There is no mistaking the origin of another street of much the same date: the Rue des Anglais signifies that a collège of English students was established here, but there were plenty of students from other countries also. At the time that these lanes were beginning to fill the fields on the bank opposite Notre Dame, Dante Alighieri studied here. The street to which his name is now attached is a relatively modern one: he actually attended the institute of higher learning by then established in the Rue du Fouarre, and lodged in the Rue de Bièvre. This followed the course of the then-open river, the Bièvre, on its way down into the Seine. (The street follows it to this day, but the once-bright river is, like London’s Fleet, in a dark pipe many feet below the paving.) Another century and a half and another poet frequented these streets: bastard son of a high-ranking priest, student-in-name, member of a secret criminal fraternity:
Cy gist et dort en ce sollier,
Qu’amours occist de son raillon,
Un povre petit escollier
Qui fut nommé Françoys Villon …
(Here lies in this attic one cast low by
love’s jest – a poor and little-regarded
scholar called François Villon.)
This knot of streets became known as the Maubert Quarter, from the name given to the triangular open space into which several of the streets ran, and from which, in the other direction, up the steep slope, ran the Montagne Sainte Geneviève and the Rue des Carmes. (Since the late nineteenth century the shape of the space has been largely extinguished by the Boulevard St Germain cutting across it.) The name Place Maubert has been generally said to be a corruption of ‘Maître Albert’, and so another echo of the Dominican preacher, but this strikes me as unlikely. The word Maubert, or Mauberge, crops up in various places in northern France: it comes from a Germanic word Malberg, meaning a place of formal assembly, law-giving and judgement. This would seem to fit, since, in its early days, the district round Place Maubert was favoured by wealthy citizens, particularly lawyers. Later, there was an execution block here, a pillory, and at one time a wheel on which miscreants were broken. In the mid-sixteenth century Protestants were burnt here, including the humanist and printer Etienne Dolet, who was accused of disseminating heretical ideas by the new, powerful medium of the printing press. A place of judgement, indeed. By that time Place Maubert had become associated with popular assemblies and with general trouble, a reputation that then clung to it for centuries and has only faded in recent years.
Even when the neighbouring streets still harboured respectable establishments of learning, and when the fine medical amphitheatre was built, and when Voltaire worked nearby as a clerk, a faint aura of the disreputable or sinister hung about the Place Maub’. At the time when Arthur Jacob was in Paris, the negro servant of Madame du Barry, the mistress of Louis XV, who had lost her head to the guillotine twenty-one years before, was living at 13, Rue Perdue. He was trying to keep a low profile in this appropriately named street, not easy for someone conspicuously black in the Paris of that era. His neighbours all knew who he was and cold-shouldered him. When he died, not one went to his funeral. Having been a spoilt favourite under the Ancien Régime, he had transformed himself into a municipal officer under the Terror and had (said the neighbours) betrayed to the authorities his lady employer, who had been so kind to him.
