At the time of the French Revolution, the revolutionaries had planned to destroy all vestiges of previous regimes, including the art, the calendar, and certainly the churches, and start over with a blank slate. It was an analogous situation, I suppose, to the looting that went on in Iraq in 2003, the difference being that the French revolutionaires had more things to loot. Many a French family still preserves the finger bone of a king, the scrap of a bonnet, motley souvenirs of that time, handed down with increasing vagueness as to the provenance, and increased carelessness in dusting. Religious buildings were deconsecrated, and many were despoiled or destroyed completely, but somehow an enterprising archaeologist, Alexandre Lenoir, was allowed to commandeer the Église des Petits-Augustins for a museum. He was given the power to gather together various parts of discarded and destroyed tombs, statuary, and pieces of torn-down buildings into a museum of monuments, thus luckily preserving much of French heritage that would otherwise have been smashed to bits.
I had been looking at the church in the École des Beaux-Arts complex for six months before I was ever able to go inside, for it is usually closed now, except for the exhibitions, or expositions, as the French call them, but it is worth trying to see inside if it is open. (It is always possible on the guided visit on Monday afternoons, by appointment; to reserve call 01 47 03 50 74.) Even if it isn’t, you’ll see the facade, taken from Diane de Poitiers’s château, her initials entwined with those of Queen Margot’s father Henri II. (At Blois, the appearance of this monogram, entwined H’s and D, is explained as denoting “Henri Deux.”) To see the chapel, you have to go inside the church, or else look out of my kitchen window. But the church itself, the courtyard, the facade of Diane de Poitiers’s château—all these are visible from Rue Bonaparte.
The facade of Anet is worldy in its origins and also its details—statues of the pagan goddess Diana the huntress, classical columns, the initials celebrating earthly pomp, and so on. Anet was begun in 1548 by Henri II’s architect Philibert de l’Orme, and worked on by sculptors Jean Goujon and Jean Cousin, and, less certainly, Benevenuto Cellini. It, too, was slated for destruction when Alexandre Lenoir saved it and brought it to Paris. The rest of the château still exists and can be visited. It was Lenoir who added statues of Apollo and Diana in the niches about half way up.
The wooden doors from Anet are particularly beautiful, decorated with Diane de Poitiers’s monogram—two D’s facing each other, their backs forming the sides of an H for Henri. Later in her life Diane would add stags, antlers, and the moon to her personal iconography. As she still seems a vivid presence, it’s interesting to keep in perspective that she was born more than five hundred years ago, in 1499, only seven years after Columbus sailed for America. And it is odd that although Columbus seems a figure of distant antiquity, Diane de Poitiers is intimately present.
Apropos of Diane, recently I went with a friend to the town of Étampes, a place an hour outside Paris where no one goes. Étampes was a French royal retreat in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, on the banks of the Juine and Chalouette Rivers—now home of a watercress festival and nothing much else to be said for it except for an amazing, ruined, round tower, of the sort the French call a donjon, all that is left of an ancient palace. This is the “Prison of Ingeburge,” standing on a rampart above the village, where, apparently, various minorities—Africans and North Africans—have now come to live, but where kings did live. The dungeon tower was built in the thirteenth century by Philippe-Auguste, whose great wall surrounding Paris is now to be seen in a few places, including the parking garage on the Rue Mazarine which I have mentioned.
My friend was writing a piece for the travel section of the New York Times on the nearby famous garden of Méréville, and I had gone along for the lunch; we had planned to check out a local inn where Times readers might perhaps be guided to eat. On the main street we stopped before the local library, a locked and shut but ancient-looking place that said in tiny letters on its sign that it was a classified building “dit de Diane de Poitiers,” Duchess of Étampes. As we were wondering how to get in, a man came along, like a figure in a fairy tale, and offered to open the large wooden doors of the gate with a key from his big bunch of keys.
