At the western end of Rue Chanoinesse, you’ll see before you one of Haussmann’s most ponderous architectural edifices, the Hôtel-Dieu de Paris, which is still a functioning hospital. Turn left on Rue d’Arcole and veer around to the right to find the Hôtel-Dieu’s entrance. It might be staid in style —Haussmann had rejected initial neo-Gothic design for something classic, in keeping with his vision of a centre for modern scientific ideas and hygiene —but you should nevertheless walk through the front door to see the central courtyard, decorated with a parterre garden and arcaded gallery.
Hospitals were originally places of rest for weary pilgrims, before being repurposed as lodging for the poor and mentally ill, whom society women would visit and feed to earn karma points. One such was the Marquise de Brinvilliers, a wealthy beauty who would shock Paris by being unveiled as a cold-hearted murderer, having poisoned her father and two brothers. In her early days, she had tested out her concoctions on those poor souls she had visited in hospital. Unfortunately for the marquise, Paris was newly a police state.
As you leave the Hôtel-Dieu, you’ll see another imposing Haussmannian building up to your right: the Préfecture de Police. The city’s first police chief, Nicolas de la Reynie, was hired in 1667. He would eventually bring Brinvilliers to justice — torture and beheading — but in the meantime his job also involved keeping the streets clean. In French, policé means civilised, well-ordered like a parterre garden. La Reynie was also charged by the King to come up with a street lighting system. Walk north along Rue de la Cité and left into Rue de Lutèce, where you’ll see a line-up of classic Parisian street lamps; originally gas-based but now, of course, electric. The police chief’s first lights were candlelit lanterns, almost 3000 of them, but they did the trick, turning after-dark Paris into a glittering metropolis, the first major city to be lit up at night, fulfilling Paris’s destiny as the City of Light.
At the end of Rue de Lutèce, just on the other side of Boulevard du Palais, is a fabulously gilded gate: the grand entrance of the Palais de Justice, the headquarters of the French court system. It’s not called a palace for its stately size alone, but also in deference to its heritage. This is the site of Emperor Julian’s fourth-century Roman villa, the location for many a feast, and no doubt toga-clad revellers sprawled on beds of rose petals; and also that of the palatial home to a succession of medieval kings who, between the tenth and fourteenth centuries, tweaked the royal complex according to needs and whims. Once the royals moved to the Louvre, the Palais continued to function judicially, and developed accordingly. Haussmann, of course, bulldozed much of it. The oldest surviving structure is the heavenly Sainte-Chapelle. We’ll get to there later … For now, head to the most notorious part of the Palais de Justice, the old prison known as the Conciergerie, former temporary home to La Brinvilliers and, most famously, Marie Antoinette, as they awaited their grisly fates.
The first space you step into is the Salle des Gens d’Armes from 1302, the old soldiers’ room and the largest medieval hall in Europe, with its echoing arches pointing upwards to dramatically lit ribbed-vault ceilings. A ‘HistoPad’ lets you digitally travel back to its early glory days of banquet tables and roaring fires, but in revolutionary times the chamber was used as a communal cell for prisoners who couldn’t afford to buy themselves some privacy, and a sense of dread seems to still linger in the air alongside the dust motes. Robespierre’s Revolutionary Tribunal of 1793 set up in the nearby Salle des Gardes; such was its brutality and pivotal role in the so-called Terror Years, that you wonder how the air here could ever be completely emotionally cleansed. (A carving on one of the columns reminds you that Paris has long had a violent streak: Héloïse lies next to Abélard, holding his detached genitals.) The old prison cells and the courtyard where the women would wash themselves, or simply wait for their lives to end, are also sad, sunless affairs, and the grooming room, where prisoners had their hair shorn off before being carted off to the guillotine, sends shivers down the spine. It’s more than the stuff of Gothic fiction; it’s all too real.
Back outside, walk north to Quai de l’Horloge, past Paris’s first public clock (this clock dates from 1585, but had replaced one of 1371), and turn left. The tower on this corner contained a royal lookout, as well as a bell that would toll for three days and nights to signal the birth or death of a king. The next trio of towers also hail back to medieval times; the oldest, the westernmost, is still known as Tour Bon Bec, or Good Beak Tower, as it housed the torture chamber, where many a Parisian prisoner was encouraged to open their beak and confess a crime. Haussmann thankfully left the towers; they lend such a unique medieval edge to the city, reminding us of the city’s secrets as much as historical layers.
