Wednesday, October 27, 2010

Wandering through the Latin Quarter

I hadn't really strolled the true Latin Quarter of the Left Bank yet, so I decided to start where it's busiest, right at the Place St. Michel.  This particular "place" (sort of like a square, except there's nothing "square" about it) sits directly across the river from Notre Dame Cathedral.  Its biggest landmark--well, aside from that little church--is the Gibert Jeune Bookstore, which has been selling books to students and non-students alike for a very long time.  Since I can't possibly resist a bookstore, I pop in and have a look, always searching for new books on the subjects I'm researching even though I'm pretty sure there aren't any.  I don't find one, but I do decide to get a new "plan de Paris"--the little book with maps of all the quarters and a metro map too.  I've had the same one for many years, but my eyes have declined, and I can't see it anymore.  The new one is bigger, but still fits in my back pocket.  Such are the wages of age.

I walk out of Gilbert and head up the huge Boulevard Saint Michel, one of the large Boulevards Haussmann ripped through the city in the 1850s.  Partly, he and the emperor Napoleon III (nephew of the one you've all actually heard of) wanted to clean up the city, clear its air, and give it great vistas.  But they had a slightly more sinister goal too--to make it easier for soldiers to put down riots and revolutions by making it harder for Parisians to block streets with barricades.  Napoleon III and Haussmann were both overthrown in the Revolution of 1871, so that didn't work so well, but Parisians have made their peace with their boulevards, and they do offer lovely vistas of the city.  I head up the grand boulevard toward one of the city's great museums and medieval buildings.  Interestingly enough, it was originally built to take advantage of one of Paris's only Roman landmarks, the bath house constructed for the Roman city of Lutetia in the second century.  That's a shell now, though one can tour it if one cares to.  I walk 'round it to take in the beautiful fifteenth century building that was constructed next it, the main house of the Parisian abbey of Cluny.

My students hear all about the Abbey of Cluny, the source for the reform of the medieval church in the 11th century, but I won't put you to sleep with that little lecture.  Today, the former abbey house is home to the State Museum if Medieval Art.  I go at least once every time I'm in Paris, but I'm feeling especially cheap this year (that damned exchange rate again), so I decide to schedule a visit on the first Sunday in November when the museum is free.  I'll blog about that later.  From Cluny I head up the street through a large complex of buildings that constitute one of the most famous universities in the world, the Sorbonne.  In French administration-speak, it's "Universite de Paris I" because there are several other state universities in Paris, and rather than give them all creative names, French bureaucrats have just numbered them.  It was a socialist thing.  The Sorbonne, though, still keeps its name.  It's been around since the twelfth century when it boasted professors like Thomas Aquinas and Peter Abelard--pretty big names those.  It was THE center of learning and it's still pretty impressive even today.  I take a picture of the entrance to the chapel that Cardinal Richelieu had built to try to bring the often rebellious professors and students under his control.  Like that ever worked.  It still doesn't, as any good university administrator will readily, if ruefully, admit.

Part of the university main buildings sit on the aptly named "rue des Ecoles" or street of schools, and this causes me a somewhat misty moment as I remember that the first hotel where I ever spent a night in the city was on this street, the Hotel St. Jacques.  It's still there, though I think maybe they've installed bathrooms in all the rooms.  When I stayed there, the bathroom was down the hall.  I couldn't afford a room with a bathroom, not least because my wife and baby son (who's now 28 and a loving father of three boys himself) were staying with me.  I remember we ate at a lot of cafeterias.  Such is the poverty-stricken life of a graduate student.

Leaving aside this brief mental stroll down nostalgia lane, I continue climbing.  My immediate goal is the city's oldest hill, which once housed its oldest church, the church of St. Genevieve.  This lovely old church played an important part in the city's history.  The king the French claim as their first, Clovis, was buried there in 511, which was a pretty long time ago.  He was the first ruler to make Paris a capital, and it's pretty well been the capital ever since.  He was also a Merovingian king.  I've no idea why the Wachowski brothers decided to make a character in their Matrix movies "the Merovingian," but that's all my students think about when I try to tell them about the Merovingian kings.  At least they're no longer asking me if Dan Brown was right, that Merovech I, a long-haired barbarian chieftain who would have just as soon killed you as look at you was a descendant of the Virgin Mary.  Sigh.  But I digress.

It would be nice to report that the beautiful old church is still there.  Alas, not so.  In the late eighteenth century, Louis XV and his successor (his grandson, actually), Louis XVI--the one who lost his head--had it torn down and replaced with a massive new domed church in the shape of a Greek cross.  The new church was barely finished by the time the Revolution decided it didn't think much of churches, so they turned the new one into the Pantheon and made it a massive mausoleum for French heroes.  Lots of famous people are here--Voltaire and Rousseau, Victor Hugo and Emile Zola and Jean Jaures, and the Curies.  The last person to be interred was Andre Maurois in 1996.  I guess nobody since has been great enough.  One can pay and tour that too, though it's kind of dark and gloomy.  Might save that one for a free Sunday too. 

I head round the right side of the Pantheon toward one of my favorite strolling streets in the city, the medieval rue Mouffetard.  Well, it used to be a favorite, but the old rue Mouff, as it's called, ain't what it used to be.  Turkish food joints have moved in along with tourist trinket shops, and the street has lost much of its charm, becoming a tourist street.  I try to fight off the guilt I feel at my snobbery in finding this change distasteful, but I can't do it.  Too many tourists, and it really was a lovely street the first few times I visited the city.  Oh well.  At the bottom of the street is one of the city's really lovely little churches, though, the Church of St. Medard.

