Parisians: An Adventure History of Paris

by Robb, Graham

  The first photographic image of a human being in the open air is the scarecrow figure of a man on Daguerre’s photograph of the Boulevard du Temple, taken from the roof of his studio in 1838. This lone pioneer in the photographic past seems to have stopped at the last tree before the corner of the Rue du Temple to have his shoes shined. Everyone else has vanished, along with all the traffic. But in 1838, the shortest exposure time for a daguerreotype was fifteen minutes. Unless the bootblack was unusually conscientious, rubbing and buffing until a faint image of his face appeared on the leather, the man must have been sent down by the photographer to stand still for as long as he could in the river of vanishing pedestrians, to give some human life to the scene.

  In 1865, exposure times have been reduced to the blink of an eye. In 1850, Gustave Le Gray was photographing summer landscapes in forty seconds. In 1853, the Emperor’s photographer, Disdéri, removed and replaced the cotton pad in front of the lens as quickly as a conjurer waving his wand: ‘If I count to two, the print is over-exposed.’ He took razor-sharp pictures of children, horses, ducks and a peacock displaying its tail, though, for some reason, he could never make the Emperor’s eyes look focused. Twelve years later, some of Marville’s photographs show dogs going about their business, stuck to the pavement in perfect, four-legged focus.

  The streets are empty because this is early morning. But even in the heart of Paris, despite Baron Haussmann’s thirty-two thousand gas lamps, the working day is still regulated by the sun. The horses are standing on their shadows, and the hour is later than it seems. There is still just one ‘business district’–around the new Opéra, where only bank managers and courtesans have nested in the expensive new apartments financed by men with close ties to Baron Haussmann’s son-in-law. Everyone else comes in from leafy quartiers in the west. Most Parisians commute to work from round the corner, from one room of the apartment to the next, or from the entresol to the shop below.

  Baron Haussmann’s secretaries could produce the statistic in an instant: every minute, on the biggest and busiest boulevards–Capucines, Italiens, Poissonnière, Saint-Denis–at the busiest times of day, fewer than seven vehicles go past in both directions. On the Rue de Rivoli and the Champs-Élysées, one vehicle passes every twenty seconds. Just behind the photographer’s right shoulder, on the new Pont Saint-Michel, only the blind, the deaf, the lame, the distracted and the dithering are in danger from the traffic. Baudelaire was already suffering from premature old age when he wrote ‘To a Passer-By’ in 1860:

  The deafening street was roaring all around me…

  The woman whose eye he catches is ‘agile’ and ‘fleeting’, ‘lifting and swaying the hem and scallop of her dress’. She is dressed in formal mourning but still able to cross the road with dignity.

  A flash…then darkness!…Shall I never see you again

  Until eternity begins?

  A century later, the passer-by and the poet might have had time to start a conversation while they waited for the lights to change. They might have sat down at the pavement café, or stood still in the rushing crowd. A photographer with a high-speed camera might have caught them kissing…

  Baron Haussmann leaves the Emperor’s question unanswered. The Emperor is probably thinking of London–the last place where he deigned to notice the life of the streets, and where he acquired his irksome predilection for ‘squares’ and tarmacadam, which is expensive and difficult to maintain.

  ‘Give me another year,’ says the Baron, ‘and I’ll turn that square into Piccadilly Circus.’

  The Emperor has to leave for Compiègne, where the Empress goes riding in a forest filled with signposts. Before he leaves, he mentions the stretch of unrepaired tarmacadam on the Avenue Victoria. The Baron takes the opportunity to mention asphalt coating, wood-block paving, granite and porphyry slabs. He is investigating a new adhesive paste and leather soles for horses…The Emperor, as ever, appreciates the Baron’s sense of humour. He looks forward to seeing the later photographs, when the streets have been cleansed of their festering tenements and exposed to the full light of day.

  III

  IN A CITY that changes almost from one blink of an eye to the next, urban planners and photographers must resign themselves to the knowledge that some of their time will be wasted and their efforts in vain.

