The Other Paris

by Luc Sante

  The dog barber: “The poor dear animal—such patience!” Illustration by Honoré Daumier, from Le Charivari, 1842

  More than likely its other tenants included practitioners of the short con, but the ones Privat lists are all trying for an honest living, however improvised. There were rag washers, doll dressers, makers of matches, of toy boxes, of toy parachutes, people who cut up rabbit fur to make felt, women who put wicks in lanterns, who unglued the silk of men’s hats, who made funeral wreaths from hoof scrapings, people who abridged famous plays for use in puppet theaters. The jobs that people invented for themselves were one of Privat’s preoccupations, and he collected hundreds of examples from all over the city. Madame Thibaudeau swept jewelers’ shops for no pay so that she could recuperate gold dust. Madame Vanard, widow of a perfumer, was a zesteuse: she picked up lemon rinds from the stalls of limonadiers and sold the zest to makers of Curaçao, syrups, and essences. Old Monsieur Beaufils bought nightingales, canaries, and finches and, after educating them in song for six to eight weeks, resold them for four times what he paid. The Meurt-de-Soif family—the name, apparently real, means “dying of thirst”—bought old suits, turned them inside out, restitched them, and resold them.

  “Shut up when I’m singing, you stupid blackbird!” Illustration by J. J. Grandville, from Les métamorphoses du jour, 1829

  Jacques Simon was awarded two goats by the government as a premium when his wife gave birth to triplets after previously producing twins. The mother and babies then died, but the goats multiplied, and Simon became a berger en chambre (an indoor shepherd), with a flock of fifty-two in a sixth-floor walk-up on Rue de l’Écosse. He sold milk from goats that were fed individual herb-based diets aimed at specific maladies the milk was intended to cure. Mademoiselle Rose, who inherited the job from her mother, was an ant farmer; she sold the eggs to pharmacists and to the Jardin des Plantes for pheasant chow. Monsieur Salier sold maggots. Mathieu Leblanc sold bespoke verses for all occasions. Monsieur Jaeglé wrote little pocket guides to the law for the use of various professions (porters, laborers, concierges, etc.). Monsieur Auguste collected stray legal papers and altered them to suit for people seeking admission to the courts of justice, which required something stamped and initialed. Mère Moskow rented out clothes; a shirt cost twenty centimes a week.

  The last woman employed as a public letter-writer, on the steps of the mairie of the Eighteenth Arrondissement, Montmartre, circa 1910

  There were men with noble titles rendered meaningless by the revolution but that nevertheless held snob appeal; some of these men made a living acknowledging others’ bastard children—but Privat mentions one who unexpectedly inherited a fortune and promptly lost it all to his elected heirs. A détripé was a professional witness, who would collect information at the scene of a crime and become the event’s leading expert, so that the court would have no choice but to hire him. A réveilleuse—always a woman, apparently—was in charge of waking others whose jobs demanded an early rise, especially at Les Halles. An ange gardien was engaged by upscale wineshops and cabarets to walk drunks home. A riboui remade shoes, extending their lives by only about a week (the product was dubbed dix-huit, “eighteen,” a pun on deux fois neuf, which can mean “twice new” or “twice nine”).

  “We passed the shop of a blacksmith who had become a cobbler.” Illustration by J. J. Grandville, from Scènes de la vie publique et privée des animaux, 1842

  Les Halles employed many hundreds, from the famous forts (strongmen, who wore distinctive sombreros and hoisted enormous baskets of produce) to people with very specific occupations: egg candlers, builders of vegetable pyramids, fatteners of pigeons, fish stall display artists, breakers of mutton heads to extract the brains and the tongue (whose workplace was called a massacre), people who flattened ducks’ breastbones with a rod to make them look plumper. There were many whose jobs involved some sort of counterfeiting: people who collected ham bones and jammed them into sundry cuts of meat, people who sprayed mouthfuls of fish oil on the surface of a bouillon to make it look fattier, people who painted turkey feet with varnish to disguise the progressive lightening in color that marks the days elapsed since death, and the confectioners of cocks’ combs (which were used in ragouts or as trimming) from beef, mutton, or veal palates. One of these told Privat that all combs are irregular: “Look at mine, by contrast. If the roosters could see them they’d all die of envy. See how mine are notched, carved, proportioned—they are perfect!”

