The Paris Night: A Flâneur in Post-Revolutionary Paris

Abstract

Introduction by J. Weintraub The Paris Night by Eugène Briffault translated by J. Weintraub

INTRODUCTION

‘M. Briffault enters the newspaper office, discards his coat, rolls up his sleeves ... Is a lead article needed, a short item, a column, some opinions? Voilà, you only have to speak up to be served. In fact, M. Briffault is the complete newspaper man ... His pen is a locomotive driving across the paper; his politics and literature are powered by steam.’¹ Pretty much forgotten today, the author of ‘The Paris Night’, Eugène Briffault (1799–1854), was an active literary figure in the Paris of his time, his career almost concurrent with the full span of Louis-Philippe’s July Monarchy (1830–48). In an age of massive technological and social change—where the reach, power and impact of the periodical press and popular media were rapidly expanding—Briffault worked, frequently in an editorial position, for a variety of newspapers including among others Le Constitutionnel, Le Courrier français, Le Charivari, Le Siècle, Le Figaro and La Presse.² Eventually, he became the theatre critic for Le Temps, and he often wrote on cultural affairs, occasionally publishing pamphlets on matters as disparate as the Paris Opera (L’Opéra, 1834) or the game of dominoes (Manuel complet du jeu de dominos, 1843) as well as contributing to various anthologies, such as Paris ou le livre des cent-et-un (1831–34), in which ‘The Paris Night’ appeared.

But Briffault began his writing career in controversy, primarily as a political journalist and satirist. Instead of practising law after his admission to the bar, he decided to participate in the revival of the liberal journal L’Album, which in 1823 had been suppressed by order of the Bourbon Restoration, its publisher, Jean-Denis Magalon, imprisoned for thirteen months. Apparently, the new L’Ancien album was no less polemical five years later when Briffault had become an editor, since one of his first articles, on the murder of the German writer August von Kotzebue, was construed by the government of Charles X to be a defence of political assassination. It resulted in a jail term of one year (and a fine of 500 francs) for Magalon and two months in prison for Briffault.³ Undeterred, Briffault continued his political journalism, assuming an editorial position with the liberal newspaper Le Corsaire, and in June 1830, a month prior to the overthrow of Charles X, he spent three more days in jail for, allegedly, exhorting a crowd to rebellion. The following month, during the ‘three glorious days’ of the revolution (27 to 29 July), Le Corsaire was publishing and posting on city walls two numbers daily.⁴

In 1832 Briffault’s political writings cost him, at least temporarily, the use of his right arm, when an article by him in Le Corsaire, questioning the character of the duchesse de Berry, the mother of the ‘legitimist’ heir to the throne, impelled a Bourbon sympathizer to challenge him to a duel. Clearly, the royalist was a better shot than the journalist, since Briffault was wounded in the right arm. ‘I only wanted to break his arm’, his antagonist was reported to have said. ‘He won’t be writing anything more for a while.’⁵

If silencing him were his object, the royalist did not succeed, since Briffault continued to write charged articles, presumably with his left hand, that provoked additional challenges. But by the next decade, one of his colleagues claimed he had lost his ‘bold spirit’ (verdeur) of political protest and was no longer to be counted among journalists opposing the ruling power.⁶ In fact he seemed to have become reconciled with the regime, having authored a pair of laudatory pamphlets on the heir to the throne of Louis-Philippe, Ferdinand Philippe, the duc d’Orléans, after his tragic death in a carriage accident (Le Duc d’Orléans, Prince Royal, 1842, and Le Duc d’Orléans, les funérailles, 1842).

In the 1840s, Briffault had also become more active as an independent writer and editor, contributing frequently to periodical literature and a variety of multi-volume anthologies focusing primarily on Parisian life and manners. He also wrote a trio of books in the decade: Paris dans l’eau (1844), an examination of the importance of the river Seine to the city; Paris à table, (1846), a look at the Parisian dining scene at every social level; and Le Secret de Rome au XIXe siècle (1846), an exposé of the corruption inside the Catholic Church.

His more ambitious journalistic ventures, however, seemed to have been rewarded with little success. Begun in January 1842, his monthly Historiettes contemporaines: courrier de la ville—a mixture of cultural observation, anecdotes, and humour written almost entirely by Briffault—was published only to September. The following year, he inaugurated his own fashion annual, La Toilette: almanach des femmes, pour 1843, but only one number appeared.

