Metro Stop Paris Read online

  But the whole world failed to be convinced by the science of Louis XIV, nor did it accept the idea—argued by most residents here—that Paris was the centre of the universe. It was eventually through the little English naval village of Greenwich that o° longitude was drawn. Hell Street was thus pushed 2°21' into the eastern hemisphere—nowhere.

  The Parisians took their revenge through a little play on words that would lull the foreign visitor into thinking that he was not really in Hell. It was Frédéric Bartholdi, best known for his Statue of Liberty in the waters of New York Harbor, who was responsible for that unapt, misplaced lion sitting uncomfortably in the middle of the square. He built an even larger version at Belfort, not far from where he was born amidst the mountains of eastern France, in commemoration of the brave resistance put up by Colonel Denfert-Rochereau during a winter campaign against the Prussians in 1870-71. The French lost, which is why the lion's head is facing westwards; it is turning its back on wicked Prussia. So that is why the square is called Denfert-Rochereau? Do not be mistaken. The Parisians are sometimes better at word games than we English speakers: "Colonel Denfert" rhymes so nicely with "d'Enfer," "Hell."

  How, in fact, could Hell's Gate be the centre of anything? Nobody lived here. In the early 1800s it was the most frightening, deserted part of Paris. All you could see was that gate, and the one next to it, Jack's Gate, or the Barriere Saint-Jacques. Travellers from the south had no other choice but to pass through one or other of those two gates, though they did so at their own risk and peril. One of Balzac's old characters in the revolution of 1848 remarks that the area is "deserted by eight o'clock in the evening and robbery is the least of the dangers one encounters there." One could be robbed here, one could be raped and murdered here, and if one was really down on one's luck one could even be guillotined at Hell's Gate.

  Everyone passed through Hell: the traders, the tourists, the pilgrims, the soldiers, the savers of souls, the heretics and even the dead. When the administrators of death decided in 1830 that capital punishment could no longer be performed in central Paris, they moved the guillotine down here. Up to then the traditional site of executions had been the Grève (the word meant river bank). The Grève in Paris was a promontory of mud which stuck out like a huge black tongue into the Seine before the medieval Hôtel de Ville, or Town Hall, to the north side of the Îie de la Cité; ships pulled up to the shore, or they moored at wooden posts in the river; bodies hanged from the gibbets on the black, slippery bank. Public executions had been royal days of festival. A famous example was on 2 March 1757 when Robert-François Damiens, who had attempted to kill the King, was quartered before an enthusiastic crowd by six horses "not accustomed to drawing." The operation took over an hour. Steel pincers a foot and a half long, built especially for the occasion, failed to tear away the arms and the legs; the patient, in his torment, cried out, "Pardon, my God! Pardon, Lord!" Finally Samson, the executioner, "drew out a knife from his pocket and cut the body at the thighs instead of severing the legs at the joints; the four horses gave a tug and carried off the two thighs."

  The Paris public in the eighteenth century was delighted at that sort of thing. But with the July Révolution of 1830 the spectacle of public death changed. Damiens' torment had begun at two o'clock in the afternoon under the full light of the sun, at the city's busiest point and against the historical backdrop of the town hall, the cathedral of Notre-Dame, the Saint-Jacques tower and, most symbolic of all, the nearby Palais de Justice. And then, in July 1830, King Charles X was thrown out of the country In the violence of that event, several dozen workers had been killed on the Grève. The popular sentiment spread through the city that the Grève had somehow been "purified" by their blood: it would no longer be possible to execute "common murderers" on this now sacred site. Executions in Paris were shifted south down the road to Hell.

  The last executions on the Greve, under the reign of Charles X, had provided an extra motive for the move. The public beheading of Daumas-Dupin on 3 December 1829 had caused such a riot that it may be considered an augur of the revolution to come. The execution a few months earlier of three men responsible for the murder of the concierge at the Hôtel Vaucanson had not gone well either. One of the prisoners had taunted the crowd with a song:

  Nous sommes trois bandits ici

  Sortis de la forêt du Bondi.

  Tas de vile canaille!

