Paris for Dreamers

by Katrina Lawrence

  When du Barry was the one buying the fancy accessories, not selling them, Rue du Faubourg Saint-Honoré was a favourite destination. She’d often pop into a new perfume boutique, À La Corbeille des Fleurs, at no.19, announced by a flower basket above the entrance. Jean-François Houbigant had opened his scented doors in 1775; Houbigant is now France’s oldest operating fragrance house. Fragrance was another industry promoted by the wily Louis XIV — his Versailles wasn’t known as ‘the perfumed court’ for no reason — and fragrance would become a particularly potent money maker for France, the spiritual capital of the world’s haute parfumerie to this day. Ever since the Marquise de Pompadour steeped herself in Huile de Vénus — a blend of iris, sandalwood and rose that she sourced from a boutique devoted to porcelain ware on Rue Saint-Honoré — Parisiennes have cherished a signature scent as the finishing touch to their outfit, something that leaves a seductive sillage fluttering behind them like an olfactory silken scarf. Most fashion houses have a perfume business, of course, and indulging in a bottle of branded parfum is always a nifty way to buy into a designer dream.

  Another affordable way to enjoy Rue du Faubourg Saint-Honoré is to treat yourself at Dalloyau. The gastronomic mecca has been here since 1802, when the Dalloyaus, a family that had worked as royal chefs for over a century, restyled themselves as caterers for anyone who wanted to eat well. To this day, you can still buy the most delectable little petits fours — salmon-topped blinis or gem-like tartlets — but it’s at the cake counter where your mouth will truly water. Oh, if only to be shopping for a soirée you’re hosting in your mansion down the street ... The Opéra, the famous layer cake of coffee and chocolate-infused cream and biscuit, invented by Dalloyau, would be parfait, non? Otherwise, you can always satisfy a sweet craving with a cute Saint-Honoré Lollipop — a novelty no-hands way to eat the famous cream-puffery of a dessert. After all, you’re on a street named for Honoratus of Amiens, the patron saint of pastry chefs.

  Saint-Honoré, by the way, also looks after candle-makers and florists. Which brings us next door, to Lachaume, Paris’s celebrated society fleuriste since 1845. It’s here you’ll find the most luxuriant roses, ruffled peonies and exotic orchids (Marcel Proust came every day to buy a fresh cattleya for his boutonnière), and can take the boutique’s scent home with you with the signature candle, a fusion of tuberose, jasmine and violet. Parisian florists such as Lachaume remind you why this city is the capital of the fragrance industry.

  Retrace your steps on Rue du Faubourg Saint-Honoré, and turn right onto Avenue Matignon. Walk straight ahead, past the Rond-Pont des Champs-Élysées, and you’ll soon reach Avenue Montaigne, a grand stretch flanked by Belle Époque mansions and horse chestnut trees. There were only marshy fields here in Pompadour’s time. Soon after, an elm-lined road was etched out, and given the name of Allée des Veuves, or Widow’s Lane, inspired by the darkly dressed women who’d linger in the shadows, waiting for some after-dark adventure. Women clad in black still stalk this street, although for a rather different reason: that of fashion. It’s here you understand how Paris became a centre for la mode not just because of its powerful, state-supported industry, but also because this is a city that perfectly showcases the display of fashion, with its broad boulevards and avenues doubling as urban catwalks.

  You’ll see more of the big fashion names along Avenue Montaigne, and it’s a particularly sacred place for aficionados of haute couture — custom-measured clothes crafted from the finest materials and flawlessly stitched by hand. Couture might be a dwindling industry — designer off-the-rack can be expensive enough — but it’s still the stuff of dreams. One of fashion history’s most acclaimed couturiers, Christian Dior, is synonymous with Avenue Montaigne. It was in the old townhouse at no.30 that he presented his legendary New Look collection of 1947, his full-skirted silhouettes instantly swishing away skimpy wartime dressing. It was romantic and nostalgic and totally in denial of modern times, but it tapped into so many Parisiennes’ yearning for a prettier world — which Pompadour would surely have appreciated.

