Into A Paris Quartier

by Diane Johnson

  In return for her cooperation with the divorce, Margot got an agreement that allowed her to keep the title of queen, and a promise that Henri would pay her debts; Henri would become one of France’s best-remembered kings, among other things for issuing the Edict of Nantes, ensuring civil rights and toleration for the Huguenots, and therefore civil harmony which lasted until Louis XIV, who revoked it and canceled toleration in 1685.

  Queen Margot remained a well-liked ex-queen. She got along with her ex-husband and his new wife, Marie de Médicis, and threw herself into arts and good works, was nice to the children of the new couple (she appears not to have produced any legal heirs herself, though accounts vary as to whether she had other children), and generally behaved as a benevolent aunt or godmother. She’s accessible to us because she wrote her memoirs, discreet and incomplete though they are, revealing all the same:

  “Misfortune prompts us to summon our utmost strength to oppose grief and recover tranquillity, until at length we find a powerful aid in the knowledge and love of God, whilst prosperity hurries us away until we are overwhelmed by our passions,” she wrote, in the uncharacteristically resigned tone that sometimes crept into her writing during her long exile.

  She began construction of the Chapel of Praises in 1608, once she had returned to Paris after the eighteen years in Usson. Usually headstrong, she began building in one of her pious and penitent phases, though her memoirs break off before she can recount this Paris part of her personal history. After her long isolation, her life became a novel, as the French say: Ma vie est un roman—a novel about the relative consolations of religion and license. Already in her fifties when she moved back to Paris, she piled up new lovers and new debts. The story is told of one of her young lovers killing another at her very door, and being executed the next day under her window.

  It was then she fled from the Marais (where she had lived in the vast and gloomy medieval Hôtel de Sens), bought a large tract of land on the Left Bank, built a splendid house on the Rue de Seine, laid out her gardens, and eventually began to build La Chapelle des Louanges, or Chapel of Praises, in whose shadow John and I are living now. The chapel and our buildings were in what were the vast gardens of her estate—the Rue Jacob, for instance, was one of the allées of this garden. Nearby, her ex-husband Henri was constructing the Place Dauphine on the Île de la Cité. His is the giant equestrian statue you see as you cross the Pont Neuf.

  In the chapel, monks of the Petits-Augustins were to offer up songs of her own composing around the clock to fulfill her vows, till she got tired of it, for she was both musical and literary, as well as renowned for her love affairs. The singing, indeed the chapel itself, was intended as part of her vow to Jacob, he of the ladder, to atone for what she began to feel had been a too-worldly life—learned, lascivious, and pious at different times, and sometimes all at once, like many people. Eventually, it is said, she became very stout.

  D’ARTAGNAN’S PARIS

  D’Artagnan therefore entered Paris on foot, carrying his small valise under his arm, and proceeded until he found a lodging suitable to his slender resources. This chamber was a sort of garret, situated in the Rue des Fossoyeurs, near the Luxembourg.

  Alexandre Dumas, THE THREE MUSKETEERS

  Queen Margot had outlived her ex-husband Henri IV and all of her family, and died in the year of d’Artagnan’s birth, 1615, leaving her land to her ex-husband’s son Louis XIII, who set out to liquidate her considerable debts. In the twenty years between Queen Margot’s death and d’Artagnan’s arrival in Paris, her palace on the Rue de Seine had been sold off in three parts, two of which remain today, one at number 10 and 10 bis (where Rosa Bonheur would teach drawing two centuries later); another at numbers 8-6; while the remainder, at 2-4, “disappeared,” disparu, that wonderfully nonjudgmental and ambiguous French word: in this case, torn down.

  Sometimes on my walks, I try to imagine the neighborhood as d’Artagnan would have seen it when he came to Paris as a very young man, probably around 1635, to join the king’s guards. After Queen Margot’s death, Louis XIII had divided her land into lots and sold parcels to developers, in the modern way, and in no time the neighborhood was a fever of building, either of sumptuous private residences to live in, or to sell or rent for profit. Aristocrats and the successful rich began to move over to the Left Bank in greater numbers, and the quarter got much of the look it has today. On Rue Bonaparte, certainly the building next door to us at 6 Rue Bonaparte, and the low building at number two were here by d’Artagnan’s day. The latter, which dates from the early seventeenth century, houses a frame shop that used to be called “Paris-American Art,” but which has now painted out the word “American,” for fear of anti-American reprisals. (They say they’ll paint it back some day. Maybe.) There remains the question about our building and numbers ten and twelve: When were they built?

