Paris_ The Collected Traveler - Barrie Kerper [183]
In their heyday the passages were places to see and to be seen. Most were located near coach transport depots and theaters. Mondaines hastened there to visit their glovemakers, engravers, milliners, and jewelers, and then to gush over their prizes at the nearby cafés and restaurants. As time went on the attractions were multiplied with the growth of the entertainments of the Boulevards. As John Russell says so aptly, “A hundred years ago … the Grands Boulevards were Cosmopolis itself,” and the passages functioned as a vital element in that sophistication. Where else were the boulevardier’s wife and mistress to buy their fripperies?
Then came the nearly fatal hiatus. In the intervening century the epicenter of the city moved west, and trains altered the transport habits of the capital, leaving the Boulevards to molder—often not very genteelly. Baron Haussmann mercilessly cut streets through some of the finest passages, like the Passage de l’Opéra. Fashionable Third Republicans deserted the small, specialized shops of the passages for the grands magasins.
Of the 137 passages enumerated by the Véritable conducteur parisien of 1828, only about twenty worthy of the name remain. Until just a few years ago even the handsomest of those were tenanted chiefly by sex shops, cut-rate clothes outlets, unpedigreed stamp dealers and numismatists, pedicurists, cobblers, printers, and a handful of old-fashioned deluxe commerçants, who were bravely determined to rise above the rainwater spilling through the broken panes of the skylights that had once been the glory of these very passages.
All that is changing. Demand for central Paris real estate has made it increasingly attractive to restore and refurbish many of the city’s nineteenth-century passages. Fueled by the prosperity of Paris’s born-again Bourse, renovation is rife, and the passages nearest the stock exchange have been the first to benefit. What with this pressure on central Paris real estate values, many of the city’s nineteenth-century passages are undergoing a resurrection—which is a boon to the nostalgic; the curious; students of urbanism; admirers of nineteenth-century cast-iron architecture; chronic lèche-vitrines, that is, those suffering from that most extreme, Gallic form of window shopping; and Parisian and visitor alike caught by winter’s weather. Rain or shine, an expedition, map in hand, through the three kilometers of Paris’s passages (which need not be undertaken of a piece!) offers a seasonable opportunity to see what’s old and new in Paris.
Just to the east of the Palais Royal, running off the tiny rue du Bouloi behind a tree-bedecked square, lies one of the lesser-known passages, the Galerie Véro-Dodat, developed in 1826 by a pair of savvy pork butchers who built opposite the terminus of the Messageries-Générales, the line of horse-drawn carriages that brought provincials to Paris from all of eastern France. Messrs. Véro and Dodat must have been tasteful butchers as well, for the identical mahogany shop fronts, with narrow brass-framed windows outlined with faux marbre columns topped with gilded bronze capitals and cherubs, are a model of grace and sobriety.
A dally along the diagonal black-and-white checkerboard-floored passage overhung with ivies dangling from the second-story window boxes can yield all manner of surprises. The bright, chic hats and trendy sweaters at Jean-Claude Brousseau catch the eye immediately. His is an address treasured by misses in search of a turban or an outrageously oversize velvet beret that will turn the heads of race-goers at Chantilly and Gauloises-puffing Breton fishermen alike. Il Bisonte at the other end of the galerie can provide the same misses with solid Florentine-made handbags and satchels. In between are the specialist antiquaires, dealers like Robert Capia, Paris’s leading expert on antique dolls