Part 19

"The city was relatively very small, or at least its activity was restricted within certain limits that were seldom passed. The plaster elephant in which Gavroche found shelter raised its enormous silhouette on the Place de la Bastille, and seemed to forbid passers-by to go any further. The Champs Elysées, as soon as night fell, became more dangerous than the plain of Marathon; the most adventurous stopped at the Place de la Concorde. The quarter of Notre Dame de Lorette only included vague plots of ground or wooden fences. The church was not built, and one could see from the boulevard the Butte Montmartre, with its windmills and its semaphore waving its arms on the top of the old tower. The Faubourg Saint-Germain went early to bed, and its solitude was but rarely disturbed by a tumult of students over a play at the Odéon. Journeys from one quarter to another were less frequent; omnibuses did not exist, and there were sensible differences of feature, costume, and accent between a native of the Rue du Temple and an inhabitant of the Rue Montmartre."

Gautier is referring in this passage to the Paris of his childhood, in the second decade of the nineteenth century, but, though by his Bohemian days the Church of Notre Dame de Lorette had been built, omnibuses had been instituted, and railway stations were about to break out on the face of Paris, his picture would have remained substantially true of Paris during the whole of Louis Philippe's reign. There was a certain amount of change during the time: the Palais Royal declined in popularity, ceasing to be "a scene of extravagance, dissipation, and debauchery not to be equalled in the world," as Coghlan's "Guide to Paris" put it; a few old houses were pulled down here and there, and the desert patches on the outskirts began to be filled by a straggling population, but, in general, Louis Philippe's Paris can be considered as a stable whole. Most visitors to Paris do not, of course, realize the boundaries of the large circle which now forms the city, for they enjoy themselves at the centre, though they may, perhaps, remember how far from the terminus a train passes the fortifications. In Louis Philippe's day the outer line of boulevards, on which stood the fortifications and _barrières_, was that second ring of to-day which even visitors reach at times; a _barrière_ existed at the Arc de Triomphe, at the Place Pigalle, where the amusements of Montmartre only just begin, at the cemeteries of Père Lachaise and Montparnasse. The actual diameter of the city was then about three miles, but for all practical purposes it was little more than two, for the outskirts were still occupied by large market-gardens, plots of land acquired for future use by speculators, with here and there some mushroom rows of houses, half finished and nearly empty, the work of a bankrupt who had too far anticipated the coming boom, farmyards, chicken-runs, cow-stalls, grass, odd weeds, and all the disfigurements of a landscape over which the impending march of a city has thrown a blight. Only on the northern heights were there still windmills and vineyards. These outskirts had only a scanty population, for there were no thousands of workpeople to spread over the heights of Belleville or Ménilmontant, or southwards over Montrouge, so that it was easy for a starveling company of Bohemians, headed by the Desbrosses and Murger, to find shelter in an old farm by the Barrière d'Enfer--now the busy Place Denfert-Rochereau--or for Balzac's Colonel Chabert to live in a tumble-down cottage well inside the boundaries. The fact was, as the dramatist Victorien Sardou has said in a passage of reminiscence,[35] that under Louis Philippe one-third of the total surface of Paris was not built on. There were gardens everywhere, except in the very centre of the city, and on the left bank, especially, houses were only dotted in the midst of orchards, kitchen-gardens, farmyards, and parks. It was this fact that made Paris, however quick the flame that burnt at her heart, in most respects a provincial city. Only in such a city could Bohemia perfectly have realized itself; an industrial metropolis would have swallowed it or brushed it contemptuously aside.

Paris, then, compared with herself of to-day, would have been almost unrecognizable. There was no sign of the rich and luxurious quarter which has grown up round the Champs Elysées, with its magnificent hotels and fine mansions. The Champs Elysées were used during the daytime for riding or driving, but there was hardly a house to be seen except two or three wretched _cafés_. After sunset it was madness to go past the _rond-point_, for beyond was the home of thieves and cut-throats, the Bois de Boulogne, needless to say, being in a much more wild state than to-day. The Parc Monceau was practically in the country, and even the Quartier du Roule, by the top of the Boulevard Malesherbes, was all market-gardens when Rosa Bonheur lived there as a child. As for the Batignolles, that Kensington of modern Paris, its repute was as unsavoury as that of the London fields now respectably covered by Sloane Square and Sloane Street. The quarter chosen by wealth, as opposed to blue blood, which lived in dreary _hôtels_ surrounded by high walls in the Faubourg Saint-Germain, lay in the neighbourhood of the present Saint-Lazare terminus. The favourite street was the Rue de la Pépinière, continued by the Rue Saint-Lazare. Only a small part of the Rue de la Pépinière is now left, most of it being called the Rue La Boëtie, but it retains its old name between the Boulevard Malesherbes and the Rue Saint-Lazare. Another fashionable street was the Rue de Provence, which runs parallel to the south of the Rue Saint-Lazare. In the former was the famous house inhabited successively by seven of Balzac's courtesans,[36] in the latter the charming house of Baron Nucingen. Every Englishman knows the clamour and smell and garish shops of the Rue Saint-Lazare to-day, and the Rue de Provence is just a plain _bourgeois_ thoroughfare of shops, _cafés_, flats, and a post-office.

