Sound and community
David Garrioch explains how "Certain sounds [in eighteenth-century Paris] were...more local. Particular houses, for those who knew, were marked by the crow of a rooster, the bark of a dog, or the creaking of a house sign swinging in the wind. Snatches of conversation and song and the clunk of pewter pots on wooden tables drifted through the open doors of wineshops. The hammering of cobblers and the grinding of wood turners' lathes marked their workshops, while shopkeepers at their doors, skilled at identifying prospective customers, went through their patter in cadences familiar to all the locals. Every neighborhood had its street sellers, too, with their distinctive calls. Many of them, in defiance of police regulations, set up small tables on busy corners to sell fruit, left-over food from the tables of the rich, tobacco, ribbons, baubles of every kind." (19)
"At dawn, or even before, the hooves of horses and the rumble of wagon wheels echoed between the tall houses along with the tapping of wooden clogs on the paving stones. The sonneurs also passed early, ringing their handbells to warn the shopkeepers to sweep the rubbish away from their doors and into the central gutter of the street. their rounds coincided with the rattle of shop shutters and the grinding of hinges, the first conversations exchanged across courtyards and from windows to the street below. Work noises, too, began at first light, hammering and dragging, swearing, shouted instructions. A Parisian (like other eighteenth-century city dwellers) did not need a timepiece." (22-23)
"For the locals, the street cries also marked the hours, since many itinerant vendors followed a regular route and passed at roughly the same time each day. Every shop had its busy times the bakers early, the wineshops at nine or ten when many workers broke their fast after some hours' labor and again in the evenings when they paused for a drink on their way home. The traffic-noises often had local rhythms, too. Six days a week the slumber of residents of the run St-Honoré, the rue Montmartre, and the rue St-Denis was disturbed at one or two in the morning by the first farmers' carts going to the central market. Along all the main streets the more rapid passage of carriages and the coachmen's cries of 'Gare, Gare" (look out), were on the whole early afternoon an dearly evening sounds" (23)
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