Parisians: An Adventure History of Paris

by Robb, Graham

  It was Charles Toubin who arranged for the hospital bed. His brother, the intern, had obtained an admission card. Henry was out when he knocked at the door. Lucile saw the card in his hand and understood.

  Later, when he came to write the ‘Epilogue of the Loves of Rodolphe and Mademoiselle Mimi’, Henry would describe the painful, jolting journey in a taxi, two miles along the quais to the hospital of La Pitié. ‘Amidst her sufferings, her fondness for pretty clothes–which is the last thing to die in women–survived. Two or three times she had the cab stopped in front of drapers’ shops to look at the window displays.’

  The hospital register shows that ‘Lucile Louvet, florist, wife of François Paulgaire, native of Paris, aged about 24’, was admitted to La Pitié on Monday, 6 March 1848. It was the second anniversary of Mimi’s first appearance in the Corsaire-Satan. Unfortunately for Henry’s reputation as a historian, the bus drivers and cabbies were all on strike on Monday, 6 March. Lucile cannot possibly have taken a taxi; she must have reached the hospital on foot.

  Henry did not go with her. Toubin assured her that her lover would visit the following Sunday, which was the normal visiting day, but she waited in vain. He knew the leprous walls, the steely nurses, the nightly concerto of coughs and groans. Before long, he would be back in hospital himself. And so he stayed at home, he told himself, out of fidelity to the past. He would preserve the precious memory of their love on paper.

  TOUBIN WENT TO the hospital every day and found the girl delirious and in pain. He urged his friend to go and see her.

  ‘I haven’t even got two sous to buy her a little bouquet,’ he told Toubin. ‘But I know of some bushes down Vaugirard way that one day soon will be covered in violets.’

  ‘Just take her your heart,’ said Toubin, ‘but get a move on.’

  He was sitting in the café when he heard the news from Toubin’s brother. Passing through the ward, Dr Toubin had found her bed empty and was told by the nurse that ‘Number 8 is dead’. Henry went and stood by the window, mopping his eye. Strangely, he felt nothing, as though his love had died with the woman who inspired it. Later that day, he went out to buy a mourner’s black felt hat.

  In a hospital as large and busy as La Pitié, mistakes were inevitable. Lucile had been moved to another bed. She was calling out for Henry and disturbing the other patients. It took a while to find him and tell him the news. This time, he set off for the hospital without waiting for the violets to bloom.

  Dr Toubin met him at the entrance and took his hand. Lucile had died–this time for real–on 8 April, and no one had claimed the body. Henry asked to see her, but the doctor simply pointed to a large wagon standing in front of a building marked ‘AMPHITHÉTRE’.

  In his writer’s mind, he saw the students ranged in tiers, writing notes to their mistresses, telling jokes and peering down at the lifeless body of the flower-girl lying in a pool of light while the surgeon exposed the course of a nerve, galvanized a limb or laid bare the heart. A man climbed onto the seat, and the wagon trundled off with another load for the common grave. There would be no funeral. The hat would have to wait for another occasion.

  The doctor offered to walk with him, but he felt a sudden craving for solitude. He turned away and retraced his steps along the river towards the forest of chimneys on the Montagne-Sainte-Geneviève. Ill-matched emotions swirled in his mind. The epilogue was already half-written; he wondered who might provide him with the sequel…A coal barge was moving slowly towards the Île de la Cité and the grey dome of the Panthéon. He turned up his collar against the fog. As he walked along, something welled up inside him like the swollen waters of the Seine and the Marne depositing their silt along the quais.

  VI

  Théâtre des Variétés, Thursday, 22 November 1849

  THE AUDIENCE FLOWED through the marble foyer, spilling out through the iron gates of the Théâtre des Variétés and into the clutter of cab-horses and umbrellas. It was nine o’clock in the evening. Despite the rain, the pavements were crowded and the cafés were coming to life. The carriage lanterns and street-lamps sent strings of pearls dancing along the boulevard.

