by Luc Sante
He turned the corner onto Rue du Commerce. In a bar all lit up and filled with mirrors, people were listening to a phonograph: regular folks, soldiers and housemaids, Japanese and Moroccan workmen in European dress … There were crowds everywhere, and whenever the streetcars that scraped the sidewalks passed by with the sudden rumble of their wheels and the ringing of their bell, every sort of men and women, some with babes in arms, jumped back quickly … The men around him mostly shepherded women and young bareheaded girls, they themselves showing ravaged faces under their caps. There were many foreigners in the throng: swarthy Arabs, Chinese, Italians with little black mustaches, filthy Spaniards, Russians with red lashless eyelids, Germans, fat Belgians …
All those people had become or were in the process of becoming Parisians. They were perhaps engaged in sharpening their repartee, straining against their existential confines, falling prey to romance.
6
Archipelago
The lives of the poor were defined and delimited by the institutions that marked, like an enormous clock, every stage in their lives. Those were the landmarks of the people. In the early nineteenth century, when country cousins came to visit, they would be shown Les Halles, Place de Grève (the symbolic locus of government, primarily because of its function as the site of public executions), hospitals, cemeteries, and the Morgue. Balzac, who did not manage to devote a novel to the lives of the poor in his immense Human Comedy, did intend one, although he left only a five-page fragment; it was to be called The Hospital and the People. People’s lives turned around the hospital, not only because the poor were more vulnerable to disease and injury (poor diets, thin clothes, inadequate shelter, hazardous occupations, street crime), but because those who were better off were attended: by courtiers, servants, employees, functionaries. Their doctor was most likely a social acquaintance; he lived nearby and would come over at once when summoned by a servant. The poor, on the other hand, had no choice but to attend themselves.
A century ago the novelist Lucien Descaves took an inventory of the eastern end of the Fourteenth Arrondissement, where he found
a long series of walls behind which misery and suffering are relegated, as in contiguous lazarettos. The whole neighborhood, in fact, is covered with them. Every misfortune has its block, where it is immured and, as it were, sampled. It is an archipelago of miseries. It seizes people when they are born and does not let go until they die, replete with the illusion that they have lived. Their destinies are inscribed within a triangle which ineluctably draws them back. At its top is the charity refuge for children; at its base is Cochin Hospital, the Santé prison, Sainte-Anne asylum; on one of its sides is the Ricord gate [of Cochin] and the lying-in hospital; on the other, the former place of execution … There’s not far to go and no chance of straying; all those buildings intercommunicate.
For as many as a thousand years the principal hospital in Paris was the Hôtel-Dieu, which tradition supposes was founded in 651, although hard evidence for its existence begins only in 829. Long before the construction of Notre-Dame it was the signal institution on Île de la Cité, where it remains (although it was moved to the north side of the island under Haussmann). Periodically over the centuries smaller hospitals founded by some religious order or other would crop up, prove inadequate, and close within a few decades. Conditions everywhere were appalling; overcrowding was inevitable; medicine was primitive; hospitals often seemed to exist less to alleviate the sufferings of the afflicted than to minimize contagion—they were warehouses of misery. And they could not, of course, cope at all with the epidemics that would wash like waves over the population at unpredictable intervals, especially in the premodern world.
The Mont-de-Piété, the state-run pawnshop, on Rue Servan, circa 1900
The Plague, which first attacked in 1348, kept striking until the middle of the seventeenth century. Leprosy had more or less disappeared by the end of the Middle Ages, but then syphilis arrived from the New World and sowed destruction in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. Smallpox and influenza recurred until well into the twentieth. Measles and whooping cough, now thought of as easily preventable childhood diseases, took a significant toll in the nineteenth century, as did diphtheria and typhoid fever until sanitary conditions improved. Tuberculosis has not yet stopped in our own age, and now there is AIDS.
