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 of the squalid bazaar will not be out of place; for there are few men of forty who will not take an interest in recollections of a state of things which will seem incredible to a younger generation. The great dreary, spacious Galerie d’Orléans, that flowerless hothouse, as yet was not; the space upon which it now stands was covered with booths; or, to be more precise, with small, wooden dens, pervious to the weather, and dimly illuminated on the side of the court and the garden by borrowed lights – styled windows by courtesy but more like the filthiest arrangements for obscuring daylight to be found in little wineshops in the suburbs. The Galleries, parallel passages about twelve feet in height, were formed by a triple row of shops. The centre row, giving back and front upon the Galleries, was filled with the fetid atmosphere of the place, and derived a dubious daylight through the invariably dirty windows of the roof . . . The treacherous mud-heaps . . . were in keeping with the seething traffic of various kinds carried on within it; for here in this shameless, unblushing haunt, amid wild mirth and a babel of talk, an immense amount of business was transacted between the Revolution of 1789 and the Revolution of 1830. For twenty years the Bourse stood just opposite, on the ground floor of the Palais . . . People made appointments to meet in the Galleries before or after ’Change; on showery days the Palais-Royal was often crowded with weather-bound capitalists and men of business . . . Here dwelt poetry, politics, and prose, new books and classics, the glories of ancient and modern literature side by side with political intrigue and the tricks of the bookseller’s trade.16
In this blessed age, when the trades of bookseller and publisher were still combined (sometimes indeed with that of printer as well), the Galeries de Bois saw the beginnings of certain publishing houses that were marked out for a fine future: Stock, Garnier, Le Dentu – supposedly the model for Dauriat in Lost Illusions, to whom Lucien de Rubempré tries to sell his sonnets on ‘Easter Daisies’ (‘For me the question is not whether you are a great poet, I know that you have a great deal, a very great deal of merit; if I were only just starting in business, I should make the mistake of publishing your book. But in the first place, my sleeping partners and those at the back of me are cutting off my supplies’).
The colonnades were not a place for reading but rather for gambling, at creps, passe-dix, trente-et-un and biribi. Stall number 9 (which occupied spaces 9 to 12 of the colonnade) offered two tables of trente-et-quarante, a table for creps, and the gamblers could drink punch flambé. At the beginning of Balzac’s The Magic Skin, the unfortunate Raphael climbs the staircase of number 36 (‘As you enter a gaming-house the law despoils you of your hat at the outset. Is it by way of a parable, a divine revelation?’). But the most famous establishment was undoubtedly number 113: eight saloons, with six roulette tables. Marshal Blücher, the victor of Waterloo, hardly left this gambling den. He ran through six million livres during his stay in Paris, and left the city with his estates all mortgaged. Mortgage agents actually stationed themselves close at hand, and in the evening, readily available girls mingled with the gamblers. Those who strolled beneath the Wooden Galleries and in the little avenues of the gardens were known as ‘semi-beavers’, those in the Galleries themselves as ‘beavers’, and those on the Caveau terrace as ‘complete beavers’.
You could also eat and drink in the galleries of the Palais-Royal. The Café de Foy was the only one that served in a garden pavilion. On the first floor, its chess club, whose members included Talleyrand and David, competed with that in the Café de la Régence, the setting of Rameau’s Nephew.