Into A Paris Quartier

by Diane Johnson

  As in one of those puzzles where the eye must discern the shapes of cats or Indians from among the patterns in a drawing of draperies or foliage, so do the seventeenth-century houses emerge from the jumble of subsequent construction in St.-Germain, once you start looking for them, for though the quarter is vibrant with modern activities, its characteristic buildings are from the 1600s, and still form the infrastructure of everyday life. The spirit of St.-Germain somehow began with these, and once you are conscious of them, they form the visual matrix as well as the physical foundation, and account for the beauty of the quarter. Here they still are, built around and onto and in front of, but still serviceable and sound, with their gables and pitched roofs, elegant mansards, handsome eaves, and imposing gateways.

  Among things Italianate that came with Catherine de Médicis and others in the mid-sixteenth century were architectural principles that influenced the style of most of the great châteaux and palaces of France. The seventeenth-century “hotels” in this neighborhood are classically symmetrical L- or U-shaped buildings set in courtyards, shut off from the street by a wall and gate or by a fourth wall of rooms closing the space so that the courtyard is completely interior, reached by a large street door and wide passage through the streetside building to the court. When the visitor walks along a Paris street he sees a solid facade of buildings with wide, thick oak doors that require numeric codes to be typed in before they will open. He should remember that behind these somber facades are delightful courtyards and gardens, and windows looking down on them as well as onto the street.

  Sometimes the garden spaces are enormous—one such garden nearby at 176 Boulevard St.-Germain (serving partly as a parking lot) can be seen by anyone during the day and gives a good idea of what is often behind the solemn facades. Some of the gardens here and in the seventh arrondissement, belonging to the huge private seventeenth-century palaces, have now been turned into embassies or government buildings, and if you happen to be in Paris on the right weekend in September, all the great private gardens of these buildings, usually hidden, are thrown open to the public. On a subsequent weekend, it is the palaces themselves to be opened, and people stand in line from early morning to get a glimpse of the remarkable interiors and treasures of furniture and paintings inside, where they are enjoyed by government officials in private the rest of the year.

  The gates that wall and close the courtyards are usually high and imposing, large enough for carriages to enter, and sometimes flanked by a single door for entrance by people on foot. (One can’t help but think of La Door, the name a witty architectural historian has given to a sort of pretentious door found in fancy Los Angeles houses; the criterion is that La Door rises higher than the eaves, as these seventeenth-century gates do.) These were palaces designed to announce the wealth, piety, and power of their owners, with vast reception rooms for public entertaining, and smaller, more intimate, apartments above—and with gardens where possible.

  The main rooms are on the first floor, that is, to Americans the second floor, or one floor up from street level. These have wooden parquet or stone floors, high ceilings, and tall windows almost to the ceilings, closed by interior shutters or volets; the remaining two (usually) floors will have lower ceilings, and on the top floor, the low, small rooms are where the servants lived. Since the invention of the elevator, these rooms have developed considerable prestige, for they are sunny and cozy, and now considered chic. As a result, it’s Americans and other foreigners who are consigned to live in the fancy étages nobles, apartments unwanted by the French and rented out.

  Then, as now, all was and is not grandeur in St. Germain-des-Prés. On the Rue Visconti, “little Geneva,” named after the main center of Protestant thought in Switzerland, runs between Bonaparte and the Rue de Seine. Racine died in 1699 in reduced circumstances at number twenty-four; and Balzac would later have his printing business at number seventeen. These are rather homely buildings, mostly plain-faced stucco over the stone walls, smaller windows shuttered on the outside, with grilles of wrought iron across their lower panes. Throughout the whole of this “historic” area, the city of Paris strictly ordains the color each building is to be painted—no frivolities of rose or blue permitted. Modest expressiveness is allowed in choosing the color of the massive double doors, sometimes painted blue or left in natural wood, like the doors from the château Anet now stuck onto the Église des Petits-Augustins—but the choice for most doors is, overwhelmingly, dark, shiny green.

