Travelers' Tales Paris

by James O'Reilly

  In August of 1991, Bob and I were concluding a test tour of the places I wanted to include in the book I was writing, to check whether those I had fallen in love with over a period of twenty years were still as I remembered them. Arriving at Versailles on a beautiful summer day, we found the parking lot in front of the palace filled with a herd of large tour buses, and the line to purchase tickets to visit the palace far longer than either of us had the patience to endure. Not wanting to spoil our memory of Versailles, we went back to Paris without visiting the palace. Without Versailles, however, I was afraid the plan of my book would be incomplete. I told myself that August, the month the French go on vacation, was not the time to visit Versailles or, indeed, any place in France. We would, I decided, go to Versailles before Easter, not only before the French vacation but before the colleges and schools let out for the summer. We returned on a rainy day in early April 1992.

  We took the Métro to the Invalides station, where there is a connection with the RER to Versailles/Rive Gauche. (The train to Versailles-Chantier does not go to the palace.) The ride was only 38 minutes. Versailles is easy to get to—perhaps too easy.

  The first thing I saw on emerging from the train station at Versailles was a sign for a McDonald’s. Horrors! And yet the vast palace did not disappoint, nor was it even crowded that day, in the depth of winter and a chill rain: we supped on the glories and follies of the dead to our heart’s content. Outside, in the gardens, we briefly lost two of our children, only to find them weeping, squatting before a puddle of rain, the Sun King’s vast edifice rippling on its surface as they poked it with sticks.

  —James O’Reilly, “On and Off the Autoroute”

  It was a Tuesday morning, cold, overcast, and intermittently rainy. But again the lot was filled with buses, huge single-deckers and even larger double-deckers. I counted over thirty-five of them—and then stopped counting. When we arrived at the gilt-and-black wrought iron gate leading to the courtyard, the serpentine line of tourists waiting to visit the palace extended past the gate curving around Bernini’s equestrian statue of Louis and across the entire length of the enormous courtyard. In 1985 I had been overwhelmed by the crowds. Oh, well, I thought bitterly, even in the Age of Louis XIV, Versailles had been commercial.

  Giving up on seeing the inside of the palace, we retreated to the gardens. The long line of visitors queued up to take a little train to the Trianons was so long that the train would have had to make four or five trips to transport the people already in line. And even as we watched, the line was getting longer.

  One of the greatest things about the gardens at Versailles is the fountains. An aqueduct and the Marly Machine were built to bring water four miles to fill 1,400 fountains. (One reason contemporaries were so opposed to Louis’s construction project at Versailles was the lack of an adequate water supply nearby.) The fountains, however, were silent during our visit. I later found out they are so expensive to operate that they are rarely turned on.

  Descending into the gardens, we sat down on the edge of Le Brun’s Fountain of Apollo. Bob, having noticed that I hadn’t spoken for quite some time, tried to whip up some enthusiasm by pointing out the geometric beauty of the terrace, the arch of dark green hedges in a great horseshoe behind it, and the arcs of Grecian urns and Grecian statues framed by the hedges circling the Fountain of the Sun God—and, behind it, the palace of the Sun King. Someone, I thought, had been a 17th-century public relations genius. At the time Louis was king, over a hundred years had passed since Copernicus had shaken the foundations of the medieval world by proving that the earth revolved around the sun. To the subconscious mind of some 17th-century visitors, the garden of Louis’s palace must have suggested that the planets revolved not around the sun but around the Sun King.

  I turned to my book on gardens and read once again that Le Nôtre had designed the gardens here to be an earthly paradise—the Elysian Fields that the Greeks had imagined. But I had to confront the fact that Versailles was no paradise to me. Originally built to destroy the independence of the nobility, in the 20th century it may work just as well to destroy tourist’s desire ever to tour again. It creates a curious dilemma: Versailles is so sumptuous and magnificent that you ask yourself, “How can I not visit it?” But after I had visited it, I began to consider buying a summer house, my desire to tour having totally dissipated. My advice is to buy Versailles: Complete Guide of the Tour of the Château and Gardens in Paris and read it in the gardens at Vaux-le-Vicomte, Rambouillet, Dampierre, or Sceaux. I recommend that you skip Versailles.

