Into A Paris Quartier

by Diane Johnson

  Every day I must go get groceries from the Rue de Buci, the Monoprix, or the Grande Épicerie. Buy a new Métro pass at the beginning of each month. Take walks, to note the changes of season, something California lacks. On Thursday nights the art galleries have openings along the Rues de Seine and Bonaparte. Americans have potluck suppers and events organized around the political situation back home or cooperative efforts for other ends. My California friend Ellery helps me set up my wi-fi network, but I’m not sure how I can be useful to him in turn. Our American world is, as it always has been, a world within a world, more or less invisible to the real inhabitants.

  From my kitchen window I notice that La Voisine’s hair is “going back.” Once a cheerful reddish brown, it is turning gray at the roots; whether she is letting it grow out or has just put off going to the hairdresser remains to be seen. When we meet on the street she does not acknowledge our back fence relationship or even seem to recognize me. Is this French good manners or something else?

  Looking out my windows in one direction I see the chapel, but out the front window, I look onto the smart shops of Rue Bonaparte. Besides the antiquaires and art dealers and book dealers around here, there are specialists in interior decoration. Far from being white paint and gilt, the French “look” of the moment seems to derive from Milan and to feature things like lampshades and lamp bases that are now rectangular where they used to be round. The wood is black, the upholstery gray, beige, or leather. Exceptions to this are to be found on the Rue Jacob and the Place de Furstemberg, where there are several maisons that deal in good reproductions of traditional shapes of furniture, silver plate, lamps, and so on. One of these, Flamant, is in fact Belgian, recalling that the French are fond of saying, with a sigh, that the best French food is now found in Belgium. There are fabric stores—French like Pierre Frey, Italian Rubelli, English Colefax and Fowler, and so on. Of interest to an American is that, unlike at home, where you have to have a decorator buy these things for you, here you can just go in and order them yourself.

  One of the most famous decorators in the neighborhood was Madeleine Castaing, who had a shop at the corner of Bonaparte and Jacob, now mostly taken over by the elegant pâtisserie and salon du thé Ladurée. When Ladurée, expanding from their original branch had bought the space and were remodeling, they tore away Madelaine Castaing’s sign, only to find underneath a beautiful earlier sign in glass and gold reading “pâtisserie,” which they retained and restored, taking it as an omen that they were meant to be there.

  Madame Castaing was known for her eccentricities—her black wig was held on by a face-lifting chin strap so that she looked like an ancient drum majorette—and also for bringing to the attention of the French bourgeoisie the nineteenth-century decorative style now called by the name of Napoleon III, the mid-nineteenth-century emperor. (His rooms in the Louvre are open to be seen, opulent in red plush and mahogany, gilded boiseries, crystal chandeliers.) We might perhaps call Madame Castaing’s taste Victorian, and indeed she brought Staffordshire dogs and English furniture over for her clients, causing a little vogue for le style anglais. When she retired to her country place, the filmmakers James Ivory and Ismail Merchant bought her apartment and with it some of the furniture, not without noting, though, her extortionist prices, which you can still pay, at her shop on Rue Jacob.

  This returns me to the tremendous world of French decorative objects. Madame Laloup, on the Quai Malaquais (or mal acquis, according to etymologists), has furnished a number of sumptuous African pieces for the Louvre and the former Museum of Oceanic Arts, but is planning on giving up her life as a dealer. “I dunno,” she says, “I’ve had it with art—I have six pieces in the African section of the Louvre over there. But, it’s getting too difficult to find things, and I’m too tired to haggle. I’m closing down. I think I’ll open a pâtisserie, something like that, in this space. I own the space….”

  Her space, by the way, is in the seventeenth-century Hôtel de Transylvanie, the grand brick-and-stone building on the corner of Bonaparte and the Quai Malaquais, dating from 1622, and named after a Transylvanian prince who rented it in the eighteenth century.

  Talking of pâtisseries and Ladurée reminds of the war of the macaroons, a lively discussion held among Parisians partial to either those made by Ladurée, by the other long-established pâtissiers Dalloyau, or Gérard Mulot on the Rue de Seine, or by the chic Pierre Hermé, former pastry chef at Ladurée who left to open his own smart shop on Rue Bonaparte, or by some particular favorite of other neighborhoods. I’ve never been into the Pierre Hermé shop because there is always a line out the door. (Though I saw him once, eating with some other chefs at Hélène Darroze, an elegant restaurant on Rue d’Assas, and, if I may say so, his enormous girth threw a scare into me about ever eating one of his concoctions.)

