Paris for Dreamers

by Katrina Lawrence

  On the other side of the bridge, take the stairs down to the long island strip known as the Île aux Cygnes — its name harking back to when the Sun King sent a flock of white swans to the city, with the aim of prettying up the riverway. This peninsula promenade, shaded by two lines of trees — lindens, horse chestnuts, maples and many others — would have pleased the aesthetically minded Louis XIV. Stroll right to the end where, in the midst of a grove of willows, stands a quarter-scale replica of the Statue of Liberty, the monument gifted by France to America in the late nineteenth century. In the downstream distance, you’ll just make out the green latticework of the Pont Mirabeau. It was Paris’s first steel bridge, but is most famous as the subject of a poetic ode. It was here where Guillaume Apollinaire used to rendezvous with his girlfriend, the artist Marie Laurencin, she of the dreamy muted-pastel paintings. Apollinaire wrote Le Pont Mirabeau to help heal his heart after the couple’s breakup, and anyone who obsessed over their French lessons as a moody teenage girl likely remembers his poignant lines: ‘Under the Pont Mirabeau flows the Seine / and our loves / I must recall / joy always comes after pain …’

  It’s time to walk against that flow once more. Retrace your steps to the Pont de Bir-Hakeim, and head back along the Right Bank. You can amble by the river for most of the way, and you should; it’s a trek, but pleasant, much of it cobbled and tree-lined and made for walking. Hopefully there’s a saxophonist or two to enhance the ambience. As you walk down the ramp just past Pont de l’Alma, look back to the foot of the bridge. The stone soldier statue known as Le Zouave is the city’s informal flood marker. Parisian history has seen a series of disastrous floods. One of the worst in recent times was in 1910, when the waters reached the Zouave’s shoulders, although things came worryingly close in 2018, when the long suffering soldier was half-submerged.

  Floods aside, sauntering by the Seine is one of the most enjoyable things to do in this city. And one of the loveliest places to be in Paris towards the day’s end is on the Pont des Arts. At any time of day, it’s the ideal platform from which to admire the 360-degree beauty: the sweep of Pont Neuf punctuated by the willowy Square du Vert-Galant, the Baroque dome of the Institut de France, the eternal Classicism of the Louvre. But this spot is particularly special as day relaxes into evening, because the buoyant bridge seems to lighten up all the more. Buskers play jazz, couples embrace, and cross-legged friends share bottles of Sancerre … And as the sun’s rays burst forth one final time, soaking everything and everyone in a golden glow, you can see why Parisians call this time of day Magic Hour.

  Itinerary

  • Hôtel de Sens: 1 Rue du Figuier 75004

  • Place des Vosges 75004

  • Hôtel de Sully (rear entrance): 5 Place des Vosges 75004

  • Carette: 25 Place des Vosges 75003; 07.30-24.00

  • Musée Victor Hugo: 6 Place des Vosges 75004; 10.00-18.00; closed Monday & public holidays

  • Musée Carnavalet: 23 Rue de Sévigné 75003; closed for renovation until late 2019

  • Hôtel d’Angoulême Lamoignon (Bibilothèque Historique de la Ville de Paris); 24 Rue Pavée 75004; 10.00-18.00; closed Sunday

  • Musée Cognacq-Jay: 8 Rue Elzévir 75003; 10.00-18.00; closed Monday & some public holidays

  • Musée Picasso: 5 Rue de Thorigny 75003; 10.30-18.00 (Tuesday-Friday), 09.30-18.00 (Saturday, Sunday); closed Monday, 1 January, 1 May & 25 December

  • Musée de la Chasse et de la Nature: 62 Rue des Archives 75003; 11.00-18.00 (Tuesday, Thursday-Sunday), 11.00-21.30 (Wednesday); closed Monday & public holidays

  • Musée des Archives Nationales: 60 Rue des Francs-Bourgeois 75003; 10.00-17.30 (Monday, Wednesday-Friday), 14.00-17.30 (Saturday, Sunday); closed Tuesday

  • Mariage Frères: 30 Rue du Bourg Tibourg 75004; 12.00-19.00

  • Hôtel des Ambassadeurs de Hollande: 47 Rue Vielle du Temple 75004

  The Marais is such an expanse of an area, spread out over most of the 3rd and 4th arrondissements, that it’s hard to know just where to start a day. Of course, so vast and varied is the district that it well merits more than 24 hours. If you have such time, book a beam-ceilinged apartment for several nights and immerse yourself in the winding streets and romantic nooks. But if you only have one day to devote, start out at the Hôtel de Sens, which reveals much about the history and character of the Marais.

