Paris for Dreamers

by Katrina Lawrence

  Most of the façades on the island, demure in discreet and subtly detailed stone, barely hint at the luxury within. That of 17 Quai d’Anjou, however, is a little more suggestive. Its frilly wrought-iron balcony is embellished with gold and its drainpipes, of all things, are bedazzled with some rather fantastical looking dolphins. The Hôtel de Lauzun is most famous as being a formative address of Baudelaire (he moved here after his stint on the southern side of the island), among other bohemian types, when it was the headquarters of Le Club des Hachichins, a group dedicated to examining the mind-bending effects of hashish — all in the serious aim of artistic inspiration, of course. Dwellers and their like-minded friends would loll about in the salon, under ceilings painted in frescoes of feminine and floral fantasia, nibbling on suspiciously scented green snacks before settling in for a night of hallucinatory entertainment. You can just imagine the poet, here in his red-and-black-walled room, penning L’Invitation au Voyage: ‘there, all is order and beauty, luxury, calm and voluptuousness.’ Baudelaire apparently had the lower panes of his top-floor apartment’s windows frosted out, so that all he could see was sky, as though he was back cruising on his own paradisiacal voyage.

  Like all the best Parisian addresses, this one has a wonderfully lurid history. Built by the son of the owner of one of Paris’s most star-studded cabarets, it came to be named after its most notorious resident, the Comte de Lauzun. The seventeenth-century bon vivant had been jailed for his uppity plans to marry Mademoiselle Montpensier — King Louis XIV’s cousin, granddaughter of Henri IV, and the wealthiest woman in France, who was known, rather fabulously, as La Grande Mademoiselle. Until this time, no man had lived up to her exalted standards, and so high society was flummoxed when she fell head over heels for the first time at forty (an age considered to be one-foot-in-the-grave), and with Lauzun of all people, a short and chubby man of no major wealth nor breeding, whose success with the ladies confounded his fellow male courtiers no end. After ten years of pining for her imprisoned paramour, La Grande Mademoiselle finally convinced Louis to free Lauzun. Some say the couple secretly wed and shacked up in this waterside mansion. La Grande Mademoiselle, however, soon discovered that the increasingly insolent Lauzun (‘Granddaughter of Henri IV, take off my boots,’ he would reportedly yell) had ulterior motives for marrying her (quelle surprise) and after three tempestuous years, the liaison was finie.

  The next Parisian power couple to call 17 Quai d’Anjou home was the dashing Louis Armand de Vignerot du Plessis, the grand-nephew of the famed Cardinal Richelieu, and the comely Marie Charlotte de la Porte Mazarin, who was the grand-niece of the equally renowned Cardinal Mazarin. The infamous affair began when the Marquis de Richelieu stole Marie Charlotte away from her convent; she’d been locked away by a father who feared this very occurrence — he also, apparently, had had her front teeth removed, in order to mar her beauty and attempt to keep libertine suitors at bay. Under the pair’s careful guidance, the Hôtel de Lauzun became the centre of Paris’s most scandalous social life, the scene of a succession of debauched soirées. The couple partied up a storm in the belief that they would one day receive the marquis’s older brother’s inheritance. Hélas, the elderly Duc de Richelieu managed to create an heir late in the game, and the party was well and truly over for Louis Armand and Marie Charlotte, the latter running off to London to end her days in a fog of drunken disrepute.

  The building now houses a research institute for social sciences but private tour guides occasionally offer access and the experience is overwhelming. You can barely breathe for all the gold. It’s Baroque style at its finest: heavy gilding, with nary a spot left white, Versailles parquetry, dramatic frescoes of sensual nymphs and chubby angels. Close to kaleidoscopic, you don’t need mind-enhancers to appreciate its fabulousness.

