Metro Stop Paris Page 13
Clovis moved house to the old Roman palace in Soissons. In a courtyard he assembled all his war booty, collected into neat piles that were to be distributed to the soldiers in accordance with Germanic custom. Bishop Remi of Reims had noticed that one of his prized porcelain vases was missing; he asked Clovis to have a look in his courtyard and, sure enough, there it was shining like a lantern. Clovis would never displease the Catholic bishops. He demanded that the vase be returned to Remi. The soldier in question, claiming his war rights, smashed the vase with his axe. Clovis, though humiliated, remained silent. A year passed. As Gregory tells the story, it was only at the following spring assembly of warriors when Clovis spied the same soldier. "Nobody is ill-equipped as you," he exclaimed before him. "Your helmet, your sword, your axe, nothing is right," and Clovis seized the man's axe, throwing it to the ground. As the soldier bent to pick it up, Clovis with a swipe from his polished axe sliced the man's head off. "That's what you did to the vase at Soissons!" cried Clovis. His alliance with the Catholic Trinitarian Church was now sealed in blood.
With the defeat of the last Roman authority in Gaul the story becomes hazy. The few surviving documents of the age contradict themselves and the subsequent histories, written by churchmen, are designed to show the providential hand of God at work. They are decorated, like the manuscripts themselves, with miracles and prophetic words worthy of Camelot and other founding myths.
In Gregory's account Clovis is invited by the Franks on the Rhine to stem an invasion of Alemanni. At the foot of the fortress of Tolbiac (or Ziilpich, near Cologne), he is cornered by the enemy and he appeals, "Jesus Christ! Thou who art Son of the living God, save me in my distress. If thou givest me the victory, I shall believe in thee, and I will be baptized!" It sounds like Emperor Constantine's sudden conversion on the Milvian Bridge—"In this Cross shalt thou conquer."The battle certainly took place. A letter from Theodoric the Great pleads for Clovis's moderation with the defeated Alemanni; but the letter proves that the battle occurred just before Clovis's great offensive against Alaric's Visigoths in 505 and it makes no reference to either Clovis's conversion or baptism.
There is also a problem of location. Gregory places Clovis's baptism after Tolbiac in Reims, presided over by Remi. Saint Vaast, writing over a century later, elaborates on the King's entry into Reims by having Clovis, first, making a saintly and triumphant tour of Alsace and Lorraine in the company of his Catholic Burgundian spouse Clothild. By the time we get to Hincmar's Life of Saint Remi, written in 875, the story has entered the realm of the marvellous, with a dove descending from the skies of Reims, bearing to the King a phial of ointment scented with "the sweetness of heaven." That potent image of the dove descending from Heaven was still used at the last coronation of a French king in Reims, that of Charles X in 1824. And it was in this tradition of a sacred baptism at Reims that the fifteenth centenary was celebrated before representatives of a most Republican government in 1996.
The baptism of France? One could as well say that it was the baptism of the Holy Roman Empire, or of Germany— the whole German line of princes, kings and emperors can be traced back to Clovis. Why not call it, for that matter, the baptism of Europe? European Christian kingship, aligned to the Trinitarian Church, also had its origins in Clovis.
But perhaps the baptism did not take place at Reims. And what evidence is there that it occurred in 496, besides Gregory's tale? One is forgetting the role of Geneviève 's Paris in Clovis's subsequent conquest of southern Gaul. Clovis continued to get support from the bishops of Gaul, who were faced with terrible repressions in the south. The elderly Geneviève was not about to abandon her Trinitarian faith or ignore the plight of the Catholic bishops there. Did Geneviève make an appeal to Clovis? In Gregory's account Clovis does make a pilgrimage to Tours, the burial site of Saint Martin, whom many consider the founder of Christianity in Gaul. Several historians have argued that it was here that Clovis was baptized, perhaps in the presence of Geneviève herself. It is plausible. Geneviève was a frequent pilgrim to Tours and, for Clovis, accepting a Catholic baptism would have been the sensible thing to do before setting off for his southern offensive. When Geneviève died around 502 he ordered that a second Parisian basilica be built where she lay buried—today's Pantheon on the Mon-tagne Geneviève —and he declared his formal residence to be in Paris. He and Clothild would eventually be buried in tombs next to that of Geneviève.
