The Invention of Paris. Eric Hazan

Seine, the stones of medieval walls, monuments as solid as the Bastille and the Temple, whereas the ‘boulevards du Midi’ were traced amid quarries, fields and windmills, leaving outside them the most important contemporary buildings such as the Invalides, the Observatoire, and the Hôpital Général or Salpêtrière. It was not until much later that the belt of the southern boulevards was completed, in the second half of the nineteenth century, with two consequences that are still evident today: on the one hand, they do not coincide with the actual limit of Old Paris, which did not extend this far, and remains separated from them by a strip of ‘modern’ building; on the other hand they were – and remain – above all a route for traffic. The only sector suited for promenading, Boulevard Montparnasse between Avenue de l’Observatoire and Boulevard d’Enfer (now Raspail), was a world away from Boulevard des Italiens: ‘This pavement is not asphalted, but planted with century-old lime trees, full of shade and joie de vivre in the spring . . . In the morning it is invaded by gardeners from the cemetery; in the evening, the silence is broken from time to time by the songs of drunkards coming back from the barrière or by the kisses of lovers returning from the radiant country of love.’¹⁴²

      Among those places that express in a clear and subtle fashion the swing of fashion from one bank to the other, there are the gardens that Paris owes to the two Florentine queens, Catherine and Marie de Médicis. During the greater part of the nineteenth century, the favoured shady haunt of dandies, lovers and writers was the Tuileries. In the flamboyant opening pages of Balzac’s The Girl With the Golden Eyes (dedicated, we recall, to ‘Eugène Delacroix, painter’), it is quite naturally on the Terrasse des Feuillants that Henri de Marsay meets Paquita Valdès. But starting with Verlaine and symbolism, and continuing right through the twentieth century (even if the Tuileries fountain still plays a role in Nadja), youth and poetry migrate towards the Luxembourg. The Journal of Paul Léautaud, 4 May 1901: ‘Dusk gave the whole garden an endless depth, and a light mist was floating. I was on the terrace not far from the door to the greenhouses. In the lower part of the garden, the fountain rose and fell almost noiselessly. Soon the drum began to beat. They were about to close. I dreamed that I was facing a beautiful landscape of Baudelaire’s . . .’ Whether Jules Vallès, Léon Daudet, André Gide, Jules Romain, Jean-Paul Sartre, Michel Leiris or Jacques Roubaud, there is scarcely a Parisian novel or diary that does not feature the Luxembourg, central and symbolic site of a Left Bank that is seen as maternally welcoming students, writers, publishers and book-shops, art and experimental cinemas, avant-garde galleries and artists, not to mention the foreigners who arrived in the wake of Oscar Wilde, James Joyce, Joseph Roth and Henry Miller. The fragility of this construction, in large part mythological, has been rather sadly demonstrated in recent years.

      As a hall or a landing opens onto the successive rooms to which it gives access, so the Luxembourg opens onto all the central quarters of the Left Bank. Near the school of apiculture it touches Montparnasse; its main entrance is towards the Observatoire; on the side of the Orangerie and the monument to Delacroix it borders on Saint-Sulpice, and in this way communicates with Saint-Germain; only Rue de Vaugirard separates it from the Odéon. And it is above all else, as Léon Daudet says, ‘the respiratory centre, the vegetable lung, of the hard-working Latin Quarter’.

       The Latin Quarter

      Along with Les Halles, the Latin Quarter is the region of Old Paris that has been most transformed from the time of Baudelaire’s childhood and Rastignac’s youth. Perrot’s atlas, dating from 1834, shows the quarter as it was for Balzac, organized around the two main north-south arteries of Rue de la Harpe and Rue Saint-Jacques. The first of these starts – as it still does – from Rue Saint-Séverin, climbs alongside Cluny to reach the Place Saint-Michel (now Place Edmond-Rostand), then continues along Rue d’Enfer: this is almost the route of Boulevard Saint-Michel today. The parallels of Rue de la Harpe and Rue Saint-Jacques are linked by a number of transverse streets: Rue de la Parcheminerie, whose name comes from the illustrators and bookbinders who worked there since the twelfth century; Rue du Foin; Rue des Mathurins (now replaced by Rue du Sommerard); Rue des Grès, near the law faculty on the present course of Rue Cujas; Rue Saint-Hyacinth, which obliquely connects the Place Saint-Michel with Rue des Fossés-Saint-Jacques, crossing the route of the future Rue Soufflot. Between Rue de la Harpe and Rue Monsieur-le-Prince – another main artery of the quarter – the street layout on the 1834 map is not very different from today’s, except for Boulevard Saint-Germain. On the other side of the hill, however, east of the Place Maubert, no one could recognize where they were, at least without a few landmarks that remain: the École Polytechnique, the church of Saint-Nicolas-du-Chardonnet, Rue d’Arras, Rue de Pontoise and Rue de Poissy.

