The Other Paris

by Luc Sante

  a strange spiderweb of alleys—baroque, sinuous, narrow, oxydized as if by fire—which tangle together and form the most picturesque décor … Handcarts are piled in courtyards from the sixteenth century; acrid, sulfurous fumes emerge through the thick bars concealing the windows of an ancient hôtel corroded by saltpeter and humidity. What weird trades are practiced in those casements made of stone of rebarbative aspect, enclosed by heavy doors bristling with rusty nails? Ragpickers and peddlers of dubious objects populate these shabby streets; lean, starving dogs wander about; an odor of wine dregs and burnt onion seizes the throat.

  After World War I the list of îlots insalubres was expanded from six to seventeen. These included areas of Belleville, La Villette, Picpus, Glacière, Plaisance, and Les Épinettes (a neighborhood in the Seventeenth, west of Montmartre and south of Clichy), and a major portion of the most ancient part of the Fifth, a quartier once called Saint-Séverin, which comprised the area around Saint-Julien-le-Pauvre, directly across the river from Notre-Dame, and a large swath that more or less corresponds to the Lettrists’ Continent Contrescarpe. Those places did not escape Cain’s eye. He gained access to an old house on Rue Maître-Albert (formerly Rue Perdue, Lost Street), half a block from the Seine:

  After climbing a rotting outdoor staircase to the third story, we enter the hovel, where an acrid odor seizes us by the throat. The present tenant is a dealer in cigarette butts collected on the public street. After frittering his merchandise he lays it out for drying on the bed, the chest of drawers, the floor, and also the small Louis XVI mantelpiece, which is still intact … After exiting that sad house we enter number 15, next door, where a fruit vendor has oddly set up shop in a courtyard indicated on the Turgot map of 1739 … Nearby, under the severe countenance of an old hôtel dating back to Louis XIV, a coffee vendor has disposed on trestles her stove, her bowls, and her mound of sugar cubes.

  Such refined and informed observations of the slums eventually laid the ground for the urban renewal practice that was to succeed outright Haussmannization, an operation named, with a medical flavor, curetage urbain. This consisted in essence of retaining the façades of the buildings along a street while gutting their interiors, presumably salvaging any Louis XVI mantelpieces that might come along. Anglophones may be more familiar with the term façadisme, although that is retail where curetage urbain is wholesale.

  How these once-fashionable neighborhoods—with their hôtels, their massive doorways, their courtyards, their friezes and cornices and architraves, their mantelpieces and balusters and bas-reliefs—wound up in the hands of the rabble is a complex tale having principally to do with fashion. The Marais in the sixteenth century was dominated by immense domains: complexes of buildings nearly village-like in their amplitude and surrounded by farmland. They included the Temple, the motherhouse of the Knights Templar, the semimystical military order founded by crusaders in Jerusalem in the twelfth century; and a few significant holdings by royal personages. When those estates were broken up, mostly in the seventeenth century, for a variety of reasons (although the Templar order had been dissolved by the pope in the early fourteenth century, the domain endured in other hands, and its central edifice stood until it was demolished by order of Napoléon in 1808), the aristocracy vied with one another to buy the lots and erect their own hôtels. The Marais then became a suburb of the nobility, especially after Henry IV ordered construction of Place Royale, later Place des Vosges, in 1605. The grandeur of the square is still very evident; the figure it must have cut as the formal centerpiece of the aspirational ancestor of every gated community in the world can only be surmised. Even so, its arcades sheltered not only purveyors of silk brocades and other accoutrements of the rich, but also gambling dens and numerous prostitutes.

