Sound Memory: Paris Street Cries in Balzac's Pere Goriot - Project MUSE
←
→
Page content transcription
If your browser does not render page correctly, please read the page content below
Sound Memory: Paris Street Cries in Balzac's Pere Goriot
Aimeé Boutin
French Forum, Volume 30, Number 2, Spring 2005, pp. 67-78 (Article)
Published by University of Pennsylvania Press
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1353/frf.2005.0029
For additional information about this article
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/186742
Access provided at 6 Apr 2020 14:42 GMT with no institutional affiliation050 bout ff30-2 (67-78) 7/25/05 10:04 AM Page 67
Aimée Boutin
Sound Memory
Paris Street Cries in Balzac’s Père Goriot
At the heart of Le Père Goriot, on the eve of one of “les jours les plus
extraordinaires de l’histoire de la maison” (3:91),1 is an episode in
which Madame Vauquer’s boarders, flush with Bordeaux wine, recite
and bellow the cries of Parisian street peddlers at dinner. Rastignac has
apparently committed himself to two mutually exclusive romantic
plots, either of which would secure his fortune, by both courting Vic-
torine Taillefer and accepting Goriot’s offer of a garçonnière. That
night, Taillefer fils will be murdered, enabling Rastignac to obtain Vic-
torine’s dowry and share the profits with Vautrin, the mastermind
behind the deal. This will be Vautrin’s last meal at the Pension Vauquer
before he is unmasked and arrested as Trompe-la-Mort.
At this moment, as each intrigue is wound tighter, it may seem odd
that the lodgers are imitating street peddlers, those itinerant merchants
who circulated among the faubourgs crying out their wares. Yet this
short scene, which stages Vautrin’s relationship to the other main char-
acters, relates to a long tradition of discourse on street cries dating back
to the Middle Ages. Representations of street cries had renewed appeal
in the mid- to late-nineteenth-century writings of, among others, Jo-
seph Mainzer and Victor Fournel. Seen in this broader context and in
the context of Balzac’s other references to modern Paris, the street cries
in Le Père Goriot draw out the novel’s ethnographic discussion of the
sounds and class dynamics characteristic of early-nineteenth-century
Paris. Like the ethnographic literature with which it shares a common
interest in the crieurs de Paris as expressions of Parisian identity, Hon-
oré de Balzac’s novel reconstructs a folkloric aural past and shows the
extent to which sound defines identity.
From the Middle Ages onward, chapmen or colporteurs traveled
from village to village advertising their wares in the streets. Each trade050 bout ff30-2 (67-78) 7/25/05 10:04 AM Page 68
68 / French Forum/Spring 2005/Vol. 30, No. 2
had a distinctive cry, a combination of words and characteristic tune,
such that buyers could identify the itinerant merchant by a sound
marker; however, street criers are frequently conflated into a broad cat-
egory of peddlers. Although originally colporteur signified the official
profession of the itinerant vendor of broadsheets (papiers volants) and
images, the word came to designate all hawkers.2 By the eighteenth cen-
tury, colporteurs were viewed with increased suspicion, because they
sold goods illegally, sold defective merchandise, or spread malicious
and subversive information, and laws were created to regulate hawk-
ing.3 The evolution of street criers’ representation parallels the seden-
tary bourgeois’ increased suspicion toward lower-class transience,
marginality and criminality. Street cries eventually become a metonym
for the working class as a whole, now defined by raucousness and crim-
inality as opposed to bourgeois silence and respectability.
