Apartment Stories: City and Home in Nineteenth-Century Paris and London - Softcover

Marcus, Sharon

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0520217268 ISBN 13: 9780520217263

Publisher: University of California Press, 1999

Synopsis

In urban studies, the nineteenth century is the "age of great cities." In feminist studies, it is the era of the separate domestic sphere. But what of the city's homes? In the course of answering this question, Apartment Stories provides a singular and radically new framework for understanding the urban and the domestic. Turning to an element of the cityscape that is thoroughly familiar yet frequently overlooked, Sharon Marcus argues that the apartment house embodied the intersections of city and home, public and private, and masculine and feminine spheres.

Moving deftly from novels to architectural treatises, legal debates, and popular urban observation, Marcus compares the representation of the apartment house in Paris and London. Along the way, she excavates the urban ghost tales that encoded Londoners' ambivalence about city dwellings; contends that Haussmannization enclosed Paris in a new regime of privacy; and locates a female counterpart to the flâneur and the omniscient realist narrator―the portière who supervised the apartment building.

About this title

About the Author

Sharon Marcus is Associate Professor of English at the University of California, Berkeley.

From the Back Cover

"Apartment Stories works from the brilliant premise that urban culture and domestic architecture are indeed related in a number of unpredictable and mutually enlightening ways. Marcus's readings of Balzac and Zola novels in the context of the new urban architecture are absolutely superb, and she remains subtle and unexpected at every step."―Bruce Robbins, author of Feeling Global

From the Inside Flap

"Apartment Stories works from the brilliant premise that urban culture and domestic architecture are indeed related in a number of unpredictable and mutually enlightening ways. Marcus's readings of Balzac and Zola novels in the context of the new urban architecture are absolutely superb, and she remains subtle and unexpected at every step." Bruce Robbins, author of Feeling Global

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

Apartment Stories

City and Home in 19th Century Paris and LondonBy Sharon Marcus

University of California Press

Copyright © 1999 Sharon Marcus
All right reserved.
ISBN: 9780520217263
1
Seeing through Paris, 18201848

Why did apartment houses become the dominant architectural elements in the Parisian landscape during the last decades of the Restoration (181430) and throughout the July Monarchy (183048)? Their popularity owed much to two factors: they provided spatially compact housing in a city with a rapidly increasing population and offered an expanding middle class opportunities for investing in relatively inexpensive and profitable properties. Demography and economics, however, do not sufficiently account for Parisians' adoption of the apartment building as their chief residential form; as we will see in chapter three, although London's population also expanded dramatically throughout the nineteenth century, Londoners did not build apartment houses. In order to understand the Parisian enthusiasm for apartment buildings, we need to excavate the cultural beliefs about domestic and urban space embedded in the discourses of Parisian architecture and everyday life. Apartment buildings appealed to Parisians as a material figure of broad social conceptions of private and public life: the containment of social heterogeneity in a unifying framework; the imbrication of the domestic and the urban; and the transparency and fluidity of every component of urban space.

Paris in the first half of the nineteenth century reflected, in intensified form, the extreme social mobility that characterized France in the years following the fall of the old regime. Many of the aspects of urban modernity that marked Second Empire and fin-de-sihcle Paris were already in

place by the 1820s, including a culture based on commodification, spectacle, and speculation, and a legible urban space easily mapped and navigated by the upwardly mobile.1 The premium on legible urban space was matched by a desire to decipher the exact social position and moral character of any Parisian in a glance, as a series of urban "physiognomists" claimed the power to do. Within the July Monarchy's capitalist democracy, the desire for transparent space and citizens, whose exteriors would be windows onto their interiors, emphasized reading people in terms of commodities and wealth; by the cut of a man's suit, you could assess his income.2 Specific as it was to that new regime, however, transparency also had deep roots in French political culture, which from Rousseau through the revolution had decried obscurity, duplicity, and theatricality as antithetical to democracy.3

The historiography of an urban culture and space as open as the society that generated them coexists uneasily, however, with the historiography of nineteenth-century domesticity, which describes a segregated private realm that emerged in the wake of the French Revolution, a realm strictly separated from public spaces and functions. That separation was most evident in political and medical discourses that aligned women with the private space of the home and excluded them from a public sphere of abstract masculine political activity as well as from a set of collective exterior urban spaces (the street, the cafi, the theater).4

Scholarly assumptions about domestic space as a separate sphere have occluded more representative discourses about Paris, discourses so invested in the notion of a legible, transparent urban space conducive to easy circulation and observation that they actively incorporated domestic space into the city and even extended urban mobility to the emblematic figures of the private spherewomen of all classes, and especially the women who lived in the middle-class apartment building. The first section of this chapter studies both apartment-house designs and architectural pattern books to demonstrate how the apartment house embodied the cultural amalgamation of private and public spaces. The next section turns to the vast descriptive literature produced about Paris, particularly during the July Monarchy, and shows how the discourse of urban observation described the apartment building as a typical and integral physical feature of the Parisian landscape and, strikingly, as a figure for the objects and activity of urban observation itself. The apartment building's ability to unify its disparate residents within a single frame mirrored the efforts of urban observers to contain Parisian heterogeneity within a single text; its transparency illustrated the fluid relationship

between apartments and the city's exterior spaces, as well as the accessibility of every space in Paris, even domestic space, to urban observers. The strength of the urban observers' commitment to mobility, transparency, and visibility can be measured by their insistence that even married women circulate within the city, and by their deployment of a female figure, the portihre, to personify the apartment building and the activity of urban observation. At the same time, however, their resistance to the implications of their own discourse can be measured by the satiric distance they took from the portihre who so resembled them.

Architectural Discourse and the Continuum of Street and Home

Historians tend to neglect the Paris of the first half of the nineteenth century for the city whose urban fabric altered dramatically after 1850. Viewed retrospectively through the lens of its eventual modernization, Paris from 1815 to 1848 is often reduced to the crowded, inefficient, and unsanitary city that Haussmann later claimed to have eradicated. The most influential scholarship on this period emphasizes the revolutionary turmoil and class anxiety of a "sick Paris" riddled with crime, death, and poverty.5 Representations of a "dangerous and diseased city" in literature, medical reports, and fledgling attempts at demographic surveys attributed the city's social problems to its decaying environment of filthy streets and crowded, decrepit housing.6

Far less attention is paid to the more benign, even celebratory view of Paris prevalent in the architectural and urban literature that abounded during this period, a literature that concentrated on the quotidian pleasures afforded to the middle classes in the city's bourgeois spaces, particularly in the apartment houses constructed in large numbers during the 1820s. During the Restoration and the July Monarchy, from the 1820s through the 1840s, the characteristic Parisian house took on a new form, that of the modern six- to eight-story apartment building with shops on the ground floor and an imposing entrance supervised by a porter (fig. 1). In terms of both their form and the ways that their form was perceived, apartments embodied an urban domesticity that aligned them simultaneously with private homes and with public structures such as monuments, cafis, and streets.