In 1839 one of his colleagues, Louis-Adrien Huart, doubted that there was any other journalist in the profession who could claim to be more active, varied, steady or witty in his production than Briffault.⁷ But by the middle of the next decade, his reputation as a journalist seemed to have diminished considerably. One contemporary described ‘the old’ Briffault, ‘trembling and hat in hand’, submitting a piece to the editor of the modish Corsaire-Satan (later to publish Charles Baudelaire and Henri Murger) who immediately handed it over to the mocking young men (‘cette blagueuse jeunesse’) of his staff to ‘trim, pare, sharpen’: ‘This is old-school journalism. He pads his copy! Tighten, tighten!’⁸

Another of his contemporaries, Roger de Beauvoir, claimed that Briffault’s most agreeable writings were composed ‘in shirt sleeves, with both elbows on a restaurant table … among ravaged dishes and empty bottles’.⁹ Throughout his career, Briffault had a considerable reputation as a bon-vivant, widely renowned for his prodigious bouts of eating and drinking. Beauvoir, in his recollections of several ‘soupeurs’ of his time, described Briffault as ‘the godfather of all the boulevard kitchens’ and accused him of having killed off over thirty restaurants (presumably by not paying his exorbitant bills).¹⁰ But eventually his profligate ways—along with, perhaps, the rigours of the journalistic life (well depicted in ‘The Paris Night’) and an unfortunate marriage to a woman of dubious reputation half his age—caught up with him, leading to his physical, financial and mental ruin. Beauvoir described Briffault in his decline as having a livid brow, sunken cheeks and a ‘cadaverous’ appearance, and in a commentary both sad and ironic when applied to the spirited late-night flâneur of the previous decade, he declared, ‘Nocturnal Paris … no longer found in him anything but a ragged phantom, the ghost of his gaiety’.¹¹

According to one of his editors, Louis Lurine, Briffault was reduced to seeking work in government ministries and among friends, and when that failed him, ‘he asked for his daily bread from God, who did not send it to him every day’. In fact, a forgetful God eventually failed ‘to illuminate the magic lantern of his brain’, and in 1848, Lurine, with some of his colleagues, arranged to have Briffault committed to the insane asylum at Charenton where he died in 1854.¹²

‘The Paris Night’ was one of Briffault’s first writings to appear outside the columns of a newspaper. It was published in 1831 in the third volume of Paris ou le livre des cent-et-un, a huge undertaking that at its inception was intended to bring together 101 of the country’s most prominent writers to review a subject with which the French literary world was infatuated: ‘this monster’, as it was described in the collection’s introduction, ‘modern Paris’.¹³

Completed in fifteen volumes in 1834, Paris ou le livre des cent-et-un spawned a series of multi-volume illustrated anthologies with titles like Les Français peints par eux-mêmes (1840–42), Le Diable à Paris (1842–43) and La Grande Ville (1845–46) and which, with particular emphasis on Paris, provided commentary on French social and cultural life at every level as well as on the customs and manners (mœurs) of its people. It was a new genre of publication that the twentieth-century critic Walter Benjamin termed ‘panoramic literature’, and Briffault, along with a host of eminent authors, contributed to most of these collections.¹⁴ In Paris ou le livre des cent-et-un, for instance, he shared bylines with Victor Hugo, Alexandre Dumas, Eugène Sue, George Sand and Sainte-Beuve, as well as with such active journalists as Jules Janin, Louis Dersnoyers, Benjamin Constant and Gustave Planche.

For journalists (who ‘seek to discover the mechanism of social existence’, according to Briffault in ‘The Paris Night’), Paris ou le livre des cent-et-un was an ideal vehicle to offer their more considered observations on a passing urban scene that many were intent on memorializing before it faded from view. Moreover, collections like this helped to pay the bills, and it is fitting that Briffault opens his own essay with a look at the harried life of those who practised a way of writing that was rapidly becoming professionalized and commercialized.¹⁵ With the opening paragraphs of ‘The Paris Night’, Briffault disassociates his journalistic calling from the cloistered life of the literary artist, aligning himself instead with the ‘working man’, who receives ‘nothing more than wages for [his] toil’.¹⁶ Although he doesn’t directly compare his work with physical labour, at the end of the day ‘depletion and affliction remove all possibility of sleep’, accounting in part for the nocturnal wandering that structures his essay.¹⁷

After reporting on a raucous and invigorating late-night gathering among journalists at the Café des Nouveautés, Briffault descends into the deserted city to begin his journey. In ‘The Paris Night’ he never refers to himself as a ‘flâneur’, although he was certainly familiar with a term whose roots go back to the late sixteenth century. Also, the practice of a close, ambulatory observation of the Parisian social scene had firm literary antecedents in the previous century with Louis-Sébastien Mercier’s Tableau de Paris (1781–88) and Restif de la Bretonne’s Les Nuits de Paris (1786–88); and Honoré de Balzac is occasionally given credit for popularizing the concept of ‘flânerie’ with his reflection on it as ‘the gastronomy of the eye’ in ‘Méditation III’ of his Physiologie de Mariage (1829). The image and significance of the flâneur evolved throughout the nineteenth century, but Pamela Parkhurst Ferguson provides a clear portrait of his activities in the early years of the July Monarchy: ‘His field of predilection is the Paris of the arcades, the Paris of the restaurants and boulevards and gardens, the Paris of crowds in public places. . . . He does not look, he observes, he studies, he analyzes. He is in sum a philosophe sans le savoir.’¹⁸ She also cites Auguste de Lacroix’s 1841 essay ‘Le Flâneur’ to emphasize the flâneur’s distinctive characterization as ‘the true man of letters’.¹⁹ In ‘Une Journée des flâneurs sur les boulevards du nord’, which also appeared in Paris ou le livre des cent-et-un, a prostitute—recognizing that the author and his companion are accosting her for investigative rather than professional reasons—describes their flânerie in terms remarkably similar to Ferguson’s: ‘I get it. . . . You’re those observateurs, those philosophes who, to depict the manners of our times in their writings (my companions warned me about this) creep even into the dens of vice and debauchery.’²⁰

