In his late-night wanderings, Bretonne meets with shop girls, blacksmiths, drunkards, servants, and of course prostitutes, spies on politicians in debate and aristocrats in adultery (notably in the Tuileries), sees crimes, fires, mobs, cross-dressers, a freshly murdered corpse. He writes of Paris in the way many others would later: as a book, a wilderness, and a sort of erogenous zone, or bedroom. The Île Saint-Louis was his favorite haunt, and from 1779 to 1789 he chiseled onto its stone walls dates of great personal significance, along with a few evocative words. Thus Paris became both the source of his adventures and a book recording them, a tale to be both written and read by walking. As Proust’s famous madeleine served to recall his past, so did these inscriptions for Bretonne: “Whenever I had stopped along the the parapet [of the Île Saint-Louis] to ponder some sorrowful thought, my hand would trace the date and the thought that had just stirred me. I would walk on then, wrapped in the darkness of the night whose silence and loneliness were touched with a horror I found pleasing.” He reads the first date he had carved: “I cannot describe the emotion I felt as I thought back to the year before. . . . A rush of memories came to me; I stood motionless, preoccupied with linking the present moment to the preceding year’s, to make them one.” He relived love affairs, nights of desperation, and ruptured friendships. His Paris is a bedroom full of liaisons in the gardens and lechery on the streets (fittingly enough, Bretonne was a foot fetishist and sometimes followed women with small feet and high heels). In his Paris, the privacy of erotic life is constantly spilling forth in public, and the city is a wilderness, because its public and private spaces and experiences are so intermingled and because it is lawless, dark, and full of dangers.
In the nineteenth century, the theme of the city as wilderness would come up again and again in novels, poems, and popular literature. The city was called a “virgin forest,” its explorers were sometimes, in Benjamin’s famous phrase, naturalists “botanizing on the asphalt,” but its indigenous inhabitants were often “savages.” “What are the dangers of the forest and the prairie compared with the daily shocks and conflicts of civilization?” wrote Baudelaire in a passage Benjamin cites. “Whether a man grasps his victim on a boulevard or stabs his quarry in unknown woods—does he not remain both here and there the most perfect of all beasts of prey?” In admiration of James Fenimore Cooper’s novels of the American wilderness, Alexandre Dumas titled a novel Mohicans du Paris; it features the adventures of a flâneur-detective who lets a blowing scrap of paper lead him to adventures that always involve crimes; a minor novelist, Paul Feval, installed an unlikely Native American character in Paris, where he scalps four enemies in a cab; Balzac, says Benjamin, refers to “Mohicans in spencer jackets” and “Hurons in frock coats”; later in the century, loiterers and petty criminals were nicknamed “Apaches.” These terms invested the city with the allure of the exotic, turning its types into tribes, its individuals into explorers, and its streets into a wilderness. One of its explorers was George Sand, who found that “on the Paris pavement I was like a boat on ice. My delicate shoes cracked open in two days, my pattens sent me spilling, and I always forgot to lift my dress. I was muddy, tired and runny-nosed, and I watched my shoes and my clothes . . . go to rack and ruin with alarming rapidity.” She put on men’s clothes, and though that act is frequently described as a subversive social one, she described it as a practical one. Her new costume gave her a freedom of movement she reveled in: “I can’t convey how much my boots delighted me. . . . With those steel-tipped heels I was solid on the sidewalk at last. I dashed back and forth across Paris and felt I was going around the world. My clothes were weatherproof too. I was out and about in all weathers, came home at all hours, was in the pits of all the theaters.”
But it was not the same medieval wilderness Bretonne had ventured into. In Baudelaire some of the same figures recur—the prostitute, the beggar, the criminal, the beautiful stranger—but he does not speak to them, and the content of their lives remains speculative to him. Window-shopping and people-watching have become indistinguishable activities; one may attempt to buy but not to know them. “Multitude, solitude: identical terms, and interchangeable by the active and fertile poet,” wrote Baudelaire. “The man who is unable to people his solitude is equally unable to be alone in a bustling crowd. The poet enjoys the incomparable privilege of being able to be himself or someone else. . . . Like those wandering souls who go looking for a body, he enters as he likes into each man’s personality. For him alone everything is vacant.” Baudelaire’s city is like a wilderness in another way: it is lonely.
