The Invention of Paris by Eric Hazan Read Free Book Online Page B

goes – for three hundred knights who had returned blind from the Crusades, the Saracens having put out their eyes. (Curiously, most historians of old Paris relate this story as if it were an established fact, just as they do that of the Jew Jonathan who, around the same time, supposedly boiled a host from the church of the Billettes, which emitted blood – for which crime he was burned alive, as can be seen on Paolo Uccello’s predella in Urbino. 23 ) The hospital precinct sheltered a whole population of craftsmen, exempt from taxation as they also were at the Temple. In 1780, the Quinze-Vingts was transferred to the former barracks of the Black Musketeers in Rue de Charenton, where it remains today.
    The Rue Saint-Thomas-du-Louvre would today pass through Ieoh Ming Pei’s pyramid. As well as the Hôtel de Chevreuse, it served a building of unparalleled importance in French literature, the Hôtel de Rambouillet. ‘I need not say that it is the most famous in the kingdom,’ wrote Sauval, who was a regular there,
as no one has any doubt on this score. The entire
beau monde
has read its praise and description in
Le Grand Cyrus
, and in the works of the most refined minds of the century. Perhaps there is not even any need to recall that in
Cyrus
it is known as the palace of Cléomire, and elsewhere it is always called the palace of Arthénice, an anagram of Catherine, the baptismal name of Catherine de Vivonne, Marquise de Rambouillet, the mansion having been devised by Malherbe. Illustrious figures have all published the name of this heroine to their heart’s content, leaving mealmost nothing to say about her hôtel . . . And as well as this, they have also told us that she devised it and gave it its design, that she alone undertook, conducted and completed it. Her fine and elegant taste revealed to our architects conveniences and perfections unknown even to the Ancients, and which they have since extended to all proud and prestigious dwellings. 24 By the discoveries that Arthénice made in architecture, by way of a pleasant diversion, it is possible to judge those that she made in literature, where she occupied a pinnacle. The virtue and merit of Catherine de Vivonne attracted to her house, for many years, all fine minds of the court and the century. In her blue chamber a circle of illustrious figures gathered each day, indeed we should say the Academy; for this is where the Académie Française had its origin; and it is from the great minds who attended here that the most noble section of this very considerable body was composed. This is the reason why the Hôtel de Rambouillet was long known as the French Parnassus . . . Those who were not known there were seen simply as ordinary persons, and it was enough to have entered there to be ranked among the illustrious figures of the century. 25
    Rue Fromenteau followed the moat of the Louvre along the Horloge pavilion, ending up at Rue Saint-Honoré close to Rue de Valois. It always had a bad reputation: ‘Is not Rue Fromenteau both murderous and profligate?’, Balzac asks at the start of
Ferragus
. Connecting Rue Fromenteau with Rue Saint-Thomas-du-Louvre, the little Rue du Doyenné hosted a street market where, in the Romantic epoch, eighteenth-century French canvases could be bought at a low price. This is where Cousine Bette lived at the beginning of the eponymous novel: ‘As we drive in a hackney cab past this dead-alive spot, and chance to look down the little Rue du Doyenné, a shudder freezes the soul, and we wonder who can lie there,and what things may be done there at night, at an hour when the alley is a cut-throat pit, and the vices of Paris run riot there under the cloak of night.’ In the 1830s, a group of young writers still little known established themselves in Rue du Doyenné in a kind of squat, their number including Gérard de Nerval:
It was in our common lodgings in Rue du