  When it came to food, not much went to waste. Bones were cycled four times over: from butchers to restaurants to vendors of cheap soup to gargotiers, who peddled hot water colored brown with carrots, burned onions, and caramel, and improved with a misting of fish oil. A boulanger en vieux (which might be translated as “secondhand baker”) collected stale bread, which could be sold as crumbs or for feeding animals; one of them allegedly figured out a way to restore the crumbs to flour, from which he made gingerbread for sale in the streets. Restaurant dishwashers could make a decent living selling not only bones and vegetable peels for various uses but also the remains on diners’ plates. These were collected by entrepreneurs called bijoutiers (jewelers), who used them to concoct a slumgullion, called arlequin (motley) or hasard de la fourchette (luck of the fork), that remained standard fare in the cheapest hash houses until around the middle of the twentieth century. There were more purely sinister ways of extending the food supply, of course, such as the adulteration of bread, which might involve alum, boron, copper sulfate (a.k.a. blue vitriol), carbonate of magnesium, carbonate of ammonia, carbonate of potassium, chalk, plaster, clay, or alabaster. In the 1870s it was estimated that forty thousand Parisians did not eat every day, “but even when they do not dine they all take their coffee, which gives them strength.”

  Porters, known as forts (strongmen), at Les Halles, circa 1900

  Recycling was fundamental to the economy, and there had always been people who carved out their own particular niches, such as the billboard stripper observed by Restif de La Bretonne before the revolution, who waited until the date of a performance had passed to collect all the playbills posted to the walls, selling individual bills by weight to the grocer and those that were stuck together to the cardboard maker, and used as fuel the ones too filthy for resale. Place Maubert, from the late nineteenth century until the 1960s the domain of the clochard, was the center of the trade in secondhand tobacco, of which there were two grades: coarse, gleaned from cigar ends and pipe scrapings, and fine, twice as expensive, collected from cigarette butts. While the very poor might sometimes hunt and eat cats, the moderately poor were known to keep cats as pets. As soon as one died, though, its keepers skinned it, salted down its hide, and sold it to a maker of cat’s-fur mittens, which as late as the 1930s were sold in pharmacies and bought by Parisians whose rooms had no heat, and who rubbed themselves with the mittens in winter to stay warm.

  “He’s hungry, he claims—the sloth. I’m hungry, too, but I take the trouble to go dine.” Illustration by Gavarni from Baliverneries parisiennes, 1846–47

  A soup vendor in Les Halles, circa 1910

  Parisians long maintained a folkloric appreciation of their street trades, which were celebrated in such popular art media as broadsides, chinaware, and eventually postcards. The sidewalks and center strip of the Boulevard du Crime featured, in addition to its wrestlers, acrobats, and magicians, a profusion of vendors: of water, eggs, greens, oysters, handkerchiefs, underwear, English pears, herbal teas, matches, rags, roasted chestnuts, sausages, fried potatoes, apples, fowl both living and cooked, and coconut water in the summer and, in the winter, oranges and mottes, which were bricks of compressed coal dust that burned without flames—just smoke, which made them the fuel of the poor. Along the banks of the Seine there were dog barbers, sailors’ barbers, mattress carders, fish bait vendors, washerwomen, stevedores, and sand carriers and dray loaders and barrel rollers for hire. On Maubert there were sock darners, birdseed vendors, public writers, confectors of
sugar pipes and little windmills with feathers as blades, gluers of paper bags and cones for grocers, and people who made the rounds trying to sell dubious objects they’d stolen or recovered from the trash. In courtyards and portes-cochères people sold newspapers, frites, and coffee. Everywhere there were buskers, acrobats, contortionists, street dentists, street jewelers, weight lifters, hurdy-gurdy players, snake handlers, flower girls, old-clothes dealers, bill posters, lamplighters, glaziers, china menders, shoe repairers, knife grinders, silver polishers, window washers, carters and porters for hire, chimney sweeps, and vendors of ink, fish, potatoes, herbs, baskets, umbrellas, shoelaces, pencils, whips, rabbit pelts, licorice water, and lemon juice.