  The hôtel particulier on Rue de Charonne where the inventor Jacques de Vaucanson died in 1782, seen here circa 1910

  Rue des Francs-Bourgeois, circa 1910

  The idyll of the Marais as home of the elite was to last little more than a century. At the start of the eighteenth, the end of the reign of Louis XIV, the more adventurous or misanthropic or ultrafashionable of the nobles began to move out to the greener pastures of Saint-Honoré, near the Louvre, or Saint-Germain, across the river from it. The movement toward the west soon became inexorable, sweeping along any aristo with the slightest interest in social standing. Well before the revolution the Marais had already become the province of the irrelevant and reactionary. Balzac consistently housed his stubborn solitaries and ruined gentility there. It could only tumble further. Much the same sort of hegira consumed the eastern side of the Left Bank, which in any case was much more socially mixed. Before very long both areas had not merely been scorned by the upper class; the dictate of fashion was so terrible and absolute that they had been relegated to housing some of the most concentrated misery in the city.

  The misery gradually faded from view over the decades, especially after the Depression and two wars reduced much of the city to an indigence that differed from one quartier to another mostly in its presentation: threadbare respectability, familial making-do, cultured scavenging, black market chicanery, or end-of-the-line dissipation. The Marais became a sort of inhabited ruin, its architectural splendors barely noticed by anyone but the odd specialist aesthete, to whom Richard Cobb posed the question of “what historical interest, and the fascinating jumble of ancient, narrow-framed plaster houses, may mean in terms of human misery to their inhabitants, often crowded a whole family to a room. The people who live in the rue Volta, the only street in Paris with fifteenth-century half-timbered houses, would not feel themselves particularly privileged.” It was a dank, gray place, enlivened only by the shredded movie posters glued to its historic walls, its houses barely heated in winter, with primeval plumbing that usually amounted to a water pump at one end of each floor, adjacent to the communal Turkish toilet, if that utility had been moved in from the courtyard; baths were taken at the neighborhood bains-douches, assuming they were taken at all. Some historically significant buildings had already been gutted by entropy and landlord neglect—there were hôtels in which you could see the sky from the ground floor—and were more likely to be tenanted by rats and pigeons than by humans. For the people who lived in the sector, wartime privation very often lasted until 1965 or 1970, when they were evicted in favor of renovations. The last thing that would have occurred to those with the power to do something about it would have been to repair the houses for the benefit of those who lived in them.

  Hôtel de Sens, Rue du Figuier, about 1867

  Across the river, the area stretching from Quai de Montebello to Place Maubert, up Rue de la Montagne-Sainte-Geneviève and down Rue Mouffetard had over the decades become primarily known for its large, mostly unsheltered population of chronic alcoholics; it was the Bowery of Paris, you might say. It was quite a bit livelier than the Marais, if not always happier. During the Occupation the poet and painter Jacques Yonnet met an ancient bum called Danse-Toujours who traced a rectangle for him on a map, one end of it seeming to follow the contours of Philippe-Auguste’s thirteenth-century wall. “‘There’s the circuit,’ he said. ‘Inside it everything is serious.’” He went on: “Listen: every seven years there’s a pitched battle or a bloodletting, and not just any little scratch; it’s got to be serious and it’s got to flow. And every eleven years—it’s a fact, you can look it up—there has to be a murder, loss of life. There has to be at least one guy who winds up dead. It’s the street, the place itself that demands it.”

  Clochards on Place Maubert, 1930s

  It was not left to elderly drunks alone to suspect predestination or the malign influence of the genius loci. The area may well have been the ancestral home of the clochard. Place de la Contrescarpe, for example, had been established from time immemorial as neutral ground where the bums from Place Maubert (la Maub’, as they called it) could parley with those from Saint-Médard without friction, a division of territory that suggests a dynamic somewhat more entrenched
than is usually the case with vagrants. Privat d’Anglemont, writing of the 1840s, well before Haussmann, noted that the city had “abandoned” the quartier centuries before, and observed that “whenever the municipal hammer, as it demolishes old neighborhoods to make new streets, drives away the vagabonds and beggars from a spot, they go seek refuge on the Montagne Sainte-Geneviève.”

