Restif de la Bretonne: “… this center of chaos of a great city.”
Richelieu chose the place thanks to his usual capacity to touch a body’s center of gravity: that great quadrangle which, at that time, was called Palais-Cardinal, then Palais-Royal, then Palais-Marchand, then Palais-Égalité, then Jardin de la Révolution, before once again becoming Palais-Royal, the center of the center of the center of the vast body of civilisation, created in the midst of eighteen years of hatred and intrigue. Mighty figureheads and stone anchors jutted from the old façade as a reminder that the Cardinal presided over the seas and over commerce.
Young Louis XIV once almost drowned in the pool of the central fountain, at a time when Anna of Austria had taken Richelieu’s place and Mazarin had only to cross the garden of the Palais-Cardinal from his residence at Hôtel Turbeuf to reach the queen’s apartments. The future Sun King was not yet ten, and spent many long hours with the daughter of one of his mother’s maidservants. He called her “Queen Marie” and they played at being king and queen in the palace kitchens.
Louis-Sébastien Mercier, a versatile writer, had described Paris in the year 2440, subtitling it: “a dream if ever there was one.” But like all rational utopias, his city was a place of Tedium and Rectitude. At the theater, the only plays to survive were those full of wise words and characters of positive virtue, a perpetual Corneille in the style of Zdanov, with great distrust of Racine, since he, “having made his heroes effeminate, makes his audience effeminate.” The streets were constantly lit, and libraries purged of any harmful literature. The “dangerous ferment” of Jews, pushy and greedy due to “inadequate vigilance in earlier centuries,” was at last brought to an end. There had naturally been a need for “wisdom, constancy, and firmness in breaking down that ardent fanaticism,” but now the Jews were finally reduced to “earning their living in absolute tranquillity,” about which Mercier offers us no further details. But Mercier’s gaze rests not only on petty utopian detail. He also had the eye of an eager flâneur—and at the end of his Tableau de Paris, after twenty-two chapters on lapdogs and roués, on Bicêtre and obscenity in the churches, on women’s fashion and Parliament, he introduces us to that matchless place, pure essence of the West, to which the whole city was mysteriously drawn, the Palais-Royal:
“A place unique on the globe. Visit London, Amsterdam, Madrid, Vienna, and you will see nothing like it: a prisoner could live here without ever being bored, and would not think of freedom for many years. This is the very place where Plato wanted to consign a prisoner, to hold him without a jailer, and without force, with sweet and voluntary chains. People call it the capital of Paris. There is everything here; put a young man of twenty there with an income of fifty thousand livres, and he will want nothing more, he’ll not know how to leave this phantasmagorical place; he’ll become a Rinaldo in this palace of Armida; and while that hero’s time and almost his glory was lost there, so too will our young man lose his, and perhaps also his fortune: from now on, he will be there only for pleasure; he will tire of everything else. This enchanted spot is a small luxurious city, enclosed within a great city; it is the temple of pleasure, from which magnificent vices have banished even the specter of shame: no hostelry in the world is more charmingly depraved; everyone laughs here, and innocence blushes.”
“Whatever you could desire, you’ll find it here; you’ll even find courses in physics, poetry, chemistry, anatomy, languages, natural history, etc., etc., etc. The women, here, have given up all the pedantic seriousness of the old Hôtel de Rambouillet, and they flirt with the sciences, which are now nothing other than a game for them, and entertain them as much as their miniature poodle and their parrot.”
“Here you can see everything, hear everything, learn about everything; there is everything necessary to turn a young man into a budding scholar: but it is here also that the realm of licentiousness acts upon a headstrong youth who, wandering then around the various environments, develops a style not known elsewhere: indecency without passion. Here, licentiousness is eternal; its temple is open at any hour of the day and night, and at prices of every kind.”
“All the fripperies of fashions that last a day are in the same shop as the most valuable astronomic gems that last for centuries.”
“The coffeehouses are packed with men who have one single occupation for the whole day: telling or listening to news, which becomes unrecognizable through the color each person gives it, according to their condition.”
“… the Palais-Royal is sapping the other districts of the city, which have the air of sad and deserted provinces.”
“… this maze of ribbons, gauze, tassels, flowers, garments, masks, boxes of rouge, packets of half-foot-long pins.”
