Into A Paris Quartier

by Diane Johnson

  The other thing I learned is that though I had always thought that early painters just didn’t know how to do children, in fact those wizened baby Jesuses that the Majesty or Madonna is holding in old paintings is to illustrate the idea that Christ was older and wiser than either his mother or mankind, and brought wisdom to us.

  Madame Boccador specializes in art of the Middle Ages and Renaissance, venturing on this métier almost by accident, after starting medical studies—which she thinks ought to be a requirement for anyone interested in sculpture. Medical studies are an integral part of St.-Germain, with branches of the medical schools, the ancient hospitals, and the present Académie de Médicine all here, the latter on Rue Bonaparte, just on the other side of the École des Beaux-Arts, handy for my husband, John, who is a corresponding member, to use its library.

  Galleries along Quai Malaquais

  Madame Boccador is one of many dealers in paintings and antique furniture on Rue Bonaparte and along the quays, art dealing a speciality of the neighborhood. I remember being struck, when I first came to France, by the abundance of decorative objects, their gold and crystal, their ormolu, and—to Americans, influenced by an aesthetic of Shaker simplicity—their overdone fanciness. The French eye, if one may generalize, has evolved a tolerance for the more complicated, even baroque, the gilded, that took me awhile to appreciate. It is the difference, say, between portraits of George Washington by Gilbert Stuart, and the famous portrait of Louis XIV in high heels with flowing curly wig. Never mind that Charles II wore similar wigs in England, those high heels are so French!

  Is it possible to think of shopping as a cultural experience? I hope it is. It’s fashionable to deplore the loss of bookstores in St.-Germain-des-Prés, and the arrival of the banal global brand-name boutiques. But it is still true that to look into the shops and galleries of this quarter is to pass in review the art of several centuries, the evolution of French decorative taste, mini-museums of African or folk or modern or medieval art—there is a gallery of contemporary Japanese art now, and, by the bus stop on Rue Bonaparte, of Indian and African oldish kitsch that from time to time has in the window something irresistible. Once I bought a large African spoon, on a pedestal, like sculpture; and another time a crystal from India to dangle protectively around my neck. For a long time I’ve been in love with one dealer’s North Indian—or Chinese?—porcelain parrots, but am deterred by their price and the fact that I want more than one, want a whole flock of them. Just as going to the flea market at the Porte de Clignancourt in Paris is to risk being overcome by the acres of Things—porcelain, wood carving, old picture frames, clothes, mirrors, statues, jewelry, boiseries, an infinitude of canvas and moldings, fireplaces, prints, sofas, tables, boars’ heads, bedsteads, tusks, theatrical scenery, pieces out of ancient pubs…so, too, is it overwhelming to go window shopping in this neighborhood.

  The French have a different attitude to Things, and the accretion of centuries of Things is impressive, a recapitulation of history itself, compressed into a few showrooms, an abundance of the greatest examples of everything from every epoch (at overwhelming expense), a carnival of astounding connoisseurship. To begin with the Greek and Roman: There’s little left of Greco-Roman Paris. There are the bits of the baths now incorporated into the Cluny Museum at Boulevard St.-Germain and Boulevard St.-Michel (where you can also see “The Lady and the Unicorn,” the charming series of tapestries), and an amphitheater, the much-restored Arènes de Lutece. But there is a lot more of Greco-Roman art for sale: There is a dealer on Rue Bonaparte, and another on the Rue des Sts.-Pères, who sell ancient busts and fragments, some so beautiful one is sure that the Greek or Italian governments ought to come after them. (Though, thinking of a visit we paid to our Greek friend Charis at his Santorini island summer place, where his yard was strewn with statues, dug up in the course of putting in a seawall, it appears that in Greece they have more than they know what to do with. If you dig up a statue in your garden in Greece, you notify the antiquities ministry, and they register it but tell you to keep it until they need it, which might be never.)