  Continue along Quai d’Anjou, through to Quai de Bourbon, the poplars grandly lined up on one side, a succession of stately façades on the other. It feels so serene and secluded, even in this faster day and age, that you can well understand how people have come to this island to hide away. Not all of them threw wild parties, though. At 19 Quai de Bourbon, a plaque states that Camille Claudel lived and worked here from 1899 to 1913. ‘At this date, [she] ended her brief career as an artist and began the long night of internment.’ And because this doesn’t sound bleak enough, it ends with a quote from a letter Camille wrote to her once lover, fellow sculptor Auguste Rodin, in 1886: ‘There is always something missing which torments me.’ It was here, in her ground-floor atelier, that a tormented Camille smashed up years’ worth of sculptures. Her ashamed family would soon lock her away in an asylum, depriving her of half a life, and history of a major talent. Evidently not everyone on the island could escape reality.

  Nor revolution. Turn left at Rue le Regrattier, on the corner of which you’ll notice a headless statue. The street was once called Rue de la Femme Sans Teste — of the Headless Woman — but the statue was actually of Saint Nicolas, hacked in half when the revolutionaries ran around Paris obliterating signs of royalty and religion, while titled residents cowered in their basements. You’ll soon reach the main, middle street of the island — Rue Saint-Louis-en-L’Îsle — and appreciate the gridded neatness of this city in miniature. Spend some time strolling up and down. It has become touristy in recent times, with chichi galleries and souvenir stores, but you can still spot an olde-worlde boulangerie, fromagerie or fleuriste, or a hotel fashioned from a seventeenth-century tennis court (jeu de paume), that speaks to Île Saint-Louis’s village-like past. The island might have been ringed with grand townhouses, but the servants needed places to shop and the shopkeepers places to live, and it’s along this main street that you can imagine the old hustle and bustle. Long after the mansions had been carved up into apartments, Île Saint-Louis remained a city within a city. As rents go up, there are fewer locals around to buy their peonies and pastries, but you still sense the old neighbourhood. Down towards the cross-street Rue Poulletier you’ll find the island’s parish church, Saint-Louis-en-L’Île; it’s modest and mottled on the outside, but inside is a burst of Baroque, with lashings of the gilding that this island so loves.

  The pride of Île Saint-Louis is the local family business of Berthillon, purveyors of Paris’s most iconic ice cream. You can buy Berthillon all over the island, but you can’t miss the original salon de thé at 29-31 Rue Saint-Louis-en-L’Îsle. The queues can stretch around the block, but the cones are more than worth the wait. You’ll find classic flavours — purest vanilla or wild strawberry sorbet — as well as fanciful ones, such as liquorice or lavender. Cone in hand, take one last saunter around the island, wandering between the upper to lower decks as you go. On the northern side, look over to the Right Bank, where the lower quays, once polluted expressways, have been transformed into a lively zone for pedestrians and picnickers and pleasure boats that serve cool, crisp rosé: this is the Parc des Rives de Seine, which even doubles up as a beach in summer, complete with large colourful parasols. Parisians have embraced their river in a new way. It no longer simply cuts their city in two halves, it’s a district in itself; it’s no longer for crossing, but for staying a while.

  Some of the coolest Parisians have appreciated the pleasures of waterfront for some time, since the Canal Saint-Martin, in the 10th arrondissement, became a shabby-yet-chic hub for modern bohemians. If you want to sit by the Seine for the evening, basking in the radiance of the setting sun, by all means do — it’s little short of blissful. But if you’d rather to see how the locals prefer to do waterside, the canal is your go-to. To best get there, cross over the Pont Marie to the Métro station of the same name, then zip your way up to République (go one stop to Châtelet Les Halles then switch to Line 11, in the direction of Mairie des Lilas). When you emerge at Place de la République, find Rue Léon Jouhaux, which runs off the northern tip, and walk eastwards for a few blocks to the canal, with its arched iron footbridges.

  The Parisian canals were commissioned by Napoléon Bonaparte, early in the
nineteenth century, to bring fresh water to Parisians, of course, but also help move goods and supplies around in the burgeoning industrial age. Like many previously working-class enclaves of western Paris, the area has gentrified of late, its lower rents luring in the creative types, and in turn the street art and cool cafés, artisanal bakeries and gritty wine bars. One sure sign of the Canal Saint-Martin’s new status was the 2001 film Le Fabuleux Destin d’Amélie Poulain (Amélie): it was from the lock-bridge that the quirky Amélie, played by Audrey Tatou, used to skip stones, one of her little joys of life.