Briffault eventually visited one of those dens of debauchery, but the first signs of public activity he encounters in the streets are the omnipresent military patrols, a disturbing and oppressive sight for him. The liberal press, to which Briffault was then committed, played a pivotal role in the outbreak and progress of the July Revolution, and with the fall of the Bourbon monarchy, many on the left expected the establishment of a republic or the strengthening of republican institutions in its place.²¹ Needless to say, these republican partisans were profoundly disappointed when, fearful of the anarchy and terror that followed the previous revolution and the possible intervention of other European powers, the Chamber of Deputies, under the leadership of the banker Jacques Lafitte, offered Louis-Philippe, the duc d’Orléans, a pathway to power. A week later, on 7 August 1830, he was installed on the throne as Louis-Philippe I, the King of the French. The intent was the preservation of order under a more liberal constitutional monarch, but the early years of Louis-Philippe’s regime—with threats of assassination and armed insurrection from both the revolutionary left and the royalist right—were anything but stable. The government occasionally responded to this uncertainty and opposition with authoritarian shows of force and, a few years later, with repressive legal restrictions on the very freedoms (including freedom of the press) the revolutionaries had fought to preserve.²²

For Briffault in 1831, nocturnal Paris resembles a city under martial law. What once had been a decadent night filled with light and pleasure, has been suppressed; the streets are dark and deserted, surveillance is pervasive, and a hint of corruption is in the air. ‘The liberation of 1830’, he writes, ‘has done its destructive work.’

Nevertheless, Briffault is determined to seek out, in this dead and sleeping city, whatever remains of its ‘living and active parts’. He finds it at the edges of the Palais-Royal, once celebrated internationally for its ‘impudent and dissolute splendour’, but now fallen on harder times. Plunging into these lower depths as an observer rather than as a participant, he first seems intrigued by the ‘scene’, cataloguing with the eye of a realist novelist the types he encounters there. But he is quickly repelled. ‘Never had vice appeared more horribly ugly and boring’, and like a theatre critic offended by the performance on stage, he looks for an exit and a breath of fresh air.

Back on the rue Saint-Honoré, he is attracted by a procession of farm wagons that lead him to the central market, Les Halles. Although urban degradation and poverty are still evident here, Briffault, encouraged by the vibrant commercial activity surrounding him, is also bemused by the commodification of vegetables, as if produce were shares on the floor of a stock exchange. The market seems to be the one district in Paris that has retained its character, its vitality and order untouched by revolution or government regulation, with farmers, porters, buyers and sellers conducting their early morning business as they had for generations.

Once Briffault leaves the market, he reverses his course back through and across the first arrondissement. He reflects on other denizens of the night—a streetwalker, ragpickers, reckless coachmen—but, except for an occasional patrol, he mentions encountering no one else for the remainder of his journey. He has left the city’s ‘dynamic night’ for one ‘full of contemplation and memories’.

In fact, he has strayed from the path of the flâneur to that of the noctambule, or nightwalker, a figure far more isolated and solitary, and who, according to Matthew Beaumont, experiences the nocturnal city (in this case London) as ‘a form of phantasmagoria’.²³ Charles Dickens, one of Beaumont’s inveterate nightwalkers who regularly makes ‘his own solitary way’ through miles of empty streets, becomes ill, for instance, when deprived of ‘the phantasmagoric effects of the city—especially at night, where it was like a magic lantern’.²⁴ Simone Delattre also finds an air of l’hallucination fixed within certain districts of nocturnal Paris.²⁵ In the shadowy areas as yet unlit by the installation, during the July Monarchy, of the new gas lamps, the streets were very much open to fantasmagories.²⁶

Walking in this other world of contemplation, Briffault recalls a popular German poem where the French dead are portrayed rising from beneath the Waterloo battlefield to be reviewed once more by Napoleon before returning to their graves. This hallucinatory image resurrects for Briffault ‘the ghost of the three days [who] wanders through the Paris Night’ to expose the vestiges of the previous year’s revolution. Haunted by the remnants of placards and postings on the walls, the mutilated face of an ornamental clock, the graves of the ‘martyrs’ that are still found in the streets, he experiences a remorseful sorrow, as if in mourning for his own dead hopes. Pausing before the scars of revolutionary violence on the masonry of the Tuileries palace (destined to be destroyed by another rebellion four decades into the future), he is torn from his reverie by a patrol, ‘advising’ him that the upheavals of 1792 and 1830 now belong only to history.

