Parisians: An Adventure History of Paris

by Robb, Graham

  In ideal circumstances, a rational person might have paused to consider the situation, and realized that, if the chosen route were correct, the Tuileries Palace must lie on an island…But circumstances were not conducive to calm reflection, and since the street in question lay on approximately the same line as the palace and the Rue de l’Échelle–though in the opposite direction–the route was sufficiently plausible to allow wishful thinking to lead the way.

  The street they had entered was the Rue du Bac, named after the ferry that had been used to carry the stones that built the Tuileries. But street signs were still a rarity: it was not until 1805 that the Prefect of Paris made sense of the muddle by inscribing the names of streets on yellow porcelain plaques–red letters for those that ran parallel to the Seine, and black for those that ran away from it.

  They passed one street and then another, expecting at any moment to see M. de Fersen’s cab standing on a corner. The road bent slightly to the right, and ran between the high walls of grand hôtels, and then between a convent and a chapel. They might have been in the aristocratic faubourg of a provincial town. Calculating their position from the probable delays and the known itinerary, and assuming a speed of four miles an hour, they must have advanced along the Rue du Bac until all hope of finding the Rue de l’Échelle was lost, to the point where the sounds of wailing and an occasional scream might lead a stranger to imagine that he had stumbled on a secret purgatory on the edge of the city: the Rue du Bac ended in an area once reserved for lepers, between the Hospice des Incurables and the Petites Maisons, where lunatics were locked away.

  Only now did they turn back towards the river. But instead of retracing their steps, they chose a different route, as though, in addition to being lost, they had still not realized that their principal mistake lay in crossing the river.

  AT THIS POINT, attention inevitably turns to M. de Malden. There is no question of his deliberately misleading the Queen. He was simply a man who was used to following orders, who found himself in an unknown street at night with a woman who lashed out at passing carriages, and who had a surprising ability to get lost a few yards from her own home; a woman, moreover, who, in view of her rank, might not take kindly to contradiction.

  The Queen may well have reproached her escort with incompetence. She may even have suggested ways in which he might have prepared himself better for a journey of less than five hundred yards. Not only her own life but also those of her children and her husband were at stake, not to mention the future of civilized Europe.

  M. de Malden’s failure to equip himself with a map, or to study one in advance, is perhaps not quite as reprehensible as it seemed to General de Bouillé when he wrote his memoirs and exclaimed at the ‘inconceivable ignorance’ of the Queen’s escort. (He was too polite to criticize the Queen herself.) But to explain exactly how M. de Malden was able to lose his way so completely would require a long detour in a story which is itself a long digression. Suffice it to say (since a brief digression is after all unavoidable) that M. de Malden was a man of his time: he might follow the dictates of Reason, but he could look for enlightenment only where Reason had cast its light.

  In 1791, Paris was effectively uncharted. There were one or two beautifully engraved maps of the city that showed the streets in the proper proportions. These maps were known to army officers, librarians, kings and rich collectors, few of whom had any practical use for them. Strangers were commonly advised to climb a monument if they wished to form an impression of the city as a whole. Crude plans sold by stationers showed the approximate location of the principal sights and avenues, but little else. A map was supposed to be a compliment to the city, not a brutal exposure of its medieval meanderings and cul-de-sacs. Cointeraux’s map of ‘Paris As It Is Today’ (1798) painstakingly omitted all the minor streets, ‘for otherwise the map would have presented nothing but a veritable chaos’.

  The inhabitants of Paris had managed quite well since the days when the city was confined to an island. Most people never left their quartier, and for those who went further afield, there were cabs. ‘Parisians’, said Louis-Sébastien Mercier, ‘take cabs for even the shortest journey’. This may have been good sense as much as laziness: ‘Not even the inhabitants of the capital may flatter themselves on knowing its streets’, the Larousse encyclopedia observed in 1874. The topographical knowledge of cab drivers themselves is something of a mystery. In all the centuries of regulations pertaining to hired carriages, there is not a single mention of the need to be familiar with the streets. There are hundreds of rules concerning speed and sobriety, suspension and interior padding, the proper feeding of horses, the undesirability of blocking pavements, driving through processions, insulting pedestrians, mistreating female passengers and removing one’s clothes in warm weather, but nothing that required a driver to know the shortest way to get from one place to another. But since cabs eventually displayed lanterns of different colours to show which part of Paris they would serve, it might be assumed that the drivers’ knowledge had always been limited in any case, and that the exact route was often left to the whim of the cab horse.

  Half a century after Marie-Antoinette was lost on the Left Bank, the benefits of a city map were still far from obvious, even to the people who printed them. In 1853, a guide for typesetters ‘who do not know the capital’, but who wished to find work there, listed sixty printing-works in an extraordinarily long piece of prose that was intended to serve as an itinerary. The unemployed typesetter was to have himself delivered to a print-shop on the Rue de Rivoli (‘formerly no. 14 of the Rue des Fossés-Saint-Germain, the staircase on the right after the first courtyard’), and then,

  On leaving this establishment, turn left along the Rue de Rivoli as far as the Rue Saint-Denis, where you should turn right and go down to the very end of this street, cross the Place du Châtelet and the Pontau-Change, and into the Rue de la Barillerie, which is facing you, to the first street on the right, which is the Rue de la Sainte-Chapelle, where, at no. 5, is M. Boucquin.

