Alan (the Lone Librarian rides again) Teder’s Reviews > The Other Paris: The People's City, Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries > Status Update

The history of Paris teaches us that beauty is a by-product of danger, that liberty is at best a consequence of neglect, that wisdom is entwined with decay. Any Paris of the future that is neither a frozen artifact nor an inhabited holding company will perforce involve fear, dirt, sloth, ruin, and accident. It will entail the continual experience of uncertainty, because the only certainty is death.

That Brassai profoundly understood the city game - much better than his contemporaries, his friends the Surrealists look even more like dilettantes and poetasters in comparison - is demonstrated by the absolute seamlessness of his transitions between fact and fiction. He knows, that is, that threat and corruption are actual and at the same time playacting, that the most daunting dark alley is equally a stage set ...

Karl Marx, who spent a month in Paris during the lull between Louis-Philippe's abdication and the election, was moved to define a new demographic category for members of the working class who would shoot their own: the Lumpenproletariat.

... a voyeuristic fascination with other people's miseries, a taste for the lurid and the scabrous - ideally stories of passion and violence with implied scenery, although mere morbidity and squalor will do in a pinch - and of course the ability to consume such things in the safety of one's armchair. (2/2)

Some of Balzac's shorter works are decorated faits-divers, while Georges Simenon's romans durs, his non-Maigret novels, are pure fait-divers, perhaps more than any other body of literary work, if you except Fénéon's daily factual contributions to a fait-divers column in Le Matin for six months in 1906. The essence of the fait-divers is that it involves ... (1/2)

... everything around us is terrible. If we are anxious, and ill at ease in our society, it's because the future is there, more terrible and maybe more bloody than the past. (2/2)
{from an 1843 letter by Alexandre Privat d'Anglemont .]

Yes, our literature is etched in acid. Yes, we use blood and fire as others employ tears and warmth. But we were nursed on alcohol, not milk. We have seen in our streets things more terrible and scenes more awful than we could ever describe. We haven't initiated twenty revolutions in forty or fifty years in order to stary where our grandfathers were. If we deal in the terrible, it's because ... (1/2)

Nerval occasionally pitched a tent in his room, or slept on the floor next to a carved Renaissance bed he claimed to be in thrall to. Most famously, he had a pet lobster named Thibault, rescued from a fishmonger's, which he, at least once, walked on a leash. ... Nerval, of course, was found hanged with the belt of a woman's apron from the grille of a cabinetmaker's stall on Rue de la Vieille-Lanterne in 1855 ...

A comprehensive accounting of its original compass was provided by Karl Marx in his Eighteenth Brumaire: "... vagabonds, discharged soldiers, discharged jailbirds, escaped galley slaves, swindlers, mountebanks, lazzaroni, pickpockets, tricksters, gamblers, macquereaux [pimps], brothel-keepers, porters, literati, organ-grinders, ragpickers, knife-grinders, tinkers, beggars ... which the French term la bohème"

The first luxury brothel ... It was a destination bagnio for the crowned heads of Europe, who legendarily indicated visits in their schedule as "appointment with the president of the Senate." The star boarder was the future Edward VII of Britain, known as [Dirty] Bertie, who had a truly remarkable stirrup chair built to his specifications and kept on the premises for erotic configurations that can only be surmised.