  One of the guests sitting on one of Monsieur Dior’s Rococo chairs on that fashion-changing day was Nancy Mitford, who would soon get to work on her biography of the marquise. She thought the New Look ‘bliss’ and would adopt the seductive hourglass silhouette as her own. The English-born author was an honorary Parisienne, having moved here to date an aristocratic French politician; he had wandering eyes — and hands, too — so she might have empathised with her future literary subject in more ways than one. But the way Mitford dealt with heartache was, like the marquise before her, to live well. She wrote her enchanting biographies and witty novels during the day, working from her luxurious home (cue brocade chaises and gilded writing tables, also à la Pompadour), and partied the evenings away in Dior, partaking in scintillating conversation with all sorts of interesting people. Like the Marquise de Pompadour, she was determined to stay busy and happy, and not let anything ruffle her beautiful life.

  The fashion streets of Paris have much to say about the good life. Sure, a fluttery Chloé dress or an iconic Hermès bag might enhance things. But fashion is not an end in itself here — it’s one of life’s arts. Just as lovely are the flowers and the perfume and the macarons. Fashion is part of a lifestyle in Paris. And if you haven’t yet honed that lifestyle, the hotels along here package it up for you —from Hôtel Costes back on Rue Saint-Honoré, to Hôtel Le Bristol on Rue du Faubourg Saint-Honoré, to Hôtel Plaza Athenée on Avenue Montaigne. The original Parisian hôtels were actually private mansions — called hôtels particuliers. Hotels, as we know them, were originally designed in the fashion of these grand Parisian aristocratic homes, with the aim of making guests feel as though they were staying in their dream house. Hotel design might be varied these days, but the main aim is still to live the fantasy life for one night, or even a couple of hours at the bar. Tomorrow, you might be back in those sweat pants, and that’s just fine.

  Cross over to Hotel Plaza Athenée, with its lacy balconies and lipstick-red geraniums, and head to La Galerie, an arcaded space overlooking the hotel’s famous ivy-coated courtyard restaurant. Settle in for a snack, or a late afternoon tea, and soak up the atmosphere. Don’t forget to order champagne and toast today’s tour guide in spirit, the marquise, who loved champagne (of course she did), insisting that ‘it’s the only wine that leaves a woman beautiful after drinking it.’

  PART TWO: ARCHITECTURAL DELIGHTS

  Itinerary

  • Parc Monceau: 35 Boulevard de Courcelles 75008; 07.00-21.00

  • Musée Nissim de Camondo: 63 Rue de Monceau 75008; 10.00-17.30; closed Monday, Tuesday, 1 January, 1 May & 25 December

  • Musée Jacquemart-André: 158 Boulevard Haussmann 75008; 10.00-18.00 (until 20.30 on Monday during exhibitions)

  • Hôtel de Salomon de Rothschild (park entrance): 12 Avenue de Friedland 75008

  • Arc de Triomphe: Place Charles de Gaulle 75008; 10.00-23.00; closed 1 January, 1 May, 8 May (morning), 14 July (morning), 11 November (morning) & 25 December

  • Folie Saint-James: 13-17 Avenue de Madrid 92200

  • Parc de Bagatelle: Route de Sèvres à Neuilly 75016; 9.30-17.00 (November-February), 09.30-18.30 (March-October), 09.30-20.00 (April-September)

  The glossy-black, wrought-iron grilles and gates of Parc Monceau, with their luxuriant flourishes of gold leaf, announce that this is no ordinary park. And rightly so. The chestnut-lined paths of the elegant enclosure might these days see more sneakers than satin slippers, but in many ways it’s still the discreet garden it was back when the Duc de Chartres, Philippe d’Orléans, had himself a pleasure house built on this land.

  It was the late eighteenth century — but not so late that revolutionary clouds were dimming the City of Light — and in the spirit of the Enlightenment, the duke hired Louis Carrogis Carmontelle — an architect, scenic painter, writer and Romantic before his time — to design a public garden that would celebrate ‘all ages, all places.’ The result w
as a pays d’illusion, a landscape equivalent of Around the World in Eighty Days. Among the meandering streams and verdant islands, intricate mazes and flowerbeds, wooded groves and French parterres, various grottoes and rockeries, was a world of delights: an Italian vineyard, a Dutch windmill, a Chinese bridge and pagoda, Greek ruins, Turkish tents, an Egyptian pyramid, an Ancient Roman colonnade … So extraordinarily otherworldly was the garden, guests must have felt as though they’d tumbled into a watercolour fantasy.

