I’ve
been reading Graham Robb’s Parisians: an adventure history of Paris with unexpected delight. The research is meticulous, yet the prose is light and
quick. The anecdotes are
fascinating: Napoleon’s youthful encounter with a prostitute before his rise to
power, Marie Antoinette’s failed escape due to want of a good map, and so
on. Great reading.
From
the book I learned that Paris once had a street named Rue d’Enfer, the road of
hell. In 1774, a great chasm
suddenly opened up forming a sinkhole.
Several houses on the Rue d’Enfer were swallowed up by the earth. This event lead architectural genius
Charles-Axel Guillaumot to discover that most of the city was in peril due to
ancient mining tunnels snaking through the ground below houses, churches, and
taverns alike. Half the city was
propped up on unstable piles of quarried stones. He rebuilt the Parisian underground, and the name of the
street was changed.
While
it is understandable that people at the time believed the road was named
prophetically, the etymology of the street name was mysterious. Today, the source is considered
unknown, but etymologists of the period were somewhat more inventive, in all
senses of the word:
“in the days of
the Romans, the Rue St. Jacques was the Via Superior, while this street, being
the lower of the two, was the Via Inferior or Infera. And so it was that, by corruption and contraction, it
assumed the name ENFER.”
(Hurtaut and Magny, Dictionnaire
historique de la ville de Paris et de ses environs. Paris, 1779.)
I prefer the old to the new. Happy reading.
