At the next cross street, turn right, into Rue de Grenelle, where you’ll come across one of the most stylish of all Left Bank boutiques: Ines de la Fressange, the eponymous emporium of the model turned fashion icon. If you’ve pored over her top-selling book Parisian Chic, this boutique will be like stepping into those glossy pages. It’s her style — tailored with a wink of quirk — come to colourful life: tricolor-striped tops and tartan shirts, pastel suits and patterned dresses, madeleine-hued trench coats and sweaters in macaron shades.
Rue de Grenelle boasts an impressive number of shoe stores, but a must-visit is Christian Louboutin, famous for its scarlet soles (fortunately the sumptuary laws forbidding mere mortals to wear red-heeled shoes have gone the way of powdered wigs). Louboutin is also celebrated for his seductive styles, including a modern take on the mule, which seems very twenty-first-century Cinderella — although you’ll probably not be able to buy a version in glass or squirrel fur.
Women have oohed and ahhed over luxe heels since their first encounter with Cinderella, but dream shoes are one thing, reality footwear altogether another … Anyway, you might have noticed by now that most Parisiennes flit around the streets in flat shoes, either sandshoes (les baskets) or ballerina flats (les ballerines). A ballet slipper seems particularly Parisian, ballet having been invented in this city, after all. The most celebrated ballet wear store is Repetto; to get there head back east along Rue de Grenelle and, at the end, turn left onto Rue du Four. Here is where you’ll find impossibly slim Parisiennes with turned-out feet and shiny buns, but fortunately you don’t have to be a professional dancer to buy the top-selling ballet flat that comes in a rainbow of shades. The style is called — what else? — Cendrillon.
Walk westwards (hopefully in your new ballerines) along Rue de Sèvres, and pop into the fabulously designed Hermès, located in the former swimming pool of the Hôtel Lutetia. (But if you can’t afford a Birkin, never mind: remember, the woman it was named after preferred to tote around a simple straw basket herself.) Then, keep sauntering along Rue de Sèvres, and you’ll soon reach Le Bon Marché. If there’s anything your inner Parisienne — or even inner Cinderella — still craves, you’ll locate it here, in Paris’s smartest department store. It was the first grand magasin in the world, in fact, and to float around the light-bathed iron-and-glass atrium — which was sublimely engineered by Gustave Eiffel, no less — is a soul-satisfying pleasure. Its shoe department, situated beneath a glorious crystalline ceiling, is particularly compelling, and will surely help to lure out that Cendrillon.
Your Left Bank relooking complete, now there’s only one thing to do: take your new self out. Head back down Rue de Sèvres to Hôtel Lutetia. It’s on the corner of Boulevard Raspail, a luxuriously appointed street that slightly rebelled architecturally against the usual strict classical dictates, when Art Nouveau was all the rage. (Classically dressed Parisiennes could probably well understand the occasional urge to shake up their look a little.) The Lutetia is a Left Bank institution and has counted such local style legends as Gainsbourg, Juliette Gréco and Catherine Deneuve among its fans. Settle into Bar Joséphine, and order an apéro. It’s the perfect happy ending to a Parisian day.
Itinerary
• Quai Voltaire 75007
• Le Voltaire: 27 Quai Voltaire 75007; 12.00-14.30, 19.30-22.30
• Quai Malaquais 75006
• Bibliothèque Mazarine: Institut de France, 23 Quai de Conti 75006; 10.00-18.00 (Monday-Friday); closed Saturday and Sunday
• Quai de Conti 75006
• Quai des Grands-Augustins 75006
• Lapérouse: 51 Quai des Grands Augustins 75006; 19.00-01.00; closed Sunday
• Quai Saint-Michel 75005
• Quai de Montebello 75005
• Quai de la Tournelle 75005
• Quai de l’Hôtel de Ville 75004
• Hôtel de Ville: Place de l’Hôtel de Ville 75004
• Quai de Gesvres 75004
• Quai de la Mégisserie 75001
• La Galcante: 52 rue de l’Arbre Sec 75001; 10.00-19.30; closed Sunday
• Quai du Louvre 75001
• Jardin des Tuileries: 113 Rue de Rivoli 75001; 07.30-19.30 (October-March), 07.00-21.00 (April-September)
This is a dream city for book lovers. So many stories have been set in Paris, for one, that the city can take on a sense of the surreal, where you can almost imagine yourself a character in a novel. And how can you not thrill to walk the streets or sit in the cafés you’ve read about from, say, Edith Wharton or Ernest Hemingway? Then there are the actual bookstores. Surely no other city has as many wonderful boutiques devoted to books, and the most fanciful of them must be the wagon-green metal sheds clinging to the quayside walls of the Seine.
