Parisians: An Adventure History of Paris

by Robb, Graham

  Faced with starvation and superior technology, the city succumbed to an epidemic of credulity: Mme Bismarck had been arrested while out shopping and was being held hostage; the Prussians were going home for Christmas; thousands of sheep were pouring into the city through secret tunnels that connected Paris to the provinces.

  Men in top hats dreamt of annihilating human beings in numbers too large to be counted: a battalion of prostitutes would go traipsing out across the Plaine Saint-Denis to infect the Prussian army with syphilis and smallpox; an airborne platform carrying scientists and cauldrons would float over the Prussian lines and dissolve their respiratory tracts with chemicals; a machine-gun disguised as a music box playing Wagner would be offered as a token of peace; a sledgehammer three miles wide would be dropped from the sky.

  Even before the beginning of the siege, when the news from Sedan was printed in the Figaro–‘People of France! A great misfortune has befallen the fatherland. After three days of heroic struggles, forty thousand men have been taken prisoner. Paris is in a state of defence!’–many of the sixty thousand Prussians domiciled in Paris were hunted down. The catacombs were prepared for long-term human habitation, and scientists were summoned to the Ministry.

  We are under attack from intelligent barbarians; civilized science must defend us!

  Paintings from the Louvre were evacuated, and precious archaeological specimens were carried from the Cluny museum to the crypt of the Panthéon. An employee of the Paris Gas Company was found to be a Prussian officer. The quarries of Montmartre were searched for explosives. Then the Prussian army was reported to have reached Reims, then Épernay, then Troyes. Towns in Picardy and the Ardennes were reported to have been wiped off the map.

  The Figaro urged Parisians to remember the Breton guerrillas of 1793 who had lived in impenetrable forests, festooned with vegetation, and who had attacked the soldiers of the French Revolution with axes and spears.

  National defence requires nothing more of every town and village that is exposed to enemy incursions!

  The Government of National Defence ordered every forest, wood and copse in the environs of Paris to be set on fire, ‘to prevent the enemy from reaching the fortifications under cover’.

  The fortifications consisted of a road, a line of trees and then a bank of earth leading up to the rampart, with bastions at regular intervals. Then came the parapet and the walkway, protected by a curtain-wall, looking down into a ditch forty metres wide. A narrow path cut into the upward slope allowed troops to move along under cover. A man could walk all the way around Paris without being seen from either side. Beyond the ditch, a grassy bank sloped down to the unprotected zone.

  On 15 September, lookouts on the parapet noticed the first signs of an approaching army. Columns of smoke were rising from the region of Drancy, Le Bourget and the Forest of Bondy. Farmers had set fire to their haystacks to prevent the harvest from falling into the hands of the enemy. But the vast crop of cabbages, beets, potatoes and radishes that would normally have fed the all-consuming city was not so easily destroyed. Then someone had the idea of sending out word to all the remote villages, where peasants lived in a state of medieval poverty as though the great city were a thousand miles away. The supply zone of Paris had always been the first to suffer in times of need. Its development had been stunted by the proximity of the capital. Recently, anthropologists had explored that neglected hinterland beyond the outer suburbs, and had recognized in certain facial features ‘the living remnants of a separate race that predates the Cimmerian invasions with which our historical era began’.

  Despite the primitive state of the roads and the lack of modern communications, word spread through the countryside with astonishing speed. They came from the forgotten hamlets with wheelbarrows and baskets, mattocks and forks, with their children, old people and cripples in ancient carts. The sun-baked horde was let loose on the fertile fields, and that vast tribe of famished peasants grubbed up in a single day a harvest that would have kept Paris eating for a season. They worked until their thin shadows stretched out across the fields, whimpering with delight–according to the Figaro’s eye-witness account–‘and with a delirious enthusiasm that is hard to describe’. ‘Poor, benighted creatures, for whom a day of such calamity is a day of feasting and celebration!’

