The Arcades Project - Operi

of this decline fuses, as though of its own accord, with the very same aspect in the
decline of the arcades. [02,3]
Feminine fauna of the arcades: prostitutes, grisettes, old-hag shopkeepers, female
street vendors, glovers, demoiselles.-This last was the name, around 1830, for
incendiaries disguised as women. [02,4]
Around 1830: I."The Palais-Royal is still enough in fashion that the renting of
chairs brings in some 32OOO francs to Louis Philippe, and the tax 011 gaming some
five and a half million to the treasury . ... The gambling houses of the Palais-Royal
rival those of the Cercle des Etrangers on the Rue Grange-Bateliere and of Frascati
on the Rue de Richelieu." Dubech and d'Espezel, Histoire
de Paris (Paris, 1926), p. 365. [02,05]
Rites de passage-this is the designation in folklore for the ceremonies that attach
to death and hirth, to marriage, puberty, and so forth. In modem life, these
transitions are becoming ever more unrecognizable and impossible to experience.
We have grown very poor in threshold experiences. Falling asleep is perhaps the
only such experience that remains to us. (But together with this, there is also
waking up.) And, finally, there is the ebb and flow of conversation and the sexual
permutations of love-experience that surges over thresholds like the changing
figures of the dream. "How mankind loves to remain transfixed;' says Aragon,
"at the very doors of the imagination!" Paysan