Free Parisians: An Adventure History of Paris by Graham Robb

project, but the new government proved less enthusiastic. When it was asked to fund the expedition, a député demanded that the matter be sent to committee for discussion, ‘in order to determine whether or not this map is really of any use’.
     
     
    I F THE Q UEEN and her escort had shared Edme Verniquet’s bird’s-eye view of Paris, they would have seen that the street whose course they had followed formed the outer edge of a spider’s web of lanes centred on the Croix Rouge crossroads. Some of those lanes were reassuringly straight, but they bisected other streets at odd angles, creating squares that were parallelograms, and trapezoids that seemed to rearrange themselves from one day to the next. Time in those asymmetrical streets passed at some indeterminable speed. It might have been five minutes or half an hour since they crossed the bridge to the Left Bank.
    By chance or by smell, they found their way back, via the Rue des Saints-Pères or some other adjacent artery, to the river, and reemerged on the quai , but further upstream from the Pont Royal. The walls of the Louvre faced them from the opposite bank. The quais were still deserted, but a sentinel had resumed his post on the far side of the bridge. To the left, the Queen could see, as though in memory, her wing of the Tuileries Palace, and perhaps for the first time surmised its place in the larger scheme of the city. A short distance beyond it, her husband and children were sitting in the cab, counting the minutes, wondering when the King’s absence would be discovered, and whether or not the Queen had been arrested as a traitor.
    Perhaps it was the calm that comes with desperation, or perhaps just the impatience of someone who, having wrapped up for a long journey, is forced to take vigorous exercise: as though the whole adventure had been a masquerade, and there was no further need for dissimulation, the Queen and her escort now walked up to the sentinel on the bridge, and asked for directions to the Hôtel du Gaillardbois on the Rue de l’Échelle.
    Assuming that he knew the way, the sentinel could hardly have directed two citizens on foot to take a short-cut through the palace, and they could hardly be seen to ignore his directions–which would explain why the Queen’s involuntary exploration of Paris led her into the labyrinth of slums that had survived for centuries on the very doorstep of the royal palace.
    The Quartier du Doyenné was a relic of the medieval city. Coiled within that small space were almost three miles of malodorous alleyways, some of which were barely distinguishable from drains. There were slums that might once have been abbeys, and curious dips and mounds that were the uninscribed memorials of the vaults and streets of earlier ages. Some of the cul-de-sacs led to patches of wasteground cluttered with stones intended for the Louvre. At night, it looked as though the Louvre itself were being demolished, while the ancient hovels in its midst were preserved in a state of permanent decay.
    As they picked their way through the unlit lanes, a church bell struck a quarter or a half of the hour. In a small town, they might now have taken their bearings, but in Paris, a peculiar situation had arisen. The oldest churches, like Notre-Dame, pointed east-south-east along the river, following Christian tradition, with the rising sun illuminating the window behind the altar. But such was the demand for space that other churches had had to fit themselves in as best they could. Saint-Sulpice, founded in 1646, was probably the last church in Paris to be ‘oriented’ now, they pointed in all directions. Of the four churches within two hundred yards of the Queen and her escort, only one pointed east. Seen from the air, the great fleet of churches would appear to have moored itself in a busy harbour full of smaller vessels each going about its own business. By the end of the eighteenth century, it was only a man with the science of Edme