  A news hawker. Illustration by J. J. Grandville, from Les Français peints par eux-mêmes, 1840–42

  Aside from those with marketable skills, many of these people were generally classed as camelots. The term means “hawker” or “peddler,” but in the eyes of a late nineteenth-century police commissioner, a camelot was “by turns a pickpocket, a pimp, a three-card monte operator, an obscure informer for the Sûreté … His getup is grotesquely affected: a wide-brimmed soft hat or a barely perceptible hat or else a silk cap with an enormously high crown; brightly colored neckerchief; tight light-colored trousers; velvet or floral-patterned waistcoat with prominent watch chain.” Certainly that avenue of enterprise attracted people who couldn’t afford leisure, lacked the connections to obtain sinecures or the inclination to join the artistic bohemia, but who demanded a certain budget of freedom in the use of their time. They corresponded to the original use of the term bohemian before it acquired artistic associations in the early nineteenth century, which referred to people who stood outside the social system and treated as porous the line between the law and the lawless. Chevalier quotes a 1913 Guide des plaisirs that takes the trouble to analyze the sorts of men who enjoy the favors of prostitutes without having to pay:

  Generally that sort is not capable of regular attendance at a job in an office or a workshop, and anyway he does not like bosses, so he tends to become a camelot or an itinerant of some sort … because he always chooses a task that will give him freedom and the open air—things of which he’s often been deprived and which he fears losing even for a day. Some only go to the racetrack, whether as mere players or as bookmakers; others are dancers, acrobats, equerries, coachmen, automobile drivers, waiters, wrestlers, boxers, etc.

  So perhaps they were jailbirds, and maybe they were independent-minded, and certainly they were unconcerned with social proprieties. They had no particular desire to establish themselves as family men or ornaments of their community. But it’s also more than likely that they were just following a path laid out for them by society since childhood. In them you can detect the features of Gavroche, all grown up:

  He doesn’t eat every day, but he goes to the show every night, if he feels like it. He doesn’t have a shirt on his back, or shoes on his feet, or a roof over his head; he’s like the flies of the air, who don’t have any of those things, either. He is seven to thirteen years old, lives in packs, pounds the pavements, sleeps in the open, wears old pants of his father’s that fall past his heels, an old hat from some other father that comes down over his ears, a single suspender with yellow edges; he runs, snoops, sneaks, wastes time, breaks in pipes, swears like a sailor, haunts the dives, knows thieves, banters with the whores, talks slang, sings dirty songs, and hasn’t a mean bone in his body … He has his own jobs: hailing cabs, lowering the steps of carriages, collecting tolls for helping people across the street in heavy weather …

  Other children, especially the ones who had families, were conscripted into the hard-labor ranks from an early age, in factories and ateliers and on the docks. Georges Cain relishes the poetry of a notice tacked up in a courtyard: “Little hands wanted for flowers and feathers.” He avoids considering the possible consequences for those hands, such as a lifetime of degenerative arthritis. The makers of silk flowers at the beginning of the twentieth century (all of them women) were paid by the gross. The artisan who fashioned 144 chrysanthemums, highly detailed, each petal individually notched, received two francs and twenty-five centimes for fifteen hours’ labor. A very experienced worker could turn out twelve dozen forget-me-nots in two days and net two francs seventy centimes.

  A boulevard peddler, circa 1910

  “If I could read, I’d never want to read old junk like that.” Illustration by Gavarni, from D’après nature, 1857–58

  A vendor of funeral wreaths, Marché du Temple, circa 1910

  At least until the middle of the nineteenth century, a great deal of labor was not apportioned by gender. In farms and factories alike, everybody did everything, and it was liberal reformers who were indignant at the sight of women hauling and heaving. In Paris this equality of labor (which might or might not have extended to equality of pay, depending on the trade) was to some degree maintained at Les Halles, where women engaged in all but the heaviest physical work pretty much until the end of that market. There were occupations that had always been dominated by women—burnishing, for example, or the flower market trades, or a great deal of couture. But the laundresses were a case apart. They had loomed large in the Parisian imaginary at least as far back as the early eighteenth century, and they remained so well into the twentieth. “In the eyes of Parisians they were one of the most important orders: the most solid, the most active, the loudest and in many respects among the most formidable. They were powerful in many ways: in their numbers, in their organization, and in the ways they had of standing up for themselves.” Washerwomen were certainly numerous (ninety-four thousand of them, according to an 1880 count*) and they were certainly visible. Anyone walking along the Seine or the Canal Saint-Martin could see the bateaux-lavoirs docked on its banks, where long rows of women on their knees scrubbed with ashes or soap and rinsed the laundry by immersion. And they were everywhere on the streets, delivering their loads, so that they took on a certain romantic aura and became ubiquitous in nineteenth-century art, in works by Daumier, Degas, Toulouse-Lautrec, Bonnard, and many genre painters. Zola’s L’assommoir (1876–77) portrays Gervaise, who begins as a laundress and then briefly achieves bourgeois respectability, with a boutique of her own, until her profits are literally drunk up by men; at the end she is once again a laundress, but now unable to iron because of the tremors in her hands.

