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Palais-Royal saw a proliferation of clubs. By July 1789 the agitation was constant, and the Palais became what Hugo called ‘the nucleus of the comet Revolution’. Camille Desmoulins relates the date of 13 July as follows:
It was half past two, and I had gauged the mood of the people. My anger against the despots had turned to despair. I could not see any groups ready for an uprising, however strongly affected they were. Three young men, standing hand in hand, struck me as inspired by a more resolute courage. I could see that they had come to the Palais-Royal with the same intention as myself. A number of passive citizens followed them. ‘Messieurs,’ I said, ‘here is the beginning of a civic force: one of us must take the initiative and stand on a table to harangue the people.’ ‘Get up, then.’ I agreed. Rather than climbing, I was immediately hoisted up on the table [in the Café de Foy]. Right away I found myself surrounded by an immense crowd. Here is my speech, which I shall never forget: ‘Citizens, there is not a moment to lose. I have come from Versailles. Necker has been dismissed; his dismissal is the signal for a St Bartholemew’s Night of patriots. This evening, the Swiss and German battalions will come out of the Champ-du-Mars tomassacre us. Just one single recourse remains, to seize arms and choose a rosette by which to recognize one another.’ 12
    In the course of the Revolution, however, the Palais-Royal, rechristened Palais-Égalité, rapidly became a rallying place for royalists, moderates, Feuillants, all those whom Robespierre called
fripons
(rogues). At the Mafs restaurant, the contributors to the royalist newspaper
Les Actes des apôtres
– Abbé Maury, Montlausier, Rivarol – held their ‘evangelical dinner’ each week. They wrote up their discussions at a corner of the table, and ‘the issue composed in this way was left on the Mafs menu, and from Mafs went to Gattey, the famous shop in the Palais’ Galeries de Bois’. 13 On 20 January 1793, the day that the Convention voted to send Louis Capet to the guillotine, it was in a modest restaurant – chez Février – in the Galerie de Valois that the bodyguard Pâris assassinated Le Peletier de Saint-Fargeau. At the Convention, on 19 Nivôse of year II, ‘the revolutionary committee of the Montagne denounced the restaurant owners and caterers of the Palais de l’Égalité, which had merely changed its name and could still bear that of Palais-Royal from the insolent luxury displayed there’. 14 Barras – who lived in the Palais-Royal, above Véfour’s – and his friends prepared the coup of 9 Thermidor at a table in the Corazza’s ice-cream parlour, and under the Directory the
incroyables
pursued republicans in the gardens, white cockade in hat and bludgeon in hand.
    The apogee of the Palais-Royal, the time when it became a myth with no counterpart anywhere in modern Europe, was the twenty years following the entry of the Allies into Paris in 1815. The arrival of Russian, Austrian, Prussian and English soldiers and officers gave a new impulse to the two most profitable activities of the site, prostitution and gambling. This was when the Galeries de Bois, wooden buildings lined up transversally where the double colonnade of the Galerie d’Orléans now stands, had their moment of glory: 15
The Wooden Galleries of the Palais-Royal used to be one of the most famous sights of Paris. Some description of the squalid bazaar will not beout of place; for there are few men of forty who will not take an interest in recollections of a state of things which will seem incredible to a younger generation. The great dreary, spacious Galerie d’Orléans, that flowerless hothouse, as yet was not; the space upon which it now stands was covered with booths; or, to be more precise, with small, wooden dens, pervious to the weather, and