by Robb, Graham
Wealthy travellers who had lurched along the post-roads for countless leagues found the voyage a delightful adventure, once they had grown accustomed to the company of soldiers, travelling salesmen, wandering musicians, monks and peasants, and the army of wet-nurses who left their babies at home and went to sell their breast-milk in the capital. A poet who made the journey a few years before this story begins imagined himself ‘aboard one of those vessels laden with creatures of every species destined to populate some recently discovered territory overseas’. Passengers who found a quiet vantage point in that Noah’s Ark behind the coiled ropes and the piles of luggage observed the peculiar effect of a landscape that seemed to glide past the motionless boat like a painted backdrop. In those long hours of idleness and gentle progress, in the cheerful promiscuity of social ranks, some passengers experienced a sudden rejuvenation. Men who were eager for the sights of Paris, and curious to test the reputation of Parisian women for congeniality and charm, often found themselves sentimentally attached long before they had glimpsed the towers of Notre-Dame.
Among the passengers who boarded the service from Auxerre on the morning of 7 November 1787 was a young artillery lieutenant from a regiment recently posted to Valence. He was eighteen years old, afraid of nothing except embarrassment; a little too short for his long leather boots, but fierce enough to demand instant reparation from any man who dared to call him Puss in Boots to his face. The inspector of his military school at Brienne had described him with something approaching admiration:
Upright and thoughtful; conduct most regular; has always distinguished himself in mathematics; possesses a fair knowledge of history and geography; weak in social accomplishments; will make an excellent sailor.
As an avid reader of Jean-Jacques Rousseau, the young man was not insensitive to the charms of a river journey, but he was far too conscious of the honour of his uniform to indulge in the sort of dalliance that made the voyage seem all too short to some of his fellow passengers: when he was sent to join his regiment in Valence, he alone in the party of young officers had not taken advantage of the night in Lyon to visit a brothel. In any case, though he was impatient to discover Paris, he had more serious matters on his mind.
He had just returned home for the first time since leaving for school eight years before. His father had died after wasting several years and part of the family’s fortune by suing his own relatives. When he saw the house again, he felt no grief at the old man’s passing, but when he found his mother performing domestic chores, humiliation struck him like a slap in the face. The family had legitimate and ancient claims to nobility, but the government in France treated them as though they were ignorant peasants. They had been granted a subsidy for planting mulberry trees and introducing silk production to their backward region, but now that they had invested their money in the scheme, a nameless servant of the Crown had withdrawn the subsidy. Since the older brother was taken up with fruitless legal studies, it was left to him to negotiate with the authorities in Paris.
It had been a long journey up from the Mediterranean, on roads that were already showing the effects of an early winter. It was only now, as he resigned himself to the leisurely andante of a river journey, that he began to think of the city that lay ahead.
He had seen Paris once before, as a cadet, at the age of fifteen, with three of his classmates and a monk from the school at Brienne. There had been just enough time to buy a novel on the quais and to say a prayer at Saint-Germain-des-Prés before they were delivered to the École Royale Militaire, from where, in twelve months, he had seen precisely nothing of the city, except the parade ground on the Champ de Mars. But of course, he had heard about Paris and its splendours from his family and his fellow officers. He had read about its monuments and treasures in histories and geographical dictionaries. He had studied its defences and resources like a foreign general planning an invasion.
He remembered his readings and his comrades’ half-true tales as he watched the satellite towns of Vitry and Choisy-le-Roi come into view, and the Bercy plain beginning to widen to the north. He stood on the foredeck, looking ahead like the captain of a ship, silent and severe among the pigs and the chickens in baskets, and the children playing at his feet. He felt the boat catch the current of the sea-green Marne as it joined the Seine at Alfort and broadened the brown river into a majestic thoroughfare. Here, the first steeples of Paris could be seen in the distance, and the deep water had yet to be sullied by the effluent of drains and factories. There were long rafts of floated wood steered by wild-looking men in wolfskin cloaks, and boats bringing passengers and paving stones from Fontainebleau. Washerwomen began to appear along the banks. He saw a tree-lined road on which carriages were running, and long wooden sheds where barrels of wine from Burgundy and the centre of France were rolled up to the waiting wagons.