  Steam rose from the corners and spread a bluish veil across the room. Heavy droplets hung in the air, exuding a soapy, clammy, insipid odor; sometimes stronger whiffs of bleach predominated. At washboards on both sides of the center aisle were rows of women, their arms bare to the shoulders, their necks bare, their skirts drawn up, showing colored socks and big lace-up shoes. They beat the washing furiously, laughed, tilted backward to yell a word through the din, leaned over their tubs, rough, ungainly, brutal, as soaked as if they’d been in a downpour, their skin reddened and steaming. Around and under them ran a great stream: buckets of water transported and dumped, cold-water faucets left wide open to piss from on high, splashes from the wash stations, drips from rinsed clothing, the puddles they trudged through, leaking out in little streamlets on the slanted flagstones. And amid all the shouts, the rhythmic thumps, the murmuring sound of rain and that thunderstorm rumble stifled by the wet ceiling, the steam engine, over to the right, all white with fine dew, panted and snored unrelentingly, the dancing agitation of its flywheel seeming to guide the whole enormous racket.

  The laundry, an “enormous shed,” was probably the size of one of the larger ateliers in the city, where manufacture remained small-scale until late in the nineteenth century. Many of the workshops had their origins in the aftermath of the revolution, when they opened in “huts encrusted on the sides of former mansions” and in courtyards bought at auction by artisans who had been sansculottes. An 1866 census noted that while one out of ten employed Parisians was in “commerce,” three out of five were in “industry.” They were printers, tailors, hosiers, glaziers, tinsmiths,
gunsmiths, brewers, bakers, butchers, carpenters, joiners, metalworkers, tanners, glovers, saddlers, bookbinders, shoemakers—much the same list as a century or two earlier. Most ateliers were headed by an ouvrier-patron (the boss worked alongside his employees), and neighborhoods brought trades together in chains of supply and demand, what today would be called synergy.

  Washerwomen on the banks of the Canal Saint-Martin, circa 1910

  “Today women want / Stuff with lace on it / And real jewels in real gold, / In the Goutte-d’Or.” Illustration by Théophile Steinlen, for Aristide Bruant’s Dans la rue, vol. 2, 1889

  The Bièvre, between Rue Mouffetard and Rue Pascal, around 1860

  Until the late nineteenth century the single most industrialized part of the city lay along the course of the Bièvre—the name comes from the Old French word for “beaver”—a river that ran northeast from its source in a pond near Versailles, entered the city just west of the Porte d’Italie, and flowed into the Seine near the present Rue des Grands-Degrés, opposite Notre-Dame (later shifted over to near the Pont d’Austerlitz). Twelfth-century monks were the first to divert its course, and dug a canal to power a grain mill. It was fully canalized by 1844; it began to be covered over around 1874, the task completed mostly after the Great Flood of 1910, the narrow Bièvre being disproportionately prone to flooding. Visitors to the area today often have no idea that a river runs under their feet. It was for a long time a sewer, collecting the outflow of abattoirs and hospitals as well as households, and its water was used by the tapestry manufacturers of the Gobelins along with tanners, dyers, and curriers of leather. Those uses destroyed the Bièvre, turning it into a festering source of epidemics, creating immense mires of brackish mud on its edges, and polluting it irredeemably. “Colored in every hue, yellow, green, red, ferrying noisome offal right alongside us, slimy, virtually immobile, nauseating, with a texture like clotted blood, with no reflections on its surface on a cloudy day, with heavy clumps of greenish foam slowly sliding by,” observed Georges Cain in 1908. For more than a century it was a place of horror. In a passage set around 1824, Balzac has seven-year-old Hélène d’Aiglemont, jealous of her mother’s love, push in her little half-brother, Charles: