Travelers' Tales Paris

by James O'Reilly

  Three small hotels on the island located on the rue St-Louisen-l’Ile, a few steps from each other, have been converted from 17th-century houses: the Lutece, the Deux-Iles and the St-Louis.

  When I telephoned the Lutece from San Francisco for a reservation, the place was booked, but the good madame leaned out the window and yelled next door to the Deux-Iles to ask if they had a place. Also booked. So was the St-Louis. But on my arrival, I managed to persuade the daughter of the proprietor of the St-Louis to find me a corner room.

  On the short walk home—saying “home” comes quickly in this island universe—I noticed that Hippolyte Taine and Georges Sandoul did their work in the same building. Marc Chagall and Charles Baudelaire, Voltaire and Mme. Pompidou, dukes and barons, and chanteurs de charme, plus a stray prince or princess, and inventor or hero—who didn’t have a connection with the Ile St-Louis?

  The Ile St-Louis is like France itself—an ideal of grace and proportion—but it differs from the rest of France in that it lives up to itself. Under constant repair and renovation, it remains intact. It is a small place derived from long experience. It has strength enough, and isolation enough, to endure with a certain smugness the troubles of the city and the world at whose center it rests.

  The self-love is mitigated partly by success at guarding itself and partly by the ironic shrugs of its inhabitants, who, despite whatever aristocratic names of glamorous professions, live among broken-veined clochards (hobos) with unbagged bottles, tourists with unbagged guidebooks, Bohemians with bagged eyes.

  Then I recalled Jean Cocteau’s saying: “Poets don’t die, they only pretend to.” They live on in their poems, songs, voices, and today it is not just Jacques’ songs that “whirl in the streets,” but his stories and anecdotes too, which have become part of his legend. One day for example he had came across a blind beggar sitting on the pavement in a town in the South of France, his hat in front of him on the ground to receive coins, and a placard saying: Blind Man Without a Pension.

  “How is it going?” asks Prévert.

  “Oh, very badly. People just pass by and drop nothing in my hat, the swine!” replied the beggar.

  “Listen, let me turn your placard round and I guarantee you a fortune.”

  A few days later he sees the blind beggar again, and asks how he is faring:

  “Fantastic! My hat fills up three times a day.”

  On the back of his placard Prévert had scribbled: “Spring is coming, but I shan’t see it.”

  —Shusha Guppy, A Girl in Paris

  The actual troubles of the world do not miss the Ile St-Louis—one doesn’t string hammocks between the plane trees here—but the air seems to contain fewer mites and less nefarious Paris ozone.

  The lack of buses, the narrow streets, the breeze down the Seine help. And as to perhaps the most dangerous variety of Paris smog, the Ile St-Louis seems to have discovered the unanswerable French reply to babble, noise, advice, and theory—silence.

  One can, of course, easily get off this island, either by walking on the water of the Seine or, in a less saintly way, by taking a stroll of about two minutes across the slim bridges to the Left Bank, the Right Bank or the bustling and official neighbor, the Ile de la Cité.

  Island fever is not a great danger, despite the insular pleasures of neatness, shape, control. Some people even say they never go to “Paris.” (In 1924, there was an attempt to secede from Paris and France, and Ile St-Louis passports were issued.) Monsieur Filleui, the fishmonger, used to advertise: “Deliveries on the Island and on the Continent.”

  The Ile St-Louis, an elsewhere village universe, happens also to be an island by the merest accident of being surrounded by water. Its bridges reach inward to shadow worlds of history and dream; and outward toward the furor of contemporary Paris.

  Shaded and sunny, surrounded by the waters of the Seine like a moat, it remains a kind of castle keep that is powerful enough in its own identity to hold Paris at bridge’s length, a breath away. Amazingly, it has occurred to no one powerful enough to do anything about it that this place, too, could be high-rised, filthied, thoroughfared, developed. There is no Métro station. The breezes down the Seine keep busy, sweeping and caressing.