  Interior of the author’s apartment

  We, like other foreigners, live on the first floor. At Bonaparte, turn right, and our building is a few doors along on the right, facing number five, which has a battery of plaques announcing that Maréchal Lyautey lived there, and that Edouard Manet was born there in 1832. In four hundred years, any building will have had a lot of residents, its seedy patches and its glorious ones, but number five has had more than its share: The French biographer Henri Troyat lived there until recently; and a friend who grew up in it says that the rumor among its occupants was that Napoleon’s mother did, too, as well as Napoleon’s sister, the frisky Pauline Borghese.

  Typical courtyard of the sixth arrondissement

  Josephine herself lived at 1 Rue Bonaparte with her first husband, Count Beauharnais, who later was beheaded in the Revolution; the street, naturally, wasn’t called Rue Bonaparte before Napoleon’s time, but Rue des Petits-Augustins. The star of number five has risen these days, as it is partly owned by Pierre Bergé, patron of the arts and founder of the empire of Yves St. Laurent. My friend Monsieur B. says that Bergé, when he wasn’t permitted to raise the ceiling of his very grand ground floor apartment, could not be impeded from lowering the floor—but he couldn’t confirm this story.

  Picture this same Rue Bonaparte at the beginning of the seventeenth century, or still earlier, when it was not a street but a canal, la Petite Seine. The present Rue de Seine was la Grande Seine. Sometime around 1540, la Petite Seine was filled in, and became the Rue des Augustins, or Petits-Augustins, referring to the Augustinian convent being built there, set in the middle of a field, or pré. In this field, students from the medieval university used to disport themselves, doing whatever they did, apparently mostly quarrel and fight. A lot of dueling, which seemed to have been the principal activity of the Three Musketeers, went on in this field, and it was here, I was sorry to learn, that the real-life counterpart of Athos, my favorite of the Musketeers, met his real-life end in a duel.

  ARRONDISSEMENTS

  Rue Bonaparte follows the course of the canal which fed water from the Seine to the moat surrounding the abbey of St.-Germain-des-Prés.

  GUIDE MICHELIN

  The St.-Germain of nostalgic memory is a little smaller than its technical designation by the Ville de Paris, which sees it as bounded by the Seine River; Rues Dauphine and des Grands Augustins on the east (because it would be too bad not to include the huge equestrian statue of Henri IV on the Pont Neuf); the area between the Boulevard St.-Germain and the Rue du Four, up the Rue de Sèvres to the Croix Rouge; and the Rue des Sts.-Pères on the west.

  Aristocrats began to build around here in the 1600s on land made fashionable by la Reine Margot, recently divorced from King Henri IV, one of the first influential people to move to the Left Bank, which became easier to get to when the Pont Neuf, a little way upriver, was finished in 1606. The famous guide to the streets of ancient Paris, by J. Hillairet, Dictionnaire Historique des Rues de Paris, includes this northern part of Rue Bonaparte in its section on the “Noble Faubourg St. Germain,” presumably because of the great houses such as those at number five and number seven, and those along the quay, along with others in the part of the seventh arrondissement, a little to the west, that also belonged to the great nobles attached to the court.

  A good example of the way these seventeenth-century buildings are everywhere nestled among more recent building is Queen Margot’s palace itself, what remains of it, at 4-10 Rue de Seine, the next street east of Rue Bona
parte. In the courtyard at number six is the basic building, which now has two more recent wings—a beautiful Renaissance construction, with its raised stone corners and ornamented dormers. To the left in the wall of the courtyard is a passage through which one can see what remains of her garden, still with its enormous chestnut trees. (A paperback edition of Hillairet exists and is by far the most rewarding guidebook to walk around with.)

