Of the three great restaurants featured in La Comédie humaine, two were in the Palais-Royal, the third being Le Rocher de Cancale, on Rue Montorgeuil. ‘Is it a dinner for foreigners or provincials whom you want to give an exalted idea of the capital? Then you must take them to Véry’s . . . This is the most expensive caterer, which allows us to conclude that he must be number one in the hierarchy of worth of his profession, one of the most enlightened artists among those who see to the preservation of good taste, and opposed to the invasions of middle-class cuisine.’19 When Lucien de Rubempré arrived from Angoulême, unhappy and humiliated, he made his way towards the Palais-Royal:
He did not know the topography of his quarter yet, and was obliged to ask his way. Then he went to Véry’s and ordered dinner by way of an initiation into the pleasures of Paris, and a solace for his discouragement. A bottle of Bordeaux, oysters from Ostend, a dish of fish, a partridge, a dish of macaroni and dessert – this was the ne plus ultra of his desire. He enjoyed this little debauch, studying the while how to give the Marquise d’Espard proof of his wit, and redeem the shabbiness of his grotesque accoutrements by the display of intellectual riches. The total of the bill drew him down from these dreams, and left him the poorer by fifty of the francs which were to have gone such a long way in Paris. He could have lived in Angoulême for a month on the price of that dinner.20
Véry’s was eventually taken over by its neighbour Véfour, the former Café de Chartres where Alexander von Humboldt, on return from Central America, very often dined under the Empire. In 1815, Rostopchin, the man who had given the order to burn Moscow, frequently caroused there with his French teacher Flore, a lovely actress from the Thêatre des Variétés: ‘There was not a foreigner, an elegant lady, or even a bourgeois from the Place Royale who did not know these three young people from the Durance, who had arrived in Paris with nothing to support themselves except the secret of brandades de morue [cod pounded with garlic, oil and cream], which eventually led to their receiving tribute from the whole of civilized Europe, from the mouth of the Tagus to the shores of the Neva.’21
The heyday of the Palais-Royal ended on a precise date: at midnight on 31 December 1836, when games of chance were banned in Paris. The decline was rapid. The dandies, gawpers, bon viveurs and call girls migrated a few hundred metres, and the Boulevards became the new promenade enchantée.
In those days, when quarters went out of style, they fell into a kind of lethargy that could last a very long while. They had not suffered in their heyday the accelerated commercial metabolism that since the 1960s has ravaged quarters such as Saint-Séverin, Mouffetard, the Bastille and the Marais, and is now at work on the Butte-aux-Cailles, or the Saint-Blaise quarter around the Place Charonne, Rue Montorgeuil and Rue Oberkampf. The Palais-Royal, for its part, has remained as it was when the crowds left and moved further north. Its essential charms, however, did not withstand Victor Louis’s bays, the monotony of which is reinforced by the impeccable alignment of the four avenues of lime trees. What still does have its surprises is the way in which the Palais-Royal, an enclosed space, communicates with the surrounding streets. Certain passages have a monumental beauty, with statues, candelabras and gilded railings – such as that which leads via the Place de Valois towards the entrance of the Galerie Véro-Dodat; or the two covered colonnades by which you leave the bottom of the gardens for Rue de Beaujolais, the one on the left passing Véfour’s restaurant, the one on the right towards the Passage des Deux-Pavillons, Passage Colbert and the Bibliothèque Nationale. Others, on the contrary, slip along in an almost clandestine fashion, like the Passage du Perron with its outlet opening on Rue Vivienne between antique dolls and musical boxes, or the three graceful stairways that lead from Rue de Montpensier towards Rue de Richelieu.
Carrousel
For Diderot or Camille Desmoulins, it was quite easy to pass from the Palais-Royal to the Tuileries. Thirty years later, however, Géricault, Henri de Marsay or Stendhal would have had to cross the new main road through the quarter, Rue de Rivoli, though not yet confront the Avenue de l’Opéra or bypass the enormous mass of Napoleon III’s extensions to the Louvre. The Palais-Royal was not hemmed in as it is today, but connected with the Tuileries-Saint-Honoré quarter. A direct connection, or almost direct, as it was still necessary to cross obliquely a quarter that – unlike any other in the centre of Paris – has disappeared without leaving the slightest trace, even in memory: the Carrousel. The verse from Baudelaire’s ‘The Swan’: ‘Once a menagerie was set up there;/There, one morning, at the hour when Labour awakens,/Beneath the clear, cold sky when the dismal hubbub/Of street cleaners and scavengers breaks the silence,/I saw a swan that had escaped from his cage . . .’ is not a purely poetic vision like his ‘Albatross’. Alfred Delvau, rambler and chronicler of street life under the Second Empire, recalled:
It used to be charming, the Place du Carrousel – today populated with great men in stone from Saint-Leu. Charming like disorder, and picturesque like ruins! It was a forest, with its inextricable tangle of wooden stalls and mud-walled shacks, occupied by a crowd of petty trades. I often strolled among this caravanserai of bric-a-brac, amid this labyrinth of planks and zigzags of tiny shops, and I knew its denizens almost intimately – men and animals, rabbits and parrots, pictures and cheap ornaments.22
The Joanne guidebook of 1870 also uses Baudelaire’s magic word baraque (‘I see only in memory that camp of stalls’), and laments the disappearance of ‘this plethora of little stalls, like a perpetual fair of curiosities, old iron and live birds, that used to stretch from the Musée to Rue de Chartres’.
The extraordinary quarter of the Carrousel lay between the Horloge pavilion of the Louvre and the avenues of the Tuileries. It was bordered on the south, along the Seine, by the Grande Galerie that had linked the two palaces from the time of Henri IV. The inner side of this gallery was adjacent to a street with the name Rue des Orties [Nettles]. To the north, the boundary of the Carrousel was Rue Saint-Honoré. Three streets perpendicular to the river connected Rue des Orties with Rue Saint-Honoré: Saint-Nicaise, Saint-Thomas-du-Louvre and Fromenteau.
The Rue Saint-Nicaise, continuing the line of Rue de Richelieu, would today coincide with the Louvre’s ticket offices. On the side of Rue Saint-Honoré it bordered onto a large hospital, the Quinze-Vingts, founded by Louis IX to care – so legend goes – for three hundred knights who had returned blind from the Crusades, the Saracens having put out their eyes. (Curiously, most historians of old Paris relate this story as if it were an established fact, just as they do that of the Jew Jonathan who, around the same time, supposedly boiled a host from the church of the Billettes, which emitted blood – for which crime he was burned alive, as can be seen on Paolo Uccello’s predella in Urbino.23) The hospital precinct sheltered a whole population of craftsmen, exempt from taxation as they also were at the Temple. In 1780, the Quinze-Vingts was transferred to the former barracks of the Black Musketeers in Rue de Charenton, where it remains today.
The Rue Saint-Thomas-du-Louvre would today pass through Ieoh