VI. SINISTER STREETS

Slums of Paris — Ancient Streets — The Old Cité of "Les Mystères de Paris" — The Personal Eugène Sue — "Les Mystères," and "Le Juif Errant" as Serials — The Underworld of 1840 — Caverns in the Cours la Reine — Paul de Kock — His Amazing Popularity — The Tribute of Major Pendennis — The Paris of Émile Gaboriau.

IT WAS the American, Richard Harding Davis, who, in "About Paris," made the extraordinary statement that Paris was a city without slums. Entertaining as Mr. Davis's book was, the author's knowledge of his subject was, above all at the time of writing, extremely limited. What he undoubtedly meant was that Paris slums were not exactly like the slums of New York or Philadelphia. But reading in any explanation whatever the statement was enough to have stirred Honoré de Balzac and Victor Hugo, not to mention Eugène Sue, in their graves. If the outward and visible manifestation of the slum means the dim, narrow, tortuous street, the dingy, moldering structure, and the broken, uneven roadway, old Paris was little more than one vast slum. And, though the American traveller who elects to spend all his time on the brilliant boulevards, or in the newer city that stretches away to the west, may never discover it, much of old Paris remains.

      To find these sinister streets is a matter of no great difficulty nor does it call for the expenditure of any vast amount of time or energy. In the course of that familiar journey along the line of the grand boulevard that, under various names, stretches from the Madeleine to the Bastille, turn, when about half-way, to the southward, and plunge into the labyrinth where the old Temple Quarter and the old Marais Quarter jumble together. Some of these streets knew the Valois; many of them, within three-quarters of a century, have bristled with barricades. In that process which has come to be called the "Haussmannising" of Paris, the Third Napoleon was actuated by the desire to make the capital more beautiful and sanitary, and also to raze thoroughfares so easy to put in a state of defence from wall to wall that they were a direct incitement to insurrection. For atmosphere seek the short Rue de Venise, which is within a stone's throw of the broad Boulevard de Sebastopol. Ten years ago there was said to be somewhere about here a famous thieves' restaurant; a sort of burglars' "Maxim's," although the apache is not so likely to lurk in this quarter, preferring the slopes of Montmartre, or the shadows of the Buttes Chaumont or of the Bois de Boulogne. In the summer of 1917 the writer could find no trace of "The Guardian Angel," which perhaps bore out the story that, in the perilous days of late August, 1914, General Gallieni dealt swiftly and summarily with Casque d'Or and his pals. But it is one of the most ancient of Paris streets, this twisting, ill-smelling, hideous, yet quaint lane with the overhanging houses and the primitive lanterns. There is a flavour to the very names of some of the streets about here; the Rue des Francs-Bourgeois, the Rue des Blancs-Manteaux, the Rue Taille-Pain, the Rue Brise-Miche, the Rue Pierre-au-Lard, and the Rue Pirouette, which derived its appellation from the old iron wheel pierced with holes for the head and arms of murderers, panders, blasphemers, and vagabonds, and turned every half hour in a different direction, exposing its victims to new points of public derision.

      Nor is it in this quarter alone, a quarter lying between the Halles Centrales to the west and the Archives Nationales to the east, that the sinister streets are to be found. Climb the hill of Montmartre for the splendid church that crowns the summit, and the vast panorama that Paris below presents, but do not grudge the half hour additional to visit what remain of the curious, half-country lanes that run slantingly between the high stone walls. On the South Bank of the Seine, from the Jardin des Plantes, zig-zag in over the trail of Javert's pursuit of Jean Valjean through old world thoroughfares that lead past the foot of the Mount of Saint-Geneviève. Once, between this quarter and the quarter that lies to the east of the Central Markets, there was another quarter where the streets were sinister. That was the Cité as it was in the first half of the nineteenth century, a region of which the most clearly staked fiction claim is that of Eugène Sue and his "Mysteries of Paris," which has been called the "Uncle Tom's Cabin" of socialism; just as Sue's other novel which has endured, "The Wandering Jew," has been called the "Uncle Tom's Cabin" of anticlericalism.

