266
PARTISAN REVIEW
,
passages
of the older sections of central Paris . I now mentioned our
project to Benjamin, and he expressed interest in it, so that we agreed
to meet again a few days later, when I would be free from my work
to spend a Saturday afternoon as his guide in older neighborhoods
where, between the Palais Royal, the so-called Grands Boulevards
and the Boulevard de Sebastopol and the Boulevard de Strasbourg,
a number of the more picturesque of these
passages
had survived.
Unfortunately, the shops that now lined many of them on both sides
were no longer as elegant and prosperous as they had been in the
days of Balzac, Nerval , Heine, and Baudelaire. A couple of years
later, Louis-Ferdinand Celine in
Mort
a
Credit,
his second published
novel, described in great detail the desperate stagnation of trade in
one of the most desolate of these nineteenth-century
passages
of cen–
tral Paris.
When we met again , Benjamin took ample notes in the course
of our afternoon expedition and expressed surprise at the number of
such
passages
or arcades that I was able to reveal to him . He reminded
me that his own native Berlin could boast of only one, leading off
Unter den Linden , and he was amused when I told him that I could
remember two of the tenants of some of its premises: Gorodetzky's,
which had been until 1934 Berlin's most famous Kosher restaurant,
and Hofmaler Fischer, formerly the official portrait painter of the
Hohenzollern Imperial family and its court, in whose windows the
most atrociously conventional and tasteless society portraits were
always displayed.
One of the
passages
of central Paris that I showed Benjamin
was the very desolate and dilapidated Passage du Saumon, which he
later mentioned several times in
Das Passagenwerk.
There we passed
by the entrance to the Hotel du Saumon , which may have been fre–
quented by Proust, as well as Albert Le Cuziat's more widely known
Hotel Marigny, one of the real-life models for
J
upien's
Temple de l'Im–
pudeur.
SaId, who ran this establishment as a homosexual brothel,
was standing in the doorway. He certainly recognized me, since I
had but recently interviewed him and shown him a photograph of
Proust in a fruitless attempt to find out whether he could remember
ever having seen Proust as one of his customers. But Said now re–
frained , true to his principles of discretion that contrasted with Al–
bert's garrulous gossip, from appearing at all overtly to know me and
from greeting me. Somewhat prudishly, I likewise refrained from
pointing out to Benjamin that SaId's establishment may well have
been one of those that Proust visited and that suggested, in
Time Re-
