Paris for Dreamers

by Katrina Lawrence

  By now you should have, in your shopping bags, at the very least: a few baguettes, a selection of cheese, some saucisson or smoked salmon, tomatoes and radishes, macarons, chocolate, wine … All that’s left now is to decide where to plate it all up. Paris is a city of beautiful parks, some with picnic-friendly areas (pélouse autorisée), such as the Jardin du Luxembourg. But if the day is almost at a close, there’s no spot more perfect than by the Seine. Head up Rue Dauphine, tout droit to the river. You can either walk across the Pont Neuf and down to the Square du Vert-Galant. If you’re lucky you’ll be able to claim the weeping willow-shaded patch at the tip of the island. But my personal favourite position is over on Île Saint-Louis, on the ramp down from the Quai d’Orléans, as the setting sun throws the spikes of Notre-Dame into Gothic relief against a glowing sky. You’ll want to savour this memory forever. And perhaps also post it to Instagram.

  PART FOUR: TIME TRAVELLING

  Itinerary

  • Place de la Concorde 75008

  • Ledoyen: 8 Avenue Dutuit 75008; 11.00-23.00 (Monday-Friday), 7.30-11.00 (Saturday); closed Sunday

  • Petit Palais: Avenue Winston Churchill 75008; 10.00-18.00 (Tuesday-Sunday); closed Monday & public holidays

  • Grand Palais: Avenue Winston Churchill 75008

  • Galeries Nationales du Grand Palais: 3 Avenue du Général Eisenhower 75008; see grandpalais.fr for exhibition information

  • Mini Palais: 3 Avenue Winston Churchill 75008; 10.00-02.00

  • Jardin de la Nouvelle France: corner of Avenue Franklin D. Roosevelt & Cours-la-Reine 75008; open 24 hours

  • Palais de la Découverte: Avenue Franklin D. Roosevelt 75008; 9.30-18.00 (Tuesday-Saturday), 10.00-19.00 (Sunday); closed Monday

  • Hôtel de la Païva: 25 Avenue des Champs-Élysées 75008

  • Jardin des Champs-Élysées 75008

  • Rosa Bonheur: Quai d’Orsay, Port des Invalides 75007; 12.00-24.00

  Stand in the middle of the Place de la Concorde, by the (seemingly random) obelisk. At most times of the day, this vast square feels more like a car park than a place of harmony, as the literal translation of its name would have us believe. And it’s near impossible to sense the paradisiacal Paris that once lay beneath the paving stones. But today we’re going to try to step back into that lost world …

  Ahead of you, the Avenue des Champs-Élysées, lined with its orderly rows of clipped plane trees, takes the eye right up to the Arc de Triomphe, and most feet, too. The grand street was designed to be a new entryway into Paris (the word avenue was derived from the Latin advenire, ‘to come to’) and it still has a sort of sweeping momentum, a gravitational pull to it. But if you take yourself off the well-beaten path, and wander into the grove of horse chestnuts just to the left of where the avenue begins, you can wind back to another time.

  The gardens at the foot of the avenue, mapped out in 1663, were given the grand moniker of Elysian Fields to conjure up visions of paradise. At the time, this lush forest of emerald elms lay just beyond the city walls, when much of outer Paris was swampland. In the not-too-distant past, wolves had prowled here, but now a new kind of wildlife was flocking to the area, on Sundays and holidays: Parisians picnicking, lazing about in the sun-dappled glades and enjoying the country wine, free-flowing and free from city taxes. It was here that Parisians came to appreciate the pleasures of leisure time.

  1667 was a momentous year for Paris. Not only was the Avenue des Champs-Élysées unveiled, but the city became the world’s first to light up at night; thousands of street lanterns, flickering with candlelight, made Paris glitter. After-dark was no longer something to fear but celebrate, and the Champs Élysées became a veritable garden of delights. In the dawning era of Enlightenment — when Voltaire declared ‘Earthly paradise is where I am’ — Parisians revelled in bucolic happiness in the guinguettes (open-air cabarets) that proliferated here. It was a time that inspired Antoine Watteau to paint his famous fêtes galantes — dreamy depictions of the beau monde enjoying pastoral parties. He even named one such work Les Champs-Élysées; no doubt he’d sourced inspiration in the balls held in the public pleasure gardens here, with their dances, games, cafés and all sorts of romantically dark and fragrant alcoves. The most celebrated fun park of the eighteenth century was La Colisée, a colosseum-inspired dancehall, ringed with arcaded shopping galleries and flower-spangled gardens lit up by firework displays. Famous for its masked balls, La Colisée even lured an incognito Marie Antoinette to its dance floor.