These belong to the bouquinistes, booksellers who themselves seem straight out of an olde-worlde tome — one set in a misty Paris peopled with knife sharpeners and organ grinders. Originally itinerant, bouquinistes became permanent Parisian fixtures in 1859, when authorities gave them allocated areas for their boxes of books. Ever since, they’ve been beloved by bookish locals as well as by tourists, for whom they’re part of the quintessential Parisian riverscape. Between Quai Voltaire and Quai de la Tournelle, on the Left Bank, and Pont Marie and Quai du Louvre, on the Right, these time-battered treasure chests turn the footpaths into an al fresco market when they open to reveal their wares: almond-scented, vanilla-tinted pages bound in embossed leather and wrapped in cellophane.
To be truthful, it’s not all treasure in these chests. Most stalls have had to throw trinkets like little Eiffel Towers in bright colours into the mix to make up for declining book sales in this digital world. Still, there’s no more inspirational way to shop for the classics of Gallic literature than along the paths where the likes of George Sand and Charles Baudelaire once also strolled.
Begin your bouquinistes day on Quai Voltaire, just east of Pont Royal. First on your shopping list is Les Liaisons Dangereuses. Pourquoi? This will soon become clear ... Across the road, on the corner of Rue de Beaune, opposite the restaurant Le Voltaire (the building in which that great philosopher lived and died), is all that’s left of a mansion once known as the Hôtel de Mailly-Nesle. Often when you scratch the surface of a Parisian building, you’ll discover a story juicy enough to be sold by a bouquiniste. The tale that these walls whisper is a particular page-turner. In the early eighteenth century, the hôtel was home to the alluring Mailly sisters. So fetching were they, in fact, that four of the five became mistress to King Louis XV (he might have gone after the fifth if her husband hadn’t whisked her away in time). There was nothing sharing-and-caring about this sisterly venture, though; it was a drama of epic proportions, one of jealousy, backstabbing and possible poisonings.
That wasn’t the only scandal to explode from within these walls. The Mailly sisters’ mother, the Marquise de Nesle — whose boudoir still remains somewhere on the first floor — fell hard for the Duc de Richelieu who, as First Gentleman of the Bedchamber, helped manage the King’s various liaisons. A ladies’ man himself, he was vigilant in tending to his own bed. Except, that is, when two of his amours were mistakenly given the same assignation time. Such a kerfuffle ensued between the Marquise de Nesle and Madame de Polignac that honour could only be restored with a duel. So several days later, the ladies met in the Bois de Boulogne and faced off, pistols in gloved hands. The marquise lost, although not fatally; she suffered a bullet-grazed shoulder, along with a dented ego. Not to mention the particular type of heartache experienced by the many Parisiennes who had fallen for Richelieu’s charms.
Richelieu would become famous for giving the world mayonnaise; his cook invented the yolky-cream sauce in commemoration of the duke’s prowess at the Battle of Mahon. One of the most famous mayonnaise odes in town, by the way, is at Le Voltaire; so consider starting today’s tour at midday, and setting the scene en terrasse, with some oeuf mayo (sauce-laden egg and crudités). But Richelieu’s saucier legacy was in being the i
nspiration for the Vicomte de Valmont, the scheming, manipulating anti-hero of the novel Les Liaisons Dangereuses. The duke was a rake of the first order, and his devious seduction strategies included dressing as a chambermaid and lurking in underground passages, which would very much be signature Valmont moves.
Which brings us back to the bouquinistes … it’s usually easy to find a copy of Dangerous Liaisons (fun fact: author Choderlos de Laclos also worked on Paris street numbering, so think of him again if you buy one of those blue-and-white-enamel house number signs that the bouquinistes often display). The Parisian succès de scandale of 1782, Dangerous Liaisons still shocks to this day for its debauchery, and the cynical games of seduction played by its two aristocratic leads. Ethics aside, though, it’s a wickedly fun read.
One edition of Laclos’ book that you often come across is illustrated by painter Jean-Honoré Fragonard’s Le Serrou (The Bolt). In this famous work, a tautly muscled man grabs a woman’s waist while his other hand reaches up to lock the door of the shadowy bedroom. It’s disconcertingly difficult to work out whether the disorder of her dress and red-curtained bed is a sign of passion or struggle, although the passivity of her face seems to suggest she has given in, albeit involuntarily, to her pursuer — who could well be Valmont, or Richelieu himself.