In 498 Clovis launched his first offensive on the Arian south with an attack on Burgundy. Godgiselus joined his son-in-law by sending troops in from Savoy. They met outside Dijon, where they inflicted a crushing defeat on the tyrant Gondebaud, who took refuge in Avignon. Theodoric, in his Italian kingdom, was beside himself with despair; the Arian brotherhood was breaking down. He urged his son-in-law, the Visigoth king, Alaric, to send in troops to save Gondebaud. Clovis, always avoiding the wider conflict, withdrew, leaving Godgiselus and his followers to be massacred outside Lyon. Clovis then drew up an alliance with Gondebaud, who in a classic piece of barbaric ingratitude, turned with the Frankish host on Alaric. Theodoric screeched in dismay. "You are both united with me by blood," he wrote to Gondebaud and Alaric. "Would I want to sacrifice one or the other?" To Clovis he wrote, "I am astonished that such slight causes can lead you to engage in a cruel conflict with my son King Alaric. You are both powerful kings, both in the vigour of life. Do not expose your realms to ruin so lightly and beware what you will bring upon your fatherlands!" Theodoric arranged a meeting between Clovis and Alaric the Visigoth on a raft moored in the middle of the River Loire, near Amboise. It was not unlike Napoleon's encounter with Tsar Alexander on the River Nie-man thirteen hundred years later, with the same result. The two sovereigns shook hands and then went to war; ties of blood did not count, for this was a religious war that pitted an old Arian against the newly converted Trinitarian king.
There was civil war in Aquitaine in 505. Catholic bishops and priests were no longer prepared to put up with Alaric's brutalities; they awaited their saviour, King Clovis. He was welcomed as a liberator in the area around Tours. Clovis prevented his barbarian converts from pillaging the farms by hanging transgressors from the nearest trees. But further south the war turned dirty. In the spring campaign of 507 whole villages were wiped out, women were raped, children were roasted on fires. And accompanying the whole business were the inevitable miracles and marvels: outside Poitiers, a huge halo appeared above the Église Saint-Hilaire; a saintly she-goat showed Clovis the way across the flooded River Vienne. Finally at Vouille, not far from Poitiers, the armies of Clovis and of Alaric met at close quarters. The battle lasted three hours. The Visigoths scattered and the Franks gave chase; Alaric was cornered in a copse and dealt the mortal blow by Clovis in person.
Things were not going too well for Theodoric himself. He had started his own little war in the Balkans and had driven the new Byzantine emperor, Anastasius, crazy by invading the province of Pannonia II, wiping out a Roman legion in Belgrade on the way Anastasius riposted by sending a fleet of Byzantine pirates under the command of Counts Romanus and Rusticus to maraud the east coast of Italy. Theodoric was a much diminished man by the time the heralds arrived in his court, in the summer of 508, to announce that the war in Aquitaine was finished, his son-in-law dead.
But how nice all this was for Emperor Anastasius, who realized that Theodoric's Gothic ring of Arians was broken. He immediately packed in a suitcase a purple robe, a crown and a batch of decrees which he sent off to Clovis, declaring him Consul and Patron, the new Constantine! Dressed as a Roman emperor, Clovis, the converted long-haired pagan, went out on the streets of Catholic Tours to receive the cheers of the crowd. The Most Christian Kingdom of the Franks now stretched from Thuringia in central Germany to the Pyrenees.
It did not last long. Within months of his death in 511 the three sons of Clovis were at war over the fragments of land to which they all laid claim; for two and a half centuries the Merovingian kings would expose Gaul, Belgium and Germania to
a regime of terror and division. The Capetians eventually pulled Christians together again when they were faced with a new threat from the south, that of Islam.
Clovis's lasting legacy was not a nation, nor even a city. What he left behind was the total destruction of the Arian heresy. The complex Trinity—three persons in one God—was henceforth the defining feature of Christianity. For those who would reduce the figure of Christ to a mere prophet, there would be a long wait until finally, in the seventh century, out of the desert there came that simple message from Islam. Today, Islam and Trinitarian Christianity face each other across the Boulevard périphérique, where Saint Denis walked north, headless.