  Pendant que vous nous regardez victimer,

  Nos amis chez vous font ripaille.

  Vous feriez mieux d'aller travailler,

  Tas de vile canaille!

  Pour vous acheter des souliers.*

  But the move south of the guillotine was also a cause for scandal. Victor Hugo expressed the problem in a preface he wrote for his novel he Dernier Jour d'un condamné (The Last Day of a Condemned Man), published in 1832. He described the inauguration of the guillotine at the Barriere Saint-Jacques with the execution, at eight o'clock in the morning—"barely dawn"—on 3 February 1832, of a certain Désandrieux. A few beggar children gathered on a pile of stones after noticing the guillotine being set up. Désandrieux had been hauled from his cell out at Bicêtre, pushed into a windowless police wagon which carted him to the location where, "without giving the man time even to breathe, furtively, deceitfully, shamefully, they conjured away his head. That is what they call a solemn and public act of high justice. Infâme dé'rision!" For Hugo, as for many other citizens of Paris at the time, Désandrieux had been covered with shame by not being allowed the honour of facing the blade of the guillotine in the full light of day, before the crowd in the central Place de Grève. Instead, he was doomed to the obloquy of deserted Hell.

  Hugo lived to be photographed, and after photography came film. It is difficult to imagine how high justice on the Grève could have continued for very long. The removal of the guillotine down to the southernmost point of what was then known as the Faubourg Saint-Jacques was the first step in the direction of the total abolition of capital punishment which occurred in our own time. It was a very long period of transition. During Louis Philippe's reign, crowds of the curious would trundle down the Rue Saint-Jacques whenever rumours of an imminent execution spread. Thackeray, in his 1840 Paris Sketchbook, recorded one instant when the crowd gathered down at Hell's Gate to enjoy a gory spectacle: "Tipsy old women and men, shrieking, jabbering, gesticulating, as the French will do; parties swaggering, staggering forwards, arm in arm, reeling to and fro across the street, and yelling songs in chorus: hundreds of these were bound for the show, and we thought ourselves lucky in finding a vehicle to the execution place, at the Barrière d'Enfer." But the event was called off and a thousand "drunken devils" were forced to rely on their imagination for entertainment. Solemn high justice, many argued at the time, had been reduced to a conjuror's trick; death had been magically removed out of sight, southwards.

  What happened to the guillotine was in fact just a sign of a broader movement of death in Paris. It was during the same revolutionary period, at the turn of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, that Paris's dead—all her dead—were carried from the centre of town to the lonely southern district of Hell. How that occurred is itself a tale of eighteenth-century conjurors.

  THE DEAD HAD always followed the main roads. For several millennia Paris had lived from the long-haul trade provided by the twin north-south routes of Saint-Denis and Saint-Martin; the dead were buried to the sides of the routes in "caemeteria" or "cemeteries," the "places where one slept." With the development of Paris as the kingdom's capital, protective walls were built; the cemeteries followed in their shadow, spreading from the road sites to areas that snuggled up against the city's parapets and towers. Sainte-Geneviève, Saint-Benoît and Saint-Séverin guarded the southern approaches. But the greatest threat to the city came from the English invaders to the north. So the strongest defences also lay on the north side of town, hence the fortress of the old Louvre.* Hence also the huge cemetery on the north side, between the walls and the old traders' route, "La
Grant Chaussée de Monsieur Saint-Denis."

  It was devoted to a church built nearly a thousand years ago and now no longer in existence, that of the Saints-Innocents. The Innocents catered to the dead of twenty parishes on the right bank of the city and was in operation for over six centuries. It came to resemble a huge municipal rubbish dump. Daily the Hôtel-Dieu, the town's main hospital on the Îie de la Cité, brought in its pile of bodies, stripped naked by the nuns, who would sell off the rags to starving traders. The Châtelet dungeon added its bit, too. With an average life expectancy of twenty-two years, medieval and Renaissance Paris had a large demand for mass graves. The Innocents was quickly filled; the ground level itself rose several feet above that of the neighbouring road. Wandering dogs dug for food. Wandering beggars dug for jewellery

