Seven Ages of Paris (24 page)

At the time of Louis’s triumphal entry in 1660, there was no street lighting in Paris, apart from the odd lantern here and there. This made it by night, in the words of the critic Nicolas Boileau, more dangerous than a dark wood, and few law-abiding citizens would venture out after dark. Art students from the Academy were reluctant to return to their lodgings after 7:00 p.m. in winter, for fear of falling into the hands of armed bands. In 1667 Louis appointed Nicolas-Gabriel de La Reynie as chief of police, the first to hold this new office which removed responsibility for the policing of Paris out of the hands of the city magistrates.** La Reynie, the closest thing to a mayor Paris had yet had, was an unqualified success, filling the job for over thirty years (he was later a central figure in the “Affaire des Poisons”: see Chapter 7). One of his first tasks was to provide Paris with a comprehensive system of street lighting, so that by the end of the seventeenth century the city could boast a total of 6,500 lamps on public streets. These consisted of groups of candles in a lantern, each one lit at dusk and burning till the small hours. Lighting up must have been a Herculean task. A visiting English doctor called Martin Lister noted heavy penalties meted out to any youth breaking the lanterns as a prank: “he is sent forthwith to the Gallies; and there were three young Gentlemen of good Families who were in Prison for having done it in a Frolick …”

Lister was highly impressed by Louis’s and La Reynie’s achievements (in London, a parsimonious administration lit the lamps only on moonless nights), and soon every city in Europe would follow suit. Hand in hand with illumination, naturally, went fire precautions, and La Reynie also provided Paris with a fire-service, forerunners of the sapeurs pompiers. Although, initially, it relied on buckets, by the end of the century it was able to use a portable pump designed by an actor, François Dumouriez de Perier.

* The catastrophic Fire of London in 1666 had delivered a message well heeded by Colbert’s and Louis’s town-planners.

LOW LIFE AND HIGH LIFE

In 1673, Louis struck a medal to celebrate the triumph of the capital over crime. It may have been somewhat premature, but La Reynie’s contributions to law and order, as well as to health, had already been quite breathtaking. When he took over, he found that—in the aftermath of the Fronde—the Châtelet, hitherto responsible for law and order, had fallen into a state of total decay. Whole sectors of the city were no-go areas ruled by thugs and armed beggars, or even by gangs of lackeys working for the affluent which lay in wait for unwary students. In the eleven cours des miracles, or ghettos—marginal quarters like that near the Church of Saint-Martin-des-Champs, Rue Saint-Honoré, Faubourg Saint-Marcel, Faubourg Saint-Germain and Saint-Roch—the guard (le guet) did not dare to enter. In the year 1642 alone, 342 murders took place during night hours on the streets of Paris, while in the aftermath of the Fronde social ills became much worse.

La Reynie strengthened the police force and brought in a range of new laws and ordinances to quell street violence in the city. There was a ban on bearing weapons at night, which even applied to “men of quality” unless they had lanterns to make themselves readily identifiable; “valets” were not even allowed to carry a baton or a stick. It was also forbidden to take arms into theatres (always places of potential disorder) or to gather outside in disorderly assemblies. Duelling was banned once again; beggars and vagabonds were ordered to leave the city by a certain deadline. Under La Reynie and his equally effective successor, d’Argenson, there was an extensive codification of criminal and civil law the like of which would not be seen again until Napoleon.

For those sentenced to death, hanging was the normal mode of execution—except for nobles, who were still entitled to be beheaded; this privilege remained on the statute books until, as one historian puts it, in the 1790s “French revolutionary terrorists extended that privilege to everyone.” As the fates of the wretched Brinvilliers and Voisin demonstrated, torture and burning at the stake were penalties still reserved for offenders such as poisoners. (Often the death sentence included a “retentum,” a secret provision for the executioner to strangle the condemned as he attached him to the stake—described as an adoucissement of the sentence.) Even in the years of the eighteenth-century Enlightenment, rascals like the engaging serial brigand Cartouche would be broken on the wheel, a hideous fate which he faced with exemplary courage; while his young nephew, sentenced to be suspended by his wrists for two hours on the Place de Grève, died in agony as onlookers mocked.