  Walk past the elegant music stand and try to imagine the silky strains of a violin and a swirl of satin dancing a minuet. It’s frustratingly difficult to do so; most vestiges from that time have drifted into thin air along with the musical notes. But the pretty buttery-yellow building up ahead, the restaurant Ledoyen, will give you a glimpse into this other world. It was a country inn before the Revolution, after which its bottle-washer, Monsieur Pierre-Michel Ledoyen, inspired by the individualistic spirit of the times, took over and transformed the establishment into a high-society restaurant, decorated as a neo-Classical pavilion. (It’s a three-star restaurant to this day.) In the nineteenth century, a glasshouse extension and terraced gardens were added, to play up a sense of rural escapism, and it became a favourite hang for Parisian painters, including Édouard Manet, a lover of the al-fresco life, as his controversial work Le Déjeuner Sur L’Herbe (Luncheon on the Grass) showed (and shocked) the world.

  Speaking of art, just behind Ledoyen is the Petit Palais, one of Paris’s loveliest museums (it’s officially the Musée des Beaux-Arts de la Ville de Paris) — and it’s free, to boot. There’s actually nothing ‘little’ about this palatial edifice. Built for the 1900 Exposition, it’s a sublime example of Beaux-Arts style, that architectural genre of the nineteenth century that saw designers reject strict neo-Classical dictates in ebullient celebration of over-the-top ornate. The lavish domes and the towering golden entry gate prepare you for the overblown drama and overscaled glamour within: ceilings painted with pastel frescoes and floral mouldings, floating high above exquisitely tiled floors. It’s a 360-degree experience, almost dizzying for its all-encompassing beauty. The artwork features many a Gallic great (Cézanne, Delacroix). Also, make sure to float down the boiserie-lined gallery of such eighteenth-century delights as a delicately painted sedan chair; at the end, you’ll see one of the city’s most fanciful flights of stairs, a gravity-defying swoop decorated with a lacy balustrade. Before you leave, wander around the inner garden courtyard — which, if your timing is good, will be bursting with cherry blossoms — then claim a table on the café terrace, a curved peristyle decorated with vibrant mosaics and festooned with garlands of gold. It’s one of the city’s loveliest spots for a reviving cup of tea.

  Across the road is the sister palace, the Grand Palais. Behind the colonnaded façade, it’s essentially a supersized glasshouse, having been built as an expo space. If you’re lucky, there’ll be an exposition showing in the ‘nef’ — the airy iron-and-glass hall. Buy a ticket, even if it’s just for a close-up of the building’s sinuous green frame and fantastical, spindly staircase. Just around the corner, to the north, are the entrances to the Galeries Nationales, which regularly host blockbuster art exhibitions; peruse to your heart’s content — or until your stomach calls. For lunch, head to the other end of the Grand Palais, where you’ll find the much-loved restaurant Mini Palais. Ask for a spot on the terrace, amid the colossal columns and exotic palms.

  When your stomach is satisfied, head out and west along Cours-la-Reine (one of the earliest streets in the area, it’s where queen Marie de Medici used to come for her carriage rides in the early seventeenth century). At the corner of Avenue Franklin D. Roosevelt, you’ll see a large grotto-like sculpture flanked by crumbling columns, an artwork called Le Rêve du Poète (The Poet’s Dream); and just by this you’ll find a gateway into the Jardin de la Nouvelle France, which is itself poetic and dreamy. Head down the fairytale steps, through the rocky arch into a secret
storybook garden. Admire the rockery walls of flowering vines, the rambling tumble of maples and lilac, and ivy-heavy log bridge, and take a moment on the bench by the waterfall-tinkling pond.

  If you’re as much a science as nature type, you might like to pop next door into the Palais de la Découverte, which stretches along the back of the Grand Palais. If not, continue up Avenue Franklin D. Roosevelt towards the Avenue des Champs-Élysées. In the nineteenth century, just to your left, there was a pleasure garden called the Bal Mabille, an enchanting oasis of fragrant copses, Chinese pavilions and artificial palm trees strung up with coloured-glass gas lamps — 3000 of them, in fact. The dancing was wild; polka was a favourite, and it was here that the famous courtesan, Céleste Vénard, better known as Mogador, developed her high-kicking take on the dance that would eventually morph into the cancan.

