Perusing Paris
• Map of Paris (graphic)
By Bob Rees
Special to The Advertiser
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| Strolling the streets of Paris, stopping at shops and sidewalk cafes, you can retrace the footsteps of Hemingway and Sartre; in some cases, the same businesses are still operating.
Gannett News Service |
Beginning with Caesar's Commentaries — "Gallia est omnis divisa in partes tres" ("All of Gaul is divided into three parts") — our most enduring views of France have come from those who have recorded their impressions.
The result is an indelible and unchanging Paris. Janet Flanner, reflecting on the "Letters from Paris" columns she wrote for New Yorker magazine, recalls of her first days in Paris in the 1920s: "One's eyes became the eyes of a painter, because the sight itself approximated art... The Pont Neuf still looked as we had known it on the canvases of Sisley and Pissarro."
Parisians casually refer to their surrounding atmosphere as "l'air du temps" — roughly translated, "the temperature of the time." Among other things, this zeitgeist ferments the spirits of individualism, idiosyncrasy and creativity that so distinguish life in Paris.
It was this spirit that moved American writer Henry Miller, in his first novel, "Tropic of Cancer" of 1934, to write, "It is now my second year in Paris ... I have no money, no resources, no hopes. I am the happiest man alive."
In "A Moveable Feast," his memoir of Paris during the 1920s, Ernest Hemingway wrote, "Paris was always worth it, and you received return for whatever you brought to it."
The Essential Paris
To see Paris, there are certain things places you must visit. Your first stop, to get your bearings, ought to be for coffee on the outdoor rooftop terrace of La Samaritaine department store. Located on Quai du Louvre on the Right Bank, it offers splendid views of Paris. Ask for the map to landmarks.
Stop by the Mariage Freres tea room on the third floor for a view of the Seine and Left Bank while you enjoy tea and madeleine cakes. (It was the aroma and taste of a madeleine that triggered Marcel Proust's recollections in what many consider the finest French novel of the 20th century, the seven-volume "Remembrance of Things Past.")
There's no better place to start in seeing Paris than where it all began.
Ile de la Cité
Paris grew outward from this small island in the Seine. The Romans called it Lutetia, from the Latin for mud, and Victor Hugo later used it as the locale for Les Miserables.
The Latin Quarter, just across the Seine from Ile de la Cité, got its name because it was in the Roman settlement. (Just off Boulevard St.-Germain in the Latin Quarter is the Hotel de Cluny with its excavations of Roman baths dating from AD 200.)
Ile de la Cité offers Paris' two finest churches, Notre-Dame and Sainte-Chapelle. Sainte-Chapelle represents the height of Gothic architecture. The upper chapel, due to the miracle of the groin vault, appears to be supported only by the stained glass windows, the oldest in Paris, that tell the biblical story of mankind.
Afterward, walk to the east end of Ile de la Cité and cross the bridge to the Ile St.-Louis. Hemingway enjoyed its "narrow streets and the old, tall, beautiful houses."
The Louvre
Don't dare set foot in the Louvre without a specific objective. More than 55,000 works of art are on display, and visitors who only wander about are apt to be overwhelmed and disappointed.
Obtain a floor plan at the information desk in the lobby and be sure to ask which galleries are closed (due to staffing problems.)
Of special interest but often overlooked is the Medieval Louvre, with access on the ground floor, that features the walls and foundations of the original structures that were built as a fortress in 1190. Also highly recommended are the Mesopotamia display on the ground floor of the Richelieu wing (with its Code of Hammurabi basalt stele) and the Italian paintings of the 13th to 15th centuries on the first floor of the Denon wing.
Study the vista that extends on a single axis from the marvelous glass pyramid entrance designed by I.M. Pei in 1989 all the way to the Arc de Triomphe and beyond. This view moved Hemingway to write, "We walked back through the Tuileries in the dark and stood and looked through the Arc du Carrousel up across the dark gardens with the lights of the Concorde behind the formal darkness and then the long rise of lights toward the Arc de Triomphe."
Musee d'Orsay
On the Left Bank, across the Seine from the Louvre in what until 1986 was a railway station, is the Orsay Museum. It houses the greatest collection of Impressionist painting in the world. Be sure to seek out Van Gogh's "La Nuit Etoille sur Rhone."
The upper level of the museum offers a good café and also a terrace with views from the Seine to the Sacre-Coeur in Montmartre.