  The French have an expression, ‘La vie est faite de petits bonheurs.’ Life is made of small happinesses. An evening by the canal is surely one of those. It’s not as grand as a Seine-side soirée, sure, but it’s an understated enjoyment. Riverside Paris can often overwhelm you with its magnificence; canalside Paris, though, is on a more human scale. Sitting or walking by the water — conversing with friends, kissing your lover, people-watching (and cool people, at that), or just meditating on the meaning of life — these are the day-to-day delights that Parisians live for. As well as feasting, of course. So head to a waterfront bar. Or, better still, buy a bottle of wine from one of the side streets’ grocers and find a bench seat back on Quai de Valmy. As you sip your dry rosé or crisp sancerre, toast the city’s drinkers who came before you; the canal was, after all, originally funded by a city tax on wine.

  Itinerary

  • Jardin du Luxembourg 75006: opens between 07.30-08.15 and closes between 16.30-21.30 depending on time of year

  • La Terrasse de Madame: from 08.00 until just before park’s closing

  • Musée du Luxembourg: 19 Rue Vaugirard 75006; 10.30-19.00 (Saturday-Thursday), 10.30-22.00 (Friday); closed 25 December

  • Angelina: 19 Rue de Vaugirard 75006; 10.30-19.00

  If you feel like, when in Paris, pondering the point of being, you don’t necessarily need to get all angsty and existential over black coffee in a Left Bank café — you should simply take yourself to the Jardin du Luxembourg for the day. If ever a garden served as a metaphor for life, with all its twists and turns, light and shade, order and chaos, this would be it. Give yourself over to its winding gravel allées that go nowhere and everywhere, listen to the whispered stories of the statues, and observe Parisians of all ages at play. By the time you exit, you’ll have formulated an enlightened theory of living. Call it being and everythingness.

  Clutching the day’s newspapers and a bag of croissants — and with your latest favourite book tucked into your tote — enter the gardens through the Porte Odéon gate on Rue de Vaugirard, past the ornamental grilles that encircle this 23-hectare park. Walk straight ahead, the immaculate emerald lawn (grass really is greener in Paris) on one side, the majestic Palais du Luxembourg on the other. Soon you’ll come to, on your left, an elongated pond bordered with plane trees that are looped together with ribbons of ivy. This fairytale-tunnel of an enchanted forest is the Medici Fountain. Claim one of the scattered green-metal chairs, and work your way through your papers and pastries. Or just be in the moment. The branches weave overhead into a leafy canopy, reflected in the mirror-esque water below. It’s all surprisingly meditative and tranquil, despite the drama of the sculptures at the fountain’s foot: a jealous Polyphemus angrily looming over the sea nymph Galatea in the arms of Acis.

  The fountain was originally a grotto, commissioned by the homesick Florentine Marie de Medici. She had come to Paris in 1600 to wed King Henri IV, whose marriage offer was a way to repay a debt owed to Marie’s wealthy father, Francesco I, the super-wealthy Grand Duke of Tuscany. Ten years later, and the day after she was finally crowned queen, Henri was fatally stabbed by an assassin. Marie, now regent for her young son — Louis XIII — could finally revel in independence and power. To escape the politics of the Louvre, the royal palace at the time, she bought some land on the Left Bank, just beyond the then city walls, from a certain Duc François de Luxembourg. While living in his former mansion (now the Petit Luxembourg), she watched her dream future palace materialise next door. She had requested something close in style to the Palazzo Pitti, where she had so happily grown up, complete with a park inspired by the terraces and parterres of the Boboli Gardens.

  The Luxembourg Palace has the same rusticated, block-textured finish as the Pitti, but with its classic beige stone and steep grey roof it’s clearly a Gallic affair. Which is perhaps one reason it was chosen, in 1958, to become the seat of the French Senate. It’s curious, by the way, that so many Parisian houses of power were originally the creations of headstrong women. France’s lower house, the National Assembly, had an early life as the Palais Bourbon, the sumptuous home of the Sun King’s legitimised daughter, known as Poupotte for her doll-like looks, and the president lives in the Élysée Palace, the former abode of the most famous of all royal mistresses, the Marquise de Pompadour. Marie, for all of her pining and planning, didn’t even get her name on her palace; it somehow ended up memorialising the duke whose land she had bought.