  Wandering minstrels, acrobats, lovers, jesters, bears and bear-baiters, mimes, divas and prostitutes were all attracted to this stinking place, for in the old days death and entertainment went together; they were a part of one world. King Philip Augustus (1180-1223), in his relish for walls, ordered the Innocents closed off: so the cemetery became a zone of enclosed entertainment and trade, which you can still find to this day—at the point where Les Halles meets Beaubourg on the Rue Saint-Denis. Behind today's Forum des Halles, along the southern side of Rue Berger runs an arcaded wall modelled after the notorious Charnier (Charnel House) des Innocents; it gives some notion of the size of the place as well as—with its prostitutes, drug addicts and police armed with truncheons—a feeling for its past atmosphere. But the dead have gone. In the 1790s the dead were expelled to a place called Hell.

  In the centuries that followed Philip Augustus's enclosures, with plagues breaking out approximately every decade, the liveliness of the area increased in direct proportion to the smell of death. The famous danse macabre, the "Dance of Death," was invented on the soil of this charnel house in the fifteenth century. Abbé Valentin Dufour, writing at the time, described how the danse macabre encouraged "les gens à dévocion . . . comme un mirouer salutairepour toutesgens": it incited people to prayer by holding up a salutary mirror for everyone to look into. The Church was enthusiastic about it; the people were intrigued by it. The danse macabre at the cemetery of the Innocents was Paris's major gift to late medieval culture. It can be found in the paintings, the poetry and the music of the time. Ugliness combines with beauty, death beguiles youth. The engraver from Nuremberg, Albrecht Dürer, comes to mind, with his weird Late Gothic images—like that of the steadfast Christian soldier marching forward, his road strewn with skulls, while Death and the Devil tempt him aside. Or Jan Van Eyck's portrait of Jean Arnolfini, a very serious and ugly middle-aged businessman, with his teenage wife—the concave mirror hanging between them.

  The danse macabre is the mix of the generations, the play of death with life, the transience of pleasure in the face of death, a titillating game between Eros and the Grim Reaper. In the instructions left by the aged Mé'nagierde Paris—or "Goodman of Paris" as this nameless late medieval Parisian bourgeois has come to be known— to his own adolescent wife, he advises that she "sing and dance full well and sweetly laugh and play and talk"; he wishes for her a life of gaiety bathed in "dancing and singing, wine and spices, and torches for the lighting." For a wealthy old man like the Mé'nagier acrobats would have done the dancing in his place. And the place where they danced could well have been the fetid neighbourhood of the Innocents, because the wealthy were just as likely to be there as the poor. As the Abbé Dufour put it, "death levels all conditions, it scythes out the old, but also the young." The nineteenth-century journalist Maxime du Camp remembered how "it was something for a bourgeois family to have his ancestors buried at the Cemetery of the Innocents." Some of the finest sepulchres in the city lined the road just there, next to the desks of the écrivains publics, who would write your love letters, the puppet show for the children and the tiny ré'clusoirs, into which adulterous women were walled with the blessing of the local curate. Nothing symbolized better the late medieval world's lively urban culture and its perverse play with death than the stinking fields of Paris's Innocents.

  The dead were piled higher; the level of the fields mounted. Charles V in the early fourteenth century had a second cemetery wall built within the Innocents, parallel to the first and several yards from it. This created the effect of a walled trench into which the bodies could be thrown. Above was a tiled roof—though from that imperfect tiling exhaled stench and pestilence. The inner walls were styled in the form of Gothic arcades, within each of which was painted scenes of the danse macabre: a skeleton whirling around a young damsel in ecstasy, or a black-hooded gentleman with a scythe reaching out for another slim maiden.

  The Wars of Religion, in the second half of the sixteenth century, which ended with a terrible siege of the city, brought more starvation, pestilence—and bodies to the Innocents. Louis XIII after 1610 did manage to extend his defensive walls westwards in order to protect his home in the Louvre, but the piles of dead to his north-east could expect no such relief; they just pressed themselves upwards and outwards. The graveyard was now about eight feet above the Rue Saint-Denis, and that was simply the ground level. The tiling of the roofs gave way, the walls cracked. One formal report estimated that the mass graves were "so rotten that a human body could be entirely consumed within nine days." The local inhabitants figured that only twenty-four hours were required; they were getting tired of the dancing.

