by Robb, Graham
II
IN HIS OFFICIAL OFFICE above the Seine–not the private study next to his bedroom, but the state room with three large windows looking onto the Place de l’Hôtel de Ville–the model inhabitant of New Paris sits at a large desk. It is, without a shadow of a doubt, a glorious morning. His shoes are spotless; he is breathing easily. No one has arrived late for work. A statistic can be brought to him within minutes. A garden of Mediterranean shrubs and sub-tropical flowers separates his building from the river.
Georges-Eugène Haussmann almost dwarfs his desk, which occupies the centre of the room. When he wears his medals, as he does today, his chest looks like an expensive apartment block. He can imagine–he has seen enough caricatures of Baron Haussmann the demolition man, the trowel-wielding beaver, the monumental henchman of Napoleon III–his forehead supported by caryatids. When the Emperor arrives, he will have to stoop to compensate for the difference in height.
Behind him, mounted on rolling frames, the specially engraved 1:5000 map of Paris (not sold in shops) stands ready to be wheeled into the light. It forms his backdrop when he sits at the desk. He often turns around and becomes absorbed in it. Notre-Dame, which is now exposed and visible across the river, precisely where it ought to be in relation to everything else, is the size of his thumbprint; the rectangle of the Louvre and the Tuileries is contained within the compass of his index finger and his pinkie.
He looks down at the Place de l’Hôtel de Ville and sees the accelerated movement of carriages across the square. He understands the flow of traffic, the vents and flumes of intersections, the multiple valves of his radiating, starry squares, of which there are now twenty-one in Paris.
Thanks to him, parts of Paris have seen the sky for the first time since the city was a swamp. Twenty per cent of the city now consists of roads and open spaces; thirty per cent if one includes the Bois de Boulogne and the Bois de Vincennes. For every square metre of land there are six square metres of floor space. The outer suburbs have been incorporated into the city, which is now fifty per cent larger than it was before 1860.
Recently, he has been asked to redesign Rome. The irony is not lost on him, Georges-Eugène Haussmann, the son of Alsatian Protestants. The Archbishop of Paris paid him a compliment that is engraved in his memory and that he would like to see engraved on a plinth:
Your mission supports mine. In broad, straight streets that are bathed in light, people do not behave in the same slovenly fashion as in streets that are narrow, twisted and dark. To bring air, light and water to the pauper’s hovel not only restores physical health, it promotes good housekeeping and cleanliness, and thus improves morality.
It also allows a busy man like Baron Haussmann to reach any part of Paris within the hour and in a presentable condition. It means that he can dovetail his duties as a father and a husband with official functions, and with the performances of Mlle Cellier at the Opéra–the actress he dresses like his daughter–and Marie-Roze at the Opéra-Comique. He has created a city for lovers who also have families and jobs.
He was brought in as a steam-roller, as a man of experience and grit. He knows that a regime founders, not on barricades, but on committee tables. The Emperor would rather not disband the Conseil Municipal, but he would like to see it behave with one mind (his own). Baron Haussmann has no intention of running budgets like a petit bourgeois. The days of cautious, paternalistic Préfets are over. A great city like Paris must be allowed her whims and extravagance. Paris is a courtesan who demands a tribute of millions and a fully coordinated residence: flower-beds, kiosks, litter-bins, advertising columns, street furniture, chalets de nécessité. She will not be satisfied with small-scale improvements.
Later that month, his childhood home will be demolished.
He is often asked (though not as often as he would like) how he manages to run the city and to rebuild it at the same time. He tells them what he told his accountants and his engineers when he took over as Préfet de la Seine, thirteen years ago:
There is more time than most people think in twenty-four hours. Many things can be fitted in between six in the morning and midnight when one has an active body, an alert and open mind, an excellent memory, and especially when one needs only a modicum of sleep. Remember, too, that there are also Sundays, of which a year contains fifty-two.
Since he grasped the reins of power in 1853, three Heads of Accounting have died of exhaustion.