      The Luxembourg opens onto the Latin Quarter through Rue Soufflot. This is a ‘recent’ street; when Père Goriot lived in Mme Vauquer’s pension, it had been built only between the Panthéon and Rue Saint-Jacques, which caused problems for the gunners trying to dislodge the insurgents who had barricaded themselves in the monument in June 1848 – I shall return to this later. On what for a long time was known as the Place Saint-Michel – changed to Place du Luxembourg when the present Place Saint-Michel was built by the bridge on the small arm of the Seine, then to Place Edmond-Rostand in the 1950s – the start of Rue Soufflot was formerly framed by two old cafés, the Capoulade on the left and the Mahieu on the right. Léautaud’s Journal, 19 January 1933:

      There was a whole period in my youth, reading the poets, reading Verlaine and often encountering him on his evening wanderings on Boulevard Saint-Michel, once also on Rue Monsieur-le-Prince at the junction with the little Rue de Vaugirard, badly dressed, limping, an infernal noise as he struck the pavement with his cane, another evening at the cellar of Le Soleil d’Or where I ventured (the café at the corner of Boulevard Saint-Michel and the quay, was that the Soleil d’Or?), one afternoon I saw him sitting, accompanied by Eugénie Krantz, on the terrace of the café on the corner of Rue Soufflot and Boulevard Saint-Michel (Café Mayeux, I believe), the side facing the boulevard, very close to the building that separates the café from the tobacconist’s, and I got a child to take him a bunch of violets.

      Rue Soufflot climbs towards Rue Saint-Jacques, which is the real highway of the Latin Quarter – more than Boulevard Saint-Michel, conceived in order to neutralize the old streets with their riots and barricades, and which I have always experienced as a corridor of noise and ugliness. Between the river and Rue des Écoles, a number of old bookshops-cum-publishers remain to remind you that until the end of the ancien régime, Rue Saint-Jacques had a virtual monopoly of printing – from the time that the three Gering brothers, who came from Konstanz, established their presses at the sign of the Soleil d’Or in 1473 – as well as of publishing and bookselling, activities that were then combined. The establishments listed in the Catalogue chronologique des librairies et librairies-imprimeurs de Paris depuis l’an 1470, époque de l’établissement de l’Imprimerie dans cette capitale jusqu’à présent (1789)¹⁴³ are almost all grouped on Rue Saint-Jacques and its immediate neighbours – Rue des Poitevins, Rue des Anglais, Rue Galande, Rue Serpente and Place de la Sorbonne. The Estiennes, printers from father to son, starting with the great Robert Estienne whose workshop was visited by François I in person, were on Rue Saint-Jacques, and the Didots on Rue Saint-André-des-Arts. ‘There is nothing more comic than the timid and conceited beginnings of a poet who, burning with impatience to appear before the public, approaches for the first time a typographer in Rue Saint-Jacques, who in turn gives himself airs and comes to appreciate literary merit’, writes Sébastien Mercier. In the early nineteenth century, before the book world crossed the Seine to lay siege to the Palais-Royal, it spilled over onto the Quai des Grands-Augustins, where there was to be found, among others, ‘the firm of Fendant and Cavalier [which] had started in business without any capital whatsoever. A great many publishing houses were established at that time in the same way, and are likely to be established so long as papermakers and printers will give credit for the time required to play some seven or eight of the games of chance called “new publications”.’¹⁴⁴ On such matters as games of chance, credit and bankruptcy, Balzac was of course in his element.

      Between Rue des Écoles and Rue Soufflot, Rue Saint-Jacques was completely rebuilt in the 1860s, but