AFTERWORD

PAUL POISSEL WAS BORN in 1848. He was the twelfth of fourteen children of Charles Poissel, an ironmonger, and Anne Poissel, the daughter of a wine merchant. The family lived in Clermont-Ferrand until 1855, when Charles sold his business and moved to Paris. There Paul won a scholarship to the Petit Séminaire Saint-Roch, in the center of town (about halfway between the real church of the Madeleine and the fictitious convent of Saint-Grimace). Poissel had little use for his religious education. “No god,” he wrote in Mardi (Tuesday), “could have impressed me less than this one, who showed special favor for old women, rulers, and blackboards.” When Poissel turned fourteen his father took him out of school and apprenticed him to the architect Antoine Garnaud. Poissel liked to draw, and remained happily with Garnaud for several years despite his master’s fiery temper (a biographer claims that Garnaud once stabbed Poissel with a compass).

In 1868 Charles Poissel died, and although Paul’s share of the inheritance was not considerable, he left Garnaud and announced that he was going on a sketching tour of the Near East. No records survive of this trip, and in fact it is doubtful that Poissel traveled farther east than Geneva, where his mother’s cousins lived. Nonetheless he returned three months later dressed in the Turkish manner, in wide silk pants and pointed slippers, and announced that he would establish himself as “the finest Turkish architect in Paris”—which, given the scarcity of competitors, may not have been an unachievable goal. Poissel rented an attic on the rue des Blancs-Manteaux, which he furnished as a cross between an architect’s study and a seraglio, with drafting tables and cushions on the floor. He was out of money six months later. Few clients, apparently, wanted houses built in the Turkish style; those who did probably mistrusted Poissel’s flamboyant clothes and his insistence that he would build nothing “of which the Great Turk himself would not be proud.”

To keep himself from starvation, he took a job as a draftsman in the Service of Public Works. This was in 1869, when Haussmann was still Prefect of Paris. The young Poissel—dressed as an ordinary clerk now—may have seen the Baron at work; Haussmann may even have stopped at Poissel’s table and looked over his plans and elevations. (If this meeting took place, we can only hope that Poissel did not mention the Great Turk.) What is certain is that Haussmann, or his work, moved Poissel from pictures to words. His first poems (collected after his death and published in 1990 as Poésie Non Choisie, by the Éditions Soupir, Paris) are tableaux of street life in the late 1860s. They owe much to Baudelaire’s Spleen de Paris, but one can hear something of Poissel’s own passion for memory, digression, and the odd corners of language in poems like “À une blanchisseuse” (To a Washerwoman):

Your hands reach into the reflection of the Quai Voltaire,

Where, in a window, a little girl

Reads Sir Walter Scott, and dreams

Of castles less like the Quai Voltaire

Than like the water into which you reach …

Like his namesake in Haussmann, Poissel was a regular visitor to the balls, cafés, and cabarets of the Parisian demimonde. Here, like his namesake, Poissel found love. His journal—which he kept in seven volumes, one for each day of the week—notes that, on a Tuesday in July, Poissel “danced with Y. at the Dépourvu.” The same Y. reappears the following Saturday, when she accompanies him on a walk through the Jardin d’Acclimatation. Poissel and Y. visit the Louvre together; they see Sarah Bernhardt in Coppée’s Le Passant and dine together at Magny’s. On September 12 (a Wednesday) Poissel records the following dream:

I was in a hot-air balloon with Y. We were flying over Paris, and the city looked like an anatomical diagram of a giant starfish. The balloon was losing altitude, because we had not thought to bring sufficient wood (not planned to go on such a long trip), and I wanted to throw some ballast over the side, but each time I reached for one of the bags of sand secured to the outside of our basket, Y. took my hand and put it on her bosom instead, and so we continued to sink, and to sink.

After that Y. appears less often in Poissel’s journals. We find her having tea at Hill’s on an October Monday; on the first Saturday in November, Y. is mentioned only as a guest at a dinner party that Poissel also attended. Although their affair, if it was an affair, lasted three months at most, there is no question that Poissel had fallen in love. In a letter to his brother Frédéric dated July 30, 1869, Poissel writes, “I have discovered, my dear brother, that the real complexities of love are as far beyond the comprehension of the heart as the complexities of the stars are beyond the minds of the astronomers. Happiness is as wrong a word for my condition, as ether is for the invisible ocean in which our planet swims.” He does not, however, tell his brother who has caused him to feel these things. Discretion probably sealed his lips: of the various hypotheses advanced about Y.’s identity, the most likely is that she was Yvonne Dutronc, the wife of one of Poissel’s fellow draftsmen at the Service of Public Works.1 Did she break off relations with Poissel out of consideration for her husband? Did she return his love at all, or did the real Poissel fare as badly as his fictive counterpart? All speculations are possible. For this, the story of Poissel’s great love, we have little more to go on than an initial, Y., and the record of a few dances and a dream.