Afterward, you might want to see more of Monet's work at the Musee Marmottan-Monet in the village of Auteuil not far from the Eiffel Tower. This museum displays 65 Monets bequeathed by the painter's son, including the one that gave Impressionism its name, "Impression — Sunrise."
While in Auteuil, visit also Le Corbusier Foundation and the Villa la Roche house he designed in 1923.
Then, for more of Corbusier and many others who ushered in the era of the modern after 1905, visit the Musee National d'Art Modern at the George-Pompidou Centre, known as the inside-out museum because its functional tubes and pipes are on the glass exterior. On its fifth floor, it offers 40 galleries with 900 classic works of modern art.
Not far away is the Musee Picasso at 5 Rue de Thorigny in the Marais district. The art was provided in lieu of taxes following Picasso's death. While at the museum, be sure to ask if you can visit the archives where the letters and other affects of Picasso are kept and sometimes displayed.
The boulevard cafes
The Boulevard St.-Germain, from east to west, extends from the Institut du Monde Arabe — an Arab cultural center that offers a great museum and a 9th-floor terrace and restaurant with tremendous views of Ile St.-Louis and Ile de la Cité — to the French National Assembly. It takes you through the Latin Quarter, the university district and past the oldest church in Paris, St.-Germain-des-Pres. Clustered together just west of St.-Germain-des-Pres are three cafes renowned for their intellectual and artistic clientele: Les Deux Magots, Café de Flore and Brasserie Lipp.
It was at Les Deux Magots that Jean-Paul Sartre, Albert Camus and later Francois Sagan used to argue about what Sartre called "Being and Nothingness." It was on the outdoor terrace that Sartre was introduced to Jean Genet.
Almost next door, the Café de Flore was, according to Sartre, a second home for him and Simone de Beauvoir.
The Brasserie Lipp, across the boulevard, was a Hemingway haunt where he worked on "A Farewell to Arms," sitting "on the bench against the wall with the mirror in back and a table in front."
In another part of Paris, the international bohemian quarter of Montparnasse, you'll find three equally significant cafes on Boulevard du Montparnasse. La Rotonde, frequented by Trotsky even while Lenin was working there as a waiter, features Garbari's painting of 1916, "Les Intellectuels ‡ la Rotonde," on its menu cover.
Le Dome, just across the boulevard from La Rotonde, was a gathering place for struggling painters, including Modigliani and Picasso.
Just a few doors from Le Dome is La Coupole, the café frequented by William Faulkner and Samuel Beckett.
How do we account for all this café life? The intellectuals and artists of Paris lived in cold and sometimes sleazy hotels. Cafes offered clean, well-lighted places to socialize, keep warm, even work.
While in Montparnasse, the quarter that Janet Flanner in 1926 claimed was the source of characterizations for Ernest Hemingway's roman á clef, "The Sun All Rises," visit the cemetery. Buried there are Sartre and De Beauvoir, Beckett, Eugene Ionesco, Alfred Dreyfus, Emile Durkheim and others who provided Montparnasse with its character. Every day, Parisians leave tokens of affection and remembrance on these graves.
Luxembourg Palace
About midway between Montparnasse and the Seine River is Luxembourg Palace, built by Marie de Medici because she didn't like living at the Louvre. The palace is home to the Musee du Luxembourg, the museum where Hemingway learned lessons "from the painting of Cezanne that made writing simple true sentences far from enough."
The garden, with its Medici Fountain, offers one of Paris' great experiences. It attracts not only students and faculty from the nearby Sorbonne but Parisians of all varieties. No matter how cold the day — even when the ponds and fountains are coated with ice — just a hint of sunshine brings Parisians to this great urban park of the Latin Quarter.
Across the street from the garden is the Café le Rostand, named after the author of Cyrano de Bergerac. Nearby is the fine Luxembourg Hotel where William Faulkner lived. Not far from there is 27 Rue de Fleurus where expatriates Gertrude Stein and Alice Toklas lived and entertained from 1903 to 1937.
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The unexpected Paris
Paris offers not only a city that is familiar to all of us but another unexpected Paris. Just a few examples:
The national libraries — the French National Library offers eight branches and at least two are worth visiting. The Francois Mitterrand site features four L-shaped towers that represent open books. The books are stored in the towers above ground and the library users work below ground where a sunken pine forest brightens the view. Library cards are available for about $4.
The Richelieu site at 58 Rue de Richelieu, with manuscripts and documents, is on the street where Moliere wrote many of the plays that were performed at the nearby Comedie Francaise. Also nearby is the Palais Royal, once the home of Cardinal Richelieu, with its famous courtyard that is now the venue for Restaurant Vefour, one of Paris's finest.
