The Invention of Paris by Eric Hazan

Doyenné that we came to recognize one another as brothers . . . in a corner of the old Louvre des Médicis, very close to the spot where the former Hôtel de Rambouillet stood . . . Good old Rogier would smile into his beard, from the top of a ladder, where he was painting on one of the three mirror frames a Neptune – who looked like himself! Then the two swing doors opened abruptly: it was Théophile [Gautier]. We hurried to offer him a Louis XIII armchair, and he read in his turn his first verses, while Cydalise I, or Lorry, or Victorine, swung nonchalantly in blonde Sarah’s hammock, stretched across the enormous salon . . . What happy days! We gave balls, suppers, costumed parties . . . We were young, always gay, and often rich . . . But now I come to the sad note: our palace was demolished. I rummaged through its debris last autumn. Even the ruins of the chapel [of the Doyennés, which was part of Saint-Thomas-du-Louvre], which so gracefully stood out against the green of the trees . . . were not respected. Around that time, I found myself, one day, rich enough to buy back from the demolishers two lots of woodwork from the salon, painted by our friends. I have the two Nanteuil architraves; Vattier’s signed
Watteau
, Corot’s two long panels representing Provençal landscapes; Châtillon’s
Red Monk
, reading the Bible on the curved haunches of a naked sleeping woman; Chassériau’s
Bacchantes
, who have tigers on a leash like dogs . . . As for the Renaissance bed, the Médicis dresser, the two sideboards, the Ribera, the tapestries of the
Four Elements
, all that was scattered a long time ago. ‘Where did you lose so many fine things?’ Balzac asked me one day. – ‘In misfortune,’ I replied, citing one of his favourite phrases. 26
    Rue Saint-Nicaise was where royalist plotters exploded a bomb on 24 December 1800, while the First Consul was proceeding from the Tuileries to the opera in Rue de Richelieu. The attack killed eight people, and marked the beginning of the end for the Carrousel quarter. Bonaparte realized the danger of having cutthroats like these so close to his residence, and had the damaged houses pulled down as well as a number of others. Helater demolished the stalls and wooden barriers that closed off the Tuileries avenues, 27 and had the triumphal arch of the Carrousel constructed as a gateway of honour to the palace. Demolition continued slowly until 1848, when the pace accelerated in order to make work for the National Workshops. ‘Three-quarters of the square was cleared in 1850. There only remained [on Rue Saint-Nicaise] the former building of the royal stables . . . and right in the middle of the new esplanade, the Hôtel de Nantes, which had resisted until the end all the offers of the expropriation assessors. The hôtel has since been demolished, and the royal stables as well.’ 28
    The Carrousel today is a dusty steppe between the Louvre pyramid and the railings of the Tuileries gardens, crossed by a stream of cars – required by some odd notion to navigate a one-way roundabout – and by an underground tunnel whose concrete entrances give a final touch to the whole ensemble. As the triumphal arch makes no sense in the middle of this desert, the idea was conceived of linking it to the Tuileries gardens and the Napoleon III wings of the Louvre by little fan-shaped plantations over which the heads or thighs of Maillol’s fat ladies emerge: there are academic gardens just as there are academic painters. Happily, some very fine chestnut trees have been saved, which in summertime provide shade for the ice-cream and postcard sellers around Percier and Fontaine’s monument.
Tuileries-Saint-Honoré
    In 1946, the Place du Marché-Saint-Honoré was renamed Place Robespierre, a decision reversed in 1950 when the French bourgeoisie raised its head again. Their