  The King of Bohemia left the theatre with the young actress on his arm. ‘Mimi’ was wrapped in a dark cloak. As far as he could tell, she had removed her face paint, though she still looked to him like a coloured engraving in a keepsake. She seemed frail but full of life, like a convalescent leaving the house for the first time after a long illness. As she climbed into the cab, he heard the rustle of her petticoats. He smiled at her through his beard, crying with one eye, and wondered whether he might address her as Mimi. It was not beyond the bounds of possibility that an old theatrical tradition entitled the author to enjoy the favours of the leading lady on the first night…

  As it turned the corner of the Rue Drouot, the carriage swayed and he felt her warmth against him. ‘Mimi’ shifted delicately towards her corner of the coach…It would take some time to find himself in this new world, and to acquire the necessary accoutrements. Mlle Thuillier’s heart was a fortress that would not be conquered without a long, expensive siege. He lit a cigar and savoured the moment. Lowering his window to blow out the smoke, he saw two lovers standing by the glow of a chestnut-seller’s brazier, and the pickpockets circling the crowd.

  The actress said goodnight while Henry was paying the driver. He walked back past the theatre and the offices of the Corsaire-Satan, then across the river to a tiny room under the leaking roof of no. 9, Rue Touraine-Saint-Germain. The tingle of Mlle Thuillier’s gloved hand was still on his lips. He sat down at the worm-eaten desk on which he had immortalized Lucile and wrote to a friend: ‘You cannot imagine what it’s like to find yourself for the first time in your life sitting next to a woman who smells nice.’

  A few days later, when La Vie de Bohème was still filling the Variétés, Henry Murger gathered up the mementos of his love affairs and ‘crossed the bridges’ to a plush apartment at no. 48, Rue Notre-Dame de Lorette. It was a new street with no history and a smooth asphalt surface, built on wasteground at the point where the Right Bank rises up towards Montmartre. Funeral processions used it as a quiet short-cut to the cemetery. It was particularly favoured by the deceptively elegant women known as demi-mondaines, whose carriages came and went at odd hours, and by wealthy artists who liked to think that they, too, had once lived the Bohemian life.

  MARVILLE

  I

  THE PHOTOGRAPH shows the back end of a Paris square, early on a summer morning, when the noises and smells of the city are still gathering their strength. The time of day can be deduced from the light, which falls from the east, the shadow of the building behind the camera, which has already cleared half the square, and the cleanness of the cobbles. The sun is up, but no one is about, except of course the photographer and his assistant.

  The picture was taken in 1865, which is hard to believe, given the glassy clarity of the shot. There is more detail per square inch than seems possible for the period. Here at the dawn of the visible past, the buildings look almost radiant in their grime, as though they haven’t yet learned how to pose for a camera.

  This is a real neighbourhood, scoured and crannied with habits and ambitions. Two or three splats of horse manure are visible on the cobbles, like blobs of paint on a canvas. A zoologist could probably identify the animal’s diet, estimate its speed across the square and even guess its breed and colour, if the droppings are consistent with the small grey horses that are waiting in front of a low building, hitched to removal carts, patiently enough for their heads to be only slightly blurred. Otherwise, the square is clean. The crossing sweepers have come and gone. In a poem written four years before this photograph was taken, Baudelaire remembered walking across a deserted square

  …at the hour when the cleaning crews Send their dark storms swirling into the silent air.

  On the corner of one of the two narrow streets that run away to the west, a grey blur might be a dust-devil raised by the sweepers, or perhaps just
the albumen-and-collodion ghost of someone hurrying from the scene into the Rue Saint-André-des-Arts.

  The odd shape of the square commemorates something that no longer exists. The church of Saint-André was one of only two churches in Paris that were entirely separate from the surrounding buildings. It was sold during the Revolution and removed like an unwanted growth, leaving only the space it had occupied for six hundred years. Somewhere near the spot where the photographer has set up his tripod, a crying infant was held over a font and baptized François-Marie Arouet (he later rechristened himself Voltaire). The masonry remains like some ancient volcanic surge when the softer stone has been eroded.