  MADAME ZOLA

  PART ONE

  1

  THEY TOOK THE ELEVATORS on the way up, because none of them were as young as they used to be, and there was a long evening ahead. The Otis elevator, which was more like a mountain railway than an elevator, took them to the first platform, where they paid another franc each and stepped into the cage of the hydraulic lift. Alexandrine felt a tug at her stomach, and saw the crowds on the esplanade turn into a scene from one of her husband’s novels–a swarming ant-hill, and then, as details disappeared, a smear of black and grey. The sky was heavy with cloud. She thought of the reports, which had troubled É mile, that the Eiffel Tower would alter the weather and bring thunderstorms flocking to Paris.

  They looked out over the quartiers in the north and east where they lived and worked. A windowpane two miles distant caught the sunlight and seemed to be signalling to the Tower. To the left of it, the Gare Saint-Lazare was a giant greenhouse, and the patch of vivid green in front must be the copper roof of La Madeleine. The men–É mile, his publisher and the publisher’s son-in-law, Edmond de Goncourt, and an art critic–tried to identify the monuments and to find their homes. The biggest surprise was that Paris had a mountain in the north-east with a big square Buddha on top of it. Beneath it, the tenements of Montmartre and the Goutte d’Or, which she knew to be filthy, were bright white cubes, like the houses of a Muhammadan city, cascading down the slopes as though they expected to find the Bosphorus at the bottom.

  It was hard to trace a route along the crevices that ran here and there through the mass of roofs. The city seemed to have been designed by a race of architects who worked in only two dimensions. The importance of everything had changed, as though years had passed with every yard of the ascent. Notre-Dame was a small toy lost in wasteground, while the pepper-pot towers of Saint-Sulpice had become a major landmark. Vast shadows swept across the scene, plunging the Batignolles into darkness, turning the Seine into a livid streak. The men at last fell silent. As the countryside beyond Paris came into view, they all felt–it seemed to her–a kind of fascinated disappointment. There was a mortal sadness in the spectacle. A great lake seemed to have welled up, spread itself across the land, and solidified into a grey mass.

  The cage juddered and came to a stop. They got out and walked over to the railing. From that height, there were no signs of life. Nothing below seemed to move and no sound reached them on the platform. She had expected to see the city where she was born and where she had lived for fifty years spread out beneath her like the floor-plan of a familiar house, but now it seemed that all along she had been living in a strange place.

  They took the lift back down to the first platform, from where Paris looked more recognizable than it had a few moments before. A table had been booked at the Russian restaurant, which was already noted for its wine cellar under the north-eastern foot of the Tower. They ordered from the menu and looked out at the panorama. She chose enough dishes to encourage É mile to order at least as much as she was intending to eat. He had surprised her recently by keeping to his diet and by refusing all alcohol–except when he had been bicycling–for three months. He had lost fourteen kilograms, while she, for a reason that escaped her, had gained six. She ordered caviar, batvinia, the boiled sucking-pig, and she would probably join them in the vodka and the Chambertin and then a Château d’Yquem with whatever came after.

  They talked about the Javanese dancers they had seen performing in the little thatched palace on the Esplanade des Invalides. Goncourt had found their ‘chubby yellow flesh’ ‘somewhat repulsive’. (‘Repulsive’ was one of his favourite words.) Nine years before, she had ridiculed his unnaturalistic brothel scenes in La Fil
le Élisa (the gentlemen had found her observations highly amusing), and ever since, Goncourt had taken every opportunity to prove that he was a connoisseur of women. Of course, he was jealous of her husband because É mile Zola stood head and shoulders above his contemporaries, and he was frightened of her because she had once been a laundress. She looked at É mile as if to prompt him. ‘There is a certain softness in their fat,’ he said, ‘that one doesn’t find in European flesh.’ Then he squeezed his nose between his fingers and moved it about as though it were made of india rubber. He was always more scientific about such things than Goncourt.

  Darkness gathered while they ate. Now, when they looked out, they saw only their own reflections. After the gélinottes–which she had wanted to compare with hers–the bear’s paw (out of curiosity), the Polish waffles, the napoleonka, the tea from the samovar, which É mile could have emptied on his own, and the gold-tipped cigarettes, they picked their way down the three hundred and forty-five wooden steps, which were already showing signs of wear. Goncourt said that he felt like an ant descending the rigging of a metal ship. She seemed to remember the image from one of É mile’s novels.