Turn left at Rue de Harlay. You’ll see the lumbering back of the Palais de Justice, so overblown and out of place, with a staircase that seems both grand and stunted. This was meant to be the official entrance to the courts, but Haussmann didn’t get around to razing Place Dauphine to create a monumental approach. Fortunately so, as this triangular square, with its quaint red-brick buildings, is one of the loveliest in town. It has been modified over time, but you still feel as though you’re stepping back into a quieter time. Sit down at one of the terrace cafés, order an apéritif, and breathe in the fresh atmosphere. The isosceles-shaped park in the middle is sprinkled with chestnut trees that, in springtime, bloom musky-pink. Invariably a game of pétanque is at play, enhancing the sleepy provincial air. This site was once the walled garden of the old royal palace, with trellised vines, beds of roses and lilies, herb patches, and an orchard of pear and fig trees. In this setting, an arcadian wedge of old Paris, you can almost picture Éleanor of Aquitaine, one-time queen of France, swishing about in her long silken gowns.
The spirited Aquitanian heiress moved to Paris on marrying King Louis VII in 1137, at the age of fifteen. She had been raised in a court that celebrated love, poetry, song and beauty, and was dismayed to find the city dark and dank in comparison to her hometown of Poitiers. Her pious husband bored her, too. I wonder if she and her ladies, as they lazed about the perfumed palace gardens, swooned over the story of Héloïse and Abélard? She eventually divorced Louis to marry the future King of England. Fleeting Parisienne though she was, she nevertheless left her mark on this city. One of her many descendants was King Louis IX, also known as Saint Louis, a patron of Gothic art and architecture, who commissioned Sainte-Chapelle, a creation of such exhilarating beauty that his grandmother would have been proud.
To get to the former royal chapel, head back to Rue de Harlay, veer right onto the Quai d’Orfèvres, then left back onto Boulevard du Palais. There will likely be a queue of people at the entrance — there usually is — but a visit more than merits a wait. First, you’ll enter the lower chapel, a vaulted crypt painted polychromatically, in red, blue and gold. That’s amazing enough, but from here to the upper chapel is like night to day, earth to heaven. The stained-glass windows seem to soar to celestial heights, to a vaulted ceiling bedazzled with stars, and the rose window, with its intricate tracery and psychedelic petals, is simply mesmerising. Dating from the mid-thirteenth century, this style of Gothic is called Rayonnant — radiant — for the glorious glasswork techniques. When the sun is out, its rays shine through the biblical tales of the colourful glazing, and fall onto the floor in gem-like shards. If you get the feeling you’re in a jewellery box, there’s a reason for that: Saint Louis built the chapel primarily as a reliquary for the purported crown of thorns. That and other precious relics were lost to the French Revolution, but the real jewel is still standing, despite all the odds. Sunset concerts are held in Sainte-Chapelle several nights a week, and are a sublime way to experience the mind-blowing brilliance of the upper chapel, to get lost in your senses as the strains of Vivaldi float through the colour-shot air.
After sunset comes that vaporous, violety Parisian twilight known as l’heure bleue. Weaving around the older streets of Île de la Cité at this witching hour feels a little magical �
� as though you’re passing a threshold into the past. At one stage in time, authorities considered keeping the island an Old Town, a sort of Gothic sanctuary. And then Haussmann came along. But in the dusky evening light you can pretend the city of Héloïse and Esmeralda is still here. Darkness veils the heavy bureaucratic institutions, strategic night-lighting sharpens the Gothic lines of Notre-Dame, and you’re back in Paris, all alone. Except for those ghosts.
Itinerary
• Musée des Arts Décoratifs: 107 Rue de Rivoli 75001; 11.00-18.00; closed Monday, 1 January, 1 May & 25 December
• Le BHV Marais: 52 Rue de Rivoli 75004; 9.30-20.00 (Monday-Friday), 9.30-20.30 (Saturday), 11.00-19.30 (Sunday)
• Passage du Chantier: 66 Rue du Faubourg Saint-Antoine 75012
• Village Saint-Paul: 21 Rue Saint-Paul 75004; 11.00-19.00; closed Tuesday
• Puces des Saint-Ouen: 09.00-18.00 (Saturday), 10.00-18.00 (Sunday), 10.00-17.00 (Monday, fewer stalls)
Paris is a city of beautiful things, and of people who love beautiful things; a city where a chair, a plate or a lamppost can be — should be — a work of art. In Paris, the most basic of items have long fulfilled a secondary duty to be aesthetically pleasing, which the Musée des Arts Décoratifs — located in the Marsan wing and pavilion of the Louvre — so elegantly showcases.