  Under the soaring minarets of the Trocadéro Palace, which was constructed for the Universal Exhibition of 1878 by the architect who designed the fountain in the Place Saint-Michel, three rooms have been assigned to the City of Paris. One thousand wooden frames containing photographs are hinged to wooden columns and can be turned like the pages of a newspaper. The display is listed in the catalogue as ‘Modification of streets–photographs of streets old and new.’ The prints, which are so vivid that the viewer seems to be examining the scenes through a flawless lens, are paired with other photographs, of wide avenues, endless iron balconies and isolated monuments that retreat into the mist.

  Charles Marville is not at the exhibition, and his name is not mentioned in the official report on the exhibits, which confines itself to generalities: ‘In the various branches of its immense administration, the City of Paris has continual recourse to photography.’ The report regrets the use of silver salts and gold-tone in the reproduction of prints ‘that will sooner or later disappear’, and it notes that the photographs have proved useful as forensic evidence ‘in questions of expropriation’.

  The picture of the Place Saint-André-des-Arts is missing from the exhibition. Baron Haussmann is no longer at the Hôtel de Ville (he was forced to resign in 1870 to placate the liberal opposition), the Emperor has returned to exile in England and some of the avenues that were traced on the map in coloured pencil are in perpetual abeyance. The Boulevard Saint-André will never be completed. Marville himself has disappeared and his business has been sold. The last evidence of his activity is an invoice sent to the Committee of Historical Works for photographs of the new streets that replaced the old. A photographer with the name of his assistant died in 1878, and Marville is thought to have died at about the same time. The place of his death is unknown.

  Though some of Marville’s techniques can be deduced from the surviving plates, his own opinions remain obscure. Nostalgia has coated his scenes with its tenacious patina, and in the absence of letters and reported conversations, no one knows what Marville himself thought about the modernization of Paris. His photographs might be portraits painted by a lover, or municipal documents in which the only trace of passion is the photographer’s love of light and shade and unsuspected detail.

  THERE IS NOTHING to compare with the photograph of the Place Saint-André-des-Arts until 1898, when another photographer sets up his tripod on the same spot. He was once a cabin boy and then an actor. Now, Eugène Atget lugs his heavy bellows camera and his glass plates about the city, taking photographs which he sells to painters as ‘documents pour artistes’.

  Thirty-three years have passed. The glassware depository has disappeared–demolished to make way for the street that never became a boulevard–but Mondet is still a big name in the quartier. The family came from the Hautes-Alpes, and its ‘Commerce de Vins’ now has a picturesque name: Café des Alpes. A removal cart and a dray loaded with barrels stand in front of the café, where a customer can eat the ‘Plat du jour’, screened from the square by the horse’s rump. The horse is at least two hands taller than the horses in Marville’s photograph. The invalid on his orthopedic bed has been replaced by an advertisement for a piano salesroom, two miles away across the river on the Boulevard Poissonnière. The balcony is still clinging to the masonry, with what appears to be the same railing, but the shed and its windows have gone. The light is murkier, either in reality or on the print, and there is no sign of the balcony’s inhabitant.

  As time passes, it becomes harder to resolve the details. On a postcard that must have been printed in 1907, the scene is almost totally eclipsed by the black girders of a circular caisson being lowered into the square
: this will be one of the entrances to the Saint-Michel Métro station. The wall above the café can be glimpsed through the girders: it carries an advertisement for the Dufayel chain of department stores, where everything can be bought for cash or on credit ‘at the same price in more than 700 shops in Paris and the provinces’. A postcard picture of the floods of January 1910, when the square lay under six inches of Seine water, is just sharp enough to show a new name on the café awning: ‘Au Rendez-Vous du Métro’.

  In 1949, the little balcony makes a fleeting appearance in Burgess Meredith’s adaptation of a Simenon novel, The Man on the Eiffel Tower. Maigret’s sidekick pursues the mad villain (played by Franchot Tone), skipping impossibly across the chimneys all the way from Montmartre to the Place Saint-André-des-Arts. Tone drops down onto the balcony, opens the door and disappears.