      The veracious author of "An Englishman in Paris" — which, incidentally, is one of the most instructive and entertaining of books of its kind despite the fact that it purported to deal at first hand with events many of which happened years before Mr. Albert Vandam came into the world — described the famous creator of "Les Mystères de Paris" and "Le Juif Errant" as the most pompous of poseurs, who, having written a rousing good story for the sake of the tale itself, found himself unexpectedly elevated to a pedestal as a champion of the cause of proletaire, and blandly accepted the motives attributed to him and the accruing honours. In company, according to the "Englishman," M. Eugène Sue was in the habit of assuming a far-off air, as if occupied deeply by problems beyond the ken of those about him. His very dandyism of manner and attire was offensive. Once he complained of cleaned gloves. Their odour made him ill. "But, my friend," said Alfred de Musset, "they don't smell worse than the dens that you describe for us. Don't you ever visit them?"

      "The Mysteries of Paris" and "The Wandering Jew" are still justly held to be among the colossal narratives of all time. But their author is now little more than a name. Yet there was a time, in the productive decade of 1840-50, when Sue, as a literary force, was ranked with the elder Dumas and the great Balzac, probably rather higher than the latter. George Sand spoke of his work as "the Menagerie," but confessed that she could not miss a daily instalment. When Wilkie Collins's "The Woman in White" was appearing in All the Year Round, the streets approaching the office of publication on the day of issue were thronged with people waiting to buy the next number. Sue's serial popularity — the "Mysteries" appeared in the Journal des Débats and "Le Juif Errant" in the Constitutional — far surpassed that of Wilkie Collins. It was impossible to purchase outright a copy of the paper. "No, Monsieur," the news vendor would explain, "we rent them out at ten sous the half hour, the time required to read M. Sue's story."

      There is an age at which one should read for the first time "The Mysteries of Paris" and "The Wandering Jew," just as there is an age at which one should first read "The Leather-Stocking Tales," and "Monte Cristo," and Murger's "Scènes de la Vie de Bohème," and a score more. When the world is young what a thrill there is in the sinister streets, and, above all, in the startling names of the characters of the strange underworld of that Paris of the eighteen-thirties — "the Schoolmaster," "the Slasher," the Skeleton," "the Ogress," "Sweet-throat"! The very first paragraph of the "Mysteries" plunges the reader into a world as amazing as the Bagdad of the "Arabian Nights." The years fall away, correct official buildings and broad open spaces disappear, and in their place is the old Cité with its tortuous thoroughfares nearly as they were when the hunchback Quasimodo peered down on them from the towers of Notre Dame. Four bridges cross the Seine from the north bank to the Cité: the Pont Neuf, the Pont au Change, the Pont Notre Dame, and the Pont d'Arcole. It was across the Pont au Change — not the spacious bridge of to-day which dates from about 1860, but the old bridge, one of the most ancient in Paris, deriving its name from the shops of the money-changers and goldsmiths flanking it — that Rodolphe found his way to battle with the "Slasher," to rescue "Fleur-de-Marie," and make the acquaintance of the den of the "Ogress." Before the changes which transformed this part of Paris the quarter was, as Sue described it, one of dark, narrow streets, where malefactors swarmed in the drinking dens, of sooty houses with sweaty walls, and so overhung as almost to touch eaves. The tapis-franc bearing the name of the "White Rabbit," and over which Mother Ponisse presided, occupied the ground floor of a lofty house in the middle of the Rue aux Fèves "The Rue de la Juiverie, the Rue aux Fèves, the Rue de la Calandre, the Rue des Marmousets." M. Georges Cain, Curator of the Carnavalet Museum and of the Historic Collections of the City of Paris has recorded, "for centuries this quarter had been the haunt of the lowest prostitution; there, too, dyers had established their many-coloured tubs; and blue, red, or green streams flowed down these streets with their old Parisian names."