The new apartment house represented a shift from earlier architectural articulations of private and public space. On the one hand, nineteenth-century apartment units were more self-contained and hence provided more spatial privacy than eighteenth-century housing for the

Figure 1
Elevation and cross-section of a Parisian apartment building
on the boulevard St-Denis. From [Louis-Marie] Normand fils,
Paris moderne  (Paris: Bance, 1837).

middle and working classes; on the other hand, the increased size of nineteenth-century buildings, and their incorporation of vestibules, lobbies, and elaborate stairways, meant that these edifices brought more strangers into contact, in more places, than earlier ones had.7 The apartment house partly owed its unique synthesis of publicity and privacy to its dual architectural sources, the maisons ` allie and the httels privis . Most eighteenth-century apartment houses were maisons ` allie, which lacked vestibules and were entered either through alleys off the street or through ground-floor shops. Internal apartments were formed by blocking off varying sets of rooms according to the needs of individual tenants and often consisted of suites of rooms distributed over several floors; this arrangement tended to multiply contact with other occupants, since one tenant might have to cross another's room to reach her own.8

Nineteenth-century apartment units were spatially self-contained and thus offered tenants greater seclusion within an individual apartment, but nineteenth-century apartment buildings maintained and even extended the public nature of the maisons ` allie, since their larger scale (five to six stories) gathered greater numbers of residents together under one roof, while their inclusion of clearly articulated common spaces for entrance and egress formalized interaction among tenants. Like the maisons ` allie, the new buildings had shops on the ground floor and thus continued to mix commerce and private life, though tradespeople and merchants were more common than artisans and manufacturers in more costly buildings.

The nineteenth-century apartment house did not evolve exclusively from earlier models of communal housing. Apartment house architects also drew on the aristocratic private townhouse, the httel privi, in their designs for the imposing double doors (portes cochhres ), elaborate vestibules, and porter's lodges that stood between the apartment building and the street. Some architectural historians have even identified the httel as the sole origin and model for the apartment house, but significant differences existed between the two building types.9 The apartment brought public and private rooms into greater proximity with one another than the httel had. The httel separated reception rooms such as salons, which were open to strangers and designed for social occasions and display, from the bedrooms, studies, and cabinets intended for retirement and solitude. The apartment not only placed both types of rooms on a single floor but often placed them in direct communication with one another, so that one might enter an apartment's salon by passing through its main bedroom. Furthermore, the httel was divided into

separate wings for the husband and wife, which included separate bedroom suites for each of them, and thus created autonomous masculine and feminine spaces; the more constricted bourgeois apartment usually accommodated only a single conjugal bedroom and thus promoted a greater degree of spatial heterosociality than the aristocratic httel .10

Apartment buildings and httels privis also differed in their orientation toward their urban surroundings. Httels privis occupied a space distinct both from other buildings and from the street. As the historian Roger Chartier points out, because httels were free-standing structures set back from the thoroughfare by a walled courtyard, they "interrupted the continuous ribbon of facades" that bordered the typical Parisian street.11 The httel turned its back to the street, since its primary, highly decorated front and its most important rooms (dining room, salon, bedrooms) faced a private garden. The part of the httel facing the street, but separated from it by a walled courtyard, consisted of service rooms such as stables and the kitchen. Apartment buildings, by contrast, were situated directly on the street, entered from the street, made to be viewed from and to provide views of the street. Builders constructed apartment buildings with strong front/back axes, aligned facades with the sidewalk, and emphasized the importance of the street front by lavishing better materials and more intricate designs on it. The most sought-after apartments were those closest to the street, and the most prized rooms of an apartmentliving room, dining room, and main bedroomfaced the street, while the kitchen, servant's room, and storage rooms faced the courtyard (fig. 2).12

Apartment-house design also bore a conceptual similarity to urban street systems. The ordered grid of the apartment-house facade, like that of city streets, worked to abstract individual details into an aggregate public form. Their unity and symmetry gave facades a decorative power of generalization over the particularities of the rooms behind them in a process related to the urban consolidation of heterogeneous individuals into a public. The windows in a building's street facade often matched one another in size, shape, and design, even when the rooms behind them were different sizes or belonged to apartments separated from one another by vertical or horizontal partitions.13 The apartment did have an area whose external irregularities suggested internal dissymmetriesthe courtyard, carved out of the space where the undecorated, cheaply constructed back walls of up to four different buildings met and were irregularly punctuated by variously sized windows. Only the occupants of

Figure 2
Floor plan of an apartment building on the boulevard St-Denis.
The main bedroom [chambre ` coucher ] and living room
[salon ] are adjacent to one another, and both face the boulevard.
From [Louis-Marie] Normand fils,  Paris moderne  (Paris: France, 1837).

neighboring buildings, however, could see the disorganization of the courtyard; the general public saw only the symmetry of a balanced, ordered facade.

Where httels privis allowed passersby mere glimpses of a circumspect, individualized image of domesticity, apartment buildings displayed and oriented a collective domesticity that communicated fully with the public street. Indeed, the building-street configuration characteristic of Paris from the 1820s through the 1840scontiguous apartment buildings lining both sides of a street or wider boulevardmade streets and houses spatially interdependent. As the urban sociologist Chombart de Lauwe put it in his typology of the Parisian apartment, "the urban habitat invites ... its users to turn toward the street."14 Conversely, the July Monarchy street was oriented toward apartment houses and derived its shape from them; as William Ellis shows in "The Spatial Structure of Streets," when buildings constitute a "contiguous building pattern, [they] seem to form the spaces between them."15

The space of early nineteenth-century Parisian buildings mingled with the space of streets in concrete, quotidian ways. As prefect of Paris after 1833, Claude Rambuteau installed benches on all the major boulevards, a practice that made the comfort and stillness conventionally associated with the home available on the street; he also increased the number of public urinals on the sidewalks.16 Apartment buildings began literally to enter the street when an 1823 ordinance of Louis XVIII allowed facades to project into the street, albeit in very restricted ways, for the first time since 1607. That ordinance also decreed that street widths would determine the height of a building and whether it could have balconies, thus deriving the facade's dimensions and design from those of the street.17 Houses, like streets, became more rationalized, more subject to surveillance, better lit, and better marked; an 1824 police decree outlawed the defacement and obstruction of street names, house numbers, and streetlights.18 And on a daily basis people threw their garbage into the streets, street sellers hawked their goods by yelling up into apartments, and merchants plastered building fronts with advertisements for their products.19