This time, he knew what he was seeing–a city that had grown up like a thousand villages, stifled by privilege and petty competition. There should have been a proper port to rival London instead of those rickety landing-stages. The government should build huge granaries and warehouses to feed the people in times of need. A city that barely knew how to keep its population alive had no right to compare itself to ancient Rome, still less to be sniffy about provincials.
Now, low houses ran along both banks. The water-coach entered the channel to the south of the uninhabited Île Louviers that was covered with enormous piles of firewood as though the Gaulish forests had only recently been cleared. Behind it stood the tall houses of the Île Saint-Louis, and, behind them, rising out of the river mist and the chimney-smoke like the stern of a great ship, the buttressed mass of Notre-Dame.
The lieutenant disembarked with the other passengers at the Quai de la Tournelle, and pointed out his trunk to a porter from the hotel where he intended to stay. Then, having previously studied the map and committed the route to memory, he set off across the Pont au Double and entered the medieval maze of the Île de la Cité.
After getting lost in the cul-de-sacs and the chapel closes, he found the other bank and threaded his way through the crowded streets to the east of the Louvre. He crossed the Rue Saint-Honoré–the main thoroughfare running east to west across the Right Bank–and turned up the Rue du Four-Saint-Honoré, at the point where the heavy stench of the river gave way to the vegetable smells of Les Halles.
The Rue du Four-Saint-Honoré was a street of furnished hotels, patronized mainly by men who came to do business at the central markets. The lieutenant went to the Hôtel de Cherbourg, next door to the Café du Chat-Qui-Pelote. The hotel register (which has long since disappeared) showed that he stayed in room nine on the third floor, and that he signed his name in its native, Italianate form rather than in the French form that he later affected.
When his trunk was delivered, he settled in, and, in that city of six hundred thousand souls, savoured the delight of being alone. In the house where he lodged in Valence, people ambushed him when he left his room each morning and when he returned in the evening; they stole his time and scattered his thoughts with polite conversation. Now, he was free to think and explore, to compare his own experiences with the books he had read, and to find out for himself whether or not Paris deserved its lofty reputation.
EVEN WITHOUT the handwritten account that forms the basis of this story–a brief, incomplete description of one night’s adventure–it would have been easy to guess the principal object of the lieutenant’s curiosity. In those days, there was only one place that every visitor to Paris wanted to see, and any traveller who published an account of his trip and omitted to mention it, or pretended to have shunned it as a place of debauchery, cannot be trusted as a guide to the city. The streets in its vicinity were said to be the busiest in Europe. By comparison, the other sights of Paris–the Louvre and the Tuileries, Notre-Dame and the Sainte-Chapelle, the Bastille, the Invalides, the grand squares and gardens, the Pont Neuf, and the Gobelins tapestry works–were almost deserted.
In 1781, the Duc d
e Chartres, a pleasure-seeking, fashionably liberal cousin of the King who was chronically short of cash, began to turn the grounds of his royal residence into an amazing bazaar of economic and erotic activity. Wooden galleries were erected along one of the rows of arcades that formed the stately courtyard. They looked (if such a thing had existed) like a railway station implanted in a palace. Shopkeepers, charlatans and entertainers occupied the galleries even before they were finished in 1784, and, almost overnight, the Palais-Royal became an enchanted city-within-a-city that never closed its gates. According to Louis-Sébastien Mercier, ‘a prisoner could live there without getting bored and would dream of freedom only after several years’. It was known, half-humorously, as ‘the capital of Paris’.