From the Chaillot heights, as his nocturnal wandering ends, he observes over the arches of the pont de Iéna —where the emblematic eagles of Napoleon’s Empire had once soared—the initials of a proud Bourbon monarchy now dethroned, and sees them being replaced by winged hourglasses, a funerary symbol for the transience of time. And from there, at the western edge of the city, he closes his unparalleled meditation on this unstable, post-revolutionary Paris with an image of the sun rising in the east, shining its rays over the tombs of Père Lachaise.

The Paris night

by Eugène Briffault

. . . . Darkness visible

John Milton

In ancient times it was written that the literary arts dwell among us, that they travel with us, that they follow us into the city and into the countryside, that they settle down beside us, at night, at the table, during our bath, during our walks and at the theatre, that they intermingle with our business and pastimes, that they heighten our pleasures and comfort us in our sorrows. Such literary arts no longer exist today. They live in our thoughts like a childhood memory, like a schoolyard reminiscence, like the inscription on an ancient and lost coin.

However, certain favoured persons, a chosen few, have endeavoured, as they themselves tell it, to lead their Muse into the desert. Others, in the midst of the city’s uproar, have prepared elegant and studious retreats, and then forming a peaceful colony among themselves, they mean to escape, for a moment or two, from the life of turmoil, upheaval, uncertainty, the fatigue and dangers pressuring today’s society from all sides.

They have rediscovered lengthy conversations, pleasurable labours, spontaneous ideas, the chosen subject, the slow pace of implementation, studies of the past, and dreams of the future. Reserved for these few are the gatherings of artists and their unencumbered wit, the brilliant jest, the literary challenges, the conversations with all their flirtatious and unrestrained charms, the joys and disappointments of vanity; to these few the time to see, to compare, or to judge, in short, the license for and command of criticism, appreciation, and good taste are also due.

For us this is not the case. Swept along and mercilessly tormented by the recurrent tides, delivered over to the most violent and perpetual of storms, we catch sight of neither calm nor light. For us no more blue skies or clarity. Heavy, deep, agitated darkness surrounds and oppresses us.

At every hour, at every minute, we have a thought to develop, a lesson to teach, an appeal for peace or for war to be heard, and during this time we, indefatigable laborers, also have to think about all the manœuvring, keep an eye on all the action and consult a horizon that appears only in a flash of lightning, and to expel, like deadly temptations, any desire for inactivity or rest.

Incentives and rewards are for us unknown things. There is nothing more than wages for our toil, and our dreary duties are carried out in the midst of insults, hatred, encounters on the green, of slanders and envious attacks, loathing and condemnation, and of the most dire knowledge of people and things.

And so the progress of Europe’s great labour pains, the products of the arts and the imagination, the bouts of parliamentary eloquence, the discussions over the public interest, the solemnities of the bar, the national celebrations, the brilliance of the theatre, the troubled permutations in the lives of a people, liberty and monarchy, these are all for us cold and inanimate corpses. We seek to discover the mechanism of social existence; the body politic and the body of civilization lie beneath our scalpels. For us everything is inquiry, everything is narrative. There are no longer feelings. Dispassionate investigators, we have an obligation that isolates us from all pain and all pleasure. An appalling condition!

How fortunate when the thought of some general benefit comes along to revive and refresh our energies!

Oh, that those who are condemned like me, by whatever fatal destiny, to work for the periodical press would tell of the gruelling and overwhelming degradation of all spiritual faculties and bodily parts that results from a day that begins with the news of one of those public calamities, now so frequent, and ends up with the complete and necessary investigation of one of those dramas played out for us nowadays--after having passed through, in the intervening hours, the debates of two legislative chambers, a session at the Academy, and the long series of events, gestures, and words from our modern populations.

At such times, depletion and affliction remove all possibility of sleep.

And so, vigorous entertainments, those that through a swift succession of strong impressions vividly bring back to us elements of bodily strength and functioning, appear to be the only way to quit this inert state, which is the most unbearable of torments. And so we are provoked by the Parisian noise that has been silenced, by the light that has been extinguished, by the sleep that—through a progressive torpor—turns everything back into immobility. We are outraged by the darkness and all of that industrial existence that retreats and seems to desert the city. And so we desire and seek out life and movement at any cost.

While everything is calm, gloomy, and closed, when only the distant rumble of carriages, a few weak and strange cries, and the measured step of the patrols are still heard, suddenly, near a theatre, dark and sad like an abandoned building, across from the Bourse, this monument so surprising to find beneath our western sky, a window illuminates and shines. Soon, loud words—chaotic but above all cheerful, playful, brilliant, and swift—emerge to strike the ear of the watchman, who in boredom guards the Corinthian peristyle of speculation’s temple.²⁷ The sound of glasses mix in with the irregular and unexpected harmonies of the almost fantastical songs, and then the shouts come one after another and intermingle, noisy eruptions followed by lengthy and boisterous laughter furrowing through this dissonance. Listen, and what familiar names reach your ears. Here is an entire gallery of our contemporaries. Judgments are expressed quickly, verdicts are relentless and concise: paintings, books, statues, verses, prints, newspapers, plays, music, speeches, laws, opinions, actions. What a brilliant parade! Everything is under their jurisdiction, their competence is universal. Those speaking seem to be paging through a catalogue. Keep listening: here come the courageous promises, the declarations of belief and integrity; here is the epigram, the sarcasm, and the sincere praise. And then you will hear advice, projects, ideas. Enter drunkenness. What an uproar! What deafening confusion, and still from all parts, from every corner of the hall, there is the most startling excess of witty comebacks, of sentences to remember, expressions to retain, and at the same time wild tales and shocking anecdotes. Is this a festival of devils? Some passers-by stop uneasily, the patrols slacken their pace, and everyone, after several minutes of scrutiny, withdraws in laughter, a laughter of desire and envy whose expression cannot be defined.

