too close symbiotic relationship with Nantes, years during which my mental image of the city became more and more detailed and extensive as I grew from childhood to adulthood, it is not surprising that I have difficulties arriving at a definitive picture. Rather, the city’s image tends to define me: generally speaking, whatever the time frame, I never see myself other than completely immersed, body and soul plunged into a much more solid, more stimulating, and at the same time more restrictive element than what is usually referred to as the milieu. I try to distance myself from that intricate web of streets and places that had such a profound bearing on me when I was young and most impressionable: a risky, uncertain enterprise, because all that which closely touched our early formative years never completely ceases to participate somehow—be it ever so slightly, and even from afar—in our mutations.
Since I spent my early childhood in a rural environment, I am very much aware of differences in tension that separate the country from the city. The country is not just a sedative milieu (or was, at least until a few decades ago), characterized by the rarity, and, at the same time, the relative insignificance and placid character of the visual and sonorous signals it emits; it is basically a neutral field that tends to mold life into a vegetative form, and to impose habitual actions on social relationships. In the city, tension is caused by the concentration of living spaces, by the state of latent, continuous friction which galvanizes relationships, by the bewildering range of possibilities, of choices offered to the individual, and, most of all, at least for me, by the antagonism between a system of natural, centrifugal outward drives which channel the flow of the urban center’s energy toward peripheral points of dispersion and the powerful centripetal force which counterbalances it, and thus maintains the city’s cohesion. In such a concept of opposites, The man of the crowds dear to Edgar Poe could symbolize one of the poles: he incarnates the imbalance resulting from total submission to a central, urban attraction. On the other hand, there is no doubt that a centrifugal attraction regulates the powerful movements of escape and re-entry, reflected in today’s travel mania and the exodus on holidays and weekends.
This is how the image of Nantes reconstructs itself dynamically in my memory—a little like a spider weaving its web: first the radials I so often traveled, starting from the center which represents the hub, the raw core of that double attraction; then the parallel lines of the side streets which fuse together and homogenize the ensemble, the connecting streets less often walked, the shortcuts, alleys, paths, and passages that dissect and capriciously cut up the urban mass, a network familiar to the true city dweller but which I never knew completely. Inside that web, place-names emerge in a disorderly fashion to reclaim their position and fasten themselves into place. They act like powerful beams of light, pulling a large area of the city out of the shadows like a piece torn from a map, showing itineraries walked so often they could never be forgotten, as well as unrelated snapshots, without a connecting theme; but instead of reassembling themselves into an image of the city, they project on it a canvas riddled with holes, covered by opaque zones that resemble badly developed, unidentifiable negatives.
First of all, the names, beginning with the name of the city. Too familiar for many years to be perceived in its singularity, but which, after being heard only here and there and less often, has once again taken on an aura of distance and independence which intrigues me; almost like a woman who, by reverting to her maiden name after a divorce, inadvertently reveals certain aspects of her personality and seems to regain her youth. A name more dense then resonant, with a great capacity to absorb and encompass because of the long, open a in its middle, which conveys a certain plenitude to the nasal syllable around which its articulation takes place. A name much more feminized by its inflection than I first thought, with a rather vague, floating outline, but which the connotation of plurality nuances with a discrete opulence, meaningful in its substance but hardly inclined to flaunt it. A name also feminized and saturated by water, and by the strong nautical connotation of its sonority, an impression reinforced long ago in my mind by the city’s emblem painted on the creamy yellow tramways, the figure of a ship under sails with the motto Favet Neptunus eunti. A name much more closely tied to the liquid element than the city itself, and which more than any other (though unjustifiably) adds luster to many songs of the old nautical folklore. A city difficult to size up or pin down, wrapped up in her softly cushioned name as if protected by a layer of bubble wrap. Not entirely landlocked, and not strictly a seaport: neither fish nor fowl—just the right chemistry to create a mermaid.
