Paris for Dreamers

by Katrina Lawrence

  A novel, in French, by the way is un roman. That’s because courtly literature used the language then known as romanz, which had developed from Gallo-Roman street-speak (Latin had been strictly the lingua of religion, government and learning). So gushing tales of love and lust became synonymous with romance, in a way. And then a new generation of writers came along after the Revolution, calling themselves Romantics. They weren’t referring to red roses and romance fiction as we might know it. Romantics rejected the stiff style of literature that had been in vogue for a couple of centuries, in favour of flowing novels that allowed them to express their emotions, especially love and anger. The red ones, you could say. The beating Roman heart of stony Paris.

  Back on the quais, peruse the bouquinistes sheds; you might just come across the perfect roman to add some spice to your own français. Take your book across the Pont Neuf and into Place Dauphine, where you’ll find the perfect terrace table for reading, and sipping rosé, too. This lovely triangular oasis was the jardin du roi in medieval times, back when the royal palace was situated on the Île de la Cité. In this haven of fragrant herbs and heady roses, exotic fruit trees and trellised walkways woven with vines, the queen and her ladies would sing and dance and recite poetry — a burst of passion within the stone walls. The square was remodelled as a residential enclave by King Henri IV (who knew a little about ladies and love), and although there aren’t many of the original brick-and-stone buildings left, the red-and-white style has always struck me as so well suited to Paris, a city of light, but also of love.

  PART FIVE: ARTS & LITERATURE

  Itinerary

  • Quai Voltaire 75007

  • Square Honoré Champion 75006

  • Monnaie de Paris: 11 Quai de Conti 75006; 11.00-19.00 (until 21.00 on Wednesday); closed Monday, 1 January, 1 May & 25 December

  • Cour du Commerce Saint-André 75006

  • Le Procope: 13 Rue de l’Ancienne Comédie 75006

  • Église Saint-Germain-des-Prés: 3 Place Saint-Germain-des-Prés 75006

  • Café de Flore: 172 Boulevard Saint-Germain 75006; 07.30-01.30

  Quai Voltaire is a stretch of refined grandeur as only Paris can do, but its architectural cachet is surely enhanced by its name, and association with one of France’s most esteemed philosophers. Voltaire, born in Paris in 1694 as François-Marie Arouet, wasn’t a philosopher in the textbook sense, in that he pioneered a breakthrough theory of thinking. He was a thinker, yes, but also a poet and playwright, not to mention a party guy, too. An international celebrity, Voltaire was the man everyone wanted at their salon, who could talk about anything and everything with panache and wit and a soupçon of sarcasm. He was also alluringly perfumed with an air of infamy, having for a time been locked up in the notorious Bastille prison.

  If Voltaire was celebrated for one theoretical concept — beyond mischief-making — it was that of tolerance. Ironically, this is what got him into trouble with the rather intolerant authorities. At a time when the Catholic Church ruled France in tandem with the royal court, Voltaire called orthodox religion the ‘scourge of all the follies and turmoils imaginable.’ Banished from Paris numerous times during his life, Voltaire returned to his hometown at the age of eighty-four, after decades in exile, and made a final resting place for himself in the building on the corner of Quai Voltaire and Rue de Beaune. Word of his homecoming quickly got out; by the end of his first day back in Paris, over 300 well-wishers — including Benjamin Franklin, one of the United States’ founding fathers, no less — had rung the bell. The church also came knocking, urging an increasingly frail Voltaire to recant his various sins against Jesus Christ. To no avail. ‘In the name of God, sir, do not speak to me anymore about that man, and let me die in peace,’ Voltaire purportedly replied, on his deathbed, to one imploring churchman.

  Voltaire always had the last laugh; officially denied a Christian funeral, he was nevertheless secretly buried in an abbey outside Paris. Such was the respect for the great man, even among many of his enemies. In 1791, during the turbulent revolutionary years, Voltaire’s remains were brought back and entombed at the Panthéon, after a procession witnessed by a million Parisians turned out to honour this defender of human rights, a role he proudly took on in later life.

  In one of the curious coincidences you often come across in the jam-packed history of Paris, Voltaire had resided in the same townhouse back in 1723, when he rented a room from his mistress, a bubbly marquise who lived there with her open-minded husband. Voltaire was back then a dashing man about town, on the cusp of fame and fortune. Yet he was also quite delicate of constitution, not particularly suited to Parisian life, complaining of the ‘infernal noise of the riverbank and the street.’