The old Paris was cut down like a forest by Baron Haussmann, who carried out Napoleon III’s vision of a splendid—and manageable—modern city. Since the 1860s it has been popular to say that Haussmann’s destruction of the medieval warrens of streets and his creation of the grand boulevards was a counter-revolutionary tactic, an attempt to make the city penetrable by armies, indefensible by citizens. After all, citizens had revolted in 1789, 1830, and 1848, in part by building barricades across the narrow streets. But this does not explain the rest of Haussmann’s project. The wide new avenues accommodated the flow of a vastly increased population, commerce, and on occasion troops, but below them were new sewers and waterways, eliminating some of the stench and disease of the old city—and the Bois de Boulogne was landscaped as a great public park in the English style. As a political project, it seems an attempt not to subdue but to seduce Parisians; as a development project, it displaced the poor from the center of the city to its edges and suburbs, where they remain today (the opposite of most postwar American cities—Manhattan and San Francisco are exceptions—abandoned to the poor when the middle class flocked to the suburbs). Other efforts were made to civilize the “wilderness” of the city in the nineteenth century: streetlights, house numbers, sidewalks, regularly posted street names, maps, guidebooks, increased policing, and the registration, prosecution, or both of prostitutes.
The real complaint against Haussmann seems to be twofold. The first is that in tearing down so much of the old city, he obliterated the delicate interlace of mind and architecture, the mental map walkers carried with them and the geographical correlatives to their memories and associations. In a poem about walking through one of Haussmann’s construction sites near the Louvre, Baudelaire complained
Paris is changing! but nothing within my melancholy
has shifted! New palaces, scaffoldings, piles of stone
Old neighborhoods—everything has become allegory for me
and my dear memories are heavier than stones.
Baudelaire being Baudelaire, the poem ends “in the forest of my exiled soul.” And the brothers Edmond and Jules Goncourt wrote in their journal on November 18, 1860, “My Paris, the Paris in which I was born, the Paris of the manners of 1830 to 1848, is vanishing, both materially and morally. . . . I feel like a man merely passing through Paris, a traveller. I am foreign to that which is to come, to that which is, and a stranger to these new boulevards that go straight on, without meandering, without the adventures of perspective. . . .”
The second complaint is that with his broad, straight avenues, Haussmann turned the wilderness into a formal garden. The new boulevards continued a project begun two centuries before by André Le Nôtre, who went on to design the vast gardens of Versailles for Louis XIV. It was Le Nôtre who had designed the gardens of the Tuileries and the garden-boulevard of the Champs-Élysées extending west from the Tuileries to the Étoile, where Napoleon later placed his Arc de Triomphe. Most of these designs of Le Nôtre were outside the city walls and thus outside the economic life of the city, but the city expanded to absorb them. Thus the boulevards that Le Nôtre built for pleasure alone in the 1660s were developed for pleasure and industry by Haussmann in the 1860s (and these long axes had been widely emulated long before; Washington, D.C., is one of the cities that derives from this imperial geometry). Haussmann was as much an aesthete as Le Nôtre; he annoyed his emperor by leveling hills and t
aking other pains to make his streets utterly straight, opening up the long vistas that now seem so characteristic of Paris. It is a great irony that though the English garden had triumphed and gardens had become “natural”—irregular, asymmetrical, full of serpentine rather than straight lines—a formal French garden had been hacked out of the wilds of Paris.
The damp, intimate, claustrophobic, secretive, narrow, curving streets with their cobblestones sinuous like the scales of a snake had given way to ceremonial public space, space full of light, air, business, and reason. And if the old city had so often been compared to a forest, it may have been because it was an organic accretion of independent gestures by many creatures, rather than the implementation of a master plan made by one; it had not been designed but grown. No map had dictated that meandering organic form. And many hated the change: “For the promenaders, what necessity was there to walk from the Madeleine to the Étoile by the shortest route? On the contrary, the promenaders like to prolong their walk, which is why they walk the same alley three or four times in succession,” wrote Adolphe Thiers. Walking in the wilderness is one kind of pleasure, demanding daring, knowledge, strength—for savages, detectives, women in men’s clothes; walking in a garden is a far milder one. Haussmann’s boulevards made far more of the city a promenade and far more of its citizens promenaders. The arcades began their long decay as the streets bloomed with boutiques and the grand department stores were born—and during the Commune of 1871 the barricades of street revolutionaries were built across the great boulevards.