  The complete tour, ‘supposing that one spend two minutes in each workshop, will occupy seven and a half hours’–after which the unfortunate typesetter could make a start on the list of ‘all print-shops within a 100-kilometre radius of Paris’.

  It so happens that, on that Monday night, perhaps not far from the Rue du Bac, the man best able to direct the Queen was working on one of the great masterpieces of modern cartography. Somewhere in that vast, confusing city, Edme Verniquet was squinting through a spyglass, measuring the angle of a street corner while a servant held up a torch. (He and his team of sixty geometers always took their measurements at night, when they could work without being jostled by the crowd, pestered by dogs, or crushed by carriages.) His dream was to create the first completely reliable map of Paris on a scale that would show every buckling wall and crooked niche: he had started work on it, at his own expense, fifteen years before, and it was still several years from completion. The King had given his blessing to the project, but the new government proved less enthusiastic. When it was asked to fund the expedition, a député demanded that the matter be sent to committee for discussion, ‘in order to determine whether or not this map is really of any use’.

  IF THE QUEEN and her escort had shared Edme Verniquet’s bird’s-eye view of Paris, they would have seen that the street whose course they had followed formed the outer edge of a spider’s web of lanes centred on the Croix Rouge crossroads. Some of those lanes were reassuringly straight, but they bisected other streets at odd angles, creating squares that were parallelograms, and trapezoids that seemed to rearrange themselves from one day to the next. Time in those asymmetrical streets passed at some indeterminable speed. It might have been five minutes or half an hour since they crossed the bridge to the Left Bank.

  By chance or by smell, they found their way back, via the Rue des Saints-Pères or some other adjacent artery, to the river, and reemerged on the quai, but further upstream from the Pont Royal. The walls of the Louv
re faced them from the opposite bank. The quais were still deserted, but a sentinel had resumed his post on the far side of the bridge. To the left, the Queen could see, as though in memory, her wing of the Tuileries Palace, and perhaps for the first time surmised its place in the larger scheme of the city. A short distance beyond it, her husband and children were sitting in the cab, counting the minutes, wondering when the King’s absence would be discovered, and whether or not the Queen had been arrested as a traitor.

  Perhaps it was the calm that comes with desperation, or perhaps just the impatience of someone who, having wrapped up for a long journey, is forced to take vigorous exercise: as though the whole adventure had been a masquerade, and there was no further need for dissimulation, the Queen and her escort now walked up to the sentinel on the bridge, and asked for directions to the Hôtel du Gaillardbois on the Rue de l’Échelle.

  Assuming that he knew the way, the sentinel could hardly have directed two citizens on foot to take a short-cut through the palace, and they could hardly be seen to ignore his directions–which would explain why the Queen’s involuntary exploration of Paris led her into the labyrinth of slums that had survived for centuries on the very doorstep of the royal palace.

  The Quartier du Doyenné was a relic of the medieval city. Coiled within that small space were almost three miles of malodorous alleyways, some of which were barely distinguishable from drains. There were slums that might once have been abbeys, and curious dips and mounds that were the uninscribed memorials of the vaults and streets of earlier ages. Some of the cul-de-sacs led to patches of wasteground cluttered with stones intended for the Louvre. At night, it looked as though the Louvre itself were being demolished, while the ancient hovels in its midst were preserved in a state of permanent decay.

  As they picked their way through the unlit lanes, a church bell struck a quarter or a half of the hour. In a small town, they might now have taken their bearings, but in Paris, a peculiar situation had arisen. The oldest churches, like Notre-Dame, pointed east-south-east along the river, following Christian tradition, with the rising sun illuminating the window behind the altar. But such was the demand for space that other churches had had to fit themselves in as best they could. Saint-Sulpice, founded in 1646, was probably the last church in Paris to be ‘oriented’ now, they pointed in all directions. Of the four churches within two hundred yards of the Queen and her escort, only one pointed east. Seen from the air, the great fleet of churches would appear to have moored itself in a busy harbour full of smaller vessels each going about its own business. By the end of the eighteenth century, it was only a man with the science of Edme Verniquet who could look to the churches of Paris for guidance, by climbing their steeples and using them as triangulation points.

  Since the several accounts of the escape disagree in the details, it is impossible to say exactly how much of that labyrinth they explored, or how much time had elapsed when they came upon the Rue Saint-Honoré and walked along its lighted pavements for a hundred yards to find the other members of the royal family beside themselves with anguish. The King–according to the governess’s account–displayed the affection that had often struggled to express itself in the years of pomp and protocol. He threw his arms around his Queen, kissed her quite passionately, and exclaimed, several times, ‘How happy I am to see you!’

