in the world, quarters reserved for human perversity, that surpass in ignominy these bordering on the Seine and stretching around the Rue Mazarine, where are they?’5 And until the late 1950s, the alleys between the Place Maubert and the river – Rue de Bièvre, Rue Maître-Albert, Rue Frédéric-Sauton – the Saint-Séverin quarter and Rue Mouffetard, were still filthy and wretched. In his itinerary among the Paris poor, Jean-Paul Clébert described in Rue Maître-Albert, ‘this dog’s leg of an alley that outsiders avoid, kitchens invisible from the main road, and which you enter from the side, taking the corridor that leads to the upper floors; you push open a door chosen at random and step down into a room as big as a chicken coop, in the midst of a family.’6 The Place de la Contrescarpe had more tramps than Situationists, and there were some cafés that were hard to enter if you were not a ragged alcoholic. There were no tourists, restaurants or shops to be seen. Hotels rented rooms by the day to immigrant workers, without asking to see their papers. The offices of Messali Hadj’s Movement for the Triumph of Democratic Liberties were on Rue Xavier-Privas, a couple of steps from Notre-Dame. Contrary to a widespread idea, the final eradication of the Middle Ages in Paris was not the work of Haussmann and Napoleon III, but rather of Malraux and Pompidou, and the emblematic literary signal of this disappearance was not Baudelaire’s ‘The Swan’ but rather Perec’s Les Choses.
THE RIGHT BANK QUARTERS
Palais-Royal
The character of Paris as a town formed in the Middle Ages is still visible in the way that its quarters are assembled. The Right Bank has four large and compact nuclei, that of Palais-Royal being the most recent, with satellites in the Tuileries-Saint-Honoré and Bourse quarters; Les Halles is the oldest of the four, and has been treated worst; the Sentier is changing now before our eyes; and the Marais is not so much a single quarter as several. Between these main regions there are transition zones that fill the gaps. This is the most densely built region of Paris.7
It is easy to imagine that the centre of the world was once where the ruined columns of Athens and Rome now lie, precisely because these are ruins. At the Palais-Royal, on the other hand, in the avenues of its gardens or under the colonnades where stalls selling tin soldiers with their crosses and ribbons, pipes, soft toys and needlepoint form an old-fashioned backdrop, nothing allows you to imagine that for fifty years this place was the agora or forum of Paris, its fame spreading right across Europe. When the Allied forces entered the city after the battle of Waterloo, ‘What was the first thing they asked for in Paris? The Palais-Royal! A Russian officer entered the building on horseback. What was the first thing in the Palais-Royal that they wanted? To sit down in one of the restaurants, whose glorious names had reached even their ears.’8
‘No matter what the weather, rain or shine’, Diderot’s narrator explains at the beginning of Rameau’s Nephew, ‘it’s my habit every evening at about five o’clock to take a walk around the Palais-Royal. I’m the one you see dreaming on the bench in the Argenson avenue, all alone.’ This was written in the 1760s, so it is still the old Palais-Royal that is referred to here. Cardinal Richelieu had bought a series of buildings and plots at the end of Rue Saint-Honoré, grouping them into a single quadrilateral that is today bordered by Rues Saint-Honoré, des Petits-Champs, de Richelieu and des Bons-Enfants.9 The Palais-Cardinal constructed by Lemercier stood close to where the Conseil d’État is today. The rest of the land formed a garden: the Argenson avenue that Diderot mentions was to the right, alongside what would become the Galerie de Valois; the avenue opposite took its name from the Café de Foy, the first of those establishments that would be the glory of the Palais-Royal. (The Caveau was founded a little later. Diderot in his old age wrote to his daughter on 28 June 1781: ‘I get bored at home. I go out and get bored even more. The sole and supreme happiness I can enjoy is to go regularly each day at five o’clock to have an ice at the Petit-Caveau.’) In the same year, the Duc de Chartres, future Philippe-Égalité, commissioned Victor Louis to construct the buildings that today surround the garden on three sides.10 Endowed with its hundred and eighty arcades, the Palais-Royal enjoyed an immediate success:
A unique point on the globe. Visit London, Amsterdam, Madrid or Vienna, you will see nothing like it: a prisoner could live there without getting bored, and it would be years before he even dreamed of freedom . . . It is called the capital of Paris. Everything is to be found there: and for a young man of twenty, with fifty thousand livres invested in government stock, there could be nothing else wanting in life, and he would never even emerge from this fairyland . . . This enchanted abode is a small town of luxury enclosed in a greater one; it is the temple of pleasure, from where scintillating vices have banished even the phantom of shame; no tavern in the world is more graciously depraved.11
Towards the end of Louis XVI’s reign, the Palais-Royal saw a proliferation of clubs. By July 1789 the agitation was constant, and the Palais became what Hugo called ‘the nucleus of the comet Revolution’. Camille Desmoulins relates the date of 13 July as follows:
It was half past two, and I had gauged the mood of the people. My anger against the despots had turned to despair. I could not see any groups ready for an uprising, however strongly affected they were. Three young men, standing hand in hand, struck me as inspired by a more resolute courage. I could see that they had come to the Palais-Royal with the same intention as myself. A number of passive citizens followed them. ‘Messieurs,’ I said, ‘here is the beginning of a civic force: one of us must take the initiative and stand on a table to harangue the people.’ ‘Get up, then.’ I agreed. Rather than climbing, I was immediately hoisted up on the table [in the Café de Foy]. Right away I found myself surrounded by an immense crowd. Here is my speech, which I shall never forget: ‘Citizens, there is not a moment to lose. I have come from Versailles. Necker has been dismissed; his dismissal is the signal for a St Bartholemew’s Night of patriots. This evening, the Swiss and German battalions will come out of the Champ-du-Mars to massacre us. Just one single recourse remains, to seize arms and choose a rosette by which to recognize one another.’12
In the course of the Revolution, however, the Palais-Royal, rechristened Palais-Égalité, rapidly became a rallying place for royalists, moderates, Feuillants, all those whom Robespierre called fripons (rogues). At the Mafs restaurant, the contributors to the royalist newspaper Les Actes des apôtres – Abbé Maury, Montlausier, Rivarol – held their ‘evangelical dinner’ each week. They wrote up their discussions at a corner of the table, and ‘the issue composed in this way was left on the Mafs menu, and from Mafs went to Gattey, the famous shop in the Palais’ Galeries de Bois’.13 On 20 January 1793, the day that the Convention voted to send Louis Capet to the guillotine, it was in a modest restaurant – chez Février – in the Galerie de Valois that the bodyguard Pâris assassinated Le Peletier de Saint-Fargeau. At the Convention, on 19 Nivôse of year II, ‘the revolutionary committee of the Montagne denounced the restaurant owners and caterers of the Palais de l’Égalité, which had merely changed its name and could still bear that of Palais-Royal from the insolent luxury displayed there’.14 Barras – who lived in the Palais-Royal, above Véfour’s – and his friends prepared the coup of 9 Thermidor at a table in the Corazza’s ice-cream parlour, and under the Directory the incroyables pursued republicans in the gardens, white cockade in hat and bludgeon in hand.
The apogee of the Palais-Royal, the time when it became a myth with no counterpart anywhere in modern Europe, was the twenty years following the entry of the Allies into Paris in 1815. The arrival of Russian, Austrian, Prussian and English soldiers and officers gave a new impulse to the two most profitable activities of the site, prostitution and gambling. This was when the Galeries de Bois, wooden buildings lined up transversally where the double colonnade of the Galerie d’Orléans now stands, had their moment of glory:15
The Wooden Galleries of the Palais-Royal used to be one of the most famous sights of Paris. Some description