  On your right, you’ll soon see the Théatre du Rond Pont. In its previous life, it was the Palais de Glace, a champagne-bar-meets-ice-skating-rink that was one of the most popular Parisian attractions in the late nineteenth century. If you’ve watched the movie Gigi — where Leslie Caron plays a courtesan-in-training — you might remember a scene set in that very place. Around here was the stomping — and dancing, and skating — ground of Paris’s most alluring women. There were the so-called grisettes and lorettes, who flocked to the area’s hot spots, all frocked and frilled up in the hope of attracting a benefactor, and then climbing the courtesan ladder to the ultimate level of grande horizontale — the mischievous term given to the most in-demand kept women, and the celebrities of their time.

  During the day, courtesans paraded their carriages along the Avenue des Champs-Élysées, en route to the Bois de Boulogne, showing off their amatory success, but with one eye always looking to catch the attention of an even wealthier patron. One of the savviest of Paris’s paramours was the lorette made good, La Païva, who came from Russia with nothing but sheer willpower and a heady dose of sexual charm. She worked her way up that working-girl ladder to eventually find herself, in the mid-century, living in one of the city’s most opulent mansions, at 25 Avenue des Champs-Élysées. The former Hôtel de la Païva is now a private men’s club (ironically so) although you can occasionally book a tour of its rooms and get a glimpse into what life was like along this avenue, once lined with townhouses, before the cinemas and fast-food joints took over. The opulence of the neo-Renaissance interior is mind-boggling. Let’s just say: her onyx bathtub filled from three turquoise-encrusted taps, one of which ran with champagne.

  La Païva was a star of the Second Empire, the tinsel period of Napoléon III’s rule that ended with French defeat in the Franco-Prussian war (from her balcony, La Païva watched the Prussians forces parade along this very avenue). As if this Siege of Paris wasn’t demoralising enough, the city was soon devastated by a bloody civil war. But just like the most determined, down-and-out Parisian courtesan of the times, Paris knew how to come back in style, with what came to be called the Belle Époque, the ‘beautiful era’ that only drew to a velvet-curtained close with World War I. Perhaps it was a case of post-traumatic frenzy, but Paris has never been as hedonistically happy as it was during these ‘beautiful’ years, a time when it was the global capital of pleasure, life as bubbly as a bottle of Bollinger.

  Cross the avenue, at the Rond Pont, and head to the northern side of the Jardin des Champs-Élysées. This was the centre of the social universe during the Belle Époque, a garden of pavilions that opened up to reveal circuses, theatres and restaurants, and café-concerts set in lush, fragrant enclosures, twinkling like electrified fairylands. Many of these establishments have sadly gone, but weave your way around the old fountains and sandy walkways back towards Place de la Concorde, past the Théatre Marigny, originally a dancehall, and you can picture the women who once sashayed along here, brightly dressed in body-hugging, bustle-backed designs, en route to the Pavillon Élysées for afternoon tea in the garden terrace.

  The Pavillon Gabriel, further along on your left, also had a former Belle Époque life, as the dancehall Alcazar d’Été, and the most famous pleasure garden of them all, the Café des Ambassadeurs, was just next door, where the L’Espace Cardin theatre is now found. One patron, the painter Edgar Degas, would immortalise that café-concert with his portrait of risqué singer Émilie Bécat; Mademoiselle Bécat au Café des Ambassadeurs, with its bright lights and flashes of fireworks, captured a glittering moment in Parisian social life, a time when all Parisians celebrated a right to terrestrial happiness. And lots of champagne, too.

  If it’s time for your own apéro, you can’t find a better place for it than on one of the Seine’s pleasure boats, spiritual descendants of the nineteenth-century guinguettes that were dotted along the river (such as the waterside cabaret Pierre-Auguste Renoir painted in his Déjeuner de Canotiers, or Luncheon of the Boating Party). Amble down to the Seine, then head westwards and across the Pont Alexandre III. Barges that double as bars and restaurants, such as Rosa Bonheur, are popular new Parisian watering holes, and tap into the laid-back way locals socialised in those old halcyon days. Lounge about under bud lights, the Seine shimmering and undulating beneath you, and enjoy the sensation of buoyancy. Watch the sky flicker to gold then coral, lavender then violet, before the Eiffel Tower sparkles up against a sapphire backdrop. For a city so cultured and cultivated, Paris can also revel in the au naturel like nowhere else. Earthly paradise is, as they say, where you are.