But everything has stopped. The last candles of the Café des Nouveautés have been blown out.²⁸ The night is complete.

The café’s clients go their separate ways and the square resonates with their farewells. Yet there are still some good jests here to be collected. These fatigued working men cannot, without scorn, think about those accusations of dissipation, disorder and orgies that follow in their wake. Can they disperse without tossing an ironic challenge at a world that demands so many good qualities from them without granting them a single vice, a world for which the imagination must always give birth to the new without gaining permission to revive and rejuvenate (not that submitting to diversions like these is required, but because pleasure has always demanded conditions of an intensity equal to those that governed the work)?

Nightlife is dead in Paris. Its fate has something of the monumental that sets it above this frivolous observation, which, at first sight, seems alone suitable to it. Before ’89, Paris was alive during the night with the same elements of ease and luxury as those offered by the liveliest hours of the day. At that time, the nobility and the commoner, the wealthy, the middling classes, and the poor, idleness and work, vice and virtue had their own customs and manners during the night, their own habits, their own districts, even their own look. All of that was defined, fixed, and consistent. The stories are well known.

Then, until about 1800, these traditions were entirely erased. During that period of time, the terrible existence lived during the day hardly allowed for nocturnal revelry.

The Directory, and after that the Consulate and the Empire saw the rebirth of a part of that shadowy civilization. And so everywhere debauchery was reorganized. Gambling houses were established, multiplying considerably and closing only at a very late hour. The Palais-Royal gleamed brilliantly in all its impudent and dissolute splendour. The balls, the cabarets, the gardens, the coliseums, the vauxhalls, the dancehalls, the licentious theatres opened a thousand sanctuaries for dissipation.²⁹ A population devoted to the most sordid rowdiness was thus formed. This world arose at midnight.

1814 found things a little less fevered. Still there was, at this time, a sort of renaissance of vice. The Empire perpetually summoned to Paris officers eager to gorge themselves on pleasures paid for with the gold from a conquered Europe. The Restoration was brought inside our walls by a Europe hungry for our Parisian delights so celebrated in all the other capitals. And so the lights were no longer out in Paris. The Palais-Royal and its adjacent streets knew neither idleness nor silence.

Gradually everything vanished. Several gambling houses were closed; all the others saw the hours of their voracious activity reduced.³⁰ Today public balls are subject to strict control. The courts ensure the modesty of our popular dance.³¹ Those places offering ‘loose pleasures’ undergo the most severe restrictions. The cafés, the cabarets, the most obscure dens of drunkenness are held to the most thorough observance of the law. The Palais-Royal, that foul Capua of former times, is no more than a bazaar.³² Finally, by a recent order, all theatres have to have completed their performances by exactly eleven o’clock.³³

These facts are enough to demonstrate that the nocturnal life—let’s put it bluntly, its licence—has always had, in Paris, an inverse relationship to political liberty. This connection is not without interest since universal observation lends it the highest degree of truth.

In England the nightly calm is something of a holy thing, and, except for London’s Strand, nothing would dare disturb it.³⁴ In Italy, on the other hand, night retains its privileges for pleasure and the boisterous life, and, a fact worthy of notice, Turin, Milan, Venice and Naples—cities subject to outright bondage—have kept in full their traditions of nocturnal mayhem.

In the United States, among North Americans, it would be a crime against the state to disturb the nightly slumber. In Spain and Portugal night opens and begins a period of veritable emancipation.

Finally, Germany, that land of real servitude and contemplative independence, charms its nights with songs of solemn, melancholy, and prolonged harmonies and with the monotonous repetitions of the town criers who combine announcements of the time with the pleasant invitation to pray for the dead.³⁵

These reflections accompanied me as I followed the rue Vivienne on leaving one of our regular suppers at the Café des Nouveautés, this Procope of the periodical press.³⁶ So, it is only there where nightlife, such as it is, finds refuge in Paris. It is we, working men, who have opened and consecrated this final sanctuary. Frascati each day loses some of its brilliance, and if certain lines of hackney cabs now and then announce certain gatherings, certain balls, certain receptions, it could almost be said that nothing leaks out from these joyless and pleasureless celebrations.³⁷

It is somewhat of a shock nowadays to consider how, in the dead of night, extreme need can lay siege to a stranger in Paris, without any possibility for him to find in this rich and vast capital—so intent on foreseeing and exploiting everything—a single place where he can obtain, at whatever cost, a meal that I would not say is suitable but is even sufficient!