  The flamboyantly turreted confection — originally home to the archbishops of Sens when in town — dates from around 1500, making it one of the oldest buildings in Paris, and its Gothic fortress feel gives you an idea of what Paris was like in its dark medieval times. Houses were havens, and the Marais boasted some of the most luxurious. One famous resident to take refuge here was Queen Margot, in 1606, when newly divorced from King Henri IV. Not that she moped, mind you. Her all-night festivities were said to be shockingly, albeit glamorously, debauched. She was before her time, the first of many bonnes vivantes to call the Marais home, as you’ll see today …

  The Marais lost some of its lustre in the eighteenth century, when the Faubourg Saint-Germain became all the aristocratic rage, but the Revolution certainly stopped the party. The Marais was reborn as an industrial enclave, its grand mansions finding new life as tenement housing, artisan workshops and industrial factories. The Hôtel de Sens, for one, housed a laundry, a jam factory and an optician during the nineteenth century, before becoming a kind of shopping mall. Neglect took a toll, but fortunately the state swooped back in to save many of these old mansions by giving them an official public purpose. The Hôtel de Sens is now home to the Bibliothèque Forney, a library devoted to the creative arts. If the library is open, you’ll be able to snoop around the courtyard. Most of the old hôtel is, admittedly, a reconstruction, but the arched doorways and elaborately framed mullion windows are wonderfully evocative nevertheless. Make sure to spend some time by the parterre in the lovely formal park out back; the government has also saved many of the gardens of the Marais’ grandest houses, clearing them of the old sheds and garages, and opening their gates for public enjoyment, a democratic pleasure that would surely make revolutionary ghosts smile.

  Walk east along Rue de l’Ave Maria and you’ll pick up some more historical clues to this area. On your left, by the basketball court, you’ll see some remains of the thirteenth-century ramparts, knocked down when the city wall was pushed further outwards in the fourteenth century. This opened up acres of lush ground — marshland (marais) that had been drained — which was just begging to be covered in grand houses. Turn left at Rue Saint-Paul, and right at the old sixteenth-century corner turret, into Rue des Lions Saint-Paul. This area is a patchwork of architectural styles, old Gothic morphing into stone-cool Classicism. Pivot left into Rue Beautreillis; at no.6 stands the lone doorway of the old Hôtel Raoul, which was knocked down in 1961, a year before laws came in to protect and preserve the Marais — this explains the occasional sad architectural sight from the early twentieth century. Still, these quiet streets of the lower Marais give you a good feel for the winding ways of Old Paris.

  New Paris could be pinpointed to one place in particular. Cross over Rue Saint-Antoine, and walk to the end of Rue de Birague, through the keyhole entrance to Place des Vosges. In a monochrome city — one of beige and grey — walking into the Place des Vosges can be like watching a film that suddenly switches from black & white to Technicolor. The square — edged with four rows of fetching pavilions, their rosy brickwork trimmed with white limestone and topped with steep slate roofs — was commissioned by Henri IV in 1605, as the city’s first piazza. Set on the site of an old horse market, Place Royale — as it was then known — was a breath of fresh air, its façades reminiscent of the brick-and-stone-chequered châteaux popular in the Île-de-France region at the time. Regal and powerful types snapped up the pavilions. They counted thirty-six in all, nine on each side, identical except for two — Henri kept the fancier one, which you just walked under, for himself. Hélas, he didn’t live to sleep in the pavillon du roi fo
r even a night; the beloved King was assassinated in 1610. But his optimistic vision of a centre of urban sociability and harmony lived on, because all Parisians were welcome on this square, originally paved rather than grassed. This was where Paris learned how to come together. Although it’s not Henri on the equestrian statue in the middle (his son Louis XIII has that honour), this square was the perfect monument for a king who had brought peace to his realm, after ending the Wars of Religion that had torn France apart for several decades.

  Criss-cross the park, through the corridors of linden trees and around the central ring of horse chestnuts. Sit on a bench seat here and then there; this square, symmetrical though it is, requires viewing from many angles, to fully appreciate it. Then wander around the perimeter, through the rhythmically vaulted arcades. There’s a meditative, cloister-like feel to this colonnade, once a hive of industry, now home to hushed art galleries and chic cafés. Occasionally you’ll be able to peep past an open carriage door into a courtyard of rambling plants and wistful statues. The door at no.5 takes you to the back of one of the area’s most impressive mansions, the Hôtel de Sully. It’s private now — the head office of the Centre des Monuments Nationaux — but you can spend as long as you want in the pleasant back garden, with its old orangerie — the first such greenhouse to be built in Paris, in the early seventeenth century, when the city was acquiring a taste for exotica.