  Rue de la Montagne-Sainte-Geneviève, circa 1910

  Even more than in the Marais, the sheer age of the neighborhood, its housing stock and traditions, gave the most improvised and ephemeral matters a feeling of deep pedigree and imbued the area with the sense that it was another city altogether, a counter-Paris with its own counter-history, indifferent to such details of the wider world as war or politics. In his great memoir Paris insolite, Jean-Paul Clébert describes the dives of Rue Maître-Albert in the late 1940s or early ’50s, perhaps located in the same houses visited by Georges Cain half a century earlier:

  The saloons of the Maubert aren’t the three modern bars that draw the rubes and the concierges of adjacent houses, the nightwatchmen and the sleepwalkers who go slumming in Rue des Anglais, but rather the kitchens of Rue Maître-Albert, that doglegged alley avoided by strangers, which are invisible from the street and are entered from the side, by way of the common hall, and you have to push open a door at random, the first one you come to, only to fall a step down into a room as big as a henhouse, the whole family assembled there, the counter barely wide enough for a couple of lovers, the table with its oilcloth cover on which the boss’s wife is chopping vegetables for soup or feeding their youngest, and the double row of five bottles, wine and apéritifs including raki, which constitute their entire stock. There are more kids than customers. And if it happens that you’re drinking with your ragpicker pal you whistled down to and who takes the occasion of knocking one back to get his liter bottle filled up for the night, the boss inevitably puts it off, and when it comes time to pay, you haul out the coin, twenty- or forty- or ten-sou pieces, a pinch will do and never mind about the francs. For that price you have another, and it’s black night when you come out, knocking your head on the ceiling beam, it’s too late to go on to the next, which has already locked up, and the street is empty. The drinking goes on upstairs. You go up to have a look. And wind up having a quick fuck with the lady next door. Because sometimes it comes to that.

  It will not come as a surprise that today Rue Maître-Albert presents a succession of demure white façades. The medieval city lives on in maybe a doorway here, a pedestal there, as well as on the map—that dogleg, the local narrowness of streets, the overall seeming randomness of layout.

  Although the layout and the corresponding narrowness are obsolete by the standards of contemporary efficiency and its corresponding technology, that obsolescence is the very thing that accords it its picturesque charm, makes it a desirable place to live for prosperous and cultured Parisians. The city today is as divided on the matter of the picturesque versus the efficient as it was a century and a half ago. It should not be forgotten that among Haussmann’s enemies were thoroughgoing reactionaries who didn’t give a toss about the inhabitants of Arcis or the Cité or their misery but who wanted to hold on to the old buildings because they were remnants of the past and the past was perforce glorious. Today the Haussmanns want to erect as many high-rises as possible within the city limits—there are probably fewer of them than in any other major city on the planet, barring special cases such as Venice—while their enemies include people eager to apply the curette to whatever remains of the unreconstructed past, saving its shell for romantic delectation.

  Place Maubert on the Turgot map of 1739. Rue Perdue, later Rue Maître-Albert, is the second street up from the bottom at left.

  An illustration by Théophile Steinlen for Dans la rue, vol. 1, by Aristide Bruant, 1889

  Preservation may be better than amnesia, but certain apparently permanent and absolute changes in the human use of the world have forever altered the nature of city dwelling. One of these is the automobile, the ever-increasing traffic of which even Haussmann’s boulevards are ill equipped to sustain. The older neighborhoods, meanwhile, might as well be so many cliffside villages in the Dolomites, planned for nothing bigger than a donkey. The American novelist Elliot Paul, who for several decades on and off lived on Rue de la Huchette, in the Fifth, not far from Saint-Julien-le-Pauvre, observed the daily employment of his street in the 1920s:

  Most of the traffic moved through the little street in an easterly direction, entering from place Saint-Michel. This consisted mainly of delivery wagons, make-shift vehicles propelled by pedaling boys, pushcarts of itinerant vendors, knife-grinders, a herd of milch-goats and the neighborhood pedestrians. The residents could sit in doorways or on curbstones, stroll up and down the middle of the way, and use the street as a communal front yard, in daylight hours or in the evening, without risk of life and limb from careening taxis.