  These days, the heart pangs to think about what came before. Revolution and real estate developers wiped out much of old Parc Monceau, but some of the original frivolous spirit remains. The quirky elongated Egyptian pyramid is still there, for one. Find your way, too, to the willow pond; the Corinthian pillars that curve around it have also stood the test of time. More than you might think, actually; they were already antique when Carmontelle repurposed them from a funeral chapel Catherine de Medici had commissioned in the late sixteenth century. Nearby you’ll walk through a stone archway, which is likewise half a millennium old; a remnant of the old Hôtel de Ville, it found its way here when the city’s town hall was burned down by the Commune in 1871. The miniature Venetian Rialto bridge is another nineteenth-century addition that seems to have been in this park since time immemorial.

  Such garden garnishes are known as follies, an architectural term derived from feuille, French for leaf. Purely decorative — think Roman temples and Gothic ruins — by the eighteenth century follies had become so extravagant, often having morphed into whimsical dream-like country estates (maisons de plaisance), that the word had become a synonym for madness (c’est la folie!).

  You might think the temple-like rotunda at Parc Monceau’s northern gates to be a folie, but true follies had no real practical purpose, and this building was in actual fact a tollbooth, being part of the 1787 city wall erected by the Farmers-General, the collectors of duties on consumer products coming into Paris. Architect Nicholas Ledoux was surely inspired by follies when he designed the fifty-five barrières, all along fanciful neo-Classical lines. Not that Ledoux’s artistic touch made Parisians warm to the edifices, seen as a symbol of royal greed. The Barrière Monceau is one of four remaining tollhouses (the others are the Rotonde de la Villette, the Barrière du Trône and the Barrière d’Enfer).

  Parc Monceau is encircled by many of the Louis-Seize-style mansions built in the Belle Époque, when much of the duke’s land was sold off for luxury haute bourgeoisie housing. As you wander around the park’s perimeter, you can glimpse the ornate roofs and windows through the branches of the linden and plum trees. One of the mansions, happily, can still be visited.

  Take the southern exit onto a short avenue shaded by plane trees and, once you’ve passed through the black-and-gold gates, turn left onto Rue de Monceau. Up at no.63 you’ll find the Musée Nissim de Camondo. Inspired by the Petit Trianon — the adorable pavilion set among a garden of follies at Versailles Palace — this townhouse was designed as a tribute to eighteenth-century décor, an obsession of Moïse de Camondo, the ultra-wealthy Belle Époque banker and bon vivant. He had originally intended to pass his creation onto his son, however Nissim, a pilot for the French army, was killed in World War I, leaving his father a heartbroken recluse. Moïse decided to bequeath house and contents to the Musée des Arts Décoratifs, on the condition that everything — down to the daintiest vase — remain as he left it. The bijou-small rooms are still filled with the antique furniture and art that Moïse so loved and studiously collected; the little tables in every which wood and shape, the armchairs pastel and plump like macarons, the meticulous tapestries lavished on screens and chairs, the walls laden in gilding, mouldings and Rococo paintings, all sorts of gorgeous bibelots created by leading eighteenth-century craftsmen, an entire room devoted to Sèvres porcelain … it all feels so lived-in that you can well imagine Moïse writing at a desk here, or reading on a sofa there. Haunting, too, is the knowledge of the fate of his other child, Béatrice: she, her husband and two children perished in Auschwitz. That such cruelty could be afflicted on a family who gave so much to France makes the beauty of this museum all the more poignant. As you leave, walking back down one of Paris’s most graceful staircases — a sweep of stone edged in gilt-spangled wrought-iron — you might realise why some people choose to revel in the follies and frivolities of life. Perhaps surrounding yourself with objects purely for the nonsensical fun of it is a way to make some kind of sense of an illogical world.

  Cross back over Rue de Monceau, and dog-leg right-then-left onto Rue de Téhéran. Walk to its very end, and take a right onto Boulevard Haussmann. The Musée Jacquemart-André, at no.158, is another mansion-turned-museum, whose original owners also well appreciated the seriousness of the superficial. Banking heir Edouard André and his society-portraitist wife Nélie Jacquemart were an haute bourgeoisie power couple who obsessively amassed art, especially of the Italian variety (think Botticelli, Tiepolo and Uccello), to showcase in their city château, designed by an architect who worked on some of the grand townhouses beside Parc Monceau. Creative genius Jean Cocteau once dubbed it ‘the museum of masterpieces and the masterpiece of museums.’ The ‘Italian Museum’ upstairs is testament to the couple’s passion for Renaissance art.