By the end of the July Monarchy, the apartment house was the most frequent and consistent element of the urban landscape. From the 1820s on architects, speculators, and landlords built small-scale apartments in central Paris and constructed new, largely residential neighborhoods just west, north, and east of the new Stock Exchange on the Right Bank, taking as their basic unit a row of apartment houses lining a street di-

vided into a roadway and pedestrian sidewalks.20 In response to this surge in building, publishers produced large volumes devoted to the new domestic architecturepattern books designed to publicize individual architects, and to provide models for the many builders and contractors who bypassed trained architects. Most of those works consisted of brief introductions assessing and classifying the city's recent architectural productions, followed by architectural plates and explanatory text. The authors were either architects who had studied at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts but had not attained its highest honor, the prix de Rome, or whose more marginal architectural training gave them little access to the most lucrative and prestigious commissions for government buildings and aristocratic private mansions. Despite the relatively low professional status of their authors, compendia of apartment-house designs represented bids to exalt multiple-occupancy middle-class housing to the level of academic and aristocratic architecture, not by replicating the theoretical discussions of classical orders and perspective that filled architectural treatises, but by retaining those treatises' evaluative criteria and representational conventions. Their publishers adopted a large folio format and used expensive reproduction techniques that required the plates to appear separately from the text, thus distinguishing pattern books visually from popular architectural journals, whose woodcut illustrations could be inserted on the page along with type. Pattern books combined a canonical emphasis on architectural composition and the presentation of every building from three perspectivescross-section, floor plan, and elevationwith a modern interest in construction techniques and the design of elements such as doors, cornices, and balconies.21

Architectural pattern books rarely used terms like "private" or "public" to describe the new residences; indeed, they barely distinguished the apartment building as a unique type at all, suggesting that its relative lack of privacy did not pose a problem for architects or their clients, and that urban homes were not defined in terms of privacy, nor in contradistinction to streets and other exterior spaces. Most architects simply called apartment buildings maisons, a general term meaning both "house" and "home," whose use emphasized the apartment building's similarity to other housing types, even more private ones, making the apartment house representative of the house in general. As late as 1850, Victor Calliat continued to classify any residence that was not an httel as a maison whether it was a small single-family house or an apartment building of any size. Architects before 1850 thus positioned apartment buildings on a continuum with other kinds of houses and even

took apartments to represent the generic "house." As we will see in chapter 4, only after 1850 did architects and writers in France promote the single-family house as the distinct ideal it was in England throughout the nineteenth century.22 Indeed, the apartment house was so typical of Parisian domestic architecture, and its congruence with the term maison so established, that some Parisians perceived the single-family house as lexically indescribable: when Fridiric Soulii, the popular novelist and playwright, described a row of houses that would have been banal in London"five or six buildings [corps de logis ] ... placed parallel to the street ... followed by a garden"he commented that "one could call them neither httels nor maisons ."23

Architectural texts linked the public spaces of the street and the private spaces of the residence by consistently associating apartment houses with the urban progress and modernity that twentieth-century historians have attributed only to public spaces such as boulevards and cafis. Victor Calliat, architect for the city of Paris from the 1820s through the 1870s, summed up three decades of Parisian building by announcing, "Never have so many private residences [maisons particulihres ] been built in Paris as during the last twenty-nine years.... An undeniably real progress has made itself felt.... Never perhaps have we built more, or better, as we have in the years since 1830."24

Others similarly associated apartment buildings with the modern qualities of contemporaneity and progress. In 1838 Jean-Charles Krafft, describing a recently built apartment house, complete with imposing entrance, ground-floor shops, and balconies, wrote: "This facade, taken as a whole and in its details, seems to conform perfectly to our modern practices and to fulfill all our current requirements for a residence; ... everything in it could serve as a model for a rental house located in the city [des maisons de ville dites ` loyer ]."25 And when L. Roux wrote that "the ground floor of a modern house is invariably left to commerce," he pointed out the links between modern consumer culture and contemporary domestic architecture.26

Over the course of the July Monarchy, architects identified apartments not only with an up-to-date, urban style but also with a financial potential redolent of modernity. Apartment buildings came to occupy an important position in a speculative Parisian real-estate market and provided opportunities for newly rich bourgeois to invest and generate income. The 1847 edition of Louis-Ambroise Dubut's Architecture civile referred to "maisons ` loyer, consisting of several floors, otherwise

known as maisons de rapport, " qualifying maison with a word that signified revenue and profit.27 The term maison de rapport defined the apartment house from a property owner's perspective, as an investment and source of income, and identified the apartment house with its economic potential far more strongly than the term maison ` loyer, which merely indicated an apartment building's availability to potential inhabitants. According to the Statistique de l'industrie ` Paris ... sur les annies 18471848, "the rapid development of the population, the subdivision of large urban estates, the development of new neighborhoods have all encouraged building and thus turned house construction into a veritable industrial enterprise; there now exists a class of entrepreneurs and merchants who deal in houses just as they do in any other industrial product."28

As we will see in chapter 3, English observers often criticized Parisian home life for its lack of privacy, not only because they took the single-family house as an architectural standard, but also because they defined domesticity in opposition to the marketplace, and the maison de rapport brought economics close to home. French architects, however, did not consider the apartment house's associations either with the street or with urban speculation to disqualify it from a domestic function; they continued to call apartment buildings and units maisons or private houses (maisons particulihres ) even after the late 1840s, when financial speculators had begun to build apartments on an almost industrial scale and landlords were commonly depicted as impersonal administrators who rarely lived in the buildings they owned.29 Frangois Thiollet, for example, in the third volume of a work that first appeared in 1829 and was reprinted in 1838, classified buildings primarily in terms of their relationship to neighboring buildings and to the street, distinguishing among httel, maison particulihre, and maison ` loyer; his use of the word maison in the two latter terms linked apartments to single-family houses.30 Maison particulihre literally meant a private house for individuals (as opposed to government or commercial offices) and its primary architectural and colloquial meaning was "single-family, owner-occupied house." Architects often stretched this meaning, however, to include multiple-occupancy rental buildings. Krafft referred in 1838 to "maisons d'habitations particulihres dites ` loyer."31 The text of Louis-Marie Normand fils's architectural pattern book, Paris moderne (1837), stated that since single-family houses had become "de luxe," the book would be devoted to "habitations particulihres." "dites de location"; the generic family

home had become a rental apartment, and the word particulihre, far from denoting ownership and individual occupation, modified a multiple-occupancy rental building.32

