Although he had breathed the air of the capital, the German dramatist could not flatter himself that he was acquainted with all its mysteries. What would he have said if he had visited the strange house described in a police report, which might well have been called the 'black market of love'?
At number 102 Rue de Vaugirard, every Thursday from eight to midnight, men and women of all classes of society met together in a darkened drawing-room. They were admitted only by introduction and on payment of twelve francs, a very moderate fare for an excursion to the seventh heaven. But they must not attempt to find out who their fellow passengers were. Love, reputedly blind, is even more so when the lamps are extinguished. When the session was over, they went their several ways, the ladies leaving a quarter of an hour earlier to avoid being followed.
This ingenious anonymity lasted until the day when the Commissioner of the district knocked at the door, gave orders for the drawing-rooms to be lighted up, and discovered — in what attire! — a certain number of honourable Parisian personages: three marquises, a banker, a head clerk of the council of State, a barrister, an advocate at the Court of Cassation, enough to compromise both nobilities, that of the sword and that of the robe. To limit the scandal, these gentlemen were allowed to go free, and only their blushing accomplices were arrested; a difference in treatment that was perhaps not very equitable, but it is a commonplace that men always stand by one another.
The police had many exploits of this kind to their credit. One day they raided a house in the Rue Campagne-Premiere, where the former cure Bonjour, having founded a religion and ensured its adepts the privilege of impeccability, was organizing strange ceremonies, degenerating into Saturnalias. Another day they interrupted the performance of an obscene play, Messaline, acted by young adepts before a masked audience. Another time, by way of a change, they gave chase to a maniacal vitriol-thrower, who had burnt some poor prostitutes in the Rue Croix-des-Petits-Champs; or they seized a collection of smutty books in Barba's bookshop — which would not be lost to everybody, since the Prefect was in the habit of showing these curiosities to the friends he asked to dinner.
Or again, they turned their attention to a special type of persons now infesting places of amusement: unpleasant individuals who based their morals on those of Greece and imitated Socrates in every respect, though without going the length, unfortunately, of drinking hemlock. 1
These instances, out of a number of others, prove that Dubois was not mistaken in saying of the capital e Corruption is rife there/ In this respect the Paris of the Empire, though perhaps a little better than that of the Directory, did not differ from it very sensibly. It might have been supposed to have sown its wild oats in B arras's tirne^ but the follies of youth sometimes endure a long while, and behind a fagade of middle-class respectability the morals of the city had actually remained exceedingly doubtful.
One of the chief headaches of the authorities was the ever-increasing number of prostitutes. In 1806 an English newspaper reckoned it generously at 75,000, but even if the figure was exaggerated, the actual total cannot have been much less than that of the population of an average prefecture. What could the police do against such an army? Fouche tried at Erst to carry out mass arrests, but the prison of the Petite-Force could not have held so many inmates. And after all, did they want to set 'all the bachelors of Paris' against them?
Wisely therefore, acting on the advice of Dubois, they contented themselves with supervising these ladies more strictly, submitting them, above all, to more regular medical examination. This turned out to be anything but useless, since out of 300 prostitutes examined during the month of Mes-sidor, year VIII, they found twenty-eight syphillitics and ninety-three suffering from scabies. Idylls of the streets of Paris, how much you lost of your poesy!
Any measure taken to safeguard public health is always to be welcomed, but unfortunately Dubois's best ideas were too often tainted by his fondness for perquisites. Every time they were examined, the clients of his dispensary had to pay a tax, part of which the ingenious Prefect slipped into the drawer of Ms desk.
1 They could claim a notorious sponsorship, for Cambaceres^ little failing' was no secret. It was to him that the Emperor said one day* when he was complaining of having been delayed by a fair visitor, 'Next time, my friend, you will have the goodness to say to this lady, 'Take your hat and stick and buzz off!" *
It may be said in his favour that he generously'devoted this revenue, every month, to his mother-in-law's dress expenses, and as the lady was reputed to have had a very adventurous youth, her good son-in-law may have considered that he was performing an act of restitution.
With a Prefect of Police of this mentality, how could those under his jurisdiction be expected to behave like little saints? In fairness to the population of Paris., it must be said that it was mostly honest; but it included, nevertheless, a certain number of rogues, and tales of robbery loom large in the chronicles of the time.
Coat-snatchers provided the greater number of these incidents. These ancestors of our pickpockets knew all the tricks of the trade even then; they operated for preference in narrow streets in which people jostled one another, in the Passage du Perron, for instance, between the Rue Vivienne and the garden of the Palais du Tribunat. An editor of the Journal de Paris tells us that strolling through there, the day before, he had been robbed by some philanthropic sharpers:
These gentlemen, thinking no doubt that my handkerchief was in my way, purloined it with a dexterity worthy of admiration. Thinking that tobacco might do me harm, they relieved me of my snuffbox with the same skill. Fearing they might be tempted a third time by my watch and purse, I vowed I would never go through that narrow passage again, and I shall continue to make the detour until the Government has had it widened."
Adventures of this kind were the terror of provincials who had lost their way in the capital. When Junot's old father came up from his native Burgundy to see a parade by the First Consul, and got entangled in the mob on the Carrousel with his wife and daughter-in-law, he was terribly worried. 'Take care, my daughter-in-law! You should pin your shawl together. ... A cashmere worth two thousand francs! Tm keeping my hand on my watch, so I can laugh at the rascals!*
But the little Parisian, who was soon to become Duchess of Abrantes, knew the ropes— she would not lose her shawl. Whereas the poor old man soon found he had been robbed of his watch, and saw his womenfolk burst out laughing as they reminded him of his good advice. We may be sure that on his return to Montbard he declared all Parisians to be thieves.
Though he may have been wrong, it must be confessed that some members of the guild had very inventive minds.
An incident in which David the painter played an Involuntary part is narrated by the press of 1807. Posing as David's servant, and purporting to have been sent by him, a c well-wrapped-up individual' went into a money-changer's shop in the Passage Feydeau. David, he said, asked for 18,000 francs in coin to be taken to his studio at the Louvre, in exchange for the same sum in notes, which he had there. A clerk slipped 900 louis into a bag, accompanied the pretended servant to the Louvre, went upstairs with him, along passages, and knocked at the door of the room in which the artist was supposed to be working. Upon which the unfortunate man was knocked on the head with a hammer, and the thief ran off as fast as he could go. Needless to say, the author of the Rape of the Sabines and that of the rape of the bag had never met.
The murderous tricks of swindlers belong to all time, but a form of robbery that assumed unusual importance during the first years of the nineteenth century was that perpetrated by the defrauders of the Customs. Never, in all the history of Paris, had they operated with such an abundance of means. The inadequacy of the city wall, which in 1800 was hardly more than a moral barrier, the low standard of the inspecting personnel, who often allowed themelves to be hoaxed, and sometimes bribed, the fact that the system of taxation had been declared defective and reorganized four times in twelve years, all helped to facilitate fraud. Moreover the constant increase in import duties made it more and more lucrative. A man could earn his day's wages now by smuggling a few pints of alcohol. If he was able to substitute barrels for bottles at regular intervals, he would soon have made his fortune.