Les Grands Boulevards

How Modern Life Has Turned the Frenchman Away from His Beloved Thoroughfares

PAUL MORAND

ONLY foreigners and provincials stroll up and down the Grands BoulevardsParisians hurry across them. As a matter of fact, the Parisian of 1929 is appalled by the Grands Boulevards. They contain almost nothing that makes him feel at home, for these Swiss hotels, these offices of Argentine and Chilean newspapers, these Jewish music halls, Chinese chiropodists, American shoe shops, and Canadian banks could hardly be called Paris. The real Paris is a city of narrow streets, cheap bars, concierges in felt slippers, push-cart women, news-stands, cobblers, and mysterious little shops which display nothing but a few newspapers, candy by the piece, and half a dozen spools of thread, but which still remain the soul and essence of their own neighbourhoods.

Paris is not what is new, but what is imperfect or repaired; it is not what is evident, but what is hidden and complex; it is not publicity, but reserve, modesty, discretion; it is a city that changes continually without ever becoming modern. Paris is not "peacocks' tongues in aspic," as Hollywood likes to think, nor "ragout of coxcombs," as Moscow would have us believe; it is the home of fried gudgeons and entrecote-Bercy.

Paris c'est une blonde

Qui plaît a tout le monde

says an old song, but the old song is mistaken; instead of being a flirtatious blonde, Paris resembles an industrious old man. It is a city of small trades, a monastery that shelters an ascetic, cloistered, and very ancient brotherhood of workers. It is not inhabited by naked women, headwaiters, and after-theatre parties; the real symbol of Paris is the cash-girl. At the races, it is not the fashionable people of the pesage; it is the common flock of "railbirds." In the world of newspapers, it is not the Paris edition of the New York Herald, but the Intransigeant. It is not "excursions by night," or "European travel," or "beauty salons"; it is not Monte Carlo. Paris does not travel; it knows nothing, reads nothing. Paris tests; Paris criticizes; Paris offers luxury and scepticism to those who have not spontaneously received these gifts from heaven.

AFTER having said that nothing is less Parisian than the Grands Boulevards, let me add that they contain eight or ten spots which still deserve this title of nobility —Parisian embassies, as it were, in a territory which is rapidly becoming international. Thanks to these places, the Boulevards are not yet Broadway. "Ça c'est Paris !" was once the refrain of a very popular song. Let us go strolling eastward toward the Place de la Bastille, and see just how often we can repeat "So this is Paris!"

We shall start from the Place de la Madeleine, now transformed into a sort of union station for tourists. The pavement is cluttered with sight-seeing busses; the sidewalks blossom with megaphones and official caps. None of the travellers crowded into their busses bother to notice the Flower Market with its huge, red-faced women clattering about in sabots; yet here is the smell of Paris, the murmur of Paris. Farther on, near the Theatre des Capucines, we pass the Carnaval de Venise, where one can still purchase the immense and out-of-date cravats, the veritable breast-plates of silk, that were worn by Marcel Proust. This old theatre and this famous shop are almost all that remains of a section which once was Clubland. To-day the Jockey has disappeared from the Boulevards, but the Union still exists, under the ghostly wings of Talleyrand. At the corner of the Rue Caumartin (Williams—Sporting Goods) are two charming ivory-tinted buildings with curved balconies; they date from i836 and suggest Regent Street as it was before the War.

Next the Grand Hotel, that splendid caravansery of the seventies. Paris was spellbound when it first opened. "Every known luxury! Bathrooms on every floor! Dumbwaiters! Speaking tubes!" Just across the street is the Opera—or, as my grandfather used to. call it, "the new Opera." Beside us is the Cafe de la Paix, where the sidewalk still retains something of its old character, even though it has been appropriated by Armenian guides and Portuguese dope-peddlers.

LET us cross the street. It is six in the evening. The newsboys calling I'lntran and Paris-Sport, the hole that leads to the Metro, the crowds homeward bound—all these are Paris. Near by is Boissier's, a famous confectionery that specializes in fine traditions and candied fruits. The great incurved beak of the Pavilion de Hanovre faces the Theatre du Vaudeville (now transformed into a Paramount film house) and Rossini's workroom. In this district, the most famous cafes once clustered: Tortoni, the Cafe de Paris, and the Cafe Anglais with its midnight suppers which were haunted by Cora Pearl ("I am Keeyoupid!"), the dandies, and the demi-mondaines. To-day the boulevardier exists only in the imagination of Rumanian tourists. The Cafe Napolitain still survives, but it scarcely succeeds in upholding its literary and journalistic traditions.

We are by now approaching the new Boulevard Haussmann, a pretentious tributary to the Grands Boulevards, and one which every true Parisian will detest for two thousand years before reversing his judgment. Here we might be in Rio, Havana, or Stuttgart; there is nothing to remind us of Paris. . . . Suddenly we smell printers' ink, for we are near the homes of the great dailies. A black, anonymous crowd has gathered before the windows of Le Matin to read the latest newsbulletins. Here, eighty years ago, the "lions" who figured in Balzac's novels used to stroll leisurely past, with their yellow gloves, their long hair falling to their shoulders, their cuffs turned back over the sleeves, and their "mediaeval" beards.

