Into A Paris Quartier
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Inside the Sts.-Pères building, the site was humming with restorers, people sanding and pounding. Certain architectural elements had recognizably been retained—the shutters of the windows, some of the parquet, carefully covered in tarp. In other places, new underflooring had been laid. Bare wires dangled from ceilings—there were no moldings or ceiling rosettes, but maybe these would come back. The height of the ceilings was magnificent, the light through the long windows superb; yes, somebody had bought it, the contractor said. All the apartments in this building had been sold at enormous prices. This one was in the millions of euros, though he would not say how many or whose, or how much it was costing to restore it to its seventeenth-century magnificence.
ACADÉMIE FRANÇAISE
A serious man has few ideas; a man of ideas is never serious.
Paul Valéry, MAUVAISES PENSÉES ET AUTRES
I am a housewife and a novelist, two activities that don’t really fit together, in that I find it too easy to skip working at my writing in the name of (mostly undone) things that need doing around the house. The solution is to get out of the house and work somewhere else, and in my case, I go to the Bibliothèque Mazarine, the library inside the Institut de France. Instead of walking south on Bonaparte to St.-Germain, which takes me by the École des Beaux-Arts, I instead turn left, walk toward the Seine, turn right at the corner of Bonaparte and the Quai Malaquais, and walk another minute or two along the quay to the Institut de France, the grand building that dominates the Quai Malaquais where it turns into the Quai de Conti.
The ensemble of the Institut de France was designed by the genius Louis Le Vau, Louis XIV’s architect for Versailles, the Louvre, and various great châteaux. D’Artagnan would have seen the Institut more or less in its present form, just as he would have seen the nearby Hôtel de la Monnaie, the beautiful, immense eighteenth-century neoclassic structure built onto a house that was started in the thirteenth century, remodeled in 1572, 1641, and 1670, and became the national mint in 1768 under Louis XV—a great example of the evolution of buildings with their times. Today the money-coining facility itself has moved, but decorative coins and medals are still made here, and it is worth stopping in to see the beautiful staircase and interesting museum.
Quai Malaquais
The Bibliothèque Mazarine is open to all for a small yearly fee and a look of seriousness, or maybe looking serious is not required. When I first went to the Flore to meet Monsieur B., someone said by a mutual friend to be (and is) incredibly knowledgeable about the “inner” St. Germain, I asked him “How will I recognize you?” He said, “I look like a clochard,” which is in our parlance a homeless person and maybe a drunk. (Of course he is neither a drunk nor a homeless person, I should hasten to add.) Nonetheless, Monsieur B. has a library card to the Mazarine, the first public library in France, founded by Cardinal Mazarin in 1648—a library open to all. While I’m not sure whether a clochard could get a card at the San Francisco Public Library, the point is they are welcome at the Bibliothèque Mazarine.
In the Bibliothèque Mazarine, the student can write or read in undisturbed splendor, and here I work, though this magnificent library is almost too grand, with its sixty-five-foot ceilings, great gilt chandeliers, leather-topped tables (nicely wired for the computer), and welcoming but always impassive librarians. I have yet to summon the nerve to ask for a book, but I do sidle along the shelves, eyeing the massive leather-bound volumes and occasionally consulting the dictionaries. Also, there is still a card catalog, a joy to leaf through, the oldest entries handwritten in the seventeenth century. The librarians here have had the wisdom to keep it, unlike American libraries which have mostly dispensed with or even destroyed their card catalogs—without knowing, as they will admit, how long electronic data can be expected to last. (I’ve always admired Nicholson Baker’s diatribes on this subject.) There is also an array of French literary and historical periodicals, perfect for browsing and putting off the daily confrontation with a manuscript in progress.
I went there almost every day to work on my novel L’Affaire, aware that the librarians must have thought I was also some sort of stray, a homeless person sheltering from the cold, a token piece of paper in front of me, toying with a pen, staring into air. I gained a couple of pounds, too, from each day buying a chocolate rocher at the Tabac des Beaux-Arts at my corner to nibble surreptitiously instead of going home to lunch. Another means of procrastination is to walk slowly around the vast salle of the reading room, inspecting the parade of marble busts of Cicero, Homer, Condorcet, and other ancients that line the aisles, their sage countenances seeming to impart brotherly encouragement, as it seems on the days when all is going well, or else a certain scorn for mere modern literary toil, fiction at that, when it isn’t.
The beautiful Institut de France, at first called the Collège des Quatre-Nations, was founded in 1661 by provisions in the will of Cardinal Mazarin, finished in 1672, opened in 1688. If you face it with your back to the river, you see a wide forecourt with a gilded, domed chapel, which, with Queen Margot’s Chapel of Praises, was one of the first domes in Paris—the technology coming from Italy in the tradition of Brunelleschi or Michelangelo. The chapel is flanked by two curved wings. The Mazarine Library faces the Seine in the left wing of this imposing building, which also houses the Académie Française and other French institutions, with a lecture hall in the chapel at the center. This chapel is normally closed—I have only seen inside it once, on the day in September when all French public buildings, many in historic palaces and hôtels particuliers, are thrown open for the public, and French people line up to inspect these valuable instances of their patrimoine, the collective patrimony they all appreciate—but only the public servants get to use on a daily basis.
