AN EXTRACT FROM
THE 17TH ARRONDISEMENT

A vast, elongated territory stretches across the north-western edge of Paris, ripped open by twelve railway lines, creating an iron social divide that relegates the poor to the north and the better-off to the west. From the start, shabby grey tenement houses arose on the wrong side of the tracks, 'smelling of the shameful destitution of Parisian roomings', as Guy de Maupassant wrote in Bel Ami. His hero, Duranty, stood in the window of one of these houses and watched the tantalising new buildings of the recently opened rue de Rome, on the other side of that 'immense trench of the western railway', luminous at sunrise, as though 'painted with white light'. Despite the jarring discrepancy, the two sides of the tracks were united into one of the eight new arrondissements created and annexted to Paris by the Baron Haussmann on 1 January 1860.

Of all these eight arrondissements, the 17th is Haussmann's creation par excellence: for, despite the 'big chasm' that separated north from west, no arrondissement was as true to the new middle-class spirit of the Second Empire or promoted the values it stood for to the same degree. Understandably, it was not to the taste of someone like Paul Verlaine who, growing up in the 1850s and early 1860s at 2 rue Saint-Louis (now 10 rue Nollet) in Batignolles, described it as a neighbourhood of small, decent people where his father felt at home, 'pettily bourgeois, shabbily well-to-do, neat, niggardly, but as clean as can be'. The village, however, bore him no grudge and buried him in its cemetery, where his humble grave can still be seen.

Similarly, young Colette was put off by the whitewashed cleanliness of the middle-class area west of the tracks. Criss-crossed by broad, well-ventilated arteries, which had mushroomed overnight, it still bore the smell of fresh paint. At the turn of the century, her aunt was living on the new avenue Wagram, 'in a magnificent, unattractive new block of flats' with a rapid lift. 'I rather disliked all those white walls,' remarked Colette. 'The drawing-room... desperately carried on the whiteness of the staircase. White-painted woodwork, frail white furniture, white cushions with light-coloured flowers, white chimney piece. Good heavens, there wasn't one single dark corner!' Needless to say, Aunt Wilhelmine Coeur greatly disapproved of papa's living with 17-year-old Colette on the narrow, dark rue Jacob on the Left Bank. 'My dear,' she said to her brother, 'the new neighbourhoods are far healthier, far airier and far better built.' Of course propriety and respectability were the underlying virtues of these virginal beaux quartiers of western Paris, as against 'that dirty Left Bank where no nice people live.'

Carrying no tainted heritage or stigma from the past the vast stretches of land, hitherto covered with cornfields, hunting grounds and meadows, became a land of opportunity for the emerging middle classes — four clear-cut strata which, within just a few decades, poured into the arrondissement, dividing themselves up neatly into four distinct neighbourhoods according to their wealth — west of the tracks the wealthy and the well-to-do, in Monceau and Ternes respectively; east of the tracks, in Batignolles, small employees, shopkeepers and pensioners, and further north in Epinettes, honest workmen. It was as neat a distribution as Haussmann's whitewashed avenues themselves.

However, not all the households of the Plaine Monceau could display respectability, certainly not that of Emile Zola's Nana, the laundress's daughter from the gutter of La Goutte-d'Or, although she too was living in a magnificent home, on the corner of avenue de Villiers and rue Cardinet. In a fluctuating society, where fortunes were made overnight, respectability and thinly disguised prostitution lived side by side, the latter 'advancing, gliding, dancing with the weight of its embroidered petticoats'. Brief notes jotted down by Zola in his notebook inform us of 'very well maintained hôtels in the 'quartier Haussmann', in particular on rue de Prony, with 'footman, powdered concierge, imposing staircase, huge landing, couch, armchairs, flowers...'  Adrieu Marx acquiesces when he speaks of the 'belles petites' who swoop down on the new quarters', adding that 'face powder has succeeded in replacing the dust of building plaster'. Semi-senile, debauched males were ready to abandon everything for an arse,' Zola jots down in his notebook. He also speaks of 'the pack behind the bitch who is not on heat', who spends as much as 200,000 francs a year, or, having recently bought a townhouse, now wants to sell it!

A decade earlier, far from the limelight of the Plaine Monceau, new ideas were fermenting in the humble parts of Batignolles from which a new conception of painting emerged, which was going to have an unforeseeable influence on art and lead eventually to a revolution. A young generation of artists, with little money but plenty of creative enthusiasm, was eager to shrug off the shackles of academic tradition and its pompous, hollow search for ideals, and set out to capture the light in the present moment of daily life. Here, in the unpolluted neighbourhood of Batignolles, they found the exceptionally translucid quality of light necessary for their outdoor scenes, combined with a homely village atmosphere and cheap board and lodgings. They liked being close to the railway, the symbol of modernity, a subject for their paintings in its own right, and also a means of transport to the countryside, to Chatou, Asnières and Argenteuil, where they could experiment with outdoor paintings, producing the treasures that now brighten the walls of museums and galleries throughout the world. They also liked to gather at Café Guerbois (on the unlikely site of today's 9 avenue de Clichy) under the inspiring guidance of their elder, Manet.