Decorative arts are defined as applied arts, those that merge form with function, prettiness with practicality. Porcelain teacups, brocade-upholstered sofas, and so on — the things that make up what we might these days term as ‘lifestyle’. Paris hasn’t always been at the forefront of living in style; it was the Renaissance culture, imported from Italy in the sixteenth century, that truly inspired Parisians to think about how they decorated the world around them.
One of the museum’s first rooms recreates a late-medieval boudoir. There’s an oak four-poster bed complete with curtains, for warmth but also privacy in the days when houses had few internal walls; tapestries to pretty up the dark wood panelling; and various stools and benches — detailed with carvings but otherwise quite simple — which would have been moved about the house as needed. It’s all glamorously Gothic, but also somewhat gloomy.
When the Renaissance came to Paris, its first stop was, suitably enough, the Louvre, home of King François I, a huge Italophile. The cultural rebirth was a great time for art but also artisans. If you couldn’t afford to commission a sculpture, you could at least find artistic furniture to satisfy your inner aesthete. You were what you bought, Parisians realised; your belongings expressed not only how you wanted to live, but also who you wanted to be.
No wonder Paris launched its own homewares industry; as the booming capital of a newly confident nation, the city wanted to express itself, too. As you move through the museum’s seventeenth-century rooms, past flourishes of gold and swirls of arabesque, things start to become lighter and more ornamental — and, well, more French. By the time you’ve reached the eighteenth century, you’re feeling positively Pompadouresque, with all the floral marquetry cabinets, chairs and consoles elaborately sculpted from gilt wood, and wall panels embellished with gold and cherubs.
Enter Rococo. One room demonstrates how this interiors trend, dominant between 1730 and 1770, changed the very structure of objects, as much as the definition of French style. Rejecting any influence from the ancient past — reverence for antiquity being one of the themes of the Renaissance — Rococo artists found inspiration in nature: shells (the word rococo is said to derive from rocaille, French for rocks), the exuberance of flowers, the fluidity of water. Championed by Madame de Pompadour, it was an emphatically feminine moment for furnishings, and even though interiors eventually reverted, after the Revolution, to a new type of neo-Classicism, Rococo to this day represents French flair at its most charming. Just look at the commode on show here, varnished in mint and strewn with garlands of flowers. I dare even the most minimal type not to smile for the delightfulness of it.
You’ll find Pompadour’s ghost in the next room, writing away at her old blue ‘Japanese’ lacquer desk. This is the Chinoiserie section. The East had long fascinated the West, with Silk Route merchants bringing back such exotica as porcelain, lacquer and tea. But Chinoiserie was a wholly European creation, a romanticised imagination of a faraway land. It was also a product of the Enlightenment, a time when the world was becoming smaller, with newly discovered countries trading plants, technology and ideas. The French were particularly open to a changing world, but importing global style was not enough — Paris wanted to be at the very epicentre of cosmopolitan culture. A slew of new style industries put a French spin on things, which is evident in the museum’s collection of eighteenth-century porcelain — including exquisite cups that held not only tea, but those other worldly tastes of coffee and cocoa.
For enlightened Parisians, what they owned not only showed off their good taste but also proved that they knew what was going on in the exciting world around them. It was also, of course, an undeniable status symbol, and haters lamented that luxury was turning people into slaves to materialism ... although collectors could in turn counter that they were helping the greater good, by supporting the arts as much as the economy. But perhaps the ultimate justification was that, quite simply, these products gave pleasure, a tangible source of happiness at a time when philosophers were debating how to live a good life. Just imagine: you no longer had to sit stoically upright on a rigid stool; now you could luxuriate in a soft velvet sofa. One room in the museum shows an eighteenth-century timeline of chair design; the seats become more sumptuous with each decade, and it’s a lesson in the evolution of modern comfort.