The Morgue. Engraving by Charles Meryon, 1854
The nineteenth century was marked above all by the five outbreaks of cholera, in 1832, 1849, 1865, 1873, and 1884; a sixth in 1892 was contained before it could cause much damage, after which the reign of the disease was finally over. The first one, which claimed 18,402 lives over the course of two months, was especially terrifying. The first reported victim was a porter on Rue des Lombards, and the outbreak spread quickly through the parishes of Saint-Merri and Sainte-Avoye, followed by the Cité and beyond. It was widely noted that the victims were all from the lower classes, although the conclusions we might draw from this (concerning sanitation, for example) were not available to the inhabitants of that time. The press reported that the disease was not believed to be contagious. It was also thought that death was instantaneous. In his Mémoires d’outre-tombe, Chateaubriand describes a worker raising his glass to cholera, then dropping stone dead when he set it down. The most common explanations hovered around imputations of witchcraft. The panic was certainly immediate. “Not only did the murder rate double, but the mob gave itself over to massacres: unfortunate passersby, deemed solely on the basis of their ugliness to be guilty of spreading the disease by poisoning fountains and food stocks, were murdered on street corners or squares or tossed into the Seine.” The epidemic inevitably exacerbated class tensions. A worker was quoted as alleging that mass rubouts of potential insurgents were occurring in the prisons, on the pretext that these people were responsible for the epidemic. It was of course no coincidence that the streets where the disease first broke out in March were the very same ones where revolt (the brief uprising employed by Hugo as backdrop for the climax of Les misérables) broke out in June.
“Here comes cholera!” Illustration by Adolphe Willette, from Le Chat Noir, 1887
Cholera is caused by a bacterium and usually transmitted by water from a contaminated source. Everyone who drinks from that source is susceptible, although people who are already malnourished will be more susceptible still. Those facts were not known then; the cholera bacterium was not isolated until 1854, and its effects weren’t widely recognized until the 1880s. There seemed to be a sense that infected water was involved—those poisoned fountains—but nobody would have had any idea that the principal cause of death is dehydration. The chief symptom is profuse if painless watery diarrhea, which might have passed unnoticed amid the general unsanitary conditions of the day. Other symptoms (muscle cramps, vomiting, chapped skin) might not have seemed especially unusual or alarming, either. People just died, in large numbers, at least 60 percent of those infected. Members of the other classes simply looked on helplessly, if they cared at all.
A tapis-franc. Illustration by José Belon for Paris anecdote, by Privat d’Anglemont, 1885 edition
Maybe they aestheticized the disaster. The English literary scholar Enid Starkie, biographer of Baudelaire and Rimbaud, sketches an arresting scene:
… suddenly, in the middle of the Carnival, just as if it had flown into the city hidden under the wings of spring, the plague swept across the Channel and lit on care-free Paris. A harlequin felt an icy hand suddenly clutch at his legs, creep up his body, paralysing his limbs. He tore off his mask in agony and the onlookers saw that his face had already turned purple. Next the whole company of pierrots were struck down by the cholera as they danced. They were carried from the ballroom to the Hôtel-Dieu, thence immediately to the morgue, and they were buried in their fancy dress, with the powder and paint not washed from their faces.
Never mind that those don’t sound like the symptoms of cholera. Starkie seems to have based her account on the Journal intime of Antoin
e Fontaney, a minor poet who himself died of tuberculosis at thirty-four a few years later (and whose journal wasn’t published until 1925). Her point is that the cholera outbreak nourished a cult of morbidity already festering among the young Romantics. Fontaney describes visits to cemeteries to take in the mass burials, a visit with Prosper Mérimée to the Hôtel-Dieu to gaze upon the cadavers, a soirée at Victor Hugo’s at which Franz Liszt played Beethoven’s Funeral March, a fantasy in which the resurrected dead strode through Paris in their shrouds to the sound of the music. “And Darkness and Decay and the Red Death held illimitable dominion over all” (although Poe wrote those words only ten years later). Those Romantics were gripped by mingled dread and awe, and distanced those emotions by converting them into an exquisitely putrescent aesthetic frisson—the sublime, the heights as measured from the abyss. Was the spectacle an incarnate metaphor that stood in for the scourges of their own class, but safely distant? Would they have been able to dramatize thus if they or their intimates had been at risk? Or maybe we insufficiently credit their lack of irony.