  French macaroons, by the way, are not those coconut-almond cookies we think of, but a sort of pastel-colored oreo, two halves of pastry with a filling in between, in various flavors and sizes—pistachio, caramel, chocolate, fraises…or even chili, or oyster. The more fanciful the flavors the better.

  I have to admit I stand in line like the rest at Ladurée, but not for macaroons; I like the lemon tarts and religieuses, and for special Sunday mornings, the croissants. There is a woman I often see there who sometimes buys nine huge boxes of pastries on Sunday mornings, as if she were godmother to an orphanage.

  When American friends ask me how I can bear to live in France, with its lack of supermarkets and parking lots, I can only gloat about the pleasures of the Grande Épicerie, a sort of supermarket, perhaps the world’s fanciest, apart from Harrod’s Food Hall in London, or the amazing German KaDeWe in Berlin. The Grande Épicerie is fifteen minutes’ walk into the seventh arrondissement to the Bon Marché, and the Bon Marché is the main Left Bank department store. Such stores were a French invention of the nineteenth century; for a sense of their history, evolving from the small boutiques that still form the basis of French commerce, you should read Émile Zola’s novel Au Bonheur des Dames. A few years ago, the Bon Marché was a slightly funky catch-all general store—you could buy paint and hardware, sewing supplies, shoes, dog food.

  Now it has reinvented itself into elegance, after the fashion of the times, and features upscale ready-to-wear and furniture. I regret the loss of the former convenient features, but it’s a treat to cruise the glamorous stuff they have now. Of course, it’s approximately the same as is found in San Francisco, which also has a Cristofle, a Cartier, and all the other main French brands, just as Paris has Gap and Levi’s. Everyone who travels complains of the same thing: the sameness of shopping no matter where.

  Purses are sold in all countries, but there seem to be more here. And who was the observant person who wrote of French women that all their purses seem to be new? It’s true that Parisiennes seem quite preoccupied with the handbag—witness their luxury brands, like Hermès, Louis Vuitton, or Longchamps. This emphasis seems to be an offshoot of the Parisian lifestyle that requires you to carry a lot of stuff around, so that a handbag becomes important beyond its looks and fashionableness.

  At first I resisted implementing the Parisian practice of little trolleys, handbags on wheels, with which to transport the daily requirement of groceries. I have been told these are unthinkable in New York, but everyone in Paris uses them, and I immediately saw why. I have one that converts to a backpack for taking it with you to the store; it then reverts to a wheeled state for coming home with heavy bottles and cat sand.

  I had lunch a week or two ago with the American art dealer Darthea Speyer, whose famous gallery is on the Rue Jacques-Callot, a little street at right angles to the Rue de Seine. This was the first gallery of surrealist art, in the twenties. Madame Speyer took it over in the fifties and has stayed here ever since. She comes from Pittsburgh. She must have known Raymond Duncan, Isadora’s brother (who was brought up in Berkeley, lived on Rue Mazarine, and wore togas and sandals), and lots of the other Americans who stayed.

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sp; From time to time one is afforded this sort of glimpse backward in time. The other night we wandered into the little restaurant La Brochetterie on the Rue St.-Benoît, a tiny place on two floors, maybe ten tables in all, that seems to exist in a kind of fifties time warp. Near us a young man in a black turtleneck, with a guitar case under his table, smoking to be sure, we heard to say, “Dieu existe, tu sais.…” God exists.

  I sometimes wonder if the esprit, gaiety, intellectual seriousness, and serious stylishness of the earlier period was the reflex of poverty and shared hardship. Maybe these privations are a precondition to gaiety and joy, moods that seem unavailable to twentieth-century Americans and French alike. La Brochetterie, by the way, is one of the few places in the neighborhood to get something halfway decent to eat. During the war, when food was scarce except for rutabagas and bits of meat, the Petit St.-Benoît, across from La Brochetterie, was somehow serving cheap meals, and is still there, still cheap, but not actually very good. I also find myself wondering if the food was any better in the old days?