  Rue Bonaparte itself continues southward from where we live, past the ancient church of St.-Germain-des-Prés, across Boulevard St.-Germain, becoming a street of smart shops (mostly clothes, but there is even someone who sells—horrors—ivory), past the Place St. Sulpice with its strange church and rococco fountain, and finishes at the Jardin du Luxembourg, where Parisians all jog, promenade their babies and dogs, lawn bowl, ride ponies, watch puppet shows, and where Marie de Médicis, the second wife of Henri IV, built her palace, now the French Senate. This southern section of Bonaparte is also included in “St.-Germain-des-Prés,” the name to which legends attach, invoking the cafés, artists, elegant lesbians, an atmosphere of intellectual ferment and jazz and so on, though all these seem to have been concentrated in the northern part.

  Our Rue Bonaparte apartment is our fourth Paris apartment, each one a little bigger than the last as our bookcases overflow and our family of potential visitors expands with every year. We had no particular intention to live in St.-Germain-des-Prés and were delightfully happy in the fifth arrondissement, where I set my first Paris novels. Frankly, being just plain American, I lack the sensitivities that influence a Parisian’s absolute preference for one quarter over another, based on social and real estate calculations that are opaque to mere étrangers. All of Paris seems great to me. If I lived in New York, I wouldn’t know where I belonged either—West Side? East Side? Village? Anyway, we fell in love with our apartment, and it happened to be in the sixth arrondissement.

  St.-Sulpice church and fountain

  Real Parisians get attached to their arrondissements and tend to regard moving as unnatural and to be avoided. Rootless Americans, of course, have no such compunctions, but when J. and I moved, first to the fifth arrondissement, and then to the seventh arrondissement, then here to the sixth, each time I felt that I was moving an impossible distance, with all the dislocation to be expected from a large, deracinating life change, as if I had been moving from New York to San Antonio. In fact the fifth arrondissement is an easy walk, or a mere five minutes away on the bus, from where I live now, and there would be no impediment to going back to the same bakery and butcher as always; yet the psychological distance is great. By now perfectly accustomed to my new street, still I often stroll back along the rive gauche (south side of the river) to my old neighborhood in the fifth arrondissement, to enjoy the bridges and markets on the way.

  Edmund White begins his delightful book about Paris, The Flâneur, by noting with satisfaction that Paris is a big city that pleases for its urban texture and the possibilities of anonymity a city affords. This is true enough, but it has also famously and often been observed that Paris is a collection of villages grown together over centuries, which would argue the opposite as the secret of its appeal—that its universally acknowledged charm comes from these diverse origins. The feeling of neighborhood or village right around wherever you live in Paris is one of its greatest charms for a small-town American. As I was raised in an Illinois city of 35,000, in some ways I am more comfortable in the St.-Germain village (which, however, is larger in itself than Moline) than ever I was in exotic California, where I moved in my teens. It is the village-like quality of Paris that has always interested me most, and most affects my life here.

  The city has retained a sense of itself as a collection of communities, suburbs, open fields, fortifiable islands—these distinctions preserved in the modern system of arrondissements by which the city is divided into administrative sections, each with its mayor, city hall, and individual character. There is a different feel to, say, the Latin Quarter, with its students and cafés, than to the sixteenth arrondissement, a sumptuous residential quarter with stately nineteenth-century buildings and wide boulevards. The sixth arrondissement, now the most expensive in Paris, clings to its image of boho bookishness.

  Probably every corner or block or place in Paris has as rich a patina of beautiful buildings, ghosts, murders, joys, the unfolding of strange events, stretching back to Roman times. But since St.-Germain-des-Prés is where we are, every day there comes to my notice some scrap of history or detail of building that I hadn’t seen before, reminding that it takes centuries to build this intangible and reassuring aura of complication and permanence that every human psyche seems to need.

  Away from America, when I think about my own country, I do wonder if some of our problems are simply those of newness. It almost seems that America today is something like the France of the sixteenth century, torn with religious suspicions, cultural divisions, a huge gulf between rich and poor, dangerous streets, and so on. Today, on Rue Bonaparte, the seventeenth-century buildings, neatly polished and painted, lean serenely against each other or rock backward on their heels, tossed and aslant as the ground beneath them has sunk and settled into its tunnels and underground streams, here to stay.