English language bookstores — Shakespeare & Company, on the Left Bank facing Notre Dame, takes its name from the original owned by Sylvia Beach. It was Beach who published James Joyce's Ulysses in 1922 and who used to loan books to T.S. Eliot, Gertrude Stein, Sherwood Anderson, Ezra Pound and other struggling writers.
Recalled Hemingway, "In those days there was no money to buy books. I borrowed from the rental library of Shakespeare & Company, which was the library and bookstore of Sylvia Beach at 12 Rue de l'Odeon."
After the original closed, George Whitman bought the name and in 1956 opened his version of Shakespeare & Company at 37 Rue de la Bucherie off Quai de Montebello. With a loose affiliation to Laurence Ferlingetti's City Lights Bookshop in San Francisco, the new Shakespeare & Company became a hangout for Alan Ginsberg, Jack Kerouac, James Baldwin and Richard Wright.
Whitman, now 91 years old, maintains a lending library and reading room on the second floor. If you ask, he'll take you to his flat on the third floor where he displays his photos of the poor and famous.
Just west of Shakespeare & Company, across Rue St.-Jacques and behind the St. Severin Church at 29 Rue de la Parcheminerie, is another fine bookstore, Brian Spence's The Abbey. Spence, a Canadian expatriate, is happy to offer you a cup of coffee while you search his labyrinth stacks.
The Village Voice Bookshop, at 6 Rue Princesse near St.-Sulpice Church, is managed by Michael Neal. He will be delighted to fill you in on the latest regarding the intellectual and political wars of France.
Jo Goldenberg's Deli — At 7 Rue des Rosiers in the center of le Pretzl (the Jewish section) in the Marais district, this deli is run by the sons of a Russian who fled the Kishinev pogrom in 1920. The deli offers its own Russian vodka, a classic assortment of food and a terrific introduction to the neighborhood.
After bagels and lox at Jo Goldenberg's, be sure to explore the entire Marais district that extends from the Hotel de Ville (City Hall) to Place de la Bastille. Among other things, you'll discover perhaps the finest square in Paris, Place des Vosges. At 6 Place des Vosges is the home of Victor Hugo.
Also in the Marais district is the Hotel de Sens, the only surviving medieval residence in all of Paris and now home to the Forney fine arts library.
Musee Jacaquemart-Andre — Sometimes compared to the Frick in New York City, this museum at 158 Blvd. Haussmann, not far from where Marcel Proust lived at No. 102, is in one of the great private homes of Napoleon III's Second Empire. It's art collection features Botticelli, Rembrandt and Van Dyke. You can dine in a glorious hall that features a painting by Tiepolo on its high ceiling. The painting depicts people looking over a balcony at the diners below.
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A little light reading makes trip more fun
Before you get on a plane for Paris, there is a certain amount of work you must do, not the least of which is some reading. A few suggestions:
- "Paris was Yesterday: 1925-1939" by Janet Flanner. Flanner's great "Letter from Paris" columns written for the New Yorker magazine under the name of Genet.
- "A Moveable Feast," Ernest Hemingway. Hemingway wrote about this book of 1960 in a letter to a friend: "If you are lucky enough to have lived in Paris as a young man, then wherever you go for the rest of your life, it stays with you, for Paris is a moveable feast."
- "Napoleon," Paul Johnson. The great man as seen by one of our most informed commentators.
- "The Green Guide," Michelin. With this and a large map, you can envision the Paris you'd like to see.
- "The Flaneur: A Stroll through the Paradoxes of Paris," Edmund White. One in a series by writers about the city secrets they know best.
- "France in Modern Times," Gordon Wright. The history of France from 1750. Wright, from whom this writer took classes at Stanford University, is perhaps the nation's most intelligible and most entertaining writer about France.
There are other preparations. Before you leave, be sure to contact the Paris tourism office, 127 Avenue des Champs-Elysees, or www.paris-touristoffice.com. They will provide, in English, notice of upcoming events and exhibits. (When in Paris, the office can help with hard-to-get tickets. While the French don't spend much time at the Louvre, most of the temporary art exhibits are sold out well in advance.)
If you have an interest in French cooking lessons, one of your best bets is Promenades Gourmande, run by Paule Caillat. She can be reached at Paule.caillat@wanadoo.fr. The cost is about $250 for a day that includes shopping for the best raw materials.