  In a book on Baudelaire’s Paris homes, published in 1967, a black-and-white photograph shows the café beneath the balcony (now called La Gentilhommière) half-obscured by a Citroën DS, but instantly recognizable from Marville’s photograph of a century before. It must have been taken at about the time when La Gentilhommière was frequented by Jack Kerouac, who came in search of ancestors, love and alcoholic illumination. The wall above the café is white and bare. Soon, it will be covered with graffiti, which appears in the early 1970s and changes faster than the advertisements ever did.

  The balcony can still be seen on some images on the Internet: it seems to be one of those secret places that inspire a fleeting desire in anyone who happens to notice them. Some of the images show the building to the right of the café, on the corner of the Rue Saint-André-des-Arts. In the days of Baron Haussmann, when whole neighbourhoods were being reduced to rubble, and houses shook to the vibrations of demolition carts, no one would have guessed that Baudelaire’s childhood home would be standing after a century and a half. It still has blinds instead of shutters, perhaps because the windows of pre-Haussmann buildings are too close together to allow wooden shutters to be fully opened, or because buildings, like people, have ingrained habits, and there is little point in changing one’s ways when demolition is imminent.

  REGRESSION

  7

  AS FAR AS ANYONE KNEW, the head had last been seen in the attics of the École de Médecine. It was an unusual item, not the sort of thing that would have been easily mislaid or confused with something else. Unlike its neighbours–most of whom were prehistoric bipeds, chimpanzees, murderers and lunatics–it was fully fleshed. Its owner had not been dug out of a neglected graveyard or eaten by his enemies. He had been a great leader, who had forged tiny nations into a powerful and righteous alliance, and dealt a mighty blow to French national pride and interests.

  This much was known for certain: the head had been shipped to the Ministère de la Marine in Paris. From there, it had been sent across the Seine to M. Broca’s little museum at the École de Médecine, where it might have proved useful to scholars as they stumbled towards a better understanding of the advance and occasional regression of the human race.

  What was done with heads when they decayed or were no longer required by science, no one could say, and so there was quite a flurry of paperwork and rummaging in old storerooms when Prime Minister Rocard acceded to the request of independence movements to have the head of their historic leader returned to the home of his ancestors.

  That was in 1988. A century and a decade had passed since the head had arrived in Paris, and the science that had looked to skulls for a measure of its own state of civilization had long since been discarded as jiggery-pokery. A few objects bearing some relation to the head had appeared at the Universal Exhibitions of 1878 and 1889, but not the head itself, which would have been considered too precious a specimen to be exposed to the rough and tumble of such an event. There were mummified remains, a few tools and musical instruments, a crude bust of Victor Hugo and some weapons–stone axes, spears and stolen rifles–that were described by the Bulletin of the Geographical Society as ‘the last efforts of a doomed race, which, far from setting it free, serve only to tighten its bonds and hasten the hour of its complete extinction’.

  Unfortunately, no record could be found of the head, and the negotiators from the overseas territory had to return home with nothing but diplomatic documents and promises. A Parisian newspaper, being less than sensitive to the political aspirations of the former colony, joked that, once again, the administration of Prime Minister Rocard had ‘lost its head’.

  6

  NEWS OF THE INSURRECTION had reached Paris with an even longer delay than usual. The telegraph wires had been cut, and the postal service to Sydney (five days in fair weather) had been interrupted. The first detailed list of victims appeared in the Figaro before the government received the news. A Figaro reader who had sailed from Nouméa after the first troubles had sent it on the packet from the Sandwich Islands. The list was divided into settlers, civil servants, gendarmes, freed prisoners, deportees and domesticated natives. In all, there were one hundred and thirty-six names. The brief descriptions gave readers in Paris the impression of a peaceful colony that had been struck by a terrible disaster: there were soldiers and policemen, but also a telegrapher, a gardener, a road engineer, a deportee who served at the hotel and two families whose little children had been murdered by the savages.