Architects also placed apartment houses on a continuum with the imperial, royal city of imposing monuments and the modern, bourgeois city of boulevards, boutiques, and cafis.33 Pattern books praised the ways that apartment houses combined public scale and private character. The apartment loomed larger than any residential building ever had, horizontally as well as vertically, and practices such as making the balconies of separate buildings continuous promoted the monumentality of apartments by emphasizing the mass block formed by their contiguity. The increased use of stone facades, often signed by stonecutters as artists would sign works of art, also contributed to the sense that the apartment building's exterior was, as one architectural historian puts it, "an enormous monumental sculpture facing the street."34 Writers commented that the shift to five-, six- and even eight-story buildings brought apartment houses closer to public buildings and monuments.35 Normand fils called maisons ` location "veritable palaces raised to industry, commerce, luxury and the arts all at once"; Krafft called apartments the "monuments" of the "artistic renaissance of the nineteenth century," and in a medical work on Des habitations et de l'influence de leurs dispositions sur l'homme (1838), Dr. Pierre-Adolphe Piorry wrote that "in Paris ... combined residences have reached such heights that they sometimes seem to dwarf nearby public monuments."36

Just as architects saw similarities between the monumental and the residential, between public and private building types, they also promoted designs that emphasized the similarity between a building's exterior, potentially more public face, and its interior, the space conventionally associated with privacy; indeed, architectural historians define Restoration architecture in terms of its "transposition of a building's indoor ornament onto its faqade."37 Authors of pattern books frequently compared apartment buildings to stores, cafis, and theaters and recommended incorporating elements from commercial and civic buildings into apartment-house decor. The stores, cafis, and restaurants that occupied the ground floor of most apartment buildings lent residences a commercial note, while the large sheets of plate glass that began to be incorporated into shops from the 1820s on made the apartment buildings that housed trade more physically open and transparent to the street.

Conversely, because cafi, restaurant, and shop interiors used the same decorating principles and materials as domestic ones, commercial spaces

often resembled apartments, but apartments open to public view and entry. The mirrors commonly placed behind plate-glass store windows reflected pedestrians just as looking glasses on salon walls mirrored people at home. The Cafi de Paris "retained the appearance of an apartment in the grand style: high ceilings, antique mirrors, magnificent carpets,"38 and Thiollet's 1837 Nouveau recueil de menuiserie et de dicorations intirieures et extirieures used the same criteria to evaluate stores, arcades, and apartments. Thiollet wrote that a "shop interior" possessed "the true character of a drawing room whose fireplace faces the entryway and whose principal ornaments are mirrors," and he praised the contemporary rapprochement of interiors and exteriors as a modern advance in decorating:

today the least little vacation house [maison de plaisance ], the most modest apartment [appartement ] and even the fashionable clerk's attic room [mansarde ] are decorated with care and often with taste. Not content with having transformed the interior of our cafis, restaurants, stores and bazaars into elegant salons, the decorative arts ... strive each day to bring the exteriors of these same establishments into harmony with this richness and magnificence.... The time may not be far when ... the facades of our houses [maisons ] will be painted in oils from top to bottom and will offer trompe l'oeil, perspective effects, and so forth.39

Thiollet first comments on the similarity between the interiors of public and private buildings, between "cafis ... restaurants ... boutiques ... bazaars [and] salons"; he then elaborates an architectural fantasy in which interior spaces coincide perfectly with exterior facades, by means of illusionistic projections (the "trompe l'oeil" effect) or false depths (the perspective effect).40

Thiollet's fantasy of the future was one that many architectural illustrators realized in their representations of contemporary buildings. Illustrators had the technical capacity to produce cross-sections with distinct foregrounds and receding, shadowy backgrounds, which conveyed the illusion of three-dimensional interiors with depth; indeed, the popular press occasionally used this convention (fig. 3). Instead, the architectural convention for cross-sections (coupes ), which combined into a single image the walls of the facade and of the apartment unit, created the odd visual impression that the rear wall of an apartment was almost flush with the external facade by suppressing any visual suggestion of their difference in depth (fig. 4). This technique produced the illusion of an architectural impossibility: that the back wall of the apartment's interior coincided with its street facade. The image that expressed this

Figure 3
"Coupe de maison ` Paris," by Karl Girardet. The use of
shadow and angle to suggest a receding background emphasizes
the depth of the rooms shown in cross-section here. From
Le Magasin pittoresque  15 (1847).

Figure 4
Cross-section of an apartment building on the rue de Marignan.
The mirrors and moldings located on the far walls of each
room are drawn to appear flush with the exterior facade. From
Victor Calliat,  Parallhle des maisons de Paris construites depuis
1830 jusqu'` nos jours  (Paris: Bance, 1850).

physical impossibility was legible to nineteenth-century readers, however, because it visually articulated their cultural equation of interior and exterior spaces. Far more marked in the depiction of apartment buildings than in those of httels or pavillons, the particularity of this convention will emerge even more clearly in chapter 3, when we juxtapose this type of cross-section with English architectural drawings. English architects adopted a more picturesque and textured approach to the representation of domestic architecture than French architects. Where English illustrators made abundant use of light, shadow, and composition to locate houses within a setting defined as "natural" by its irregularity and variety, French illustrators represented apartments in isolation from adjacent structures (although contiguous buildings were required by law to be directly attached to one another, with no gaps between them) and idealized buildings into a series of graphic, planar, blatantly two-dimensional lines that corresponded to the topographical conventions for representing the urban grid, creating yet another link between the city and its apartment houses.41

The Tableaux de Paris and the Apartment-House View

Beginning in the 1830s, an unprecedented number of books about Paris not only posited a continuum between the apartment house and the street but also presented the apartment house as an ideal framework for visual observations of the city. The texts that critic Margaret Cohen has identified as "a characteristic nineteenth-century genre for representing the everyday" were known as tableaux de Paris and were accompanied in the early 1840s by an important subgenre, the physiologies .42 Authored mostly by professional writers who worked for the popular press and wrote criticism, prose, and plays, the tableaux and physiologies mapped the new types, places, and trends of contemporary Paris for a reading and viewing public eager to consume images of the city. As the critic Richard Sieburth has pointed out, "these illustrated anthologies of urban sites and mores responded to the public's desire to see its social space as a set or gallery whose intelligibility was guaranteed both by its visibility as an image and its legibility as a text."43 Issued by various publishers, the tableaux de Paris conformed to certain generic conventions: they were usually multivolume, large-format books utilizing a variety of typefaces, lavishly illustrated by artists such as Daumier and Gavarni, and written by multiple authors who provided an encyclope-

dic overview of the city with fictional sketches and articles on Parisian history, geography, social types, and current events.

