The border between Les Halles and the Sentier on one side, and the Marais on the other, is formed by three north-south axes in close parallel: Rue Saint-Denis and Rue Saint-Martin, which are old Roman roads, and, in the middle, Haussmann’s cutting par excellence, the Boulevard de Sébastopol. The contrast between Rue Saint-Denis with its metered sex, bloody memories, and nighttime brawls, and the chaste and peaceful Rue Saint-Martin, can already be read from the boulevard, on the two gates that the Paris burgesses dedicated to ‘Ludovico Magno’ (Louis XIV). The Porte Saint-Martin with its vermicular embossage and calm bas-reliefs is as modest as a triumphal arch can be. The ‘very fine and very useless Porte Saint-Denis,’ as André Breton calls it in Nadja, presents on the contrary the political-decorative programme of absolute monarchy at its apogee:
Its main gate stands between two pyramids set into the body of the arch and decorated with falling weapons as trophies, ending with two globes with the arms of France . . . At the base of these pyramids are two colossal statues, one of which represents Holland in the figure of a woman in dismay seated on a crouched and dying lion, which holds in its paws seven arrows denoting the United Provinces. The other symmetrical statue is that of a river, holding a cornucopia and representing the Rhine. In the tympani are two Fames, one of which, by the sound of its trumpet, announces to the whole earth that the king’s army has just crossed the Rhine in the presence of his enemies . . . The bas-relief on the face of the gate facing the faubourg represents the taking of Maastricht.62
There is an interesting parallel with the ceiling of the Painted Hall at the Royal Naval College in Greenwich, where the defeated Louis XIV drags himself wretchedly at the feet of William III.
Though Rue Saint-Denis is pretty down-at-heel, and not all its shops brilliant, it keeps the unity and noble vestiges of a royal road. To cite Sauval again:
In olden times Rue Saint-Denis was known for a long while simply as the Grand’Rue, as if for its excellence. In 1273, it was still referred to as magnus vicus . . . This was very fitting, for not only was it for many centuries the only main road in the quarter that we call the Ville, but also the only road leading to the Cité, which made up the whole of Paris at this time. Subsequently, it served as another triumphal way by which our kings generally made their magnificent entrances when they came to the throne, after their coronation, on their marriages, or on their victorious return from defeating their enemies; and finally, for more than three hundred years, it was the route they were carried after their death to Saint-Denis, where their mausoleums are.
The buildings bordering the street are very old, rickety and irregular towards Les Halles, with a proliferation of sex shops and peep shows, shading to fine neoclassical residences as you approach the Porte Saint-Denis.
Rue Saint-Martin, by comparison, is almost village-like. This is not just a matter of toponymy, running as it does past Saint-Martin-des-Champs and Saint-Nicolas-des-Champs. It is wide and airy, with a fine place to pause under the chestnut trees of the square facing the high wall of the Conservatoire des Arts et Métiers. Towards the centre, you still have the narrowness of a medieval street, but greatly deteriorated. It is better to take Rue Quincampoix, which has hardly changed since John Law established his central bank there, and ‘crowds rushed into this narrow street to convert coin into paper’.63
Marais
Once you cross Rue Saint-Martin – some would rather say Rue Beaubourg – you enter the Marais.64 The appearance of this word to denote a region of Paris is relatively recent: it was not until the seventeenth century that only the zone of the Marais that was still really marshy was called by that name, around the present convergence of Rues de Turenne, Vieille-du-Temple, de Bretagne and des Filles-du-Calvaire, not far from the Cirque d’Hiver.65 In referring to the Paris quarter, marais means a region of watered gardens (maraîchers) rather than an actual marsh. If there was such a marsh, if the battle of Lutetia between Camulogène and Caesar took place around here, the fortifications of Charles V subsequently served as a dyke, and its moats as a drainage canal. This arrangement is still very visible: Boulevard Beaumarchais, built on the line of the walls, is in such a raised position that Rue des Tournelles and Rue Saint-Gilles, coming from the Marais, have to rise quite steeply in their final stretch in order to meet it. And on the other side, to descend to Rue Amelot – formerly Rue des Fossés-du-Temple – it was necessary to install a stairway.
It is strange, and has no other equivalent in Paris, how the physiognomy of the Marais today is haunted by the phantoms of three great domains, which have left their names and yet not a single stone: the Temple, the Hôtel Saint-Pol and the Hôtel des Tournelles.
The mother house of the order of Knights Templar, founded in Jerusalem in the twelfth century, was located at the far end of the region’s major north-south axis, on Rue du Temple.66 Its lands fell into two distinct sections. The heart was the enclos, a fortified quadrilateral whose boundaries would now be Rues du Temple, de Bretagne, Charlot and Béranger. At the centre of this enclosure was the keep, used as a prison for Louis XVI and his family after 10 August 1792, and later for Babeuf and Cadoudal. A large part of the enclosure was rented out to artisans, exempt here from tax as in all the religious precincts of the city.
To the south and east of the enclosure, the Templars possessed large tracts of agricultural land: this was the censive, whose limits defined a further quadrilateral, extending to Rue du Roi-de-Sicile and thus corresponding to a large section of the Marais today. The wall of Philippe Auguste cut through this censive, along the line of Rue des Francs-Bourgeois.67 On the side facing the city, these lands were gradually populated along the axes, particularly along Rue Vieille-du-Temple, which was then called Rue de la Couture-du-Temple [couture = cultivation], but on the outward side there was nothing but market gardens until the sixteenth century.
The other major axis of the Marais, its east-west orientation, was Rue Saint-Antoine, as it still is today. At the end of this, the outer limit of Paris, two royal dwellings stood face to face, the Hôtel Saint-Pol and the Hôtel des Tournelles. Saint-Pol was the creation of the Dauphin, the future Charles V. Tired of the old Palais de la Cité, where he had been forced to confront popular insurrection and Étienne Marcel, he decided to establish himself somewhere more calm. He bought buildings and gardens from the Comte d’Étampes, the archbishop of Sens, and the abbés of Saint-Maur, ending up with all of the land between Rue Saint-Antoine and the Seine, and from Rue Saint-Paul right through to Rue du Petit-Musc. Saint-Pol was not a single building, an hôtel in the usual sense, but rather a group of buildings surrounded by gardens, and linked by covered galleries that framed a succession of courtyards, a cherry orchard, a vineyard, a sauvoir for raising salmon, aviaries, and a menagerie where lions were kept, pensioners of the hotel down to its final days. (In his Vies des dames galantes, Brantôme recalled how ‘one day when François I was amusing himself by watching his lions fighting, a lady who had let her glove fall said to de Lorges: if you want me to believe that you love me as much as you swear every day, go and pick up my glove. De Lorges went down into the lions’ den, picked up the glove from among these fearsome animals, came up, threw it in the lady’s face, and since then, despite all the troubles and pains that she took towards him, never wanted to see her again.’)
From the main gate of the Hôtel Saint-Pol you could see on the other side of Rue Saint-Antoine the gateway of the Hôtel des Tournelles, which, according to Piganiol de La Force, ‘took its name from the number of towers by which it was surrounded’. In the 1420s, under the English occupation, the Duke of Bedford, acting as regent, made his residence in a small hotel that was situated between Rue de Birague and the Impasse Guéménée. ‘John, Duke of Bedford, stayed there during the disturbances of the Bourguignons and the Armagnacs’, wrote Sauval. ‘He extended it and had it magnificently built, so that it has since been a royal residence,