Beloved as the city of light, Paris in the nineteenth century sparked the acclaim of poets and the odium of the bourgeois with its distinctive sounds. Street vendors bellowed songs known as the Cris de Paris that had been associated with their trades since the Middle Ages; musicians itinerant and otherwise played for change; and flâneurs-writers, fascinated with the city's underside, listened and recorded much about what they heard.

Aimée Boutin tours the sonic space that orchestrated the different, often conflicting sound cultures that defined the street ambience of Paris. Mining accounts that range from guidebooks to verse, Boutin braids literary, cultural, and social history to reconstruct a lost auditory environment. Throughout, impressions of street noise shape writers' sense of place and perception of modern social relations. As Boutin shows, the din of the Cris contrasted economic abundance with the disparities of the capital, old and new traditions, and the vibrancy of street commerce with an increasing bourgeois demand for quiet. In time, peddlers who provided the soundtrack for Paris's narrow streets yielded to modernity, with its taciturn shopkeepers and wide-open boulevards, and the fading songs of the Cris became a dirge for the passing of old ways.| Cover Title Page Copyright Contents List of Illustrations Acknowledgments Introduction Chapter 1. Aural Flânerie: The Flâneur in the City as Concert Chapter 2. Blason Sonore: Street Cries in the City Chapter 3. Sonic Classifications in Haussmann's Paris Chapter 4. Listening to the Glazier's Cry Chapter 5. "Cry Louder, Street Crier": Peddling Poetry and the Avant-Garde Conclusion Notes Works Cited Index | "Exploratory and rich in its investigation of multi-sensory critical methods as well as in its pursuit of the aural flaneur."—French Studies
"In an innovative effort to provide an auditory history of Paris, Boutin mined the works of 19th-century writers, poets, composers, and painters for descriptions of or images evoking the cris de Paris. Recommended."—Choice
"Boutin convinces us both of the possibility and the value in probing the sounds of the city of light in the nineteenth century."—Nineteenth Century Contexts

|Aimée Boutin teaches French literature and culture in the Department of Modern Languages and Linguistics at Florida State University. She is the author of Maternal Echoes: The Poetry of Marceline Desbordes-Valmore and Alphonse de Lamartine.