Into A Paris Quartier

by Diane Johnson

  D’ARTAGNAN

  It is about a year ago, that in making researches in the Bibliothèque Nationale…I by chance met with the Memoirs of Monsieur d’Artagnan, printed by Peter the Red at Amsterdam—as the principal works of that period, when authors could not adhere to the truth without running the risk of the Bastille, generally were. The title attracted my notice; I took the Memoirs home, with the permission of the librarian, and actually devoured them.

  Alexandre Dumas, THE THREE MUSKETEERS, author’s preface

  How do we account for the curious thrill we feel standing in some ancient space, in the presence of some historical artifact, thinking of all the things that have happened here? It is surely something about immortality, the idea of one’s self connected, by being present, to the past and to the ongoing. It was only a few years ago, before we came to live in this apartment on Rue Bonaparte, that one day when I was riding the 69 Bus down the Rue du Bac, I noticed on the building at number one, a plaque that said: “Here stood the house where lived Charles de Batz-Chastelmore d’Artagnan, captain-lieutenant of the Musketeers of Louis XIV, killed at the siege of Maestricht in 1673, immortalized by Alexandre Dumas.”

  Perhaps that little plaque more than anything else brought home the realization that Dumas’s immortal characters had once been living people who may have conducted their sword fights on the very spot where I was standing, in what were then the fields called Prés aux Clercs, a favorite dueling ground lying around the abbey of St.-Germain between our street and the Rue des Sts.-Pères. Of course, I knew there had been a historical d’Artagnan, but I had not until then experienced that particular sense of the reality of past events that sometimes strikes with special force. Would having known when I was a child that I was reading true history have increased my excitement and pleasure at Dumas’s tale? Now it was hardly possible to feel any more pleasure and excitement than was mine to have my childhood favorite again before my eyes.

  Perhaps not everyone remembers the engaging young d’Artagnan of Dumas’s creation. Like the hero of a fairy tale, he sets out from his native province of Gascony for Paris, to make his fortune, with only a few possessions—his father’s blessing, a powerful ointment, his sword, and a yellow horse. His naïveté and cheerful, trusting nature endear him to the fierce Musketeers as much as to us. Is it too much to say that an American may find something of ourselves in his wonderment as he confronts the big city for the first time?

  We know quite a bit about the historical d’Artagnan. He was born in Bigorre, in southwestern France, became a Musketeer (an elite corps of the king’s soldiers) and rose in their ranks, married a rich widow, Charlotte-Anne de Chanlecy Damas de la Claixe (or Clayette), and he himself had become rich, as a captain in the Guards. In 1659 the couple moved to the corner of Rue du Bac and the Quai Voltaire, in what was later called the Hôtel Mailly-Nesle; “hotel,” meaning large private house, the word not having at all the connotation of inn or lodging we think of today. Apparently they were not entirely happy, or not happier than most couples.

  Something is known of the d’Artagnan household. Charlotte-Anne brought a dowry of 60,000 livres worth of property, 24,000 livres in cash, and furniture worth another 6,000, large figures for today. Their wedding, at the Louvre, was attended by the king and Cardinal Mazarin. D’Artagnan was an important and trusted minion of Louis XIV—entrusted, for instance, with the arrest and delivery of the disgraced minister Fouquet to prison, after Fouquet had had the bad judgment to build a château more beautiful than Louis’s.

  An inventory of the d’Artagnan property shows them to have had two carriages—one for four people, one for two, the former lined in green velvet with four mirrors and green damask curtains, the latter upholstered in red damask. It was a time when wealth was ostentatiously displayed, and it was important to display it.