He looks down at the square and sees a row of taxi-cabs and a small detachment of cavalry. The Emperor is due to arrive, to view the commissioned photographs. His carriage will encounter a stretch of unrepaired tarmacadam where the Avenue Victoria meets the Rue Saint-Martin, and he will arrive approximately three minutes late.
Seventeen years ago, Louis-Napoléon arrived at the Gare du Nord with a map of Paris in his pocket, on which non-existent avenues were marked in blue, red, yellow and green pencil, according to the degree of urgency. Nearly all of those avenues have now been built or scheduled, and many of the Baron’s own ideas have enhanced the original plan. The Île de la Cité, where twenty thousand people lived like rats, is now an island of administrative buildings with the Morgue at its tip. The waters of the River Dhuys have been brought sixty miles by aqueduct, and Parisians are no longer forced to drink their own filth, pumped from the Seine or filtered through the corpses of their ancestors.
Haussmann told the Emperor about the conversation that took place after the council meeting–because the Emperor likes to hear about his steam-roller getting the better of ministers and civil servants:
‘You should have been a duke by now, Haussmann.’
‘Duke of what?’
‘Oh, I don’t know, Duc de la Dhuys.’
‘In that case, duc would not suffice.’
‘Is that so? What should it be, then? Prince?…’
‘No, I should have to be made an aqueduc, and that title is not to be found in the list of nobiliary titles!’
Some people say that the Emperor never laughs, but he laughed when he heard about the aqueduke.
Anything that binds him to the Emperor is good for Paris. That year, his daughter gave birth to the Emperor’s child, three days before her marriage, to which the Emperor gave his blessing. His Majesty even offered to pay for a dowry, which the Baron refused, because no one must be able to accuse him of corruption.
HE STANDS WHERE the mirror shows him in his entirety, from bald head to polished boot. At times like this, when a few extra minutes have been built into the schedule, he allows himself the luxury of remembering. He remembers the boy with the body of a man and an incongruous susceptibility to asthma. He remembers–in this order–his home in the quiet Quartier Beaujon, the boots that stood waiting for him every morning, the walk to lectures in the Latin Quarter, the depressing view that faced him like an insult from the arch of the old Pont Saint-Michel, and the state of his boots after the square where the drains of the Latin Quarter had their muddy confluence.
All that ugliness will vanish from one edition of the map to the next. The Boulevard Saint-Michel has smashed through the warren of streets, and the new Boulevard Saint-André will erase the Place Saint-André-des-Arts. The ends of the buildings exposed by the Boulevard Saint-Michel have been cauterized with a fountain on which a snarling Satan (too small for the Baron’s liking) is trampled by a Saint Michael with wings as beautiful as a waterproof cloak. He calls this his revenge on the past.
1. From the ‘Plan Turgot’, by Louis Bretez (map commissioned by Michel-Étienne Turgot), 1734–39.
2. Louis-Léopold Boilly, The Galleries of the Palais Royal (1809; the original version, now lost, was shown at the 1804 Paris Salon). Some of the gentlemen may be British visitors, taking advantage of the Peace of Amiens (1802–03).
3. View taken from under the Arch of Givry (1807), by John Claude Nattes, engraved by John Hill: Pont au Change, Conciergerie and Tour de l’Horloge. The arcades, flooded at high tide, ran under the Quai de Gesvres and later formed part of a
tunnel in the Métro.
4. ‘Monsieur, someone has robbed me of a thousand-franc note’: Honoré Daumier’s view of Vidocq’s Bureau des Renseignements. Le Charivari, 6 November 1836.
5. Gustave Le Gray, Paris, View of Montmartre (a montage: cityscape, c. 1849–50; sky, c. 1855–56).
6. ‘Cross-section of a Parisian house on 1 January 1845’, by Bertall (Albert d’Arnoux). Le Diable à Paris, vol. II (1846).
7. ‘Le Stryge’ at Notre-Dame (1853), by Charles Nègre. The man is the photographer Henri Le Secq. The streets below were demolished to make way for the new Hôtel-Dieu hospital.