  Walk east along that once-infernal riverbank, as Voltaire must have done so many times. These days Quai Voltaire is home to luxury antique boutiques, which Voltaire would have well appreciated, as the Royal Historiographer of France. But Voltaire was more than a history buff — he craved knowledge of all sorts, as both a creature and leader of the Age of Enlightenment, an era when the modern world was emerging, inspired and informed by new ways of scientific know-how. The Seine might nowadays be an excellent spot for pleasure cruises, but imagine a time when the riverboats brought back mind-spinning discoveries from all corners of the globe. To the dismay of the Church, which until now had a stranglehold on knowledge, people began to push boundaries, dream of a bigger life. At 1 Quai Voltaire, in 1742, Jean-François Boyvin de Bonnetot, a self-styled inventor, leapt out of his window with glider-like wings attached to all limbs. After a brief flight, hovering above a crowd of awed Parisians, Bonnetot plummeted into the Seine. Leaving aside the broken leg and bruised ego, he was just one of many Parisians who saw science as the answer to a better existence.

  Continue strolling along the quais, stopping now and then to peruse the bouquinistes. You might even chance upon a vintage copy of Candide, Voltaire’s celebrated satirical work. Voltaire tried his best to be a positive kind of guy — ‘I decided to be happy because it’s good for the health,’ he once declared — but he was no grinning idiot. His classic novella, inspired by the devastating 1755 Lisbon earthquake, was an attack on blind optimism, and those who insisted, when confronted by tragedy, that God was benevolent, and the world the best it could be. Candide also gave us another of Voltaire’s most famous proclamations: ‘We must cultivate our garden.’

  When you reach the Statue of the Second Republic, on a traffic island at the end of Quai Malaquais, go behind it to where Rue de Seine begins. Just around the bend is a curve of garden that is bookended with cherry blossom trees and embroidered with a twirl of a flowerbed. It’s pretty, yes, but rather modest, and hardly the place you’d expect to find a statutory tribute to the towering personality of Voltaire. And yet here he is, flecked with moss, looking perfectly content — his lips curled in that signature amused way of theirs — to be in this very cultivated garden. It might come as a surprise that such an outward looking man has become known for a quote that seems to advise an insular approach to existence. But what Voltaire came to see, with time, is that everyone needed their own private patch to germinate ideas, and that the world grew best when everyone first tended to action on a local level; his later incarnation as a justice crusader for the everyman proved his social engagement. But I think Voltaire also meant the quote literally, as during his periods of exile in the country he had come to appreciate the therapeutic effects of planting lavender and plotting our parterres. So I like to think Voltaire’s spirit lives happy here, in this Square Honoré Champion.

  Across the road, a doorway takes you into the paved foreground of the Institut de France. In Voltaire’s time, this baroque beauty of a building was a college, and the various academies that are housed here now were across the river, in the Louvre. Voltaire was a member of the literary Académie Française, although he would have liked also to belong to the Académie des Sciences, because Voltaire was very much a maths nerd. Mathematics had been cool
in French philosophical circles since the previous century, whose two preeminent thinkers, René Descartes (he of ‘I think therefore I am’ fame) and Blaise Pascal (‘the heart has its reasons of which reason knows nothing’), were also mathematicians.

  Descartes may have championed the brain as the body’s hero organ, and inspired French thought to organise itself with mathematical-like logic, but Pascal reminded Gallic types not to forget the heart. Voltaire went a step further, managing to make maths romantic. A ladies’ man though he was, Voltaire yearned for The One. He found her in one of the century’s most intriguing women, Émilie du Châtelet, a striking aristocrat and brilliant mathematician to boot. The couple bunkered down at her country château, drinking champagne and entertaining friends — while also conducting various experiments, raving about the genius of Isaac Newton, and reading their way through thousands of books. The fifteen-year love affair was a true meeting of minds as well as hearts.

  Maths helped find Voltaire love, and it also made him his fortune; on discovering a loophole in the state lottery, he was able to legally game the system, and become seriously wealthy. In Paris, money could buy you everything, even respect, in a world where economic prestige was fast becoming more important than class status. The Paris Mint was a monument to such a time.