  French food is delicious, but there are neighborhoods better than this one to find it in. The French say the declining standard of the food is the fault of tourists, who evidently are less demanding than real French people, allowing them to get by with indifferent food. On the same street as La Brochetterie, Rue St.-Benoît, I used to like the Dedicace, which was relatively new, a large space and hence often rather forlornly empty, and now seemingly vanished.

  I’m speaking of “French” restaurants. As happened in England, Italians have made a difference in the neighborhood food—I can think of four really good Italian restaurants—Marco Polo, Vicolo, Armani (the best of them, actually, in, yes, the Armani boutique, upstairs), and a cozy little one, Monteverdi. And there are a lot of others, it’s just that we haven’t tried them. When we’re truly homesick, we go to the City Zen on the Rue de Seine for a really good hamburger, or Coffee Parisien, next to the important Village Voice Bookshop on Rue Princess. Coffee Parisien is owned by the son of my late friend Rita, who was run over by a bus, that archetypal fate. We all imagined she was in danger on her bicycle, a woman in her eighties, but this time she was on foot; how we wished she had been on her bike.

  People get attached to their native food. The French and Americans alike all used to love the Restaurant des Beaux-Arts on Rue Bonaparte, charmingly old-timey, with its plump, tired waitresses. When it was replaced by a really trashy art gallery (bronze sheep), well-dressed French people walking by were stunned that such a thing could change, and shook their fists, shouting “honteux, honteux”—“shame, shame,” at the embarrassed construction workers.

  The anglophone in this quarter has two choices of where to go for books, the Village Voice Bookshop, run by Odile Hellier, a knowledgeable Frenchwoman who studied American literature at Berkeley, and the San Francisco Bookshop on the Rue de l’Odéon for secondhand books. There is also still the Shakespeare and Company, named after the famous bookshop run in the thirties by Sylvia Beach and Adrienne Monnier, but the new avatar is in the fifth arrondissement, and so dusty I got out of the habit of going there because of sneezing fits. I have been told that Sylvia Whitman (named for Sylvia Beach), the new young manager, has dusted. There is also a Canadian-run bookshop in the fifth arrondissement, Abbey Books, so no lack of books in English.

  Walking over to the Village Voice takes me by a number of thrilling specialty bookshops on the Rue Bonaparte, including two in this very building or next door: the Porte Étroite, a tiny place which is actually underneath La Voisine’s courtyard and sells art books; and the bookshop of M. Rossignol, a drawn, silent-looking person whom I meet in the foyer of our building as he checks his mail. In the window of Monsieur Rossignol’s bookshop as I write, is an autographed letter by Henri IV, his hand authoritative, assured, genial, royal, only the slightly faded ink and odd S’s suggesting another era, but hardly more than four centuries. I inquired, but he had nothing from the hand of Queen Margot.

  The drawback of all these bookstores for me is, of course, that the books are in French, but apart from that, it is bliss just looking in the windows at the wonderful things that could be read, if only I didn’t read French so slowly. (Except for books by Georges Simenon; I buy Inspector Maigret mysteries from the bouquinistes on the quays.) Never mind, books lend the tone to the neighborhood that it long has had, of intellectuals and debates, forgotten knowledge, the elaborate appreciation of their culture that the French have and write about, sometimes so boringly, even when, as Edmund White points out in The Flâneur, “Paris itself has become a cultural backwater,” and St. Germain is like “a beatnik brat [who] has grown up to be an elegant and rather brainless matron.”

  Nonetheless, most of French publishing is clustered around here in the fifth or sixth arrondissements, and here is where the writers tend to live, only the ones that can afford it, alas. My last novel came out from a publisher called Ramsay, on the little street Rue St. André des Arts, across from an ancient building associated in the fourteenth century with the Navarres, the family who would rule in the south, become Protestants, and produce Henri IV. My new French publisher, Buchet-Chastel, looks out on the Place de l’Odéon, also in the sixth.