  They had a servant called Fiacrine Pinou, and a big table and armoire in their kitchen on the ground floor off the court. Upstairs, an antechamber and a big room was hung with tapestries of leaves and flowers—milles fleurs, the prettiest ones. These hung also in the bedroom on the second—third, in the American sense—floor. In the bedroom, too, a huge bed hung with striped silk was placed behind a screen, and on the wall a mirror and a portrait of Anne of Austria, the queen who d’Artagnan served so well. There was a lovely view of the Seine. D’Artagnan himself had lace gloves, silk stockings, a bathrobe lined in green satin, two swords, one with a gold handle…

  Many buildings like the one the d’Artagnans lived in contained “apartments” from a very early time, that is, apartments in today’s sense of an individual habitation consisting of a number of rooms in a larger building containing several such habitations. The d’Artagnans lived in such an apartment. It is also said this style of dwelling—with many families in one building—existed in ancient Rome; anyway, it is still the dominant way of living in Paris. Our building on Rue Bonaparte has four families, counting us.

  The French novelist Boris Vian recounts that, in 1765, one William Cole, an Englishman, took lodgings on Rue Bonaparte. His rooms were in what was then called Hôtel d’Orleans “in the Fauxborg [sic] St.-Germain,” which was probably across the street from us at number thirteen, looking over the gardens of the Duc de La Rochefoucauld, descendants of the author of the famous Maxims, a hundred years after his death. (The spelling “fauxborg” gives an idea of the original meaning of the modern word “faubourg,” false city, or suburb.)

  Cole was accompanied by a pushy French servant, for he had found that it was “absolutely necessary to have a French Servant, as [my] own knew not a word of the Language.” Unfortunately the fellow was drunk and threw in “impertinent” observations that ruined Cole’s experience of going around to look at churches and tourist sights, much as we do today. He was also cheated by his landlady. English mistrust of the French (and vice versa) such as Cole’s goes back eternally, or at least to 1066.

  Cole described his rooms in some detail, giving a glimpse of what these apartments were like, and though this was a hundred years after d’Artagnan, much would have remained the same:

  “…up two Pair of Stairs; it consisted of a little Bedchamber for my Servant in the Passage or little Gallery to my own,…a Bureau, half a Dozen elegant & sumptuous elbow-Chairs & a Sopha of the same Sort, of the Tapestry of their own Manufacture.” He also had an “elegant & lofty Crimson Damask Bed…raised on a Step,” and red tiled or oak floors, heavily waxed, and in general was very comfortable.

  For the d’Artagnans all was to end badly; after they had two sons, d’Artagnan began to stray, Madame to nag, and then to have him followed. Finally they parted. She went back to her country place to live, and d’Artagnan went off on the king’s wars. Eventually, he would be killed in battle, serving his king.

  But he lives on. There are descendants today who can claim him as their ancestor. And most days as I walk up to the Boulevard St.-Germain past the church, a man is standing, dressed as a Musketeer, perhaps d’Artagnan, with leather baldric and high-heeled shoes, shoulder-length hair and wide plumed hat that he is quick to doff while bowing at any queenly figure who comes near enough to toss a euro in his little cup.

  THE CHAPEL

  The chances of history are happily reunited in the same building, conceived by Marguerite—the souvenirs and the evocations of the Valois, and also of the times which preceded her intervention in the site, til then empty of inhabitants.

  Emmanuel Schwartz, LA CHAPELLE DE L’ÉCOLE DES BEAUX-ARTS DE PARIS

  My present connection to St.-Germain is for me also symbolized or represented by something I see out my kitchen window every day, the back of a little chapel built by Queen Marguerite de Valois in 1608. It is a building that d’Artagnan must also have seen, though I cannot guess whether he ever went inside. Now it can’t be seen at all, either from the street or from within the École des Beaux-Arts, the national fine arts academy next door.

  When we came to live in our apartment on Rue Bonaparte, I was entranced, and s
till am, by the things about it that have not been changed since the seventeenth century—its “Versailles parquet”—which is the lovely way of laying oak floors in large squares within which the wood is fitted on the diagonal. The windows are twelve feet tall, the ceilings even taller. I even love the gilding on the living room panels, though at first I thought it was gaudy and planned to paint it out. Somehow the eye gets used to decors that in the U.S. would look like hotel lobbies.