There is one place where Paris, in all its dispersion and fragmentation, in its aroma of pleasure and money, grows and accumulates everything within the setting of a palace, within its limpid shell. This place is the Palais-Royal, which becomes Palais-Marchand when, thanks to the debts and greed of the Duc d’Orléans, workshops, erotic caverns, perfumeries and gaming rooms are opened beneath the porticoes. On the brink of the Revolution, those arcades become the magnet of Rumors, the astrolabe of courtesans, the embers of persecutions. From those windows—through which only the shouts of playing children can now be heard, and long before Colette and Cocteau gazed out of them—two rivals had once kept watch in the darkness, attendants to the most credulous and indifferent being, the Lord of the Place, the Duc d’Orléans, later Philippe-Égalité. These were Madame de Genlis, who “to avoid the scandal of flirtation had always readily succumbed,” and Choderlos de Laclos, well-practiced in intrigue, theorist of “wicked gallantry” as “a useful prelude for the wicked politician.”
One of the most perfect opening passages in literature conveys to us the irresistible attraction of the Palais-Royal: “It is my practice, no matter what the weather, to go for a stroll at around five in the evening to the Palais-Royal. I am the one who can always be seen alone, dreaming, on the banc d’Argenson. I amuse myself with politics, love, questions of taste and philosophy. I let my spirit run completely free. I give it free rein to follow the first wise or foolish idea that presents itself, in the same way that we see our dissolute young men in allée de Foy following the footsteps of some flighty courtesan with smiling face, keen eye, nose in the air, and then leaving her to follow another, tagging on to all of them and on to none. My thoughts are my whores.” Here Diderot formulates a poetics of thought quite opposite to that advocated in the Encyclopédie—and which, above all, is far more radical in rejecting the past. Here the most obstinate of sins, the delectatio morosa, is not only vindicated but raised to the level of a technique. That which a long succession of witnesses had believed it was necessary to extirpate before thought could even be countenanced, becomes the primordial water of thought itself. Palais-Royal is the mnemotechnical setting for this thought. A nameless being, comfortably settled in the midst of the chaos, follows strands of words, roaming images, constructs minuscule paper edifices, watches ribbons, buckles, and shawls ruffled by the wind under the arches, catches frissons of excitement, immerses inner words into the external hum of voices, lets himself be carried away by lights and sudden imperious shadows, succumbs, has no idea where he’s going—nor even whether that maelstrom will soon guide him back, without recollections, to the banc d’Argenson.
A place for gossip and “deep idleness,” a universal storehouse promising limitless availability, a no-man’s-land where the police never set foot (for such is the family prerogative of Orléans), the park of the Son of Heaven, paradisus inversus, “a great flesh market,” heralding the industrial phantasmagoria that will entice Benjamin into the arcades, the Palais-Royal is the image of an unpurified, childish, crude bonheur that increasingly exasperates its own pleasure and seeks to draw it to destruction. It is here that the first liturgical act of the Revolution takes place, on July 12, 1789, when two wax busts of Necker and the Duc d’Orléans, taken from Curtius’s already Hoffmannesque wax museum, were carried in procession. According to one witness: “The people, at the sight of those two species of phantoms, abandoned themselves to extravagant conjectures.” Those conjectures would be followed, two days later, by the taking of the Bastille. Events throughout the Revolution would be nurtured by the teeming ghosts of the Palais-Royal.
Les Galeries de Bois, Le Camp des Tartares, Le Cirque, names of places at the Palais-Royal now gone, large muslin shawls, almanacs describing women and their prices, thirty-one gaming houses. In 1790 the National Assembly received a “petition from the two thousand one hundred prostitutes of the Palais-Royal.” Gold and silver earrings in the shape of guillotines were fashionable. La Chevalier, one of the “nymphs” most in demand, was daughter of the executioner at Dijon. Restif satisfied his mania for classification—already much like that of Fourier—by listing the “girls from the alley of sighs,” the “sunamites,” the “converseuses.” Boutonderose, always dressed in linen; Dorine, the philosopher, air of refinement, generally dressed in pink-lined muslin; Élise, “a woman exuding Sensuality rather than Grace”; Pyramidale, pretty brunette; Sensitive; Amaranthe; Barberose. The inhabitants of Le Camp des Tartares included a giant Prussian, Mademoiselle Lapierre, more than seven feet tall; the beautiful Zulina, naked, reclining odalisque, a full-size wax statue covered with artificial skin; the gigantic Paul Butterlbrodt, who weighed 475 pounds. The shops sold “Roman dresses à la Clio,” “Greek blouses,” “Thessalian coats” that opened by loosening a single knot. Hairstyles were introduced “à la sacrifiée,” “à la victime.” The “femmes du monde” now held court in the apartments of noble émigrés on the second floor of the galleries. Those ten or so grand courtesans, with small black servants and fashionable accoutrements, were “the real peril,” far more than the “nymphs” who took their clients to attic rooms, rented by the minute, that were dotted around the vast maze of corridors, beyond the sumptuous salons where the ivory roulette wheel spun. The brain was overwhelmed by the aroma of that warm scented flesh, by the smells from the open kitchens, hung with game, the meeting point, Baudelaire wrote, for “calamitous dogs,” for “those who wander lone in the meandering ditches of the immense cities,” for those “who sleep in a suburban ruin and arrive each day, at a fixed time, to claim a wrap of food at one of the kitchen doors of the Palais-Royal.”
