The streets were crowded and as I watched the couples in love, the old men, the women walking small dogs, a woman caught my eye. She and a friend stopped and surveyed the scene: me in front of my icy tray of oyster shells, with rosy cheeks and a glass of wine in hand. They gave me an enthusiastic nod, a smile, a thumbs-up salute, and as they walked away I felt as if my whole day had just been blessed.
Michele Anna Jordan is the author of thirteen books about food and wine, including San Francisco Seafood, The New Cook’s Tour of Sonoma, Salt & Pepper, and California Home Cooking. She writes for a variety of national publications and hosts two radio shows on KRCB-FM. She has won numerous awards for both cooking and writing, including a 1997 James Beard Award, and makes her home in Sonoma County.
Paris can be many things for lovers, but for me, it will always be the place where my kid sister fell head-over-heels—for chocolate.
Emily was sweet 17 and I, her guide, was a worldly 24 when we arrived that summer in Paris. The first morning in our little hotel near the Luxembourg Gardens, we woke to a rap-rap-rapping and a voice singsonging “Bonjour.” Emily opened the door and brought in the breakfast tray that I had ordered the night before: a baguette with fruity jam, strong milky café au lait for me, and for Emily, the drink that would change her life. When she lifted the white china bowl to her lips and took her first sip of that steamy, creamy chocolat chaud, she knew that she had found true love.
Emily had tasted hot chocolate before, of course. Even at her tender age, she was well on her way to becoming a confirmed chocoholic. But somehow, in Paris, the chocolate was richer, unexpectedly different, like the gangly boy next door you’ve known all your life, who suddenly catches your eye and he’s become a strikingly handsome man.
Every night, my sister curled up in her bed and talked about her new amour, its smells, its look, its feel in her mouth, shivering with anticipation about her next encounter. She bounded out of bed when she heard the morning tap on our door, scooping her bowl off the tray with both hands. She held it up to her nose to let the warm, moist sweetness circle her face. “Ah,” she sighed. “Chocolate....”
I’ve been back to Paris several times now. I’ve walked with my husband along the Seine. We’ve sipped red wine by night and savored buttery croissants as the morning sun peeked across our bed. Emily is grownup now, too, a sophisticated New Yorker with a husband of her own. But I know she still remembers that tender early love. And as the matchmaker who paired her with that special first amour, I will always remember Paris as the City of Chocolate.
—Carolyn B. Heller, “The City of Chocolate”
TIM O’REILLY
Illumined in Sainte-Chapelle
Louis IX left Notre Dame to the ordinary folk and heard Mass himself across the square, in his exquisite private chapel.
AFTER VISITING NOTRE DAME, I HEADED ACROSS THE STREET, nose in a map, driven by a faint memory of a passing mention of a small church “with the best stained glass outside of Chartres.”
Sainte-Chapelle. That must be it, I thought. But where was it? On the map it looked like it was actually in the courtyard of the police headquarters building, the Palais de Justice. And indeed it was. As we approached, it seemed we had to go through metal detectors to get anywhere near.
With my wife and daughters in tow, I walked to the back of a courtyard, rounded the bend and entered a small, low-ceilinged Romanesque chapel. It was quite pretty, but it hardly justified the high praise I’d heard.
Then I noticed that people armed with guidebooks were passing by with hardly a glance at the frescoes and stained glass I was trying to admire. Instead, they were streaming right to a doorway in the back wall of the chapel. There must be more through there, I said to myself.
We squeezed through the narrow doorway and up a circular stone staircase...into Glory.
With the perfect proportions of a Gothic cathedral, but only the size of a vest pocket, Sainte-Chapelle seems somehow to bring into vibrant coexistence the magnificence of those cathedrals and the intimacy of a space meant for more ordinary living.
And the stained glass! Narrow ribs of soaring stone separate band after band of illumination—what seems like more glass than all of Notre Dame in a space one-tenth the size. Colors so exquisite that they seem more real than those we ordinarily know. Shafts of brilliance from every side, as if we’d found our way to the heart of a jewel, to the heart of a dragon’s hoard of jewels.