  There must be a connection between the very noticeable French interest in material objects, witness their abundance of statuary, figurines, busts—three-dimensional objects rather than pictures—and their concern to dismantle things carefully, stone by stone. Someone bought the stones of the destroyed Bastille to build his château in the Midi. It is as if the French now have a more active sense than others of the material world as the potent manifestation of political and religious or other intangible conditions of life, perhaps because of their destructive mistakes during the Revolution?

  Take the little carvings by Jean Goujon on the Anet doors of the chapel. We are all travelers, at heart if not in fact, and it is no secret that because we all travel at top speed, we are too apt to miss these tiny details, the odd felicities that derive from the accretions of centuries of civilization—or of savagery, of which this neighborhood has seen more than its share. In the Cour de Commerce, ten minutes’ walk from Rue Bonaparte at Odéon, you can see the emplacement of the first guillotine, set up by Dr. Guillotin to practice on sheep, now marked by two little holes in the pavement.

  For the visitor to Paris to think in terms of just one neighborhood is to miss the Arc de Triomphe, and the cemetery at Père-Lachaise, or Lafayette’s grave in the Cimetière de Picpus; but there are almost certainly mysteriously quiet and charming things two steps from wherever the traveler happens to be staying that may better repay his attention than battling tourist crowds at the great monuments. A day spent climbing the Tour Eiffel and you will probably miss the four della Robbia medallions on the facade of the little building in the courtyard of one of the houses on the Quai Malaquais, around the corner from me, four portraits, garlanded and smiling—were they embedded in the plaster when the building was put up in 1630? Did they come there with the Italianate influence of the Médicis? Or are they the whim of some recent traveler? No one in the building is quite sure.

  One day I went around the quartier looking only at doors and entrances, many listed on the register of protected sites in France, and all always indicative of the status of the former occupants, often carved, often crowned by statuary. Just to walk up and down any of the streets of St.-Germain looking only at these elements is to see things you have never seen before; the visual details of Parisian architecture in any quartier is so rich that sometimes this way of disciplined looking is the only way to begin to take it in.

  Another focus might be only to look into courtyards. This is harder where there are door codes, but often these are off during the day; the only way to know is to walk along a Parisian street, punching the central buttons and entering the doors that give the reassuring little click. If someone questions what you are doing in his courtyard, say, “Je fais une étude d’architecture.”

  Talking of architecture: As everybody knows, Paris is bisected by the Seine River, broad, brisk, brown, and tamed between sumptuously tended banks and stone ramparts, walkways, arched over by forty bridges along the length of the city. During the First World War, the American writer Edith Wharton, who lived not far from St.-Germain all through it, on the Rue Varenne in the Faubourg St.-Germain, and was a war heroine into the bargain, wrote a little booklet, French Ways and Their Meaning, to explain to people in America why French civilization was worth their fighting for. One of her reasons was the lovely way the French took care of their riverbanks, with pedestrian walkways, statues, cobblestone paths, and planting. She deplored our American habit of putting factories along the river and letting them dump their waste into them. She had other views as well, many of them quite critical of her native land, which, like Henry James, she left for good and never went back to.

  The width of the Seine presented a challenge in medieval times, and even in the seventeenth century you mostly had to cross by ferry, though some bridges existed and would be swept away from time to time. D’Artagnan would have been able to cross on the Pont Neuf, the ol
dest bridge in Paris, looking today more or less as it did in the sixteenth century when it was begun (1578, finished in 1607). Henri IV and Marie de Médicis were there to inaugurate it, while Queen Margot would then have been overseeing the building of her house nearby. Many things have happened on the Pont Neuf since, including Pierre Curie being killed by a carriage, as he walked along, distracted, it is said, by Madame Curie’s infidelity.

  No one remembers this now, but I have seen swastikas hung on the Pont Neuf during a fifty-year commemoration of De Gaulle’s speech to his countrymen from England in June of 1942. Now it was fifty years later, and the decor of the bridges was meant to re-create the city as it was during the Occupation, when the Parisians heard on their radios the words that they should and would resist. A copy of a radio set was put on top of the obelisk in the Place de la Concorde (where once there stood a guillotine!) and the speech broadcast again. Even fifty years later, it was chilling to see the Nazi banners, thrilling to hear the brave words.