  Back on Place des Vosges, you’ll find an ideal breakfast spot in Carette, where you can sit en terrasse, looking across to those lindens, neatly lined and clipped behind the park’s railings. Order up generously, to fuel yourself through to a late lunch. Whether your morning caffeine hit comes courtesy of coffee, tea or chocolate, any choice seems apt, as all three brews made their way to Paris, from newly discovered continents, in the 1600s, stimulating minds and inspiring Parisians to dream big in the grand siècle. As symbolised by Place des Vosges, the seventeenth century was a time when Parisians learned how to socialise. Although not in salons de thé like Carette — these didn’t become a Parisian institution until the late nineteenth century. The original salons, back in the time when women couldn’t go out in public on their own, were early literary clubs, held in the comfort of a stylish home. The tradition was inspired by the Italian-born Madame de Rambouillet, who lived on this square before moving to a colourfully designed house near the Louvre, where she would host le tout Paris in her famous Blue Room. In Italian, the word for a large reception room was salone; it became salon in French, a word that also came to denote an urbane, culturally minded gathering.

  Salons became the social hub of Paris, where both genders could intermingle, and talk about politics, philosophy, art, literature, love, anything really … Guests could even gossip maliciously. But the key was to do so with esprit — a tricky-to-translate term that embraces wit, intelligence, spirit and spark. One salonnière of the Marais, Mlle de Scudéry, once proclaimed: ‘I want great and small things to be spoken of, so long as they are spoken of elegantly.’ The most legendary salons were run by high-society women, early feminists who had few ways of wielding social power, but oodles of enticing esprit. By hosting the Parisian elite in their homes, they could influence men, and society, by stealth, moulding trends in etiquette, language and sociability, in the very definition of a civilised life, to their own refined taste. Another leading salonnière Ninon de Lenclos — who hosted soirées a block away in her Rue des Tournelles home — attracted some of the day’s most powerful men, who faithfully came for her witty bons mots as much as seductive charm, hoping to be invited back for a private reception, this time in the boudoir.

  One star performer of the salon circuit was Marie de Rabutin-Chantal, a.k.a. Mme de Sévigné; born at no.1 bis Place des Vosges, she would go on to become France’s most celebrated epistolary writer. Her posthumously published letters glitter with the wit and fun that made her such a popular guest (and are a must-read if you want to know more about the vivacious seventeenth-century world, and language, of the Marais). She was always around chez Madame de Rambouillet and Mlle de Scudéry, and even made it to Ninon’s from time to time, despite the fact that the latter had seduced both Mme de Sévigné’s son and husband. Not that she cared much about her rake of a spouse, the Marquis de Sévigné, and his philandering ways. When he died duelling over a courtesan, the marquise, aged twenty-five, was happily free to pursue a life of social pleasures.

  You can get an idea of the world into which Marie was born over in the Musée Victor Hugo, the house museum of the legendary French author. Despite living two centuries apart, they would have shared a similar outlook: a vast public space for all Paris, that perhaps gave Mme de Sévigné her taste for sociability, and Hugo his commitment to social justice — it was here that he began to write Les Misérables, in 1845, after the revolutions of the 1830s had played out on his very doorstep. He would have also been able to look over to no.11 Place des Vosges, the one-time home of seventeenth-century courtesan Marion Delorme, and the heroine of one of his early plays.

  The décor of the author’s old digs is not the glitzy Sun King style that Madame would have loved. Still, the museum is a window into history in more ways than one. Hugo was a hopeless nostalgic, with a love of architecture and stones that told stories, as his hit 1831 novel Notre-Dame de Paris (The Hunchback of Notre-Dame) proved, wary of modernity for modernity’s sake; and he furnished his interior world as he did his literary realm: with one eye joyously on the past. A visit here is to appreciate his Romantic tastes, with the mix of Gothic glamour and Chinoiserie exotica, the clash of Flemish tapestries and Turkish rugs. It was in the red-damask bedroom, with the ornate Louis XIII four-poster, that the author left this world with fittingly dramatic flair, his last words being ‘I see the black light.’

