About this time, he also became acquainted with the writings of Edgar Allan Poe and began the difficult work of translating Poe into French—not, as he insisted, because he was a translator but because he found in Poe a kind of brother, someone who also believed in the natural evil of mankind. Baudelaire’s series of essays passionately defending Poe had already appeared when selections from what would become his famous, or infamous, book of poetry, Les Fleurs du mal (The Flowers of Evil), were published in June 1855—just as the Exposition Universelle was opening.
Baudelaire—by this time poverty-stricken, hiding from creditors, and broken in health—had returned to art criticism for the 1855 exposition. Once again he lauded Delacroix and Romanticism, but he completely ignored his friend Gustave Courbet. This, even though Courbet’s one-man exhibit contained L’Atelier du peintre (The Painter’s Studio), a huge canvas containing figures grouped around Courbet—figures that included Baudelaire. Despite the compliment, Baudelaire had already moved away from Courbet’s politics—the radical politics of 1848—as well as the emerging school of Realism that Courbet so emphatically espoused.
The publication of eighteen of Baudelaire’s poems in La Revue des Deux Mondes, a longtime supporter of French romanticism, marked a moment of triumph for the impoverished and depressed poet. These were “a complete success,” an enthusiastic Maxime Du Camp later wrote, and added that they “produced a great sensation.” But this sensation was by no means entirely favorable. Du Camp added that “Baudelaire’s skillful composition and the sonorous vigor of his verses were greatly admired, but more than one reader was shocked by the crudity of his ideas.”7
Five months later, the critic Louis Goudall wrote a scathing review in Le Figaro, which only deepened Baudelaire’s depression. “What emptiness around me!” he wrote his mother. “What blackness!”8
Earlier that same year, another poet, writer, and translator—although not quite so young as Baudelaire—had ended his life in a squalid quarter of Paris, hanging himself from the iron bars of a window in a dismal back alley. Like Baudelaire, this poet, Gérard de Nerval (the nom-de-plume of Gérard Labrunie), had gone through an inheritance, had led a Bohemian life, and had taken to some eye-popping doings (Baudelaire on at least one occasion dyed his hair green; Nerval took his pet lobster for walks). Like Baudelaire, Nerval played a critical role in the French Romantic movement, and like Baudelaire, he had a large pool of artistic and literary friends, including Alexandre Dumas père and Nadar as well as Théophile Gautier. And, much like Baudelaire, he had reached the depths of darkness of the soul.
But unlike Nerval, Baudelaire did not commit suicide.
“Paris changes! but nothing of my melancholy has lifted.”9 Baudelaire did not publish these words until 1857, but already he was grieving for the Paris that Georges Haussmann was destroying.
Haussmann indeed remained fully engaged in transforming the city. While working up a development plan for the space between the Hôtel de Ville and the Place du Châtelet, including the restoration and raised elevation underpinning the Tour Saint-Jacques and the creation of the first of Napoleon III’s urban green spaces around it, he now was devoting much of his attention to work on the Left Bank. There, he focused on the Boulevards Saint-Michel and Saint-Germain, where in 1855 he was pleased to announce the achievement of the Grande Croisée. He also continued work on the Left Bank’s Rue Jeanne d’Arc, a major thoroughfare reaching from Mount Saint-Geneviève and the Salpêtrière hospital to the Farmers-General wall at Place d’Italie, deep in what now is the thirteenth arrondissement.
In addition, Haussmann pressed forward with the Rue de Rennes thoroughfare, starting at Gare Montparnasse, which he and the emperor wanted to take all the way to and across the Seine via a new bridge. Since this meant the demolition of the Institut de France and the Pont des Arts, it was a nonstarter—the “immortals” of the Académie française as well as a host of others were not pleased.10 Instead, the Rue de Rennes would slice its way through south-central Paris but would come to an abrupt stop at Boulevard Saint-Germain and Place Saint-Germain-des-Prés.
On the Right Bank, Haussmann now laid the groundwork for a Boulevard du Nord, later called the Boulevard de Magenta, to link the Gare de l’Est and the Gare du Nord along with a number of other streets along this route, to ease access to the railroad stations as well as to the Lariboisière hospital.