  Keep walking along what is now Quai Conti, curving around until you come to a low and long building in neo-Classical style. This is the Monnaie de Paris. Begun in 1767, the Paris Mint was very much a creation of the Enlightenment, when public buildings were designed to express the power and prestige, but also seriousness, of the French state. And so architects harked back to Classicism, the imposing temples and stately columns of Ancient Rome and Greece; it had the purity and clarity that seemed to match the lofty ideals of the times.

  Wander around the courtyards behind the Mint’s main wing, once a shelter of coinage workshops, and now a calm and airy cobbled maze that makes for a curiously apt contemporary art space. There’s a permanent museum dedicated to the art and science of coinage, if that’s your thing. But if an exhibition is on in the main building, go — even if just to see the old council room, with its trompe l’oeil domed roof, marbled columns and tinselly mouldings. It’s deliciously lavish, particularly in contrast with the austerity of the exterior.

  This is one of those classic Parisian paradoxes: a demure façade that belies knee-weakening extravagance within. The French, despite their democratic ideals, adore luxury. Even the enlightened, status-quo-questioning minds of Voltaire’s time liked the finer things in life, as we shall soon see. For now, head back to Quai Conti, and continue eastwards. At Rue Dauphine, turn right and walk to the end, before veering left into Rue Saint-André des Arts. Between nos. 59 and 61, you’ll see the arched entrance to Cour du Commerce Saint-André.

  This part-arcaded, prettily paved passageway was built on the moat that once ringed the city’s thirteenth-century defensive wall; the base of one of its bastions still stands in the unlikely place of a salon de thé (Un Dimanche à Paris, nos. 4-6-8). But that’s not the only reason this cour is one of the most important portals into Parisian history. The quaint, quiet strip is, in fact, where the French Revolution arguably began; a plaque here goes so far as to name it a quasi shrine (haut lieu) to the Revolution. At no. 8, the journalist Jean-Paul Marat printed his radical newspaper L’Ami du Peuple (Friend of the People). Just across the way, at no. 9, was the workshop in which Dr Guillotin tested out his new, supposedly humanitarian, decapitation machine, which would come to symbolise the bloody terror of the Revolution.

  Another celebrated revolutionary address backs onto the Cour du Commerce Saint-André: Le Procope, Paris’s oldest café, and the place where the motto ‘Liberté, Égalité, Fraternité’ was said to have been first uttered. To get to it, take the Rue de l’Ancienne-Comédie exit, and turn right. Le Procope is primarily a restaurant these days, but you can tuck yourself into the front-corner café and order a chocolate-laced coffee as Voltaire did before you, and if it’s quiet the staff will allow you to sniff around upstairs. And you well should, as the restaurant has been redecorated in olde-worlde fashion, complete with Voltaire’s marble-topped desk, bookcases of leather-bound tomes, crystal-laden candelabra and gilt-framed portraits of Le Procope’s most famous customers.

  Le Procope dates back to 1686, when Sicilian Francesco Procopio dei Coltelli, who’d been selling coffee at the Saint-Germain Fair, decided that this exotic drink, newly imported from the Orient, was more than a fad. Several coffee houses had already opened in the area, but Monsieur Procope — as he had Frenchified himself — reasoned that customers would linger longer when in a luxurious setting. And so he sat his clients on padded armchairs at marble tables, serving them coffee from silver pots, and offering a selection of newspapers along with pastries. It was all very civilised; unlike in the taverns, you couldn’t smoke or booze. So refined was it, in fact, that women could respectably hang out here, and admire themselves in the mirrored walls, which reflected sparkling chandeliers. Le Procope, its format soon copied all over town, created no less than one of the city’s first social scenes, as well as the template for traditional Parisian restaurant décor.

  This might not seem like the place to brew a revolution, but that’s just what happened when the cleverest minds gathered here, out of earshot of the King and co, who were in their ivory tower at Versailles. Cafés not only served up mind-buzzing stimulants — coffee, chocolate and sugar, increasingly imported from France’s American colonies — but also encouraged conversation; percolated together, this made for a potent brew. It was at Le Procope where two of the more radical minds of the Enlightenment hit upon the idea of the first French encyclopaedia — an ambitious collection of information that was an ingeniously subversive way to undermine the authority of the elite, which was accustomed to controlling knowledge. A newly literate middle class was reading anything it could, from science journals to travel essays to political pamphlets, and ending up in heated debates in the city’s cafés. It was always going to end in trouble.