With the intent gaze of the naturalist, Hippolyte Taine stoops to look at the Palais-Royal and recognizes there the peculiar vegetation of new times, the venomous flora of the down-and-outs who clog and corrode the elementary mechanisms of every class struggle: “Center of prostitution, gaming, idleness and pamphleteering, the Palais-Royal attracts all that rootless population that drifts around a large city and which, having neither employment nor home, lives only for curiosity and pleasure, which haunts coffee shops, gambling houses—opportunists and down-and-outs, lost or redundant sons of literature, art and law, attorney’s clerks, schoolboys, fools, flâneurs, foreigners and lodgers in hôtels garnis; it is said there are forty thousand of them in Paris.” Michelet denounced the Palais-Royal of the Orléans as “this house where everything is fake.” That arid and intoxicating fever could develop only in a place dedicated to a karman of sensual enjoyment, of cold exasperation and deception: powers that belong to the retinue of exchange. But when the liturgy of the Revolution begins, the roles are reversed: the down-and-outs of the Palais-Royal, these gossipmongers, become the voice of the people, they fill the public galleries of the assemblies and intimidate the provincial representatives. The Council of State would eventually arrive—Napoleon installs it at the Orléans palace to exert administrative control over that center of ghosts. There, one evening in 1787, the young Bonaparte, a military officer, had approached a pallid “nymph,” despite being “affected more than anybody else by the loathsomeness of their condition.” “You’ll catch cold, how do you manage to wander about here outside?” he said. “Oh, sir, it’s hope that keeps me going, I have to get through the evening.” There were still fire attacks, restorations, and barricades: but no compromise was allowed between the Modern State and the Palais-Royal. When Bonaparte came to power, the first rumor to emerge from the Palais-Royal was that the general was preparing to deport the girls from that place to Egypt. “But that’s outrageous! Hell, deportations aren’t done like that!” said Bonaparte with feigned indignation, as soon as he was told about the rumor. And he began stroking the head of Rustan, his favorite mamluk. Today its silence is pervaded by the echo of occasional footsteps. A public garden, with solitary benches, children. Returning home, Colette, who was sensitive to the cold, felt between the colonnade and the wall “a perennial, zigzag movement of air that comes from the square of the Palais-Royal and splits into two currents: one fills rue de Montpensier, the other penetrates into the galerie de Chartres. In summer, this is where the dust swirls; in fall, a maelstrom of early-falling leaves dances in the same spot.”
There is laughter at the Palais-Royal, for “comedy is one of the clearest satanic signs in man,” unquestionable evidence of original sin. The mark of the Orléans family, a compulsive scorn for everything, is impressed even on the perfect symmetry of their palace. But its garden is also the retreat for the Old Man of the Mountain, at the point where civilization is most “turbulent, excessive, mephitic.” As he walks the streets of Paris, Baudelaire imagines Bernardin de Saint-Pierre’s Virginie, for whom Napoleon still felt moved during his last days on Saint Helena—while he was emperor, he had told Bernardin: “You should give us a Paul et Virginie every six months.” She who “is the perfect symbol of absolute purity and innocence” seemed, thought Baudelaire, “still wholly imbued with sea mist and gilded by the tropical sun, with eyes full of great primitive images of the waves, of the mountains, and of the forests.” She, too, heads on toward the Palais-Royal. And there, “by chance, innocently,” Virginie sees on display in a window a “caricature full of gall and rancor, as only a bored and perspicacious civilization can produce.” An image of the lovers of the hated Autrichienne, perhaps? Or a lascivious scene in the Parc aux Cerfs? Virginie realizes she is gazing into the unknown: “this impression will leave her with a strange uneasiness, something that resembles fear.” While we are observing Virginie who is observing the caricature at the Palais-Royal, we hear Baudelaire’s quiet laughter nearby. “For the phenomena engendered by the fall will become the means for rescue,” he adds.
The West dreamed of being encyclopedia and brothel, theater stage and museum, Eden, polytechnic, harem: that dream was realized at the Palais-Royal. But it was a dream that was afraid of itself. It remains with us, suspended.