The lottery offices, alone, by an entitlement that does little honour to the administration that granted it, remain open after the closing of all the other stores.³⁸

The liberation of 1830 has done its destructive work. Now numerous patrols, armed with suspicion and a certain appetite for seizure, roam throughout the city at every hour and in all directions.

The regular troops, the National Guard, the Municipal Guard are no longer sufficient for this harsh duty.³⁹ The ‘grey patrols’ have been invented.⁴⁰ Officers of the political inquisition, bailiffs of the public order, the men who form these bands walk along silently, armed with hidden nightsticks, daggers, and pistols. A carriage stopping, the sound of a door-knocker, a word of farewell, a song’s refrain, an outburst of laughter—all are crimes in their eyes. They surround and close in on the guilty and make that terrible word ‘papers’ resound in their ears. They infest the Parisian night like the doctor of the island of Barataria infested Sancho’s dinner.⁴¹ The grey patrols can be compared to the sbirri of the Venetian state who, without uniforms, dressed in the clothes of the thoroughfare, frighten the traveller they are supposed to protect.⁴² The thirst for arrest devours them.

The guard posts have been doubled. Sentinels keep watch at every corner. The Royal Library alone has been forgotten. Around the Palais-Royal and the Tuileries, it is all soldiers, sentries, and ‘Who goes there?’ The pavement of the Carrousel, respected up until now, today has its special guard and its soldiers charged with driving away from its railings those passers-by accustomed to finding support there.⁴³ The mansion facing the palace—this former residence of Cambacérès whom Napoleon said dined like a prince—this building given over in turn to the grenadiers of the island of Elba, to the Hundred Swiss of Louis XVIII and to Charles X’s pages, along with the small stables, the unfinished wings of the Louvre, the building of the former quartermasters of the king’s house have all become barracks where day and night garrisons of infantry, artillery and cavalry stir things up.⁴⁴ Never was the sense of surveillance more complete or more active. I will say it again, the Royal Library alone had been exempted. And today it has lost its prized department of coins, medals and antiquities, but it has two extra watchmen to protect its empty and plundered display cases.⁴⁵

And I continued along my way, avidly observing and seeking out everything that Paris, dead or asleep, could still contain of living and active parts. It was three hours after midnight.

I crossed the Palais-Royal. Four municipal guards were walking there alone. Everything about them spoke of the boredom of that watch beneath the long vaults that are widened into square and regular compartments and give the appearance of a cloister. Was it to complete that illusion that the municipal guards were cloaked in hoods of homespun, like the followers of St Francis? At the very moment when I passed near them, they looked at me, and their eyes were like an interrogation or a deposition.

On the rue Saint-Honoré, near the square of the Palais-Royal, there was some movement. The watches of the infantry and of the national guard were together launching an assault of courtesy, gallantry and consumption on the lady canteen workers who, there as at the Tuileries, arrive in droves, stocked with rolls, sausages, brandies and cigars, delicious supplies that—along with the bouillon and café au lait of the street vendors who come at the break of day—enhance and shorten the night for the citizen-soldier.

I took a quick glance over at the former site of the Hôtel d’Angleterre. I had paid a visit to it once, and I will not try to paint a picture of this old pandemonium of misery and depravity.⁴⁶

Beyond the square of the Palais-Royal, I was struck by the radiance from some of the small streets. From the height of the second floor, bright lanterns shone in almost all the windows, giving it the appearance of a Chinese town, something out of the decor for Panurge.⁴⁷ If you penetrate into these streets, you will read over each of these lanterns: ‘Rooms for the night’. It is the district for potential and uncertain sanctuary. Chodruc-Duclos is the notable figure here.⁴⁸

At the time of my arrival, night’s afternoon was clearly in full operation. I saw soldiers there and afterwards non-commissioned officers cheerfully passing the time with persons whose sex I recognized only with a shudder. A sort of slang was spoken. Two months in prison under the former regime, for a few free and independent lines, had taught it to me. Beer and brandy were flowing freely. A bit of noise and then all that I saw were some appalling caresses. There was certainly no distinctive character there. Just as I was leaving one of these dens, songs and bursts of laughter encouraged me to knock on a door above which was written ‘Tavern’. Six of those repulsive women—who would have blushed at the thought of having a mother—rushed over to the noise. I was surrounded. There was going to be a party, and my entire body trembled. The master of the house saw my distress, he signalled, I escaped the danger.

