Coteau Vert

Coteau Vert is the hilltop quarter associated with Bouville’s old business and shipowning families, a place whose social standing is made visible in the city’s streets, public ceremonies, and portraits. The district’s importance lies not only in where its residents live but in how they convert that position into civic influence: their preferred church site, their Sunday encounters, and their claims to rule all present class power as tradition and public duty.

Setting and Civic Rivalry

When Bouville planned a church dedicated to Saint Cecile, the old families wanted it on the summit of Coteau Vert, where they lived, so that the saint could watch over the town as the Sacre-Coeur watched over Paris. Nouveau-riche residents of the Boulevard Maritime opposed that location: they would finance the church only if it stood on Place Marignan, where they could use it and make their own power felt against the established bourgeoisie. The bishop’s compromise placed the building halfway between the two districts, on Place de la Halle-aux-Morues, renamed Place Sainte-Cecile-de-la-Mer. Completed in 1887 at a cost of fourteen million francs, the church thus materialized a contest over which group could claim the city’s sacred center.

The choice of site also distinguishes Coteau Vert from the Boulevard Maritime without removing either from the same elite order. The old families’ preference rested on residence and established standing; their newer rivals pressed the practical claim that those who paid for the church should be able to use it. The compromise gives neither faction an uncontested victory, but it records their competition in the city’s built geography.

The Sunday Quarter

Coteau Vert is also a point of reference in the Sunday procession along Rue Tournebride, where the narrator learns to distinguish its residents from people of the Boulevard Maritime. The latter are marked by new overcoats, soft felt hats, and dazzling shirts; people from the hill are recognized instead by a shabby, sunken appearance, narrow shoulders, and worn faces carrying an air of insolence. Social identity is read from clothing and bearing before anyone’s position is explained.

The street’s encounters make that hierarchy a ritual. A little old man identified as Coffier, president of the Chamber of Commerce, waits among the crowd; another group moves past exchanging greetings, introductions, and solicitous advice about putting hats back on against the cold. A woman appears to watch Coffier while smiling at a doctor, but Coffier does not acknowledge the people from the Boulevard: they do not belong to his world. Elsewhere, a man presumed to be from Coteau Vert approaches the old man, first bending toward his child as though absorbed in fatherly attention, then turning to give Coffier a sweeping salute. The child does not remove his hat; the narrator recognizes the exchange as an affair between adults. In these gestures, deference and separation coexist: the public greeting affirms a rank that social boundaries continue to police.

The District in Bouville’s Landscape

The hill’s relation to the rest of Bouville is visible in the Sunday movement toward the sea. A family leaving a villa turns onto Rue de l'Aumonier-Hilaire and climbs toward Coteau Vert, appearing as three dark figures against the sparkling asphalt. The narrator turns instead toward the Jetty Promenade, where the crowd has become more mixed than it was earlier in the day. Businessmen and officials walk beside shabby employees, and the social distinctions so carefully sustained before luncheon seem to loosen amid the crowd. The upward route to the hill and the movement toward the shore therefore frame different social scenes: the former leads into a residential quarter; the latter gathers people across occupational and class divisions.

Coteau Vert also appears as a landscape of established domestic authority. Coffier lives at its summit in a large brick house whose windows are always wide open. The detail places a civic figure physically above the town and gives his residence an openness that contrasts with the guarded social world represented by the Sunday rituals. The hill is at once a neighborhood and a visible marker of the stature its inhabitants claim.

Portraits and the Right to Rule

The Bouville elite represented in the museum includes figures who met on Rue Tournebride on Sundays and greeted the mayor’s wife with ceremonious salutes. In the paintings, their faces have been rendered so clearly that their connection to trees, animals, earth, or water seems to have vanished. The narrator interprets this separation from nature as part of their self-image: the portraits present humanity as having mastered the surrounding world, with the Rights of Man and Citizen as its crowning ornament.

The museum’s assertion of privilege is explicit: these people were entitled to life, work, wealth, command, respect, and finally immortality. That entitlement joins the hill’s social geography to a larger political claim. Olivier Blevigne, whose family entered the city’s elite and whose political career was repeatedly renewed by election, declared that the ruling class had grown unwilling to rule and that governing was not an elite right but its primary duty. His formulation recasts inherited advantage as obligation. Seen together, the church dispute, the Sunday salutations, and the painted faces show how Coteau Vert’s standing is maintained through both material position and public signs of respectability: the hill’s residents do not merely inhabit an elevated quarter; they present their elevation as the basis for directing the city.