For less serious offences, there were the galleys—an archaic and harsh form of punishment that also provided the backbone of the French navy well after Louis XIV. Meanwhile, the much feared Bastille, where the average stay during Louis’s reign was about sixteen months, had graduated into something like a luxury home for the rich in trouble. There some of the residents’ “rooms” resembled those in a good hotel. As early as 1670, prisoners were allowed to hang tapestries on the walls and to carpet the floor; in 1684 Louis donated a lending library to it. To be in the Bastille was no great shame, the identities of its inmates protected with the kind of secrecy to which Parisians attached so much importance. Regarded as a much worse fate, in the event of royal disfavour, was the terrible sentence of exile from Paris (later, from Versailles) to the miscreant’s country estates, there to die of lingering boredom—the most dreadful condemnation for any Frenchman. Still worse, prostitutes would often be transhipped to the colonies, to Canada or Louisiana, to expiate their sins by incrementing the settlers’ birthrate. Such was the immortalized end of Manon Lescaut, exiled to die in the unspeakable desert of Biloxi.

As in most urban societies, in the Paris of Louis XIV crime was closely linked with poverty. On the one hand, La Reynie strove, with some harshness, to get beggars and the poor in general off the streets and out of town. On the other hand, the compassionate side of Louis XIV led him to spend heavily on hospitals for the poor. The famous Salpêtrière, once an arsenal on the eastern outskirts of Paris, now in the 13th arrondissement close to the Gare d’Austerlitz and still one of Paris’s major hospitals, was one of his creations, initially filled with beggars, paupers and down-and-outs. Built around a magnificent basilica designed by the architect of the Invalides, Libéral Bruant, the Salpêtrière had the lofty objective of providing a charitable institution where “all the poor would be gathered on clean premises, so as to be tended to, be educated and given an occupation.” Alas, these good intentions swiftly evaporated after 1682 as Louis left Paris and lost interest. The hospital failed to become economically viable, and could offer accommodation for only a fraction of the mendicant population, which was constantly augmented by beggars from the countryside. Appallingly overcrowded (at one time it had 10,000 inmates), the Salpêtrière also became a prison for prostitutes, and later, in the eighteenth century, it became Paris’s principal lunatic asylum, a particularly dreadful place where the mentally deranged were chained to the walls. In September 1792, revolutionaries from the Faubourg Saint-Marcel set forth with the noble intent of liberating the prostitutes; but liquor got the better of them and instead they dragged out on to the street forty-five wretched madwomen and massacred them in a pointless orgy of killing.

Occasionally grain crises afflicted the country at large, and in the early 1660s Colbert found himself forced to import food from as far off as Poland. As always, in Paris it was the poor who came off worst. Vast quantities of free grain, le blé du roi, were distributed, with Louis even selling bread through the wall that surrounded the Tuileries Palace in order to break an alleged monopoly by the Parisian bakers. Fortunately for the capital, there were no food crises on a similar scale during the remaining years of the century, but hunger was never far removed for the city’s under-privileged.

The observant Englishman Dr. Lister, though not greatly concerned with the lot of “the common people,” noted that during Lent they “feed much on White Kidney Beans” (presumably a kind of flageolet), which he had never come across in England, but with which he was “well pleased.” Otherwise he found the average Parisian diet to consist chiefly of “Bread and Herbs,” the bread much coarser than country bread, supplemented by large quantities of red onions, garlic and sorrel. He added that Parisians “delight in nothing so much as mushrooms,” which he found grown liberally in fields in what is now the Rue de Vaugirard on the Left Bank. Paris introduced him to the morille, “The first of that kind of Mushroom, that I remember ever to have seen.” But, always the good practitioner, he warned that many visitors fell sick from eating the wrong kind of mushroom: “a sudden shortness of breath, and sometimes Vomitings, or went off in a Diarrhoea or Dysentery.” Most surprising is the variety of wines he found imported from considerable distances. Lister regularly drank wine from Languedoc, and even from Spain and Italy; he esteemed the “Vin de Bonne” (Beaune), but considered both the red and white Saint-Laurence from southern Provence to be “the most delicious Wine I have ever tasted in my life.”

Like contemporary Londoners, Parisians indulged a great deal in coffee, sugar, tea and chocolate. Perhaps not unexpectedly, Lister recorded how— compared with his earlier visits—Parisians “are strangely altered in their Constitutions and Habit of Body; from lean and slender, they are become fat and corpulent, the Women especially: Which, in my Opinion, can proceed from nothing so much as the daily drinking of strong Liquors.” The King himself was said to have a gargantuan appetite. Though he eschewed chocolate, tea and coffee (in 1711 the death of one of the royal princesses was blamed on coffee), he had “often” been observed to polish off “four full dishes of different soups, an entire pheasant, a partridge, a large plate of salad, two large slices of ham, mutton in gravy and garlic, a plate of pastries and then, in addition, fruit and hard-boiled eggs.”