The authors of the physiologies often overlapped with contributors to the tableaux . The physiologies, however, were the work of only one author (and one illustrator); and where the kaleidoscopic tableaux aspired to a cumulatively exhaustive description of Paris, the physiologies adopted an overtly fragmentary approach, since each text anatomized, in a deliberately slangy style, an individual Parisian type (e.g., the grocer, the kept woman, the husband). Aubert published physiologies according to a standardized small, in-32 format of 120 pages, with copious but cheap illustrations. Priced at 1 franc each, the physiologies were considerably cheaper than the ordinary book, which cost roughly 3.50 francs, and much cheaper than the oversized, lavish tableaux . Their modish appearance and low price contributed to their popularity: more than 125 separate physiologies were issued between 1840 and 1842, and a total of approximately 500,000 copies were in print in the 1840s.44

Because the tableaux and the physiologies understood the city as a site in which events unfurled and as a decor within which character emerged, they frequently treated apartments as settings for the various episodes and types they recounted. Unlike architectural pattern books, which by convention eliminated all representations of people from their illustrations, the tableaux defined Paris as much by its population of parisiens and parisiennes as by its physical environment.45 Apartment houses were seen as privileged settings for Parisians and their plots, as figures for "this big city where misfortune, good fortune, pain and pleasure frequently live under the same roof," and as sites of a narrative available only to the urban initiate, who with the aid of the urban observer would become aware of "entire novels hidden in the walls of ... [a] house."46

In addition to privileging the apartment house as a descriptive object and narrative device, the tableaux also shared formal traits with apartment buildings. The visual arts represented apartment houses as both static objects and animated scenes, as pictorial, frontal planes to be viewed and as spaces through which to move, if only illusionistically.47 The tableaux similarly set out to combine a static "store of information," including history, statistics, and geography, with lively anecdotal incident and narrative.48 Updating long-standing equations between literary and architectural construction, the frontispieces of several tableaux explicitly represented their own volumes as elements of architectural

construction (fig. 5), and, conversely, the tableaux frequently invoked the metaphor of buildings as books, pages, and lines, as if to endow readers with the ability to decipher a building as they would a text.49 The visual presentation of the tableaux even mirrored the structure of apartment-house facades: innovative page layouts intercalated text and image so that illustrations were situated like windows in the space defined by the text (fig. 6).50

The writers who represented the city to itself thus not only emphasized apartment houses as elements of the Parisian landscape but also saw through the apartment house, treating it as a lens or as a point of view and not simply as an opaque visual object. In the process, they imagined apartment houses to be as transparent as they wanted the city to be. And by depicting the apartment house as though its facades and walls were transparent, Parisian chroniclers demonstrated that even the city's most private spaces posed no impediment to their vision. In a sketch called "Les Drames invisibles," which exemplified the tableaux 's representation of the apartment building, Fridiric Soulii, a frequent contributor to the genre, deployed the common device of describing Parisian society through a single apartment building. Even the most private events within the apartment housewhat should be the "invisible dramas" of the titlebecome visible, with the narrator exposing blackmail and suicide on one floor and a concealed pregnancy on another. For Soulii, to reveal the secrets of the building's occupants makes possible a more general exposure of the Parisian social body; for example, he describes a tenant's concealed pregnancy as "teem[ing] beneath the social epiderm."51 Initially hidden by the woman's body, then inevitably revealed by it, the increasingly visible course of conception, pregnancy, and birth mirrors the trajectory of the apartment-house narrative, which transforms facades, walls, and doors from barriers that keep secrets into transmitters of sounds and stories.

By containing the many stories of an apartment house's occupants in one narrative, Soulii displayed his ability to control the city's heterogeneity, just as the tableaux contained numerous and diverging views of the city within a single anthology. The multiply authored pieces collected within the tableaux replicated the collective form of the apartment building, whose separate compartments were united by a common frame.52 In architecture, the multiplicity of a building's parts were gathered in a unity that made each part, as well as the whole, transparent. As the architectural historian David Van Zanten explains in Developing Paris, "all ... parts ... [were] interrelated, so that the whole ... [could]

Figure 5
Frontispiece to volume four of  Les Frangais peints par euxmjmes
(Paris: Curmer, 1841), depicting the preceding volumes
as horizontal and vertical architectural supports.

Figure 6
Pages from volume two of  Le Diable ` Paris  (Paris: Hetzel,
1846). The rectilinear blank spaces surrounding the images
create the impression of windows cut into blocks of text.

be reconstructed from a single element.... The ideal ... was transparency ... where the whole work of architecture ... might be grasped by a glance at its exterior, as if one were conceptually seeing right through its walls."53 Similarly, the tableaux 's collection of many disparate essays on Paris into a single book aimed to unify the "thousand facets" and "multiple aspect" of Paris, and to make that multiplicity more visible and legible by making it more manageable.54

The preface to the fifteen-volume Paris, ou le livre des cent-et-un (1831), one of the first tableaux to use multiple authors (the 101 of the title), emphasized that its multiple authorship and encyclopedic range encapsulated the heterogeneity of Paris itself and described the book's literary ambition to capture the city's multiplicity in terms of an architectural fantasy. Declaring that Paris has become so multiplii "multiple" and "multiplied"that one must "renounce unity in favor of a

multiple portrayal," the preface's author, Jules Janin, consolidated that representational process into an allusion to a single figure, Asmodeus, the devilish hero of Lesage's Le Diable boiteux (1707), who removed roofs and peered inside houses. His reference suggested that Paris itself was reducible to a series of domestic interiors, and that those interiors were the primary objects of an ambulatory urban gaze: "whatever the imagination of our contributors might be, it [elle ] will have a place in this book, it will temporarily put on Asmodeus's cloak and go everywhere, poor girl, everywhere where a man who fears nothing would go."55 For Janin, the book's multiple form engenders multiply gendered figures who can roam the city at will: the male Asmodeus's cloak can extend even to the female figure of the imagination, which Janin deliberately personifies as a woman by referring to the grammatically feminine imagination as "poor girl." The power of Asmodeus and his urban observation is so strong that it can even make a "poor girl" mobile, dressing a pitiful female figure in the garb of a maleone whose urban explorations know no limits.56

Janin's Asmodeus, faithful to the methods of the original, enters apartments by lifting off their roofs. His bird's-eye view perceives buildings as a series of scenes and organizes the apartment house as a planar picture to be observed, as a live, three-dimensional scene to be entered, and as the narrative formed by movement from one scene to the next. Asmodeus's horizontal and aerial orientation, however, marks even Janin's updated version of Lesage's viewpoint as premodern. A decade later, in the 1840s, Asmodeus began to peel away apartment-house facades, and even when he approached apartments from the sky, he aligned his viewpoint with a building's vertical front. Take, for example, the caption to Karl Girardet's image of a coupe de maison a cross-section of an apartmentwhich appeared in the Magasin pittoresque in 1847 (see fig. 3): "Asmodeus has borne you up above the big city ... your eyes have come to rest on an elegant three-story house.... Asmodeus has understood; he makes a gesture, and the walls that hid the interior from you have become transparent. Everything that happens there appears before you like so many moving pictures framed under glass."57 This Asmodeus's procedure resolved a sensory contradiction experienced by apartment-dwellers, who could easily hear neighbors whom they could not see from within their apartment unit's confines.58 The peeled-off facade translated the uncontrolled sound and visual inaccessibility of contiguous apartments into a vivid and lucid pictorial composition"so many moving pictures framed under glass."