The Theatre des Variétés, looming on our right, has remained almost unchanged since its reopening in 1807. During the Exposition of 1867, it was the centre of the world. The Khedive of Egypt used to wait every night at the corner of the Passage des Panoramas until Hortense Schneider emerged from the theatre. The Cafe Brabant, once patronized by Paul de Kock, stands near by, as does the Cafe de Madrid, which was a favourite haunt of Gambetta, Villiers de l'Isle Adam, and Barbey d'Aurevilly, as well as of Baudelaire, who once remarked that he was revolted by the mere sight of water.

AT this point the Boulevards begin to rise, to heave themselves up from the soil of Paris. . . . The Theatre Robert Houdin, home of magic and legerdemain, has disappeared, but we can still visit the sinister Musée Grevin with its criminals shown in wax. The Passage des Panoramas, like all the passages in this vicinity, is a maze perfumed with the odours of the street angels. The adjoining streets are occupied by "the people," the real plebs, the descendants of those who fought the revolutions of the Nineteenth Century. The trees have changed in the course of our ramble. Near the Madeleine, they were tall and luxuriant, like the trees that shade the streets of a summer resort; here they are scrawny but not ridiculous, battered but unyielding—true hangman's trees which are protected, moreover, by cast-iron grills that make excellent projectiles when broken into pieces by a mob. ... We are passing the Theatre du Gymnase, where plays have been performed since 1820. Now comes the Porte St. Denis with its triumphal arch. The street lamps tempt us to sing a la lantcrne—"String up the aristocrats"!—the old Revolutionary refrain. In this vicinity the Boulevards, with their slopes and undulations, seem to follow the contours of the old market gardens which they replaced in the Seventeenth Century. The street itself sinks beneath the surface level, while the raised sidewalks, which are very much like stages, remind us of the many old theatres which crowded this section of Paris: the Délassements Comiques, the Ambigu, the Folies-Dramatiques, the Funambules. The whole district reeks of poverty and riots. The offices and employment bureaus of the labour unions are near at hand. Should we turn aside into the Rue de la Lune, which offers sleeping quarters by day to those who unload vegetables at night in the markets, we should come face to face with destitution. Life in this quarter is an epic by Eugene Sue. Here nobody receives emoluments, honorariums, or even salaries; here nobody speaks of settlements, advances, or partial liquidations. And yet, if you meet, question, investigate the people of this neighbourhood, you will find Paris in its truth and flesh. "The only parent they acknowledge is the thousand-franc note," said Balzac. Victories, panics, disasters; pork butchers, street girls, javas. Each passerby is a liqueur distilled and redistilled from this ancient soil, a sort of Parisian alcohol produced drop by drop like intoxicating tears.

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The Place de la Republique ultimately terminates the Grands Boulevards like a final period at the end of a line. Unlike the Place de la Madeleine, which is a mere plain, a crossroads in the midst of the flat lands that border the river, it is one of the strategic centres of Paris; it commands the Seine, the Bastille, Menilmontant, Montmartre. You can well believe that in every plan for a revolution, it is marked with a cross. And the barracks of the Republican Guard were not placed here by chance.

Finally we reach the Place de la Bastille, which is opposed to the Madeleine as the alpha is to the omega, or the moon to the sun. Here, moreover, we find an astronomer who vents his frank hatred on the day and offers to show us the moon through his telescope. We hear the shriek of klaxons, the iron rush of trucks and motorbusses. Where are the ghosts? . . . "Hi, cabby!" . . . We think of the hacks that used to clatter through the square, with the horses' hoofs ringing clear on the wet pavements. We remember the posters of Cheret and Toulouse-Lautrec. . . .

"The Boulevard during the Restoration," says J. Bertaut in a delightful book that deals with our present subject, "was a discreet and charming feature of the great village that was Paris. The Boulevard was a sort of mall where one rarely encountered a stranger." . . . And where are the Mardi-Gras floats of other years? Where is the fat ox that was paraded through the streets with a great festoon of paper round his neck? (Our family always hired a private room for the occasion, on the mezzanine floor of Durand's, overlooking the Place de la Madeleine, and we used to fling paper streamers from the windows.) Where are the curious wagers, the epigrams, the duels, the leading editorials, the newsboys, the German beer served in those Gothic taverns which had replaced Italian cafes? Where are the barricades of 1830? And the Cossacks of 1814? And Louis XVI passing by on his way to the scaffold? . . . The revolutions of the future will be fought at Javel or Puteaux, outside the old fortifications of Paris; the massacres and executions of the future will take place in Passy or the Bois de Boulogne, and the Boulevards will be ignorant of the whole affair. Distant Boulevards, neglected Boulevards! They will read about it in the morning papers, like people in the country.