Here was the scene. From their first words I understood that I had before me young tradesmen who, during the day, yelled themselves hoarse selling chains and fobs, collars, pencils and other goods of dubious quality.⁴⁹ They were tallying up the profits and the shady tricks of the day. These gentlemen were of the same society as those ladies. Several young men who were, as they said with considerable affectation, without position—and were covered, not with workers’ clothes but with squalid rags of broadcloth and modern wear—declared that they were ‘burning their bridges’, that is to say that they had finally summoned the courage to become absolutely destitute. The women were doing their best to help with this strange form of suicide. The entire company of men—with their pale, soft, wilted faces—wore dark and frayed collars, enormous sideburns and broad moustaches. No signs of undergarments were apparent. I do not dare say what kind of ornaments adorned some buttonholes. One of the attendees was slowly chanting—without even giving a hint of the least desire for variation or intonation—a song of obscenities revolting beyond all expectation. It was the height of sublimity for its type. The chorus was repeated as if it were La Parisienne itself.⁵⁰ Absent men and women were very much talked about. They had had some misfortune; the hardships of hospital and prison were overwhelming them. Then there were arguments over the reform of the penal code, which seemed to produce some sharp feelings among that segment of the population.⁵¹ And, elbows on the table, they awaited the day. My presence was no surprise. They seemed accustomed to visits from curiosity-seekers. Never had vice appeared more horribly ugly to me and boring.

I turned back up rue Saint-Honoré. The heavy wagons of the market gardeners were enough to show me the way to the Central Market.⁵²

And here I am, face to face with the provisioning of a city of eight hundred thousand souls.

The opening of the stores of all the liquor merchants is the first sign of public activity. Men and women of the countryside, men and women of Paris, children, the elderly, young girls, all rush to the hundreds of counters to have their ‘consolation’ poured straight-up. And that is how all important initiatives begin for the people of Paris.

The cabarets and cafés on the borders of the market are always full of the life of patronage and commerce. Here there is less vice. You still distinguish quite clearly the unfortunate homeless, the man who, under a triple layer of dirt, mud, and fatigue falls slumped over or below a table. You also find here the vagrant who dares not even to submit to the ordeal of registering for a room for the night. But the nature of the foods, the conversation of the crowds announce that there is work and some resources even among the regular customers of The Mousetrap, which is the name attached to the most famous of these havens.⁵³ A robust constitution is required to handle the thick and hellish vapours protecting its entrance and cloaking its walls.

All these places remain open due to a special authorization from the police.

At the Central Market it is the custom to rise early and work hard. As soon as a cart arrives, the owners—small farmers from surrounding areas—unload it promptly and with caution. The vegetables are separated, sorted, and labelled in particular ways according to their varying qualities. The finest or most delicate of the vegetables, the best fruits are carefully wrapped in bags, in cloth, in herbs, in fine straw, placed in baskets. Everything is washed until clean. Nothing can match the order of the market’s opening. Never has more sensitivity been shown in displaying the merchandise at its best and drawing attention to it. The farmers work at it with the greatest skill.

The great capitalists of the place then come down; these women all reside in the neighbouring houses. The outward appearance of these merchants reveals their prosperity. In summer they are dressed lightly in fresh printed fabrics; in winter they are draped in well-lined woollen dresses and coats. Their hair is wrapped warmly in madras, their clogs are elegant, their linens are a brilliant white, they all wear gloves, and they like to adorn themselves with big and heavy jewellery. Their distinguishing feature is a lantern. When they meet they call each other Madame, and address the other women as Mother. They roam through the market at first, inspecting and examining everything. Then they return, chat among themselves, estimate, price out the commodities, and then make their bids. Ordinarily, they buy only in blocks of a hundred, fifty, or twenty-five units. They always pay in cash. This is the trading floor of the Central Market. Like government bonds, vegetables have an opening and closing price. The strategies and language of these contracts cannot be deciphered.

This preliminary operation is completed by five in the morning. The buyers arrange for the purchased vegetables each to be brought to its place of sale, and then they go back to bed. The farmers then call out loudly among themselves. They recognize each other by their distinctive cries, and agree to meet at an inn or to leave together. The porters load the vegetables and distribute them to their proper places. The day is about to begin. The resellers at the next level, with more limited resources, await the second rising of the initial purchasers, who, accordingly, make up the market’s aristocracy. To arrive at the pensioner’s pot-au-feu at nine or the student’s vegetable soup, a cabbage is bought and sold seven times.⁵⁴

In the middle of all this activity, some young people are seen wandering about, interrogating the heavens as they lie in wait for the day. The bad humour of a porter or the practice of pleasure has sent them to sleep beneath the central market’s pillars. They are always the target of jokes from the district’s regulars.

I have heard much about the dangers of Parisian nights. There is not an hour of the night that in different years and in all the seasons has not seen me roaming the streets of every district. Not only have I never happened to run into any unfortunate encounters, I have never caught sight of anything that could inspire in me the least concern.⁵⁵ I am fearful of only one thing, that of being crushed under the wheels of the hackney cabs that—to get to those spots where they hope to be hired or even to return home—travel at night at the most dreadful speed without ever bothering to toss out a warning. They are still more dangerous when they run up very close to the houses without any pity whatsoever for the pedestrians whom they hardly even seem to notice.