  The great event for the Pont Neuf in recent years was when the artist Christo wrapped it. Always beautiful, it was now swathed in a million yards of gold-colored canvas. Two little ladies on my bus said, “This government! What will they think of next? I suppose we the taxpayers are paying for this.”

  There are forty bridges in all, whereas as late as Napoleon’s time there were only thirteen. Several of the nicest and most interesting bridges are those I see every day, the Pont Neuf, the Pont des Arts, the Pont du Carousel, and the Pont Royal. D’Artagnan wouldn’t have seen the Pont des Arts, our nearest bridge, a footbridge leading from the Institut de France, just downriver from the Pont Neuf, over to the eastern wing of the Louvre. Wide and welcoming, it’s the scene of art shows, strolling minstrels, joggers, tourists, and locals admiring the view up and down the river, people painting, pouring cocktails, or just hanging out. When Christo wrapped the Pont Neuf, we found the best view of it was from this bridge, where people hung over the railings exclaiming and snapping photos. The Pont des Arts was the first steel bridge, built by Napoleon Bonaparte in 1803.

  More recently, the Pont des Arts itself was the scene of an amazing show of sculpture, larger-than-life figures made in mud, straw, and daub by an African sculptor, Ousmane Sow from Senegal. It was almost too creepy to walk across the bridge by moonlight, especially for an American, since the images evoked were of the American slaves, now seeming to come to life in positions of anguish, against the dark Parisian river.

  Everywhere you look in Paris there are statues. They are an important part of the French decorative style. St. Germain and all the bridges, and all of Paris, are peopled with huge figures in marble or bronze, even wood; busts in terra-cotta, bronze, plaster, marble, sometimes embellished with gold, giants several times life-size, tiny figurines…for instance, the immense, inspiring statue of Henri IV on the Pont Neuf. A recent Houdon exhibition at Versailles also brought some figures familiar to Americans—Lafayette, Franklin, Washington, who all sat for the great sculptor. A Versailles curator told me there are thousands of statues in the park and in the reserves of that château alone.

  Philip Trager’s lovely book of photographs, Changing Paris, captures these amazing presences on public buildings and bridges—Justice, Neptune, Lyons, the Seine, Paris, Industry, Abundance—a population of exemplary or mythological beings numerous enough to form a city by themselves. The facades of the Louvre alone are encrusted with hundreds of statues. At my nearest corner, Quai Malaquais and Bonaparte, three: La République, Voltaire, and Montesquieu. At the other end, outside Les Deux Magots, a large cubist figure by Zadkine, and Picasso’s bust of Dora Maar in the little park across from it. Often you pass without noticing them, wonderful statues posing as modest architectural elements holding up porches or balconies or looming over lintels. There is a beautiful building at 6 Rue des Sts.-Pères whose iron balcony is held up by four superb lions, who, blackened by traffic fumes, are scarcely noticeable except when you specially look for them.

  A NOD TO THE BELLE ÉPOQUE

  In the old days, there were in Paris witnesses to the majority of events I present here, and who could have confirmed them, if you don’t believe me. Alexandre Dumas fils,

  CAMILLE: LA DAME AUX CAMILIAS

  In 1801, Bernard Germain-Étienne De La Ville, Comte de Lacépède, the biologist, who had left during the Revolution, was back in Paris, living in the apartment we live in now. Along with his scientific activities he was a senator, wrote two operas, and was widely admired. I wish his ghost were more palpable here in our rooms, since he was said to be a genius; but I don’t really feel its presence, nor see his face in the mirrors in my living room that must have reflected him, too. Like Lacépède, many people had prospered after the Revolution. The landless bourgeoisie could buy property, or win it by lottery. It was the dawn of the nineteenth century.

  In 1810, part of Rue Bonaparte, then still known as Rue des Petits-Augustins, received its present name; the whole street would not be called Bonaparte until 1852. Napoleon Bonaparte was the force, the event, the fascination of this period. As I live on the first floor, I gaze across at the windows of what by one tradition were the apartments of his sister Pauline, though Hillairet doesn’t mention her. But it is certain that his first wife, Josephine, lived at 1-3 Rue des Petits-Augustins with her first husband, Beauharnais.