  Though the report explicitly denied that this had ever been the case, Nouméa itself had been threatened. The capital of New Caledonia covered approximately the same area as Paris, but it counted barely four thousand inhabitants, almost all of whom were European. By normal standards, its fortifications were primitive. They had been constructed by French and Algerian deportees from the penal colony on the Ducos peninsula, which formed the northern shore of the harbour. The harbour was protected by gun batteries and by the white coral reefs that placed a ring of silver around the island, as well as by a mariner’s nightmare of little coves and marshy creeks. But an attack from the interior was hard to repel. The bare hills that looked down on the wooden town were surrounded by forests. When the man who kept watch from the semaphore tower was butchered and eaten, his Kanak murderers could only be driven back into the hinterland, where a dry haze hung over the Humboldt Massif. At the time the troubles began, only a band of soldiers and a Basque shepherd with a flock of two hundred sheep had safely traversed the southern part of the island, though several explorers had reported helpful and inquisitive natives who indulged their cannibalistic instincts only on special occasions.

  It had been obvious from the outset that, despite their willingness to defend their farmsteads to the death, the colonists would provide insufficient reinforcements for the garrison. And so the decision had been taken, with some misgivings on the part of the Governor, to arm the convicts and the political prisoners. On 19 June, a settler called M. Chêne had refused to return a native woman to her tribe and had been brutally murdered. This first hint of a tribal uprising gave everyone a keen sense of their frailty and common purpose. Hardened criminals who had been shipped to Nouméa in irons, anarchists who had plotted the downfall of France and Algerian freedom fighters who had tried to repel the French invader, all served with distinction–though a small number of anarchists lived up to their reputation. Louise Michel, known as the Red Virgin, showed Kanak tribesmen how to cut telegraph wires, and when their forests were set on fire, some of the savages who hoped to escape by setting out across the Pacific Ocean in canoes came to bid her farewell and were given the famous red scarf she had worn on the barricades in Paris.

  Apart from this predictable reversion to type, the deportees behaved with discipline and courage. The skills they had acquired in fighting the French were put to good use, and the people of Nouméa, seeing the columns of smoke that rose above the forests becoming ever more distant, felt reassured. The confederation of troops and deportees marched against the slings and spears of the Kanak tribesmen, hunted them down like wild boar and sterilized their fields with salt. Some tribes surrendered and were deported to the islan
ds that lay just beyond the northern horizon. Their wives were given to enemy tribes. Between June and September 1878, fifteen hundred Kanaks were shot, burned and starved to death. At least some good had come of the insurrection. The Figaro of 17 November published a copy of the Governor’s letter to the Ministère de la Marine:

  The attitude of the deportees was excellent, and, by their knowledge of the country, they rendered valuable service to the expeditionary columns. In view of their particular devotion, I would ask that the following be granted a complete pardon. [There followed the names of three deportees.]

  From an objective point of view, this boded well for the future of the colony. Before long, settlers would be more preoccupied by the price of gold and nickel on the international markets than by movements in the dark interior. The convicts and political prisoners who had survived the first four years of exile would eventually be absorbed by the rest of the population. The new quarter of Nouméa, known as ‘the Latin Quarter’, would be a thriving community in some ways more civilized than its namesake.

  Even so, the uprising had come as a shock. The native population had been carefully studied and incorporated into a growing body of scientific knowledge. Nature had divided the islanders into geographical zones and assigned a colour to each group: black (the primitive race) in the mountains, bronze in the valleys and plains, yellow in the centre, reddish-brown on the coast and half-castes in the town. A live Kanak had been taken to Paris, and although the ethnological findings were called into question when he was shown to be mentally retarded, there was no doubting the inferiority of a race that was unable to count beyond its ten fingers. Consequently, when the insurrection had broken out in several different places at once, and when previously antagonistic tribes had banded together under the leadership of Ataï, who was black, this had been profoundly unsettling. Ataï had effectively created a national liberation movement, and some of his reported sayings sounded remarkably like the self-righteous sarcasm of a sans-culotte. He had promised to fence off his property and to respect the settlers’ land rights ‘on the day he saw his yams rise out of the ground to go and eat the settlers’ cattle’.