But thoroughfares and connections to the railways were just the beginning: Haussmann also wanted to improve the means of transportation for Parisians, and in early 1855, he made use of an imperial decree to merge eleven private-concession omnibus companies into a Compagnie Générale des Omnibus—a move that especially favored the Pereire brothers but also provided better service for the riders, offering modest fares, regular timetables, and a system for transfers throughout the city. These horse-drawn vehicles, now double-decker, usually seated fourteen below and twelve above, with the upstairs being in the open. Open-air seats cost less than those inside and attracted large numbers of workers, smokers, and anyone with limited funds. But the low ticket prices at either level (thirty centimes downstairs, fifteen centimes upstairs) offered something of a revolution in lifestyles for many Parisians, giving them an easy and inexpensive way to travel throughout the city.
The number of Parisians taking advantage of the new omnibus system showed that Haussmann had correctly gauged the demand as well as the price. The new Compagnie Générale des Omnibus owned 347 carriages, and among them, these lumbering vehicles carried a grand total of 36 million passengers in 1855 alone—an average of thirty-three trips per person per year. Within ten years, the Compagnie Générale would boast 664 omnibuses, which would carry 107 million passengers. By this time, each traveler was making an average of sixty trips per year—double the number of a decade before.
And where did all these people go? Many, or most, went to work, or to obligations of one sort or another, but many also were escaping their cramped and often dirty living quarters and heading for a variety of amusements, whether shops, theaters, or cafés.
Shops were becoming ever more delightful—and affordable—as Boucicaut progressively transformed his Le Bon Marché into a grand magasin, or department store, and others, such as Le Printemps and La Samaritaine, soon followed, offering the lower prices that mass production and bulk buying made possible. The Pereires created the Société des Galeries du Louvre for the boutiques in their Hôtel du Louvre; these soon became such a success that, known familiarly as “Au Louvre,” they in turn combined and grew into one of the grands magasins of Paris. Later, this department store would expand into the hotel itself, which would eventually relocate to the other side of the Place du Palais Royal.
As for cafés, there were thousands of them, in every part of the city, each with its own loyal clientele. On the Boulevard des Italiens, in the heart of the Grands Boulevards, the fashionable Café de Paris attracted glittering after-theater crowds, while the literary set gathered at the Café Riche, and the prestigious Café Anglais drew those who enjoyed what was widely reputed to be the best food in the city. Writers and intellectuals gravitated to the Left Bank’s Le Procope or the Café Voltaire (a favorite of Delacroix), while Edouard Manet and his friends met at the Café Guerbois, on Avenue de Clichy at the foot of Montmartre. Cafés provided the place and occasion for serious intellectual debate, drinking, or hijinks, depending on the clientele and the evening. And throughout the city there were countless neighborhood cafés, some little more than corner bars, where locals could gather, exchange news, and gossip.
Water was rarely an option for those with a thirst, nor was it readily available in which to bathe or launder. For despite the fact that a major river ran through it, Paris was a city that had always needed water—now, with its steadily growing population, more than ever.
The Seine (not yet dammed and controlled) was still a broad and shallow river that flooded regularly, leaving wide bogs and marshes along its lowland banks. It was also a river whose level lowere
d precipitately during the dry summer months, leaving behind a muddy detritus of shallow pools and ooze. It was to avoid the Seine’s mud and floods that Paris’s Roman conquerors built their homes and forum on the Left Bank hill of Mount Sainte-Geneviève, and it was to supplement their undependable and inconveniently located water supply that they built a lengthy aqueduct to bring in water from the south.
This aqueduct subsequently deteriorated and disappeared as the Roman Empire crumbled. Parisians had to fall back on Seine water, although a growing number began to dig wells—especially on the Right Bank, where the water table lay close to the surface. This water seemed clean but unfortunately was not. The very fact that it lay near the surface meant that it received the runoff from Paris’s notoriously muddy and filthy streets, as well as seepage from its open sewers.
Until Haussmann, few drew a connection between the quality of water they drank and the epidemics that regularly swept the city. Instead, for centuries they merely drank up, with the more finicky either filtering the liquid or simply allowing it to settle before drinking.