I lay on the floor for a few precious moments, soaking it all in without having to divert even the attention it requires to stand, until the embarrassment of my daughters and the disapproval of the guard reeled me back, a fish torn from what ought to be my natural element, afloat in those seas of light.
Tim O’Reilly, senior partner and co-owner of Travelers’ Tales, is the founder and CEO of O’Reilly & Associates, Inc. (www.oreilly.com), the most-respected name in computer book publishing. O’Reilly & Associates also runs a successful series of conferences on leading-edge technologies and manages online technical sites including www.perl.com and xml.com as part of the O’Reilly Network. Tim is an activist for open source software and internet standards, and is a board member of ActiveState and Collab.Net. He lives in Sebastopol, California.
Sainte-Chapelle: magical, a labour of love. As I wait for you in the chapel I marvel at how time has left this magical space untouched. The late light streams bright colors through warm air—casting wine reds and luminous yellows on mosaics of royal blue and gold, musical patterns placed with loving, whimsical hands. As we join hands in the nave I’m amazed by the depth of light in your eyes, your face lyrical and surrounded by stained glass of incredible height and detail. Paris: Could we stay here forever? I love you.
—Gina Granados, “Dear Patrick”
HERBERT GOLD
On Ile St-Louis
A Cleveland native discovers a village universe.
AN ISLAND PRIME, AN ISLAND AT THE SECRET HEART OF PARIS, floating in time and space across a footbridge on the shady side of the Cathedral of Notre Dame de Paris, the Ile St-Louis may also be the most ambiguous orphan island there is—city and not a city, village and metropolis, provincial and centrally urban, serene and hyped by hundreds of years of noisy lovers of solitude.
Unique it is, possessed of itself, even self-congratulatory, yet available to all who choose to stroll from the population sink of contemporary Paris to a place that has no Métro stop or depressed highway. One could live there forever and do it in a short span of time, and I did.
Just after World War II, I came to study philosophy amid the existentialists of St-Germain-des-Prés. The first winter was bitter cold, with food rationing and no heat, and we philosophers—that is, admirers of Juliette Greco with her long nose, hoarse voice, black jeans and sweaters—had to find cafés to do our deep thinking in.
In existential pursuit of the largest café au lait and most tooth-rotting but warming chocolate, I bought a bicycle to widen my field of operations, showing a certain Cleveland shrewdness by paying $8 for the rustiest, most battered bicycle I could find so that I could leave it unlocked.
Behind Notre-Dame, across the narrow footbridge of the Pont St-Louis, on the tranquil Ile St-Louis, which did little business and did it negligently, I leaned my bike against a café that served large coffees, rich chocolate and few customers. I remember it as Aux Alsaciennes, because it served Alsatian sausage, corned beef and cabbage, choucroute garnie at lunchtime; but for many years, now that the place had been discovered, it has been called the Brasserie de St-Louis-en-l’Ile.
Somehow, here I couldn’t think about Bergson and Diderot and the hyphen between them, a little-known idea-smith named Maine de Biran, my thesis. Maybe it was the action of pumping a rusty bicycle; maybe it was the red-faced waiters, the black-dressed postwar girls with bruised eyes; but on the Ile St-Louis I graciously allowed the history of philosophy to continue on its way without me.
My bike had no carrier for books; instead, I could stick a note-book under t
he seat. While warming myself at Aux Alsaciennes, I began to write a novel.
Nearly two years later, when the stationery store lady wrapped the package for mailing to Viking Press, she figured out what it was and gave it a sharp slap, crying out, “Merde!” I was startled because I thought I knew what that word meant and took it as a judgment of my coffee-and-choucroute-fueled eighteen-month creative frenzy, but she explained that it meant good luck!
(The book, Birth of a Hero, about a Resistance hero who happened to be stuck all his life in Cleveland, was published. I went home to Cleveland to buy the three-cent stamp with my picture on it but they were still using George Washington. I like that first novel now mostly because it instructed me that I had the right to do it.)