  D’Artagnan certainly knew the most important monument of the quarter, the church of St.-Germain-des-Prés, at the corner of Rue Bonaparte and the Boulevard St.-Germain, where it has stood in some form or another since the sixth century, some think on the site of a first-century Roman altar. In d’Artagnan’s day it was a powerful abbey, mostly dating from the twelfth century, with extensive grounds where he and others fought duels.

  Church of St.-Germain-des-Prés

  It had been consecrated in 558 by a Merovingian king, Childebert I, the son of Clovis. At first it was called St.-Vincent-et-St.-Croix, after St.-Vincent, relics of whom Childebert had brought back from an expedition against the Visigoths in Spain; but by the eighth century it had taken the name of St.-Germain, after the early cardinal Germain who had inspired its building and was buried inside, along with Clovis and subsequent kings. Hillairet, the indispensable index to Parisian streets, says that the “des-Prés” was added to distinguish this church from another, St.-Germain-le-Vieux.

  The Normans sacked the church in the ninth century; it was rebuilt in about the year 1000—the “incipiently Gothic” features of the choir were designed, perhaps by the architect of the cathedral at Sens, about 1145. After that, chapels and cloisters were added over the centuries, dismantled yet again, rebuilt yet again. In 1794, during the Revolution, when religion was disapproved of, it was used to store gunpowder, and accidentally blew up, destroying the refectory, the Chapel of the Virgin, and its immense library, though many of the manuscripts were saved. After that, the whole wreck was in danger of being demolished, but was rescued by Victor Hugo, among others, who led a campaign to save it. Thus it was rebuilt another time, but never did get back two of its original three towers.

  During the time of its ascendancy, this church and abbey were rich and powerful, answerable only to the pope—or perhaps not even to the pope—and in effect governed the surrounding population. It owned extensive lands, for the use of which it exacted revenues, was a center of learning in competition with and in frequent dispute with the Sorbonne, and even had political powers of taxing and punishing misdeeds, for which, the prison.

  Now it still forms the centerpiece of the neighborhood, as it has for a thousand years, but it stands alone in a setting of worldly consumerism and mundane big-city bustle, across from the boutiques of Louis Vuitton and Christian Dior, and a building that houses The Society for Encouragement of Industry. The irony of this unholy atmosphere of commerce escapes no one, and is especially emphasized by the current mode at Dior, of bruised biker-moll clothes, spike heels and punk chains, a sort of celebration of depravity chic that would have shocked the abbots, and probably elegant old Christian Dior himself as well.

  “On Sundays we sat at the Deux Magots and watched the people, devout as an opera chorus, enter the old doors,” wrote Zelda Fitzgerald in the twenties; but signs of devoutness are long gone. People sitting on the terrace of Les Deux Magots, gazing out at the church in good weather (rare in Paris), behold in the forecourt an antic crowd of musicians, many of them Americans, doing familiar jazz chestnuts and endless renditions of “As the Saints Go Marching In” t
he mime dressed up like d’Artagnan; the little old woman who does Piaf imitations very badly almost every night; the waffleseller; a man who pretends to paint tiny postcard-size pictures of local sights; and dozens of other characters. I haven’t seen the organ-grinder lately, with his family of docile or drugged cats.

  At Les Deux Magots

  The Place St.-Germain-des-Prés is cobbled with largish stones, terrible in high heels as you run for the 63 Bus across the boulevard. Concerts are held in the church many nights of the week, heavily emphasizing Vivaldi’s Four Seasons. All in all, there is a festival quality to the precincts of the ancient church that must be somewhat like that of medieval times. It makes a rather profane sight, so that the simple white cross erected over the porch is startling as the solitary reference to higher things.