On the other side of the Place, where the equally narrow and ancient streets ran up towards the not yet rebuilt Sorbonne and to the Panthéon, a greater gentility was apparent. Bordering on the Place was a lateral lane, Rue des Noyers – Street of the Nut Trees – named after a line of trees that had once run there along the bottom of the Clos Bruneau vineyard. Here, in 1814, in an apartment in a substantial stone house of the previous century, with an inner courtyard, lived the de Musset family, with their four-year-old son Alfred. The father of the future romantic writer was listed in the register of births at the local Mairie as a propriétaire, someone whose income came chiefly from other properties he owned and rented out; one of the family friends who signed the register as a witness was a legal consultant. The premises on the ground floor were occupied by someone in the less exalted profession of wig-maker, but the lane was secluded and respectable in an almost rural way. The small church of St Yves, in ruins since the Revolution, stood at one end of it, a nesting place for pigeons and crows. Behind it, the great trees in the gardens of other one-time religious buildings – the Carmelite monastery, the Collège de Lisieux, St Jean de Latran – ran in a vista of greenery all the way to the Hôtel de Cluny.3
Further up the hill, and to the east of the Rue de la Montagne Sainte Geneviève, immediately outside the line of the old city wall, there existed in 1814 a still-thriving religious enclave with an entirely rural and provincial air, swathed in gardens.4 This conventual property was not seized at the Revolution, since it could not be considered a bien national. Its owners, les Dames Anglaises, were English Catholic Sisters who had owned the site since they had fled from Oliver Cromwell. A similarly protected Irish seminary and a Scottish college were near to hand, although canvas was nailed over the gate-grilles of the English convent so that the Sisters and their charges could not see these male neighbours. Three years after Arthur Jacob’s stay on the Left Bank, a young French girl called Aurore Dupin was sent to board here by her grandmother, herself an ex-pupil. Aurore grew up to become the lover of Alfred de Musset, among many others, and to take on a literary identity as George Sand. She described the convent as having been like a prison, but one with a big garden full of chestnut trees and huge old cellars to explore. The Mother Superior was a well-upholstered, worldly, loquacious lady known as Madame Canning. All the Sisters had English, Irish or Scottish accents, as did two-thirds of the boarders: ‘Once inside the gates it was as if one had crossed the Channel.’ English jokes and reprimands abounded (‘Oh fie, Miss!’) and Mary Queen of Scots was venerated as an unofficial saint.
No diary or letters survive from Arthur’s stay in Paris. Any domicile I give him can only be an informed guess. But I think I see him most clearly on the rising ground just above the Maubert huddle of streets, near the Rue de la Parcheminerie, St Séverin and the Hôtel de Cluny but a little more secluded among the neglected greenery east of the Rue St Jacques. Perhaps in the Rue des Carmes, which ran, and runs today, up the steep hill towards the Panthéon? Although it has been tidied and widened since those days, there are still a few old houses in it which, under accreted crusts of cement and plaster, hide seventeenth-, sixteenth- or even fifteenth-century stones, great beams, and the glassed-in remains of paved courtyards, the whole structure supported on cellars of a still older date. Here Arthur could have rented a moderately priced but airy room with a view. Leaning out of the window one way, he would see the neo-classical church of Sainte Geneviève (as the Panthéon was now, briefly, once again) and the other way the perpendicular-Gothic towers of Notre Dame.
The street was originally a path running through the Clos Bruneau vineyard. The first few Carmelites who were to give it its name arrived in Paris in the thirteenth century, drawn there, like many other groups, by the sainted King Louis IX. They settled first in the Marais, on the Right Bank, and then migrated in the following century to the developing Quartier Latin. They acquired much of the Clos Bruneau, and also the site of what had been a Jewish settlement before the first expulsion of the Jews at the end of the twelfth century, and which still appeared on plans as ‘vicus Jude’. They built themselves living quarters, a cloister, a chapel and then, as their numbers increased, a grander one, swallowing up a collège or two in the process. On the finely carved façade of their wall on what was now the Rue des Carmes they erected a pulpit, from which both Albert the Great and St Thomas Aquinas preached at different times. They flourished, and ornamented their cloister with paintings. It was regarded as the most beautiful one in all Paris, and became a favourite burial place for important citizens of the Quarter, including a prominent sixteenth-century printer and chronicler of the Paris streets.
&nbs
p; Such a well-established and wealthy institution stood no chance when the Revolution came. In 1790 (the year of Arthur Jacob’s birth) the place was shut down.
In the years that followed, the building was used as an armaments manufactory, which seems to have been a common fate for ex-religious structures. Then, under the Empire, it became a military school. But Napoleon had another scheme in mind for the site: in 1811 demolition began, and by 1813 the cloister on the Rue des Noyers was being rebuilt as one of the new covered markets – the Marché des Carmes. The square shape of the cloister was still clearly apparent in this new guise, and remained discernible for the next century and a half.