The Bolt was painted in 1778, at a time when popular art often reflected the dark and decadent world of aristocrats with too much time, money and power on their hands, hinting at the moral collapse that would, at least in part, lead to the French Revolution. One of the century’s most celebrated artists, François Boucher, revelled in portrayals of voluptuous beauties, their gossamer layers barely containing an abundance of peachy-ripe curves. His most notorious work was Nue Étendue Sur un Sofa (Nude on a Sofa), for which a luxuriously fleshy Marie-Louis O’Murphy, one of Louis XV’s many mistresses, had sprawled on a velvet couch. Fragonard and Boucher, unashamedly painting for the senses, produced the soft porn of the day, that era’s equivalent of the cheeky 1920s postcards that bouquinistes often stock.
Continue walking east along the quays, past all the antique stores that Honoré de Balzac prefigured in his breakout 1831 novel La Peau de Chagrin (The Magic Skin), Baudelaire’s old haunt at 19 Quai Voltaire, and George Sand’s celebrated mansarde bleue at 19 Quai Malaquais. This is one of the most enjoyable of all the bouquinistes’ strips, especially when the plane trees are in leaf, their greenery enhancing the colour of the sheds below, which flutter with blooms of their own: posters of Pierre-Joseph Redouté’s full-blown roses. Here you’re also in the shade of that great Parisian monument to literature — the Institut de France, with its glamorous Baroque dome — so it’s fitting that many of these stalls are devoted to the French classics.
The Institute — home to the vaunted Académie Française, a.k.a. the guardians of the French language — is mostly inaccessible but a guard can direct you to its public library, the Bibliothèque Mazarine.Head up the neo-Classical stone stairs and step into a glorious seventeenth-century room, with its soaring colonnade of shelves filled with leather-bound books, and parquet floors that squeak with the sound of countless footsteps before you. You won’t be able to sit down at one of the long wooden tables placed beneath the gilded-bronze chandeliers, but if you feel inspired to come back and work, you can easily sign up for a carte annuelle — you’ll just need photo ID, two passport photos and 15 Euros.
Another bouquinistes must-buy, and a classic of French literature, dates from not long after architects put the final polishing touches on the library’s woodwork: the 1678 blockbuster La Princesse de Clèves. Considered the first modern novel for the way it examined a character’s psychological and emotional life, Madame de Lafayette wrote it, in part, to warn women of the dangers of early libertinism in Parisian high society. Her lead character, a virtuous girl thrown into a royal court of intrigue and affairs, is determined to honour her adoring husband, whom she doesn’t love; hélas, the princess is mortified to find herself falling for the Duc de Nemours, an early prototype of the libertine lover. After pages of inner struggle, she manages to resist the dashing Nemours, even when the death of her husband leaves her fancy-free.
It’s not your usual happily-ever-after ending. Which French novels don’t, by and large, do. Then again, there is something satisfying in seeing a romantic heroine think with her head, not her heart, in protecting herself from future heartache. The French are an all-or-nothing kind of people, with a tendency to think in binary terms — their capital city, of course, is one of left and right banks. These children of revolutions know that without order, there’s usually chaos. And that, if you don’t keep your wits about you, life can get messy.
Madame Bovary by Gustave Flaubert, is another classic novel that argues in favour of sense over sentiments, but in a much more dramatic way, You’ll see a number of editions of this 1856 novel in the bouquinistes’ sheds. However illustrated, the cover girl is sure to have a dreamy look on her face, and an aura of the foreboding about her. Emma Bovary, at Flaubert’s hands, is severely punished for wanting a different life, and for her adultery, dying an agonising death. Flaubert was disdainful of the romantic tendencies of so many French women. His Emma was partly modelled on a girlfriend, the artist model and prize-winning poetess Louise Colet, whom he’d met at sculptor James Pradier’s studio, back at 1 Quai Voltaire. But it was a complicated match. He was a Realist, she a gushing Romantic, and in a way he punished her for this, basing so much of Emma on her. It all ended bitterly, as you can imagine.