Representations of transparent facades also expressed their authors' desire to make the apartment building continuous with the street, where everything and everyone was visible and within reach. The apartment house was an important focal point for the flbneur who roamed the city's streets; while an article from the 1830s pointed out that "the flbneur scarcely has an interior of his own," the peripatetic Parisian observer frequently included the domestic interiors of others in his urban itinerary.59 As a result, both streets and apartment buildings were equally described as areas of display and contact, open to effortless visual penetration.

In a landmark article on the flbneur, Janet Wolff argues that urban discourse gave men a monopoly on urban circulation and observation, and consigned women to the role of objects of a masculine urban gaze.60 Many moments in the tableaux seem to support her argument but, as we will see, urban discourses also represented women as mobile urban observers, because to do otherwise would have been to acknowledge a limit to the transparency and accessibility of urban space. Indeed, even the most blatant examples of male voyeurism in the tableaux worked not only to constitute women as sexualized objects of a male gaze but also to liquidate the barrier potentially posed by the private space of the home. As a result, the objectification of women viewed either in the street or in their apartments had the unintended effect of bringing women into the city or bringing the city to women and did not, as Wolff implies, simply confine them to an impermeable private space.

In a contribution to Les Rues de Paris (1844), for example, Albiric Second attached his description of an entire Parisian neighborhood to a man who simultaneously observes an apartment building and its female tenants. In his story, a painter's ability to bridge the gap between facing apartment buildings becomes a device for depicting the Parisian neighborhood of Notre-Dame-de-Lorette: "it is in the person of his female neighbors that a painter indulges in observations of nature. His gaze pierces [transperce ] windows and their light muslin armor; the couch [divan ] and loveseat [causeuse ] can hold no secrets for him; he deciphers at first glance all the hieroglyphics of the boudoir."61 The painter's gaze takes on an ambulatory life of its own, and its remarkable capacity to penetrate is emphasized both by the verb transpercer and by the overstated opacity ascribed to the curtains: the painter does not merely catch a glimpse of something through parted muslin drapes but has a gaze that "pierces ... armor." Once the painter's gaze has rendered the facade transparent and penetrable, it perceives the women's interiors as sexu-

ally legible. Second highlights the sexual connotations of the room and its furniture by using boudoir, the word for a woman's private bedroom, instead of the generic word for bedroom, chambre, and by singling out the loveseat; his claim that the painter deciphers "the hieroglyphics" of the bedroom "on first sight" underscores the immediacy of his access to the most intimate recesses of the woman's apartment.

For the young, unmarried male sexual adventurers featured in many of the tableaux 's sketches, access to women in the city's apartment buildings had all the hallmarks of the urban: it was deliberately transient, the result of a cultural understanding of the city as a place for fleeting, chance sexual contacts, yet all the more vulnerable to interference because of its very ephemerality. These texts conflated women with the city on the basis of rental, not ownership, and modeled men's temporary possession of women encountered in streets and buildings on their equally temporary rental of city property. At the same time, the tableaux also produced more stable configurations of women as the city and the city as a woman, suggesting that male property owners could own, trade, or rent out women as they did buildings and land. Various texts referred to the landlord's droit du seigneur over his female tenants, as well as to women's equivalence to real estate and to the money derived from it.62 Apartment buildings were assimilated to female bodies: they were "girls of stone"; their faults could be covered up just as "an old coquette" would "conceal her wrinkles"; the For Rent signs hung outside apartments (white for unfurnished, yellow for furnished) would "glitter like a courtesan's ardent eyes"; and landlords renting apartments for the first time would feel like "unnatural fathers who sell their children," but children figured as nubile women"virginal," "completely fresh," full of "innocence."63

The feminization of the apartment house clearly worked to adumbrate the status of both women and buildings as legible signs of male property, but at the same time, equations of women with apartment houses placed them in an open urban realm instead of in a sequestered private space. Not surprisingly, then, the tableaux often identified women with Paris, describing the city's regions in terms of the types of women who inhabited them and arguing that women were condensed expressions of the city's essence, so that one could understand Paris by studying la parisienne .64 Contributors to the tableaux developed a sexualized topography that classified Parisian neighborhoods according to the types of women found in them and defined female types in terms of their urban locations and their relative sexual availability to men.

Examples of these types included the lorette who lived in and was named for the newly constructed quarter of Notre-Dame-de-Lorette and was a scheming, rapacious courtesan; the grisette who lived between the Bourse and the Palais-Royal (often on rues St-Denis and Vivienne) and selflessly helped support her student lover; and the parisienne who could be recognized by the unforgettable decor of her bedroom, to which all were welcome.65

The sexualization of Parisian streets, apartment buildings, and urban observers often had the surprising effect of enhancing rather than negating women's powers of urban locomotion and observation within the discursive world of the tableaux . Women's movement was essential to the urbanism and urbanity that issued from those texts, in which all women, including married bourgeoises, were required to be sexually available to men, in a city whose every space became an open heterosexual forum: one physiologie, for example, described the city's omnibuses as the "providence of lovers" and "hell for husbands."66 Even the home became the locus of a compulsory Parisian heterosexuality that prevailed over any patriarchal urge to restrict women's forays into the city or to confine them to marital sexuality. Thus a humorous sketch entitled "Where Does A Woman Who Goes Out Go? A Riddle [Oy va une femme qui sort: inigme ]," although it posed the destination of the woman who "goes out" as a riddle, emphasized her ubiquity and legibility by offering ten ways to recognize her. The sketch regretfully admits that "it is as easy to recognize a woman who is going out as it is difficult to know where she is going" but implies that her destination is perfectly familiar, arguing that if men confess "loyally" to one another, her secret will be revealed; "a woman who goes out" is a woman engaged in adultery with one of her husband's friends. Her freedom of movement is delimited by the homosocial male circle that contains her, but the equivalence of going out and meeting a man exemplifies the tableaux 's vision of both street and home as heterosexual bazaars, and of the city as a network of interior and exterior bedrooms through which women constantly moved.67