The fashionable boulevards have already appeared in a previous chapter, but a word must be said of the difference between the then and now of that brilliant corner of Paris which most Europeans and Americans see once before they die. To-day, without a doubt, the Boulevard des Capucines, which stretches from the Madeleine to the Opéra, has the most distinguished and luxurious appearance. The Boulevard des Italiens beyond the Opéra is dowdier and more workaday. In the days of Bohemia the Boulevard des Capucines had no social existence. It had as yet not been levelled with the Rue Basse du Rempart, which, some fifteen feet below it, followed the course of the ancient moat; it was flanked by plots of land on which new houses were being erected, and its only traffic was the omnibus which jogged between the Madeleine and the Bastille. The present Opera-house and Place de l'Opéra were not existent, for the Opéra stood just off the Boulevard des Italiens, beyond Tortoni's, while the Rue de la Paix came quietly into the boulevard at a sharp angle, instead of arriving in that busy open space, with Cook's office as its centre, over which traffic plies in all directions with bewildering activity. The Avenue de l'Opéra, also, was not known to Bohemia. At that day a pedestrian who wished to go direct from the top of the Rue de la Paix to the Louvre had to thread a maze of narrow streets--an example of which remains in the Rue des Petits Champs--which became meaner and more sinister as he neared the Louvre. The Louvre quarter, so close to brilliance and luxury, was a squalid plague-spot, that has since been thoroughly cleansed. The brotherhood of the Impasse du Doyenné, I suspect, were careful to have a companion when they ascended the Rue Froidmanteau or the Rue Traversière after dark. If one crosses the Avenue de l'Opéra between the entrance of the Rue de l'Echelle on one side and the Rue Molière on the other, one will have exactly traversed the site of the infamous Rue de Langlade where in "Splendeurs et Misères des Courtisanes" Vautrin found Esther la Torpille on the verge of death, _à propos_ of which Balzac has a lurid passage on the thick shadows, the flickering lights, the phantom forms, and disquieting sounds which characterized at nightfall this _lacis de petites rues_.

On the north-east and the east of the Louvre lay the most unregenerate portion of Paris, a district as tortuous, narrow, and unhealthy as in the Middle Ages, yet the centre of Parisian commerce. Even to-day the visitor may wonder that such a district can exist in a capital city, when he ventures into the Rue Quincampoix, the Rue des Francs Bourgeois, and the other alleys which cut them at right angles. But at least this quarter has been cleared by the thorough reorganization of the Halles and by the construction of some large arteries, the Boulevard de Sébastopol, the Rue Rambuteau, the Rue Etienne Marcel, and the Rue de Turbigo. It is sufficient to glance at a map of Louis Philippe's Paris, such as Dulaure's, to see what a maze it was then. Save for the two narrow thoroughfares, the Rue Saint-Martin and the Rue Saint-Denis, going from north to south, it had hardly a single continuous street. A stroll in the region of the old church of Saint-Merri will show many of these streets in their original dimensions; there is the Rue des Lombards, for instance, where Balzac's Matifat presided over the wholesale drug market, and the Rue Aubry le Boucher, formerly the Rue des Cinq Diamants, where in the virtuous Anselme Popinot's shop the first measures were taken for the reconstruction of César Birotteau's shattered fortunes. The darkness and insalubrity of this quarter are specially commented on at the beginning of Balzac's "Une Double Famille," where he says that a pedestrian coming from the Marais quarter to the quays near the Hôtel de Ville by the Rue de l'Homme Armé and other streets--practically the route of the present Rue des Archives down to the Place Lobau--would think he was walking in underground cellars. This unsavoury network in the day of Bohemia continued right on to the quays, which have now been cleared by the construction of the Théâtre and Place du Châtelet, the Théâtre Sarah Bernhardt, the Place de l'Hôtel de Ville, and the Place Lobau with its barracks. But in Louis Philippe's reign the Rue de la Vieille Lanterne, where poor Gérard de Nerval was found hanged, occupied the site of the stage of the Théâtre Sarah Bernhardt, and instead of the Place Lobau the Rue de la Tixanderie and the Rue du Tourniquet-Saint-Jean forked at the back of the Hôtel de Ville. The house described in "Une Double Famille" stood in the Rue du Tourniquet-Saint-Jean, which was only five feet wide at its broadest and only cleaned when flooded by a shower. The inhabitants lit their lamps at five in June and never put them out in winter.

