The Arcades Project - Operi

was a poor devil whose means forbade his going on foot, and who asked for alms
as another man might ask for directions . ... This mendicant . .. on his little nag,
with its wild mane and its shaggy coat like that of a rural donkey, has long
remained before my eyes and in my imagination . ... He died-a rentier." Alfred
Delvau, Les Lions dujour (paris, 1867), pp. 116-117 ("Le Pauvre it cheval").
[M7a,5]
Looking to accentuate the Parisians' new feeling for nature, which rises above
gastronomical temptations, Rattier writes : ''A pheasant, displaying itself at the
door of its leafy dwelling, would make its gold-and-ruby plumage sparkle in the
sunlight ... , so as to greet visitors ... like a nabob of the forest;' Paul-Ernest de
Rattier, Paris n'exisle pas (paris, 1857), pp. 71-72. 0 Grandville 0 [M7a,6]
'"It is emphatically not the cOlll1terfeit Paris that will have produced the rubberneck
. . . . As for the fHineur, who was always-on the sidewalks and before the
display windows-a man of no account, a nonentity addicted to charlatans and
tcn-cent emotions, a stranger to all that was not cobblestone, cab, or gas lamp, . ..
he has become a laborer, a wine grower, a manufacturer of wool, sugar, and iron.
He is no longer dwnbfounded at nature's ways. The germination of a plant no
longer seems to him external to the factory methods used in the Faubourg Saint­
Denis." Paul-Ernest de Rattier, Paris n'existe pas (Paris, 1857), pp. 74,-75.
[MS,!]
In his pamphlet Le Siecle maudil (paris, 1843), which takes a stand against the
corruption of contemporary society, Alexis Dumesnil makes use of a fiction of
Juvenal's: the crowd on the boulevard suddenly stops still, and a record of each
individual's thoughts and objectives at that particular moment is compiled
(pp. 103-104). [MS,2]
"The contradiction between town and country . .. is the crassest expression of the
subjection of the individual to the division of labor, to a specific activity forced
upon him-a subjection that makes one man into a narrow-minded city animal,
another into a narrow-minded country animal." in Marx-Engels Archiv, vol. 1, ed. D. Rjazanov (Frankfurt
am Main