  Itinerary

  • Lamarck-Caulaincourt 75018

  • Lapin Agile: 22 Rue des Saules 75018

  • Place Dalida 75018

  • Allée des Brouillards 75018

  • Square Suzanne Buisson 75018

  • Avenue Junot (& Villa Léandre) 75018

  • Rue Lepic 75018

  • Rue Norvins 75018

  • La Maison Rose: 2 Rue de l’Abreuvoir 75018; 12.00-23.30 (Monday), 18.00-23.30 (Thursday), 11.00-23.30 (Friday-Sunday); closed Tuesday and Wednesday

  • Musée de Montmartre: 12 Rue Cortot 75018; 10.00-18.00 (October-March), 10.00-19.00 (April-September)

  • Square Marcel Bleustein Blanchet 75018

  • Sacré-Coeur: 35 Rue du Chevalier de la Barre 75018; 06.00-22.30 (Basilica), 08.30-20.00 (Dome, May-September), 09.00-17.00 (Dome, October-April)

  • Square Nadar 75018

  • Place du Tertre 75018

  • Place Émile-Goudeau 75018

  • Place des Abbesses 75018

  • Café des Deux Moulins: 15 Rue Lepic 75018

  • Place Blanche 75018

  It took me many years to fall under the spell of Montmartre. Back in the days of rudimentary guidebooks, before you could follow the fashionable virtual paths of travel bloggers and influencers, you had to find your own way when somewhere new, meandering here and there and hoping for the best, but so often taking the wrong turn. I wanted my early jaunts to Montmartre to be like stepping onto a vintage movie set, where artists drank absinthe in rickety bud-lit cafés, frill-hemmed cancan gowns swept along cobbled paths, and the strains of ‘La Vie en Rose’ drifted on the windmill-whirred breeze. Instead, the Parisian hilltop felt like Disneyland, complete with loud (non-French) accents, bright tracksuits and neon flashing signs.

  Go to Montmartre on a weekend, or in peak season, and trudge up the hill to the Place du Tertre, where honeymooning tourists sit for caricature portraits while beret-topped buskers play the accordion, and Montmartre can still feel like a theme park, an ironic simulacrum of itself. But choose a quieter time, and a softer approach, and you’ll sense the Montmartre of old, a rambling bucolic village — removed from the pollution, politics and propriety of the city — that bubbled with such creative energy it was, around the turn of the twentieth century, the most dynamic place in the world.

  Take the train to Lamarck-Caulaincourt, then the stairs — so emblematic of Butte (knoll) Montmartre, and so beloved by photographers — up to Rue Caulaincourt, noting the Métro signs bordered with stencil-like swirls. Turn left at stre
et level and wander uphill, passing the long spindly trunks of the Japanese pagoda trees which, if it’s late summer, froth with white flowers.

  Rue Caulaincourt was opened in 1867, after the old tax wall came down and surrounding villages were annexed into the perimeters of Paris proper. However, Montmartre remained resolutely rural for decades. Turn right at Rue des Saules and take the stairs by the ivy-draped cemetery wall just ahead, and you’ll get a feel for that old neighbourhood. Montmartre stayed stuck in the past largely for structural reasons; gypsum — a soft white stone that transformed into Plaster of Paris — had been mined here for centuries, making the hill unsafe for rapid redevelopment. But the resistance to change was also cultural; the up-and-coming artists who had flocked here during the Belle Époque, escaping the inner-city, loved their cheap rent and the many bars that flowed with tax-free wine.

  One of the era’s most popular drinking holes is just up ahead on the left, opposite Montmartre’s last vineyard; behind the gnarled trees and storybook fence, you’ll see an old cottage painted in sun-ripened peach and festooned with green shutters and a ramble of ivy. Once a country tavern known somewhat sinisterly as the Cabaret des Assassins, it eventually took on the cuter name of the Nimble Rabbit. Caricaturist André Gill had painted its sign — a bow-tied bunny jumping out of a frying pan — which inspired the popular soubriquet of the Lapin à Gill (Gill’s Rabbit), the sound of which in turn inspired a permanent name-change: the Lapin Agile. By the twentieth century, this cabaret specialising in provincial folk songs was the edgiest place to be in all of Paris. With a hint of the red light — thanks to ruby scarves draped over lamps — and all sorts of art cluttered over its walls, the Lapin Agile attracted iconoclastic new artists like Picasso and Modigliani, as well as musicians and poets who tested out verses on a receptive audience. Among the revellers were dancers and acrobats unwinding after gruelling shifts, and after-work artists’ models still in their period costumes. (This might well have been how Picasso got the idea to paint himself, here, in harlequin costume — a pattern that is nicely echoed in the glasswork of the front door.) The party continued long after the scarlet lights were switched off, with merrymakers sprawled on this very terrace, discussing the meaning of art through to the wee hours.