Lost Illusions (Penguin Classics) (35 page)

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that period the Wooden Galleries constituted one of the outstanding curiosities of Paris. It will not be out of place to depict this disreputable bazaar, since for the last thirty-six years it has played so important a part in Parisian life that there are few men in their forties to whom the description of it – unbelievable to young folk – will not still give pleasure. On the site of the cold, lofty, broad Orleans Gallery, a kind of hot-house void of flowers, were shanties, or more exactly wood huts, poorly roofed, small, dimly lit on the court and garden side by lights of sufferance which passed for windows but which in fact were more like the dirtiest kind of aperture found in taverns beyond the city gates.
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triple range of shops formed two galleries about twelve feet high. Shops sited in the centre looked out on to the two galleries, from which they borrowed their pestilential atmosphere and whose roofing allowed only a little light to filter through invariably dirty window-panes. These bee-hive cells had acquired so high a price thanks to the crowds which came there that, in spite of the pinched proportions of some of them – scarcely six feet wide and eight to ten feet long – they commanded a rent of three thousand francs a year. The shops drawing their light from the garden and court were hedged round with little fences of green trellis-work, perhaps in order to prevent the mob from rubbing against and demolishing the walls of crumbling plaster and rubble with which the shops were backed. So there was a space two or three feet wide in which vegetated the strangest botanical specimens – unknown to science – mingled with the varied, no less flourishing products of industry. Waste sheets of print hung round the tops of rose-trees in such a way that those flowers of rhetoric drew some scent from the stunted blooms in this untended garden watered only with fetid liquids. The foliage was beflowered with multicoloured ribbons or book-prospectuses. Vegetation was stifled by the flotsam and jetsam of fashion: you
might find a bow of ribbon or a tuft of verdure, and you were disillusioned about the blossom you were inclined to admire when you found that what you thought was a dahlia was really a loop of satin. From court and garden alike this palace afforded a view of all the most bizarre products of Parisian squalor: anaemic colourwash, patched-up plaster-work, faded daubs, fantastic posters. Lastly, the green trellis-work in both garden and court was outrageously befouled by the Parisian public. Thus, on both sides, a disgraceful and nauseating fringe seemed calculated to keep any fastidious person from approaching the Galleries, but fastidious people no more recoiled from these horrors than the prince in a fairy tale recoils from dragons or any other obstacles interposed by some wicked genie between him and his princess. Then, as today, a passage ran through the middle of these Galleries, and, as today, you could go into it between the two peristyles still standing which had been begun before the Revolution but never completed for lack of funds. The fine stone gallery leading to the Théâtre-Français then formed a narrow passage, disproportionately high, and so badly roofed that the rain often came in. It was called the Glazed Gallery to differentiate it from the Wooden Galleries. The roofing of these hovels was moreover in such bad condition that the House of Orleans was sued by a dealer in cashmeres and other fabrics when he found that his merchandise had suffered considerable damage in the course of one night. He won his case. In some places a double tarpaulin provided the sole covering. The floor of the Glazed Gallery, where Chevet laid the foundations of his fortune, like that of the Wooden Galleries, was the natural soil of Paris, reinforced by the adventitious dirt brought in on the boots and shoes of passers-by. In all seasons, one’s feet stumbled against mounds and depressions of caked mud; the shopkeepers were constantly sweeping them up, but newcomers had to acquire the knack of walking across them.