It wasn’t Baudelaire who had first drawn Benjamin’s attention to the arcades and to the possibility of configuring walking as a cultural act, but Benjamin’s contemporaries—fellow Berliner and friend Franz Hessel and the surrealist writer Louis Aragon. He found Aragon’s 1926 book Paysan de Paris (Paris Peasant) so exhilarating that “evenings in bed I could not read more than a few words of it before my heartbeat got so strong I had to put the book down. . . . And in fact the first notes of the Passagenwerk [or Arcades Project] come from this time. Then came the Berlin years, in which the best part of my friendship with Hessel was nourished by the Passagen-project in frequent conversations.” In his Berlin essay, Benjamin describes Hessel as one of those guides who had introduced him to the city, and Hessel himself had written about walking Berlin (and, with Benjamin, worked on a translation of Marcel Proust’s Remembrance of Things Past, a novel that with its themes of memory, walks, chance encounters, and Parisian salons fits neatly between the two bodies of French literature Benjamin took on). It is these twentieth-century writers and artists who best fit the descriptions of the nineteenth-century flâneur.
Aragon’s Paysan de Paris is one of a trio of surrealist books published in the late 1920s; the other two are André Breton’s Nadja and Philippe Soupault’s Last Nights of Paris. All three are first-person narratives about a man wandering in Paris, give very specific place names and descriptions of places, and make prostitutes one of their main destinations. Surrealism prized dreams, the free associations of an unconscious or unself-conscious mind, startling juxtapositions, chance and coincidence, and the poetic possibilities of everyday life. Wandering around a city was an ideal way to engage with all these qualities. Breton wrote, “I still recall the extraordinary role that Aragon played in our daily strolls through Paris. The localities that we passed through in his company, even the most colourless ones, were positively transformed by a spellbinding romantic inventiveness that never faltered and that needed only a street-turning or a shop-window to inspire a fresh outpouring.”
Paris, which had been stripped of its mystery by Haussmann, had recovered it to serve once again as a kind of muse to its poets. Both Nadja and Last Nights are organized around the pursuit of an enigmatic young woman met through a chance encounter, and it is this pursuit that gives the books their narratives. Such encounters are a staple of city-walking literature: Bretonne follows women with beautiful feet; Whitman eyeballs men in Manhattan; both Nerval and Baudelaire wrote poems about a passing glimpse of a woman who could have been their great love. Breton “spoke to this unknown woman, though I must admit that I expected the worst.” Soupault’s nameless narrator stalked his subject like a detective and came to know the underworld she and her associates inhabited, though this sordid realm of the ambitious, the demented, and the murderous neither explains nor fully dispels her fascination. Aragon’s book, the least conventional of the three, has no narrative and is organized, like Benjamin’s One-Way Street, around geography: it explores a few Parisian places—the first of which is the passage de l’Opéra, a shopping arcade already slated for destruction when Aragon wrote about it. (It was, tidily enough, torn down to make way for the expansion of the boulevard Haussmann.) Paysan de Paris demonstrated how rich a subject the city itself was for wandering, on foot and in the imagination.
Aragon made the city itself his subject, but Breton and Soupault pursued women who were embodiments of the city: Nadja and Georgette. Soupault writes of his protagonist spying on Georgette as she takes a customer to a hotel near the Pont Neuf and returns to the streets. Afterward, “Georgette resumed her stroll about Paris, through the mazes of the night. She went on, dispelling sorrow, solitude or tribulation. Then more than ever did she display her strange power: that of transfiguring the night. Thanks to her, who was no more than one of the hundred thousands, the Parisian night became a mysterious domain, a great and marvelous country, full of flowers, of birds, of glances and of stars, a hope launched into space. . . . That night, as we were pursuing, or more exactly, tracking Georgette, I saw Paris for the first time. It was surely not the same city. It lifted itself above the mists, rotating like the earth on its axis, more feminine than usual. And Georgette herself became a city.” Once again and yet more deliriously, Paris is a wilderness, bedroom, and book to be read by walking. The protagonist—nameless, without a profession, the perfect flâneur at last—has taken up Bretonne’s task of exploring the night, but by pursuing a single woman entangled with a single crime, a murder whose aftermath they both witnessed. The protagonist is a detective on the trail of crime and aesthetic experience, and Georgette embodies both.
