A vast, elongated territory stretches across the north-western edge of Paris, ripped open by twelve railway lines — an iron social divide that relates the poor to the north and the better-off to the west. From the start, shabby grey tenement houses arose on the wrong side of the tracks, "smelling of the shameful destitution of Parisian roomings", as Guy de Maupassant wrote in Bel Ami.

Standing in the window of one of these houses, his hero watched the tantalising new buildings of the recently opened rue de Rome, on the other side of that "immense trench of the western railway", luminous at sunrise, as though "painted with white light." Despite the jarring discrepancy, the two sides of the tracks were united into one of the eight new arrondissements created and annexed to Paris by Baron Haussmann on 1 January 1860, Haussmann's arrondissement par excellence.

For, despite the 'deep chasm' that separated north from west, no arrondissement was as true to the new middle-class spirit of the Second Empire or promoted the values it stood for to the same degree. Carrying no tainted heritage or stigma from the past, the vast stretches of land, hitherto covered with cornfields, hunting grounds and meadows, became a land of opportunity for the emerging middle classes — four clear-cut strata which, within just a few decades, poured into the arrondissement, dividing themselves up neatly into four distinct neighbourhoods according to their wealth — west of the tracks the wealthy and the well-to-do, in Monceau and Ternes respectively; east of the tracks, in Batignolles, small employees, shopkeepers and pensioners, and further north in Epinettes, honest workmen. It was as neat a distribution as Haussmann's whitewashed avenues themselves.

Understandably, it was not to the taste of someone like the poet Paul Verlaine who, growing up in the 1850s and early 1860s at 2 rue Saint-Louis (now 10 rue Nollet) in Batignolles, described it as a neighbourhood of small, decent people where his father felt at home, "pettily bourgeois, shabbily well-to-do, neat, niggardly, but as clean as can be". The village, however, bore him no grudge and buried him in its cemetery, where his humble grave can still be seen.

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