  Now, the walls that used to see nothing but other walls are festooned with letters from every page of a typesetter’s sample book, as numerous as the cartouches in an Egyptian tomb. Fifty feet in the air, a giant invalid lies on a mechanical bed that can be hired or purchased at 28 Rue Serpente. The forty-centime baths around the corner in the Rue Larrey are in competition with the more distant but sophisticated steam baths at 27 Rue Monsieur-le-Prince.

  Even if the date of the photograph were unknown, it could still be deduced from the addresses on the advertisements: the greater the distance, the later in time. In 1865, no one is expected to go shopping in streets across the river. A person could stand where the photographer stood and compose a comprehensive shopping list. She could buy some glass for a broken window, some wallpaper and furniture–or a piece of leather for the armchair–and hire a removal cart (from M. Mondet) to take away the items that were damaged by the rain. M. Robbe (5 Rue Gît-le-Cœur) could repair the window frame, and M. Geliot at no. 24 could check the lead flashing and the zinc roofing. She could buy a print engraving (a Notre-Dame is displayed in the furniture-shop window), and a new piece of porcelain or crystal from A. Desvignes. She could order some coal and some wine (also from M. Mondet), buy a cheese at the crémerie and a book to read by the fire. She need never leave the quartier.

  So much information is contained in that split-second burst of photons that if the glass plate survived a holocaust and lay buried under rubble for centuries in a leather satchel, there would be enough to compile a small, speculative encyclopedia of Paris in the late second millennium. It might even contain some pieces of information that were missing from encyclopedias published while the city still existed. If the middle section of M. Robbe’s advertisement for firewood had not come adrift, we might never have known that some of those words were not painted on the walls but printed on rainproof cloth and hung up like backdrops.

  Few writers even mention this ubiquitous plague of advertising. A single phrase in Baudelaire’s notebook is almost the only surviving evidence of its impact: ‘Immense nausée des affiches’–an overdose of advertising, or a bad case of publicity sickness. Imagine a poet testing words in his mind, measuring rhythms with his feet, bombarded with verbless phrases. As a teenager, he walked the streets of his native city,

  …stumbling upon words as on the paving-stones, Sometimes bumping into lines I’d dreamt of long before.

  Now, there are pavements, like the one in front of the glassware depository, with proper kerbs and gutters. There is no longer any excuse for stumbling. Baudelaire has taken to writing poems in prose. The art lover who grew up with the smell of his father’s oil paints has begun to look at photographs, and even to savour their ‘cruel and surprising charm’. He probably knows the photographer, and he certainly knows his work, but Charles Marville usually sends an associate to exhibitions. He keeps his techniques and his friendships to himself. He feels quite at home in a city devoid of people, at the hour when the sun shines for no one but himself and his assistant.

  By the time the removal carts have trundled off, and the chairs outside the wine-shop are occupied, the photographer and his assistant will be back in the Faubourg Saint-Germain, on the aerial terrace at 27 Rue Saint-Dominique, photographing the vast pageant of clouds, the airborne battalions that are several times wider than a city, bound for some indefinable realm beyond the suburbs.

  WITH THE SKIES’ rippling explosion still developing on his retina, Marville leaves the terrace and retreats into the studio where the light is purple and umber. There are stained-glass windows and dark oak cupboards. The wallpaper is embossed with sombre vegetation. The assistant carefully removes the pane of collodion-coated glass from the wooden frame. At this stage of the process, the glass appears quite blank. Then he pours on the solution of pyrogallic acid and ferrous sulphate, and, by some chemical trick for which science has no explanation, the light from the morning square turns the silver into reality.

  This alchemy-in-reverse always amazes him. It looks like a pristine, miniature city from which the inhabitants have fled, a neighbourhood after the plague or a chemical bomb dropped from a balloon. There are traces of human life but no people. His assistant plunges the plate into the gold chloride to darken the tones. Marville watches the young man’s dark hair fall across his cheek-bone as he bends over the porcelain basin. The assistant washes the negative and fixes the image with cyanide of potassium. Words appear as though they were printed on the plate before it was exposed to the light: BAINS d’EAU; LITS & FAUTEUILS; COMMERCE DE VINS.