  The church does still have its ritual and ceremonial functions. Just after September 11, 2001, people gathered there for a silent prayer vigil. Those who came were not just Americans—there were many French people, too, and some people who looked like North Africans, that is, Muslims. Almost every American who was here on that day talks about the support and concern Paris felt, and experienced some expression of kindness and sympathy. In my building, two of my neighbors offered guest bedrooms and haven to anyone we might know stranded in France because of the interruption of transatlantic travel. What changes have taken place between our two nations in two years! But the French, at least, assure Americans it isn’t us, only our leader, that they mistrust.

  Inside the church, which, to be frank, is not as beautiful or moving as many churches, the most affecting thing is the chapel of St.-Symphorian, a simple stone-walled space dating from the eighth century, accessible through double doors on the right-hand side of the porch. Symphorian was a young Roman soldier, martyred in the first century, but for what not even Google seems to know, presumably Christianity.

  If you walk along the Rue de l’Abbaye, the street that runs just north of the church of St.-Germain-des-Prés, and which was not there in d’Artagnan’s day, first you see a little square park, Square Laurent-Prache, which snuggles up to the side of the church, and contains in the space of a few hundred square yards allusions to all the long history of St.-Germain-des-Prés. To begin, someone has scrawled on a bas-relief of the worthy gentleman Laurent Prache, whoever he was, after whom the square is named, “tête du con,” meaning, more or less, “what an asshole,” a typical graffitist sentiment, a little jarring for this churchly precinct, but modern in feeling.

  Elsewhere in the little garden of the square, which can’t be more than sixty feet on each side, a statue of Dora Maar by Picasso, and dedicated by him to his friend Apollinaire, sits on a pedestal, and bits of the thirteenth-century chapel of the Virgin are stuck to the outside walls of the church, saved from further depredations but deteriorating in the polluted air. After the Revolution, when everything was for sale, a local doctor bought the damaged chapel and tore it down to reuse the bits to decorate his house. His house was in turn torn down—sic transit Gloria—and the fragments came back to be displayed here. The bust of Dora Maar was stolen a couple of years ago, too, but recovered under circumstances that remain a little mysterious. At least she is back, though some say this bust is a copy, and the Ville de Paris is tight-lipped about the whole affair.

  As you continue down Rue de l’Abbaye, there are more bits of ancient buildings preserved as parts of the structures of several boutiques across the street from the abbatial palace, in Flamant, a furniture store, for example, where they form part of the wall of the building, and in the shop that sells things from Asia at number ten, in a sous-sol that can be seen from the street through the window. At the end of the street on the right, the abbot’s palace, built in 1586, still looks rather as it must have looked to d’Artagnan, built of brick and stone in the style seen in the Place des Vosges in the fourth arrondissement. Its size gives a good idea of the power and influence of the abbots of St.-Germain—it appears nearly as large as the church itself, its grounds still luxuriously ample, and it seems still to belong to the Catholic Church.

  From here, turn left and walk through the charming Place de Furstemburg to Rue Jacob, another street so charged with history, so overlain with the names of all the famous people who had lived there that it almost baffles description. At number three, for example, just to the right when you reach Jacob, was the eighteenth-century home of the unfortunate Princesse de Lamballe, the friend of Marie-Antoinette who was dismembered by an angry mob, and her body parts gleefully paraded outside the queen’s prison window. I have two different American friends who are living at 3 Jacob now, one of them in an apartment that used to belong to Simonetta, the Italian dress designer (who still lives elsewhere on Rue Jacob), and the other who rents from a French baroness. And so on, up the entire street, haunt of Tom Paine, Franklin, Washington Irving, Hemingway…

  The Rue des Fossoyeurs, where d’Artagnan found his first Paris lodging, came to be called Rue Servandoni in 1806. I like to think he could have been renting in the house of Madame D.—a wonderful guru to artists, to whom I once in desperation repaired for a (miraculous) consultation, whose family (Protestant) has lived there since the seventeenth century. The ironwork on her stairs is the same as in our building, perhaps another clue to the date of ours.

  END OF THE GREAT CENTURY

  Whatever great advantages nature may give, it is not she alone, but fortune also that makes the hero.