  Find the daylight, instead, and walk diagonally across the park to head west along Rue des Francs-Bourgeois (the street that once ran along the outer edge of the thirteenth-century city wall), past the bustle of beauty and fashion boutiques. At the corner of Rue de Sévigné, you’ll see the former home of the woman who inspired that street’s name. It’s now the Musée Carnavalet, a museum dedicated to the history of Paris. It’s closed for renovation until the end of 2019, but diary-note a return visit, as this fabulously rambling museum well deserves a full day for any Paris devotee. The collection is eclectic and extensive, from medieval shop signs to paintings of the city in all eras to sumptuous Parisian salons and boudoirs that were saved from demolition and painstakingly reassembled here. You can even waft through some of Mme de Sévigné’s old rooms.

  Built in the mid-sixteenth century, the Hôtel Carnavalet was one of the Marais’ earliest private mansions (in French: hôtel particulier — hôtel once referred to a grand residence instead of tourist accommodation). Another house ahead of its time — built just before the Place des Vosges marked this as the area to be — is just ahead, on the south-western corner of Rue des Francs-Bourgeois and Rue Pavée. It’s the Hôtel d’Angoulême Lamoignon, built in the 1580s for Diane de France, King Henri II’s legitimised daughter. You can nip into her rear garden or find the front entrance just left at the turret peeking out from the corner, a holdover from late medieval times. By the seventeenth century, most Parisian mansions were becoming more classic and streamlined in style, and followed a typical template: a rectangular building positioned between a back garden and a front courtyard, which was protected by a high stone wall featuring a grand carriage door. You’re free to walk through the door of Hôtel Lamoignon, because the building now houses the public library of the history of Paris. Like many such estates in the Marais, it spent many years as a jumble of stores and workshops, but is now fully restored.

  Continue along Rue des Francs-Bourgeois, where more boutiques still are nestled into old boulangeries or mansions, their façades all that remain of an old Marais. Many Parisians grumble about the so-called façadism of the area; scratch the surface of an old peeling door and it will no longer reveal artisans toiling away in ateliers. Once th
e government had renovated the landmark old mansions, filling them with museums, libraries and administration offices, the developers pounced on most else. By the turn of the millennium, a new generation of Parisians had flocked to the Marais (the famous bobos — or, bourgeois bohemians), ecstatic to find there the Old Paris. But, of course, rents duly skyrocketed and the Parisians who had made the area so authentic — the tailors and the toymakers — moved out, leaving space for shops better suited to the stylish needs of the new locals. So a façade might suggest a cobbler is at work inside, but you’ll more likely find designer dresses; go into what might first seem to be a pharmacie, and you’ll risk leaving with a brand new handbag.

  If there’s a sense of the stage set, or museum, to the Marais, that’s somewhat fitting, because the area does boast some of the city’s most charming museums that recreate lost worlds. At Rue Elzévir, turn right to find, a few doors up, the Musée Cognacq-Jay, devoted to eighteenth-century taste. Entry to the permanent collection is free, and even a whirl around of fifteen minutes will delight, for the Rococo in all shapes and sizes, from furniture of the Marquise de Pompadour’s dreams to bijou snuff boxes, and powdery pastel paintings strung up throughout the boiserie-lined, chandelier-lit rooms. The house, built in 1575, was one of the Marais’ most handsome from the outset. As you roam through the suites of rooms, you not only get a good sense of what life was like in pre-revolutionary Paris — for the lucky ones, at least — but also realise how surprisingly amenable this old ‘enfilade’ style of interior architecture is to the needs of a museum. It’s almost as though those canny architects knew, or at least hoped, their handiwork would be viewed by all in the future.

  At the top of Rue Elzévir, swerve left then right to find Musée Picasso. If you’re a Picasso buff, you’ll want to come back for a more serious session, but for today give yourself an hour to wind around the museum. After an epic five-year renovation, the three floors showcase Picasso’s lifelong artistic progression, in his paintings, of course, but also sculptures. Whether you’re into his aesthetic or not, you have to admit the guy had taste. Testament to this is his personal collection of art, which includes a Cézanne that will transport you to the southern France that he and his friend Picasso so knew and loved. Sadly, due to the architectural neglect that was so common in the Marais, little remains of the 1650s interior of the Hôtel Salé — so named for its original owner, a tax farmer who collected duties on salt, and evidently made enough of a fortune to commission what was essentially an urban palace.