* All bishops were "popes" in those days. The primacy of Rome over the other bishoprics became a reality only in the eleventh century. See Julia M. H. Smith, Europe after Rome (Oxford, 2005), Ch. 8.
7
CHTELET-LES HALLES
THE SAD TRUTH about Paris is that it does not have a historical centre. Or to be more accurate, it is a hole in the ground. Just as all roads lead to Rome, so all métro lines will take you eventually to métro stop No. 7, Châtelet -Les Halles, "le ventre de Paris" the centre of the world as Parisians would have it, and a great big hole in the ground as every metrostopper will notice. It was where the old north-south axis of the long-haul trade met the east-west flow of the Seine, where the foodstuffs for the city were collected for distribution, where the architects and planners drew a natural cross in the soil from which the streets and the underground would derive their shape.
" Châtelet " simply meant the point of exchange; une halle is a covered market—a word that, applied to the vast central markets that served Paris, had to be put in the plural. Baron Haussmann designed his whole project for the rebuilding of Paris during the Second Empire from a cross he drew over the Place du Châtelet, confirming once more the centrality of this point in the city, and the centrality of the market. Residents of the area still thought they were at the centre of everything in the 1960s: "Les Halles is the geographical centre of Paris and of the French Republic," said one inhabitant in an official report made in 1968—a perfectly outrageous remark. Yet for people living in the proximity of Victor Baltard's iron and glass pavilions, which housed Les Halles, this kind of comment seemed as natural as the observation that the planets circled the sun. After all, Les Halles were the central marketplace of Paris. And, second, back in 1848 this was the central battleground in the fight to establish the French Republic.
The district of "Les Halles" was vast, extending well beyond the complex of Baltard's glass pavilions. Many of the old buildings and streets that fed off the markets are still there, and they constitute one of the most enchanting parts of Paris. When the new mayor of Paris, Bertrand Delanoë, wanted to show the Queen of England a typical quarter of Paris, he brought her here; Monsieur Duthu and his smiling colleagues at the Patissier Stohrer have never stopped speaking of the day, in April 2004, when Queen Elizabeth II walked into their shop to buy a cake. You can spend two days wandering around Rue Montorgueil without exhausting all the treasures it has to offer. But why is it there? All those patissiers, the delicatessens, the caterers, the brasseries and the little restaurants are by-products of a huge marketplace that is no longer there. In London, the old pavilions of Covent Garden were preserved. In Paris, where they covered half the district, they were destroyed. The market itself was moved out to Rungis, next to Orly airport, in 1969. In 1971 the demolitions began. Through most of that decade all that was left of the "belly of Paris" was a vast hole in the ground, le Trou.
Paris, since the time of the Roman walls, has always been subjected to ambitious urban plans, and change, of course, is the sign of a living city. But in the past, planners — such as those of the cathedrals or those of nineteenth-century theatres, town halls and boulevards—were supported by an army of anonymous artisans who chiselled stone, creating those alluring little details one generally attachés to a work of art; today plans are set in flat concrete. A journey from the underground of Châtelet -Les Halles to the surface brings to the eye that blunt fact.
In the 1980s the "belly of Paris" was turned inside out and upside down. The surface was transformed into a garden, while beneath one's feet there developed the largest underground railway station in the world, transporting over 800,000 souls a day. The station forms the pivot of the largest underground shopping centre in the world, the Forum des Halles, catering every year to 41 million consumers of clothes, handbags, postcards, pens, pocket calculators and laptop computers. There are twenty-three cinemas down there, set in huge concrete cells. Line 1 (following the modern east-west axis) crosses Line 4 (the old north-south axis) here. Line A of the RER, the rapid transit system which stretches into Paris extra muros, crosses Lines B and C: heaven help the poor English tourist who arrives at this point from Roissy airport with his heavy bags and a covey of tired children; he has a mile's walking to do down unending tunnels interspersed with three or four flights of concrete staircases. The labyrinth is so vast that the architects who designed it had to name the station after not one, but two places. Indeed, two whole quartiers, Les Halles and the north bank of the Seine, were ruined for good by the construction of this den, Paris's new underground crucifix, a calvary of sore feet.