We went into the graveled courtyard. Across it was a lovely and old, rather touchingly small sixteenth-century building—noble houses would become larger and more grandiose in the seventeenth century. This one was of two stories, with stone carvings by the ubiquitous Jean Goujon around the door and on the gables and a mossy slate roof. Inside, something of a letdown, a cheerful modern library, with the banal lowered ceiling of perforated soundproofing tiles and rack of bulletins and announcements, and the New Book shelf standard in all libraries. The librarian stepped out to talk to us—she was closed for lunch. On the door and amid the carvings, the same two D’s forming an H that we see on the Anet facade, also worked on by Jean Goujon. Just tracking the works of a prolific sixteenth-century sculptor like Goujon gives a good idea of what the life of a prosperous artisan/artist was like then, itinerant and varied. Goujon worked on the Louvre, at Anet, and on many other famous châteaux, and did numberless statues, but would die in Italy, in exile for his Huguenot beliefs.
To return to the contents of the Église des Petits-Augustins in the École des Beaux-Arts: Lenoir’s museum, established after the Revolution, would stay a museum until the restoration of the monarchy in 1814, when some of the bits were given back to those who had possessed them originally but had lost them in the upheavals, happy to have kept their heads. Like kings, religion had come into fashion again, the churches were reconstituted, and the monuments were moved to other sites or restored to the families and churches they had belonged to. This period of restitution decimated Lenoir’s collection, though luckily many things made their way to the Louvre—for instance, Diane de Poitiers’s fountain, a lush work begun by some unknown sculptor for her Anet château and finished by Pierre-Nicolas Beauvallet in 1799–1800, showing the naked goddess Diana and a stag reclining on an urn.
The next phase for the church/museum was as a fine arts college, the École des Beaux-Arts. This institution took over the whole complex of the Petits-Augustins, cloister and courtyard, in 1832 to harbor copies or moulages of great artworks, taken mostly from the Italian and meant for the training of art students who might not be able to go to Italy to see these mighty works for themselves. Copies of great statues were gathered to inspire them, and to form part of their course of study.
If you have a chance to go in, do. (I have mentioned that this can be arranged in advance.) Inside you will see a hangar-size, barrel-vaulted space, ceiling painted blue, whose oxblood walls are decorated by copies of famous paintings from Carpaccio to Ghirlandaio, and dominated by a vast rear wall showing the Last Judgment, copied from the Sistine Chapel.
To the right you can enter Queen Margot’s chapel, which has numerous copies of famous sculpture: Michelangelo’s works—the “Pietà,” “Prisoners,” the Médicis’s tombs, slightly reduced in scale—and others, like the Ghiberti doors and some of the famous French royal tombs. These copies seem neglected, blackened and chipped, quite unlike the gleaming marble one sees in Italy; disappointing until it occurred to me that the copies date from a time when the Italian statues and paintings were probably dark with age and pollution, and the copyist had faithfully reproduced the patina he saw. Similarly, the “Last Judgment” is as it would have been seen a hundred years ago, before the recent cleaning of the work in Rome, lending to these copies a kind of historical interest of their own. The artist Xavier Sigalon, dispatched to Rome to make copies of some of the paintings when more influential painters thought it would be a waste of their talent, was fated to die there of cholera soon after finishing his work.
Beside housing the rather dusty and pocked plaster copies, the museum now also serves as a temporary gallery space, most recently showing drawings by the American artist David Smith, whose chaste abstractions were in striking contrast to the baroque ornament
s ranged around the dim interior, and, this week, some drawings by the original architect of the École, Felix Duban (1798–1870), who designed the rest of the grand early nineteenth-century buildings in the courtyard.
THE ARCH
[The church was] originally lit by high arched windows (traces of which can still be seen from the outside).