  M. de Fersen, knowing the tricks that streets can play, instead of trying to reach the north-eastern perimeter by passing through Paris at its widest point, drove east along the Rue Saint-Honoré and the meandering Faubourg Saint-Antoine, all the way to the Bastille, where he turned left and followed the boulevards until, at long last, after a journey of more than three miles, he took what might be called the exit at the Barrière Saint-Martin. He could, of course, have turned left much earlier at the church of Saint-Merri, and pursued the conveniently straight hypotenuse provided by the Rue Saint-Martin. But it is easy to give directions after the event. The expedition, all told, went off much better than it might have done. As the custom-built carriage raced through the Forest of Bondy and set out across the plains of Brie and Champagne, passing the point at which the news from Paris could have overtaken them, the King declared himself extremely satisfied. He imagined the effect that his address to ‘Frenchmen, and above all Parisians’ would have on the National Assembly, and he announced to the other occupants of the coach with undisguised delight,

  So, here I am out of that city of Paris, where I’ve had to swallow so much bile. I can tell you all that, once I’ve got my arse back in the saddle, you’ll see a very different man from the one you’ve seen until now!

  His optimism at this point in the journey was fully justified. In fact, had it not been for the long delays in Paris, they would have reached Pont-de-Sommevesle, a hundred and ten miles to the east, before the royalist troops were forced to decamp by a suspicious populace; and they would not have been exposed to the curiosity of the citizens of Sainte-Menehould, one of whom, a postmaster’s son, recognized the King from the face on a coin. This was at eight o’clock in the evening of 21 June 1791: the journey had lasted barely six-and-a-half hours. At about the same time, one of those tireless Parisian wits, who seemed to thrive in even the darkest times, attached a piece of paper to the walls of the Tuileries Palace:

  Citizens are advised that a fat pig has fled the Tuileries. Whoever encounters him is requested–in exchange for a modest reward–to bring him home.

  16 October 1793

  The view from the Place de la Révolution (formerly Place de LouisXV) was one of the finest in Paris. The afternoon sun shone through the trees on the Champs-Élysées and bathed the square in deep shadows and pink light–which is why the face of Charlotte Corday appeared to blush when her head was shown to the crowd. The phenomenon, observed by several thousand people, gave rise to an official scientific enquiry into the question of sensory survival, and, since Mlle Corday had dressed herself nicely in the manner of her native Caen, it started a fashion for lacy Norman bonnets.

  The men and women who were taken to the square in open carts showed astounding calm. For all the ferocious, gloating rhetoric of the sans-culottes, there is scarcely a single account of an aristocrat disgracing herself with a cowardly display. The words of those who stood ten feet above the square and looked about them at the scene of chaos contained by uniformed soldiers and by the very architecture of the city are almost universally impressive:

  ‘O Liberty! What crimes are committed in thy name!’

  (To the plaster statue erected in the square.)

  ‘May my blood cement the happiness of the French.’

  ‘Monsieur, I beg your pardon. I did not do it on purpose.’

  (To the executioner, after stepping on his foot.)

  They came in tumbrels from the Conciergerie, across the river, and along the Rue Saint-Honoré. It was a journey of about two miles. Some of them, as they descended from the cart and climbed the wooden steps, knew for the first time in their lives exactly where they were, and how they had got there. At the end of her ride through Paris, Mme Roland asked for pen and ink so as to record the last moments of her journey, and ‘to consign to paper the discoveries she had made on the way from the Conciergerie to the Place de la Révolution’.

  Though she seemed to commune silently with herself and to concentrate on her courage, the Queen at times appeared to become observant of her surroundings. Several witnesses saw her studying the revolutionary inscriptions on the walls, and the tricolour flags that flew from windows. She would have heard the noonday cannon in the Palais-Royal. As the cart turned off the Rue Saint-Honoré and into the square, she was seen to look across the gardens towards the Tuileries Palace. ‘Signs of deep emotion’ were noted on her face by the official reporter.

  From that vantage point, the city had an almost providential air. Several of Verniquet’s principal triangulation points were visible from the Place de la Révolution, and several more if the observer was on a platform: the dome of the Tuileries, the north tower of
Saint-Sulpice and the summit of Montmartre. By some inexplicable design, the curve of the Seine appeared to have been straightened, so that the eye might have traced an uninterrupted line along the palace walls and the river to the hills beyond the city. The colonnades of the Tuileries, the tall houses that ran away to the east and the billowing architecture of clouds that rested on the rooftops made it possible to imagine that what had seemed a chaos created by the centuries was in fact a model of the heavenly city. From the centre of the square, one could see a long way and be seen from a great distance. A man who was standing that day in front of the Tuileries Palace, and who, hearing the noise of the crowd, climbed onto the pedestal of a statue, quite distinctly saw the blade of the guillotine fall, at a distance of almost half a mile.

  RESTORATION

  IT ENDED SOME WHERE IN England in 1828. An elderly man lay in bed, dying of an illness that left his mind clear enough to feel the weight of sin that clung to his immortal soul. Beside the bed, a French Catholic priest sat at a writing desk with a sheaf of paper. A scene like this suggests Soho, where most French exiles and expatriates lived. The abbé P…(only his initial is known) would have heard dozens of death-bed confessions in which the recent history of France was twisted up in personal tales of loss and betrayal, but this man’s tale was long and twisted even by the standards of exile. Fortunately, the story had told itself in his head so many times that the dictation was quite straightforward.