At some point in the creative process, I left a GI overcoat—the vestmental equivalent of my bicycle—on a rack at the brasserie. The waiters kept asking when I would take it again, but spring came, the birds sang on the Ile St-Louis and other birds allowed me to buy them hot chocolate; I was too overwrought.
Later, I decided to see how long the coat would live on the coat rack. As the years went by, I committed more novels, visited Paris as a tourist, and came to the Ile St-Louis to check on my coat. It was still there. “Soon,” I promised the waiters.
One May in the early ’60s, I noticed that the narrow, swaying footbridge across which I used to wheel my rustmobile had been replaced by a wider, stabler cement product, although it was still blocked to automobiles. And my coat was gone from the café, which had changed its name to the Brasserie de St-Louis-en-l’Ile. And that tout Paris had discovered the happy place that in my secret mustard-loving heart will always be Aux Alsaciennes.
I often write at the Café Beaubourg, which strikes the English, who love crowded, smoky pubs, as disagreeably austere and new, but which I find airy and calm although there’s always something to see. It was built at the end of the 1980s, right across from the Centre Georges Pompidou and the giant digital clock that counts down the seconds that remain until the end of the century. At the corner is the always busy fountain designed by Niki de Saint-Phalle and her husband, Jean Tinguely, with a pair of red lips, water squirting from the tits of one of Niki’s famous fat ladies, or nans, a top hat that spins, a treble clef in black metal, and so on, all bobbling and twirling—and soaking passersby on windy days. Fred [the author’s dog] likes to walk by here because I encourage him to defecate on the grill above the underground center for experimental music, directed by Pierre Boulez, who once refused to give me an interview.
—Edmund White, Our Paris: Sketches from Memory
Anciently, the Ile St-Louis was two islands, Ile Notre-Dame and Ile-aux-Vaches (Cow Island). You can buy old maps that show the walls of medieval Paris and this tiny pasture in the Seine, from which cows and milk were brought by dinghy into the city. In the 17th century the places were joined, and in a burst of elegant speculation, bankruptcies and re-speculation, a dense web of hôtels (fine mansions) were spun.
The Hôtel Lambert and the Hôtel de Lauzun are two noble examples, but the entire island, its narrow pre-Detroit and even pre-Citroën streets, its encircling quays for strolling and breeze-taking by the Seine, has a comfortingly unified classical pattern.
The decoration and architecture date from a single period of French elegance and are protected by fanatic preservationists, among whom was former president Georges Pompidou, who helped stuff other districts of Paris with freeways and skyscrapers. (Pompidou lived on the Ile St-Louis.)
There is an ice cream shop, Berthillon, with perhaps the best and certainly the most chic sherbets in France. Usually the lines stretch out onto the street—people waiting for their glace café, sorbet, crème—as others in other places wait in line to pay taxes or to see if their portrait is on the three-cent stamp.
There is but one church on the island, St-Louis-en-l’Ile—lovely, tranquil, softly flowing, with devout deacons scrubbing the stone with straw brooms from a stock that seems to have been purchased by some 17th-century financial genius of a priest who feared inflation in the straw-broom market.
Contemporary Paris discovered it could find quadruple use for the Ile St-Louis: as an elegant residential quarter of the 4th arrondissement; as a strolling museum neighborhood, a sort of Tricolorland with no parking meters, no movie house or cemetery (if people die, they have to be taken to the Continent); as a quiet corner for small restaurants, antiquaries, bars, book shops, hotels, Mme. Blanvillain’s 160-year-old olive shop (she was not the founder), and a pheasant-plucker named Turpin in case you need your pheasant plucked; and the fourth use is optional.
On my most recent visit, the spirit of the place was expressed by the aforementioned Berthillon, the studio for ice cream masterpieces with the 17th century aspect. It was early July. A cheerful sign said: “Open Wednesday, 14 September.” Where else would an ice cream shop close for the hot months?
I was relieved by this assurance of little change in the weekend-maddened, vacation-crazed spirit of the French commerçant. No matter how greedy he might seem to mere mortals, plucking money from the air and sewing it into his mattress, the flight to seaside or country cottage remains sacred.
