Rue Cardinale

From the Getty Museum record

> Eugène Atget repeatedly photographed this neighborhood and the tiny street that leads away from the intersection and then turns sharply to the left. The rue Cardinale is less than two hundred feet long and little more than sixteen feet wide at its narrowest point. It was named after the cardinal (Furstembourg) who was the prior of the Abbey of Saint-Germain-des-Prés when the street was laid out in 1700 on what had been a lawn tennis court on the abbey grounds. The site had changed very little from 1899, when Atget first photographed it. He may have been drawn to it as a durable record of a kind of imagined urban innocence. > > The sharply angled lines of the dark buildings in the foreground lead the eye to the white house on the far corner of the irregularly shaped intersection. Atget carefully placed his camera so that the plane of the house terminates the near vista. Had he moved his camera slightly to the left, another street parallel to the rue Cardinale would have become visible, diluting his one point perspective. The spatial qualities of the place are neatly captured. There is no one visible save for a ghostly figure with a ladder under a distant streetlight that resembles the one in the foreground. The scene is so pristine as to make this seem like a stage set just after the curtain rises. One waits for a figure to appear at the open window or for the little band of artists and writers in Puccini's La Bohème to come carousing around the corner at the beginning of act two. > > Another photograph in the Getty’s collection gives a slightly closer view of the light colored house on the far corner (see [90.XM.64.173](https://www.getty.edu/art/collection/objects/63607/eugene-atget-maison-coin-de-rue-de-l'abbaye-et-cardinale-french-1903/)). Atget also [documented](https://www.getty.edu/art/collection/objects/63559/eugene-atget-rue-de-l'abbaye-6-french-1898/) the view looking down rue de l’Abbaye, a street that intersects with rue Cardinale. > > Adapted from *Eugène Atget*, In Focus: Photographs from the J. Paul Getty Museum by Gordon Baldwin (Los Angeles: J. Paul Getty Museum, 2000), 70. ©2000, J. Paul Getty Trust.