Boulevard de Sébastopol

The place, briefly

Boulevard de Sébastopol is one of the straight lines Baron Haussmann drew through the medieval city. It opened in 1858 as the northern arm of the grande croisée, the cross of boulevards meant to let traffic and troops move through a quarter that had been unnavigable on purpose, and it took its name from the siege of Sevastopol three years earlier. It runs a kilometre and a third from place du Châtelet up to the boulevard Saint-Denis, and it is a boundary as much as a street: the 1st and 2nd arrondissements lie on its western side, the 3rd and 4th on its eastern.

For most of its length it is an ordinary working boulevard, wide and loud, wholesale shops at street level. Since 2019 it has also carried one of the busiest bicycle routes in France, a two-way lane down the middle that on weekday mornings moves several thousand riders an hour. It is not a place people photograph. It is a place people cross.

In Giovanni's Room it gets one sentence, and the sentence turns the book.

David and Giovanni have been up all night. They met a few hours earlier behind the bar where Giovanni works, they have eaten oysters at dawn in Les Halles with Jacques and Guillaume, and they are now walking, still talking, still playing at not deciding anything. Then Baldwin puts them on this boulevard:

Giovanni has been teasing David for wanting to go home. He breaks off the teasing, puts up his hand for a cab coming down the boulevard, and says that David will have to see his room one of these days anyway. David notices, in the same moment, that Giovanni is nervous too. Then Giovanni pushes him into the taxi ahead of him, as though afraid he will turn and run, and gives the driver the address.

Everything the novel is about happens after that cab door closes. The room they are going to is the room of the title, the one David will live in and then flee, the one Giovanni will be evicted from and the one that ends with Guillaume dead and Giovanni waiting for the guillotine. Baldwin marks the threshold with a street name and nothing else. There is no scene here, no description of the boulevard, not even weather. Just the place where one of them stopped pretending and put his hand up for a taxi.

That economy is the point of naming it. Giovanni's Room is not a novel with an address book. Baldwin invents Guillaume's bar and gives it no location, leaves Giovanni's room itself somewhere vague in the outskirts, and names Madame Clothilde's restaurant without placing it. The real streets he does name — Sébastopol here, Les Halles, the American Express office at Opéra — are the ones where David is moving between two lives rather than living either. The boulevard is a crossing in both senses.

There is nothing to look for at the spot. The buildings are Haussmann's, the traffic is heavier, and the cab would be an app now. What a reader can do is walk it: from Les Halles, where the oysters were, down to Châtelet and the river, which is the direction the two of them came from, at the hour when the wholesale market was closing and the rest of the city was getting up.