  Voltaire would have been aghast to know how the Enlightenment would unravel with the Revolution. Many of the philosophical types able to idle away time at Le Procope were from the upper classes, after all. While they thought society should be better, they advocated reform rather than anarchy. They had a lot to lose, including their heads. And what’s more, they liked their luxuries, as the success of Le Procope proved. Paris in the eighteenth century was — leaving aside the gruesome final decade — devoted to the pursuit of pleasure, and the luxury industry boomed in this consumer economy; the Cour du Commerce, originally edged with boutiques, was first of all a shrine to shopping.

  Once your mind is feeling suitably enlightened, or at least caffeinated, wander west along Boulevard Saint-Germain. Saint-Germain-des-Prés, the area you’re now in, is a modern-day temple to shopping, as much as this might pain traditionalists, who lament the loss of the district’s literary cred. Way back, when the universities set up just next door in the Latin Quarter, Saint-Germain-des-Prés was the place where students would come for after-hours debates. The land was then a patchwork of meadows (prés) beyond the city’s walls, and here the students would often duel; later they’d swap their swords for sharp wit, wielding it in the many cafés that proliferated in emulation of Le Procope. Many future authors whiled away the hours here too, dreaming of catching the eye of the most prestigious publishers, who were once all based in the area. And then came the twenty-first century, and the designer stores. The legendary bookshop La Hune got bumped off the main boulevard by Louis Vuitton. The intelligentsia could have cried into their cravats. But Saint-Germain-des-Prés actually started up as a style centre in the seventeenth century, when the Saint-Germain Fair reinvented itself as a shopping mecca of covered markets selling everything from hair ribbons to shoe buckles (on the site of the current Marché Saint-Germain). So the district has been a paradox for many years, a whirlwind centre of opposing gravitational forces, both frivolous
and serious. Like Voltaire himself, you could say.

  As its name suggests, Saint-Germain-des-Prés was religious before anything else; up on the right, you’ll come to the church, Paris’s oldest, that gave the area its name. The Romanesque tower above the entrance of this former abbey dates from around the year 1000. Ravaged during the Revolution (when it was the site of a most savage massacre) and dulled by the grime of time, the Église Saint-Germain-des-Prés is currently under renovation. Wander through where you can, because the transformation in progress is remarkable. To me, the church used to feel gloomy, oppressive and heavy — but now it’s like a weight has lifted, both physically and spiritually. The murals shimmer and the stained-glass windows dazzle — the visual equivalent of angels singing — and columns that look like colourful candy canes reach up to a vaulted ceiling painted brilliant sapphire and studded with golden stars. It’s a heartening and happy effect in a city where most churches are decidedly sombre.

  The Revolution didn’t just start to dismantle religion, it also severely set back Parisians’ pursuit of happiness. Voltaire and his friends had sold the concept so well: that everyone had the right to enjoy life, and in this world, not the next. They believed that everyone could, and should, be happy. Before this, happiness was seen as a thing of luck (bonheur derives from the Latin for ‘good augur’), and if life dealt you a sad deck, you bore it, in the hope that the afterlife would reward you for your forbearance and faith. But throughout the eighteenth century, a time of so many tempting pleasures, Parisians couldn’t help but yearn for earthly happiness, and resent the royal and religious powers that seemed to be standing in the way. Voltaire and his ilk believed that society, enhanced by science and reason, and governed by some higher force of goodness, was progressing to a fairer state, but in the end the masses weren’t convinced. Their revolution, though, didn’t deliver. Actually, the trauma of the Terror years altered the city’s emotional state for, arguably, decades. The nineteenth century was one of rebellions; the world wars of the following showed Paris what evil could do. Thing was, if people didn’t believe in religion in this now secular country, could their moral code be enough to keep society harmonious? How far did you go in seeking your own happiness — and what if it came at others’ expense? After all, feeling good wasn’t the same as being good — or was it? These were pressing questions with no easy answers. No wonder philosophers sank into an existential funk.