Essays. Catscan Columns

Fuck yes you are. Of course you are. I mean, just *look* at it!

In the all-too-immortal words of the Brothers Goncourt: "Men like ourselves require a woman with little breeding, small education, gay and natural in spirit, to charm or please us as would an agreeable animal to which we might become attached. But if a mistress had a veneer of breeding, or art, or of literature, and wanted to talk on an equal footing with us about our thoughts and our feeling for beauty; if she were ambitious to become the companion of our taste or of the book gestating within us, she would become for us as unbearable as a piano out of tune -- and very soon antipathetic."

Nadar reports his last view of Jea

Here's Theophile Gautier on page 113. He was an extremely hip and happening guy, Gautier. There's a lot to be learned from him. He looks very much like a bouncer in a biker bar. This beefy dude is the ultrarefined escapist lily-clutching Romantic aesthete who coined the dictum "only what is useless is beautiful" in his *Mademoiselle Maupin,* one of the great indecent books of the nineteenth century. Gautier was a major pioneer of fantasy as a genre, an arty arch-Romantic who wrote about Orientalism and female vampires and mystically revived female mummies and tasty female succubi who jump off the embroidery in ancient tapestries to fuck the brains out of undergraduate XIXth-cent. lit-majors, and yet Nadar's portrait makes it utterly clear that Gautier is a guy who could swiftly kick the shit out of nine men out of ten.

At age nineteen, Gautier led the howling Romantic contingent at the premiere of Victor Hugo's *Hernani* in 1830, the public brawl that marked the end of NeoClassicism as a theatrical doctrine; and you can see from his portrait that Gautier wasn't doing anything so mild as "marking" the end of classicism, he was publicly breaking its back and was proud and happy to do it.

Gautier's table-talk is the best stuff in the famously gossipy *Journals* of the Brothers Goncourt. By the 1860s Gautier had become the most powerful critic in Paris; a man who wrote operas and ballets and plays and short stories and novels and travel books and poetry and about a million crap newspaper columns, and yet he found the time to eat hash and dominate salons and throw monster parties at the house of his common-law wife that had, among other attractions, actual Chinese people in them. Gautier was writing for the government organ *Le Moniteur* as a theatre critic and he was the lion of Mathilde Bonaparte's circle, Mathilde being Napoleon III's cousin and the Second Empire's officially sanctioned token bluestocking liberal. Having reached the height of Bohemian public acceptance Gautier ground out his copy in public and in private he lived in open scandal and bitched about the government every chance he got. The stuff he says is unbelievable, it's a cynical head-trip torrent worthy of Philip K. Dick.

Picture this: it's 1860. Civil War is just breaking out in the USA. Meanwhile, Theophile Gautier's at a literary di

Claudin, shocked, babbles something eminently forgettable.

"You see," Gautier continues suavely, "the immortality of the soul, free will -- it is very pleasant to be concerned with these things before one is twenty-two years old; but afterward such subjects are no longer seemly. One ought then to be concerned to have a mistress who does not get on one's nerves; to have a decent place to live; to have a few passable pictures on the wall. And most of all, to be writing well. That is what is important: sentences that hang together... and a few metaphors. Yes, a few metaphors. They embellish life."

Gautier divided his time between the literary salons of Mathilde Bonaparte and La Paiva. La Paiva was a courtesan, a true grande horizontale, a demimondaine who had battled her way to the top through sheer chilly grit and professional self-abnegation. She scared the hell out of the Brothers Goncourt, who paint her as an aberrant harpy, but Mathilde was jealous of her nonetheless, and complained that the litterateurs made so much of bluestocking demimondaines that the Imperial princess herself felt unlucky not to have been born "a lustful drab."

In the last years of his life -- he died in 1872 -- Gautier took a sinecure as Mathilde's official librarian, something of an apology on her part for not being able to wedge him into the Academy or get him a sinecure post in the Empire's rubber-stamp Senate. Gautier was just that one shade too Bohemian to manage the conventional slate of honors; but he was not quite so Bohemian that he wasn't of real use to Mathilde. Mathilde did not have the direct social power of her cousin's wife, the Empress Eugenie, a woman Mathilde cordially despised; but if Mathilde couldn't have the court painters, the ladies-in-waiting, and the full imperial etiquette, she could nevertheless reign as Queen of Bluestockings over the literary counterculture. Mathilde liked books, she liked painters, she liked music; she was a moderately bright and cultured woman who could follow an intelligent conversation and even lead one sometimes; but she knew how to guard the interests of her family as well. The Goncourts recorded her tantrum as a salon favorite joined the staff of an opposition newspaper.

"He owes everything to me," Mathilde screamed. "And what did I ask in return? I didn't ask him to give up a single conviction. All I asked was that he keep away from those people on the *Temps.*"

The "opposition" established by Mathilde's countercultural noblesse oblige was one of the guises assumed by power itself; to pay off Theophile Gautier was to nourish the serpent to one's bosom in the hope of stroking it to sleep. It was a risky game, but their lives were risky. The cultural Entente Cordiale between the Court and Bohemia didn't have to hold together forever; it only had to hold together long enough. The entire structure of the Empire itself collapsed in 1870, crushed in the Franco-Prussian War.

The street may find its own uses for things -- but Things find their own uses for the street. The Rue Jules Verne is a two-way avenue, a place where monde and undermonde can embrace illicitly and swap infections. While Nadar rose in his balloons to document the city with his cameras, Napoleon III's Parisian prefect, Baron Haussman, demolished and rebuilt the landscape below him. It's thanks to Haussman that we know Paris today as a city of wide, straight, magnificent boulevards -- the Champ d'Elysees is one. For Nadar and his contemporaries the Haussmanization of the city was the truest sign of its modernization. Nadar's photographic studio was located in one of these new streets. He dominated the entire second floor of a new building in the latest taste.

Haussma