![]() This eclectic guide to Paris, published just a few years before the Revolution, chronicles the old world on the brink of collapse and the new world about to rise from it. Panorama of Paris by Louis-Sébastien Mercier Spanning a period of two hundred years (or a little more) they reveal a vital part of the city that the beautification attempts of Louis XIV and his successors could never quite paint over. The books below celebrate the darker side of Paris: city of vagabonds and fugitives, mud, chaos, dissidents and revolutionaries, expatriates and ex-convicts, queer men and women, the lonely and the dispossessed. Louis imported swans to beautify the Seine, and they became bedraggled and sick from the Parisian mud, he pushed for the army of lamplighters who would illuminate the city’s dangerous streets after the sun went down, and he oversaw what many call the first modern police force, led by Nicolas de La Reynie-the Lieutenant General of the Police who would also preside over both the investigation of the Affair of the Poisons and the installation of those famous street lamps. Deep social changes were transforming Paris at the time, engineered in part by Louis XIV, who was said to hate the city for the role that its populace had played the Fronde, the rebellion that shook the throne during the king’s youth. ![]() My own novel, The Disenchantment, is set in the Paris of the late 17th century, during the Affair of the Poisons-a scandal of poison and black magic that rocked French society, reaching from the back alleys of Paris to the halls of Versailles. But there has always been another side to the city’s reputation: while travel guides dwell on the twinkling lights, the thief chased out of the lantern’s circle of illumination has a point of view as well. It also began to gain the reputation that it has today, for glittering nightlife, impeccable fashion, and glamor. The streetlights were a modern innovation, and Paris became famous for them. Electric lights did not appear on the streets until 1843. Halfway through the 18 th century, the candles slowly began to be replaced with oil lamps. The city levied a new tax just to pay for the cost of candles, and assigned a program of lantern maintenance to each neighborhood. Three thousand of them were installed in 1667, and every evening the lantern man would pass along his route, unlock the box that controlled the pulley that raised and lowered each lantern, and light the tall candle that would burn throughout the dark hours. The City of Light gained its nickname for the streetlights: glass lanterns, a candle inside each one, to illuminate the streets and make them safe to walk even in the depths of night.
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