When I first wandered about Paris there was little west of the Arch of
Stars except groves and meadows. Neuilly and Passy were distant villages.
Auteuil was a safe retreat for lovers and debtors, with comic opera villas
nestled in high-walled gardens. To Auteuil Armand Duval and his Camille
hied away for their short-lived idyl. In those days there was a lovely lane
called Marguerite Gautier, with a dovecote pointed out as the very "rustic
dwelling" so pathetically sung in Verdi's tuneful score and tenderly
described in the original Dumas text. The Boulevard Montmorenci long ago
plowed the shrines of romance out of the knowledge of the living, and a
part of the Longchamps racecourse occupies the spot whither impecunious
poets and adventure-seeking wives repaired to escape the insistence of
cruel bailiffs and the spies of suspicious and monotonous husbands.
Tempus fugit! I used to read Thackeray's Paris Sketches with a kind of awe.
The Thirties and the Forties, reincarnated and inspired by his glowing
spirit, seemed clad in translucent garments, like the figures in the
Nibelungenlied, weird, remote, glorified. I once lived in the street "for
which no rhyme our language yields," next door to a pastry shop
that claimed to have furnished the mise en scene for the "Ballad of
Bouillabaisse," and I often followed the trail of Louis Dominic Cartouche
"down that lonely and crooked byway that, setting forth from a palace yard,
led finally to the rear gate of a den of thieves.
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