Those Romantics were bohemians, which is to say that they were trying to evade the strictures of class, whichever one they came from. Some of them lived in hovels, and some of them lived in the ruins of the ancien régime—camped out in abandoned hôtels particuliers with one or two exquisite pieces of furniture and hardly any other possessions, for example. The poor did not have those sorts of options. They lived in miserable furnished rooms for which they were charged as much as decent ones cost in other parts of town. Or else they lived in flophouses—ICI ON LOGE À LA NUIT—where thirty sous would get you a meagerly furnished private room with sheets on the bed, 10 sous a cot in a dormitory, and two sous a spot on the floor, the only further amenity being the ropes strung in a grid to separate the flops from one another. Later on in the century, when space was at a higher premium, the ropes became supports for the sleepers’ arms and heads—they slept sitting—and the tension was loosened at first light, waking the clientele by sending them sprawling. If the tenants missed a payment, their goods were seized and sold by the proprietor. Aside from the filth, the noise, the fights, the bugs, what also made it hard to get a decent night’s sleep was the near-constant presence of the police, who were always shining lanterns into faces in search of some fugitive or other.
“Lodging for the night,” 1840s
Scenes from the homeless shelter Asile Fradin, 1893
People also lived in their workplaces. Ragpickers, for example, were packed by the dozen into the same rooms, airless and lightless, that were employed for washing rags. Unsurprisingly their death rate from cholera was three times the city average. But they also lived in somewhat more reasonable circumstances if they were lucky, such as Cité Doré, which was effectively a self-governing community, where sheds were laid out in avenues and streets and squares like a miniature of the city, where health was a priority and drunks and violence were dealt with peremptorily. There a week’s rent was usually equivalent to a day’s wage, and a missed payment was met not with eviction but with the removal of the shed door, in winter as in summer, until the matter was rectified. According to Privat d’Anglemont, Cité Doré was “far away, at the end of an inconceivable faubourg, farther than Japan, more unknown than the interior of Africa, in a neighborhood no one has ever passed through”—actually it lay between the Jardin des Plantes and the Gare d’Orléans (now the Gare d’Austerlitz)—and he describes it as “incredible, incomparable, strange, awful, charming, distressing, admirable.”
Hôtel du Compas-d’Or, Rue Montorgeuil. Photograph by H. Stresser, circa 1900
In the mid-nineteenth century there were other cités, tucked into little-trafficked parts of the outer arrondissements, in which ragpickers, everywhere the lowest of the low, banded together and kept one another from sliding into the misery, disease, alcoholism, and violence that marked most lives in slums such as the Montagne Sainte-Geneviève, to which most of them were consigned. A few cités were cooperative enterprises, others were more authoritarian. Cité Foucault, one of the latter, was also known as Cité de la Femme en Culotte: of the “woman in trousers.” Sophie Foucault, cousin of one of Napoléon’s field marshals and daughter of a businessman who lost everything, was well educated but suddenly confronted with the need to make a living. She elected to become a compositor in a print shop, a difficult job both physically and intellectually, since it involved correcting manuscripts on the fly while setting them in print. Observing that women were paid half as much as men, she decided to pass as a man despite the fact that she was small and delicate. By the time her gender was exposed she had saved enough money to buy a tract of land off Boulevard de Clichy, where she erected her cité. She ran the place with a firm hand and was beloved of all, it was said, continuing in male drag for the rest of her life—its end date is unrecorded, as is the ultimate fate of the cité, which seems to have been situated in or near the Petite-Pologne slum, razed by Haussmann.
A cour des miracles on Rue du Caire. Engraving by Célestin Nanteuil, 1840s
The autonomous cité had its antecedent in the cour des miracles, a peculiar institution dating back at least to the Middle Ages and perhaps earlier. Hugo describes it in Notre-Dame de Paris as
a sewer from which flowed out every morning and to which flowed back every night that stream of vice, beggary, and vagrancy that always floods the streets of the capital; a monstrous beehive to which all the hornets of the social order returned in the evening with their plunder … an immense changing room for all the players in that eternal comedy which theft, prostitution, and murder enact on the streets of Paris.