  Despite the claims of metropolis on all sides, the Ile St-Louis still expresses the shadow presence of the Ile Notre-Dame and the Ile-aux-Vaches. The ancestor islands make a claim to be remembered because they have been forgotten, and both the aristocratic and the chic who live here, and the gratteurs de guitare, who occasionally come to serenade the ghosts of counts and courtesans, know that they tread in a palimpsest of footsteps, including ancient Gauls, Romans and now, chirping and clicking beneath the willows, the occasional polyester-clad, camera-breasted tourist.

  A more characteristic sight is that of the professional anguish of a French intellectual walking his dog. The rich tend to live like Bohemians here. (Only the poor, as Anatole France said, are forbidden to beg.)

  The Ile St-Louis is one of the places where a postwar generation of Americans in Paris loosened its military discipline—if we happened to have any—studied peace and art and history and depravity (called it freedom, called it fulfilling ourselves), lived in awe before our fantasy of France (still do just a little).

  We bought old bicycles and new notebooks. We pretended to be students, artists, philosophers, and lovers, and, out of our pretensions, sometimes learned to be a little of these things.

  Remarks are not literature, Gertrude Stein said, and islands are not the world. But some remarks can tell us what literature is about, some islands can tell us what a sweeter, more defined world might be. In Spinoza’s view, freedom consists of knowing what the limits are. I came to Paris as a philosophy student but left it as a novelist. On the Ile St-Louis, I am still home free, watching the Seine flow and eddy and flow again.

  Herbert Gold also contributed “On the Left Bank” in Part I.

  I walked outside, planning to stroll around in search of a last image to match that picture in my mind of a wonderful old man offering me the first waters of the Seine cupped in his hands. The moon mugged me. I mean, this was a moon, so huge and round it looked like an orange. I watched until it was no longer startling, just an unbelievably lovely source of light that splashed gold over the estuary. Its human face seemed animated, but this was no man. I swear to God, Sequana [goddess of the Seine] was talking to me.

  —Mort Rosenblum, Secret Life of the Seine

  DAVID ROBERTS

  Bonjour, Chaos

  Not far from Paris, there’s a great place to monkey around.

  I AM NO LOVER OF FORESTS, THE BIRCH MAZES OF THE Adirondacks, the hideous brush-choked ravines of the Cascades, the gauntlet of squat taiga enfilading the Alaska Highway—such woods have always seemed to me landscapes of gloom, brewed up by Darwin’s mutative riot at its most careless. Even the open lodgepole and ponderosa stands of my boyhood Colorado served only as glades of passage, gateways to the bursting promise that timberline laid bare.

  But Fontainebleau is a forest I can love. Thirty miles southeast of Paris, bisected by the roaring Autoroute du Soleil, Bleau—as the climbers call it—should not be confused with wilderness. From about 1130 to 1840, the forest was the hunting ground for the rulers of France. The palace of Fontainebleau, exceeded in magnificence only by Versailles, served for centuries as the swankiest hunting lodge in the world; thus the 62,000 acres of surrounding woods are crisscrossed with hand-cobbled carriage roads that meet in puzzling carrefours in the middle of nowhere.

  Despite its name—an antique contraction of fontaine de belle eau—the forest is all but waterless, a desert out of which pines, oaks, beeches, and wild cherry trees somehow connive to spring. Aeons flooded the plain with limestone; millennial rains wore this softer stuff away, leaving woods strewn with grotesque sandstone monuments up to 50 feet high. The homely taxonomy of English calls such an assemblage a “boulder pile”; in French, it forms a chaos.

  During the last hundred years, many of
the best mountaineers in the world, from Pierre Allan to Guido Magnone to Catherine Destivelle, found in Bleau a nursery for their youth and a Sorbonne for their maturity. Today Parisian office workers routinely shut off their word processors at 5:30 and careen down the autoroute for an evening’s sport at Bleau. No major city in the world has a more genial rock garden so close at hand.

  On my last visit to Fontainebleau I discovered the ideal way to apprehend the place. Shunning the thronged cafés that edge toward the palace, I alighted in the one-street town of Barbizon, at the Hôtellerie du Bas-Bréau [formerly the Hôtel Siron]. The very same inn had, in the 19th century, sheltered the salon of a lively gang of painters who trooped daily into the forest, armed with canvas and easel.