  François de La Rochefoucauld

  The seventeenth century drew on. D’Artagnan died in 1672. He had served Louis XIII, and in turn Louis XIV, the Sun King, but with the latter, the court had moved off to Versailles, and Rue Bonaparte resumed a calmer aspect. St.-Germain was fashionable now for its graceful social life, wit, and literary bent, the character it would keep, interspersed with periods of catastrophe.

  I think of the Duc de La Rochefoucauld as the emblematic man for this time—sometime around 1660 he lived near here in the house of his uncle, on the Rue de Seine (14-18 Rue de Seine), a few hundred yards from where Queen Margot’s palatial residence had been. His pious and talented friend Madame de La Fayette lived not far away on Rue Vaugirard, other friends were a bit farther away at Port-Royal, a neighborhood at the south of the sixth arrondissement, at the border of the fifth (twenty minutes’ walk from here), immersed in the mood of the Jansenists. These devout crypto-Protestant Catholics reacted to the power and political status of the Church by encouraging private devotions, translations of the Bible, a return to simple forms of worship, and so on—a movement so menacing to Louis XIV, perhaps for the subtly seditious political implications of these criticisms of Jesuit and pope, that he had the convent of the Port-Royal nuns burned to the ground.

  The sixth Duc de La Rochefoucauld was born in 1613 (two years before d’Artagnan), and had the career expected of a man in his position: He joined the army, was involved in most of the going conspiracies against Cardinals Richelieu and Mazarin, participated in the Fronde—an uprising of aristocrats against Mazarin—was wounded in battle, exiled, and jailed, but survived to end his days peacefully enough in Paris in a circle of his friends, including Madame de Sévigné, Madame de La Fayette, whose La Princesse de Cleves is thought of as almost the first and among the greatest of French novels, and his particular friend, Madame de Sablé. These were stately, or it could seem, mildly depressed, intellectuals who found solace in each other, in literature, and in witty topical dissections. In short, they had salons, a social form that had begun in the sixteenth century, and still characterized this period. With their famous interdiction of talk about politics and religion (respected to our day, if more in the breach than the observance, given everyone’s actual preoccupation with politics and religion) they were, after the court, major arbiters of taste.

  They valued concise expression, purity of feeling, wit, and affection, but it was the barbed and even bitter mockery of La Rochefoucauld’s tone that would be widely adopted, even become characteristic in the eighteenth century
with Voltaire, Madame de Stael, and so on. The salons gave considerable influence to women. The seventeenth-century salons, many of them around Port-Royal, must have lent to this whole quarter the sort of tone that would persist in the 1920s when American and English women, many of them lesbian or black, would find a congenial atmosphere of female self-sufficiency.

  La Rochefoucauld’s epigrams convey the mood of the upcoming eighteenth century: harsh but undeniable, startling in the hypocrisies they exposed:

  Whatever care we take to conceal our passions under the appearance of piety and honor, they are always to be seen through these veils.

  Our virtues are most frequently but vices in disguise.

  His maxims brilliantly characterize the dodgy life of a courtier:

  Hypocrisy is the homage vice pays to virtue.

  We promise according to our hopes; we perform according to our fears.

  Interest speaks all sorts of tongues and plays all sorts of characters; even that of disinterestedness.

  He is always preoccupied with death, with a very modern skepticism:

  Men have written in the most convincing manner to prove that death is no evil, and this opinion has been confirmed on a thousand celebrated occasions by the weakest of men as well as by heroes. Even so I doubt whether any sensible person has ever believed it, and the trouble men take to convince others as well as themselves that they do shows clearly that it is not an easy undertaking.

  By the end of the seventeenth century, La Rochefoucauld is dead (1680), as is Madame de La Fayette (who said of him, “He gave me wit, I gave him a heart.”) in 1692, and Madame de Sévigné (1696), too. The latter two ladies lived to see Louis XIV revoke the Edict of Nantes, and the country plunged again into religious turmoil, with an enormous exodus of Protestants to Holland, England, and the New World. (According to my aunts, one of our ancestors went to America soon after, one René Cossé or Cosset, whose name in the more dubiously educated colonies became “Ranna Cossit.” Was he a Huguenot? My aunt doesn’t know.)