The Cris de Paris refer both to the historical practice of peddling
and to an art (either written, visual or aural) form that dates back to
Guillaume de la Villeneuve’s thirteenth-century poem “Les Crieries de
Paris,” and to sixteenth-century woodcuts.4 A modern revival of inter-
est in the Cris de Paris from as early as the 1820s coincided with a
gradual decline in the practice. As Balzac and Fournel were keenly
aware, the reorganization of space following the urban renewal begun
under Napoleon I and spearheaded by Baron Haussmann in the 1850s
was changing sound culture, and street criers were increasingly con-
fined to the older neighborhoods of Paris. Their perceived disappear-
ance, and their concomitant association with Vieux Paris, was likely
what motivated nineteenth-century writers engaged in Parisian ethnog-
raphy. These ethnographers drew on the genre set out in Louis-
Sébastien Mercier’s Tableau de Paris to document their societies and
capture what was new and changing. Balzac heeded this documentary
impulse by contributing to an evolving body of littérature pano-
ramique5; moreover, his novels, especially Le Père Goriot, can be pro-
ductively read as a folkloric record or a literary ethnography within the
tradition of the Tableau de Paris.6
In Balzac, as in the other ethnographers I will refer to, the discourse
on street cries reveals the mixed perception of peddlers as both objects
of mistrust and of nostalgia. In “Ce qui disparaît de Paris,” published
in Le Diable à Paris in 1845, for instance, Balzac describes the petits
métiers that have disappeared in the last thirty years, and bemoans nos-050 bout ff30-2 (67-78) 7/25/05 10:04 AM Page 69
Boutin: Sound Memory / 69
talgically the loss of this industrious culture at the hands of the capi-
talist bourgeoisie.7 Balzac’s observations echo what was fast becom-
ing a cliché in the discourse on the Vieux Paris. In a similar spirit,
Joseph Mainzer catalogs the disappearing types of peddlers in Les
Français peints par eux-mêmes (1840–42). In his essay on Les Cris de
Paris, Mainzer nostalgically equates the sounds of hawkers with the
sounds of childhood: “L’enfant de Paris a grandi au milieu des
marchands d’habits . . . il a été bercé avec leurs tendres mélodies, il les
a sucées avec le lait de sa nourrice.”8 This intimate familiarity with city
noises defines the Parisian just as the distinctiveness of street criers
characterizes the capital city for Mainzer. It is easy to see how the ref-
erence to street cries in Le Père Goriot reinforces the Parisian identity
of Madame Vauquer’s boarders and becomes a sign of the city of Paris
itself. In Balzac’s novel as in the ethnographic literature, references to
the Cris de Paris act to aestheticize the working classes, turning them
into timeless, peaceful and picturesque workers. Their shady past,
however, is never fully forgotten. Balzac embodies these tensions and
contradictions in his representations of the lower classes as picturesque
objects of nostalgia and threatening noise producers in Le Père Goriot.
In a novel set between new and old upper class neighborhoods, the
Chaussée d’Antin and the Faubourg Saint-Germain, the street cries
episode is one of the few that focuses on the daily life of the lower class
in the Faubourg Saint-Marceau. Elsewhere in the Comédie humaine,
Balzac describes the itinerant working class in passing, but rarely, if
ever, gives them a significant role to play in his fictional society. The
lowest classes and their neighborhoods are often seen through bour-
geois eyes with revulsion. When Derville visits Chabert’s domicile, for
example, he describes the Faubourg Saint-Marceau as an “ignoble
spectacle” since “. . . à Paris la misère ne se grandit que par son hor-
reur” (3:337). That same horror comes across in Illusions perdues,
when Lucien de Rubempré portrays the street population of Paris as:
la puante escouade des claqueurs et des vendeurs de billets, tous gens à casquettes,
à pantalons mûrs, à redingotes râpées, à figures patibulaires, bleuâtres, verdâtres,
boueuses, rabougries, à barbes longues, aux yeux féroces et patelins tout à la fois,
horrible population qui vit et foisonne sur les boulevards de Paris, qui, le matin,
vend des chaînes de sûreté, des bijoux en or pour vingt-cinq sous, et qui claque
sous les lustres le soir, qui se plie enfin à toutes les fangeuses nécessités de Paris.
(5:470)050 bout ff30-2 (67-78) 7/25/05 10:04 AM Page 70
70 / French Forum/Spring 2005/Vol. 30, No. 2
Representations of the working class such as this betray the prejudices
of the bourgeois observer that Balzac essentially was. Balzac’s narra-
tor sees the proletariat mired in poverty with horror and mistrust; they
appear indistinguishably as poor and criminal.9
It comes as little surprise then that the street cries dinner scene is
described from the vantage point of a bourgeois.