  Edouard and Nélie, like Moïse de Camondo, adored the decorative arts of the eighteenth century, yet they housed their antique finds in what must have been a modern, rather showy way. There’s a riot of colour and so much gold brilliance that you almost need sunglasses, but a sense of light-heartedness for all the sumptuousness. Down by the winter garden is a fabulous folly of a staircase; the pair of marble twirls seem carved by magic — that, or engineering genius. You feel like you’re on a film set more so than in someone’s former home, and you can only imagine the parties that must have been thrown here. If it’s lunchtime, linger and daydream a little longer in the old dining room, now a pretty tearoom that serves up delicious salads and scrumptious pastries.

  Our next destination, the Arc de Triomphe, is a twenty-minute walk away, along Boulevard Haussmann/Avenue de Friedland. This area was still rather rural when Baron Haussmann ploughed through in the mid-1850s in his quest to extend and modernise the city, knocking out countless country manors and quite a few old follies, too. If you need a break en route, pop into the garden of the Hôtel de Salomon de Rothschild, now a public park. It’s situated on land that was once part of the Folie Beaujon, a country villa surrounded by mazes, vines and windmills that became a kind of celebrated aristocratic fun park, featuring an undulating structure on which Parisians could whiz along in wheeled carts: it would go down in history as the first modern roller coaster. You’d never guess that such a tranquil patch of land can lay claim to such a wild ride of history.

  As you approach Place Charles de Gaulle, you’ll feel awed by the presence of the Arc de Triomphe. It is, after all, the tallest triumphal arch in the world, measuring in at 50 metres. Such arches go back to Ancient Rome, where they were commissioned to commemorate momentous events, such as a victorious battle, more so than have any true practical purpose — say, doubling as a gateway. So in this way they have the folie about them. But this particular arch manages to look substantial, not just due to its magnitude, but also the restraint of its decoration; it’s not your usual frilly type of folly, having eschewed extraneous columns and the like. To get a closer look at the sculptures and reliefs — which seem all that more powerful set against so much blank wall — find the stairwell at the corner of the Avenue des Champs-Élysées that will take you underground and across. You’ll see that the arch is the site of the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier and Flame of Remembrance, adding to the sense of sobriety. Emperor Napoléon wanted the arch to celebrate the French army. It now equally serves as a reminder of the realities of war.

  If you have the energy to tackle a climb of over 300 steps, spiral your way up to the terrace of the Arc de Triomphe, and you’ll be rewarded with a breathtaking 360-degree panorama of Paris. You’ll also see why t
he roundabout was originally known as Place de l’Étoile; the twelve avenues radiating outwards do indeed make for a star-shaped effect, studded with a diadem of buildings. It was Haussmann who engineered this dazzling design, in his efforts to urbanise and harmonise outer Paris. The first stone of the arch had been laid at what was the intersection of a few country lanes. When finally completed, thirty years later, the arch still overlooked a largely pastoral landscape of fields and vineyards. That’s near impossible to picture these days, in what is one of the world’s busiest — and craziest — traffic zones. Spend some time looking down at the cars as they weave and swerve their way around the unmarked road; you’ll be amazed they all make it out without a dent!

  From here, take the Métro Line 1 from Charles De Gaulle-Étoile out to Pont de Neuilly. One of the wealthiest suburbs of Paris and home to many of the country’s power people, Neuilly was historically an aristocratic stomping ground, and the perfect place for building temples to one’s wealth. A few blocks west of the station, you’ll come to Folie Saint-James. The grapefruit-pink Italian-villa-like house is not open to the public, but you can walk around the old gardens, which were another folly-filled creation of the late eighteenth century, the result of Claude Baudard de Saint-James declaring to his architect: ‘Do as you please, as long as it’s expensive.’

  Most of the grounds and their garnishes have disappeared, which is a pity as it must have been a true garden of delights. Dotted around the winding streams and fanciful bridges were almost fifty follies: classically minded temples and statues, a Chinese pavilion, a thatched cottage, an aviary, a flower garden, swings and a tightrope . . . The most celebrated, fortunately, is still there: the Grand Rocher. The artificial rock formation once trickled with water and if you ventured through the Doric portico of an entrance you’d find a bathroom, reservoir and crystal-encrusted grotto. It was as capricious as it was a little bit kitsch, totally extravagant (forty horses had been needed to deliver just one of the rocks), and the very definition of folie.