Visitors in Paris
David Garrioch points out that "The Paris that visitors saw...overlapped only in part with the city that most Parisians knew. People who spent only a brief time there remained insensitive to the regular rhythms and meanings that structured the lives of most of the city's inhabitants" (22), however, "There were parts of the city that even a visitor could at once identify by ear. Loud, irregular thuds echoed along the quais near the laundry boats where as many as two thousand washerwomen hammered the linen with their wooden batons. The central market rang with the cries of vendors advertising the week's best buys. Occasionally their sharp tongues cut too deeply and good humor turned to anger. Sometimes the target of their scorn was a customer who rejected a price reached after much haggling, or a passer-by overdressed in ribbons and lace. Around the market pillory, where convicted offenders spent two hours a day in the stocks, ballad singers and street musicians hawked the latest broadsheets. They also congregated on the Quiai de la Ferraille where their songs competed with those of the caged birds on saleoutside the shops. They were even more numerous on Pont Neuf..." (19)
On April 8, 1778, future U.S. President John Adams crossed Pont Neuf upon entering Paris for the first time, "passing the Palace of the Louvre, Adams was astonished at the crowds, the numbers of carriages in the streets, the 'glittering clatter' of Paris he had read of in books. Toward morning, awake in his hotel room on the Rue de Richelieu, he wondered at the stillness of so great a city–until first light when the clamor of bells and street cries and iron-rimmed carriage wheels on cobblestones was such as he had never heard." (McCullough, 189)
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