After this catastrophe, the Opéra shifted for a few months to the Salle Favart, built in the 1780s on the lands of the Duc de Choiseul, which had up to then been devoted to Italian comedy. Its odd position, with its back turned to Boulevard des Italiens and opening into the little Place Boieldieu, is explained by the desire of the actors not to be mistaken for the mountebanks of Boulevard du Temple.35 In 1821, the Opéra was moved a few metres, crossing Boulevard des Italiens to settle at the corner of Rue Le Peletier. This was the grand Opéra of the nineteenth century, the mythical hall of Rossini, Boieldieu, Meyerbeer, Donizetti and Berlioz, as well as of Balzac and Manet. It also burned down in 1873, and the Opéra spent a few months in the Bourse quarter, at the Salle Ventadour,36 before it moved into the new hall built by Garnier, inaugurated in 1875 with La Juive by Scribe and Halévy.
Finance and opera were not mutually exclusive activities. West of Rue de Richelieu (‘street of business and pleasure’ in the words of Alfred Delvau), and overspilling the line of what would later be Avenue de l’Opéra, was a mound of rubble, the result among other things of the demolition of the old wall of Charles V and the Porte Saint-Honoré. This Butte des Moulins was one of the high places of Parisian prostitution. At the start of Scenes from a Courtesan’s Life, the touching character of Esther lives in Rue Langlade, a tiny alley between Rue de Richelieu and Rue Traversière-Saint-Honoré (now Molière):
These narrow streets, dark and muddy, where such industries are carried on as care little for appearances, wear at night an aspect of mystery full of contrasts. On coming from the well-lighted regions of Rue Saint-Honoré, Rue Neuve-des-Petits-Champs, and Rue de Richelieu, where the crowd is constantly pushing, where glitter the masterpieces of industry, fashion, and art, every man to whom Paris by night is unknown would feel a sense of dread and melancholy, on finding himself in the labyrinth of little streets which lie round that blaze of light reflected even from the sky . . . Passing through them by day, it is impossible to imagine what they become by night; they are pervaded by strange creatures of no known world; white, half-naked forms cling to the walls – the darkness is alive. Between the passenger and the wall a dress steals by – a dress that moves and speaks. Half-open doors suddenly shout with laughter . . . Snatches of songs come up from the pavement . . . This medley of things makes you giddy.
The Butte des Moulins was cleared to allow Avenue de l’Opéra to connect with Rue Saint-Honoré. A photograph by Marville shows the gigantic work this involved, with the new Opéra glimpsed in the background through the dust. But the tradition of love for sale long survived in Rue des Moulins, depicted in Toulouse-Lautrec’s famous Salon, as well as Rue Chabanais, which before the Second World War still contained one of the most select brothels in Paris – hence the expression that was once very common in Le Canard enchaîné: ‘a fine chabanais’.
The Arcades
The majority of the great Paris arcades are found between Avenue de l’Opéra, the Place des Victoires, Rue des Petits-Champs and the Grands Boulevards. Some have been renovated, or frozen into museums, like the Passage Colbert. Others have become commercial galleries of semiluxury, like the Galerie Vivienne. But certain of them, however changed from their day of splendour, still keep a particular charm: the Galerie Véro-Dodat – where Mlle Rachel lived, and which housed the offices of Philipon’s La Caricature – with its dark woodwork and checkerboard paving;37 the Passage Choiseul, where Lemerre published the Parnassians and whose bustle still offers unexpected surprises; and especially the ancestor of them all, the Passage des Panoramas. This took its name from the two wooden turrets framing its sentry on Boulevard Montmartre. A group of painters, including Daguerre, executed panoramic views of Toulon, Tilsit, Napoleon’s camp at Boulogne, and the battle of Navarino, on immense canvases close to a hundred metres in circumference and twenty metres tall. At the centre of the rotunda, spectators were immersed in a spectacle lit up from above. Chateaubriand, in his Itinerary from Paris to Jersualem, wrote: ‘The illusion was complete, I recognized at first glance the monuments that I had indicated. No traveller was ever confronted with so rude a test; I could not wait for Jerusalem and Athens to be transported to Paris in order to convince myself of the truth or otherwise.’ The rotundas have disappeared, but the Théâtre des Variétés remains, where Offenbach had his triumphs, succeeded by Meilhac and Halévy, Lavedan, Capus, de Flers and Caillavet. It was in front of the entrance that poor Count Muffat waited for Nana, where
a perfect stream of brilliancy emanated from white globes, red lanterns, blue transparencies, lines of gas jets, gigantic watches and fans, outlined in flame and burning in the open. And the motley displays in the shops, the gold ornaments of the jeweller’s, the glass ornaments of the confectioner’s, the light-coloured silks of the modiste’s, seemed to shine again in the crude light of the reflectors behind the clear plate-glass windows, while among the bright-coloured, disorderly array of shop signs a huge purple glove loomed in the distance like a bleeding hand which had been severed from an arm and fastened to a yellow cuff.
The melancholy beauty of the Passage des Panoramas extends across Boulevard Montparnasse, through Passage Jouffroy and Passage Verdeau, as far as Rue de Provence, a long walk completely out of the rain. This was indeed the main reason behind the fashion for these arcades, from the Directory to the end of the Second Empire: you could stroll there without stepping into the famous Parisian mud, or the risk of being run down by carriages. (At the start of the twentieth century: ‘Gourmont explained to me that when he was at the Bibliothèque Nationale, he lived on Rue Richer and in bad weather could walk to the Bibliothèque, almost without experiencing it, via the Passages Verdeau, Jouffroy and des Panoramas, Rue des Colonnes, etc.’38) In 1800, Paris only had three streets provided with sidewalks: Rues de l’Odéon, Louvois, and de la Chausée-d’Antin. Elsewhere, the gutter was most commonly in the centre of the road, as in the Middle Ages. ‘With the least shower’, wrote Sébastien Mercier, ‘rickety bridges have to be put down’, in other words, boards on which street children helped pedestrians to cross in return for payment. Frochot, prefect of the Seine department under the Empire, could still lament: ‘The capital of France, adorned with admirable monuments and possessing so many useful establishments, offers those who cross it on foot only an excessively difficult and even dangerous way, which seems to have been exclusively designed for the movement of carriages.’39 Fifty years later, the picture had scarcely changed. Baudelaire wrote in his little prose poem ‘Loss of a Halo’: ‘My dear, you know my terror of horses and carriages. Just a little while ago, as I was crossing the boulevard very hastily and jumping about in the mud, through that moving chaos in which death comes galloping towards you from all sides at once . . .’ The decline in these arcades coincided with the completion of Haussmann’s first great cuttings: ‘Our wider streets and more spacious pavements have made easy the sweet flânerie impossible for our fathers except in the arcades.’40 By the end of the century the arcades were already being