Another typical specimen of the Paris I am describing is to be seen in that curious confluence of three narrow streets, the Rues de la Lune, Beauregard, and de Cléry, just off the Boulevard Bonne Nouvelle. The Rue de la Lune is dominated by the forbidding portals of a gloomy church, and its cobble-stones are quite deserted even when the activity of the neighbouring boulevard is at its height. No flight of imagination is needed to realize its appropriateness as the scene of that tragic close to "Illusions Perdues," where in a garret Lucien writes drinking songs over the corpse of his wretched Coralie to pay the expenses of her burial. This street and the two others, which meet at an extraordinarily acute angled building, diverge into the squalor of the Rue Montorgueil. It is easier to see the conditions in which _la vie de Bohème_ was passed in such spots as these than in the regions towards Montmartre. The Rue de la Tour d'Auvergne still exists, but to search there for the garret of Murger and Champfleury is disappointing. One ascends the cheerful Rue des Martyrs from Notre Dame de Lorette, with its prospect of the Sacré Cœur standing out against the open heavens, and on turning along the Rue de la Tour d'Auvergne one is confronted by a respectable, clean, sleepy street that might grace any neat provincial town in France. All suggestion of Bohemianism is remarkably absent, even on the top floors. In Murger's day this quarter was far less civilized, as may be seen from a water-colour sketch by Victor Hugo which hangs in the Carnavalet Museum. This represents the view southwards from the Rue de la Tour d'Auvergne--a wild foreground of uncultivated land with sombre trees and dilapidated fences, and in the distance all Paris spread out in panorama.

The left bank has changed no less than the right. The luxurious quarter of the Faubourg Saint-Germain has spread immeasurably, and even where old streets remain, as many do in the Quartier Latin, their houses have been rebuilt. Many a Bohemian could probably have told a parallel to Champfleury's touching story of how, long after his mistress had left him, he witnessed by chance the demolition of an old wall of a house in the quarter, and there on the topmost story was laid bare the room, with its very wallpaper unchanged, where they spent so many happy months of youth and love. In particular, this part of Paris was cleared and aired by the construction of those two very important thoroughfares, the Boulevard Saint-Germain, which broke through a host of little streets, including the rampageous Rue Childebert, and the Boulevard Saint-Michel, which replaced and widened the straggling old Rue de la Harpe. Before these were made, the Quartier Latin had not a single main street, though it was not quite so uncivilized as the Halles quarter, nor so large. Southwards by the gardens of the Luxembourg it soon became comparatively _bourgeois_ and spacious with pleasant houses and gardens, built originally for rich nobles and prelates, but relinquished at the dictation of fashion to prosperous tradespeople and officials like the Phellions and Thuilliers of Balzac's "Les Petits Bourgeois." Searches for vestiges of Bohemia in general on either side of the Boulevard Saint-Germain are fruitful enough; many an _hôtel garni_ recalls that in which Lucien first hid his diminished head, or the early home of Arsène Houssaye, when Nini Yeux Noirs was his divinity and revolution his creed. Specific quests, however, are apt to be disappointing. The Rue des Quatre Vents, the headquarters of d'Arthez' _cénacle_, in Balzac's time "one of the most horrible streets in Paris," remains blamelessly near Saint-Sulpice as dull and decent as the Rue de la Tour d'Auvergne; and the Rue Vaugirard, where the second _cénacle_, headed by Pétrus Borel, held its frantic orgies round the punch-bowl and where Murger wrote his "Scènes de la Vie de Bohème," is devoid of any spark of romance. On the other hand, a visit to the delightful Cour de Rohan, just off the Boulevard Saint-Germain, will land you _en pleine Bohème_, as will certain streets leading up towards the Church of Saint-Etienne du Mont, or the narrow passages by the Church of Saint-Séverin. It is just too late to see another unmistakable relic of Balzac's Paris, for the Maison Vauquer of "Père Goriot" has just been pulled down. Yet to make a pilgrimage to its site gives a very good impression of the gloominess which Bohemian high spirits had usually to combat. The Maison Vauquer stood near the junction of the Rue des Postes and the Rue Neuve Sainte-Geneviève, now the Rue Lhomond, and the Rue Tournefort, south of the Panthéon. I have walked down the Rue Lhomond at three on a sunny autumn afternoon, yet I met no soul in this dingy street, which seemed to catch not a ray of the sun's illumination. It is crossed by two sinister little lanes, the Rue Amyot, at the corner of which Cérizet, in "Les Petits Bourgeois," carried on the business of a small usurer in a loathsome, grimy house, and the Rue du Pot de Fer, before coming to which one passes a high, dark barrack, heavy iron bars shielding its dirty lower windows, the "Institution Lhomond pour l'éducation des jeunes filles"--poor _jeunes filles_! When the Rue Tournefort meets the Rue Lhomond there is a very steep descent, accurately described by Balzac, into the Rue de l'Arbalète. Almost any of the mournful dwellings with weedy gardens on this slope might have been the hideous _pension_ where Goriot died, while at the corner of the Rue de l'Arbalète there is a veritable dungeon, only two tiny windows in cracked frames piercing its high, blank wall. If you proceed into the narrow Rue Mouffetard, one long, smelly vegetable market, you will then realize the general state of all but the best of Louis Philippe's Paris.