      But the slums of old Paris with which M. Eugène Sue's novels had to do were not confined to the Cité. We are too much inclined to overlook the sweeping changes that a century has wrought even in old world cities. The American traveller of the present would stare if put down in the Place de la Concorde of 1830. In what is now the Cours la Reine, stretching away to the west along the banks of the river, there was, until 1840, when the last of them disappeared, a number of subterranean caverns, low buildings with cracked walls and tiled roofs usually covered with slimy green moss, and, attached to the main buildings, wretched wooden hovels, serving as sheds and storehouses. One of these taverns was the Bleeding Heart, kept by "Bras Rouge," and into its cellar Rodolphe was thrust by the "Schoolmaster" to await death by the rising of the tide from the near-by Seine waters. The stone walls of the cave were found hideously spattered with the blood and brains of "La Chouette" (Screech-Owl) when the police officers entered after the vicious child Tortillard had pushed her down the steps into the clutches of the blind "Schoolmaster" chained to a rock in the cellar floor.

      As befits its sweeping title, the trail of "Les Mystères de Paris" is all over the city as it was in 1838, and also reaches out through the environs. By following the Rue de Rivoli eastward in the direction of the Bastille, and turning north into the Marais at a corner opposite the Hotel de Ville, we enter the Rue du Temple, which, at its other end, intersects with the Rue Turbigo just below where the circle of great boulevards, between the Boulevard Saint-Martin and the Boulevard du Temple, is broken by the spacious Place de la République. In this street dwelt the family Morel and the respectable Pipelet. Since 1838 the thoroughfare has been changed and greatly widened. The old Temple Market, of which only a part remains, was a favourite bit for description by the French romancers of the early half of the nineteenth century. Of the Temple itself, the chief stronghold in France of the Knights Templar of the Middle Ages, the Tower, where the royal family was imprisoned in 1792 and 1793, was demolished by Napoleon I in 1811, but part remained until the Haussmannising of Paris under Napoleon III. In the days of "The Mysteries of Paris," toward the middle of the Rue du Temple, near a fountain which was placed in the angle of a large square, was an immense parallelogram built of timber, crowned by a slated roof. A long opening, intersecting this parallelogram in its length, divided it into two equal parts; these were in turn divided and subdivided by little lateral and transverse courts, sheltered from the rain by the roof of the edifice. In this bazaar new merchandise was generally prohibited; but the smallest rag of any old stuff, the smallest piece of iron, brass, or steel, found its buyer or seller.

      Half a score blocks eastward from the Temple, in the direction of the Bourse, may be found to-day the Rue du Sentier, which begins at the Rue Réaumur, is bisected by the Rue des Jeûneurs, and abuts on the Boulevard Poissonière. It was there, in a corner house, that dwelt the notary, Jacques Ferrand, perhaps the most sinister of all the sinister characters of the complex tale, the evil genius of the "Mystères de Paris" as Rodin was the evil genius of "Le Juif Errant." There, under a garb of assumed sanctity the spider spun his webs and wrought his villainies until the day when he was enflamed and outwitted by the octoroon, Cecily. In the early part of the century this was a neighbourhood which drew its individuality from the gilded copper escutcheons of men of Ferrand's calling. Streets, even where they continue to exist, change materially. Institutions change less. In connection with Eugène Sue, there is Saint-Lazare, once a prison for women, where Mont Saint-Jean was put to the torture by the "She Wolf" and her companions, and rescued by "Fleur-de-Marie." But La Force belonged essentially to old Paris, and the prestige of Bicêtre, where the "Schoolmaster" was seen for the last time, long since passed to Charenton.