In twenty years the concrete of the métro station has turned a dirty grey; in eight centuries the decorated stones of Saint-Eustache have never ceased to cause marvel. The contrast between ancient and modern is edifying—and not new— ÉmileZola made a similar observation on this spot 150 years ago. It was indeed the leitmotiv of his novel Le Ventre de Paris which gave this district its nickname.
ZOLA, IN THE summer of 1872, was at an early stage of his research on the novel when he neatly noted down, in a bound exercise book, the view he got of the southern facade of the Église Saint-Eustache: "Rue des Prouvaires, choked: wine merchants, coal merchants, etc.; one can see, beyond the Halles, a porch of Saint-Eustache, two rows of windows at the level of the arch, surmounted by a rose window. Flying arches on both sides." That is exactly the same southern perspective of the church that one has today from the métro station—only we look through bare concrete walls. Zola ran his eyes through a cluttered covered alley framed by cast-iron pillars and glass. It must have been a pretty sight.
Zola's novel would open with a night convoy of wagons carrying vegetables from Nanterre to the central Halles; on their way they pick up Florent, a refugee from the penal colony of Cayenne, who has fallen, starving and exhausted, by the wayside just beyond the Pont de Neuilly. Half conscious, Florent is carried into the "belly of Paris," to the Pointe Saint-Eustache—just a few hundred yards from where he was arrested after the shooting on the Rue Montmartre, which had followed Napoleon Ill's coup d'etat of 2 December 1851. But the place, he discovers, has been entirely transformed. The historical centre of Paris has disappeared. The old buildings have been knocked down. The streets have gone. Replacing them are "gigantic pavilions whose roofs, superimposed on each other, seemed to him to grow, to stretch out, to lose themselves in a hazy dust of glimmering light." Through slim Fish-bone pillars of iron he looks up, in the dawn's greyness, to perceive "the luminous face of Saint-Eustache," last vestige of the Middle Ages. So the mid-nineteenth century was another age like ours, a time of destruction and transformation.
On 2 June 1872 Zola had had lunch with the famous critic and novelist Edmond de Goncourt. De Goncourt noted in his diary that Zola, who was then thirty-two, looked "weak and nervy." Zola described over lunch the punishing method he had developed for writing "a novel on the Halles, an attempt to paint the plump people of this world." Every day he worked from 9 to 12.30 and from 3 to 8 p.m. First he drew up an ebauche, or draft, then he would make detailed notes on location-spending entire nights, as well as days, walking around the Halles—and only after a full review of the characters and their habitat would he start to write his novel. "The general idea is: the belly— Le Ventre de Paris, Les Halles . . . —the belly of humanity and by exten
sion the governing bourgeoisie, chewing and ruminating, sleeping it off, in peace with its pleasures and its commonplace honesty." At the time Zola spoke to de Goncourt, he was only four years into his vast Rougon-Macquart cycle, an epic on social and political life under the Second Empire which he would complete twenty-five years later.
Thus it was a young Zola who wrote Le Ventre, and this shows. Zola gets his historical facts wrong, some of the characters are a little artificial and it takes him too long to get the plot moving. Zola does not reach the grandeur of the later novels, such as Germinal on the northern coal mines, or La Terre set in the Beauce. But that is not the point. What we find in Le Ventre is a detailed portrayal of life in the Halles, the belly and the heart of Paris —the sights, the crowds, the sounds and the smells in and around Baltard's famous pavilions shortly after they were set up. Le Ventre de Paris is a priceless historical document.
When Zola takes you into a wine merchant's bar on Rue Rambuteau you are stifled by the smell of pipe smoke and gas lamps — something you could not imagine today without Zola as your guide. When you come out of the métro at the Porte du Jour you may reflect that this was the former Pointe Saint-Eustache where 150 years ago the wagons lined up to deliver their goods to the central market. We know the noise was deafening as the goods were unloaded, that the live fowl were packed in square baskets, the dead fowl in deep beds of feather, while whole calf carcasses were wrapped in tablecloths and laid out like children in baskets.