeting me in Paris, of not spending more than three days without seeing me pass, toward the end of the afternoon, along the Boulevard Bonne-Nouvelle between the Le Matin building and the Boulevard de Strasbourg. I don’t know why it should be precisely here that my feet take me, here that I almost invariably go without specific purpose, without anything to induce me but this obscure clue: namely that it (?) will happen here.’122
Beyond the Porte, Boulevard Saint-Martin played a transition role between the boulevard that was still a little bit bourgeois and the genuinely plebeian boulevard, ‘as the jacket is a transition between the suit and the overall’.123 What was most striking here in the nineteenth century was its canyon-like aspect: Rambuteau’s levelling work had only affected the carriageway, which was subsequently ‘lowered, and so much so, that from the Porte Saint-Martin to the Théâtre de l’Ambigu-Comique it was necessary to install a railing on each side, with steps every now and then. In this place, therefore, the carriageway was set down like a railway . . . When the return of the troops under Marshal Canrobert from the Italian war of 1859 was announced, on the previous evening this part of the boulevard was invaded, the places against the railing were taken, and people spent the whole night there.’
This was the site of some of the great romantic theatres: the Théâtre de la Porte-Saint-Martin, built by Lenoir in forty days on the orders of Marie-Antoinette, where Frédérick Lemaître and Marie Dorval were hailed in Marion Delorme, and Mlle George in Lucrèce Borgia; the Ambigu, devoted to serious drama (‘this is where you must go, lovers of great plays, dark and mysterious, but in which innocence always triumphs in the end, between eleven o’clock and midnight’124); the Folies-Dramatiques in Rue de Bondy (now René-Boulanger), ‘where vaudeville is generally played, drama mixed with song, and finally the Fantaisie’. For Heine, this is where theatre was at its best, and it steadily declined as one went further east, towards the ‘Boulevard du Crime’, finally reaching ‘Franconi’s, where the stage scarcely counts as such, as the plays performed there are more fit for horses than for men’.125
With Franconi, we cross from Boulevard Saint-Martin to Boulevard du Temple. At no. 52 – a plaque notes that Gustave Flaubert lived here from 1856 to 1869 – the line of buildings curves northward, to the right if you face the nearby Place de la République. The last of these out-of-phase buildings abuts an immense blind wall, perpendicular to the boulevard and replacing in the general alignment the few metres that precede the Place. This arrangement has a simple explanation: the curve of the staggered buildings indicates the course of the ‘original’ Boulevard du Temple, before the cutting of Boulevard du Prince-Eugène (now Boulevard Voltaire) and the Place du Château-d’Eau (now Place de la République). This first Boulevard du Temple reached Boulevard Saint-Martin close to the present site of the Garde Républicaine barracks. Rue du Temple and Rue du Faubourg-du-Temple were then continuous, on either side of the Boulevards. This slightly dilated crossroads formed a small square, with a fountain in the middle where a flower market was held on Tuesdays and Thursdays.126
This is the most famous part of Boulevard du Temple, destroyed by the works of 1862: the Boulevard du Crime, thus named ‘not by the Imperial prosecutors, but by vaudeville artists jealous of their fame for melodrama’.127 Its popular favour began under the last years of the ancien régime. In its heyday, under the Restoration and the July monarchy, ‘it was a Paris festival, a perpetual fair, an all-year carnival . . . You could see birds doing tricks, hares bowing, fleas pulling carts; Mlle Rose with her head down and feet in the air: the spatchcocked Mlle Malaga, jugglers, conjurors, dwarves, giants, skeleton-men, ugly customers, boiling oil. Finally, Munito, the savant dog, a great calculator who did not disdain to give performances and lessons to the domino players at the Café de la Régence.’128 In 1844, Balzac could still write that ‘this is the only place in Paris where you hear the cries of Paris, you see the people thronging, rags to astonish a painter and looks to frighten a man of property. The late Bobèche was there, one of the local glories . . . His accomplice was called Galimafrée. Martainville wrote sketches for these two illustrious acrobats who made children, soldiers and maids laugh enormously, their costumes always dotting the crowd on this famous boulevard.’129 Haussmann, as we saw, was set on removing as soon as possible ‘these unhealthy distractions that increasingly degrade and brutalize the popular masses’.
As reinscribed in collective memory by the joyful papier-mâché of Les Enfants du Paradis, seven theatres stood side by side on the left side of the boulevard, looking towards the Bastille. All these establishments had their stage door on Rue des Fossés-du-Temple (now Amelot), which formed a kind of common corridor. There was the Théâtre-Lyrique, which had ‘mistakenly strayed into these parts’, according to Haussmann. Massenet, when a student at the Conservatoire, played the kettledrum there in the evening to earn his living. ‘I have to confess that I sometimes came in at the wrong place, but one day Berlioz complemented me for this, and said: “You’re actually right, which is unusual!”’130 At the Cirque-Olympique, run by the Franconis, the alternating attractions were Indian jugglers, Chinese and Italian acrobats, and savant animals – as well as military parades that revived the epic of the Empire. Then there were the Folies-Dramatiques, the Gaîté, devoted despite its name to the gloomiest melodramas, and the Funambules, whose star was the mime Debureau, as played by Jean-Louis Barrault in Les Enfants du Paradis. The diarist for Le Globe, the Saint-Simonian newspaper, wrote on 28 October 1831:
There is in this man’s comedy something intangibly bitter and sad: the laughter he provokes, this laughter that comes so freely from his breast, is painful at the end, when we see, after having been so well entertained in all these ways, poor Debureau – or rather poor people! – fall totally back into the state of subjection, abasement and servitude in which we found them at the start of the play, and from which they escaped only for a moment to delight us so much. Adieu Pierrot! Adieu Gilles! Adieu Debureau! Adieu people, till tomorrow!131
The line of theatres ended with the Délassements-Comiques and the Petit-Lazzari – which owed its name to an Italian mime of the eighteenth century – very close to the house where Fieschi exploded his bomb when Louis-Philippe was approaching in 1835. After that, writes Haussmann, there were ‘other well-forgotten dives’.132
These theatres were the stimulus for a proliferation of small trades, ‘from the opener of carriage doors to the collector of cigar butts, and especially the seller of pass-out tickets, of whom there were few at the doors of other theatres’.133 If there were cigar butts to collect and doors to open, this betokens a fashionable clientele who came slumming on the Boulevard du Crime: ‘These ladies come into the little halls that in theatrical slang are called dives [bouis-bouis], in the same fashion that under the Regency the “impure” entertained themselves from time to time at the Théâtre de la Foire.’134
Haussmann’s great works led to the disappearance of almost all these marvels. There remained the Théâtre Déjazet (‘The name alone brings a smile, reminding you of a charming actress whom you must have applauded a hundred times, and will applaud again. Déjazet is an eighth wonder of the world, and for my part, I prefer her by far to the colossus of Rhodes’135), which owed its salvation to the fact that it was the only one on the opposite pavement from where demolition was taking place. There was also the Cirque d’Hiver, the former Cirque Napoléon built by Hittorff, where on Sunday afternoons the lions and clowns were replaced by concerts organized by Pasdeloup. ‘Works by Haydn, Beethoven, Mozart, Weber, etc. were played here. This was not the place for quadrilles or polkas, but rather for strict and serious music, great music indeed.’136
‘The rest of the Boulevard, from Rue d’Angoulême [now Jean-Pierre-Timbaud] through to the Bastille, has – we must confess – a sad scent of the Marais, which after nine in the evening is a kind of cemetery.’137 Balzac shows scarcely any greater esteem for the two major establishments