  In the nineteenth century, Paris as a whole would achieve the look it generally has today, but only a few things happened to change St.-Germain-des-Prés, most notably the construction of the Boulevard St.-Germain and the “Haussmannian” apartment buildings that line it. But Haussmann was by no means responsible for all the changes; many had been made before. For instance, it was Napoleon I who in 1800 pulled down the Chapelle de la Vièrge of the Abbey to make the Rue de l’Abbaye.

  An association with art and literature continued in this quartier. The Comédie-Française had had its birth on Rue Mazarine, one street over from Rue de Seine, where the works of Racine and Molière were first performed in the seventeenth century. Actresses lived in this area, most famously Voltaire’s friend, poor Adrienne Lecouvreur, who died but was refused burial in a consecrated cemetery (on account of her godless ways) and so was cremated by her friends on a makeshift bier on the street. Legend has it that it was Voltaire himself who closed her eyes. Marechal de Saxe, the great-grandfather of George Sand, was another of her lovers.

  By 1831, George Sand was living on the Rue de Seine, at number thirty-one, dressed like a man, trying to exist by painting tobacco cans and portraits in watercolor, and doing translations; the street she saw must have looked pretty much as it does today. Balzac worked on Rue Visconti. La Rochefoucauld’s house, called Hôtel de la Rochefoucauld since he became famous in his time, was sold after the Revolution, and became a public bath. Rooms were rented in it, a Madame Ancelot held a literary salon there; then it was torn down, in 1825, and the Rue des Beaux-Arts constructed.

  It is on that street that poor Oscar Wilde died in 190l, hounded out of England by legal problems to do with his homosexual misadventure with Lord Alfred Douglas, the son of the Marquis of Queensbury, in what was then a seedy, and now is a sumptuous, little hotel, L’Hôtel, decorated by Jacques Garcia. The present proprietors will show you the very room where Wilde died, or you can stay in it, and luxurious it is, with paneling and faux-malachite panels. If it is true that Wilde remarked of the wallpaper, on his deathbed, “One of us has to go,” and if it had been in its present state—it is so pretty—he would not have had that excuse to die. Another remark ascribed to him, “I am dying beyond my means,” would certainly be true today, with his room costing more than four hundred euros a night.

  On the southern part of Rue Bonaparte, near the Jardin du Luxembourg, there had been a building at number eighty for Jesuit novices. These were evicted at the time of the Revolution and the place rented to the Masons, called by the French “le Grand-Orient.” A sort of clandestine, maybe illegal thing then, Masonry is still, for the French, maybe for all
Europeans, slightly different from American Masons, whom I have always thought of as stout, civic-minded gentlemen, like Elks and Moose, who enjoy a men’s night out. For Europeans, it seems, Masons are a powerful quasi-subversive group of godless conspirators.

  As the Baron Haussmann, the henchman at mid-century of Napoleon III, went about his work of tearing down quaint old things, changes had occurred next door to us at 14 Rue Bonaparte, the École des Beaux-Arts. And I shouldn’t fail to mention that by standing on the Quai Malaquais in 1871, we would have seen the flames in the sky of the burning of the Tuileries and the Hôtel de Ville just across the river in the uprising of the Commune; but St.-Germain did not burn.

  This was the period of the great courtesans, immortalized in Dumas’s (fils) play La Dame aux Camilias, or in Verdi’s opera La Traviata, or even in later works like Collette’s Gigi. However, unlike the actresses of the eighteenth century, in the 1800s these ladies lived in the eighth and sixteenth and other arrondissements to the west. The tradition of kept women was well alive into the twentieth century (and, for all I know, is still alive); the figure of Liane de Pougy (1869–1950) comes to mind, who had a great career in the Belle Époque, but lived on to become a lover of American Natalie Clifford Barney, around the corner at 20 Rue Jacob; and, eventually, a nun.

  NOS JOURS

  I think perhaps I have gotten more out of life than it contains.