"You see," Gautier continues suavely, "the immortality of the soul, free will -- it is very pleasant to be concerned with these things before one is twenty-two years old; but afterward such subjects are no longer seemly. One ought then to be concerned to have a mistress who does not get on one's nerves; to have a decent place to live; to have a few passable pictures on the wall. And most of all, to be writing well. That is what is important: sentences that hang together... and a few metaphors. Yes, a few metaphors. They embellish life."
Gautier divided his time between the literary salons of Mathilde Bonaparte and La Paiva. La Paiva was a courtesan, a true grande horizontale, a demimondaine who had battled her way to the top through sheer chilly grit and professional self-abnegation. She scared the hell out of the Brothers Goncourt, who paint her as an aberrant harpy, but Mathilde was jealous of her nonetheless, and complained that the litterateurs made so much of bluestocking demimondaines that the Imperial princess herself felt unlucky not to have been born "a lustful drab."
In the last years of his life -- he died in 1872 -- Gautier took a sinecure as Mathilde's official librarian, something of an apology on her part for not being able to wedge him into the Academy or get him a sinecure post in the Empire's rubber-stamp Senate. Gautier was just that one shade too Bohemian to manage the conventional slate of honors; but he was not quite so Bohemian that he wasn't of real use to Mathilde. Mathilde did not have the direct social power of her cousin's wife, the Empress Eugenie, a woman Mathilde cordially despised; but if Mathilde couldn't have the court painters, the ladies-in-waiting, and the full imperial etiquette, she could nevertheless reign as Queen of Bluestockings over the literary counterculture. Mathilde liked books, she liked painters, she liked music; she was a moderately bright and cultured woman who could follow an intelligent conversation and even lead one sometimes; but she knew how to guard the interests of her family as well. The Goncourts recorded her tantrum as a salon favorite joined the staff of an opposition newspaper.
"He owes everything to me," Mathilde screamed. "And what did I ask in return? I didn't ask him to give up a single conviction. All I asked was that he keep away from those people on the *Temps.*"
The "opposition" established by Mathilde's countercultural noblesse oblige was one of the guises assumed by power itself; to pay off Theophile Gautier was to nourish the serpent to one's bosom in the hope of stroking it to sleep. It was a risky game, but their lives were risky. The cultural Entente Cordiale between the Court and Bohemia didn't have to hold together forever; it only had to hold together long enough. The entire structure of the Empire itself collapsed in 1870, crushed in the Franco-Prussian War.
The street may find its own uses for things -- but Things find their own uses for the street. The Rue Jules Verne is a two-way avenue, a place where monde and undermonde can embrace illicitly and swap infections. While Nadar rose in his balloons to document the city with his cameras, Napoleon III's Parisian prefect, Baron Haussman, demolished and rebuilt the landscape below him. It's thanks to Haussman that we know Paris today as a city of wide, straight, magnificent boulevards -- the Champ d'Elysees is one. For Nadar and his contemporaries the Haussmanization of the city was the truest sign of its modernization. Nadar's photographic studio was located in one of these new streets. He dominated the entire second floor of a new building in the latest taste.
Haussmann's streets were the Rue Jules Verne as a killing ground. Yes they were elegant, yes they aided the flow of traffic, but their true raison d'etre was as a strategic military asset. In 1789, 1830, 1848 the Parisian populace had barricaded their narrow twisting streets and foiled the Army. After Haussmann, Paris would be splayed-out on a lethal command grid where grapeshot could fly on arrow-straight lines through whole city blocks, directly through the insubordinate carcasses of any revolutionary proletariat.
The streets didn't save the regime, though. In 1870 Bismarck's Germans smashed the French armies at Sedan. Paris was blockaded.
In response, Nadar invented airmail.
In 1859, Napoleon III had offered Nadar 50,000 francs to take aerial photographs of the Italian front in his military adventure in Italy; but Nadar was a staunch radical republican and stoutly refused any bloodmoney from the imperial war-machine. The disaster of 1870 was a different matter. As Nadar explained from Paris, via balloon, to *The Times* in London, destroying the repugnant Imperial regime was one thing, and rather understandable; but killing the Parisian populace wholesale was quite another.
Nadar was normally a highly mannered, rather precious prose stylist, rarely using one word when ten elegantly sesquipedalian ones would do; but with his own people at bayonet-point Nadar apparently concluded that this wasn't the time for copping aesthetic attitudes. Things had reached such a point that Nadar's balloons, which he himself regarded mostly as publicity stunts, were in fact a last hope. He had invented, and owned, the last means by which Paris could publicize herself. Under these circumstances, Nadar addressed humanity at large with as much directness, simplicity, and clarity as he could manage. He lacked official backing -- in the blockade of 1870 there was essentially no government left in Paris -- but what he lacked in authority, he made up in simple eloquence, self-starting nerve, and headline-grabbing novelty.
Nadar's balloon corps didn't make much real military difference. Some were shot down; one was blown off to a fjord in Norway. In any case, balloon traffic could not hope to match the enormous military significance of German railroads.
And yet the balloons were there -- and they could fly. After the debacle of Sedan, Paris had no government, damn little food, no mail, no official backing, and victorious enemy guns on all sides -- but anyone in Paris could see Nadar's balloons. There wasn't much to them, really, other than straw and hot air and an attitude, but they were there, and they were flying. They were energetic, they were optimistic, and they made a bold pretense of practicality. People have died cheerfully for less. It was his finest hour.
Nadar outlived everyone in the Pantheon Nadar. His enormous vitality served him well, and he died two weeks short of his ninetieth birthday, in 1910. This man, who showed such preternatural insight into other people, was not devoid of self-knowledge. As early as 1864, he described himself welclass="underline"
"A superficial intelligence which has touched on too many subjects to have allowed time to explore any in depth.... A dare-devil, always on the lookout for currents to swim against, oblivious of public opinion, irreconcileably opposed to any sign of law and order. A jack-of-all-trades who smiles out of one corner of his mouth and snarls with the other, coarse enough to call things by their real names -- and people too -- never one to miss the chance to talk of rope in the house of the hanged man."
Nadar died eighty-three years ago. We have no real right to claim him -- visionary, aesthete, polemicist, Bohemian, technologist -- as a spiritual ancestor.
But it might be a damned good idea to adopt him.
CATSCAN 13 "Electronic Text"
In the mid-1980s I bought a modem and began hanging out on local computer bulletin board systems. I found the practice intriguing. There seemed to be a lot of potential online for interesting new forms of cultural agitation and fanzine work. The proto-Net itself was a remarkable technical innovation; a kind of primal soup of unwritten SF scenarios.