The problem that the tableaux posed for women in the city was not how to gain access to the street but how to find any place, inside or out, where they could be left alone or with one another without incurring blame. The tableaux expressed little disapproval of female mobility that brought women into men's purview, defined variously as a heterosexual marketplace, a worldly heterosocial circle that met in salons and cafis,

or a domestic niche based on the conjugal couple.68 They did, however, censure women like the "spinster" [vieille fille ] and the "bluestocking" [bas-bleu ], who occupied negative positions vis-`-vis heterosexuality. Louis Couailhac's Physiologie du cilibataire et de la vieille fille condemned the unmarried woman for her "selfishness" and ended with a remarkable vision of an association of wealthy, unmarried women who open up a boarding house "where one encounters only old maids.... There, these witches begin by disrupting the house and forcing everyone young and respectable to flee; then they undertake to do the same for the street, then they extend their malicious influence throughout the neighborhood; the entire city risks coming under their sway."69

Yet the physiologies and tableaux spoke glowingly of wives who haunted the city "amidst the movement and tumult of a market" in search of reasonably priced food for their husbands: "The ladies of Paris go to market, and that is to their credit, for it proves that they take care of their household [minage ] and of the interior details of their houses."70 They also tolerated women who pursued economic gain through heterosexual transactions, if those women competed against other women and conformed to stereotypes of narcissistic and exhibitionistic femininity by acting out their "need to show off [se faire voir ]" for a male audience.71 Taxile Delord, an editor of Le Charivari, a satirical weekly established in the 1830s, and author of several physiologies, described the Parisian woman's sexual career as the development of a joint-stock company: "speculation is the genius of this century ... and since she [la parisienne ] is a woman, in other words a highly sought-after pleasure mine, she has taken it upon herself to issue stock in herself." Delord's language suggests an amused, tolerant, and somewhat admiring tonethe parisienne participates in the "genius" of her time, demonstrates "cleverness" in her choice of shareholders, and becomes a "young female industrialist" [jeune industrielle ].72

When women banded together to pursue their own financial interests independently of men, however, the male observer could make little sense of the scene. In his article on "La Bourse," Fridiric Soulii wrote that "the oddest and most inexplicable group of gamblers at the Stock Exchange are the women. A police regulation has relegated them to the upper galleries." Women of all classes, from the "duchess" to the "dishwasher," mingle in this gallery and exchange information about the market, a cooperation that astounds Soulii: "that the woman dressed in velvet talks to the worker in cotton truly surprised me!"73

The Portihre and the Personification of Urban Observation

The tableaux and physiologies directed their most concentrated animus against a female type whom they themselves associated with the power to see into apartment buildingsthe portihre .74 By the 1840s the portihre had become a standard presence even in buildings that lacked a formal entrance or porter's lodge. She often selected tenants for the landlord and collected rents; within the building, she distributed mail, cleaned landings and entrances, and did light housekeeping for some tenants (especially unmarried men); and she responded when tenants (who did not have keys to the main door) and visitors rang the bell.75 The portihre personified the passage between the street and the apartment because she let tenants into the building; because, as the historian Jean-Louis Deaucourt puts it, she "appeared everywhere, in the building's semiprivate spaces, in the open space of the street"; and because her loge, located off the building's vestibule or courtyard, was a "space both closed and open at the same time, eminently theatrical ... propitious for exchanges, for comings and goings."76

The portihre was a modern phenomenon, like the apartment house in which she worked, since only apartments constructed after the 1820s included a porter's lodge. Before then, only httels had porters (known as suisses or concierges, and exclusively male). During the July Monarchy, a portihre signaled a modern building's bourgeois status and aristocratic pretensions, although her own body also brought into the building the working-class presence that both landlords and tenants sought to exclude.77 The authors of the tableaux and physiologies underscored the contemporaneity of the portihre, who in their view personified the modern apartment house. Taxile Delord, in a physiologie entitled Paris-Portihre, wrote that "the portihre is a very recent creation, a product of modern civilization."78 She was a "modern creation," wrote James Rousseau in 1841, like the "houses populated by a large number of tenants ... that people build nowadays."79

Urban literature characterized the portihre as an adept observer: her duties as mail distributor, rent collector, and maid gave her an intimate and composite overview of the building's individual parts that perfected the totalizing yet local vision of the Parisian microcosm sought after by the authors of the tableaux . Skill at reading the city was not the only characteristic the portihre had in common with the authors of the physiologies . They shared a liminal class position: the portihre came from the working classes but lived among the bourgeoisie, worked as a servant

but had the power to choose tenants and demand rents, while the authors of the physiologies were primarily lower middle-class men of letters who parlayed their skills at reading a range of modern types into cultural capital. Writers did not explicitly acknowledge their resemblance to the portihre, but their satirical portrayals of her can be read as defensive attempts to distinguish between acceptable and unacceptable social climbing during a period of intense class mobility, as well as between their culturally endorsed interpretive activities and those of the portihre, whose information gathering was denigrated as feminized prying and gossipcommirages .80

The tableaux made the apartment house into an object and means of urban observation and the physiologies made the portihre a stand-in for the apartment house: the portihre was thus both a prime object of urban observation and embodied the activity of observing. The physiologie of the portihre situated her at the intersection of the exterior street and the interior home, while physiologies as a genre assumed that external activities penetrated an individual's soul and mind, then reemerged at the body's surface as a set of typed expressions, behaviors, mannerisms, and physical signs.81 The portihre was herself a type, whose labor marked her appearance, but her topographical situation (at the door, in the stairwell and vestibule, shuttling between the apartment and the street, and even peering out of the space of the page) also emblematized the key locus of physiognomythe point where external and internal coincided (figs. 7, 8, 9).82

Physiologists represented the porter as a personification of their own project of rendering the city "legible" by describing her as an Asmodeus figure, a knowing urban observer and an expert reader of physiognomies. Rousseau wrote that in terms of her "topographical position," the portihre is "first in the house" and "knows how to read physiognomies admirably."83 Other writers similarly identified the portihre as a figure for the processes of reading and writing. In Henry Monnier's play Le Roman chez la portihre, the author identified himself with the portihre by playing her in drag (reversing Janin's figure of a female imagination dressed in Asmodeus's cloak) and mocked the portihre 's obsession with finishing her novel by contrasting her desire to read with the constant interruptions of tenants ringing the bell to be let in.84 Writers endowed the portihre with authorial omniscience, placing her in the allegorical ranks of destiny and the fates: "It's hard to believe how much occult power is attributed to the portihre, " wrote Rousseau; "she plays the role of destiny in our lives." He entitled his eleventh chapter "On the Portihre 's

Figure 7
The portihre  as voyeur and spy, examining the hidden
contents of a letter. Honori Daumier, illustration
from James Rousseau,  Physiologie de la portihre
(Paris: Aubert, 1841).