It was part of the old world, unconscious of its impending reformation in the light of the new ideals of comfort and sanitation which were to become the accented notes of modernity. It was a provincial city of small compass with no industrial suburbs, no railways--let alone trams or river steamboats--and a population of considerably less than a million concentrated for the most part in its overcrowded quarters by the river banks, where the excitement of its spiritual life made up for the deficiencies of its material well-being. There were few public buildings of recent construction; the Louvre was still disfigured by the _débris_ of the Place du Carrousel; the Hôtel de Ville, Notre Dame, and the Palais de Justice were hemmed in by crabbed streets and thickly clustering old houses. Private gardens were many, but public squares were few. Except for the boulevards the streets had medieval paving with central gutters, from which all and sundry were liberally splashed, so that for well-dressed persons to venture in them on foot was an impossibility. An American writing in 1835 says of them: "They are paved with cubical stones of eight or ten inches, convex on the upper surface like the shell of a terrapin; few have room for side-walks, and where not bounded by stores they are as dark as they were under King Pepin. Some seem to be watertight."[37] They were seldom swept, never flushed, and primitively lit. The noise, too, except on the boulevards, was deafening and incessant. Not only did the eternal rumbling of wheels over cobblestones and the sharp clatter of stumbling hoofs assail the ear, but also the ringing of bells, the rattle of water-carriers' buckets, the din of barrel-organs and itinerant singers, and all those street cries of fish-sellers, clothes-merchants, rag and bone men, glaziers, umbrella menders, and fruit-vendors so picturesque in isolated survival, but so unbearable in the _ensemble_ of their heyday. It would be a mistake, however, to imagine this Paris as sleepy, stagnant, or unpricked by the progressive spirit; on the contrary, she was exceedingly wide-awake. But, whereas the Englishman at once translates his progressive idea into mechanism, the Frenchman prefers to let the first thorough ferment take place in his mind alone, allowing it, if need be, to inspire in him the primitive actions of attack and defence, but leaving more complicated handiwork to a later date, when the logic of change has been worked out, according to which he then acts rigorously. In this light the Paris of Bohemia must be regarded--picturesquely stagnant externally, seething inwardly--and of this condition Bohemia was the type. Its extravagant or tattered dress, its Rabelaisian speech and self-indulgence, the antiquated splendours of the Impasse du Doyenné and the equally antiquated hovels and garrets of its poverty, its disregard of public convenience and its real antagonism to democracy, were externals voluntarily or of necessity adopted from an earlier age; they were the old bottles which served for a moment to hold and to flavour with a distinctive tang the new wine of the Romantic vintage. Other vintages of equal potency have quickened men's hearts since then, and every new age, whether its ideals be artistic or social, will have its particular ferment that will find its appropriate vessels, but the past can never return any more than the first delirious headiness can be restored to an old wine that now charms with its matured delicacy. Bohemia is a thing of the past with that irrevocable Paris with its tortuous, noisy streets, its high gables, its wide skirts and embroidered waistcoats, its

_Fashionables musqués, gueux à mine incongrue,_ _Grisettes au pied leste, au sourire agaçant,_ _Beaux tilburys dorés comme l'éclair passant--_

the Paris of Balzac, the Paris of Roger de Beauvoir and Alfred de Musset, the Paris of Théophile Gautier and Gérard de Nerval, the Paris of Rodolphe, Schaunard, and Marcel, the Paris, in fine, which was the only home of _les vrais Bohémiens de la vraie Bohème_.