  Most people understand the Bleau’s sandstone is unique and doesn’t need any manipulation. You’ll find big slopes, tiny edges, soft pockets—any kind of hold you could imagine, with a very pleasant feel. When you climb at Fontainebleau you rarely rip up your fingertips, but after three or four days your skin is as pink and soft as a baby’s, so worn that you cannot touch anything.

  —Baptiste Briand, “The Magic Forest,” Climbing

  No group of artists has fallen into a moldier neglect than the Barbizon School: Corot, Millet, Theodore Rousseau, and their lesser-known cronies. Often they are damned with the faint praise of serving as “precursors to the Impressionists.” To my mind, however, the savage woodland epiphanies of Corot are far more powerful than Seurat’s picnics. Sleeping at the Bas-Bréu, visiting the small museums housed in the ateliers of Millet and Rousseau, venturing into the forest, I began to see Fontainebleau through the painters’ eyes, to recover the revolutionary fervor with which their landscapes teem.

  These were the first Europeans who dared to paint for nature’s sake, rather than as a backdrop for mythology or history. Trees, rocks, light, and shade—these made as noble a subject as the martyrdoms of saints, declared Rousseau. The Barbizon paintings seize upon the disorder of nature: ancient oaks are tortured by the twisting agonies of arboreal thirst; even a restful clearing brims with fathomless mysteries. So dark are their canvasses that the artists’ detractors accused them of painting with prune juice.

  Yet what a raucous, hedonistic band the Barbizon School was! Coyly, the painters posted a sign in the salon declaring, “Under pain of fine, visitors are forbidden to excite the artists.” Yet by moonlight, they marched with their admirers into the forest to the tread of trumpets, built campfires in caves, drank flagons of wine, and made love all night. Their number included Lazare Bruandet, gentle as a lamb while he painted but a great brawler when drunk, who accosted strangers at the Siron and once threw his wife out the window; Stamati Bulgari, the eccentric military hero who held a parasol while he painted; and Rousseau, the nervous insomniac, whose passion for the forest amounted to a private religion. When King Louis Philippe ordered 15 million pines, not native to Fontainebleau, to be planted there in regimental rows, Rousseau organized expeditions into the woods to tear the trees up by the roots.

  Steeped in these 19th-century glimmerings, I set out into the woods each day on my own excursions. In my pack I stuffed a loaf of hearty bread, cheese, and a bottle of wine. For many a lazy hour I followed the blue dots of the old Denecourt trails, named after Claude-François Denecourt, who had been a soldier under Napoleon before he settled near Fontainebleau in 1832 and set out to handcraft sentiers that eschewed the rectangular logic of the king’s roads in favor of winding tours.

  Denecourt’s paths seek out every chaos in the forest: they deliberately scuttle through natural tunnels, or corkscrew around a handsome boulder, or linger on a ledge with a view of acres and acres of sand. Coming upon caves in which outlaws and hermits and society’s castoffs once lived, I recaptured the medieval fear of the forest as a dangerous, alien place.

  Every day I chose a bouldering circuit, Bleau’s specialty. Each circuit contains a numbered sequence of boulder problems, as many as 70 or 80, that weave in and out of a particular chaos. The rocks are neatly painted with tiny arrows, numbers, and parenthesized dots indicating a jump. Color-coordinated by difficulty, the circuits range from the yellow peu difficile to the fiendish black extrêmement difficile. In the United States, eco-vigilantes would have squelched such desecration of the scenery before it got started; at Fontainebleau, the circuits integrate the human and the natural, as do the formal gardens of the palace.

  I had lost for good, I thought, the urge to boulder: at stateside crags, the scene reeks for me of chalk-dust and ego and painful calisthenics. But Bleau reawakened a sense of play. On a warm, windy day, with no one else in sight, I puttered through the 71 problems on the blue (difficile) circuit at Manoury: I tackled the Mustard Pot and the Camembert Traverse, was stumped by the Drunkard’s Arête and the Subway Handle, but managed Toto’s Slide.

  Then I lounged on a sandstone table and opened a bottle of wine. Rousseau’s gnarled oaks swayed in the breeze, and Corot’s umbrageous glooms flickered on the periphery. As the Beaujolais worked its charm, I lapsed into wistfulness, ruing the eternal injustice of having been born too late.

