The Arcades Project - Operi

exactly how the sanguine and the nervous temperaments act on one another-to
the detriment of each. But this explanation could satisfy no one. Nor does it
explain the admixture of colportage, the bloodthirstiness, the cinematic goriness
of the action. Which-by no accident-takes place in an arcade.' If this book
really expounds something scientifically, then it's the death of the Paris arcades,
the decay of a type of architecture. The book's atmosphere is saturated with the
poisons of this process: its people drop like flies. [HI,3]
In 1893 the cocottes were driven from the arcades. [HI,4]
Music seems to have settled into these spaces only with their decline, only as the
orchestras themselves began to seem old-fashioned in comparison to the new
mechanical music. So that, in fact, these orchestras would just as soon have taken
refuge there. (The "theatrophone)) in the arcades was, in certain respects, the
forerunner of the gramophone.) Nevertheless, there was music that conformed
to the spirit of the arcades-a panoramic music, such as can be heard today only
in old-fashioned genteel concerts like those of the casino orchestra in Monte
Carlo: the panoramic compositions of