      If Eugène Sue is to be regarded as the captain among those who have found inspiration for fiction in the underworld of Paris, the company he must be considered as leading is one of well-filled ranks. The romance of crime has ever been a favourite subject to the reader of a certain kind of French feuilleton. In print, as on the stage, fat épiciers have found delight in blubbering over mimic woes and shaking their fists at imaginary villainies. The more complicated the plot of novel or melodrama has been the better it has been liked. Take, by way of illustration, "The Two Orphans" of d'Hennery and Cormon, which has held the stage for forty-five years, and will doubtless hold it for twenty years more. It was Brander Matthews who once said that if any one were to write down a description of the plot of "The Two Orphans" he would have to fill a dozen pages; and yet such was d'Hennery's knack as a born playwright that on the stage it is all evolved so lucidly and naturally as to be perfectly clear at every moment. If there was space here for a consideration of the Paris of the Playwright, "The Two Orphans," with its definite setting in eighteenth-century Lutetia, its contrast of the persecuted poor and the oppressive rich, would occupy a position somewhat analogous to that of Sue's "Les Mystères de Paris" in fiction.

      Contemporaneous with Eugène Sue, and, though not taking himself quite so seriously as a social reformer, as conspicuous in his day as a chronicler of the fortunes of the humble, was Charles Paul de Kock. It is only by the retailing of anecdotes that one can convey an idea of what De Kock's stories once meant to readers not only in Paris and France, but throughout all Europe, from London to St. Petersburg. Chateaubriand went to the Vatican to visit Pope Gregory XVI. "Give me, Vicomte," began His Holiness, "some news of my dear son Paul de Kock." A new ambassador presented his credentials to the king of the country to which he had been assigned. "Ah! You are just from Paris," said His Majesty. "You must know the news. How is the health of Paul de Kock?" Honoré de Balzac, at the height of his fame, was arrested for trespass on the outskirts of Paris. The presiding magistrate released him instantly, believing him to be the author of "La Laitière de Montfermeil," which he considered the greatest of all novels. Add a bit of Thackerayan tribute: Major Arthur Pendennis's library was confined to the "Army and Navy Register," the "Campaigns of the Duke of Wellington," "Debrett's Peerage," the "Almanach de Gotha," and the novels of Paul de Kock, "which certainly make me laugh." Disraeli's testimony: One of the characters of "Henrietta Temple" was arrested. A friend offered congratulations, "Now you can read Paul de Kock. By Jove, you are a lucky fellow!" All over Europe people were studying Parisian manners in his novels, while the author, the most quiet and bourgeois of men, was working away steadily in his little apartment on the Boulevard Saint-Martin, or among the trees and vineyards of his place at Romainville.

      It was perhaps to being the most bourgeois of men that he owed a large measure of his popularity. He has been described as a "Philistine of the Marais." He had the advantage of being absolutely like his readers, sharing their opinions, their ideas, their feelings, and their prejudices. Gautier once said of him that he had not the faintest idea of aesthetics; that, indeed, "he would readily have supposed, like Pradon, that they were some chemical substance." For the purpose of the Paris trail it is enough to consider two of his books, "L'Homme aux Trois Culottes" and "Le Barbier de Paris." It was on his own parents' tragic story that he based the former novel. His father, a wealthy Dutch banker who had served in the Army of the North, was guillotined by the order of the Revolutionary Convention, and his mother was thrown into prison. The Paris of "Le Barbier de Paris" was old Paris, the Paris of 1630, during the reign of Louis XIII; the Paris the youthful Gascon D'Artagnan found, when he entered it astride his Rosinante. For full tribute to Paul de Kock as the chronicler of the streets of his much beloved Lutetia through many ages turn to Théophile Gautier, who said: "Some of his novels have the same effect on me as Fenimore Cooper's 'The Last of the Mohicans'; I seem to read in them the story of the last Parisian, invaded and submerged by American civilization."