  David Roberts is the author of thirteen books including A Newer World: Kit Carson, John C. Frémont, and the Claiming of the American West, True Summit: What Really Happened on the Legendary Ascent of Annapurna, and Once They Moved Like the Wind: Cochise, Geronimo, and the Apache Wars. He was also responsible for the rediscovery of the lost Arctic classic In the Land of White Death, by Valerian Albanov, published in English for the first time in 2000.

  For centuries the Fontainebleau forest had a very bad reputation. It was synonymous with darkness and fear, inhabited by demons, dwarves, and witches. Eventually, kings came to hunt in the forest, but people still avoided it, except the brigands, who would hide behind trees to ambush the unwary, cut their throats, and steal their money. At the beginning of the 19th century, entrepreneurs took interest in the rocks of the Fontainebleau woods, finding useful materials to pave muddy roads. The soft sandstone was easily cut, and many quarries were created. The woods lost their dark reputation. Writers, poets, and painters started to praise the Fontainebleau’s forest. Footpaths were created and more and more people walked the woods, sometimes sleeping under the oddly shaped rocks. At the start of this century the first serious scramblers approached the rocks, and Fontainebleau climbing was born.

  —Baptiste Briand, “The Magic Forest,” Climbing

  COLEMAN LOLLAR

  Monsieur Fix-It

  A search for the holy grail ends in hardware heaven.

  WE HAD ONLY ONE DAY LEFT IN PARIS. MY FRIEND FATIMA wanted to go to the Louvre, and since I had other things to do, we agreed to meet later in the day at a favorite café. We were both breathless with stories when we reconvened.

  “You won’t believe all that I say,” she was saying excitedly as I tried in vain to recite all the accounts of my own ingenious discoveries.

  “But the crowds,” I complained.

  “Yes, the crowds were fearful,” Fatima concurred, each of us expounding on lines and elbows. Finally we stopped trying to talk at the same time and laughed at the absurdity: we had had the same afternoon—hers at the world’s greatest museum; mine at its greatest hardware store.

  I had browsed for hours, outlasted the peak-hour rush of shoppers and acquired bags full of trophies at the BHV, a sprawling department store on the rue de Rivoli across from the Hôtel de Ville, Paris’ city hall. At the BHV (the letters stand for the seldom-used name, Bazar de l’Hôtel de Ville) my passion for gadgets and gizmos found ultimate gratification in the basement hardware department. BHV’s management insists that there is more hardware for sale in its sous-sol (basement) than under any other roof on the planet. Certainly this hardware junkie wouldn’t dispute the claim.

  On more than one trip to Rome or Frankfurt—and once going to Addis Ababa—I have booked myself through Paris to shop for hardware (and to eat, of course). I’ve held off on home repairs until I could get back to the rue de Rivoli a
nd buy just the right faucet or latch among the possibilities that fill a full city block. Some think it’s quite mad (or at least pretentious) to go to Europe for hardware, passing perfectly good malls on the way to the airport. And to Paris, yet!—blasphemy to every junior high school English teacher who ever canted that edifying ditty “Oh, London is a man’s town, there’s power in the air; and Paris is a woman’s town, with flowers in her hair.” My Paris has flowers, too—and nuts and bolts and gadgets too inscrutable ever to see the fluorescence of an American shopping mall.

  I discovered the BHV years ago when a Parisian friend suggested I might find there a little window ventilator like those I had seen in French kitchens. The one I wanted required no electricity—its silent spin was powered by variations in barometric pressure. I knew what made it go, but I didn’t know what it was called, and I’d never seen one for sale.

  The BHV saleswoman listened intently as I undertook to clarify my grail. Was it a fan, perhaps? No, not exactly. A gyrating showerhead? A motor of some kind? Electric? Battery-powered? Windup? Solar? No, not that either (although I was getting the idea that this place had potential). As her eyes followed my finger drawing ever-more-rapid circles in the air, she ignited with comprehension. “Ah, oui! Un aérateur!”

  She led me to a whole wall of aérateurs. They came in plastic or metal, in decorator colors and in sizes that ranged from the diameter of a coffee cup to that of a soccer ball. I bought four clear-plastic ones, and they spin to this day.