  In my state of love for my apartment, I hadn’t paid attention to the curious, windowless, rounded building about fifteen feet away across a tiny court outside the kitchen window. It was simply there. When I did focus on it, at first I didn’t like the dark domed shape, resembling the edge of a huge, lead-colored zeppelin, or perhaps an alien spaceship alighted outside, looming over the small, enclosed garden space, and more than two stories high, covered in slate tiles, overbearing and mysterious.

  Nor did I know, at first, what this structure was, though I saw that it was somehow part of the École des Beaux-Arts, an assemblage of buildings built around a vast cobbled court, one of them a church, the others Palladian structures housing classrooms where generations of students—including well-known American artists—have learned architecture or to paint and draw.

  I soon learned that the small, rounded structure was somehow part of a church built by Marguerite de Valois or de Navarre—Queen Margot—in 1608. In her day, the tiny chapel stood alone. In seventeenth-century engravings, a small hexagonal structure ornaments her gardens, topped by a cupola and tiny spire. Thirty-five feet across and twenty feet high, it would have been visible from all the paths and walks through her gardens and from her palace nearby. It was her idea that monks would sing there all day long, in praise of God, Jacob, and Jesus, representing her penitence for a misspent life: It was called La Chapelle des Louanges—the Chapel of Praises.

  Once freestanding, it now forms a bay of a larger church, Église des Petits-Augustins, which incorporated the chapel when it was built, after 1618. Some time went by until I could go inside either the church or its chapel. At first, I was told by the gatekeeper at the École des Beaux-Arts that though the church would be open for art exhibits from time to time, none was planned for the moment, so I was obliged to look at it, front and back, only from outside. Fortunately, the exterior alone was enough to contemplate in the meantime. There are no windows facing my side, but the front of the church (which is visible in the courtyard of the École des Beaux-Arts) has a tall, flat classical facade taken from the château at Anet of the famous courtesan Diane de Poitiers, about whom more later.

  RUE BONAPARTE

  …of which the north part between the Seine and the Rue Jacob was called chemin de la Petite-Seine (1368), de la Noue (1523), Rue des Petits-Augustins (XVIIth c.);—the central part between the Rue Jacob and the boulevard St. Germain, open on the ancient abbey, was called Cour des Religieux (1804), Rue Bonaparte (1810)…

  Rochegude et Dumolin, GUIDE PRACTIQUE À TRAVERS LE VIEUX PARIS

  My husband John and I have lived on Rue Bonaparte next to the chapel for about four years now, for six or so months of every year. Paris comes to feel more and more like home, while our place in San Francisco seems farther and farther away. In Paris, we are a step or two away from the Louvre, the Institut de France, the Pont Neuf, and other iconic structures in this precious, actually rather small, city.

  Rue Bonaparte begins on the Quai Malaquais, on the Left Bank of the Seine, across from the Louvre. Parisians make a sharp distinction between the Left and Right Banks of the Seine (by which they mean the south and north banks), but the visitor has the luxury of ignoring this age-old distinction—the legacy of days when the river had to be crossed by ferry—which attributes staid respectability to the Right Bank, and an aura of artiness to the Left. The area is a harmonious ensemble, the work of centuries, but especially of the seventeenth century, the epoch that has most distinctly shaped the whole sixth arrondissement. The eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, and even modern Paris, are also represented within a few minutes’ walk, the latter by the new Solférino bridge, a lovely arc linking the Left Bank with the Tuileries, across from the refurbished train station, Gare—now Musée—d’Orsay, a museum for the art of the nineteenth century. The Orsay includes the amazing painting by Courbet, “L’origine du monde,” of a hairy vagina and two plump thighs; the eagerness to see this curiosity, I’m told, in part explains the long lines always waiting outside the museum to buy tickets.

