Free The Invention of Paris by Eric Hazan

gutter was most commonly in the centre of the road, as in the Middle Ages. ‘With the least shower’, wrote Sébastien Mercier, ‘rickety bridges have to be put down’, in other words, boards on which street children helped pedestrians to cross in return for payment. Frochot, prefect of the Seine department under the Empire, could still lament: ‘The capital of France, adorned with admirable monuments and possessing so many useful establishments, offers those who cross it on foot only an excessively difficult and even dangerous way, which seems to have been exclusively designed for the movement of carriages.’ 39 Fifty years later, the picture had scarcely changed. Baudelaire wrote in his little prose poem ‘Loss of a Halo’:‘My dear, you know my terror of horses and carriages. Just a little while ago, as I was crossing the boulevard very hastily and jumping about in the mud, through that moving chaos in which death comes galloping towards you from all sides at once . . .’ The decline in these arcades coincided with the completion of Haussmann’s first great cuttings: ‘Our wider streets and more spacious pavements have made easy the sweet flânerie impossible for our fathers except in the arcades.’ 40 By the end of the century the arcades were already being spoken of in the past tense: ‘The arcade, which for Parisians was a kind of walking saloon where you could smoke or chat, is now no more than a kind of shelter which you suddenly remember when it rains. Certain arcades keep a certain attraction because of this or that famous shop that is still to be found there. But it is the renown of the tenant that keeps the fashion going, or rather the death agony.’ 41
    Though abandoned and down-at-heel, the Paris arcades are still present in twentieth-century literature – the Passage de l’Opéra in Aragon’s
Paris Peasant
, which gave Walter Benjamin the idea for his
Passagenwerk
, the extraordinary Passage des Bérésinas – actually Choiseul – described in Céline’s
Death on the Installment Plan
as ‘a kind of sewer’. What is stranger is that scarcely a trace of them can be found in books written in the age of their glory. To my knowledge, there is no mention of the arcades either in
La Comédie humaine
or in such other texts of Balzac’s as ‘Histoire et physiologie des boulevards de Paris’, nor in Nerval, nor in Baudelaire’s
Tableaux parisiens
or his prose poems, even though Poulet-Malassis, the publisher of
Les Fleurs du mal
, had his offices in the Passage Mirès (later Passage des Princes, before its recent demolition), nor in
Les Misérables
or Eugène Sue’s
Mysteries of Paris
. Perhaps the arcade, such a poetic place today, was for its contemporaries simply an urban detail that, however convenient, had little intrinsic interest, any more than shopping centres, multiplex cinemas or underground car parks have for us today.
Les Halles
    To pass from the Palais-Royal to Les Halles is to pass from the newest quarter of old Paris, as well as the most elegant and best preserved, to a quarter that is quite the opposite. The most visible border between them is Rue du Louvre, a widened version of the very ancient Rue des Poulies. Another frontier, perhaps more precise as it follows the trace of the walls of Philippe Auguste, is Rue Jean-Jacques-Rousseau, which went under the
    name of Rue Plâtrière when Jean-Jacques lived here, earning his living as a music copyist. ‘His imagination’, wrote Sébastien Mercier, ‘dwelt only in the meadows, waters and woods, with their animated solitude. Yet as he approached the age of sixty, he came to live in Paris, in Rue Plâtrière, in other words the most noisy, uncomfortable, crowded and diseased of bad places.’
    The destruction of the market halls in the 1970s was such a trauma that the demolitions of Baltard at the