  And since there are as many Parises as there are people who live or visit, so there are as many beginnings, each personal and cherished, by which each visitor comes to feel a sort of connection here. What other place has such a resonance with each soul who walks around in it, choosing his personal selection of sites and sights, building a complex and (usually) satisfying set of memories to take away, even if the memories include heartbreak, as in those American stories I mentioned? For the moment, though, J. and I lead the quiet daily lives of real Parisians, even though we will always be foreigners, comfortable in the knowledge that being a stranger is in itself very much in the tradition of St.-Germain-des-Prés. Since long before those Italian queens arrived in the sixteenth century, it is, and has been, the haven of people from everywhere else.

  QUEEN MARGOT

  The bride was the daughter of Henry II, the pearl of the crown of France, Marguerite de Valois, whom, in his familiar tenderness for her, King Charles IX always called ma soeur Queen Margot. Marguerite at this period was scarcely twenty, and already she was the object of all the poets’ eulogies, some of whom compared her to Aurora, others to Cytherea.

  Alexandre Dumas, LA REINE MARGOT

  One of several Italian queens of France, Catherine de Médicis, had a daughter, the Reine Margot, Queen Marguerite de Valois, later Marguerite de Navarre, who was in some ways the founder of the neighborhood. Margot was not one of the better-known queens of France, but now I think she is one of the most fascinating, and for me the presiding genius of the bookish and worldly quarter St.-Germain-des-Prés began to become, once it was liberated from the stern monks of the abbey of St.-Germain-des-Prés. These latter had been here for a thousand years, presiding over peasant festivals like the giant Foire de St.-Germain-des-Prés (a sort of precursor of state fairs and the like, known for pickpockets then as now), settling scholarly disputes, conducting diplomacy, and meting out justice.

  Marguerite de Valois lived from 1553 to 1615 (approximately contemporary with Shakespeare); and she lived more or less on this spot; our building stands in what was her gardens, and I have mentioned her palace only a few minutes’ walk from here, on what is now Rue de Seine. Queen Margot in many ways seems to have set the tone of St.-Germain-des-Prés, of music, intellectual life, adultery, and massacres, to say nothing of starting the real estate boom, as one of the first royal persons of importance to live on this side of the river (the great princes had long lived nearly within earshot across the river at the Louvre).

  Seventeenth- and eighteenth-century portraits never succeed in conveying to our modern eyes the charms of fabled beauties. Ladies in old portraits are apt to seem to us too stout, somewhat chinless, their eyes a bit bulging, their hair too elaborate. How much this is owing to techniques of portrait
ure and how much to changing standards of beauty is hard to say. Queen Margot’s beauty is not especially obvious from her picture, and she was the daughter of Catherine de Médicis; probably any daughter of this illustrious queen would automatically be agreed to possess beauty, whatever the case. Her portraits show an intelligent, quizzical lady, slender, with her breasts thrust up with a kind of Wonder Bra effect from under her low bodice, wearing the ruff and wide skirts we associate with Queen Elizabeth of England.

  Queen Margot was described by Dumas, who was drawing on older accounts, as “comely,” “the pearl of the crown of France,” with black hair (someone else says chestnut), a voluptuous figure, and very small feet, an attribute he seems to have admired and often awarded to his heroines. (In the 1993 Chereau film made from Dumas’s novel La Reine Margot, she is played by normal-footed Isabelle Adjani.) A few details about her life: She was the child of Catherine de Médicis and the Valois king Henri II, born at the royal château at St.-Germain-en-Laye, christened Marguerite, and nicknamed Margot.

  Catherine de Médicis (or de Medici, or d’Medici) was the formidable Italian queen who is said to have brought ice cream, an Italian expertise at poisoning, and various other Renaissance fashions with her to France when she married Henri II, himself son of the great King François I. Catherine de Médicis seems to have been a terrifying mother—manipulative, competitive, and sly, at least where her daughter Margot was concerned, though Margot wrote of her mildly enough, “The Queen my mother [was] a woman endowed with the greatest prudence and foresight of anyone I ever knew.”