  In 1992 it was no longer possible to sit in, or even enter, the wonderful Colonnade, the circle of 32 arches supported by columns of blue and pink marble from Languedoc, which, after my earlier trips, I would have suggested as a particularly lovely place to sit while reading a book. The whole Colonnade was now fenced off. When I saw a VIP being given a private tour, I became truly annoyed. I was angry at Bob, too. I could have arranged for a special tour of Versailles and many of the other places I was visiting, but Bob had asked me when I started doing the research for this book, “How can you write honestly about places where you are given special treatment and the average traveler isn’t?” So I had come to Versailles as an ordinary tourist and the experience had become truly unpleasant. When I glared at Bob, he had no idea why. Exercising my divine right to leave, I headed for Les Trois Marches, a charming, romantic restaurant in the town, where in 1985 we had enjoyed a meal whose asparagus wrapped in pastry I still remembered melting in my mouth—but the restaurant had moved, probably to larger quarters to accommodate more tourists.

  When, hungry and tired, I settled back in my comfortable seat on the train for the ride back to Paris, I heard sighs of other people settling into theirs. Don’t get me wrong: these were not sighs of contentment but of relief—of escape from a truly enervating and depressing experience. The train was packed with tourists, and the gloomy atmosphere of disappointment reminded me of a sub-way ride I had taken many years before from Giants Stadium in New York after the loss of a championship football game.

  Since I always like to travel with someone from the century I am visiting, I had stuck Voltaire’s The Age of Louis XIV in my oversized purse along with my camera. On our trip back to Paris I sat silently reading it for a second time. I was amused to see how, within a few hours, my reading of this paean to Louis XIV had changed. On the trip to Versailles, hoping to experience the brilliance and splendor of the Sun King’s court by visiting the setting of endless rounds of feasts, ballets, masked balls, and hunts that all of Europe wanted to emulate, I had approvingly underlined: “It seems clear that one of Louis XIV’s main preoccupations was to inspire, in every field, that spirit of emulation without which all enterprise languishes.” On the way back, being in a nasty mood, I found a bit of malicious pleasure in recalling that Voltaire’s book had not been well received. It was published twenty years after the Sun King’s death, and the king at the time, Louis XV, considered Voltaire’s praise of Louis XIV’s reign to be a criticism of his own. In addition, a line I had read right over on the way to Versailles now stuck in my mind: “If he had spent...a fifth of what it cost to force nature at Versailles on embellishing his capital, Paris today would be, throughout its whole extent, as beautiful as is the area around the Tuileries and the Pont-Royal, and would have become the most magnificent city in the Universe.”

  As we emerged from the Métro station, the good thing, I thought, about our trip to Versailles was that it was still early in the afternoon and we had plenty of time that day to spend in Paris.

  Ina Caro also contributed “The Fairy Palace” in Part II.

  The palace allowed Louis XIV freely to indulge his passion for hunting and other courtly pleasures, such as entertaining mistresses and staging concerts and ballet. The palace was also an exercise in power architecture, whereby Louis emphasized his social and political superiority. Basic amenities counted for less than conspicuous display: accommodation for courtiers was often cramped, a
nd toilet facilities were few. Versailles became the center of power and court patronage, where sycophantic nobles vied with one another for the king’s favors. The court also became a fashion center, imposing its own lavish styles on an aristocracy that was dependent on royal largesse.

  —John Ardagh, Cultural Atlas of France

  PART FIVE

  THE LAST WORD

  JULIAN GREEN

  St-Julian the Poor

  Enter the city of infinite doorways.