Ce fut des rires féroces, au milieu desquels éclatèrent quelques imitations des
diverses voix d’animaux. L’employé au Muséum s’étant avisé de reproduire un cri
de Paris qui avait de l’analogie avec le miaulement du chat amoureux, aussitôt huit
voix beuglèrent simultanément les phrases suivantes:—A repasser les
couteaux!—Mo-ron pour les p’tits oiseaulx!—Voilà le plaisir, mesdames, voilà le
plaisir!—A raccommoder la faïence!—A la barque, à la barque!—Battez vos
femmes, vos habits!—Vieux habits, vieux galons, vieux chapeaux à vendre!—A
la cerise, à la douce! (3:202, my emphasis)
Raucous animality characterizes the bellowing and meowing noises
made by the boarders. Their singing lacks rhyme and reason, “un
tapage à casser la tête, une conversation pleine de coq-à-l’âne”
(3:202). The knife sharpener’s cry is followed by the bird peddler’s
and by the vendor of plaisir or oublie (waffle cones); then come the
cries of the earthenware mender, and of the hawkers of oysters, used
clothes and cherries. When Bianchon exclaims “marchand de para-
pluies!” with an affected nasality, he may well be imitating the accent
of itinerant peddlers from the Provinces who have come to the capital
to make money (not unlike the student-boarders). The boarders’ imi-
tation of street cries here evidences more of the language games, espe-
cially “la plaisanterie de parler en rama,” that they play on a regular
basis at the pension. Indeed, the sequence of cries is playful and arbi-
trary, one cry soliciting another without appeal to subject matter, like
a “coq-à-l’âne.” This arbitrariness reflects not only the historical prac-
tice of hawking merchandise in the streets, but largely the bourgeois
appropriation of this practice in the visual-aural art form known as the
Cris de Paris. Traditional Cris de Paris typically present a series of
randomly selected (or in some cases alphabetical) street vendors in a
grid or checkerboard. While the presentation avoids any hierarchy of
the trades depicted, it does however reveal a need to organize what
might otherwise be overly chaotic.10
In the novel, the arbitrary sequence of cries amounts to noise, dis-
orderly sounds that are perceived as discordant and annoyingly exces-050 bout ff30-2 (67-78) 7/25/05 10:04 AM Page 71
Boutin: Sound Memory / 71
sive. The two colloquial expressions “casser la tête” and “coq-à-l’âne”
further connote the lodgers’ noise as popular and common. The lower
classes, loud and animal-like, are implicitly contrasted with the silent
and civilized bourgeoisie for whom the Cris de Paris make no sense
and sound like mere cacophony. The passage here recalls Mercier’s
Tableau de Paris, in which he describes the bourgeois’ desire to sepa-
rate himself from the noisy servant class:
Non, il n’y a point de ville au monde où les crieurs et les crieuses des rues aient
une voix plus aigre et plus perçante. Il faut les entendre élancer leur voix pardessus
les toits; leur gosier surmonte le bruit et le tapage des carrefours. [. . .] Tous ces
cris discordans forment un ensemble, dont on n’a point d’idée lorsqu’on ne l’a
point entendu. L’idiôme de ces crieurs ambulans est tel, qu’il faut en faire une
étude pour bien distinguer ce qu’il signifie.11
Mercier, here, makes clear the relationship between academic scholar-
ship and mastery of the lower classes’ troubling difference in a way that
will prove influential to later commentators. Mainzer and Fournel also
refer to the need to “mettre quelque ordre dans un sujet si compliqué,
dans cet immense tintamarre de cris. . . .”12 Balzac’s description thus
appeals directly to the class dynamics at work in this clichéd discourse.