So here, perhaps, a little uphill of the market, near ground that had once belonged to the Lombards and then to the Irish, and where a Rue Judas still recalled yet older times, Arthur Jacob had a high room to himself. It would not have seemed very strange to him to be here in a hidden corner near the flower pots and bird cages of his Parisian neighbours, for the high houses of old Edinburgh where he had been living for the past year were of the same kind. It would have had one of those red-tiled floors that were and are quintessentially French, and that the fussier English visitors considered ‘naked’ and ‘poor’ – ‘Why no carpet?’ It would have been furnished with a canopied bed, a cupboard, a washstand with basin and slop-pail, a table, a bookshelf, a chair or two. It probably had no fireplace, but small charcoal stoves, with a chimney stuck into an adjacent flue or simply through the roof tiles, were in standard use. Paris, unlike London, still burnt only wood at that time, huge boatloads of which arrived in the Quarter at the boat-steps by the Rue de la Bûcherie. This attachment to wood, and the virtual lack of industry by British standards, made the air of Paris far cleaner than that of coal-burning London, in spite of the time-honoured Parisian smell of open street-gulleys and drains.
There was no water on tap anywhere in the house, nor yet in the courtyard. Nearly all the drinking and washing water used in Paris, in dwellings of all classes, then and for another half-century, was still carried into houses and up many flights of stairs in wooden buckets, as it had been in the Middle Ages. The water might come from the Seine, or from the new Canal d’Ourcq, or from one of the seventy-odd public fountains within Paris. An elegant example of one of these5 stood in the middle of the new Marché des Carmes, probably on the site of a well used by the convent. But the water still had to be carried about on yokes, a bucket of twenty litres on each side at a time, by a small army of strong men. These were traditionally Auvergnats, come to Paris from the mountainous heart of France. There were well over a thousand of them at work all day long in the city at the Restoration of 1814, and the usual price of a full bucket to a customer was ten centimes – fifteen for two buckets bought at the same time. Ten centimes was worth roughly one old penny, a small sum of money even by the standards of the poor. A water-carrier did not earn his family’s income easily, but at least it was a steady job once he had built up a clientele.
Water closets, called cabinets à l’anglaise since they were by then beginning to proliferate on the other side of the Channel, were still virtually unknown in France. There had been one each for Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette at Versailles before the Revolution, but courtiers there had continued to relieve themselves in palace corridors. Parisians behaved similarly on the streets, ‘just as if they had been in the open countryside’ complained the English, and sometimes apparently used the communal staircases of their own living quarters. Within their homes, the better-off used chamber pots and close stools. Even when a lodging house was well kept, it only had one latrine, usually on the top floor with a shaft descending the whole height of the house to a cess-pit at cellar level, which was pumped out at long intervals. The latrine (lieu d’aisance) cannot have been a pleasant place to visit; indeed ordinary workmen, arriving in Paris from France’s deeply backward rural regions, found the very idea of an indoor convenience disgusting, and said so. However, our ancestors, even those inclined to clean linen and new concepts of medical hygiene, necessarily took a more relaxed view of such things than we do today. The tall houses of Edinburgh had the same system as the Parisian ones. There would have been few flush toilets in the Dublin Arthur Jacob knew as a young man, and certainly none in rural Ireland.
The Parisians were not particularly dirty in themselves, though the British liked to imagine them so. Although some French medical men were of the opinion that frequent bathing caused infertility, there were many public bath houses and also floating baths on the edge of the Seine, like shallow swimming pools. These were carefully designated according to sex and price – Bain pour Dames, Bain pour Femmes, Bain pour Hommes, etc. Legions of washer-women also scrubbed clothes on the edge of the river, sometimes on the flat stones of the quays, sometimes in specially constructed bateaux lavoir.