8. The Siege of Paris, 1870, by R. Briant: the Prussian army to the south of Paris, and Thiers’s fortifications, on the line of the present Boulevards des Maréchaux, just inside the Périphérique.
9. The Hôtel de Ville, torched by Communards. June 1871.
10. Gustave Caillebotte, Young Man at His Window (1875): the artist’s brother at the corner of Rue de Miromesnil and Rue de Lisbonne, with Boulevard Malesherbes in the background.
11. Camille Pissarro, Avenue de l’Opéra, Sun, Winter Morning (1898), from the Grand Hôtel du Louvre.
12. Universal Exhibition of 1900: Champ de Mars station, Celestial Globe and Maréorama (an attraction simulating a sea voyage from Paris to Yokohama).
When he took the Emperor to see this new gateway to the Latin Quarter, the Emperor looked along the parallel lines of house-fronts, and his eye fell, as planned, on the spire of the Sainte-Chapelle across the river. Then he turned to the Baron and said, with a smile, ‘Now I can see why you were so keen on your symmetrical arrangement. You did it for the view!’
He hears the clatter of horses and guardsmen’s sabres on the square below. The Emperor will see the photographs and perhaps, this time, won’t tease him about his ‘weakness’ for symmetry. He always talks about London, where traffic and troop movements were the essential point. But, as Haussmann reminds him, ‘Parisians are more demanding than Londoners.’ He has been known to triple the width of an avenue for effect, and also, he would admit, to sabotage the paltry designs of the Emperor’s favourite architect, Hittorff. He may be a steam-roller but he understands the principles of beauty. A painting must always have a focal point and a frame, which is why it is now possible to stand in the middle of the Boulevard de Sébastopol and to see the Gare de l’Est at one end and the dome of the Tribunal de Commerce like a full stop at the other–except when the mists are rising from the Seine, filling the avenues and blurring perspectives, turning carriages and pedestrians into a procession of grey ghosts.
THE DOUBLE DOORS are opened to admit His Imperial Majesty Napoleon III.
The man still has the dimensions of the prison cell about him. He lives in palaces but looks as though he could fit into a tiny space at a moment’s notice. There is something about his smallness that commands respect. Baron Haussmann will not be asked to die for his Emperor, but he is prepared to sacrifice his reputation, which is besmirched almost every day–by liberals and socialists, who forget that the poor now have more hospital beds and proper graves; by nostalgic bohemians, who forget everything; and even by his own social equals, who find the inconvenience of moving house too heavy a price to pay for the most beautiful city in the world.
The framed photographs have been arrayed on the table in geographical order.
This makes a nice change from the usual squabbles with architects. (The Emperor speaks in short sentences, like an oracle.) He has sat for many photographers, but this Marville is unknown to him.
The Baron explains–it is unclear whether it was his idea or the Historical Committee’s: Marville is the official photographer of the Louvre. He takes photographs of emperors and pharaohs, Etruscan vases, and medieval cathedrals that are being demolished and rebuilt; he records artefacts that have been disinterred and rescued from the past. Marville was commissioned to photograph the sections of Paris that are about to be buried and forgotten. It might be seen as archaeology in reverse: first the ruins, then the city that covers them up. A copy of the Plan was given to M. Marville, who then set off to erect his tripod at every designated site.
At this, the Emperor turns his head towards the Baron with what could be a quizzical smile: knowledge of the Plan (as their enemies point out) would allow a speculator to buy up properties before the City expropriates them and pays a handsome compensation. But Marville is an artist, not a businessman–so much is clear from the photographs.
They stand at the table and survey the scenes that are about to disappear. They see the wasted space, the lack of uniformity, the corners where rubbish collects and thieves lurk. They sense the provincial hush and the age-old habits. Sometimes, there are flecks that might be bullet-holes in the walls, and scratches on the plate that look like scraps of cloud above a battlefield, but mostly the images are sharp and clean.