THE SIXTH ARRONDISSEMENT: A GUIDE TO ITS HISTORY AND ARCHITECTURE
For awhile, a mystery remained, outside our kitchen window, about the bricked-up arch in the wall the chapel (and my kitchen) are attached to. One of the great torments of my life was the wish to know what that archway was or what it once led to. I asked Emmanuel Schwartz, the librarian of the École des Beaux-Arts, whose book on the chapel has been fascinating and useful; he knows all about the chapel, but he couldn’t explain about the arch, no doubt because my description was so imperfect. I had not yet realized that the arched wall ran along to become my kitchen wall.
At first I wondered if it were a part of some ancient wall enclosing Paris? I went to check again the vestige of the wall of Philippe-Auguste that remains in the parking garage on the Rue Mazarine, a few minutes’ walk from Rue Bonaparte. I was fairly sure that my wall was not a part of that ancient wall, built to defend the Paris of 1200; old maps and drawings show the wall of Philippe-Auguste a little to the east. But I wanted to look again, to see if there was any resemblance that might indicate a date for mine; so I descended into the parking lot on Rue Mazarine, as if I was looking for my car.
Most people are interested in archaeology whatever is dug up. In California, when we remodeled our 1906 house on Telegraph Hill in San Francisco, the workmen unearthed old whiskey bottles, the bones of two cats, and a shoe. I kept the old bottles. Bottles seem to survive everywhere, strangely resilient testimonials to the habits of vanished times; and in the Louvre one can see old bottles from around here, shimmering little things of glass dating from the Roman beginnings, dug up in the course of some repairs to the Louvre or Notre-Dame cathedral.
My wall makes me marvel at the way the French have built on history—that is, using it concretely, recycling the bricks and mortar and stones, to found the new. Buildings, like the Musée de Cluny, are sometimes built over Roman beginnings and the vestiges of medieval ditches influence the modern names. We have seen that, at the north side of the church of St.-Germain-des-Prés, remnants of things that were torn out of it during the Revolution are affixed to its sides. The physical dismantling of so many monuments and buildings vandalized during the Revolution (to say nothing of melting down the statues and scattering the bones of their kings) seems in contrast to, say, the Russians who during their revolution tended to preserve the artifacts of the tsars, their art and palaces, the contents of museums, and so on. Of course, the Russian Revolution was later by more than a century, and people’s attitudes must have evolved everywhere, though to say that is immediately to remember the Taliban blowing up the Buddhas.
As I mentioned, the French also seem to believe, at least by tradition, that violence, even if symbolic, like the otherwise lame, traffic-blocking little manifestations, or manifs, that disrupt the streets of our quartier all the time, are a necessary precondition for social change—in contrast to our society, otherwise so much more violent but where political violence is rare. (Europeans could not understand why we were not in the streets after the election of 2000.) One day near here, on the corner of the Rue du Bac and the Boulevard St.-Germain, I saw a fresh puddle of blood where plumbers, or maybe schoolteachers, had been marching, and someone had been wounded.
Sometimes, respect for the archaeology of Paris sets up unexpected conflicts, though people don’t take to the streets about it. A few months ago, workers digging around the Orangerie—the building at the west end of the Tuileries fronting the Place de la Concorde—came upon a wall constructed in the sixteenth century by Charles IX, and then continued by Henri III, two of the three brothers of Queen Margot, and eventually covered over by Le Nôtre, the garden designer for Louis XIV. Now the modern French authorities have to decide what to do with their discovery, and the place is closed until 2006.
This wall has engendered the predictable standoff between those who want to save it, which would mean changing or putting on hold the projected enlargement of the Orangerie museum, which presently contains, among other things, an installation of Nymphéas, the beautiful, rather absent-minded water-lily paintings of Monet, and others, including the state, who want to demolish the relatively ordinary-looking pile of stones. A commission of architects and archaeologists has been studying the possibilities, and the government has come in for reproaches for not having foreseen that they would probably dig up something precious in such a sensitive location. The guess is it will probably opt for a way of incorporating the wall into its museum-enlargement scheme, and, meantime, a public subscription has been announced for rebuilding the Tuileries palace from scratch, which the people burned in 1871 during the Commune, that peculiar and short-lived uprising that people would think back on fearfully during the social upheavals of May 1968.