No one who saw the Palais-Royal in 1787 could doubt the progress of industry and the benefits of modern civilization. There were theatres and puppet shows, and nightly firework displays in the gardens. The galleries and arcades housed over two hundred shops. Without having to walk more than a few hundred feet, a man who cared nothing about cost or the honesty of shopkeepers could buy a barometer, a collapsible rubber raincoat, a painting on a pane of glass, a copy of the latest banned book, a toy to delight the most despotic child, a box of rouge for his mistress and some English flannel for his wife. He could rummage in mountains of ribbon, gauze, pompons and satin flowers. In the slow-moving crowd, he could find himself pressed up against a strangely attractive woman, her bare shoulders glaring in the lamplight, and move on, a moment later, his pockets completely empty. If he was sufficiently rich, he could lose his money in a gambling house on the first floor, pawn his gold watch and embroidered coat on the second, and console himself with one of the ladies who lived in rented rooms on the third.
There were restaurants fit for emperors, fruit stalls with exotic fruits from the suburbs of Paris and wine merchants selling rare liqueurs from non-existent colonies. Everything that made a person beautiful could be bought at fabulous prices: lotions and ointments that whitened the face, eradicated wrinkles or showed up the blue veins on a breast. A feeble old chevalier could leave the Palais-Royal a twinkling Adonis, with lustrous teeth, a glass eye of any colour, a black toupee under his powdered perruque and new calf muscles in his silk stockings. An ill-favoured girl in want of a husband could make herself desirable, at least until the wedding night, with false shoulders, hips, cleavage, eyelashes, eyebrows and eyelids.
There were fancy boutiques in which the clothes of gamblers and libertines were displayed in glass partitions, poorly lit to hide their stains, and sold to clerks and petits maîtres. There were public latrines where, for a modest fee, a customer could wipe his bottom on the day’s news. The Palais-Royal catered to every taste, and, it was said, created tastes that had never existed before. A guide that was published shortly after the lieutenant’s visit recommended Mme Laperrière, ‘above the baker’s shop’, who specialized in old men and whips, Mme Bondy, who supplied the foreign and the very young (recruited from the most reputable convents), and Mlle André’s fashion store–though ‘one should never spend a night there, because Mlle André applies the principle that “at night, all cats are grey”’.
Despite his abhorrence of a place where everyone felt free to stare at everyone else, and despite his aversion to crowds, the lieutenant seems to have made some preliminary forays into the palace gardens–perhaps in the morning, when ragged women rooted in the shrubberies and drains for dropped coins and trinkets, or at noon, when people set their watches by the cannon that was fired by the rays of the sun through a powerful lens. During one of these reconnaissance expeditions, he visited Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s favourite coffeehouse, the Café de la Régence on the square in front of the palace, where chess-players sat at marble tables in a gigantic hall of mirrors and chandeliers. In Valence, he enjoyed a certain reputation as a chess-player. At the Café de la Régence, he marched his pawns across the board, deployed his knights with an occasional flash of brilliance, apparently indifferent to his losses, and always furious to find himself in checkmate.
The Hôtel de Cherbourg stood just five streets from the Palais-Royal, along the Rue Saint-Honoré. On his way back to the hotel from the Finance Ministry, where he spent hours each day in antechambers to learn the outcome of his family’s appeal, he often passed the iron railings that ran along the galleries. Eventually, he began to explore the galleries, always later in the day, after dark–to satisfy his curiosity and to fill a gap in his knowledge (though he felt that too much was made of the matter, and that it was commonly approached in a frame of mind that made it impossible to profit from the experience). The Palais-Royal was, after all, a place where a man of philosophy and sense could make some valuable observations. As he wrote a year or so later in an essay on happiness, entered in a competition that was held by the Académie de Lyon, ‘the eyes of Reason preserve us from the precipices of Passion’. At the Palais-Royal, he was able to witness the illusory pleasures of bachelorhood and the deleterious effects of the modern contempt for family life. A man might go to the Palais-Royal to see the savages from Guadeloupe, or ‘la Belle Zulima’, who had died two centuries ago but whose exquisite body was perfectly preserved; but he might also see those civilized monsters who had turned the natural desire for health, happiness and self-preservation into a brutish quest for animal satisfaction.
