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dimly illuminated on the side of the court and the garden by borrowed lights – styled windows by courtesy but more like the filthiest arrangements for obscuring daylight to be found in little wineshops in the suburbs. The Galleries, parallel passages about twelve feet in height, were formed by a triple row of shops. The centre row, giving back and front upon the Galleries, was filled with the fetid atmosphere of the place, and derived a dubious daylight through the invariably dirty windows of the roof . . . The treacherous mud-heaps . . . were in keeping with the seething traffic of various kinds carried on within it; for here in this shameless, unblushing haunt, amid wild mirth and a babel of talk, an immense amount of business was transacted between the Revolution of 1789 and the Revolution of 1830. For twenty years the Bourse stood just opposite, on the ground floor of the Palais . . . People made appointments to meet in the Galleries before or after ’Change; on showery days the Palais-Royal was often crowded with weather-bound capitalists and men of business . . . Here dwelt poetry, politics, and prose, new books and classics, the glories of ancient and modern literature side by side with political intrigue and the tricks of the bookseller’s trade. 16
    In this blessed age, when the trades of bookseller and publisher were still combined (sometimes indeed with that of printer as well), the Galeries de Bois saw the beginnings of certain publishing houses that were marked out for a fine future: Stock, Garnier, Le Dentu – supposedly the model for Dauriat in
Lost Illusions
, to whom Lucien de Rubempré tries to sell his sonnets on ‘Easter Daisies’ (‘For me the question is not whether you are a great poet, I know that you have a great deal, a very great deal of merit; if I were only just starting in business, I should make the mistake of publishing your book. But in the first place, my sleeping partners and those at the back of me are cutting off my supplies’).
    The colonnades were not a place for reading but rather for gambling, at
creps
,
passe-dix
,
trente-et-un
and
biribi
. Stall number 9 (which occupied spaces 9 to 12 of the colonnade) offered two tables of
trente-et-quarante
, a table for
creps
, and the gamblers could drink punch flambé. At the beginning of Balzac’s
The Magic Skin
, the unfortunate Raphael climbs the staircase of number 36 (‘As you enter a gaming-house the law despoils you of your hat at the outset. Is it by way of a parable, a divine revelation?’). But the most famous establishment was undoubtedly number 113: eight saloons, with six roulette tables. Marshal Blücher, the victor of Waterloo, hardly left this gambling den. He ran through six million livres during his stay in Paris, and left the city with his estates all mortgaged. Mortgage agents actually stationed themselves close at hand, and in the evening, readily available girls mingled with the gamblers. Those who strolled beneath the Wooden Galleries and in the little avenues of the gardens were known as ‘semi-beavers’, those in the Galleries themselves as ‘beavers’, and those on the Caveau terrace as ‘complete beavers’.
    You could also eat and drink in the galleries of the Palais-Royal. The Café de Foy was the only one that served in a garden pavilion. On the first floor, its chess club, whose members included Talleyrand and David, competed with that in the Café de la Régence, the setting of
Rameau’s Nephew
. The Café des Mille Colonnes, run by a famous beauty, was Balzac’s particular preference. The Café de la Rotonde, close to the Passage du Perron, had been during the Revolution the headquarters of the Brissotins (who were not known in their time as Girondins), after being the site under Louis XVI of the quarrels between the champions of Gluck and those of Piccini. Café Lemblin was frequented by those