      Of Paul de Kock's Paris Théophile Gautier wrote:

      One met French people, even Parisians, in the streets. One could hear French spoken on that boulevard which was then called the Boulevard de Gand, and which is now called the Boulevard des Italiens. . . . The city was relatively very small, or at least its activity was restricted within certain limits that were seldom passed. The plaster elephant in which Gavroche found shelter raised its enormous silhouette on the Place de la Bastille, and seemed to forbid passers-by to go any farther. The Champs-Élysées, as soon as night fell, became more dangerous than the plain of Marathon: the most adventurous stopped at the Place de la Concorde. The quarter of Notre Dame de Lorette included only vague plots of ground or wooden fences. The church was not built, and one could see from the boulevard the Butte Montmartre, with its windmills and its semaphore waving its arms on the top of the old Tower. The Faubourg Saint-Germain went early to bed and its solitude was but rarely disturbed by a tumult of students over a play at the Odéon.

      Of the lesser men, how long the list might be made to run! Take, at random, the name of Fortuné du Boisgobey, or of Ponson du Terrail, who has been dubbed "the Shakespeare of secret assassination," or of Gaston Leroux, at whose "The Mystery of the Yellow Room" and "The Perfume of the Lady in Black" we were thrilling only yesterday. As conspicuous as any, above all when the Paris trail is to be considered, was Émile Gaboriau, who passed on to Conan Doyle what he inherited from Poe. What American of average reading does not owe a debt of gratitude for pleasant hours in company with the characters of "Monsieur Lecoq," "The Honour of the Name," "The Lerouge Case," "File No. 113," and "The Mystery of Orcival?" Linked with a network of streets was Javert's pursuit of Jean Valjean and Cosette; Oliver Twist's journey through old London under the direction of the Artful Dodger that finally ended at the den of Fagin; the cab ride about Rouen described in "Madame Bovary" that was responsible for Flaubert's prosecution before the Tribunal Correctionnel de Paris. Of comparatively minor importance, but no less thrilling in the reading, is the story of the relentless tracking by the ambitious Lecoq of the purposely released assassin who had cried "It is the Prussians who are coming" when surrounded in the drinking den near the Barrière d'Italie, through half the winding thoroughfares of the city to the garden wall of the Hotel de Sairmeuse.

      "File No. 113" is perhaps esteemed the best of the Gaboriau stories. It will serve to indicate how those tales were bound up with the stones of Paris of their day. The banking house of André Fauvel, the scene of the safe robbery with which the narrative began, was definitely placed at No. 87 Rue de Provence. The Rue de Provence is as close to the Boulevard Haussmann as Nassau Street is to Broadway. Nina Gypsy, the letters of whose name Prosper Bertomy had used in setting the combination of the safe, lived at No. 39 Rue Chaptal. That number is at the corner of the Rue Léonie, and almost directly opposite the entrance of the Grand Guignol, world famed for its association with a certain kind of one-act play. The Archangel, where Nina sought refuge, was on the Quai Saint-Michel, which faces the river to the left of the Place Saint-Michel, the gateway through which one passes on the way to the Latin Quarter, the Luxembourg, or the Panthéon. Fanferlot, the "Squirrel," finding the problem beyond his strength, appealed to M. Lecoq, seeking that dominating personage in his home in the Rue Montmartre, which is less definite than usual, for the reason that the street in question is a long one, extending from the great boulevard all the way to the Halles Centrales. Lecoq, under his assumed name of M. Verduret, conferred with Prosper, after the latter's release from prison, at "La Bonne Foi," a small establishment, half cafe and half shop, in the Rue Saint-Honoré, near the Palais Royal. The fancy dress ball, which Lecoq turned to such use, was held in the house of the bankers Jandidier, in the Rue Saint-Lazare. The ensuing attempt on Lecoq's life took place in the near-by Rue du Faubourg Montmartre, a street the detective had naturally to use on his way home. For that home the admirer of the ingenious in the narrative of detection may without shame feel an interest akin to that stirred by the sight of the windows in Upper Baker Street, London, behind which Mr. Sherlock Holmes smoked countless pipefuls of shag tobacco, and dogmatically imparted his theories to the obtuse Watson.

(THE END)