Read Online The Invention of Paris by Eric Hazan - Free Book Online

remark that Benjamin wrote about this room which he knew so well, and which was basically the only true ‘apartment’ that he had in Paris: ‘When you leaf through pages below, you can hear a murmur above.’ 32
    The quarter’s links with finance also date from the eighteenth century. For Sébastien Mercier, ‘there is more money in this single street’ – Rue Vivienne – ‘than in all the rest of the city; it is the capital’s purse’:
The major counting-houses have their offices there, in particular the Caisse d’Escompte. This is the stamping ground of the bankers, the money changers, the brokers, all who make a trade out of money . . . The whores are more financial here than in any other quarter, and never mistaken in marking out a henchman of the Bourse. These moneymen might have a greater need for reading than any others, so as not to completely lose the faculty of thought; but they don’t read at all; they provide material for those who write . . . All the inhabitants of this street are men who literally work against their fellow citizens, without feeling any sense of remorse.
    The banks have now left Rue Vivienne for the Boulevards, but there are still several shops that sell coins, where gold is changed just as in Balzac’s time.
    Rue de la Banque leads from the Bourse to the quarter’s other financial institution, the Banque de France. The Hôtel de La Vrillière, designed by François Mansart, was confiscated during the Revolution and the Imprimerie Nationale established there. Robespierre’s speeches were printed in runs of 400,000, and Marat needed three presses in the courtyard to print
L’Ami du peuple
. The famous Galerie Dorée – whose paintings by Pietro da Cortona, Tintoretto and Veronese had been transferred to the Louvre to make them accessible to the people – was used as a paper warehouse. The Banque de France took over the building from the Imprimerie in 1808, 33 and like all banks, it destroyed the marvel that had been entrustedto it. Mansart’s doorway disappeared, which, according to Germain Brice, ‘was seen as his masterpiece because he had been able to preserve the regularity of the Ionic order despite the pairing of columns, which had previously been viewed as very difficult’. The gardens likewise disappeared, on which Sauval had written that they ‘offered two admirable vistas: on the one hand a large parterre surrounded by mock privets, and accompanied by a great number of statues and busts, both ancient and modern, of bronze and marble; on the other, the length of Rue des Fossés-Montmartre [now d’Aboukir], receding towards Rue Montmartre . . . Of all the palaces that Paris contains, only the Palais d’Orléans [Palais-Royal] and this possess such a long avenue, and enjoy such a rare perspective.’ In 1870 the Galerie Dorée was likewise demolished, ‘the most perfect in Paris and perhaps in the whole of France’, according to Sauval; its fifty metres ended in an overhang supported by a pendentive above Rue Radziwill.
    This quarter, with only a single church (Notre-Dame-des-Victoires, where the moneymen met while the new Bourse was being constructed), has had three opera houses – without counting the Opéra Garnier, which is no distance at all as the crow flies. On the square facing the main entrance to the Bibliothèque Nationale, the site of the former Hôtel Louvois, where three streets dedicated to great ministers of the ancien régime – Richelieu, Colbert and Louvois – converge, Victor Louis built a theatre for the great actress Mme Montansier. Its entrance was a peristyle with thirteen arches and a balcony onto the street. The vestibule was supported by two ranks of Doric columns; four monumental staircases painted in white and gold served the five levels. Under a quite fallacious pretext – Chaumette to the