  It would be reckless to calculate exactly how many human beings ended up as remains in the rotting heap at the Innocents, though this was attempted by several in the two centuries which followed. The last gravedigger there claimed to have buried 90,000 bodies in thirty years. That was just after the great scandal of 30 May 1780: a brewer on Rue de la Lingerie descended into his two-storey cellar and got the shock of his life; he discovered not dozens, but hundreds of human bodies, in varying states of decomposition, lying there. Like many who served food and drink in the district, he had been wondering why the water in his wells was undrinkable, why his galettes gave off that fetid odour. Other cases like this had been recorded. But it was the scandal of Rue de la Lingerie, occurring just ten years after the first great smallpox epidemic, which wiped out one tenth of Paris's population and 90 per cent of all infants under nine months, that forced the city authorities to find a new solution for what to do with their dead.

  Something radical happened in the last decades of the eighteenth century that altered attitudes towards death; it could be noticed in the changing style of public executions; it was reflected also in the new proposals regarding the accumulating piles of urban dead. The change seems to be linked to the fact that, despite all the epidemics, death itself was actually declining after the middle of the eighteenth century and would continue to do so from then on. As a result, Paris's population picked up rapidly after 1750, attaining 650,000 in 1790, three quarters of a million at the end of the Napoleonic Wars and its first million by 1850. That new million of Parisians, who could expect to live to the age of fifty or more, did not want to see or hear about death any more; they wanted to live. The culture of the danse macabre was gone and with it disappeared the Charnel House of the Innocents.

  Nobody in Paris at the time of the Rue de la Lingerie scandal was aware that a political revolution was about to tear the kingdom apart. But the rapid increase in the number of printed pamphlets addressing the problem of what to do with the dead did demonstrate how fundamental was the shift in attitudes towards death. "The apparatus of death is terrible to behold," proclaims one of the pamphlets. "Its idea alone can poison life, its contemplation can shorten it. All who draw its image afflict us and displease us . . . " This is evidently not Durer embracing the dead; it is a total rejection of death, a demand to hide it away Even the mention of the "memory" of the dead requires an extended endnote on the paradox of reason and sentiment, with all the praise going to the former. The ancient Egyptians, the Greeks, and later the Romans kept their dead and their dying aside,
the pamphlet goes on: "One never saw, I say, in the midst of their towns these appalling hospices of death, these asylums permanently exposing suffering humanity." The danger of constant exposure to death and to the dying is proved by the "pestilential diseases spread around by putrid and vile air."

  For the anonymous author of the pamphlet, printed in London, the solution had to be found in "the hand of art." He meant this quite literally Centuries of creative labour, the pamphleteer notes, had produced exquisite monuments in the capital. Now where did all that stone come from? Paris had been "countermined" everywhere; there were holes and caves which could easily be turned into "catacombs," as in ancient times. The "hand of art" had produced fabulous buildings on the surface of the town and great, unused caverns underground: let the "hand of art" store the piles of unwanted dead down there.*

  The idea was popular among the philosophes and, after the Rue de la Lingerie affair, it spread fast among those who governed, although they did not like to talk about it in public. Louis Sebastien Mercier, the most famous of the late eighteenth-century pamphleteers, drew attention to Paris's huge network of underground stone quarries in his immensely popular Tableaux de Paris, whose twelve volumes provide us with the most extraordinary detail about the city's street life just before the Révolution. "These towers, these steeples, these vaulted temples," he meditated, "all these signs which say to the eye: what we see above ground must be lacking below" It was discovered that the whole outer area of Hell contained labyrinths of underground stone quarries. In 1784 three hundred yards of the Rue d'Enfer gave way and a gardener disappeared into the depths of nowhere. The idea began to spread: why not transfer all those bodies in the Innocents southwards to empty, undermined Hell?