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Poissel kept his post at the Service of Public Works until 1899. After he retired (with a half-pension), he worked as a freelance writer, contributing articles on fashion and history to the Journal des Demoiselles. He also created puzzles for the Journal: riddles, tongue twisters, and especially his impoissibles, a cross between a rebus and what we would today call a comic strip. A simple impoissible might show a poor young man saluting a rich girl’s carriage in the street; then the man and the girl before a marriage altar; then the same man, older, at home, holding his head as he contemplates a stack of bills; and finally, the man swimming toward an island on which there is nothing but a cask of water. Read as a story in pictures, the impoissible cautions against marrying above your station; or else, it warns, you’ll have to spend beyond your means, and in the end you’ll run to the ends of the earth to hide from your creditors. As a rebus, on the other hand, the impoissible reads: fier (proud), voeu (vow), douleur (pain), fût (cask), île (island), or, fiez-vous de l’heure futile, “trust the futile hour,” one of Poissel’s favorite sayings. The impoissibles were a great success; indeed, they were the published work for which he was best known during his lifetime.

Yvonne Dutronc, ca. 1872. “Love,” Poissel wrote, “is the scaffolding with which we build ourselves up to the summits of our being. Even if we are, like the Tower of Babel, demolished afterward by angels.”

Collection Paul Poissel, Bibliothèque Nationale

Paul Poissel in 1880. “What a tragedy if I am remembered only as I am,” he wrote in his journal. Poissel was reluctant to be photographed, and, not long before he died, asked his friends to “think of someone else as Poissel, always think of someone else.”

Bibliothèque Nationale

He must have grown tired of the limits of the genre, however; when his brother Frédéric died in 1904, leaving him a substantial inheritance, he gave up his puzzles and devoted himself entirely to his own work. In the decade that followed, Poissel wrote Antinomie, a collection of poems, and Les faits d’hiver,2 a series of prose poems inspired by the faits divers published in popular newspapers. He also began an Histoire du Contresens, which was intended to be “a history of human misunderstanding from the Tower of Babel to the fall of Volapük [an artificial language of the late nineteenth century],” but which was never finished. None of these projects prepared him—or his audience—for Haussmann, or the Distinction, his only novel.

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Yvonne Dutronc died in 1915. A year later, Poissel wrote to his friend Bartholomeo Facil that he had begun work on “a sort of memorial to our youth, which seems, in retrospect, like the youth of the world.” The First World War had by then swept the nineteenth century from the European landscape; the gaudy Paris of the Second Empire must have seemed as distant a memory as the medieval city Haussmann demolished. Yet Poissel’s aim was not, I think, to bring either city back to life. The novel is preoccupied not with what was, but with, as Poissel puts it, “what might have been and was not.” Although the city Haussmann built and the city he demolished each have an important role in the novel, its emotional center is a city which never existed: the new Paris as imagined hopefully by the old, or the old Paris as remembered with regret by the new. Paris to Come, or Paris As It Was. This city must have had a personal dimension for Poissel. Apart from passionate friendships with his brother Frédéric (until his death) and with Facil, Poissel’s life was not rich in human attachments; he lived alone and never married. He must have looked back on the romantic tumult of 1869 with a certain regret, or at least a certain curiosity. It would be overstating the case to say that Haussmann is built on a single letter, Y; but, in a life so lightly touched by love, what memory is more likely to stand out than the one of the moment in which happiness seemed possible, and within reach? Certainly, Poissel’s Paris is a city informed as much by emotional as by historical fact. He invents characters, changes the look of people and the names of places to suit his design. There are quite a number of facts in Haussmann—the Baron had a mistress; he dressed her as his daughter; he tried to build the Railroad of the Dead and failed—but what are told here are the incomplete, circuitous truths of the heart, which no urbanist or novelist has ever been able entirely to set straight.

Paris

November, 2000