Free The Invention of Paris by Eric Hazan Page B

lived here, and was not just a court of miracles, but perhaps the earliest and largest one in Paris’.
    The first great ‘reformation’ of the Halles was conducted under Henri II in the early 1550s, at the same time as construction started on the church of Saint-Eustache. ‘In 1551’, wrote Gilles Corozet, ‘the Halles of Paris were entirely knocked down and rebuilt, equipped with finely worked buildings, hotels and sumptuous houses for those townspeople who tookthe old sites.’ 46 The old wall of the Halles was then demolished, and future access was through regular streets. The allocation of space was more clearly defined. On the south side, where Rues des Bourdonnais, Sainte-Opportune, des Deux-Boules and des Lavandières now run, was the hall for linen and cloth. Butchers were also to be found there, though the greater part of their activity was in the quarter of Saint-Jacques-de-la-Boucherie – the Saint-Jacques tower is a vestige of this large church – where flocks were brought to the slaughterhouses on the hoof.
    To the northwest, close to where the Bourse du Commerce now stands, was the Halle aux Blés, close to the hotel that Catherine de Médicis had built by Philibert de l’Orme (‘A modern writer’, stated Germain Brice two centuries later, ‘whom one can follow on this occasion, says that, after the Louvre, there is no more noble building in the kingdom than this hotel.’) On the northeast side, towards the Pointe Saint-Eustache, was the Carreau des Halles, extending to the market for
poirées
: ‘Throughout the year, and every day, all kinds of vegetables and herbs are sold here, including medicinal ones, and all kinds of fruit and flowers, so that this place is a real garden, where the flowers and fruits of all seasons can be seen.’ 47 This arrangement – textiles and meat to the south, grain, fish and vegetables to the north – would last until Baltard’s time.
    At the end of the ancien régime, the Halles were once again transformed from top to bottom. The hotel of Catherine de Médicis – Hôtel de Soissons – was demolished, and in its place Le Camus des Mézières built a new Halle aux Blés, a large circular building that Molinos covered in the 1780s with an immense wooden dome, an innovation new to Paris. The halls dating from the Renaissance were replaced by new buildings. And above all, the buildings surrounding the Innocents cemetery were pulled down, on Rues aux Fers 48 (now Berger), de la Lingerie and Saint-Denis.
    This destruction did away with the church of Les Saints-Innocents, but spared the adjacent fountain, a monument much admired: ‘Signor G. L. Bernini, one of the most renowned architects of the last several centuries, always very sparing with his praise, and who affected to think nothing of all the beautiful things that he saw in this city, could not prevent himself from exclaiming when he inspected this incomparable work, and declaringthat he had not noticed anything like it in France.’ 49 The fountain of the Innocents was then given a fourth arch, completing those that Jean Goujon had already sculpted, so that it no longer had to stand against a wall, but could be placed at the centre of the new Marché des Innocents. The cemetery, in fact, was closed. In an ecological vein, Mercier wrote that ‘in this narrowly enclosed space, infections attacked the life and health of the inhabitants. The knowledge newly acquired about the nature of air [Lavoisier!] had cast light on the danger of this mephitism . . . The danger was imminent; soup and milk spoiled in a few hours in the houses close to the cemetery; wine turned acid when it was poured; and the miasmas from the corpses threatened to poison the atmosphere.’ The skeletons were then removed to the quarries to the south of Paris that became the Catacombes: ‘We can only imagine the lit torches, this immense