  A SCORCHING HOT SUMMER’S DAY IS THE RIGHT TIME TO PUSH open the slightly rickety door that shuts off a treasure trove of coolness. I enter and stand motionless. In here the great shout of Paris is reduced to a murmur, overpowered by the greater silence of this little church. The stocky pillars glow pink in the afternoon light that falls from narrow windows of clear glass set between panes of blue. The pillars support the Romanesque barrel vault, beneath which thought takes wing like a bird beneath a woodland canopy. They are so strong, so still, as if waiting for the Last Judgement, lost in a kind of contemplation that cuts them off from our century. Like kings engrossed in dreams of greatness, they scorn the sad modern anxiety of which I have my share and make me, unawares, a gift of some of the peace they hold within them. Crowns of foliage are set on their heads, and they bear them towards the altar like baskets of offerings in a procession that has been going on for 800 years; a winged siren here, a Christian knight there are like symbols of the solemn thoughts they harbour beneath the rounded sky of the vaults.

  This could be the spot where Dante knelt, between these green-stained walls that look as if an ocean has draped them with its algae; this was where the visionary hailed the invisible, and he later recalled the narrow Paris street where his meditation had enjoyed a moment’s respite on its journey towards the abysses of the inner world.

  It is hard to imagine the sumptuous past of St-Julian the Poor today. The church appears to have waited for our sad modern age in order fully to deserve its name. We catch only a feeble glimpse of the way it was when a priory adjoined it and 50 monks filled its vaults with the sound of their chanting, and it is difficult for us to appreciate that one of the loveliest ceremonies of the Middle Ages was held in a place that our spiritual poverty has brought so low. Yet this is where the rector magnificus of the Sorbonne handed over the ermine cloak and the velvet bag containing the seal of the university to the person who was to succeed him. It was here, too, that on June 11 each year the teaching staff gathered with great pomp before proceeding to the annual fair in St. Denis Fields to purchase their parchment requirement. The rue Galande, the rue du Fouarre, the rue Saint-Séverin, and the rue Saint-Jacques would be roused at dawn by the drums and trumpets of the students, many of whom brandished spears, swords, or sticks for no other reason than that they were young and loved a rumpus. Of all that full, strong, joyous life that belonged to an age we cannot match, what is left in this quarter, apart from one name? It is that of the rue du Fouarre, which reminds me of when Pope Urban V enjoined students to sit not on benches but actually at the feet of their masters. The ground being hard to sit on, the lads would go running to the street vendors who sold straw for stuffing in the shadow of St-Julian. There is nothing to stop us picturing Dante doing as everyone else did and coming here for his bundle of straw before attending the lessons of his excellent master Brunetto Latini, whom he subsequently pitched into hell, though he did in a way make up for it by slipping the name of the little rue du Fouarre into a tercet of the Paradiso.

  The 17th century shook its ignorant wig at the venerable church and pronounced it barbaric. No doubt it was not thought significant enough for wholesale modernization; probably, too, St-Julian, situated on the very edge of the Romanesque, though already subject to the first stretchings of the new style, did not strike Mansart’s contemporaries as possessing the Gothic character that so got their goat and that they did their best to obliterate in the choir of St. Séverin, St-Julian’s less fortunate neighbour. But it was the prior of St-Julian himself who shortened the nave and replaced the Romanesque portico with a façade that that tonsured ass believed to be Doric. Latterly, in a final metamorphosis, a wide iconostasis put in by Eastern Orthodox priests bisects what is left of one of the loveliest and most ancient churches in Paris.

  Even so, St-Julian the Poor has kept its sturdy grace and mysterious youthfulness. You can imagine it surrounded by fields, for it has the charm of a country church. Its solid, artless countenance is so different from the fevered flights of St. Séverin, which withdraws into itself behind great tatters of shadow. St-Julian embraces the day and holds the light in its walls until dusk; it is as four-square, firm, and placid as a Scholastic argument. Neither doubt nor distressing visions will ever disturb its pensive, serene solitude. It is a simple-hearted divine, sitting in his white robe on the bank of the Gallic river.