*
There are few cities where successive municipalities have misused as shamelessly the privilege of naming and renaming places and avenues as they have in Nantes, and transformed at will a repertory of streets into obituaries of dead or rejected town councilors. The old names which escaped this misappropriation by elected officials have become that much more endearing, easy on the ear, and fondly remembered. Their frequent endings in ière, in eau or in ais, so well suited to the rural toponymy of the region (La Tortière, la Jonnelière, la Morrhonière—la Barbinais, La Refoulais, La Hunaudais—le Landreau, le Grand Blottereau, le Port Communeau) call to mind those enclaves in the midst of an urban expanse which were once part of the countryside, areas that have remained intact, and kept their original freshness. They remind me of a layer of native soil, from which the city secretly continues to draw its life blood. In the nineteen-twenties, that layer of topsoil was not just something that had barely been plowed under and still survived in the realm of place-names: my great-aunt still counted a number of petits rentiers proprets among her acquaintances, dapper elderly gentlemen with small independent incomes who wore celluloid collars and cravates “à système” (pre-knotted ties attached to shirt collars), who lived like she did in a small house with a garden, and received rents from their tenant farmers as well as redevances—payments in kind in the form of lumps of butter, chickens, and eggs by the dozen, produced on farms around Nozay, Sautron, or Carquefou. These old-fashioned names, drawn from deep within the soil, still touch me; they carry traces of an umbilical cord which the city, in spite of its zeal for emancipation (Favet Neptunus eunti), has never been able to cut completely.
Superimposed on that urban humus are the names of medieval Nantes, all of them gathered within the narrow perimeter bordered by the former quays (now filled in), the Château, the rue de la Marne, and what was once the riverbed of the Erdre; I have already mentioned a few of them on these pages: rue des Echevins, rue de la Juiverie, rue du Petit Bacchus. A purely archeological Nantes emerges here, a site with no echo, no harmonious ties to other parts of the city, and just as strange for Nantes’ citizens as Lutèce can be for today’s Parisians. For me, Nantes’ most evocative names are those which, each in its own way, have broken their ties with historical or anecdotal origins in order to form a purely verbal constellation inside of me, where the city’s layout finds itself imprisoned and exalted, like those ancient maps of the sky which superimpose the outlines of the Dog, the Bear, or Orion the Hunter over the clusters of stars: Pirmil Bridge—rue Kervégan—marché de la Petite Hollande—quai de la Fosse—cours Saint-Pierre—Port Communeau—Morand Bridge—quai d’Orléans—place Royale—passage Pommeraye—rue Crébillon—rue du Calvaire—place Graslin—marché de Talensac—rue Félibien—Sainte-Anne—Saint-Similien—Saint-Nicolas—Saint-Clément—place Bretagne—place Viarme—rue du Marchix—rue Monselet—rue des Dervallières—place Canclaux. It is without doubt the toponymy, arranged like a litany, and the sound of the place-names succeeding each other which enables memory to proceed with the linking process, and draw a picture inside of us that corresponds to our idea of a city we no longer inhabit. My vision of that idea is a compact agglomeration, narrowly and badly dissected by streets, never at rest and filled with sounds (bells ringing on Sundays when we went on our outings), a compact urban block inhabited by a bourgeois population, touched only here and there by industry and the sea traffic, and infiltrated by placid little suburban gardens as soon as one starts to leave the inner city. A city that has much more in common with a Dutch town, with its bourgeoisie and their tulips, than with a city in Spain, since private enterprises and the many-layered, industrious buzzing of a thousand domestic beehives here cover up and almost drown out the arid Dienst of its official services. There is nothing in the confusing, democratic jumble of its edifices to remind us of cities whose crenellated walls immediately call to mind their austerity, asceticism, and hierarchy—church, army barracks, convent, citadel, hospital, prison—all those centers of cloistered activity grouped together which rise in front of the visitor in Lérida, Pamplona, or Segovia. Much to my surprise, I found an example of this kind of cityscape not long ago in Langres, where an austere, monumental cliff crowns part of the old city sitting high up on the hill, right above the track of its former funicular railroad. Nantes is an aggregate of a strictly civilian society, a vivacious, disorderly, unplanned proliferation, born of its own spontaneous vitality, without an official decree of state like Le Havre or Cherbourg, and without the discipline of a merchants’ confederation like the Hanseatic towns. A city which invented herself, which reinvents herself every day, without being particularly anchored in her past, and without being excessively fixated on her memories. Having forgotten, in due time, the stopover of Julius Caesar (now the name of a café), the sieges of Alain Barbe-Torte, the stakes of the Middle Ages and its Jewish ghettos; forgotten also, the islands and commerce of ebony wood, the wars of the Vendee, and now forgetting its railways and its transporter bridge and even its river, which today flows alongside the city at a distance, like a rejected