INDEX

Names of characters in fiction are printed in italics.

A

ABRANTÈS, Duchesse d', 71

Alton-Shee, _see_ Aulnis, Duc d'

Ampère, Jean-Jacques, 36, 37, 51

Amusements of _Bohème_, 176-178, 182-186, 198-200, 214, 215, 252-281

Ancelot, Madame, 71, 72, 95

Anglemont, Privat d', 224-228, 262, 278, 279, 280

Anglomania in Paris, 87, 88

Arsouille, Milord, _see_ Battut, Charles de la

_Arthez, Daniel d'_, 14, 15, 127-129, 298

Artois, Comte d', 23

Arvers, Félix, 102

Asselineau, Charles, 56, 58, 59, 61, 109

Aulnis, Duc d', 70, 78, 79, 80, 91, 275

B

BADOUILLARDS, LES, 224, 225

Bal Bullier, 279, 280 Mabille, 280

Bal Musard, 270, 276

Balzac, Honoré de, 44, 45, 67, 71, 72, 73, 78, 81, 99, 129, 164, 165, 258, 285, 286, 302 characters in the novels of, 14, 15, 16, 49, 59-61, 62, 67-69, 75, 76, 78, 80-86, 99, 102, 111-114, 127-129, 163-165, 256, 261, 262, 264, 268, 271, 274, 290, 292, 294, 295, 296, 298, 299

Banville, Théodore de, 33, 73, 104, 109, 226, 227, 233, 277

Barbara, Charles, 248-250, 265, 269

_Barbemuche, Carolus_, _see_ Barbara, Charles

Barrière d'Enfer, Bohemian colony at the, 239-243

Barrière, Théodore, 244

Bastide, Jules, 36, 37

Battut, Charles de la, 90, 91, 275, 276

Baudelaire, Charles, 13, 15, 33, 57, 61, 66, 230-233, 261

Beauvoir, Roger de, 13, 44, 73, 76, 93-97, 101, 102, 106, 168, 169, 177, 186, 187, 212, 255, 256, 259, 273, 284, 302

Belgiojoso, Prince, 71, 93, 102 Princess, 13, 71, 86

Béquet, 101, 106

Béranger, 23, 24

Berlioz, Hector, 73, 122, 269

Berry, assassination of the Duc de, 23

Bisson, the brothers, 236, 237

_Bixiou_, 82, 84-86, 99

Blanche, Doctor, 190

Bœuf Enragé, Cabaret du, 227

Bohème, La, meaning of the term, 1-12 its place and period, 12-20 rise and fall, 1830-1848, 21-34 general characteristics of, 111-129 Romanticism of, 25, 26, 29-31, 40-50, 56-64, 131-159, 200-204, 272 its place in Parisian society, 65-68, 73, 76, 77, 110 amusements of, 176-178, 182-186, 198-200, 214, 215, 252-281 drama in, 132-136, 140, 141, 175, 176, 272-274 life of, 126-251 love in, 173-176, 178-182, 213-218, 246-248 music in, 249, 250

Bohème, La, the Paris of, 282-302 smoking in, 151, 152 _See also_ Cénacle, the Second: Bohème Galante; Buveurs d'Eau; Gautier; Murger, &c. Galante, La, 158-193, 194, 203, 205, 206, 207, 210, 216, 221 _see_ Doyenné, Impasse du

Boissard, 231

Borel, Pétrus, 15, 41, 43, 57, 58, 61, 133, 135, 136-140, 144, 149-155, 169, 177, 201, 298

Bouchardy, Joseph, 136, 140, 152, 155, 156, 218, 272

Bouffé, 101

Bouginier's nose, 223, 224

Bouilhet, Louis, 230

Boulevard des Italiens, 74, 112, 121, 288, 292, 293

"Bousingots," 55, 62, 144

Briffaut, 101, 106

Brot, Alphonse, 136, 137

Bullier, 279 Bal, 279, 280

Burnett, George, 17

Buveurs d'Eau, Société des, 212, 233-242, 266-268

Byron, Lord, influence of on Bohème, 35-37, 64, 125, 134, 151

C

CABANON, Emile, 97, 101, 102, 106