Here at least you rediscover the century of Louis XIII, both in its manners and in its outdated opinions. The Marais is to the brilliant quarter of the Palais-Royal what Vienna is to London. It is not poverty that holds sway there, but the full complement of old prejudices: those with a modest fortune take refuge there. That is where you find grumbling old men, gloomy enemies of all new ideas, and highly imperious ladies who denounce without having read them those authors whose names they have heard of: the philosophes are referred to here as ‘people to be burned’.
During the Revolution, emigration emptied this quarter of such aristocracy as still remained. In La Comédie humaine this is where Balzac situates the déclassés, the worthy, isolated and humble misfits. As early as the ‘Prolegomena’ to his Treatise on Elegant Life, he explains how ‘the petty retailer, the second lieutenant, the sub-editor . . . if they do not save like casual workers in order to ensure their board and lodging in old age, the hope of their bee-like life scarcely goes beyond this: possession of a very cold room on the fourth floor, in Rue Boucherat’ (now de Turenne). Comte Octave, in Honorine, who ‘occupied one of the highest legal appointments’, led a life of ‘hermit-like simplicity’, as ‘his house was in the Marais, on Rue Payenne, and he hardly entertained’. Cousin Pons, Balzac’s most important Marais figure, whose character and condition were identified with the quarter, lived on Rue de Normandie, ‘one of the old-fashioned streets that slope towards the middle; the municipal authorities of Paris as yet have laid on no water supply to flush the central channel which drains the houses on either side, and as a result a stream of filthy ooze meanders among the cobblestones, filters into the soil, and produces the mud peculiar to the city’.87
Fortunate to escape Haussmann’s demolitions – by a hair: the baron planned to extend Rue Étienne-Marcel as far as Boulevard Beaumarchais – the Marais remained out of fashion until the mid twentieth century. In the immediate postwar years it was still a poor quarter, the courtyards of its great hôtels clogged up with vans, lean-tos with galvanized metal roofs, piles of pallets, and carts with iron-trimmed wooden wheels. The years of de Gaulle, Malraux and Pompidou soon put paid to this anachronism. Property developers realized the profit they could make on these edifices – so historical, so down-at-heel, and inhabited by a population so little able to defend itself. In the space of twenty years the Marais became unrecognizable, and the old hôtels – façades scrubbed down, outlines tidied up, door frames plasticized, security and parking assured – are now in the hands of a well-off bourgeoisie, an opposite change to that which saw their forerunners emigrate west en masse some two centuries earlier.
The boundaries assigned to the Marais have fluctuated over the years. In the eighteenth century, it stretched as far as the city limits of the time. For Piganiol de la Force, it was ‘bordered on the east by the ramparts and Rue du Mesnil-Montant [now Oberkampf], to the north by the further reaches of the Temple quarter and the Courtille [Boulevard de Belleville], to the west by the main street of the same faubourgs [Rue du Faubourg-du-Temple]’, and thus included a large part of what is now the 11th arrondissement. Today, what is known as the Marais denotes everything between the Boulevards, Rue Beaubourg and the Seine, with a little inset along Rue de la Verrerie for what remains of the Hôtel de Ville quarter. But the dual origin of the Marais – the artisanal north around the Temple enclosure, the aristocratic south around the royal hôtels – has left such deep traces that it is almost an abuse of language to call both by the same name. Though the quarter dates almost entirely from the same short epoch, it includes so many local particularities that it can only be read as an archipelago.