Surprisingly, when the Balzacian narrator’s attention shifts to
Vautrin, the “tapage” acquires form, musicality and coherence as it is
transformed into “un véritable opéra que Vautrin conduisait comme un
chef d’orchestre” (3:202). Although the Museum employee initiates
the singing, it is Vautrin who prepares the scene by getting the dinner
guests roiled up (“[il] sut mettre en train tous les convives” [3:200])
and providing the “petite bouteillorama de vin de Bordeaux” (3:201).
Vautrin stands apart from the boarders’ hilarity and the general disor-
der induced by their drunken revelry. From this outsider’s position, the
street cries coalesce into an opera and their charm becomes palpable.
Thus Vautrin takes lower-class ‘noise’ and turns it into ‘art’ in a man-
ner parallel to Balzac’s own aesthetic appropriation of street cries in
the novel. We see the same ‘poetic turn’ in other texts on street cries.
While Mainzer and Fournel somewhat ambiguously refer to “la dis-
cordante et criarde mélopée des milles cris de Paris” and to “[le] caril-
lon monstre,” others relate the Cris to plainsong and Gregorian chant.
Among other theatrical and musical productions based on the Cris,
Georges Kastner was inspired to produce a symphony whose score is
included in his volume on Les Voix de Paris (1857).13050 bout ff30-2 (67-78) 7/25/05 10:04 AM Page 72
72 / French Forum/Spring 2005/Vol. 30, No. 2
By transforming what was initially cacophony into orchestrated
music, Balzac capitalizes on the undecided nature of the head-splitting-
racket-cum-opera, and ultimately elevates the street cry to new heights
of controlled artistry. Such artistic appropriation attempts to neutralize
the political threat of les petits métiers by turning peddlers into frozen
types in a picturesque, folkloric archive of Vieux Paris. Le Père Goriot
performs this neutralization much more subtly than the later ethno-
graphic discourse on the subject, for the repressed undercurrents of
peddling—criminality, social unrest, revolution—are merely tem-
porarily suppressed. They resurface of course when the concertmaster
Vautrin is unmasked.
In the figure of Vautrin, the novel plays out the criminal underside
of peddling to contradict the myth of the peddler as ahistorical, peace-
ful and picturesque. His marginality and performative identity become
apparent as soon as he is apprehended. Exposed as a convict, he is
accused of passing for a bourgeois (3:222). His criminality runs deeper
than his past actions, for as a student of Jean-Jacques Rousseau who
is disillusioned by the failures of the social contract and who protests
against a gangrened society, he stands for a philosophy of social
revolution:
[Vautrin devint] le type de toute une nation dégénérée, d’un peuple sauvage et
logique, brutal et souple . . . [un homme] qui proteste contre les profondes décep-
tions du contrat social, comme dit Jean-Jacques, dont [il se] glorifie d’être l’élève.
Enfin [il] est seul contre le gouvernement avec son tas de tribunaux, de gendarmes,
de budgets, et [il] les roule. (3:219–220)
Vautrin’s rebellious, even revolutionary, spirit allies him with crimi-
nally suspicious peddlers. Definitions of the colporteur, as discussed
above, frequently stressed that they are persons of bad faith who sell
merchandise illegally. In Le Nouveau Paris, the sequel to Tableau de
Paris, Mercier goes so far as to emphasize the ability of the peddler—
especially the newspaper hawker or town crier—to circumvent cen-
sorship and to control and proliferate the word. “Vainement a-t-on
voulu imposer silence à ces commentateurs. Ils se prétendent des
hérauts privilégiés: on enchaînerait plutôt le son que leurs person-
nes.”14 After the French Revolution, considered by some “the golden
age of peddlers,” street singing became inherently subversive.15 It is in
fact, as we shall see, through the indomitable nature of sound that the050 bout ff30-2 (67-78) 7/25/05 10:04 AM Page 73
Boutin: Sound Memory / 73
novel best conveys the subversiveness of the protean Jacques Collin
(a.k.a. Vautrin).