  France has traditionally been a patriarchal kind of place and some might say it still is. But when you scratch the surface of history, you come across many stories of formidable French women. They, admittedly, wielded power with varying degrees of success; Marie, for instance, was ultimately banished from the kingdom by her come-of-age son. But these women battled the forces against them, attempting to cultivate a harsh world, as a gardener might try to impose some sort of order on the elements.

  Take the stairs next to the Medici Fountain — at the top of the flight, you’ll see the Panthéon peaking in the distance — and turn right. Marie’s terracing remains, overlooking the old octagonal pond in the central axis — with its geometric shapes of lawn edged with flowers and paths dotted with tree-boxes of citrus plants — that has become the template for the formal French garden. Positioned around this terrace, as though guardians of Marie’s original vision, is a series of twenty marble statues, the so-called ‘Queens of France and Famous Women.’

  One of the first you’ll pass by is Sainte Geneviève. Her angelic face is framed by two long ropey plaits, and her eyes are closed as though in prayer, fittingly so as she’s the patron saint of Paris. Back in the fifth century, it was Geneviève, a Gallo-Roman noblewoman, who convinced Parisians not to abandon their island city as Attila the Hum pillaged his way towards Paris. His change of course was attributed to the prayer marathon Geneviève led, and it is for this, plus a lifetime of piety, that the Panthéon was originally constructed as a church in her name. Secularised during the French Revolution — which promised égalité but also fraternité, and so female power was further socially curbed — the Église de Sainte-Geneviève was reborn as a remembrance to great men (literally: ‘aux grands hommes’ is inscribed above the portico). Once again, behind every masculine monument you usually find a strong woman …

  Jeanne d’Albret, Henri IV’s mother, the Queen of Navarre, stands on a nearby plinth, across the way from her own mother, the formidable Marguerite d’Angoulême, who’s resting her chin pensively on her ladylike fingers, in keeping with her reputation as a philosophically minded, poetry-writing Renaissance princess. Just to her right is her granddaughter-in-law, Marie de Medici, who’s looking rather pleased with herself, trussed up in lace and accessorised with a sceptre and ruff-collared cape. She looks, in this captured moment, to be quite enjoying life — the double chin perhaps gives it away — and unwilling to give up her mantle as queen, even though her own daughter-in-law, Anne of Austria is only five statues away.

  Anne was betrothed at the age of eleven, to help secure the Franco-Spanish alliance (despite her name, she hailed from Spain), and she arrived at an unfriendly court a few years later. Lonely for years (when perhaps chocolate, which she had brought to France, proved a handy consolation), her fate considerably brightened when she gave birth to the future Sun King. Anne came into her own after her husband’s death, proving herself to be a wily politician, and it must be this phase of her life that’s comm
emorated here in stone, given the self-assured poise.

  With her chin proudly raised, Anne looks across the pond to her niece — and near-daughter-in-law — Mademoiselle Montpensier. La Grande Mademoiselle, as she was also known, was the catch of the seventeenth century, as Henri IV’s granddaughter and heiress to swathes of valuable land, including the Luxembourg Palace, which she had inherited from her father. Every eligible European bachelor asked for her hand but she decidedly said non, and was all but set to marry Louis XIV until getting herself caught up in the Fronde, a messy civil war of sorts between royal rule and Parisian aristocrats. She went on to live a decidedly good life, before finding herself, at the ripe old age of forty, falling for an altogether lowlife of a man. Long story, short: it didn’t end well. And so she retreated to her palace, to soothe her soul and write her memoirs.

  All women here are worthy of sweeping memoirs, and these marble tributes, but what really strikes you are the glaring absences of other great French women of history. Joan of Arc, granted, was originally in the gardens, but moved to the Louvre when it was decided that her statue was too frail for outdoor exposure. (Perhaps it was the decision to dress her in a wistful dress, rather than her usual armour, that contributed to this sense of fragility?)