  You used to be able to push open the little side door inside the church and find yourself in a delightful piece of waste ground, covered with vegetation, where your feet might stumble against some of the oldest stones in Paris. Hard by the chevet of St-Julian one of the last vestiges of “Philippe Auguste’s Wall” stuck up abruptly out of the long grass like a rock emerging from the sea, and a twisted tree, slowly dying beneath the weight of several centuries, still sprouted leaves that quivered overhead. Who remembers that place, so attuned to daydreaming? In the distance the towers of Notre Dame, white in stormy weather, looked black against the July sky, and the occasional tugboat on the Seine would utter a long-drawn-out, melancholy cry, the misty note lingering and fading into the blue beyond. Yet the hubbub of Paris seemed to die at the edges of that small solitude where I loved to come and think. The silence around me was like a dwelling in which the past had sought refuge; that inner peace seemed to me to hold a real feeling of Romanesque France, of which St-Julian’s ancient stones offered a tangible image. That was what so attracted me in my sixteenth year or thereabouts. Having come across the little church by accident on one of my walks, I went back there again and again.

  Sometimes we do things, without thinking, that make no sense to us until much later and yet appear to have been prompted by the most alert part of our being. In the spring of 1940, which ended so tragically for civilised Europe, I instinctively visited those places in Paris where I had most memories, and certain churches detained me at length, though I did not then imagine I should be deprived of them so soon. St-Julian was the one I found hardest to leave: having crossed the threshold on my way out, I recrossed it a moment later, touched by a misgiving too vague to find expression in words, and took one last look at those columns, which the setting sun had invested with a melancholy glow.

  Born in 1900 of American parents living in Paris, Julian Green spent most of his literary career there, writing in French for a wide and enthusiastic European readership. He published more than sixty-five books in France: novels, essays, plays, and numerous volumes of his Journal. Initially writing in English, he published five celebrated books in the United States before writing exclusively in French. He was the first person of American parentage to be elected to the Académie Française, and he died in 1998.

  Recommended Reading

  We hope Travelers’ Tales Paris has inspired you to read on. A good place to start is the books from which we’ve made selections, and we have listed them below. Many general guidebooks are also worth reading and the best ones have annotated bibliographies or sections on recommended books and maps.

  Applefield, David. Paris Inside-Out: The Insider’s Guide for Visitors, Residents, Professionals & Students on Living in Paris. New York: Houghton Mifflin Company, Inc., 1995.

  Ardagh, John. Cultural Atlas of France. Oxfordshire, England: Andromeda, 1991.

  Baldwin, James. No Name in the Street. New York: Dell Publishing, a division of Bantam Doubleday Dell Publishing Group, Inc., 1986.

  Barry, Joseph. The People of Paris. New York: Doubleday, a division of Bantam Doubleday Dell Publishing Group, Inc., 1966.

  Be
auvoir, Simone de. Witness to my Life: Letters of Jean-Paul Sartre to Simone de Beauvoir, 1926–1939. Translated by Lee Fahnestock and Norman McAfee. New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1992.

  Bernstein, Richard. Fragile Glory: A Portrait of France and the French. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, Inc., 1990.

  Buzzi, Aldo. Journey to the Land of the Flies & Other Travels. Translated from the Italian by Ann Goldstein. New York: Random House, 1996.

  Campbell, James. Exiled in Paris: Richard Wright, James Baldwin, Samuel Beckett, and Others on the Left Bank. New York: Scribner, 1995.

  Camus, Albert. Notebooks 1942-1951. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, Inc., 1965.

  Caro, Ina. The Road from the Past: Traveling Through History in France. New York: Doubleday, a division of Bantam Doubleday Dell Publishing Group, Inc., 1994.

  Carroll, Raymonde. Cultural Misunderstandings: The French-American Experience. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1988.

  Daley, Robert. Portraits of France. London: Hutchinson, Random House, 1991.

  D’Arnoux, Alexandra, Bruno De Laubadere, Gilles De Chabaneix (photographer). Secret Gardens of Paris. New York: Thames and Hudson, 2002.

  Desmons, Gilles. Walking Paris: Thirty Original Walks In and Around Paris. New York: Contemporary Books, 1999.

  Durrell, Lawrence. Spirit of Place: Letters and Essays on Travel. New Haven, Connecticut: Leete’s Island Books, Inc., 1969.

  Feldkamp, Phyllis and Fred. The Good Life...or What’s Left of It. New York: Harper & Row Publishers, Inc., 1972.

  Fitch, Noel Riley. Walks in Hemingway’s Paris: A Guide to Paris for the Literary Traveler. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1992.