The piece de resistance of the evening was a little improvisation acted by Baptiste junior, Araiand and a few others. Seated in front of footlights composed of eight candles, Duchesnois and her female friend heard themselves proclaimed in doggerel verse that praised them to the skies. Duport, the great dancer, was then applauded for a few pirouettes, and this kept them going till it was time for supper, which was served on the second floor, in a miserable little room where the men, for want of space, were obliged to 'remain upright'.
Although the feast was somewhat meagre, the health of the hostess was duly proposed. Chazet improvised a couplet in which he informed the century that Melpomene and Thalia were sisters. Mile Contat stopped her ears, and turning to her hostess, cried, 'My dear, they could have come for your sake without coming for mine! 5 'How charming!' exclaimed everybody. And after more poems, arousing fresh applause, the effusions, embraces and enthusiasms knew no bounds.
Supper over, they went back to dance in the drawing-room, but by four in the morning it was time to think of going home. Beyle, always practical, was one of the first to slip away, with one of his friends,
As these gentlemen had no cab, and were not inclined to walk two miles in dancing-shoes, in Siberian cold, they treacherously took possession of a carriage that was waiting for Millevoye. The cabby remonstrated in vain. 'We made him start off in a furious hurry, in spite of his reluctance, promising him anything he liked to ask.'
So much the worse for the author of the Fatting Leavesl If he got inflammation of the lungs it would merely be an opportunity for him to compose an elegy on the ill fortune of poets, the cruelty of prose writers and the Impudence of the drivers of cabs.
CHAPTER VI. A RUINOUS CAPITAL
Life in the ruins — An epidemic of demolitions — Saint Michael and the Devil — Mud - Kennels and pavements
A TOWN that is no longer kept up, whose streets are left unswept, its houses unplastered, its walls and roofs unrepaired, soon becomes unrecognizable; it takes on the ruinous, catastrophic aspect presented by Paris at the beginning of the nineteenth century.
Many of its wounds, of course, were mementoes of the Revolution: eight years after August 10, the holes made by cannon-balls and the marks of bullets were still to be seen on the facade of the Tuilleries. The stones of the Bastille choked the moats of the ancient fortress; pedestals bereft of their statues were still standing in the middle of many squares, while convents like that of Saint-Lazare, and houses of the high-living nobility like the former H6tel de Castries, still showed the marks of pillage.
But what had done more harm than any act of vandalism was the complete neglect from which the town had suffered. Absorbed by the triple worry of internal politics, war and 'rations', the authorities had never had the leisure or the means to bestow the requisite care on it. They had allowed time to do its work, to heave up the paving-stones, hollow out ruts, choke the drains and make circulation almost impossible. The result was heart-rending. 'It is easy to imagine', wrote Sainte-Beuve in his Biographic de Frochot, 'what Paris was like in 1800, after ten years of anarchy, sedition and laxity, during which no useful work had been undertaken, not a street had been cleaned, not a residence repaired, nothing improved or cleansed/ And in another place he quotes the evidence of a contemporary: "Not a courtyard gate was left on its hinges/
This was hardly surprising, since most of the houses of the aristocracy, deserted by their former owners at the time of the emigration, had been either put to business uses or declared national property and sold to the bande noire, an association of house-breakers that robbed them of their panellings, mirrors and pier-glasses, and made a fortune by reselling them, before allowing the unfortunate property to collapse. Paris had in fact been turned into one immense house-breakers' yard, combined with an equally huge junk shop.
For more justifiable reasons the new Government began by following the example of the bande noire, pulling everything down as fast as they could. Because many monuments were threatening to fall, or standing in the way of traffic, they decided to hack them down without asking themselves whether some of them might not deserve a better fate.
The tower of Saint-Andre des Arts was the first to be sacrificed. Then came the church of Saint-Nicholas and the hotels of the Coignys and the Baudoins in the little streets of the Carrousel; in the Tuileries, the poky little houses lining the terrace of the Feuillants; elsewhere, the Seminary of Saint-Sulpice, the old buildings of the Chapter of Notre-Dame and the Grand Chatelet, with the tower of the Temple to come.
So many memorials lost, so many regrets for the artists and historians of the twentieth century! But at the beginning of the nineteenth, people set little store by the relics of Old Paris. They were being suffocated in a cramped, inconvenient city, and every time they were given more air, promised new streets and wider vistas, they were delighted to see the walls falling.
The newspapers of the day always found excellent reasons for justifying the demolitions. When work was started on the Manage of the Tuileries, they said that this scene of so many cruel conflicts 'was already tottering under its own weight*. When Notre-Dame was to have a space cleared round it, they accused the neighbouring buildings of masking half the cathedral. When the Grand Chatelet was pulled down they declared it was 'a shapeless mass, offensive to taste, obstructing the public thoroughfare and injurious to the health of the citizens'. And when there was talk of getting rid of the houses still bordering the Pont Saint-Michel, a poet seized his lyre and published in the Journal de Paris this Desire of an inhabitant of the Quai des Grands Augustins fond of fine views:
As we all know, Saint Michael, Armed with his terrible spear, Aimed such a blow at the Devil As made him fall into a swoon. But the Devil, being immortal, Was soon convalescent, and well; May he soon raze to the ground, out of vengeance, The houses on Pont Saint-Michel!
He was to raze many more yet, but we cannot stop to enumerate the thousand and one works undertaken during the Napoleonic era, the architectural history of Paris being only somewhat distantly related to our subject. Confining ourselves to social history, therefore, let us see how little modern the capital was in 1800, and what scanty means it disposed of for guaranteeing the material existence, security and hygiene of its 600,000 inhabitants.
With the addition of a lot of dirt, the streets at that time were just as they had been under the old regime, that is to say, of an almost medieval narrowness. The point of view changing with each epoch, people then talked of the Rue du Bac, the Rue de Lille and the Rue de FUniversit6 as we should speak today of the Avenue Foch or the motorway of Saint-Cloud. Except for the main boulevards, the Rue Royale and the Rue Samt-Antoine, Paris had as yet no really wide thoroughfares. Nearly everywhere there spread a network of by-streets, blind alleys and passages — a labyrinth in which only old Parisians contrived to find their way. But people found fault with the capital less for its lack of air and space than for its extremely dirty condition.
Mercier had complained of it even under Louis XVI, but the dirtiness merely increased with the Revolution. Was it because the carts were employed on other duties during the Terror that sanitary tasks had been neglected ever since? At any rate, countless heaps of garbage piled up before the doors, waiting for the next thunderstorm to spread themselves over the middle of the road and turn it into a slough. When bad weather took a hand, the appearance of most of the streets, with their big, disjointed flagstones, their single central kennels and their lack of pavements, was indescribable. Lost in this swamp, drenched by water off the roofs, which long gutter-pipes, pretending to be gargoyles, spouted to a distance of three feet from the houses, pedestrians experienced some tragical moments.