As you time-travel into the nineteenth century, you see how the Revolution stripped away all of the supposedly superficial padding … for a while. Parisians are, it seems, creatures of comfort as much as habit, and the rooms — as you pass the eras of Romanticism and the Second Empire — become all the more sensual, the tables so floral as to be almost fragrant, the chairs lushly cushioned once more. It was a period when home was a temple to pleasure, which is eye-poppingly exhibited in the courtesans room. Cue the most ornate bed you’ve ever seen, a frenzy of velvet and gold that belonged to one of Paris’s most famous grandes horizontales, Valtesse de la Bigne.
One thing I love about Paris is that it has become so unashamedly feminine over time. Technically and grammatically, the city has long been male; it’s le vieux Paris, not la vieille Paris. And it would have seemed apt to declare Paris as beau back in those dark medieval times … but these days, how could the city of shimmering lights, voluptuous buildings, lacy balconies and velvet-lined boudoirs be anything but belle? For all its patriarchal history, Paris is a city of women who have managed to wield a powerful influence — just like those wily courtesans who knew how to play men at their own game, in turn becoming businesswomen as well as philanthropists and art patrons.
By the time you reach the fin-de-siècle era of Art Nouveau, a design movement — like Rococo — inspired by nature and the womanly form, all sinuous lines and floral motifs, you well appreciate that Paris is most at home when revelling in femininity. Sure, the city has gone through minimal, modernist, masculine moments, and the Art Deco rooms showcase this, but really, these pieces could have been designed anywhere in the world. However, when chairs can be described as curvaceously seductive, when lights look like jewellery, and when tables are precious works of marquetry art, they cannot be anything but French.
Launched in 1905, when Art Nouveau was in full swing, the Musée des Arts Décoratifs was an initiative of an industry pushing to have applied arts recognised and celebrated. It was also a time when artisans were under threat from mass production, enabled by industrialisation and promoted by the new phenomenon of department stores. Exit back onto Rue de Rivoli and head east, and you’ll see the old Louvre des Antiquaires building; before it was an antiques mall, it was the Grands Magasins du Louvre. The late nineteenth century was a boom time for department stores (grands magasins), and it was apt th
at one lay across the road from the Louvre, because such stores were like museums themselves, displaying glossy wares in glass cabinets. They enticed Parisians to admire, but also collect objects. Remember how so many of the Musée des Arts Décoratifs’ nineteenth-century rooms were so cluttered? One theory is that Parisians turned their homes into carpet-and curtain-lined cocoons so as to be safe from the streets that so regularly erupted in revolution. The other theory, of course, is that Parisians simply love owning things of beauty.
Continue along Rue de Rivoli, a rather monotonous stretch of high-street shopping (although pop into Le BHV Marais if you can’t resist fossicking through a department store), until it becomes Rue Saint-Antoine. This leads out to the old Faubourg Saint-Antoine, the Parisian suburb once the centre of French furniture making; many of the pieces you just admired in the museum would have been lovingly carved, inlaid and polished out here, in the days when Parisians commissioned custom designs from local craftsmen. But department stores forced suppliers to ramp up the production line, using new materials as well as industrialised techniques to turn out products on the cheap. Craftsmanship has mostly gone the way of sepia-tinged photographs, although you can still get a sense of how Parisian artisans toiled by venturing to the Passage du Chantier, off Rue du Faubourg Saint-Antoine; the paved path seems to lead back in time, to old-school ateliers that reupholster and restore chairs, or reproduce them à l’antique.
One other way to get to that Parisian past is by tracking down actual antiques. Retrace your steps back to Rue Saint-Antoine, and head south down Rue Saint-Paul. These are the southern, silent streets of the Marais, the paths less travelled by tourists who head straight for the Marais of Rue des Francs-Bourgeois, with its designer boutiques. For a more authentic Parisian shopping fix, you can’t go past the Village Saint-Paul. Actually, you can go past it if you’re not careful … blink and you could miss the arched entryway. But find the portal, and step beyond the border of 500-year-old buildings. Within is a labyrinth of cobbled courtyards, over which antique dealers spill their wares (antiques within an antique? Only in Paris): curlicue-bordered portraits of Belle Époque beauties and faded shop signs, marble-carved cupids and wooden carousel horses, bar carts topped with faceted crystal coupes, a clutter of Limoges porcelain and silver Christofle spoons. The village is often eerily quiet. Sometimes it’s just you riffling through the boxes of lace and jumbles of jars — and, you swear, the spirits of owners past. Find a terrace restaurant here, and dine among the ghosts.
Paris for Dreamers Page 19