since i first began to walk the streets of paris text by SIMON LIBERATI The sacred character, akin to revelation, of Paris’s geography — its streets, arcades, signs, and door numbers — is one of the arcana of the Surrealists. This comes from Nerval and Lautréamont, but also from Baudelaire, Huysmans, and other alchemy, for the Surrealists are a much more mixed group than people usually say. In fact, this heterogeneity assured their stability — it was key to the spiritual dominance and unrivaled influence that, from Paris, André Breton’s group exerted over the literary and artistic world of the 20th century. Has anyone noticed, for example, that the first chapter of [Louis Aragon’s] Paris Peasant, a chapter devoted to the description of a shopping arcade — the Passage de l’Opéra, destroyed in 1925 — begins like the first chapter of Maurice Barrès’s The Sacred Hill? Not identically, of course, but…