The Arcades Project - Operi

A bookstore places together an neighboring shelves {alluring manuals of the art
oflove, } introductions to outmoded vices. accounts ofstrange passions and vices,
and memoirs of a maidsel7Jant, with vividly colored Ep inal prints, an which
Harlequin betroths his daughter, Napoleon rides through Marengo, and, close
beside all types of artillery pieces, Old English burghers travel the broad Path
to hell and the narrow path of the Gospel. }
Preserved in the arcades are types of collar studs fir which we no longer know
the corresponding collars or shirts.
Should a shoemaker's shop umbrella handles
5. At the entrance to one of the poorest arcades, we could read: ''Bureau de Placement
pour Ie Personnel des Deux Sexes,""fiunded in 1859.
"The Personnel must live here that can be in/i;rred tram the fa ct that a
placement bU1-eau fOr it exists
This stood above ''Article de Paris, Spicialiffs pour Forains_" We fillowed the
narrow dark corridor to where-belzveen a ulibrairie en solde," in which
masses of books were stacked in dusty tied-up bundles, and a shop selling only
buttons (mother-ofpearl, and the kind that in Paris is called "defontaisie'')we
discovered a sort of salon. On the pale-colored wallpaper full of figures and
busts shone a gas lamp_ By its light, an old woman sat reading. They say she
has been there alonefir years.
{Having passed a stamp shop with South American hummingbird stamps on paper
stained by damp, we come to an qffice shrouded in black: there, gold and silver
is purchased. } There, the proprietor seeks sets of teeth in gold, in wax, or
broken:
*And not tar {i-om there must have stood the offices in which. toward the
bt{;inning o[the Biedermeier Period. Doctor Miracle created his OlymPia.
FOr they are the true kliries o{these aJ'Cades (m ore salable and more warn
than the life-size ones): the fOrmerly world-tamous Parisian dolls. which
revolved on their musical soele and bare in their arms a doll-sized basket
aut o[which. at the salutation o{the minor chard. a lambkin baked its
curious muzzle
But a small, red tin parasol, at the fiat of a staircase close by, paints the way
coyly to afoctory producing umbrellafirrules.