Vautrin peddles sounds in multiple ways. Diabolically eloquent, he
is a mastermind of linguistic manipulation and language play. He ped-
dles ideas, words, and money by circulating them; he has already sold
Rastignac on the necessity and means of social advancement at what-
ever cost. Like the peddler, Vautrin manipulates language and song to
sell his plans most effectively. Rastignac even compares Vautrin to a
female peddler when he realizes that “la parole de Vautrin, quelque
cynique qu’elle fût, s’était logée dans son coeur comme dans le sou-
venir d’une vierge se grave le profil ignoble d’une vieille marchande à
la toilette, qui lui a dit: ‘Or et amour à flots!’” (3:149–150). Compar-
ing Vautrin to a “vieille marchande à la toilette” not only feminizes
him, but equates him with the marchand d’habits. In his essay “Le
Marchand d’habits,” Mainzer in fact emphasizes that this peddler isn’t
just any peddler: “Ce qui rend surtout remarquables les marchands
d’habits dans la grande famille des crieurs, c’est qu’ils en sont les fi-
nauds, les intrigants, les roués . . .”16 The used clothing hawker employs
language persuasively to obtain the merchandise at the lowest cost
from the seller, however destitute. He then sells the scraps that he has
amended and transformed (“[il] métamorphos[e] [ces misérables vieil-
leries] en nouveautés de la plus belle apparence” [255]). The marchand
d’habits is not what he seems: apparently miserable, in reality he has
amassed such a secret fortune that, as Mainzer imagines, he might dis-
appear one day and resurface as landed gentry in a commune near
Paris. Similarly, Vautrin, who wears the mask of an honest bourgeois,
puts a glittery spin on the shady truths he markets to Rastignac in the
hope of securing a profit for himself. Vautrin traffics in meanings, so
that he is indeed much more than meets the ear.
Vautrin also resembles the peddler in his tendency to view his crim-
inal actions in poetic terms. “Mes poésies, je ne les écris pas,” he
claims, “elles consistent en actions et en sentiments” (3:141).17
Vautrin’s tendency to embody an entire degenerate nation even likens
him to an “infernal poem” (3:219). Similarly, contemporary ethno-
graphic texts such as “Le Marchand d’habits” frequently compare the
hawker to the poet.18 Vautrin’s “poetic” sensibility is evident in his
propensity for quotation, especially musical quotation, and the pen-
chant for word play that he shares with the other boarders.050 bout ff30-2 (67-78) 7/25/05 10:04 AM Page 74
74 / French Forum/Spring 2005/Vol. 30, No. 2
Concertmaster and poet, Vautrin is associated with sound through-
out the novel; his use of musical references is of special interest to any-
one examining his significance as a character. The “véritable opéra” of
the Paris street cries, in fact, occurs within a series of references to
music, which confirms the scene’s central role in the novel’s use of
sounds. In her narratological and performative reading of the operatic
references in Le Père Goriot, Carol Mossman argues that the incorpo-
ration of vaudeville lyrics delimits “spaces and fields of understand-
ing” that structure the characters’ relations to each other and situate the
reader as audience according to operatic conventions (arias and even
duets are intended for the audience alone).19 In the scenes surrounding
the Cris de Paris episode, Mossman shows how operatic references
have proleptic meaning for the reader that remains obscure to the char-
acters. For example, as the boarders are sitting down to eat, Vautrin’s
late entrance is announced by his singing an air from Grétry and
Sedaine’s opéra-comique, Richard Cœur de Lion followed by a cou-
plet of his signature song, “J’ai longtemps parcouru le monde” from
Nicolo and Etienne’s opera-comique La Joconde ou les coureurs
d’aventures (3:200).