  The crowds on the Champ de Mars were even noisier and smellier than in the daytime. The sightseers filled the streets and doorways like a flood. They managed to stay together and found their way to the Rue du Caire which, with its minarets and musharabiya designed by a French architect, was said to be more authentic than any street in modern Cairo. They stared at the Africans, who stared back, and entered the Egyptian café to observe the danse du ventre that had supposedly scandalized the thousands of Parisians who went to see it.

  She sat next to Marguerite Charpentier, the wife of É mile’s publisher, and discussed the dancer’s costume–the lilac bodice, the low belt and the tight skirt, the panel of yellow gauze that revealed the extraordinary mobility of her navel. There had been some difficult moments with Marguerite in the past. Mme Charpentier had grown up in the Place Vendôme, was always elegant, knew three languages and had never had to work, but somehow her husband’s philandering, which Alexandrine had known about before Marguerite, had brought the two women closer together. É mile had always been faithful, but for the other wives, a husband’s fidelity meant only that he didn’t keep a mistress, and she had overheard Julia Daudet’s husband say that if only Julia would allow him to do the things that any barmaid in the Brasserie des Martyrs would be glad to have done to her, he would be ‘the most faithful of Fidos’.

  ‘What I can’t understand,’ Goncourt was saying, as they watched the Syrian dancer who danced with a jug of water on her head, ‘is that when one sleeps with a Moorish woman, there’s only the most imperceptible swaying, and if you ask them to spice it up with some pitching and tossing in the fashion of our European women, they complain that you’re asking them to make love like dogs!’ The men agreed that the dance would be more interesting if the woman were completely naked, because then they would be able to observe the arrangement and displacement of organs in the female body.

  After the sabre dance and the whirling dervish, they walked along the artificial street and bought some of the sticky sweetmeats that everyone was eating. They talked to the cafetiers and sat down at one of the Tunisian cafés to drink a glass of date brandy. Even this late in the evening, the Rue du Caire was full of people. The Egyptian donkey-drivers seemed to be having the time of their lives. The faces of the crowd were lit by red lanterns, and everyone looked slightly drunk. At the end of the street, women queued for the water-closets and talked in loud voices. A group of men stared up at the finely wrought windows of a harem. The Exhibition was an immense department store where all the world came to indulge its pleasures and to find out what it wanted.

  The Chemin de Fer Intérieur that had been built for the Exhibition had a little station by the Galerie des Machines. They would take it all the way to Les Invalides, where they were more likely to find a cab. As they waited under a wooden pagoda for the next train, É mile took out his notebook and jotted down some observations. Charpentier asked Alexandrine if the train would appear in his new novel about railways, La Bête humaine, but she didn’t know, because she had been less involved with the research than usual.

  The locomotive pulled into the station and sent up a cloud of steam. Before they boarded the train, they looked back across the Champ de Mars and saw what could only be seen from a distance. At the very top of the huge metallic structure, in the gallery that was closed to the public, two projectors were sweeping their powerful electric beams over the city. The idol of the Exhibition seemed to be looking for something in the sea of roofs, searching for the secrets that only a novelist could discover.

  2

  THE MAIN RAILWAY LINE from Paris to Le Havre ran past the foot of their garden. Médan was less than two hours from the centre of Paris–a train from Saint-Lazare, then a short walk along the Seine. They had bought the little house, which É mile called ‘a rabbit hutch’, for nine thousand francs in 1878, when only one other Parisian owned property in the district. Of course, they had kept the apartment in Paris, because of his work, and because she had always been a city girl. Two hundred thousand francs later, the rabbit hutch was a residence fit for a genius. The original cottage with its little shuttered windows was squeezed between two tall towers like a victim of mistaken identity being marched to the commissariat by two hefty gendarmes.

  The big square tower had risen while he was writing his novel about the daughter of a laundress who became a courtesan. It was called, in her honour, the Tour Nana. The hexagonal tower, which had been completed in 1886, was the Tour Germinal. It was there, above the billiards room, that she had her spacious lingerie. She sat among the piles of linen, sewing and embroidering, looking out at the misty trees along the river, calculating the wages of the servants and the builders, while É mile sat writing on the other side of the house.