They pause over one print in particular, though it has nothing of obvious interest. It shows the back end of a square that looks overpopulated and deserted at the same time. The Baron identifies the tenements on the right as the handiwork of one of his predecessors, Prefect Rambuteau, and makes a rumbling sound of satisfied disapproval. He points to the tenements wedged into the corner of the square and the Rue Saint-André-des-Arts. The photographer has captured the anaemic radiance that fills the Latin Quarter in the early morning. The light that bathes the facade of no. 22 only intensifies the gloom. Its shielded windows suggest some secret life behind.
The building has wooden blinds instead of shutters, hung out over the window railings, which means that the day is warm but not windy. This is the economical style that was used by Prefect Rambuteau in the 1840s, with grooves scored in the plaster to imitate expensive freestone, and, instead of a continuous balcony, iron railings at the foot of each window and a ledge no wider than a kerb. Baron Haussmann remembers the scene from his student days: the area of no particular shape, veering off from the Place Saint-Michel; the bookshop at no. 22 with the puddle in front of it. The image is so vivid that, without thinking, he glances down at his boots.
Only a man who had walked there a thousand times would know that the neighbourhood is bulging with books. No. 22 alone contains one hundred thousand volumes, advertised as dépareillés, which means they belong to broken sets. This is a bookshop that can make a mystery of any life. It once shared the building with the publisher of ‘la Bibliothèque Populaire’, a series devoted to antiquities: Chardin’s history of the East Indies; Chanut’s Campagne de Bonaparte en Égypte et en Syrie. This is where Champollion-Figeac, brother of the decipherer of hieroglyphics, published his famous treatise on archaeology.
The quartier has barely changed. From one of those windows at no. 22, Baudelaire looked out on his first Parisian landscape. He was seven years old. His father was dead, and his mother was still in mourning. He wrote to his mother in 1861 and reminded her of their time together in the Place Saint-André-des-Arts: ‘Long walks and never-ending kindness! I remember the banks of the Seine that were so melancholy in the evening. For me, those were the good old days…I had you all to myself.’
By chance, no. 22 appears on another of the photographs, further along the table, at the foot of an advertisement for kitchen stoves and garden furniture: ‘The Special Billposting and Sign Company is still at 22, Rue Saint-André-des-Arts.’ Some of those advertisements that upset the poet’s mind must have come from his childhood home at no. 22. Coincidences like this are unremarkable in a set of four hundred and twenty-five photographs. If Baron Haussmann notices any of those words on the walls on Paris, it is only because wall space is a source of revenue for the city, and because some of the words are the visible portents of his power: ‘VENTE DE MOBILIER’, ‘FERMETURE POUR CAUSE D’EXPROPRIATION’, ‘BUREAU DE DÉMOLITION’.
THEY SPEND much longer than they mean to, staring at the glassy image. The Emperor has no intention of inspecting all four hundred and twenty-five photographs, but he lingers over this one, as though trying to dissolve some difficu
lt thought into the image. The Baron adjusts his position once or twice. He pictures the gaping space that will open up where the masonry blocks the view. He briefly imagines himself standing on the demolition site, recognizing the twisted metal remnant of that balcony in the centre of the picture–if such a cluttered mess can be said to have a centre. He imagines the Emperor’s compliment when he notices the columns of the Odéon Theatre neatly framed at the far end of the new Boulevard Saint-André.
As he wedges a finger under the photograph to turn to the next one, the Emperor raises his hand. Something has occurred to him…He sometimes asks odd questions, perhaps on principle or simply out of distraction, it is hard to tell. He wants to know where the people are. (Marville is not there in person to explain; he has sent a messenger with the photographs.) Why are those daylit streets so empty? Is the quartier already half-abandoned?
The answer is obvious. The streets are empty because anything that moves, disappears–the smoke from a pipe, a cart-wheel turning a corner, a bird fluttering down to the cobbles. All movement is lost in long exposures. But this is one of those false gems of historical wisdom (photography has made such rapid progress): the thought of a sitter forced to resist an itch, smile frozen, head clamped…