Only after Vautrin’s arrest do readers come to a fuller understand-
ing of these references. We eventually deduce that Vautrin’s favorite
refrain (“J’ai longtemps parcouru le monde / Et l’on m’a vu de toute
part”) ironically suggests his worldliness, since, as a man incognito, he
was not visible by all until his exposure by the law. The popular air
from Richard Cœur de Lion that was adopted as the Royalist anthem
during the French Revolution—“Ô Richard, ô mon roi / L’univers t’a-
bandonne”—also foretells the fate of Vautrin who, like Richard and
Louis, is abandoned by his supporters at Madame Vauquer’s board-
inghouse. Moreover, at the moment of his arrest, Vautrin’s descrip-
tion—the “royauté que lui donnaient le cynisme de ses pensées”—and
his “gestes de lion” (3:218) recall the characteristics of Richard the
Lion-Hearted. The following musical reference also has more signifi-
cance for the reader than for the character, Victorine, who overhears it
but is excluded from understanding. Before leaving for a performance
of Pixérécourt’s melodrama Le Mont Sauvage (3:203), Vautrin sings a
romance from Scribe and Delavigne’s vaudeville, La Somnambule, to
the drugged and sleeping Rastignac. Whereas Victorine does not appre-
ciate the significance of the reference, the reader infers both Vautrin’s050 bout ff30-2 (67-78) 7/25/05 10:04 AM Page 75
Boutin: Sound Memory / 75
intention to go forth with his murderous plans (all obstacles now neu-
tralized) and his sexual interest in the Endymion-like Rastignac that
motivates in part these plans that would bond him to the young man.
If, as Mossman suggests, operatic signs are proleptic, then the
meaning of the street cries episode carries beyond the strict confines of
the Trompe-la-Mort plot. In addition to its narrative or structural
importance, the scene in question sets the socio-cultural and ideologi-
cal tenor of the novel. Consistent with the documentary impulse of the
Tableau de Paris genre, the sounds in the novel, particularly the oper-
atic references, contribute to the recreation of Restoration Parisian
society. As Patrick Berthier has argued, theatrical allusion engages the
spectator-reader’s memory of ephemera and current events, thus rein-
forcing the Realist illusion.20 Frequent references to fashionable
vaudevilles unknown to audiences outside Paris, he argues, create in
the novel “cet appel constant de Balzac à une mémoire visuelle ou audi-
tive qui nous est interdite, et dont l’impossibilité même nous oblige à
faire preuve d’une constante imagination rétrospective” (288). The
street cries scene is one such episode of lost sound that means nothing
to the typical reader today. Ephemeral sounds reinforce the novel’s
realism through reference to practices localized in time and space
(1820–30s Paris) and doomed to extinction. As Berthier reminds us,
the possibility that these practices may have lost their meaning and thus
solicit the readers’ nostalgic sensibility is part of the essential dynamic
of Le Père Goriot, a novel about loss and change.
Reading the episode in which the boarders recite the Cris de Paris
in the context of nineteenth-century writings on peddling enriches our
interpretation of what might otherwise appear an unintelligible, or at
the very least a trivial digression at a major turning point in the novel.
More than a picturesque detail that captures the sounds of Paris in the
1820s and 30s at a time when the beginnings of urban renewal would
mean substantial alterations to the sonic environment, the episode
dialogues with, and in some measure complicates, the popular and pro-
lific discourse on street-crying and on lower class raucousness elabo-
rated in the period’s literary ethnographies and in Balzac’s own “Ce
qui disparaît de Paris.” Le Père Goriot both illustrates middle-class
ideology by discounting and marginalizing the rue Sainte-Geneviève,
its population and its traditions, and, at the same time, undermines this
ideology by suggesting its historical and aesthetic worth as well as its050 bout ff30-2 (67-78) 7/25/05 10:04 AM Page 76
76 / French Forum/Spring 2005/Vol. 30, No. 2
revolutionary energy. On the surface, Balzac appears to repeat pre-
vailing clichés about noisy peddlers; but on closer reading, the novel
presents the complex relationship between sound and class. The scene
also stages the relationship between other boarders and Vautrin, whose
characterization draws freely on the metaphor of peddling. Moreover,
taken in combination with the musical references in the novel, the ref-
erence to street cries suggests the ideological, performative and narra-
tive functions of sound in Le Père Goriot. Balzac uses sound to foretell
outcomes and shape identity, that of his characters and of the city of
Paris itself.