Women who can’t keep a check on their impulsive hearts have often been reprimanded in French literature. Think of Abbé Prévost’s Manon Lescaut, in which Des Grieux is driven to financial ruin in his pursuit of pleasing his unfaithful lover. The gambling den in which he loses a fortune was, by the way, located in the grand red-brick building at 9 Quai Malaquais, an address notorious in fast-living eighteenth-century circles.
Keep walking around the bend, past the Institut through to Quai de Conti, and loiter by the sheds in front of the Monnaie de Paris. Peer over the parapet and you’ll see the triangular tip of the Île de la Cité, the Square du Vert-Galant, with its apt burst of greenery. Un vert galant (literally: a green gallant) roughly translates as a lusty old ladies’ man. It’s a reference to King Henri IV, who reigned over France, and a realm of mistresses, from the late sixteenth century. His brand of gallantry was about courtesy and chivalry. Yes, he was a womaniser … but a polite one! It was a century or so later that gallantry began to morph into something dark and disreputable: the flipside of libertinism, where a man’s goal was not to please the ladies, but very much himself.
Most bouquinistes carry posters of old Parisian maps, which make for swank souvenirs when framed. One of the best is the Turgot Map of 1739, an impressively detailed bird’s-eye-view of the city in the era of libertinism (King Louis and his sister-mistresses, Richelieu and his ruses, Boucher and his babes, and so on). You’ll notice that the Square du Vert-Galant didn’t exist at the time, and see an old Paris that Baron Haussmann tore down in the mid-nineteenth century — which makes Parisians shake their heads to this day. Paris is a city that cherishes its history. Once a city where time seemed to stand still, it now seems to be modernising. Hold onto some of the past by buying the scenic postcards that most bouquinistes sell, the ones that show the old washing-boats along the Seine, or the boulevards graced with carriages. Or pick up an old tourist guide that will take you back to Belle Époque Paris. Plus, the more you buy from a bouquiniste, the more you’ll help keep them in business, in this changing world.
Continue to saunter — and window-shop — along the Quai des Grands-Augustins, one of the earliest Parisian quays. The eclectic buildings here are also some of the city’s oldest, having avoided Haussmann’s bulldozer. You can’t miss no.51, an elegant seventeenth-century townhouse trimmed with navy boiserie, gilt-bordered windows, lacy balconies and paintings of Belle Époque beauties. It was in this era that the restaurant Lapérouse became a sensa
tion. Wannabe libertines of the late nineteenth century particularly loved it for its lavishly decorated private rooms, where they could take their mistress — via a secret stairway if discretion was necessary. The rooms are still there, complete with the patinaed wall paintings and crystal chandeliers, and mirrors scratched decades ago by courtesans testing the veracity of the diamonds gifted to them by their latest amour. Authors loved Lapérouse, too, no doubt for the stories the walls seemed to tell. George Sand, Victor Hugo, Émile Zola, Marcel Proust, Colette and Guy de Maupassant all ate here. If you’ve ever read their books and wished you could only time-travel back to their world, make a mental note to come back this evening for a fix of old-world Paris in the ground-floor bar (fittingly the location for the scene in Midnight in Paris when a nostalgic Gil Pender goes partying with the Scott Fitzgeralds).
Follow the bouquinistes’ tin trail through to Quai Saint-Michel. You’re now in the Latin Quarter, the heart and soul of literary Paris. An international student mecca for centuries (since the time when students spoke Latin), it also became the hub for printers, publishers and booksellers. Bouquinistes began to roam around the quarter’s medieval streets in the sixteenth century, selling their bouquins (old books) from a tray strapped to their shoulders. Business boomed during the French Revolution, when bouquinistes got their hands on the contents of ransacked aristocratic libraries, although they’d played a part in the overthrow of Valmont’s world, by secretly hawking political pamphlets to the angry masses.
As Notre-Dame looms closer, make a mental note to scan the green sheds for Victor Hugo’s The Hunchback of Notre-Dame, a Romantic classic that perfectly illustrates the French love of nostalgia and drama. As with the other books mentioned above, it’s a must-read for French students. Some other essentials include L’Étranger (The Stranger) by Albert Camus, and Françoise Sagan’s Bonjour Tristesse — classics from Paris’s existential era. They’re both written in a clear prose that is easy for French learners. Super-advanced? Look for Marcel Proust’s dreamy À la Recherche du Temps Perdu (In Search of Lost Time), or Charles Baudelaire’s swoon-worthy poetry. And if your French is more at the bébé level? Well, you have to start somewhere, and where better than children’s classics like Babar and Madeline.
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