  Rue Bonaparte, author’s home

  And there are vestiges of Roman Paris and medieval Paris within a few minutes’ walk. If you go into the parking garage on the Rue Mazarine and walk down one level, you will see a formidable wall, perhaps twenty feet high and six or eight feet thick, of gray stones, part of the wall built by King Philippe-Auguste in 1200 to encircle Paris. Archaeologists must know, but I have never understood, how civilizations sink. They are always covered over by subsequent civilizations, but mustn’t they have sunk first, as if the core of the Earth were shrinking, drawing everything down? Or do they rise, thickening the Earth as they acrete layer upon layer of city? It is always hard to visualize.

  A few words by way of orientation for anyone who plans walking around. Part of the pleasure of living in Paris is the pleasure of discoveries impossible when you’re separated from the world by a car. From Rue Bonaparte I can walk almost anywhere in Paris, and certainly everywhere I need to go. If you want to get there faster, or in bad weather, there are the Métro and the buses, and there is Paris by Arrondissements, a little booklet of maps that show every street in every arrondissement. You get it at any newsstand—much easier than unfolding a big map—and with this indispensable, and a packet of bus/Métro tickets, or better yet a weekly pass, you can never be lost.

  Nor are you in danger, except from pickpockets. It is sometimes hard for visitors to internalize the paradox—having both the carefree feeling that personal safety gives you, and the need to keep your purse and pockets zipped up. I’m both careful and wary, but I do travel a lot, and have been pickpocketed or had things stolen, out of bags, from under the X-ray screener, in a store, five times, always in France. The skill of the pickpockets defies belief. The last time, getting off the bus at my own bus stop, I was so exasperated I confronted the thief and demanded my wallet back. To both our surprise, he gave it to me, without a word, but with a look of fear on his face. Perhaps he (correctly) saw in mine the look of a woman who was going to raise a big, audible fuss.

  Say you are standing in the courtyard of the Louvre, the great palace, along with its gardens the Tuileries, that dominates the Right Bank of central Paris (and which any taxi can find). Stand with your back to the Pyramid—the amazing glass structure designed by I. M. Pei when François Mitterand was president. (Mitterand was not the only French president who wanted to change the face of Paris. Luckily most of them have been deterred. One hears that Georges Pompidou, who did place the Centre Pompidou, an amazing modern structure on the site of the old market area, also wanted freeways along the Right and Left Banks. This would have meant tearing down much of historic Paris, rather as Baron Haussmann did in the nineteenth century for Napoleon III, to build the large, handsome Right Bank apartments we think of today as being so typically Parisian.)

  Anyway, you are facing the Tuileries. From this spot, you turn left and walk toward the river on the street that runs through the middle of the Louvre, cross the bridge (Pont de Carousel), a wide structure guarded by four female figures, whether queens, goddesses, or muses I am not sure. When you get to the Left Bank turn left on the Quai Malaquais. Walk eastward, crossing the Rue des Sts.-Pères, and continue along the Quai Malaquais past the École des Beaux-Arts museum, a large, classical nineteenth-century building fronting the quay to the next street, which will be Rue Bonaparte. It will take no more than ten minutes to walk from the Louvre to Rue Bonaparte.

  On this short stretch of the Quai Malaquais, by the way, the buildings, except for the museum, were b
uilt about the time that d’Artagnan came to Paris, in the 1630s. Number seventeen, now part of the École des Beaux-Arts, was formerly Hôtel de la Bazinière, or Chimay, whose beautiful doors are classées, that is, on a list of valued buildings or parts of buildings that cannot be changed. We have a friend to whose family this palais belonged in former centuries, but I don’t know if it was the Revolution or the persecution of Huguenots that deprived them of it.

  The name Malaquais came from mal acquis, or wrongly acquired, no one knows by whom or why, and the stretch of it between Bonaparte and the Rue des Sts.-Pères was called Escorcherie aux Chevaux. The meaning is unclear—I haven’t found the word escorcherie in my French dictionary, the closest being escorter, to escort. The street names of Paris have often changed when a new or better name came along, and the changes always tell a story. Recently the Quai du Louvre on the Right Bank was changed to Quai François Mitterand after the late president.