suitor. Faithful only to a blind vitality, to the force of inertia within its masses moving forward, which continue to propel her ahead. A city without rough edges, without anything protruding from its compact mass (except for the exotic incongruity of the Tour de Bretagne), where even the cathedral has neither towers nor spire; a city which has come a long way, and yet a city where the local dialect and signs of peasant awkwardness can suddenly resurface at a street corner, just as simply and spontaneously as an overnight crop of mushrooms. Perhaps nothing but a substance, a living, nourishing substance to be plunged into again, something like an ever active, fermenting bread dough: a city forever renewing herself. Valéry Larbaud, who briefly visited Nantes in the nineteen-twenties—during the time I lived there—only remembered (aside from the passage de la Pommeraye) what the city has since done away with: “Nantes has an immense river, divided into several arms by islands that are covered by houses and streets as far as the eye can see, though they are just the city’s suburbs. There is also a remarkable glass-enclosed passage, a passage several floors high, theatrical, with iron staircases that connect floors and provide access to boutiques with beautiful, shining windows, arranged around the galleries like glass cases in a museum. Finally, the trains pass along a quai that runs through the middle of the city, alongside the streets; they all seem to be express trains about to join the ocean liners ready to set out to sea. This is like the America of the novels of Jules Verne (who was born in Nantes)—America before and after the war of Secession—the America of long, pointed beards and caps with short square visors, of dark blue uniforms with facings and braiding in white worn by the infantry, yellow for the cavalry, and red for the artillery—an extraordinarily modern America, and which will always remain modern thanks to Jules Verne—but it would be preferable if the locomotives passing through the streets of Nantes had snowplows and big bells.”
Less suggestive than the garland of intertwined, emblematic place-names draped around a city, powerful names whose evocation bring it back to life (just like the often quoted children’s rhyme in the old song “Orleans—Beaugency—Notre Dame de Cléry—Vendome!—Vendome!” capable of resuscitating the fifteenth century and the Loire of the Book of Hours) are the snapshots which appear on that screen inside of us whenever we try to project pictures of a familiar town. The spontaneous ways in which memory sorts and groups them is a reminder that a sequence of intelligible sounds is far more likely to result in sheer poetry than sights mechanically registered by the eye and rigidly framed by one’s perception. A stack of postcards spread out flat in front of us, even “personalized” postcards, could never succeed in reconstituting the overwhelming, indivisible, sheer mass of the city as seen in our mind’s eye; it would only dehumanize, devitalize that vision. Oddly, my interiorized views of Nantes have not been updated: they refuse to take into account the transformations which took place in the city over the last fifty years; rather than ordinary memories, they constitute an archival ensemble of intimate documents, classified and inventoried. The first of those images is no doubt a view of the Erdre flowing into one of the Loire’s former eddies, seen from the narrow quai d’Orleans, almost on the axis of the little river, against a background of the old town houses on Feydeau Island. It is a typical “Tableau parisien” à la Baudelaire, nothing but surfaces of stone and a body of calm water, without the various touches of greenery which were added after the landfill. Next comes the former view of the Loire as seen from the place de la Duchesse Anne, at the foot of the Château, looking toward the tip of Feydeau Island: almost like a smaller version of the Monnaie in Paris as seen from the edge of the Ile de la Cité. This snapshot prominently features the sloping embankment of the old quai Baco across from the Château, weeds crowding the paving stones shaded by trees in the summertime. The third view is from the current café on the place Royale, an image of the houses on both sides of the rue Crébillon, including, beyond the place Graslin, the crenellated space of sky cut out by the façade of buildings at the entry of the rue Voltaire; in that privately held negative, the place Royale has kept its big clock and its configuration before the bombings, when it was slightly smaller than now. I can almost hear the lively talk and laughter of the Sunday crowd assembled there in the summer—even noisier than today’s crowds because of the chirruping on the large terrace of another café at the corner of the rue La Perouse, the café d’Orléans, which has since disappeared. Neutral images from which life has withdrawn, but where the blocks of buildings, the bodies of water, the fixed arrangement of empty and occupied space frozen in time stand out conspicuously, looking almost disdainfully at the crowds milling about. They effectively rejoin the ghost-like, mineral qualities of le Rêve Parisien—an insidious x-ray taken by visual memory, where only the skeleton remains after all the adjoining tissues have been eliminated. Images personalized by our presence, but which nevertheless remain nonchalantly vague and noncommittal about man’s impact on his physical surroundings, they evoke the haughty, majestic neutrality of empty streets during the early morning hours.
