The Doll - Bolesaw Prus [229]
Seen from the Panthéon and from the Trocadéro, Paris appeared the same: a sea of houses, criss-crossed by a thousand streets, the irregular roofs looked like waves, the chimneys like spray, and the towers and columns like larger waves.
‘Chaos!’ said Wokulski. ‘But how could it be otherwise in a place where a million endeavours converge. A great city is a cloud of dust; it has contingent contours, but can have no logic. If it did, the fact would have been discovered long ago by the authors of guides; for is that not their role?…’
And he examined a plan of the city, mocking his own efforts. ‘Only one man, and a genius at that, can create a style, a plan,’ he thought. ‘But that a million people, working across several centuries and ignorant of each other, should create some kind of a logical whole, it is simply impossible.’
Slowly, however, to his great surprise, he perceived that this Paris, built over several centuries, by a million people, ignorant of each other and with no plan in mind, did, nevertheless, have a plan, it constituted a whole, even a very logical one.
He was first struck by the fact that Paris was like a great bowl, nine kilometres wide from north to south and eleven kilometres long from east to west. To the south, this bowl was cracked and divided by the Seine, which cut it in a bow running from the north-east corner through the centre of the city and turning to the south-west corner. An eight-year-old child could have outlined such a plan.
‘All right,’ thought Wokulski, ‘but where is the order in the positioning of individual buildings…Notre-Dame in one direction, the Trocadéro in another, and the Louvre, the Exchange, the Sorbonne!…Nothing but chaos…’
But when he began to examine the plan of Paris more closely, he noticed something that not only native Parisians had failed to perceive (which was less strange), but even K. Baedeker, who claimed the right to know his way about the whole of Europe.
Despite an apparent chaos, Paris did have a plan, a logic, even though it had been built over several centuries by millions of people ignorant of each other and giving no thought at all to logic or style.
Paris possessed what could be called a backbone, the city’s crystal axis.
The Vincennes forest lay in the south-east, and the edge of the Bois de Boulogne on the north-west side of Paris. So—this crystal axis of the city was like a great caterpillar (almost six kilometres in length) which, bored with the Bois de Vincennes, had gone for a walk to the Bois de Boulogne.
Its tail leaned against the Place de la Bastille, its head on the Etoile, its body cleaved almost to the Seine. The Champs-Elysées were the neck, the Tuileries and Louvre its corset, and its tail was the Hôtel de Ville, Notre-Dame and, finally, the July Column on the Place de la Bastille.
This caterpillar possessed many long and short legs. From the head, the first pair leaned to the left: the Champ de Mars, the Trocadéro Palace and Exhibition; to the right they reached as far as the Montmartre cemetery. The second pair (of shorter legs) reached the Military School on the left, the Hotel des Invalides, and the Chamber of Deputies; to the right the Madeleine church and the Opéra. Then (ever on towards the tail), to the left the School of Fine Arts, to the right the Palais Royal, the bank and Stock Exchange; to the left the Institut de France and mint, to the right Les Halles; to the left the Palais du Luxembourg, the Cluny museum and Medical School, to the right the Place de la République, with the Prince Eugène barracks.
Aside from the crystal axis and the regularities in the general contours of the city, Wokulski also became convinced (something the guides pointed out anyway) that in Paris there existed whole divisions of human labour and some order in their arrangement. Between the Place de la Bastille and the Place de la République were grouped mainly trade and craftsmen; opposite them, on the other bank of the Seine, was the ‘Latin Quarter’, a nest of students and scholars. Between the Opéra, the Place de la République and the Seine