If you enjoy cooking, plan also on visiting E. Dehillerin at 20 Rue Coquilliere near Les Halles, the area called "the belly of Paris" by the French novelist and critic Emile Zola, who lived in Paris in the late 19th century. E. Dehillerin's is the best kitchenware store in Paris and offers the further advantage being close to Le Pied de Cochon, a 24-hour-a-day restaurant famous for its onion soup.
If you are need of a specialized tour, contact Rachael Kaplan, www.frenchlinks.com. She has lived in Paris since 1994, and her father studied there on the G.I. Bill.
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Stroll boulevards beloved by writers
The best way to experience transcendental Paris is on foot. Armed with a Michelin Green Guide and a map, you can create your own walks. Here are two to get you started.
Walking with writers
(About 90 minutes, but half a day is best.)
Begin at Café Dumas on Place de la Contrescarpe in Ernest Hemingway's old neighborhood in the Latin Quarter. What is now Café Dumas used to be the Café des Amateurs and was described by Hemingway as "the cesspool" of the neighborhood. Today it is a fine brasserie.
The square overlooked by Café Dumas is a small jewel, something from a Sisley painting.
Running south from the square is Rue Mouffetard, remembered by Hemingway as "that wonderful narrow crowded market street." It will take you from the square to Rue du Pot de Fer, where George Orwell lived while he worked on "Down and Out in Paris and London."
Wrote Orwell, "It was a narrow street — a ravine of tall, leprous houses, lurching towards one another in queer attitudes, as though they had all been frozen in the act of collapse." It hasn't changed.
Heading north out of the square on Place de la Contrescarpe you'll find Rue Cardinal Lemoine. Hemingway lived at No. 74 and James Joyce at No. 71 Rue Cardinal Lemoine.
From there, if you head west on Rue Clovis, the walk is that taken almost daily by Hemingway: "I walked down past the Lycee Henri Quatre and the ancient church of St.-Entienne-du-Mond and the windswept Place du Pantheon and cut in for shelter to the right and finally came out on the lee side of the Boulevard St.-Michel and worked on down past the Cluny and the Boulevard St.-Germain until I came to a good café that I knew on the Place St.-Michel."
If you keep walking on Boulevard St.-Michel until you reach the Seine, and then head one block west along Quai Des Grandes Augustins to Rue Git le Coeur, you'll find the Hotel du Vieux Paris where the beatnik writers from San Francisco used to stay during the 1950s and early '60s.
A little further west on Quai Des Grandes Augustins is a cross street of the same name and the studio where Picasso painted in the 1930s.
A fashionable stroll
(A couple of hours, three if you add Avenue George V; but a day is not too much.)
Start at Café de la Paix, where singers Edith Piaf and Josephine Baker used to have supper, and cross the street to the Palais Garnier at Place de l'Opera. Even though tickets are as much as about $88, make a point of seeing the National Ballet of Paris at this fine example of architecture from the Second Empire. The intermissions will provide the opportunity to study the overhanging balconies, the classical columns and the ceiling painted by Marc Chagall that so distinguish the Palais Garnier.
Just north of the Opera Garnier on Boulevard Haussmann are two department stores, Galeries Lafayette (with a fine gourmet store and a quasi-pornographic new lingerie shop, Le Red Hot Boulevard) and Printemps (with its new two-level display of booths, each created by one of 200 makeup and fragrance companies).
From Place de l'Opera, take Boulevard de la Madeleine to Place de la Madeleine. There you'll find two of Paris' best gourmet stores, Fauchon's, at No. 26, and Hediard's, at No. 21. They are elegant but expensive. One kilogram of pure Kona coffee costs about $106.
From the front steps of the Madeleine Church you can enjoy one of the best vistas in Paris, down Rue Royale to Place de la Concorde across the Seine to the National Assembly. Just off this axis to the west is Hotel Des Invalides, with its Musee de l'Armee. (The portion devoted to World War I is closed until 2006, but the new section on World War II has opened and is well worth seeing.)
Wrote American author James Baldwin of Place de la Concorde, "Whenever I crossed la place de la Concorde, I heard the tumbrels arriving, and the road of the mob, and where the obelisk now towers, I saw — and see — la guillotine."
From Rue Royale you can turn east on Rue du Faubourg St.-Honore. This is one of the great shopping streets of Paris. Be sure to visit Au Nain Blue, the toy store founded in 1836.
From St.-Honore head north on Rue de Castiglione, the street where Orwell worked as a hotel plongeur (dishwasher — "one of the slaves in the modern world," as he called it), to Place Vendome. There, at 15 Place Vendome, is the Ritz Hotel, with its famous Hemingway Bar. It's a good stopping-off point.