For years, Paris had employed an extraordinary number of devices to step up its water supply, including aqueducts that tapped the northern springs of Belleville and Ménilmontant (neither being very productive or even drinkable) and the huge Samaritaine water pump on the Pont Neuf (dismantled in 1813) and its sister Notre-Dame pump on Pont Notre-Dame (removed in 1858). Along the way, steam pumps had their day, as well as Napoleon Bonaparte’s grand Canal de l’Ourcq, which served as a navigation system as well as a supplier of drinking water.
By the 1830s, several entrepreneurs decided to take a new approach and proposed to tap into the pristine aquifer that lay deep below the city’s surface. The idea was that this aquifer, caught between layers of impermeable rock and clay, could be reached by drilling. Unlike a regular well, an aquifer—if tapped in just the right spot—spurts upward. As it happened, Paris was sitting at the center of a huge geological basin containing an aquifer of formidable proportions. Prodded by various officials, the municipal council approved a large sum to tap this underground reservoir by drilling a series of artesian wells within city limits.
The first of these, the puits de Grenelle (begun in 1833 at what is now the intersection of Rues Valentin-Haüy and Bouchut, in the 15th arrondissement), encountered innumerable hardships until, after eight years and a depth of 538 meters, a sudden whistling sound pierced the air and a column of water dramatically shot up. Work then began, in 1855, on a well in Passy (at present-day Square Lamartine, in the 16th arrondissement). Two others followed, one at Place Hébert (in the Chapelle quarter of the 18th arrondissement) and another on the Butte-aux-Cailles (in the 13th arrondissement), both begun in 1863. The drilling in Passy reached water after six years, but the one at Place Hébert suffered a serious cave-in and did not become operational until 1888. The well on the Butte-aux-Cailles (interrupted by war as well as by internal squabbles) did not become operational until 1904.
By this time, it had become obvious that the Paris aquifer was not inexhaustible, as each additional well had noticeably depleted the force and flow of the others. But any disappointments over the artesian wells was significantly lessened by success elsewhere. Soon Paris would become the beneficiary of one of Haussmann’s most daring—and successful—ideas.
Even before becoming prefect of the Seine, Haussmann had taken a great interest in the problems associated with public water, and although water’s role in spreading epidemics was not yet widely known, he became convinced that something had to be done about Paris’s water supply, which not only was insufficient and poorly distributed but also was cloudy and smelly. Quickly deciding against trying to draw more water from the Seine (which advocates planned to lightly filter and pump to reservoirs situated at the greatest possible height, for gravity distribution), he decided instead to investigate whether good-quality spring water could be brought into the city in quantities and at a sufficient height to be distributed to a large number of Parisians. In addition, Haussmann believed that it was necessary to provide adequate drains for wastewater, and he wanted to examine the whole related problem of sewage.
After consultations with the emperor, Haussmann called to Paris a former colleague, Eugène Belgrand, a civil engineer whose work he respected. At the time, Belgrand was in charge of river navigation in the lower Seine, and he was familiar with the waters of the Paris basin. Belgrand soon joined the Public Works Ministry of the Seine prefecture, and in 1854, he began to investigate the problems that Haussmann had outlined, first computing the springs in the Seine basin from which water could reach Paris at a sufficient height and then estimating the cost of channeling this water to Paris, filtering, and storing it there. Within months, Belgrand had his report on Haussmann’s desk, and the prefect sent on his recommendations to the municipal council, which in early 1855 authorized Belgrand to continue his investigations.
It was the start of something big.
In the meantime, the spread of the telegraph for private communications was revolutionizing major parts of the city, while at the same time, Paris was undergoing its transformation into the City of Light. Gaslit streetlamps were rapidly spreading along the boulevards as well as on theater and shop fronts, and in 1855, Haussmann prompted a major improvement in gas supply by arm-twisting the various concessionary companies into forming a single Compagnie du Gaz, headed by the Pereire brothers. This not only gave the Pereires yet another area to monopolize, but it immeasurably improved the service.