This sinister accumulation of refuse, these windows grimy with rain and dust, these squat huts with rags and tatters heaped around them, the filthy condition of the half-built walls, this agglomeration reminiscent of a gypsy camp or
the booths on a fair-ground – the sort of temporary constructions which Paris heaps about the monuments it fails to build – this contorted physiognomy was wonderfully in keeping with the teeming variety of trades carried on beneath these brazenly indecent hutments, noisy with babble and hectic with gaiety, and where an enormous amount of business has been transacted between the two Revolutions of 1789 and 1830. For twenty years the Stock Exchange stood opposite, on the ground-floor of the Palais-Royal. There then public opinion was formed, reputations were made and unmade, political and financial affairs discussed. People met in these galleries before and after Stock Exchange hours. The Paris of bankers and merchants often encumbered the court-yard of the Palais-Royal and swarmed inside the building for shelter in rainy weather. It had sprung up haphazard in such a way as to become strangely like a sounding-board. It rang through and through with bursts of laughter. No quarrel could be started at one end of it without people at the other end knowing what it was about. It was the home ground of publishers, poets, pedlars of prose, politicians, milliners and, lastly the prostitutes who roamed about it in the evenings. There news buzzed and books by both young and established authors abounded. There Parliamentary conspiracies were hatched and publishers concocted their mendacities. There were sold the latest novelties which the public refused to buy elsewhere. There in one evening were sold several thousand copies of this or the other pamphlet by Paul-Louis Courier or
The Adventures of a King’s Daughter
, the first broadside fired by the House of Orleans against the Charter of Louis XVIII. At the time when Lucien put in his first appearance there, a few shops had elegantly glazed front windows; but they belonged to the rows giving on to the garden or the courtyard. Until the day when this strange colony collapsed under the hammer of the architect Fontaine, the shops situated between the two galleries were entirely open and supported by pillars like booths in provincial fairs; the eye could see across the merchandise and the glass doors to the two galleries. Since heating was impossible, the shopkeepers had to put up with foot-warmers
and were themselves responsible for the firemen’s service, for, in a mere quarter of an hour, any careless act could start a fire in this commonwealth of timber dried by the sun, already smouldering, as it were, with the heat of prostitution, littered with gauze, muslin, paper, and ventilated by frequent draughts rushing through it.

The modistes’ shops were full of unimaginable hats which seemed to be intended less for sale than for show, hanging in their hundreds on wire holders with mushroom knobs and decking the galleries with their manifold colours. For twenty years people strolling through the galleries have been wondering whose heads these dusty hats at last adorned. Seamstresses, usually ugly but free of speech, accosted women with artful words, adopting the manners and diction of the Parisian Covent Garden. A milliner’s assistant, glib of tongue and bold of eye, would stand on a stool and harry passers-by: ‘Won’t you buy a pretty hat, Madame? Won’t you let me sell you something, Monsieur?’ Their rich and colourful vocabulary drew variety from their modulations of tone, the looks they gave and the jibes they made at passers-by. Booksellers and shopkeepers lived on good terms together. In the passage so pompously styled the Glazed Gallery the most singular avocations were to be found. There ventriloquists plied their trade, and charlatans of every kind, mountebanks who had nothing to show and others who showed you everything. There for the first time a man set up a concern by which he has made seven or eight thousand francs on the fair-grounds. The sign over his booth was a sun revolving in a black surround, and about it these words were inscribed in flaming red:
Here man sees what God cannot see. Price one penny
. The ‘barker’ never admitted one man by himself, nor ever more than two people. Once inside, you found yourself facing a large mirror. Suddenly a voice which might have terrified Hoffmann himself rang out like a mechanical contrivance when a spring is released: ‘You see here, gentlemen, what through all eternity God cannot see, namely a fellow-creature. God has no fellow-creature!’ You went out ashamed of yourself without daring to confess your stupidity. From behind
every small door similar voices could be heard vaunting Cosmoramas, views of Constantinople, marionette shows, automata playing chess and dogs which could pick out the most handsome woman present. The ventriloquist Fitz-James had his heyday there, in the Café Borel, with Polytechnic students all around him, before he met his death in the fighting at Montmartre.