  He sees the quartier caught unawares. This is the square en déshabillé, in its own private time zone, a section of abandoned city with all its interiors intact. He is pleased by the evident chaos of misaligned walls, the stain-trails of rainwater, the patched-up render, the slump of the house-fronts, the dislocated cobbles and the absence of people. The only vehicles are the removal carts: perhaps, behind one of the windows, someone is gathering together her belongings.

  The image joins the other prints that are waiting to be framed for the exhibition: four hundred and twenty-five pictures of a magical, vacant metropolis called Marville. The Emperor will see the dingy peristyles and the crumbling pylons, and be reminded of his uncle’s expedition to Egypt, the monuments to vanished gods, frozen in the desert. He might wonder how much of Paris he has really seen, and how anyone can be said to govern a city so full of secrets.

  IN THE STUDIO, the light grows darker as the sun grows more insistent. The assistant tightens the latch on the shutters, and makes certain that the curtains overlap.

  When photography was still a sideshow on the boulevard, Marville set up his easel in the Forest of Fontainebleau. He drew empty landscapes for magazines and illustrated storybooks–Paul et Virginie, The Banks of the Seine, The Arabian Nights–and left his colleague to insert the human figures. His own figures were always clumsy and incongruous. Now, he finds his solitude in Paris, on expeditions with his assistant. Certain times of day are more suitable than others, but the time of day can be lengthened indefinitely, divided up into fractions of seconds.

  Fresh coffee helps to neutralize the smell of ammonium and varnish; it concentrates the mind. These days, only an old-fashioned artist with a paint-spattered smock would use alcohol to stimulate his brain and to steady his hand. The silken slip of albumen paper is laid on the proof. The slightest defect will be visible–a mote of dust, a speck of tripoli stone, a furtive sunbeam.

  The scene glows red (an effect of the albumen) until the final washing. The print is rinsed, dried and pressed. A light coat of wax and mastic is applied. The assistant places the print on the table and stands back like a painter from his easel.

  Marville takes a magnifying-glass: his eye wanders from window to window, looking for the familiar pattern of smudges. It takes a long time to explore the scene…At last, he sees them: they might be mistaken for imperfections on the plate, and even at this level of precision, it is hard to be sure. A slightly stooping form in a long, grey coat is entering the crémerie. At the window between the Bains d’Eau and the Bains de Vapeur, a pale circle bisected by the railing, and a patch of light beneath, might be someone holding a bowl of coffee, looking out at the two photographers in the square below. There is so much clutter in the scene that these wan blotches are barely noticeable.


  He sits up now and surveys the whole picture. This time, he realizes that it has an unexpected focal point–the little balcony on wooden struts, high above the wine shop, level with the invalid on the orthopedic bed. A shed with six windows and a stovepipe–it might almost have been transplanted from some outlying village–leans against a whitewashed wall that might almost be a cottage. A long pole is propped on the railings to keep open a skylight in the tiled roof. Six box shrubs have been arrayed in pots, and there, to the left of the little hedge, a figure bends over a piece of work. It might just be a rag that looks like a head of grey hair, but it has a certain distracting poignancy.

  The figure could be removed with a paintbrush dipped in India ink and a gum solution. This is how some photographers eradicate splotches on a face or a sleeve. But he likes the way in which the camera turns a human form into something small and fleeting, like a puddle on the cobbles or a reflection on a windowpane.

  The varnished print is left to dry. Marville spends the afternoon indoors with his assistant. He photographs him from behind, poring over prints in the studio. He photographs him with his shock of black hair, reclining on the terrace with chimney-pots in the background, like a Nubian lion or a Paris alley-cat. He photographs him in close-up, as delicately as though his face were a row of buildings, with his marble forehead and the slender balconies of his eyebrows under the stormy sky of his hair. It might be the portrait of a poet, with almond eyes and cruel lips, lit beautifully like the square in the morning sun.