Florida State University
Notes
1
References are to the Pléiade edition of La Comédie humaine edited by Pierre-Georges Cas-
tex (Paris: Gallimard, 1976–81), and will follow in the text.
2
“COLPORTEUR. s. m. Il se dit de Petits marchands ambulants qui portent leurs marchandises
sur leur dos ou devant eux, dans des mannes, dans des caisses, etc. Ce colporteur va de ville en
ville. Il se dit également de Ceux qui crient et qui vendent dans les rues les bulletins, les arrêts,
etc., avec approbation de l’autorité (1:344).” Dictionnaire de l’Académie française, ARTFL Pro-
ject: Dictionnaire de l’Académie française, 6th Edition, 1835, University of Chicago, 14 Aug.
2002 http://duras.uchicago.edu/cgi-bin/ACAD1835.sh?WORD=colporteur>.
3
The entry for “colporteurs” in Diderot and d’Alembert’s Encyclopédie reads: “c’était anci-
ennement des gens de mauvaise foi qui rodoient de ville en ville, vendant et achetant [des]
marchandises, qu’on ne doit vendre qu’en plein marché” (3:660). “Colporteurs,” Encyclopédie,
ARTFL Project, University of Chicago, 14 Aug. 2002 http://colet.uchicago.edu/cgi-bin/
getobject_?a.21:218:0.projects/artflb//databases/artfl/encyclopedie/IMAGE. In 1767, the Conseil
decreed that hawkers needed to be licensed. Furthermore, the Paris lawyer Prévost de Saint-
Lucien noted in 1799 “that if criers were driven from their business, the cities would have far
worse problems with beggars.” As for night criers, they “were forced to give up their rounds
because a thief, Louis Dominique Cartouche, disguised his band of men as criers and thus got
access to homes which they then robbed” (quoted in Karen Beall, Kaufrufe und Strassenhändler:
eine Bibliographie / Cries And Itinerant Trades: A Bibliography [Hamburg: Hauswedell, 1975]
19). Alfred Franklin, in his late-nineteenth-century Dictionnaire historique des arts, métiers et
professions exercés dans Paris depuis le XIIIe siècle (Paris, 1906), also underscored the shady
nature of peddlers who trafficked in defective merchandise.
4
For illustrations, see Massin, Les Cris de la ville: commerces ambulants et petits métiers de
la rue (1985, New ed., Paris: Albin Michel, 1993); and Beall, Kaufrufe und Strassenhändler/Cries
and Itinerant trades. For more detailed information on the history of street-crying, see Vincent050 bout ff30-2 (67-78) 7/25/05 10:04 AM Page 77
Boutin: Sound Memory / 77
Milliot, Les Cris de Paris ou le peuple travesti: les représentations des petits métiers parisiens,
XVIe-XVIIIe siècles, preface by Daniel Roche (Paris: Publication de la Sorbonne, 1995).
5
The literature on Paris that flourished in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries is often
referred to as littérature physiologique or littérature panoramique (in reference to Walter Ben-
jamin’s Paris, capitale du XIXe siècle). In addition to Le Diable à Paris (“Ce qui disparaît de
Paris” and “Histoire et physiologie des boulevards de Paris”), Balzac contributed to Paris ou le
livre des cent et un and Les Français peints par eux-mêmes. He is also the author of Physiologie
de l’employé (1841) and Paris marié (1846).
6
In La Capitale des signes (Paris: Editions de la Maison des sciences de l’homme, 2001),
Karlheinz Stierle in fact interprets Balzac’s novel within the context of the myth of Paris created
by the Tableau de Paris genre, and has claimed that “Le Père Goriot est la plus achevée des appro-
priations de la ville [de Paris]” (266).
7
Balzac, “Ce qui disparaît de Paris,” Le Diable à Paris: Paris et les Parisiens: Mœurs et cou-
tumes, caractères et portraits des habitants de Paris. . . , ed. George Sand, P.-J. Stahl et al, vol.
1. (Paris: J. Hetzel, 1845–46).