On the night in question, the lieutenant had spent almost two weeks in Paris, far from his family and comrades. He was no further advanced with the subsidy for the mulberry groves, though he had acquired some useful ideas on the subject of administrative reform. He felt the need of some distraction. He walked past the Palais-Royal and the Bibliothèque du Roi towards the tree-lined boulevards and the theatre where the actors of the Comédie Italienne performed their comic operas. The ‘Italiens’ was popular with lovers of light music and humorous innuendo, but also with gentlemen in search of a companion for the night, who appreciated the convenience of finding the ladies already arranged by price, from the expensive balcons to the cheap amphithéâtres.
On the bill that night was a historical operetta called Berthe et Pépin. It was a subject to stir the imagination of an ambitious young officer. By acts of astounding bravery, the diminutive Pépin le Bref impressed the soldiers who dubbed him ‘the Short’. Such was his political skill that he had himself crowned King of the Franks by the Pope at Saint-Denis. After imprisoning his brother in a monastery, King Pépin subdued the Goths, the Saxons and the Arabs, and marched victoriously across the Alps into Italy. Pépin, rather than his son Charlemagne, was the first ruler of a European empire.
The operetta was based on an amorous interlude in Pépin’s life. Having inadvertently married a tyrannical woman pretending to be Berthe of Laon, Pépin happens upon the real Berthe in the forest of Le Mans. ‘Big-Footed Berthe’ (so called because of her club foot) has sworn never to reveal her true identity, except to save her virginity. By threatening her maidenhood, Pépin discovers her to be his true queen, and the pair return in triumph to Paris. The main dramatic interest, to an audience chiefly preoccupied with sex, was the pursuit of a club-footed maid by a short and lusting king.
By the end of the performance, the young lieutenant was in a state of agitation that can easily be imagined. The evening was far from over, and all around him people were talking excitedly about the night ahead. He had no desire for cheery company, yet the thought of dining alone at the Hôtel de Cherbourg was repellent. He left the theatre and pulled his coat about him as the winter wind blew down the boulevard. People and carriages were rushing about as though the day had just begun. Impelled by a sudden resolution, he set off down the Rue de Richelieu towards the galleries and arcades where a thousand lamp-lit dramas were acted out every night.
An hour or so later, he returned to room nine in the Hôtel de Cherbourg. This time, he was not alone. When his visitor had gone, he sat down to record his observations in a large notebook. He never completed his account, but he kept the notebook, perhaps because it recorded
an event of such importance in his young life.
Years later, when his life was in danger, he placed the notebook in a cardboard box covered with grey paper, and had it sent to his uncle for safe-keeping. It is fortunate that the manuscript has survived. So many people visited the Palais-Royal, yet so few left any honest account of their dealings there, that the value of the manuscript as a historical document far outweighs its biographical significance.
Thursday, 22 November 1787. Paris, Hôtel de Cherbourg.
I had left the Italiens and was striding along the avenues of the Palais-Royal. Stirred by the vigorous sentiments that characterize my soul, I was indifferent to the cold. But as my imagination cooled, I felt the chill of the season, and took shelter in the galleries.
I was standing on the threshold of those iron gates when my eyes fell on a person of the female sex. From the time of day, the cut of her clothes and her extreme youth, I deduced without hesitation that she was a whore.
I looked at her, and she stopped, not with that martial air of the others, but with an air that was perfectly in keeping with her physical appearance. I was struck by this concordance of manner and demeanour. Her timidity emboldened me, and I spoke to her–I who feel more keenly than any other man the odiousness of her profession and who have always considered myself soiled by a single glance from one of those creatures…Yet her pale complexion, her frail physique, and her gentle voice caused me to act without delay. Either, I told myself, this person will be of use to me in the observations I wish to make, or else she is simply a dolt.