There were fruit-sellers and flower girls, and a famous tailor whose military embroideries glimmered through the dusk like so many stars. In the mornings, until two-thirty in the afternoons, the Wooden Galleries were mute, sombre and deserted. The shopkeepers chattered among themselves as if they were at home. The Paris population only began to congregate there at about three o’clock, when the Stock Exchange opened. Once the crowd arrived, young people hungry for literature but out of cash did their reading – gratis – at the booksellers’ shopwindows. The assistants employed to watch over the books exposed for sale charitably allowed these poor young men to go on turning the pages. When it was a matter of a 12-mo volume of two hundred pages, as with
Smarra, Pierre Schlemilh, Jean Sbogar
or
Jocko
, it was devoured in two sessions. At that time there were no free public reading-rooms: one had to buy a book to read it, and so the number of volumes then sold would seem fabulous today. There was therefore something typically French in this charity shown to the juvenile intelligence, avid and poverty-stricken. As evening fell, this terrible bazaar became resplendent in its poetry. From every adjacent street there came and went a large number of prostitutes who were allowed to walk up and down without charge. From every direction street-walkers were hurrying along to ‘do the Palais-Royal’. The Stone Galleries belonged to privileged brothels which paid for the right to parade gaudily dressed creatures between such and such an arcade and in the garden square into which they opened; but the Wooden Galleries were a happy hunting-ground for the commoner kind: they were supereminently ‘The Palais’, which at that time meant that they were the temple of prostitution. A woman could arrive there, go off with her
capture and take him wherever she thought fit. Consequently, every evening, these women attracted so considerable a crowd to the Wooden Galleries that it was only possible to move along at a snail’s pace, as in a procession or at a fancy-dress ball. This slow progress worried no one since it gave an opportunity for gaping. The clothes worn by these women are now a thing of the past. Their habit of wearing dresses cut low at the back and very low also in front; their quaint hair-styles devised to draw attention, here perhaps a Norman and there a Spanish
coiffure
; one street-walker all in curls like a poodle, another with sleek hair parted down the middle; legs enclosed in tight-fitting white stockings and displayed in various ways, but always to advantage: all this inglorious poetry has gone. The licentiousness of invitation and response, the open-air cynicism so in keeping with the locality are no longer to be found, not even in fancy-dress balls or the notorious public dances of our times. It was horrible but gay. The gleaming flesh of shoulders and bosoms stood out amid the almost invariably sombre hues of male costumes, producing the most magnificent contrasts. The hum of voices and the sound of pattering feet made a hubbub which could be heard from the middle of the garden as one continuous bass note punctuated with the shrill laughter of the prostitutes or shouts raised in occasional squabbles. Respectable persons and men of the greatest consequence rubbed shoulders with people who looked like gallows-birds. These monstrous gatherings had an indefinable piquancy which affected even the most insensitive persons. That is why the whole of Paris congregated there right up to the last moment and paced along the wooden flooring with which the architect of the new construction covered his basements. The demolition of these ignoble wooden erections aroused wide-spread and unanimous regret.

A few days previously the publisher Ladvocat had set up his premises at the corner of the passage running through the middle of the Galleries, opposite those of Dauriat, a now forgotten but very enterprising young man who blazed the trail which his rival so brilliantly followed. Dauriat’s shop
stood in one of the rows which gave on to the garden; Ladvocat’s shop faced the court. Dauriat’s shop was divided into two parts, one of which provided him with a vast storehouse for his books while the other served as his office. Lucien, arriving there that evening for the first time, was stunned at the sight of it, so irresistible was the impression it made on provincials and young men. He had soon lost touch with his guide.

‘If you were as handsome as that boy over there, I’d return your love!’ a trollop said to an old man as she pointed to Lucien.

This made Lucien as shy as a blind man’s dog; he followed the torrent of people in a state of stupefaction and excitement difficult to describe. Harassed by the ogling of the women, tempted and dazzled by the white rotundity of shamelessly-exposed bosoms, he clung to his manuscript and held it tight against him for fear, poor innocent, of having it stolen!

‘What do you want, sir?’ he exclaimed as someone took hold of his arm – he thought that his poetry might have aroused some author’s curiosity.

Then he recognized his friend Lousteau, who said to him: ‘I knew very well you’d come this way in the end!’