  His mother had lived with them for the first two years, which might have been even worse than it was without the silent games of dominoes in the evening. Since her death in the autumn of 1880, they had been busier than ever. They had acquired some adjoining plots and the island in the river, on which they erected the Norwegian chalet that had been part of the 1878 Exhibition. They went shopping for all the things they had never owned as children and had never dreamed of wanting. In the original part of the house, she had a kitchen with blue porcelain tiles and copper pans of every size and a white wooden table in the middle with sliding compartments. É mile had some specially made stained-glass windows and a collection of antiques that Victor Hugo would have envied, including a sarcophagus and a medieval bed that had sent Gustave Flaubert into raptures. He had a gas lamp disguised as a candle, and the latest kind of orguemélodium with foot-pumped bellows and a stop for ‘celestial voices’. He played chords on it at dusk, which either alleviated or exacerbated his hypochondria, she wasn’t sure. They had a horse, a cow, rabbits, doves, chickens, dogs and cats, all of whom had names. Their friends–when the house was finally ready to receive them–were amazed.

  She had hoped that Marguerite, Julia and the others would stop feeling sorry for her because she had no children. She and É mile had abandoned the idea of a family long before. As É mile said, his novels were their children, and all his creative energy went into Les Rougon-Macquart, which was now only four novels from completion. Sometimes, she remembered the foundling hospital in the Rue d’Enfer, when she was practically an orphan herself, a flower girl, twenty years old, with a baby whose father she had almost forgotten. She had seen them attach a piece of white paper (white for girls) to the baby’s bonnet, with her name, Caroline, her number and her date of birth, and watched them carry her into the big dormitory with the inscription above the door, ‘My Father and Mother Have Abandoned Me, But The Lord Will Take Care Of Me.’ In the year when Caroline would have turned eighteen, Alexandrine had told É mile about her long-lost daughter, and they had gone to consult the register, in which it was recorded that the baby had die
d in 1859, twelve days after being left at the hospital.

  When they moved to Médan, she had thought that she would miss the city. She did miss their research expeditions–the sweatshops in the northern suburbs, the dressing-rooms of the boulevard theatres, their nocturnal exploration of Les Halles and the delicious cabbage soup that was served on a street-corner at dawn, for which she still had the recipe. She thought of their tiny apartment by the Odéon on the Rue de Vaugirard, the long nights of literary discussions and their enormous appetites. She was looking forward to equipping the new apartment in the Rue de Bruxelles, which was a short walk from the Gare Saint-Lazare. But in the end, though she was often dissatisfied, she told herself that Médan had been a wholesome break with the past. She had discovered her talent for organization, her love of the countryside and boating on the river, and she liked the fact that his friends from the old days felt ill at ease there, especially Cézanne, who was making a career out of failure and who always seemed to have mud on his boots even after a week without rain.

  She had even relished the responsibility of managing staff. Having worked long hours herself, as a flower-girl and a laundress, she knew what to expect of servants. She knew how to train them and when to dismiss them. Her chambermaid and seamstress, Jeanne Rozerot, had been a particular success. As soon as she saw the tall girl–timid but elegant, dressed in a modern, practical skirt and a high collar–she had known that she would enjoy the task of teaching her the trade. Jeanne had lost her mother when she was still a baby and been sent to a convent school. She might almost have been Alexandrine’s daughter. Though she looked quite frail, she was lively at work and always cheerful, even when her mistress was being bossy.

  Alexandrine had explained Jeanne’s qualities to É mile, and he had not objected when she declared her intention to take the girl with them to Royan, where she had coped well with all the turmoil of a summer vacation. (He could hardly have objected, since Royan was his idea.) That had been barely nine months before the dinner on the Eiffel Tower. She was still disappointed that, after the holiday, Jeanne Rozerot had handed in her notice for ‘personal reasons’, which she had tactfully not enquired after. With all the important visitors and two rather moody employers, she must have found life at Médan somewhat bewildering. It was vexing, all the same, to spend so much time training a servant only for someone else to have the benefit.