It’s here that the immortels are inducted into the Académie Française, the august assembly of men of letters, with once in a while a woman. It isn’t given to Americans, usually, to meet members of that distinguished group, but by accident I have met one, not through literary channels but because of that apartment-hunting propensity I have mentioned. I was helping Carolyn Kizer, the distinguished, Pulitzer Prize–winning American poet and fellow Californian, and her husband, John Woodbridge, the architect (who has written a marvelous Guide to Paris), look for an apartment. Arthur Hall Smith, an American painter now living in Paris, was the fourth of our party.
We were a bit late for a rendezvous with the real estate agent, and he/she had gone, leaving us standing in confusion in the foyer of an elegant seventeenth-century building discussing what to do next. At the same time, a pizza deliverer came in, rang, and we saw a beautiful woman in her housecoat who had been waiting for him upstairs and had overheard us. She accepted the pizza, then said to us, in perfect but rather oddly idiomatic English, “I’m sorry the guy is gone, but if you’d like to see an apartment in this building, you can have a look at ours, they are all somewhat like this.” (The French all use the word “guy,” clearly an artifact of correct English lessons of a while ago; we do say it, but, unlike this woman, most never seem to use it in quite the right context, a great warning never to use the slang of a language not your own.)
It seemed rude to refuse, even though it was evident that she lived in a large, splendid place and our lot, as Americans in Paris, is usually to inhabit the unwanted first floors and mezzanines; Carolyn and John weren’t planning to buy a sumptuous whole upper floor on the Rue Guénégaud, but we went in.
“I’m sorry, my husband isn’t home,” she said. “This is his day for the Academy.” Now we were thrown into a bit of a panic. Académie Française?! Whose house were we in? We looked around with extra penetration, as she led us through several splendid rooms into his beautiful and imposing library. We squinted at the framed photos on the tables and tried to read the titles of the books in the shelves. Finally, brilliant Arthur, spying a familiar title, had a brainstorm: “Not Jean Dutourd! Le Bon Beurre?” he asked.
“Yes!” And she was Madame Dutourd, Camille.
Le Bon Beurre, about black marketeers during the Second World War, I have read described by someone as eminent as V. S. Pritchett (perhaps it was he?) as the greatest Second World War novel in French, or perhaps the greatest, period. All Dutourd’s work is witty and worldly as well as wise—a tone that modern French writing rarely seems to find. To our taste much of it is rather “Oh! Stupeur!” in the declamatory style the French appear to admire, a manner that to us amounts to “fine writing,” the sin people writing in English are taught to avoid.
The story goes on. Carolyn, with her characteristic good nature and generosity, thinking over this episode next day, said, “There’s something not right here. Why was that woman in her housedress at three in the afternoon? I think she’s depressed, and especially when he goes off to his clubby little lunches. Let’s invite her to lunch ourselves.”
We did; she declined, did not ever go out to lunch, but instead said that she and her husband had decided that they would like us all to meet them for dinner one night at Brasserie Lipp, the venerable institution on Boulevard St. Germain. We were shown to the best table—I’ve learned that there are bad and good tables at Lipp, which practically rules out going there without a French friend, for fear of getting a bad one, almost an inevitability to someone with an American accent and an unknown face. Also, the food isn’t exceptional, and there are no rules against cigars.
But, sitting at a privileged table, one has the chance to gape at the other regulars. That night, at the next table was Maurice Herzog, the great climber of Annapurna. That feat was in 1950, but he still looks fit and attractive, except, of course, no tips of fingers. His book about the expedition, called, I think, Annapurna, recounts how he lost them to frostbite.
Anyway, the dinner. Jean Dutourd was affability itself to this rabble his wife had somehow collected. At one juncture I asked him if they often invited a pack of strange Americans to dinner? “Never,” he said. “This is the first time. But after this, I’ll make a point of doing so.” That chivalrous reply is very French, or at least very Jean Dutourd.
We remained in touch, and would all get together whenever the Woodbridges came to stay in the pied-à-terre they eventually found. I’ve been struck at how the waiters, in whatever restaurant we go to, recognize a French academician and are powerfully impressed and extra gracious, and I couldn’t help but reflect that, for better or worse, writers in America, except for a few, are not fawned over by waiters, or even noticed. Of course, I also noticed that the Dutourds were HUGE tippers—noblesse oblige, I suppose. Upon leaving the restaurant, Camille gave a clochard a hundred francs. “It’s just for drink,” she told the man, and that seems very French too, if, in our parlance, “enabling.” It’s our puritanism, the French would say, that keeps us from enabling a drunk; it’s true, I would have been disapproving of that man spending his windfall on drink instead of something nutritious.