These activities would have been impossible, by that date, on the Thames in the centre of London, where the quays were lined with industries and wharfs and there were boats everywhere going to and from the great port below London Bridge. But Paris was not a port city. Her river, too far from the sea to accommodate large ships, is not tidal. The only activity to disturb the calm waters round the Ile de la Cité came from slow barges unloading the heavier and less perishable merchandise that Paris needed for itself: wood, charcoal, wheat, wine, building stone …
‘The peculiar cleanness of the air of Paris – (at least, peculiar as it seems to an Englishman) – gives a glancing brilliancy, an almost startling distinctness to every object. Distances are lessened by the pellucidness of the medium … through which they are seen … The general effect here, on a fine day, is that of a Venetian painting … Angular peninsulas of lofty buildings jut out from the opposite side of the Pont Neuf: a gigantic facing of stone houses, stained, irregular, and uncertain in their indications, looks from its height on the green crystal of the river, and is depicted far downwards in its depth.’
This unusual view of the Latin Quarter, seen at an angle from across the river, is from the pen of John Scott, editor of The London Magazine and friend of Hazlitt, who came to Paris at the same time as Arthur and with the same eagerness. Half a dozen years later Scott’s strong emotions were to carry him into a duel with a rival editor, in which he was killed. Large numbers of his fellow country men had by then met a similar violent end on the field of Waterloo, which he also visited, and described in passionate detail.
But in the autumn of 1814 the Battle of Waterloo was unimaginable. Napoleon was apparently consigned to Elba. English people came in increasing numbers, rattling to Paris in the swaying French diligences or in hired post-chaises, sending enthusiastic or critical bulletins home. They found a city enjoying, with a rather febrile gaiety after all that had gone before, the novel idea of being ruled by a king once again.
Chapter VI
RICHELIEU’S HEAD, AND OTHER REVOLUTIONARY MEMENTOES
Few people familiar with Paris today, if asked to delineate the Latin Quarter, would place its core as far east as the Place Maubert. But while it was the construction of the Boulevard St Michel in the 1860s, bisecting the district north to south five hundred metres west of Maubert, that created a new central axis for the Quarter, some degree of westward shift had taken place before that. At the end of the eighteenth century the building of the Ecoles de Médecine, so near the wall-line of old Paris, and a new theatre just beyond it (later to be known as the Odéon) introduced a sense of expansion into a Latin Quarter that for six centuries had been a fixed territory, self-contained within the corset of streets that followed the one-time fortifications.
On this western side, the phantom wall was the raised Rue des Fossés St Germain (today’s Rue Monsieur le Prince), which met the Rue de l’Ecole de Médecine at the point where the present Boulevard St Germain cuts across, and then continued to the river along the line of the short Rue de l’Ancienne Comédie and then the Rue Mazarine. The narrow lane with an arcaded entry off the boulevard, called the Cour de Commerce St André, runs closely parall
el to the Rue de l’Ancienne Comédie as far as the Rue St André des Arts: it is on the line of the ditch that once ran below the wall. Till the boulevard cut through it, the Cour was longer, extending all the way from the Rue des Ecoles. In the seventeenth century it was laid out as a bowling alley: it acquired a Turkish baths (sure sign, as in London’s Covent Garden, of a place of slightly disreputable enjoyment) and it was in this bath house that an enterprising Sicilian opened Paris’s first coffee shop, the Café Procope. With one entry from the bowling ground and another convenient for the actors at the Ancienne Comédie, who were the King’s players, Procope’s was frequented throughout the eighteenth century by such men as Voltaire, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Diderot, Beaumarchais, and (with a darker nuance) Robespierre, Danton and Marat. By the end of the century the alley was lined with houses on both sides and had become an arcade of small workshops, the forerunner of a number of glassed-in passages that were to be constructed in Paris over the next generation. Shopping became an elegant Paris pastime, and shoppers were happy to avoid the medieval dirt of the open streets, both the stinking black mud underfoot and the danger of having filthy water poured down your back from an overhead window.
Beyond the exit from the Cour onto the Rue St André des Arts the immediate district was already an animated one, spilling beyond the old city gate at the west end of the street into the lively market on the Buci crossroads. This is still a market today. From there, St Germain des Prés, a name whose celebrity today eclipses that of older Latin Quarter landmarks, is a very short walk away.
Footprints in Paris Page 6