If the Tuileries are rebuilt, it will restore a structure built by Catherine de Médicis but abandoned out of superstition. Queen Margot tells of her mother’s belief in omens and predictions: “Many have held that God has great personages more immediately under his protection, and that minds of superior excellence have bestowed on them a good genius, or secret intelligence, to apprise them of good, or warn them against evil,” she wrote, this view contrasting with more politically correct modern views that God cares as much for the peasant as for the prince. “Of this number I might reckon the Queen my mother, who has had frequent intimations of the kind; particularly the very night before the tournament which proved so fatal to the King my father; she dreamed that she saw him wounded in the eye, as it really happened.”
She makes no claims for herself: “I am far from supposing that I myself am worthy of these divine admonitions,” yet she herself has had warnings, belying her modest denial; she goes on to recount how she was once struck by a bizarre shivering fit when she encountered one of her brothers, Henri, who was plotting against her, and was himself the victim of intriguers who were trying to turn him against her, because she was loyal to another brother and was married to Henri of Navarre.
In the case of the abandoned Tuileries palace, Catherine was told she would die “near to St.-Germain,” which she thought referred to the palace itself, but the prophecy turned out instead to refer to the priest named St.-Germain who gave her the last rites twenty-two years later. The Tuileries Palace was eventually finished by Henri IV, used by all the Louises to a greater or lesser extent, and by Napoleons I and III, and then, as we have seen, burned down.
I have a friend, Sally W., who lives at 12 Rue Bonaparte. Looking at our building from Sally’s third-floor apartment gave me some new perspective on our filled-in arch. From her window, I could see along the walls of the church up to the place where the chapel protrudes, and now I could see that the wall outside my window, its arch filled in but the outlines still visible, is a wall of the church of the Petits-Augustins in the Beaux-Arts complex. That is, my kitchen is built smack up against the church, in a sense is actually a part of it; this suggests that my kitchen dates from an earlier era than the rest of our apartment, and was part of a convent built onto the church.
But what was the arch? From some old engravings that a friend has found, it appears to have been a window of the church that has been filled in, leaving the outline of the arch in place. One of the engravings shows the church to have had just these arched windows in the days of Anne of Austria. I have also found a French guidebook about the sixth arrondissement that confirms that the church used to have high arched windows, subsequently bricked up, “traces of which can still be seen from the outside” and, finally, there are paintings in the Musée Carnavalet, the museum of the city of Paris, showing the interior of the Église des Petits-Augustins in Lenoir’s time, with light shining though arched windows that a
re today no longer visible inside. So it appears that the simple explanation is that the arch was a window, now filled in.
Speaking of windows, one of the most charming customs of local architecture is that of painting a trompe l’oeil window if the eye expects a window that is in fact bricked up. Sometimes the passerby doesn’t even notice the false one among the real. A good example is at the southwest corner of Rue St.-Sulpice and Rue de Condé, as you are looking south from Boulevard St.-Germain.
All over Paris, bits of old or former Paris are used as part of the new, but there are many parts of the city where the new is not allowed to show on the outside. Facades are preserved and the interiors, unless they are classé, can be rebuilt behind them. A few days ago I wandered into 12 Rue des Sts.-Pères, where the doors stood open and tarps and scaffolding lay about, indicating a remodeling project. A sign, evidently intended for some delivery man, said to go up to the first floor, so I did, up the magnificent staircase.
I seemed to remember that there had been a developer’s sign on this building a few months earlier, calling it the Hôtel de Noailles, referring to the famous family of aristocrats who apparently had some association with this location. Their most famous house, in the Place des États-Unis, has recently been bought by Baccarat, remodeled by Philippe Starck, and displays sumptuously the collection of fine glassware assembled by this famous company of glassmakers, preserving some of the Noailles’s decor behind new wall coverings painted by the contemporary artist Gérard Garouste.
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