  I think I have described how if, when I leave my building, instead of turning right toward St.-Germain, I turn left out the front door, we are perhaps a hundred yards from the river, and at the corner one can either turn left toward the Quai Voltaire, where Voltaire lived, and the Musée d’Orsay, or else turn right along the Quai Malaquais toward the Institut de France and the Bibliothèque Mazarine. I might just finish this essay by suggesting a little walk in this direction.

  Facing the quay in this short block, the first two buildings were built around 1630. Number seven now houses a tabac on the ground floor, the Tabac des Beaux-Arts, (which is more of a café than a tabac, as it also serves food), which has been there for more than a hundred and fifty years. The current proprietor and his wife are proud of this tradition, and have shared their papers about it with me, photocopied from the Bulletin de la Société historique du VIème Arrondissement, Tome XXXVIII, année 1938. (They are too young to remember André Breton, whom a friend of mine often used to see in their tabac in the fifties, having a drink with other intellectuals and artists; but they know a lot about the neighborhood of today.)

  Reading the history of their building, just that building alone, you see that in the 375 years it has been there, it’s been the scene of at least five hundred personal histories, each with its private anguishes, marital and fiscal disasters, joys, no doubt, and endless legal entanglements, enough for dozens of novels. Just a few of the names: Monsieur de Garsanlan; the Marquis de Mirabel; an English diplomat, Isaac Wake, who was renting but died of a fever; to be replaced by a Dutchman, Hugues de Groot, imprisoned; Guillaume Brisacier, a con man and illegitimate son of Brisacier; Paul and André Verani de Varennes; Monsieur and Madame La Fosse; Marie de St.-Simon, who married René de Cordouan but had the marriage annulled for impotence; Monsieur Alagille, bourgeois…

  Tabac on Quai Malaquais

  The next building, number five, belonged to the same seventeenth-century owner, Jacques de Garsanlan, who also built number seven. If you walk into the number seven courtyard, look into the foyer in the passage on the right, at the beautiful staircase. Up it climbed the former residents, including the ubiquitous Marechal de Saxe, great-grandfather of George Sand, and Baroness Korff, a Swedish friend of Marie-Antoinette’s presumed lover Count Ferson, who was renting it before the Revolution. The baroness and others, appalled by the mounting savagery of the dawning catastrophe, conspired to help get Louis XVI a passport so he could escape, though he didn’t.

  Number three, built around the same time as the others, has a little house in the courtyard, on which the four small della Robbia medallions have been mounted. Number one was part of Queen Margot’s house, but this wing was torn down.

  All three buildings in this row have housed numberless foreign diplomats, for St.
-Germain has always drawn étrangers who had the luck to find themselves here. For the thousandth time, I reflect on why I myself am here, an unexpected fate. In coming with a husband who had work here, liking it, and settling in, I am in the same situation, probably, as the Baroness Korff. All of Paris is filled with foreigners whose story is the same, brought here by chance, staying on. For some people, living in exotic distant places is normal, but John and I never expected to. What luck that life does not turn out exactly as we expect.

  So, finally, I cannot escape the idea that St.-Germain-des-Prés, French as it is, is also ourselves, the foreigners who have always been here. And, if you have always been here, can you be foreign? St.-Germain-des-Prés, in extending its welcome, seems to know that its strangers are part of the whole.

  As to the question of what is eluding us at home—it is perhaps that which Americans go home to address. Little has been written about the answer. Maybe it is one of those questions that is unanswerable, and though I have my own views, those are not the subject of these notes.

  APOLOGIA

  When I began to write about St.-Germain-des-Prés, I had the naive idea that it would be possible to characterize it in the suggested 200 pages or so. I soon realized that one could easily write 200 pages on each of the buildings on my street, or on just the statues of the neighborhood, or only on the magnificent and ancient abbey church itself. To recount the rich history of this quarter, describe the abundant details of its architecture, try to convey its beauty, suggest its meaning to others, mention the fascinating characters who have lived here—all this defies brevity; some principle of selection was called for. This, then, is a subjective account of the things that bear upon my own daily life in St.-Germain-des-Prés, with apologies that of necessity I fall short of presenting the whole with anything like a guidebook’s comprehensiveness. Yet I hope an account of the history and traditions that have created this urban marvel will be helpful in looking at other bridges or buildings beyond those I am speaking of and all the places I haven’t space to include.