The Invention of Paris by Eric Hazan Page B

posing in groups for the photographer in front of the debris of the column in May 1871.
Bourse
    Between the gardens of the Palais-Royal and the Boulevards, the district often known as the Bourse quarter is one of the most homogeneous and harmonious in old Paris. In these blocks that are called neoclassical for want of a better word, many buildings date from the reign of Louis XVI, others from the Revolutionary years – Rue des Colonnes, whose miniature neo-Grecian vocabulary, Doric columns without pediment, palm-leaf mouldings and strange windowed balustrades form such an original ensemble that great architects from all over Europe – Gilly, Soane, Schinkel – came to admire and draw it. Others in this style were constructed under the Empire, like Brongniart’s Bourse. The paradox of so grandiose a building devoted to so mundane an activity did not escape his contemporaries:
I vex myself every time I enter the Bourse, the beautiful edifice of marble, built in the noblest Greek style, and consecrated to the most contemptible business – to swindling in the public funds . . . Here, in the vast space of the high-arched hall, here it is that the swindlers, with all their repulsive faces and disagreeable screams, sweep here and there, like the tossing of a sea of egotistic greed, and where, amid the wild billows of human beings, the great bankers dart up, snapping and devouring like sharks – one monster preying on another . . . 29
    The Bourse quarter is crossed by three parallel streets with a more or less north-south orientation – Rue Vivienne, Rue de Richelieu and Rue Sainte-Anne – and two transversals. One of these is very ancient, Rue des Petits-Champs, which links the two royal sites of Place des Victoires and Place Vendôme. 30 The other is Rue du Quatre-Septembre, one of the least successful of Haussmann’s cuttings. Under the Second Empire it went by the name of Rue du Dix-Décembre, commemorating the election of Louis Bonaparte as president of the Republic in 1848. The Society of 10 December, founded by the prince-president, recruited among the Paris lumpenproletariat caricatured by Daumier’s character Ratapoil, playing a role comparable with that of the Gaullist Service d’Action Civique in the 1960s.
    For a very long time this quarter has been devoted to three activities that have resisted pretty well the changes in fashion and luxury goods: books, finance, and music. ‘Since the reign of Henri IV,’ Germain Brice tells us, the Bibliothèque Royale
had been maintained very negligently on a private house in Rue de la Harpe. In 1666 it was moved to another house on Rue Vivienne, on the orders of Jean-Baptiste Colbert . . . In 1722 it was decided to install it in the Hôtel de Nevers, or rather in the apartments that had been used for some time for the Bank, to which others had been added, built on neglected gardens that were close by, in such a way that the public would have the satisfaction of seeing it to better advantage than before, when it was scattered in a number of rooms in that shabby building on Rue Vivienne. 31
    From the Regency to the 1990s, the Bibliothèque – royal, imperial, or national – remained in this quadrilateral between Rue Vivienne and Rue de Richelieu. To sum up the spirit of this archaic institution, exasperating and blessed, I would choose Gisèle Freund’s photograph of Walter Benjamin at work, with his glasses and his dishevelled hair, bent over a book that he holds open with his left elbow, and taking notes with a large black pen. And as caption I would cite a connoisseur of libraries:
It may well be that in having branches of trees painted high up on the very lofty walls of the Bibliothèque Nationale in Rue de Richelieu, Henri Labrouste, an architect with a literary bent, had an intuition of this connection between reading and nature. That is in any case what one may believe in reading the