Figure 8
The portihre  peers through a window and out of the page,
with her fingers grasping a letter illuminated as a windowsill.
Honori Daumier, illustration from James Rousseau,
Physiologie de la portihre  (Paris: Aubert, 1841).

Figure 9
The portihre  on the stairs, sweeping dirt onto the tenant below
her, who has forgotten to give her the porter's customary New
Year's Day tip. Honori Daumier, "Un Locataire qui a eu un oubli
le 1er janvier" (1847). Plate 28 of the series  Locataires et propriitaires
(Tenants and landlords) from Delteil,  Peintre-graveur
(Paris, 1926), plate 1622.

Influence on Everything in Life and on Lots of Other Things Besides That" and began it, "I've said it once and I'll say it again: the portihre plays the role of Destiny on earth. She can, according to her whim, make your life sweet or turn your existence into a premature hell."85 Eughne Scribe asked rhetorically in his one-act comedy La Loge du portier (1823),

Who knows the news
Of the whole neighborhood?
In faithful accounts
Who will publish it all?
. . . . . . . . .
It's our portihre,
Who knows all, who sees all,
Hears all, is everywhere.86

Porters were not exclusively female, and Parisian chroniclers also attributed acute visual power to male portiers . Jacques Raphael, in Le livre des cent-et-un, used language almost identical to Rousseau's when he wrote that the portier "admirably possesses what we could call topographical knowledge of every apartment in the building [maison ]" and labeled the portier "the Argus of the building.... [H]e knows your habits ... he penetrates into the most secret folds of your private life."87 The reference to Argus recalls Janin's characterization of the tableaux 's multiple authorship and the city's multiple scenes: here the portier has an eye in every apartment because metaphorically he has thousands of eyes.

Writers evaluated the ocular powers of male and female porters very differently, however, indicating that their uneasiness about the powers of working-class porters in general was inflected by a particular hostility to the female porter. Commentators suggested that the spying of her male counterpart was official men's work by linking it to despised but legitimate forms of government surveillance and to the invisibility proper to the police. A contributor to the 1839 Paris au XIXe sihcle, for example, invoked the portier 's "occult power" and "shadowy power ... to know everything and everyone, to be aware of every detail ... to read the lives of ten families like an open book ... to be feared like a god or like a police commissioner."88 Such analogies to a deity or the police placed the male porter at the invisible center of a complex web of surveillance that could easily extend over the entire city.89

The female porter's dominion, however, was overt rather than shadowy, limited to the immediate realm of her apartment building and tied to her overwhelming physical presence within it. She entered the political arena only through a metaphorical miniaturization that transformed her apartment building into a small kingdom:

In all second- and third-class apartment buildings [maisons de second et de troisihme ordre ], the most influential person is without a doubt the portihre .... She has the upper floors completely in her power [sous sa domination immidiate ], is authorized to give people notice ... if their political opin-

Figure 10
The portihre  and her female circle. Honorh Daumier,
illustration from James Rousseau,  Physiologie de la
portihre  (Paris: Aubert, 1841).

ions aren't in sympathy with hers.... [and] reigns like a sovereign ... she has survived all the landlords who succeeded one another.90

The portihre in this passage has a sovereign monarch's visible power but lacks the police's invisible stealth, and she can exercise that power only within the apartment building, within a domination immidiate . The characterization of the portihre as grotesque and almost monstrous stemmed partly from the disparity between her quasi-divine powers and the minuscule space in which she exercised them, since the tableaux rarely showed the portihre outside the vicinity of her apartment building and described her own apartment, the loge, as hyperbolically tiny. The portihre 's ambitions and powers strained the bonds of her location.

Like the "blue-stocking" and the feminists of the 1840s, the portihre became a figure for a female society that existed apart from heterosexual exchange, as well as for an inverted, "women-on-top" domestic sys-

Figure 11
The portihre  and her cats. Honori Daumier, frontispiece to James
Rousseau,  Physiologie de la portihre  (Paris: Aubert, 1841).

tem.91 The physiologists associated the portihre with a powerful circle of women who transformed the apartment building into a space permeated and governed by a network of female servants, female tenants, the portihre 's children, almost inevitably daughters, and her many cats, who emphasized the portihre 's femininity by functioning as both generic symbols of women and as slang references to female genitalia (figs. 10, 11).92 And the texts that showed the portihre running her building with an iron hand and a sharp tongue also showed her dominating her husband, who typically made no sound, took up no space, and worked at home as either a cobbler or tailor, trades that had been feminized by the 1840s.93 Monnier wrote, "she completely dominates her husband" and Rousseau emphasized the portihre 's inverted conjugal relations: "When the portihre has a husband, he's just another piece of furniture in her lodge [loge ]. In the portihre 's household more than in any other the scepter has been conquered by the distaff. The poor husband is a purely passive being ... and if people call him a porter, it's only because he's the husband of one."94 Whereas Rousseau earlier described the portihre as personifying

the entire building, her husband's person is an inanimate portion of the building, a piece of the portihre 's property"just another item of furniture in her loge ." Rousseau's reference to the scepter and the distaff invokes classic symbols of male and female power, political and domestic rule. The distaff that prevails in the portihre 's household, however, is not simply domestic. It casts its net over the public sphere, since the portihre 's work within the apartment house defines her husband's public identity.

The authors of the tableaux and physiologies represented the portihre as, like themselves, an adept practitioner of urban observation, but also as a barrier frustrating men's visual access to the apartment building, and by extension to the city itself. As we have seen, the literature of Paris ultimately suggested that their authors cared so intensely about keeping traffic fluid in both the home and the street that they extended fluidity to women, on the condition that women participate in heterosexual exchanges within those urban spaces. The tableaux depicted both the Parisian street and the apartment house as sites of display, voyeurism, and heterosexual exchange, whose open structures ensured women's availability to men, even in the city's potentially private apartments. The only significant threat to male enjoyment of the city was the portihre, the apartment building's live-in caretaker. As a relatively independent woman who replaced heterosexual conjugality with powerful female homosocial networks and who controlled the commerce between domestic spaces and public thoroughfares, the portihre came to symbolize an obstruction to men's heterosexual gaze precisely because she shared, even surpassed, their ability to penetrate and know the apartment building. In the next chapter, we will see how Balzac, a frequent contributor to the tableaux and the author of several physiologies, took up the portihre 's challenge to the male observer's urban omniscience in one of his final novels, Le Cousin Pons .

Continues...

Excerpted from Apartment Storiesby Sharon Marcus Copyright © 1999 by Sharon Marcus. Excerpted by permission.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.

Edition details

• Publisher: University of California Press
• Publication date: 1999
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0520217268
• ISBN 13: 9780520217263
• Binding: Paperback
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 336