Of course, all of the improvements that Haussmann was undertaking cost money, lots of it, and by spring of 1855, another major loan (of seventy-five million francs) was needed. This time, the city issued bonds with a face value of five hundred francs, repayable in fifty years at an interest rate of 3 percent. But to entice lenders sufficiently, it had become necessary to add something extra—in this case, each bond was entered into a twice-yearly lottery that would give out significant amounts of cash. This of course added considerably to the total real cost of the loan. The Pereires stepped up and ensured the success of the bond appeal, but the cost of borrowing was rising.
The Pereires had regularly served as Haussmann’s dependable allies and had benefited greatly from the relationship. In 1855, they bought a magnificent mansion on prestigious Rue du Faubourg Saint-Honoré, a residence that rivaled the Rothschilds’ mansion on nearby Rue Saint-Florentin. There, each Pereire family had its own apartments, and the sumptuously decorated mansion became a kind of museum for displaying the Pereires’ growing collection of art.
But James de Rothschild had by no means given up the fight. The banking and railway boom had reached its peak in 1855, and now a plethora of demands on the economy, from the cost of the endless Crimean War to an unfortunately bad French harvest, placed the Banque de France under great strain. In a critical win for the Rothschilds in their rivalry with the Pereires, one of their own family, Alphonse de Rothschild (son of James), was now elected a regent of the Banque de France—the first Rothschild, and the first Jew, to hold the position. This now gave the Rothschilds a foothold at the Banque, which at the critical juncture of August 1855 chose to secretly buy thirty million francs of gold and twenty-five million of silver from the Rothschilds, to replenish its reserves.
The Pereires’ seemingly invincible position was about to encounter major difficulties, starting with the center of their empire, the Crédit Mobilier.
Money was at the heart of the enormous transformation that was tearing down the old and creating the new in Paris, even as pleasure and decadence were defining the city’s image and appeal. One evening in August, the Goncourt brothers gave vent to their disgust, proclaiming that “we . . . are suffering from a moral indigestion brought on by debauchery.” Later, in October—over “a couple of tankards of beer at Binding’s”—they concluded that their moral dilemma was entirely women’s fault. “Woman,” they decided, “is an evil, stupid animal unless she is educated and civilized to a high degree.” As far
as they were concerned, women’s only usefulness was for sex.11
The aristocratic Goncourts were hardly alone in their misogyny, which reflected a world in which women, even if placed on a pedestal, were generally viewed—and treated—as chattel. Those few who escaped these constraints usually were, like the extraordinary novelist George Sand (the nom de plume of Amantine-Lucile-Aurore Dupin), blessed with wealth, position, a liberal education, and an uncommon degree of strength and independence. Or, like some of the most famous courtesans of the day—such as the Russian-born Esther Lachmann, known during her Second Empire heyday as La Païva—they used their beauty and ability to manipulate men to rise out of poverty and into great wealth and influence. In La Païva’s case, the mansion she built on the Champs-Elysées fairly dripped with money, featuring a surfeit of Italian Renaissance-style carvings along with a fabulous yellow onyx staircase and a gossip-inducing silver bathtub boasting three taps, the third providing either milk or champagne. But without comparable assets, a woman’s lot in Paris of the Second Empire was not enviable.
The vast numbers, as well as the hierarchy, of sex workers in the mid-nineteenth-century City of Light is one indication of its women’s plight. Shopgirls and factory workers illegally walked the streets by night to supplement their meager incomes, while registered prostitutes worked in around two hundred legal brothels and maisons closes.12 Young dancers, singers, and actors, like Zola’s gloriously endowed Nana, were in a more enviable position; if attractive, they could become courtesans, or cocottes, kept by wealthy protectors. If sufficiently clever, they could milk their protectors for all they were worth and become wealthy in their own right, retiring to a comfortable old age.
And then there was that in-between world, the demimonde, a term that Dumas fils introduced to Paris in his 1855 play, Le Demi-Monde. Dumas fils used the term to describe a woman who occupied a midway position between the worldly woman and the courtesan. Although it came to depict women who carried on the trade of love for money, Dumas himself used it to describe the half-world that contained mistresses “who do not present a bill the next morning,” and he specifically included wives “put away” for infidelity and young girls such as the second wife in Zola’s The Kill, who have compromised their virtue and desperately seek a husband—or a permanent protector.
Paris, City of Dreams Page 13