There lives in Paris a mysterious woman. She comes out only at night. She usually takes her walks in the neighbourhood around the place Vendôme. On sighting a passer-by whose appearance gives her some hope for success, she throws herself into his arms, pretends she is being followed and begs for protection. Who would want to deny such a woman? She then points out a house on the place Vendôme as her residence. Led to that spot, she asks after a merchant very well known for his wealth in the world of Parisian business. The gatekeeper always and invariably replies that ‘Monsieur’ is not in. Our nocturnal siren then apologizes, becomes anxious and pleads for refuge. She speaks French, English, German and Italian equally well. There are few persons of importance in Paris whose names she does not cite with some proof of intimacy. Bad luck to whomever she detains and seduces. He will find that he is in possession of a woman reduced by her homeliness to running such a base traffic only at night, under the cover of the most complete obscurity.

Ragpickers are natives of the dark. Nothing can compare with their customary integrity and restraint. We need to praise especially their consideration for those unfortunates whom drunkenness tosses down next to the street posts. The ragpickers treat them as veritable brothers.⁵⁶ These good-natured people make war only with the dogs, whose number in the streets at that hour is always great.

The dynamic night of Paris is completely concentrated in the space I have just passed through, between the Bourse and the Tuileries, between the Tuileries and the Central Market. It stops at the place du Châtelet, at the salons de Martin where, from time to time, torches are kindled for weddings and banquets. Only the Saturnalia of the Carnival alters this habitual look.⁵⁷

But there is in Paris another night, one full of contemplation and memories.

It does not offer, like the one I was struggling to portray, the customary traits that are the birthmarks of the Parisian people, but it is richer emotionally.

The poet-soldier who sung of German freedom in the fight against our armies presents a sublime conception in one of his odes.⁵⁸

At midnight on the field at Waterloo, the drum and the trumpets sound out their dull tones, the grave mounds quiver, the formations emerge from the earth, the skeleton-soldiers take up their arms, recognize their flags, their officers, their regiments. Then the ghost in the bicorn hat and the grey overcoat appears.⁵⁹ He shows himself among all the ranks, passing before the troops, addressing his comrades with words of affection and farewell, and then the dull, sombre signal is given once again, and the earth covers the bones.

In the same way, by the light of the moon, the ghost of the three days wanders through the Paris Night, coming to visit its beloved city.⁶⁰ Here it points out on the frontages of the closed stores the postings of the July newspapers; and there the accounts can be read of the first infractions, the first attacks, the first acts of courage, and the first victory. These vestiges exist everywhere, on the place de la Bourse, in the streets named Vivienne, Richelieu, Montmartre, on the boulevards, in the Montmartre neighbourhood, and in the entire district that was the theatre for the writers’ resistance against the ordinances of 25 July.⁶¹ The desire to scrape off, wash away, erase, eliminate these faint monuments is in vain. They endure, and every night I gaze upon them. There I read Lafayette’s name written by the uncertain hand of a labourer or a child.⁶² I discover again that first appeal to the National Guard, and further along the false news of the Duke of Ragusa’s death.⁶³ Elsewhere are signs of the field hospitals and improvised arsenals. I have reread in its entirety the invitation to preserve our excellent barricades, as they were then called. Oh, July! July! At night, within this silent Paris, you show up again, but it is like a remorseful sorrow, the regret over a tomb, because it is also at these hours that the grave sites of the martyrs can best be seen.⁶⁴ The noise and occupations of the day seem to tarnish and disturb them.

And so, too, the large surfaces of our buildings become clearer in the dim light. The Institut, riddled with bullets and shrapnel, still displayed a couple of days ago its clock face mutilated on 29 July. A bullet fired from the Louvre had struck the second-hour numeral; at two o’clock, the same day, the tricolour flag fluttered above the Tuileries.⁶⁵ The Louvre reveals all the wounds of its richly sculpted pediments. The Hôtel de Ville is adorned with the scars of the combat at the place de Grève. The young trees on the boulevards attest to the recent date of the barricades. The ruins of the quai d’Orsay tell of an Empire fallen in the midst of great and incomplete works. The monument atoning for the death of Louis XVI is today—without a single stone having been added to the pedestal—consecrated to the Charter and recounts on the place de la Révolution the era of the Convention and the enthusiastic triumph of the three days.⁶⁶ The Tuileries bears on the courtyard side of its main entryway the traces of a cannonball from August 10, 1792, and on the garden side, on one of the chapel’s columns, the traces of a cannonball from 29 July 1830.⁶⁷ But the blue and grey patrols wrench me out of that contemplative inspection, advising me that 1792 and 1830 now belong to nothing more than history.

There is the column: how brightly its bronze shines in the moonlight!⁶⁸ Then the twelve phantom statues of the pont de la Concorde.⁶⁹ I hurry along and arrive at the Chaillot heights. There the plan for the palace of Napoleon’s son was mapped out; there the absurd Trocadéro was parodied.⁷⁰ Right before me is the pont de Iéna whose arches, first enhanced by imperial eagles, has seen these emblems become the initials of Louis XVIII, and then turned into winged hourglasses.⁷¹ What a strange lesson!

Reveille sounds at the École militaire.⁷² The first rays of the sun shine on the hill and over the mausoleums of the Eastern Cemetery.⁷³ Paris awakens.

Footnotes