  Elements of this scene may have persisted here and there as late as the 1970s, but they will very likely never be seen again.

  4

  Zone

  Paris was a fortified city from at least around 1200, when Philippe-Auguste’s wall was erected (there may well have been earlier, unrecorded walls), until 1670, when Louis XIV, in the fullness of his royal self-confidence, decided to tear down the fortifications and lay boulevards in their place. The word itself reflects this step, since boulevard derives from the same root as bulwark. Before a century had elapsed, however, the open-city plan had revealed its weakness. The lack of a wall made it difficult to enforce collection of the octroi, the much-hated tax levied upon goods entering the city for immediate local consumption, wine in particular. To that end the Farmers-General (who were not farmers but rich and powerful tax collectors), beginning in 1785, built a new wall that had no military purpose, was only about ten feet high, and was meant to be breached by sixty tollgates. Only fifty-four were built, because the architect was the visionary Claude-Nicolas Ledoux, whose vivid if rather supererogatory propylaea were ridiculously expensive to build.*

  The wall did not prevent smugglers from tunneling beneath it, nor did the decree stipulating that nothing could be built within three hundred feet of the wall on the far side preclude a lively, free-flowing commerce flourishing in guinguettes (a name given to slap-up wineshops, generally outdoor and rusticated) as close to the boundary as was practicable. The octroi, which lasted until 1943, during the Occupation, and was formally repealed after the war, created a semipermanent black market economy, with housewives purchasing their soap and salt and flour in the banlieue, where such things were considerably cheaper, and sneaking through the contraband dissimulated in heaps of rags and the like. As with so many laws of its type, the octroi pushed masses of otherwise blameless citizens to petty criminality, and arguably did much to foster and perpetuate the famously defiant attitude of the Parisian proletariat with regard to the constabulary and its servants.

  The barrière Montmartre, future site of Place Pigalle, in 1855

  “On more than one occasion, as he left the masked ball, M. de ** was arrested by the guards.” Illustration by J. J. Grandville, from Scènes de la vie publique et privée des animaux, 1842

  The tollgates, known as barrières, remained functioning long after many of their Ledoux structures had been demolished by the revolutionary masses. On the Left Bank, where construction south of the Latin Quarter and Saint-Germain was still haphazard at best in the early nineteenth century, the barrières were incongruous outposts of officialdom in the depopulated and anarchic wilderness. Victor Hugo, writing of the 1820s, noted that

  Forty years ago, the solitary walker who ventured into the wasteland of the Salpêtrière and descended the boulevard toward the Barrière d’Italie came upon places where you could say that Paris had disappeared. It wasn’t empty, since there were passersby; it wasn’t the countryside, since there were houses and streets; it wasn’t a city, since the streets had ruts where grass grew, as on rural turnpikes; it wasn’t
a village, since the houses were too tall. What was it, then? It was an inhabited location where there was nobody, it was a deserted place where there was somebody; it was a boulevard in the big city, a street in Paris, that was wilder at night than a forest, gloomier in daylight than a graveyard.

  The southern barrières became a byword for menace, obscurity, obscure menace. The term rôdeur de barrières (rôdeur means “prowler”) came to designate a sort of urban highwayman, leaping out from behind the vegetation to accost passersby and relieve them of their negotiable goods, and it remained in the language as a generalized epithet long after urbanization had rendered this sort of banditry impracticable. Various sensational murders occurred around the barrières, with psychopaths taking advantage of the absence of potential eyewitnesses to kill by chance and at random. In the Parisian imaginary, place-names such as Glacière, Grenelle, Montsouris, even Montparnasse, and perhaps especially the Tombe-Issoire (an ancient if murky sepulchral title, now attached to a long, nondescript street in the Fourteenth, coincidentally near the Catacombs) became a sort of in partibus infidelium, a vague landscape of gnarled trees and blasted heaths, populated by beings whose heads grew below their shoulders.