The table manners displayed by the Parisian bourgeois under Louis XIV, which generally reflected those of the court, are illuminatingly set out in a book dated 1671 by Antoine de Courtin, Nouveau Traité de la civilité qui se pratique en France parmi les honnêtes gens. During meals the men kept on their swords, cloaks and plumed hats (except when rising for the grace; and they were expected to doff their hats and bow each time Madame, the hostess, passed a plate). This must have been extremely inconvenient. Although the fork had been introduced into la haute société around 1600, it had not become universally accepted among the bourgeoisie; in Le Bourgeois Gentilhomme, Molière’s popular satire on the vanity of the Parisian nouveaux riches, the rascally Comte Dorante mocks
Mme.
la Marquise for serving the pretentious bourgeois M. Jourdain with her fingers. According to de Courtin it was proper etiquette to eat olives with a spoon rather than a fork; and oranges (which were served with the joint) had to be sliced sideways, not like an apple. “There’s nothing of worse breeding,” he decreed, “than to lick your fingers, your knife, your spoon or your fork; and nothing more unattractive than to clean and wipe the plate with your fingers”—unless it be “to blow your nose on your napkin.” Most degrading of all, though, was to be caught “trying to make off with fruit in your napkin, or your pocket, from the table of a person you wish to honour.” On the other hand, it was good form to sing with the dessert.

Thus, concludes the historian Georges Mongrédien in his engaging La Vie quotidienne sous Louis XIV, “the most delicate nuances of courtesy mingled with the most slovenly behaviour.” This was the world in which the Galerie des Glaces and the fountains of Versailles coexisted with the open sewers of the Ile de la Cité. So the bon bourgeois of seventeenth-century Paris could “show that he belonged to a highly sophisticated social world, but one which had not yet succeeded in developing hygiene and comfort.”

** Under the regime of Louis XIV the all-embracing term “police” meant much more; it covered, in effect, the whole civil administration of the city; thus La Reynie was in charge not only of law and order, but also of health and sanitation.

CULTURE

The sense of security that the reign of Louis XIV brought allowed Parisians to enjoy their leisure. Apart from the periodic grand spectacles that were guaranteed to engage and distract, there was time to watch or to participate in games. Predecessor of our modern tennis, the jeu de paume—greatly favoured by the King—became immensely popular, with no fewer than 114 courts springing up in Paris. Less testing were skittles, le mail (which was to evolve into croquet); for women, there was shuttlecock. Above all, gambling—notably at Versailles—became all the rage. Harmless family entertainments such as trictrac and dominoes graduated into games like piquet, lansquenet, pharaon and hoca played for serious money. On Christmas Day 1678 (according to
Mme.
de Sévigné),
Mme.
de Montespan, the reigning mistress, lost 700,000 écus; on another occasion she lost 400,000 pistoles to the bank—but, possibly with the connivance of the banker, was able to win it all back. Inciting the court to take part in lotteries, Louis was all for gambling of every kind; the opiate of the nobles, it was one very simple way of “domesticating” or taming them.

For a distraction, however, which many could take part in and enjoy, there was nothing quite to compare with the theatre or the opera. A flourishing of the arts usually requires a set of special conditions, rather as a pearl does. Could Shakespeare have produced what he did without the immense self-assurance of the Elizabethan world scene? The age of Louis—at least in its earlier, pre-Versailles days—was also the age of Racine, Molière and Boileau, and of Lully and Couperin. Possibly the sombre tragedies of Racine could have flourished in the times of Henri IV and Louis XIII, but almost certainly it required the sureties of the reign of the Roi Soleil for a Molière to make such mock of human frailties, manners and mannerisms. Could such hilarious farces, which so effectively flayed contemporary social affectations, have been performed at any earlier time in French history? Would the Fables of La Fontaine, with all their taunting scepticism, have fallen on such fertile ground in previous ages? And what about the biting wit of La Rochefoucauld and his Maxims? Could they have appealed without the scepticism which swept France in the wake of the religious wars of the previous century—and which would form an important part of the philosophic backdrop to 1789?