Baudelaire

BAUDELAIRE • A. E. Carter Tn m'as donne ta boue, et j'en ai fait de l'or. ("Epilogue i\ la ville de Paris") The Boulevard Richard Lenoir, between the Bastille and the Place de la Republique, is a typical piece of Baron Haussmann's town planning. Before the 1850's it was the St. Martin canal, joining the Seine to the network of waterways that spreads over northern France. But the Baron, with his eye for the useful and the agreeable, dropped the level by a fathom or two, vaulted it over, and planted trees and fountains on an esplanade in the middle. What had been an incongruous bit of Holland in the heart of Paris became a uniform boulevard, designed for the long parades of carriages and the swishing crinolines of the Second Empire. The quarter is commercial nowadays (warehouses, small shops) and during most of the year offers little of interest. The monotonous fa9ades have become dirty with the passage of a hundred years. Trucks unload merchandise at the curbs, the 69 bus from Pere Lachaise snorts by, a few nursemaids and their charges sit on the benches or play in the gravel around the fountains. The plane-trees are pale; they bud late and lose their leaves early; they have a sulky look, as if they knew that their roots were allotted only a meagre ration of earth between the asphalt and Haussmann's cantilevers. It is one of those places one goes through to get somewhere else. Yet twice a year there is a change. In autumn, when the sunlight has a cold edge and Paris takes on a violet haze, or during the first fine days of spring, with their smell of the river and warm stone, the esplanade is covered with an irregular line of wood and canvas booths. One has to fight one's way through a crowd; there is a reek of garlic and hot oil from the fried-potato stands, mixed with vanilla from cauldrons where almonds are dipped in sugar. The Foire a la Ferraille is in session. It lasts a week, from Sunday to Sunday. And while the word means literally old iron, old iron is only one of the things you can buy there. Most of 60 A.E.CARTER the dealers from the big flea-market at Clignancourt have stands, and drive into Paris with truckloads of assorted rubbish. The city, like a great snake, has been shedding its skin for centuries; and for centuries the little deposit has been gathered up from clearance projects, bankruptcies , estates in liquidation, garbage tins; gathered up and sold at the Foire. The results are spectacular-a sermon, in moth-eaten finery and chipped brie-a.-brac, on the vanity of human affairs. Like prehistoric saurians in river mud, ten thousand households have dropped their remains here: bedroom crockery, old silver, burnt-out stoves, feather boas and ostrich-feather fans, clocks, mahogany door-knobs, chandeliers, bundles of rusty keys. The variety is infinite. If some member of the family was a globe trotter or a colonial servant, there will even be a thin oriental sediment-the carved tusks and Benares brass for which people used to haggle among the flies and strange accents of souks and bazaars from Port Said to Hong Kong. But variety is not the only fascination of the Foire. The form, the design of all these objects-that, perhaps, is what keeps one longest at the booths, or kneeling in front of the oddments laid out on a worn strip of carpet. A clock is an Etruscan tomb of black marble, or a bronze globe upon which a bronze Napoleon rests his feet in meditation. A hat-rack becomes a swirl of gilded metal ending in a mermaid; a gas fixture is a smirking brass lady, emerging coyly from a tangle of bullrushes. The Foire 11 la Ferraille is not just a deposit of junk: the junk is of a very special kind-so massive, so elaborate that it can scarcely be called junk, rather a social and political phenomenon, the proof and illustration of a state of mind and a way of life. For this...