there – my little one, my obscure adolescent! – the great and glorious M. de Balzac on the morning of the first performance of his Les Ressources de Quinola.’156 Much later, in the Café Voltaire on the Place de l’Odéon, where Pierre Louÿs and Henri de Régnier often came, Paul Fort celebrated the marriage of his daughter to Severini: ‘The Prince of Poets, standing on the piano, sang. Marinetti, whose proud white automobile stood on the grey paving of the Place de l’Odéon, abandoned himself to the joys of Futurism. He broke the glassware. It was splendid.’157
Odéon
As for the Odéon quarter – an isosceles triangle with its apex at the Odéon intersection, its sides formed by Rue Monsieur-le-Prince and Rue de Condé – is it part of the Latin Quarter? Léautaud was categorical, and he knew what he was talking about, as he lived at various times on Rue Monsieur-le-Prince, Rue de l’Odéon and Rue de Condé, working at Le Mercure de France on the same street. In his Journal, on 6 October 1903, he wrote: ‘Move from Rue de Condé to Rue de l’Odéon, 6 October. Hatred of this whole Latin Quarter. When will I be able to live somewhere else?’ For him, it was crossing Rue Tournon that brought you into Saint-Germain-des-Près. In the early twentieth century, and in the years between the wars, this point of view was certainly justified. If the Odéon quarter was not really a student district, the booksellers under the theatre colonnade played a role in literary life. For the bachelier Vingtras-Vallès, ‘the Odéon is our club and our asylum. Rummaging on the bookstalls there gives you the air of a man of letters, and at the same time you’re sheltered from the rain. We come there when we get tired of the silence and smell of our hovels.’ Many years later, Léon Daudet – a student in medicine, which did not work out for him – was also attracted by ‘the famous galleries of the Flammarion bookshop around the Odéon, bristling with books. These are connected for me with meeting rather wild young people, and also with my first success, Les Morticoles. I did not dare inquire about it in the two weeks after the volume appeared. The booksellers, who knew me, signalled to me from a distance, and one of them cried out: “Great success!” ’158
And around the same time, Léon-Paul Fargue: ‘We read under the galleries of the Odéon, standing up, our noses as far forward as possible in pages that were not cut, seeking our food.’159 Behind the theatre, on the corner of Rue de Tournon and Rue de Vaugirard, Foyot’s restaurant was frequented by intellectuals – senators too – until an anarchist bomb blew them up.160 The Mercure, and the bookshops of Adrienne Monnier and Sylvia Beach on Rue de l’Odéon, gave the triangle a literary coloration that succeeded in attaching it to the Latin Quarter, but has since almost entirely disappeared.
Saint-Sulpice
To pass from the Luxembourg to Saint-Germain-des-Près you have to cross the little quarter of Saint-Sulpice, and to reach its central square you must choose between three streets which, although all parallel, sloping, short and of the same era, have each to my eyes a different charm. Rue Férou has perhaps the most perfect architecture. Rue Servandoni is the setting for an important episode in The Three Musketeers, on which Umberto Eco writes: ‘Alas, our empirical reader will certainly be moved at the mention of the Rue Servandoni, because Roland Barthes lived there, but Aramis couldn’t have, because the action takes place in 1625 whereas the Florentine architect Giovanni Niccolo Servandoni was born in 1695, designed the façade of Saint-Sulpice church in 1733, and had the street dedicated to him only in 1806.’161 For my part, I always choose the third, Rue Garancière, not for the little fountain of the Princess Palatine, nor for the rams of the Hôtel de Sourdéac and the memory of the Plon-Nourrit publishing house, but to greet once again, at the foot of Saint-Sulpice, the lead pelican on top of the large bulbous roof of the chapel of the Assumption, and above all the pendentive supporting the overhang of the axial chapel above the street, a masterpiece of Paris stereotomy, perhaps even finer than the one on the Hôtel Portalis, at the corner of Rue Croix-des-Petits-Champs and Rue de La Vrillière.
There are many things on the Place Saint-Sulpice. For example: a mairie, a tax office, a police station, three cafés – one selling tobacco –, a cinema, a church on which Le Vau, Gittard, Oppenordt, Servandoni and Chalgrin worked, and which is dedicated to an almoner of Clotaire II who was bishop of Bourges from 624 to 644, with his feast day on 17 January, a publisher, an undertaker, a travel agent, a bus stop, a tailor’s, a hotel, a fountain decorated with the statues of four great Christian orators (Bossuet, Fénelon, Fléchier and Massillon), a newspaper kiosk, a shop selling pious objects, a car park, a beauty parlour and many more.162
By contamination from the style of plaster saints known as saint-sulpicien, this square and its church have often been badly thought of (‘Herrera lived on Rue Cassette, near Saint-Sulpice, the church to which he was attached. This building, hard and stern in style, suited this Spaniard, whose discipline was that of the Dominicans.’163). But there are now many who admire the double portico of Servandoni’s façade, and regret that his death prevented him from finishing the square and realizing the grand arch he had designed along the axis of the church, under which Rue Neuve-Saint-Sulpice would have opened.164
Saint-Germain-des-Près
Of the quarters defined by the ordonnance of 1702, Saint-Germain-des-Près was the twentieth and last, a sufficient sign that it was not similar in kind to the others. The old abbey, which had remained outside Charles V’s walls but was fortified at the same epoch, kept its defences until the 1670s and was never part of Paris. When all the fortifications were pulled down, the abbey also demolished its crenellated precinct and filled up the ditches over which the major streets of the present-day quarter were built.
Around the monastery – of which the bell tower of Saint-Germain-des-Près indicates the centre – a whole community of merchants and artisans developed, living peacefully there just as in other Parisian enclosures. It was known indifferently as the bourg or faubourg Saint-Germain. In the eighteenth century it was a quadrilateral, with three of its sides corresponding to modern streets: Rue Saint-Benoît, Rue Jacob, Rue de l’Échaudé (the name does not refer to a ‘scalded’ person, but to a triangular cake – and by extension to a block of houses of this shape bounded by this street, along with Rue de la Seine and Rue Jacob). The fourth side was formed by a sequence of three streets, more or less along the line of Boulevard Saint-Germain: from west to east, these were Rue Taranne – where Diderot lived for a long time, commemorated by a statue there – Rue Sainte-Marguerite and Rue des Boucheries.165
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