Artisanal Marais begins to the north of the axis formed by the sequence of Rues Saint-Gilles, du Parc-Royal, de la Perle, des Quatre-Fils, des Haudriettes and Michel-le-Comte. It is divided in three by the ‘T’ formed by Rue de Bretagne and Rue du Temple. First, between Rue de Bretagne and the Place de la République, on the site of the Temple enclosure, there is the typical municipal equipment of the Third Republic: mairie, police station, square and market, represented here both by the Enfants-Rouges and the Carreau du Temple, with a very old tradition as an old-clothes market.88 Second, set amidst Rue de Bretagne, Rue du Temple and the boulevard is a labyrinth of short and narrow streets, running in all directions as if the abandonment of the projected Place de France had left chaos behind. Rue Charlot and Rue de Saintonge, parallel straight lines, are superimposed on this anarchic lattice. ‘Rue Charlot and all the surrounding streets,’ wrote Sauval, ‘were bordered with houses by Claude Charlot, a poor peasant from the Languedoc whom fortune nourished, fattened and stuffed until, as adjudicator-general of the gabelles and the five great tax-farms, and lord of the duchy of Fronta, he fell down and died in the mud out of which fortune had pulled him.’ The old metal trade, surviving alongside pleasant galleries of contemporary art, occupies these calm streets in which signs in gilded type proclaim the activities of another age – etching and embossing, hallmarking and stamping, plating, electrolysis, low-fusion porcelain, lost wax and polishing. Third, in one of those contrasts that make for the quarter’s charm, on the other side of Rue du Temple and through to Rue Beaubourg is the busy district of clocks and watches, jewellery, and leatherwork. Jews and Asians coexist peacefully on the territory of the Revolutionary section of the Gravilliers, fiefdom of the Enragés, ‘hot and vehement souls, men who enlighten, lead and subjugate’, as Jacques Roux wrote to Marat.89 The courtyards of Rues Volta, au Maire, des Gravilliers and Chapon are still those of the old Marais: gates wide open, vans and trolleys, piles of boxes, bottlenecks and car horns, all the clinical signs of life.
The southern part of the quarter, the Marais of kings, business leaders, historians and tourists, is divided and organized by Rue Saint-Antoine, one of the finest in Paris – a genuine city of streets, which cannot be said of New York, Tokyo, or even Rome, which is rather made up of alleys and squares. Rue Saint-Antoine stands at the balancing point between regularity, in the alignment of its buildings, its width and its harmony of colours, and tension, in its double curve and the way it widens out at the end. (For streets, there is no beauty without regularity: Rue des Archives, broken up by constant variations in width, missing teeth and heteroclite additions, does not stand comparison with its contemporary neighbour, the very regular Rue du Temple. Conversely, regularity without tension can become boring if overly long, like the arcades on Rue de Rivoli or Boulevard Magenta. Beauty in strict modular repetition is a particular feature of short streets, such as – however different in style – Rues du Cirque, des Colonnes and de Marseilles, or Rue des Immeubles-Industriels which so intrigued Walter Benjamin.)
The curves of Rue Saint-Antoine (there is more than one curve, as Rue François-Miron is historically its initial segment) are punctuated by two domes that for me – and certainly many others – are not just mere silhouettes but old friends. That of Saint-Paul-Saint-Louis, the church of the Jesuits, is the oldest large dome in Paris, still a little clumsy, too small on a too large base, giving the church the charm of an adolescent run to seed, particularly its back view from Rue des Jardins-Saint-Paul.90 The Visitation, designed by François Mansart, a remnant of the convent of the Visitandines that stretched right to the gate of the Bastille, is on the contrary the most perfect cupola on a centred plan that can be found in Paris, along with Libéral Bruant’s chapel of the Salpêtrière.
The Marais archipelago extends on either side of Rue Saint-Antoine. On the river side are the silent streets of the Saint-Paul quarter. The other side has, from east to west, the Place des Vosges, the great museum island91 and the Jewish island. ‘The Rue de la Juiverie [since 1900 Rue Ferdinand-Duval] is thus called because in former times the Jews lived here, before they were expelled from France by Philippe Auguste for their excessive usury, and the execrable impieties and crimes they committed against Christians’, wrote Abbé Du Breuil.92 Sauval was of a different opinion, noting that ‘as regards the streets of this Jewish quarter, some are very narrow, crooked and dark . . . All the houses bordering on them are tiny, tall, poorly built, and similar to the Jewish quarters in Rome, Metz or Avignon.’ The Jewish quarter today is prosperous and lively, despite the pressure of fashionable boutiques on the one hand and gay bars on the other. And the inevitable disappearance of the old Bundists with their caps has