Young Louis XIV once almost drowned in the pool of the central fountain, at a time when Anna of Austria had taken Richelieu’s place and Mazarin had only to cross the garden of the Palais-Cardinal from his residence at Hôtel Turbeuf to reach the queen’s apartments. The future Sun King was not yet ten, and spent many long hours with the daughter of one of his mother’s maidservants. He called her “Queen Marie” and they played at being king and queen in the palace kitchens.

Louis-Sébastien Mercier, a versatile writer, had described Paris in the year 2440, subtitling it: “a dream if ever there was one.” But like all rational utopias, his city was a place of Tedium and Rectitude. At the theater, the only plays to survive were those full of wise words and characters of positive virtue, a perpetual Corneille in the style of Zdanov, with great distrust of Racine, since he, “having made his heroes effeminate, makes his audience effeminate.”⁶⁸⁷ The streets were constantly lit, and libraries purged of any harmful literature. The “dangerous ferment” of Jews, pushy and greedy due to “inadequate vigilance in earlier centuries,” was at last brought to an end. There had naturally been a need for “wisdom, constancy, and firmness in breaking down that ardent fanaticism,” but now the Jews were finally reduced to “earning their living in absolute tranquillity,” about which Mercier offers us no further details.⁶⁸⁸ But Mercier’s gaze rests not only on petty utopian detail. He also had the eye of an eager flâneur—and at the end of his Tableau de Paris, after twenty-two chapters on lapdogs and roués, on Bicêtre and obscenity in the churches, on women’s fashion and Parliament, he introduces us to that matchless place, pure essence of the West, to which the whole city was mysteriously drawn, the Palais-Royal:

“A place unique on the globe.⁶⁸⁹ Visit London, Amsterdam, Madrid, Vienna, and you will see nothing like it: a prisoner could live here without ever being bored, and would not think of freedom for many years. This is the very place where Plato wanted to consign a prisoner, to hold him without a jailer, and without force, with sweet and voluntary chains. People call it the capital of Paris. There is everything here; put a young man of twenty there with an income of fifty thousand livres, and he will want nothing more, he’ll not know how to leave this phantasmagorical place; he’ll become a Rinaldo in this palace of Armida; and while that hero’s time and almost his glory was lost there, so too will our young man lose his, and perhaps also his fortune: from now on, he will be there only for pleasure; he will tire of everything else. This enchanted spot is a small luxurious city, enclosed within a great city; it is the temple of pleasure, from which magnificent vices have banished even the specter of shame: no hostelry in the world is more charmingly depraved; everyone laughs here, and innocence blushes.”