Throwing duffel on bed, not even glancing at the exchange rate, I seized a notebook in jet-lagged claws and made a quick tour of the few streets and circumnavigating quays of the island, trying to find what had changed, what had remained the same, and what might persuade my body that it was time to sleep. The fact that I had cleverly scheduled my visit to come near the July 14 celebration, when France dances and drinks and makes new friends in the street till dawn—all because their ancestors tore down the Bastille—did not induce thoughts of prudent shut-eye.
(In my student days, when an American friend studying in Belgium bicycled into Paris for the first time, he happened to arrive on Bastille Day and found colorful lights strung from everywhere, accordions, embraces, a fierce festival glitter in every eye. He fell upon my little room crying, “Oh, I always knew Paris would be like this!”)
A street sweeper with the timid face of a peasant come to the metropolis was scrubbing down the stones in front of the St-Louis-en-l’Ile. No change here.
Libella, the Polish bookstore on the rue St-Louis-en-l’Ile, reminded me that Paris has always been everyone’s other home. The wall above Libella bears a stone plaque telling us that in 1799 the engineer Philippe Lebon discovered, in this building, the principle of lighting and heating with gas—the word “principle” and past experience suggest that the French did not actually get around to doing it for a while.
The island is crowded with such notices—tributes to poets, advisers to kings, soldier heroes, men of God, and even a film critic immortalized on a plaque affixed to the place where he analyzed Jerry Lewis as auteur.
There is also a plaque on the wall of the Ferdinand Halphep Foundation in the rue des Deux-Ponts:
To the Memory
Of the 112 Inhabitants
Of This Building
including 40 Children
Deported and Killed
In the Concentration Camps in 1942.
No island is entire of itself, exempt from history. Across the street, in the ice cream shops, bistros, the Bateau Bar—50 brands of beer from all nations—gratification proceeds on its necessary course.
One in two French people have never set foot in a café.
—Paris Notes
It was time to sit at a café table for the island equivalent of my typical San Francisco after-racquetball vitamin and health hi-pro yogurt shake; in this case, a coffee with “yak”—cognac.
Two helmeted Vespa people came skidding to a stop in front of me. Like space warriors, they were encased in huge plastic headgear. Evidently they knew each other, because they fell to kissing, their helmets thudding together. I peeked at their faces when they came apart. They were both about 60 years old and hadn’t seen each other in hours.
A fisherman nearby, when I asked what he caught with all his equipment, assured me
that trout hover near the fresh underground springs at the head of the island.
“And what else?”
“A moment of meditation. A view of Notre-Dame. There are gargoyles, sir. At this season, there are roses.”
During the morning, a fisherman was catching roses; that night in front of the footbridge leading to Aux Alsaciennes, the Communist Party sponsored a rock celebration of Bastille Day. A girl in a “Wichita University Long Island” t-shirt danced to a French knockoff of “Lady Jane” and other Rolling Stones’ hits. Instead of a male partner, she held a contribution box for Humanité, the party newspaper.
The little park at the end of the island where the Pont de Sully links the left and right banks of Paris—leading to the workers’ quarter of Bastille in one direction, the Quartier Latin in the other—has a grand stone monument to “Barye 1795-1875” at its entrance. The sculptor seems to be telling a busy story, including naked lads, heroes, a foot on a screaming animal, a sword, a staff, a few less boyish youths. Who the heck was Barye 1795-1875?
He may be there to provide a little relaxation from all the really famous people who lived and live on the Ile St-Louis. (He turns out to have been a watercolorist.)
The Square Barye, surrounded by the Seine on three sides, is quiet, peaceful, scholarly, artistic, with occasional summer concerts; kids sleeping on their backpacks, workmen with bottles of rouge; Swedish au pair girls watching the babies and sunning themselves with that passionate solar intensity only Swedish girls achieve—happy sunbathers when it’s hot and moonbathing when it’s not; haggard widows in black, wincing with their memories; birds chirping and barbered bushes and peeling-bark trees and neat cinder paths: all honor to Barye 1795-1875!
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