A cour des miracles was a cluster of houses that by some mix of tradition, common accord, and benign neglect was deemed off-limits to the law and, as lore has it, where a sort of permanent feast of misrule persisted. The name derives from the fact that miracles were a daily occurrence there—the blind could see, the hunchbacked stood straight, the clubfooted ran and danced, leprous skin became clear and unblemished—once their disguises had been put away for the night. The inhabitants were generally known as gueux or argotiers, the latter with reference to the fact that they spoke a secret language known only to them, at least as of the fifteenth century, when François Villon made use of it in his poems; its earliest vocabulary derives from the language of the Roma. The intricate social structure is illustrated by the abundance of names the gueux had for their highly specific professions: rifodés posed as families (they were usually unrelated) and begged in the streets, holding out a certificate that claimed their house had been destroyed by “fire from the sky”; hubains presented a document stating that Saint Hubert had cured them of rabies contracted by a dog bite; coquillards displayed seashells as proof that they had lately returned from a pilgrimage to Santiago de Compostela in Spain; sabouleux were fake epileptics; piètres were fake amputees; francs-mitoux were fake lepers; capons were gambling shills; and so on. They were ruled by an elected chief called the King of Thunes, or Grand-Coësre, who carried a cat-o’-nine-tails and whose banner was a dead dog impaled on a pitchfork. Their relationship with the church was hand in glove: fake lepers would claim to have been cured by a certain statue or relic; donations from the devout would pour into the abbey; the monks would share the proceeds with the gueux.
Gueux having relieved themselves of the constraints that made them appear crippled, blind, or with amputations. Illustration from the seventeenth century
The former office of Jacques Hébert’s revolutionary newspaper Le Père Duchesne, once part of the cour des miracles. Photograph circa 1900
Nineteenth-century chroniclers couldn’t agree on how the cours des miracles had been established in the first place: was it by right of asylum, or through an understanding with the corporation of the argotiers the way the city maintained compacts with other guilds, or was it simply a matter of a long-standing blind eye? In any case, there were as many as a dozen of them between the thirteenth and eighteenth centuries, all then located on
the far fringes of the city and not easily accessible. The only one that lasted up to the revolution was in the Sentier, off what is now Rue du Caire—very much in the center by then, although it had once abutted the wall built by Charles V and remained protected by a labyrinthine approach through alleys and culs-de-sac and down a long, rough, crooked incline. The seventeenth-century historian Henri Sauval described
a mud house, half-buried and falling over from age and rot, not four square fathoms [i.e., 576 square feet] in size, which nevertheless sheltered more than fifty households loaded down with an infinite number of children legitimate, illegitimate, or stolen. I’m told that this house and the others contain overall some five hundred large families piled atop one another. As large as the courtyard is now, it was once much larger, and was surrounded on all sides by low, sunken, dark, shapeless dwellings made of dirt and mud and filled with the evil poor.
During the revolution it was taken over by ironmongers’ workshops and the office of Le Père Duchesne, Jacques Hébert’s scabrous newspaper. The era of the cour des miracles was officially over, although there were survivals of a sort. Privat d’Anglemont describes the cloister of Saint-Jean-de-Latran, across from the Collège de France. The church itself, destroyed during the revolution, had long offered asylum to the bankrupt and debt-ridden, to forgers and libelers and perjurers and refractory apprentices. As late as the 1840s the right of asylum was apparently still in effect in the ruins, with its four wings laid out in the sign of the cross (the Father, the Son, the Holy Ghost, and the Amen), its gardens, and its “innumerable quantity of houses—no, we’re wrong, it is a single house with many staircases, behind which lurk the sort of ignoble, sordid, stinking cesspools that are decorated with the term ‘courtyard.’” It gave shelter to a population that owed fealty “much more to the Kingdom of Bohemia and the Egyptian Empire than to the Republic.” That is to say, its inhabitants included buskers, street singers, sword swallowers, egg balancers, acrobats, tooth pullers, and fire eaters.