The truth is that neither the magic of names nor the snapshots engraved in my memory will ever allow me to embrace and recapture the city in her entirety. I have lived there wrapped up inside my imagination rather than surrounded by reality: her physical presence has been for me what a first garrison might be for a second lieutenant who dreams of being chief military commander someday. It was an environment filled with premonitions, where everything was a sign or a symbol and each barrier an obstacle to overcome, a place where to be alive was first and foremost a powerful yearning to grow up, to develop. A city that has watched over your fledgling debuts will fade and recede into the background unless memory has been able to capture what happened during the time it provided the unique, irreplaceable, familiar warmth of an incubator. A broken egg can be put together again, a cocoon with holes can be mended; but nothing will ever be able to re-create that blind urge inside which willed everything around me to burst or explode so that I could learn to exist in other ways, nothing will ever be able to re-create the plasticity, the malleability of a soul still vague, on which every impression became an imprint, or rather, in a Goethean sense, a printed form, a destiny in the process of developing itself.
Perhaps it would be better to allow Nantes to reshape herself inside of me simply by calling on chance encounters with various bits of flotsam and jetsam, sometimes imaginary, sometimes real; all of them the result, or fallout, of the same explosion. They would come together, helter-skelter, without any kind of organization: the dream-like vision of the omnibus in the film Zéro de Conduite, which takes the student back to his boarding school. The odor of cold coal and dense winter fogs settling at dusk on a city illuminated by pale strings of streetlights. The ceramic, modern-style décor which continues to transform La Cigale into a provincial Lipp, reduced to the size of a candy box. The round paving stones, the cloistered little houses of the old passage Russeil, more silent than a nuns’ convent behind its garden gates, underneath its magnolia trees. The winding, hairpinshaped rue de Garennes which dominates from up high where the Loire flows past Trentemoult, and its counterpart in my memory, the panorama of St. Augustine in Florida, as illustrated in the Hetzel edition of Jules Verne’s novel North against South. The small covered tramway stop on the place du Commerce, where the yellow cars went screeching around the bend in the tracks with a noise that made one’s teeth grit—a stop that served as nighttime shelter for a bum who wrote poetry, author of at least one unforgettable line:
Greetings to you, roses that bloom in the snow!
The beginning of the rue Charles Monselet, and its connecting elbow to the boulevard Delorme, a spot which announces from afar the peace and quiet of the area around Procé Park, where the frantic activities of the inner city subside as suddenly as if one had momentarily entered a secluded garden: a site of glad tidings, the promise of a pleasant neighborhood—and the exact opposite of the boulevard de Doulon, which has always impressed me as the harbinger of gloom. The poster announcing the lyrical program for the week, fastened behind its protective screen to the wall of the Graslin theater’s colonnade, almost identical in its format and lettering to the straw-yellow posters of the Comédie Française. Although nothing seems to link these disparate, at times ridiculous images which bear not the slightest resemblance to each other, I think of them as an old gold piece cut into quarters and then into smaller and smaller wedges: as if the city, after bursting into a myriad of pieces, had reconstituted herself into an entity more meaningful than what could ever be achieved by any and all panoramic views remembered. The secret of this process lies in the sovereign, instinctive manner in which a young, impressionable soul still without a guide, without models, and without being urged, sorted out and made its selections from the chaos at hand. Not a single one of the city’s emblematic images has been able to anchor a landmark inside of me by connecting it to a specific date in my past, because I developed no close ties, formed no personal attachments, nothing except an almost abstract drive of the ego to annex and absorb, an enormous, acquisitive, prospective bulimia which dominates life from age eleven to eighteen. I was growing, and so was the city all around me, engaged in the process of changing and remodeling herself, carving out her boundaries, setting her perspectives, forging ahead in a manner amenable to any and all future expansions—the only way for her to remain inside of me, and still be herself—and to keep on changing.