Mundus Patet

A shadow line separates us from every ancien régime: the moment when the single Palais-Royal was dispersed into a myriad of arcades. The galleries of royalty, the “superbes dehors du Palais Cardinal” celebrated by Corneille, were taken over by shops, gambling dens, coffeehouses, brothels: the city’s gossip whirled around the gardens, the Rumors intensified. Everything took place in a quadrangular epiphany, like a final fling before the curtain of character drama came down. There, in that indiscreet swarm, everyone—from the noble libertine to the ignorant rustic—found their allotted place among the numerous folds of the hierarchic fan of courtesans. By the time that Napoleon installed the Council of State at the Palais-Royal, the place was already inhabited by invisible carcasses—and their remains were soon abandoned to an enemy power: the Administration. A few years later, the arcades began, furtively, then frantically, to be opened up to the streets of Paris. Here, the essences of the Palais-Royal, which had now withdrawn into the shade, spread once again into a suffocating and artificial space, multiplied into the city. Benjamin’s divining eye would have recognized the entrance to the Hell of the new world, facilis descensus Averni: “In ancient Greece, there were places from which it was said you could go down to the underworld.⁷¹⁵ Our waking existence is also a land that, at certain hidden points, leads down into the underworld, full of places barely visible, from which dreams flow. In the daytime we pass in front of them without suspecting anything, but as soon as we go to sleep we return swiftly toward them, groping in the darkness, and lose ourselves in those dim corridors. By the light of day, the labyrinth of urban dwellings resembles consciousness; the arcades (which are galleries that lead into the city’s past existence) emerge unnoticed onto the streets. But at night, under the obscure masses of houses, their denser darkness becomes distinct and frightening; and the late-evening pedestrian hurries past—unless, that is, we have encouraged him to wander along that narrow alley.” Paris, after the impudent exhibition of the Palais-Royal, experienced its industrial prehistory by rediscovering traces of the mundus in the obscurity. As at the foundation of Rome, even before the city had been given a name, in the “round pit” called mundus there were placed—says Plutarch—“the first fruits of all that is good according to tradition and necessary according to nature,” and in that pit was seen a door to the underworld (deorum tristium et inferum quasi ianua); thus the arcades were crowded with the first fruits of trade of varying kinds, under glazed vaults, between the marble tables and wrought iron columns.⁷¹⁶ If the “soil of Rome was scattered with openings to the underworld,” Paris opened onto mercenary cavities, where “the Sirens of the gaslights would sing […] on one side, while oil-lamp odalisques offered enticements from the other.”^{717, 718} But the adventures that occur here are above all the adventures of objects: mild dominators, immersed in the stagnant air of shop windows, they soon abandon themselves to arbitrary alliances: they discover “secret affinities: palm tree and feather duster, hairdryer and Venus de Milo, prostheses and letter-writing manuals find themselves here together, after a long separation.”⁷¹⁹ In an extract from Cato quoted by Festus, we read: “The mundus takes its name from the mundus [vault of heaven] that is above us; indeed, as I have managed to learn from those who have entered there, it has a form similar to that of the other mundus.”⁷²⁰ For the arcade, the celestial and subterranean vaults do not exist, apart from the milky light that reflects onto the shop displays and onto their alluring windows. The Romans prudently considered that it was not propitious to start a war on one of the three days of the year when the pit of the first-fruits was open. It was said then: mundus patet (the world is open). The Parisians of the Restoration and of Louis Philippe regarded the arcades above all to be a practical and lucrative invention for those who wished to flâner safe from bad weather, as well as a way of facilitating seduction. For Benjamin they seemed like a collection of oneiric fragments that we could visit at last in a state of wakefulness. Writing about the arcades, he repeated a ritual gesture of the foundation of Rome: having dug the mundus, says Plutarch, “each person brought a piece of earth from his own country and threw it in among the first-fruits, mixing everything together.”⁷²¹ The land of romanticism finally encountered that which it had never known: the Big City.