Jean Dutourd is or was on a committee of the Académie Française that is revising the French dictionary. Unlike English, French has, or would like to have, a fixed vocabulary, and vigilantly guards against incorporating new words from foreign languages. But of course it does add them, and then the academicians have to rule them in or out. Some words, like “weekend,” are invincible; others are weaker, like “seat belt,” and can be repulsed. I believe he told me they work in the mornings, then go to lunch; and sure enough, one day when I was lunching at Le Cafetière on the Rue Mazarine, I was told that the academicians were upstairs, very jolly after their labors. When these august, and mostly elderly, gentlemen came downstairs, they did look quite flushed and cheerful. There have been a couple of women in the Academy—Marguerite Yourcenar was the first—but probably not on that committee.
SOME NEIGHBORS
Vieille maison, Lacépède y vivait en 1801.
GUIDE PRACTIQUE
Our kittens, Babbage and Watson, love to prowl in the inner court outside our kitchen window in the shadow of the Chapel of Praises. This little court, perhaps twenty by thirty feet in size, is bisected by a low wall that separates the space between our building and number ten, the building next door. It is planted with pots of ivy and hedge and flowers, and gives an experience of the natural world to their cloistered lives. Luckily, there’s nowhere they can escape out of it, though Babbage once climbed precariously to a rain gutter that rims the chapel and had to be rescued by ladder.
The garden is tended by a woman, a passionate gardener. She introduced herself as La Voisine—the neighbor. I don’t know her name, though perhaps she mentioned it. La Voisine and I speak in French, which limits me, but when our friends Fran and Bu come to spend the summer in our apartment, they talk to her, and Fran reports that La Voisine speaks English perfectly well. Most people around here speak English perfectly well; Americans used to complain that they didn’t, but now the disappointing thing is that they do, and insist on it whenever they detect an American accent. Not La Voisine, however. She politely sticks to the language we spoke at the beginning.
(This reminds me of a pet peeve—when French waiters, hearing your American accent, change into English and refuse to speak French, even if you, always hoping to practice and improve, resolutely stick to French. Almost worse is the menu in English, with its inevitably bizarre translations, so that you have to ask for a menu in French to find out what you’ll be eating.)
The chapel wall forms one of the limits of La Voisine’s space. On its other three sides are her doorway, the half wall that she sets her plants along, and the high stone surface with the ancient bricked-up archway in it that forms the back wall of the Église des Petits-Augustins and runs along to become the back wall of my kitchen. La Voisine has valiantly painted the lower part of the chapel wall white, probably in violation of the architectural protections legislating the exterior treatment of historic buildings in this neighborhood, but in an inner court, who is to see or report? Our conversations concern her gardening, which requires her to climb over the low wall to pose her pots and trellises on our side, and, now, the kittens. She loves cats, she says, but is apprehensive for her plants. I foresee that we will eventually have to replace some of them, but so far the kittens, joyful to be outside, tiptoe among the pots with utmost delicacy.
I don’t garden, because the floor of my side of the court is a skylight for the underground storage area of an art gallery in our building. This storage area in our basement, or cave, is linked, I am told, by a series of underground passages all the way to the church of St. Germain-des-Prés. There is also a frightening, deep well, perhaps a vestige of the branch of the Seine which trickled along Rue de Petite-Seine, one of the names of our street before it became Bonaparte. Or it might be a source, or spring—no one knows, but they are sure that it provided water for the monks of the convent of the
Petits-Augustins.
Two retired neighbors have done some research on such archaeological aspects of the neighborhood—a military man and an avocat, or lawyer, both of whom have interested themselves in the history of Rue Bonaparte buildings. (One must be called maître, for that is what lawyers are called, and the other mon colonel, by men though not by women.) Luckily, we have moved to a first-name basis. Jean-Jacques and Robert. (Perhaps they accede to this American familiarity because they know our louche ways.)
Jean-Jacques and Robert say that the caves communicate via passages and troughs with those of the church of St.-Germain-des-Prés, but for the moment I find them too creepy to explore. I would, however, like to see an inscription said to have been scratched on the wall of a cave at number twelve Bonaparte by Huguenots hiding there, something told me by a noted American composer, but unconfirmed by Jean-Jacques, who hasn’t yet taken me down there.
As we found, hunting for real estate in Paris is one way of getting to see places you might never otherwise get inside. Curiosity is part of the reason we happened on our apartment. John and I were seriously in the market for a bigger apartment, but John is not much for idle browsing. Luckily, my friend Bob and I are, so it was Bob and I who went with Monsieur Chevallier, the real estate agent, to have a look at something he proposed. It was a gloomy day in December, and a nondescript building, but close to the Seine, where I love being. We climbed the stairs to find sinister developers standing in the foyer of the apartment discussing putting in a mezzanine under the tall ceilings, ripping out the boiserie of the living room, and dividing the place into two apartments—animating our anxiety at the mere idea of changes to this more or less unchanged and lovely space, however shabby, and all painted a bubblegum pink. “You have to have it,” Bob said. As he used to be my editor, I obey him in all things.