Later Georgette tells him she took up her profession because she and her brother needed to live, and “Everything is so simple when one knows all the streets as I do, and all the people who move in them. They are all seeking something without seeming to do so.” Like Nadja, she is a flâneuse, one who has made of the street a sort of residence. While Last Nights of Paris is a novel, Nadja is based on Breton’s encounters with a real woman, and to underscore his book’s nonfictionality, he reproduces photographs of people (though not of pseudonymous Nadja), places, drawings, and letters in the pages of his narrative. On one of their dates, Nadja leads him to the place Dauphine at the west end of the Île de la Cité, and he writes, “Whenever I happen to be there, I feel the desire to go somewhere else gradually ebbing out of me, I have to struggle against myself to get free from a gentle, over-insistent, and finally, crushing embrace.”
Thirty years later, in his Pont Neuf, Breton, in the words of one critic, “famously proposes a detailed ‘interpretation’ of the topography of central Paris according to which the geographical and architectural layout of the Île de la Cité, and the bend of the Seine where it is situated, are seen to make up the body of a recumbent woman whose vagina is located in the place Dauphine, ‘with its triangular, slightly curvilinear form bisected by a slit separating two wooded spaces.’ ” Breton spends the night in a hotel with Nadja, and Soupault’s narrator hires Georgette for sex, but in these tales eroticism is not focused on bodily intimacy in bed but diffused throughout the city, and noctural walking rather than copulating is the means by which they bask in this charged atmosphere. The women they pursue are most themselves, most enchanting, and most at home on the streets, as though the profession of streetwalker was at last truly to walk the streets (no longer victims of or refugees from the streets, as so many earlier heroines had been). Nadja and
Georgette are, like most surrealist representations of women, too burdened with being incarnations of Woman—degraded and exalted, muse and whore, city incarnate—to be individual women, and this is most evident in their magical strolls through the city, strolls that lure the narrators to follow these sirens on a chase that is also an homage to and tour of Paris. The love of a citizen for his city and the lust of a man for a passerby has become one passion. And the consummation of this passion is on the streets and on foot. Walking has become sex. Benjamin concurred in this transformation of city into female body, walking into copulating, when he concluded his passage about Paris as labyrinth, “Nor is it to be denied that I penetrated to its innermost place, the Minotaur’s chamber, with the only difference being that this mythological monster had three heads: those of the occupants of the small brothel on rue de la Harpe, in which, summoning my last reserves of strength . . . I set my foot.” Paris is a labyrinth whose center is a brothel, and in this labyrinth it is the arrival, not the consummation, that seems to count, and the foot that seems to be the crucial anatomical detail.
Djuna Barnes wrote a sort of coda to these books in her 1936 Nightwood, where once again the erotic love of an enchanted madwoman mingles with the fascinations of Paris and the night. The heroine of Barnes’s great lesbian novel, Robin Vote, walks the streets “rapt and confused,” abandoning her lover Nora Flood and directing “her steps toward that night life that was a known measure between Nora and the cafés. Her meditations, during this walk, were a part of the pleasure she expected to find when the walk came to an end. . . . Her thoughts were in themselves a form of locomotion.” A cross-dressing Irish doctor who frequents the pissoirs of the boulevards explains the night in a long soliloquy to Nora, and Barnes must have known what she was doing when she housed this Dr. O’Connor on the rue Servandoni by the place Saint-Sulpice, the same small street in which Dumas had housed one of his Three Musketeers and Hugo had settled LesMisérables’ hero Jean Valjean. Such a density of literature had accumulated in Paris by the time of Nightwood that one pictures characters from centuries of literature crossing paths constantly, crowding each other, a Metro car full of heroines, a promenade populated by the protagonists of novels, a rioting mob of minor characters. Parisian writers always gave the street address of their characters, as though all readers knew Paris so well that only a real location in the streets would breathe life into a character, as though histories and stories themselves had taken up residence throughout the city.
Wanderlust: A History of Walking Page 28
