Paris_ The Collected Traveler - Barrie Kerper [185]
The Passage des Princes, running off the rue de Richelieu to the north, was another hangout of the Parnassiens, whose poetry magazine, the Revue fantaisiste, published works of Charles Baudelaire, Catulle Mendès, and others. Built in 1860, the elbow-shaped Passage des Princes is the last subsisting Second Empire passage, yet it looks very tired, which seems a terrible pity, especially when one reflects on the glitter its airy, lantern-hung coral arches once knew as the home of Peter’s restaurant. French gastronome Courtine credits the eponymous Pierre Fraysse, who had worked in Chicago, with naming homard à l’américaine, a variation on a lobster preparation of his native Sète, to flatter a table of late-arriving Americans.
Today the Passage des Princes’s most visitable shop is Sommer, a pipe-making concern five years older than the passage itself and long-standing supplier to serious smokers like Georges Simenon. Even the most dedicated antitobacco lobbyist cannot help but admire the workmanship in the antiques for sale or stand fascinated before the craftsmen creating small works of art in the window, using brier and the firm’s specialty, écume de mer, a silicate said to purify the noxious elements in tobacco.
Perhaps the most evocative if not the tidiest of Paris’s passages are the three spanning the boulevard Montmartre, the Passage des Panoramas, the Passage Jouffroy, and the Passage Verdeau. The oldest, the Panoramas, is named for the two giant panoramas that were installed to either side of its entrance by an American speculator named James Thayer. Thayer had purchased the French patent for painted perspectives, or panoramas, from countryman Robert Fulton, who used the proceeds to fund his experiments with steamboats. Meanwhile Thayer developed the passage to cash in on the crowds come to see the sixty-two-foot-high canvases of Paris and Toulon.
And his success was great. The Passage des Panoramas was a center of fashionable shopping right up to the fall of the Second Empire. Modistes vied with stylish cafés. Jean-Marie Farina perfumed the air with his véritable eau de Cologne. Marquis’s chocolate brought top-hatted dandies sprinting. There the antiquaire Susse sold Alexandre Dumas père Eugène Delacroix’s Le Tasse dans la prison des fous for six hundred francs, little suspecting that the wily Dumas would go on to sell it for fifty thousand.
The Passage des Panoramas was extended repeatedly, eventually providing access to the stage door of the Théâtre des Variétés, the theater where Zola’s Nana held men spellbound. Here is Zola’s description of the Panoramas, where poor Comte Muffat waited:
Under the glass panes, white with reflected light, the passage was brilliantly illuminated. A stream of light emanated from white globes, red lanterns, blue transparencies, lines of gas jets, and gigantic watches and fans outlined in flame, all burning in the open; and the splash of window displays, the gold of the jewelers, the crystal jars of the confectioners, the pale silks of the milliners, glittered in the shock of mirrored light behind the plate-glass windows.
However bogus Nana’s art, real talent was encouraged there after 1868, when the Académie Julian was installed in the Passage des Panoramas. The Académie tutored many painters, including Americans Childe Hassam and Charles Dana Gibson.
Today the Passage des Panoramas has more memories than glamour, but it seems to be bootstrapping its way up, led in no small part by Stern, the capital’s grandest graveur, which since 1840 has served a clientele of emperors, grandees, miscellaneous aristocrats, diplomats, and just plain folk with painstakingly engraved bristols (calling cards), bookplates, signet rings, invitations, and letterheads from its ravishing shop paneled with dark oak heavy with caryatids and curlicues.
The neighborhood is mixed.