If you want to see still more of fashionable Paris and even the Paris of haute couture, begin at Café Fouquet — a hangout for celebrities and film stars — on Avenue des Champs-Elysees. From there, stroll south on Avenue George V past the Hotel George V (always decorated inside with enormous displays of fresh flowers and now home to Paris' newest three-star restaurant, Le Cinq) and past the American Cathedral (which opened in 1886 to coincide with the unveiling of the Statue of Liberty).
When you reach the Seine, turn almost 145 degrees northeast to follow the Avenue Montaigne back to Champs-Elysees. For shopping on avenues George V and
Montaigne, take lots of money.
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Tips on where to stay, what to do in Paris
These days, it seems easier to fly on a U.S. carrier, and United and American can take you to Paris from Hawai'i with plane changes in Los Angeles or San Francisco. Expect to pay in excess of $800 for an economy-class round-trip ticket booked in advance.
For a hotel or place to stay, the really grand hotels such as Plaza Athenee, Hotel Crillon and George V are often isolated and somehow aloof from Paris. The city is filled with moderately priced and good hotels where you will feel Parisian while avoiding Americans on expense accounts.
For dining, the bistros, brasseries and cafés that you see on every block are highly recommended. Even the least-expensive of French restaurants takes great pride in its culinary art. If you insist, there are seven three-star restaurants in Paris, but you will need reservations well in advance for the privilege of paying $190 or more per person. As an alternative, try La Rotisserie du Beaujolais at
19 Quai de la Tournelle, across the street from Tour d'Argent. Without wine, the cost is about $38 per person.
The best way to see the classic Paris, the one contained within a sort of magic parallelogram defined by the Eiffel Tower and Arc de Triomphe to the west and the Bastille and Pantheon to the east, is on foot or by city bus. Purchase a Carte Orange, a pass good for seven days that offers unlimited rides on all buses and on the underground Metro for only about $17. The Carte Orange also is good for the Montmartrobus that climbs up to Sacre Coeur and returns to Place Pigalle.
Also fun is the Batobus, a boat that makes eight stops on the Seine at strategic points and allows you to get on and off as you wish. The cost is about $12.
For Internet connection, there's the Cyber Café at 18 Rue de la Bucherie on the Left Bank near Notre Dame. It offers English keyboards. One hour is about $6.
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If you go ...
Mobile: For hotel and tourism information, visit www.mobile.org or www.gulfshores.com, or call the Mobile Convention Bureau at (800) 566-2453.
PARADE SCHEDULE:
- Feb. 12 — Order of the Polka Dots, 6:15 p.m.
- Feb. 13 — Order of the Inca Parade (www.orderofinca.com), 6:30 p.m.
- Feb. 14 — Mobile Mystics Parade (www.mobilemystics.com), 2 p.m.; Maids of Mirth, 6:30 p.m.; Order of Butterfly Maidens and Mobile Married Mystics, 7 p.m.
- Feb. 15 — Order of the Pharoahs (www.thepharaohs.org), 2:30 p.m.; Mystic Friends, 3:30 p.m.; Neptune's Daughter, 6:30 p.m.
- Feb. 16 — Krewe of Marry Mates, 6:30 p.m.; Mystical Ladies, 7 p.m.
- Feb. 17 — Order of LaShe, 6:30 p.m.; Order of Venus, 7 p.m.
- Feb. 19 — Mystic Striper, 6:30 p.m.
- Feb. 20 — Crewe of Columbus, 6:30 p.m.
- Feb. 21 — Floral, 12 noon; Knights of Mobile, 12:45 p.m.; coronation of queen to King Felix III, 6:30 p.m.; Mystics of Time, 6:30 p.m.
- Feb. 22 — Arrival of King Elexis, 2 p.m.; Joe Cain, 2:30 p.m.; Le Krewe de Bienville, 5 p.m.; Les Femmes Cassettes, 5:30 p.m.; coronation of King Elexis, 8:15 p.m.
- Feb. 23 — Arrival of King Felix III, noon; Infant Mystics, 6:30 p.m.
- Feb. 24 — Order of Athena, 10:30 a.m.; Knights of Revelry, 12:30 p.m.; King Felix, 1 p.m.; Comic Cowboys, 1:30 p.m.; Mobile Area Mardi Gras Association, 3 p.m.; Order of Myths, 6:30 p.m.
Correction: Francois Mitterrand's name was misspelled in a previous version of this story.