8
Mainzer, “Les Cris de Paris,” Les Français peints par eux-mêmes. Encyclopédie morale du
dix-neuvième siècle, Vol. 4 (Paris: Curmer, 1841–50) 207.
9
In Classes laborieuses et classes dangereuses à Paris pendant la première moitié du XIXe
siècle (Paris: Plon, 1958), Louis Chevalier argues that Balzac does not distinguish these two
classes when he confuses criminality and poverty in the Comédie humaine (58–72); Chevalier
also discusses the influence of “la littérature pittoresque” (his term) and its types such as the ped-
dler—what I have called literary ethnography—on Balzac, see 476–82.
10
For a discussion of the iconography of Les Français peints par eux-mêmes and the tradi-
tion of the Cris de Paris, see Ségolène Le Men and Luce Abeles, Les Français peints par eux-
mêmes. Panorama social du XIXe siècle (Paris: Réunion des musées nationaux, 1993) 36–45.
11
Mercier, Louis-Sébastien, Tableau de Paris (Amsterdam: 1783–88) chapter 379, 67–68.
12
Mainzer, “Les Cris de Paris,” 204.
13
As early as the 1820s, the Cris de Paris are frequently subject to aesthetic appropriation.
Vaudevilles such as Joseph Pain’s La Marchande de plaisir, vaudeville en un acte (Théâtre des
Variétés, 1799) or Francis, Simonnin and D’Artois’s Les Cris de Paris, tableau poissard en un
acte (Théâtre des Variétés, 1822) aestheticized popular street culture. No street scene was per-
haps as well known as Daniel François Auber’s chorus of Naples street peddlers in La Muette de
Portici (1828). Georges Kastner’s musicological and ethnographic study of street cries was pub-
lished as Les Voix de Paris, essai d’une histoire littéraire et musicale des cris populaires de la
capitale, depuis le moyen-âge jusqu’à nos jours, précédé de considérations sur l’origine et le car-
actère du cri en général et suivi de Les Cris de Paris, grande symphonie humoristique vocale et
instrumentale [paroles d’Edouard Thierry] (Paris: G. Brandus, Dufour et Cie, 1857). In La Pri-
sonnière, Marcel Proust draws on the analogy of the Cris de Paris and Gregorian chant to fuel
the narrator and Albertine’s reflections on the old-fashioned custom of peddling.
14
Mercier, Le Nouveau Paris (Paris: Mercure de France, 1994) 212. Mercier is referring to
the royalist chansonnier, Ange Pitou, who captivated his large audience to the extent that guards
dared not arrest him and he defied attempts to silence him until his final deportation.
15
See Victor Fournel, Les Cris de Paris, types et physionomies d’autrefois (Paris, 1889) 45,
220.
16
Mainzer, “Le Marchand d’habits” 255.050 bout ff30-2 (67-78) 7/25/05 10:04 AM Page 78
78 / French Forum/Spring 2005/Vol. 30, No. 2
17
In a classic essay, Max Milner discusses the poetry of evil in the Comédie humaine. He
argues that Vautrin expresses more than the revolt of the Byronic hero by actively vying to be
God, taking hold of souls and vicariously living through them. See “La Poésie du Mal chez
Balzac,” L’Année balzacienne 1963: 321–35.
18
“Autrefois on naissait marchand d’habits comme l’on naît poète. . . . Mais depuis qu’on a
découvert tout ce qu’il y a de lucratif dans ce trafic, . . . on a fait irruption de tous côtés” Joseph
Mainzer, “Le Marchand d’habits,” Les Français peints par eux-mêmes. Encyclopédie morale du
dix-neuvième siècle, Vol. 4 (Paris: Curmer, 1841–50) 251.
19
Carol Mossman, “Sotto voce: Opera in the Novel: The Case of Le Père Goriot,” French
Review: Journal of the American Association of Teachers of French 69.3 (Feb. 1996): 390.
20
Patrick Berthier, “Le Spectateur balzacien,” L’Année balzacienne 1 (2000): 279–99.You can also read
