The Invention of Paris by Eric Hazan Read Free Book Online

nostalgic for the Empire. Philippe Brideau ‘was one of the faithful Bonapartes of the Café Lemblin, that constitutional Boeotia; he acquired the habits, manners, style, and life of a half-pay officer.’ 17 Behind the counter, the waiters had swords wrapped in green serge, ready to hand to their customers for duels. Some evenings there was such a demand that they had to excuse themselves: ‘Messieurs, they’re in use.’ Among the establishments specializing in prostitution, the most famous was the Café des Aveugles, which took its name from the composition of its orchestra. (‘Why blind men, you will say, just in this café, which is scarcely more than a cupboard under the stairs? It’s because in its early days, which went back to the time of the Revolution, things happened that would have shocked the decency of an orchestra.’ 18 )
    Of the three great restaurants featured in
La Comédie humaine
, two were in the Palais-Royal, the third being Le Rocher de Cancale, on RueMontorgeuil. ‘Is it a dinner for foreigners or provincials whom you want to give an exalted idea of the capital? Then you must take them to Véry’s . . . This is the most expensive caterer, which allows us to conclude that he must be number one in the hierarchy of worth of his profession, one of the most enlightened artists among those who see to the preservation of good taste, and opposed to the invasions of middle-class cuisine.’ 19 When Lucien de Rubempré arrived from Angoulême, unhappy and humiliated, he made his way towards the Palais-Royal:
He did not know the topography of his quarter yet, and was obliged to ask his way. Then he went to Véry’s and ordered dinner by way of an initiation into the pleasures of Paris, and a solace for his discouragement. A bottle of Bordeaux, oysters from Ostend, a dish of fish, a partridge, a dish of macaroni and dessert – this was the
ne plus ultra
of his desire. He enjoyed this little debauch, studying the while how to give the Marquise d’Espard proof of his wit, and redeem the shabbiness of his grotesque accoutrements by the display of intellectual riches. The total of the bill drew him down from these dreams, and left him the poorer by fifty of the francs which were to have gone such a long way in Paris. He could have lived in Angoulême for a month on the price of that dinner. 20
    Véry’s was eventually taken over by its neighbour Véfour, the former Café de Chartres where Alexander von Humboldt, on return from Central America, very often dined under the Empire. In 1815, Rostopchin, the man who had given the order to burn Moscow, frequently caroused there with his French teacher Flore, a lovely actress from the Thêatre des Variétés: ‘There was not a foreigner, an elegant lady, or even a bourgeois from the Place Royale who did not know these three young people from the Durance, who had arrived in Paris with nothing to support themselves except the secret of
brandades de morue
[cod pounded with garlic, oil and cream], which eventually led to their receiving tribute from the whole of civilized Europe, from the mouth of the Tagus to the shores of the Neva.’ 21
    The heyday of the Palais-Royal ended on a precise date: at midnight on 31 December 1836, when games of chance were banned in Paris. The decline was rapid. The dandies, gawpers, bon viveurs and call girls migrated a few hundred metres, and the Boulevards became the new
promenade enchantée
.
    In those days, when quarters went out of style, they fell into a kind of lethargy that could last a very long while. They had not suffered in their heyday the accelerated commercial metabolism that since the 1960s has ravaged quarters such as Saint-Séverin, Mouffetard, the Bastille and the Marais, and is now at work on the Butte-aux-Cailles, or the Saint-Blaise quarter around the Place Charonne, Rue Montorgeuil and Rue Oberkampf. The Palais-Royal, for