Unlike the street whose end it anchors, this little church has lost none of its charm, with its cool flying buttresses, its wooden interior, its clean medieval lines.  I imagine that the old church of St. Genevieve must have looked something like this before it was replaced by the grandiose thing that sits on the top of the hill, but maybe I'm just being hopelessly romantic.  The old church is long gone now, so we'll never know, and it's nice, I guess, that Voltaire and Marie Curie can share a space of honor.

Beyond the church of St. Medard, I wander some of the back streets of the Latin Quarter.  The sun is fading a bit, but the city is still beautiful in this light.  I pass by a playground crowded as all the playgrounds in the city always are in the late afternoon with the sound of small children laughing and playing, and I admire simple streets in the city, normal streets with normal shops and no monuments, the kinds of streets that delight the flaneur with their simple sights and smells, with their shop keepers willing to serve with a pleasant "bonjour monsieur," throwing out buckets of water onto the pavement in front and sweeping it to keep it clean.  Parisians like to keep their city clean, well, except for the dog owners, but we won't go there.  I head into a metro station and home.  I'm planning a nice little meal for myself tonight--some soup, a fresh baguette, and a farm-made Camembert, the cheese of the gods.

Thursday, October 21, 2010

From a King's Pavillion to the Lost Temple

Sounds a bit like an Indiana Jones movie, doesn't it?  Nothing quite so dramatic, but I decided to take my walk on the outer edges of the Marais today.  The Marais is the oldest neighborhood in Paris, and one of the few that wasn't carved up into huge boulevards by Haussmann in the 1850s and 1860s.  It still has a lot of its smaller, picturesque streets, cool little shops, and green hideaways--also some grand city houses of the old elites.  I get off the metro and haven't walked half a block before I look left and see a beautiful archway.  I recognize it as one of my favorite squares in the city, the beautiful Place des Vosges.  I found this cool aerial photo of it on the net, but of course, that's not how it looks when you wonder into it.  It's been called the Place des Vosges since early in the French Revolution, named for the first French department (equivalent to an American state) to pay its taxes to the Revolutionary government back in 1792.  I find myself wondering how many states in the U.S. would seek out that particular honor?!  Before that, it was the Place Royale and represented one of the very first efforts at some kind of urban planning.  Henri IV set out the plans for the square and built the first pavillion (which is still called "The King's Pavillion") and "invited" his nobles to pay for the others.  As a result, Paris has one of its most beautiful squares.  Today it's sunny, and so I stroll through the Place des Vosges.  It's the only large green space in this part of Paris, so it's always a popular place for local people to sit and take the sun and for kids to drum up a fast soccer match. 

One of the cooler things about it is that the city closes about half the lawns each day but allows people to lounge on the other half.  That way, they preserve the grass!  It's very French.  After a slow stroll around I leave the Place des Vosges and meander into the Marais past the (closed for renovation) Picasso museum by which there are some very cool little art galleries.  Presumably, people who visit the museum must be in the mood to buy unusual art.  Anyway, I head up toward the Rue Bretagne at the outer edge of this part of the city and take in the sites.  Traffic seems normal to me even though reports claim the French aren't driving as much right now to conserve fuel.  As those of you who've been following the news know, the big French unions have been demonstrating and striking over the conservative government's decision to raise the retirement age from 60 to 62 and the age for full pensions up to 67.  Most countries are doing something similar (the US will have to soon), but it's a big deal here.  It's perceived as a step back in the safety net, which it is.  Anyway, they've been blockading most of the country's refineries, and gas supplies are running low.

You sure wouldn't know it to see the traffic, which is just as crazy as usual.  I make my way down the street to a gorgeous little park called the Parc du Temple (thus the title of this post).  It's almost perfectly rectangular, has a great little playground for kids which, at this time of day (close to 5 pm) is fairly crowded, the kids having gotten out of school for the day, and parents trying to tire them out before dinner.  The sun is fading now, but it's still shining on one side of the park, and those benches are all crowded with people grabbing that last vestige of fall sunshine.  I know this because I go over to grab a little myself. 

One of the odder things about being a historian of France in Paris is that there are usually two Parises I inhabit, the modern one everyone sees, and the historical one behind it that I tend to see.  It's sometimes a bit like having double vision!  In this case, the park sits on the original site of the great monastery of the Knights Templar, the subject of endless goofy Dan Brown-like suspense thrillers.  The Templars were in fact a religious order of the middle ages which did become very wealthy.  King Philip IV decided to take all their money at the beginning of the 1300s and used a charge of heresy as a cover for the theft.  It was a nasty business, but then Philip was a pretty nasty fellow.  He did succeed, however (killing all the Templars he could lay his hands on in the process), and all the property of the Templars became royal, which also conveniently allowed him to set up one of the very first central treasuries in the world.  From such actions are modern states made.  The remains of the Templar properties stayed up for centuries, and the keep--the original castle--was eventually turned into a prison.  Louis XVI and his son who would have been Louis XVII (the so-called "lost dauphin") were imprisoned there before the king was executed by the guillotine.  It was a complete wreck by the mid-19th century and Haussmann tore it down to make a park out of it.

As I walk through the park, with its pretty little lake and bird houses, I wonder if anybody else who spends time here ever thinks about these things.  I decide they probably don't.  I must be the only lunatic contemplating a king two centuries dead in the fading sunlight of a pretty October day in Paris!  The historian's curse, I guess.  But it's been a great "flaneur" wandering this pretty part of the city.  I pop into the "Temple" metro stop named for guess-what, and head for home, making sure to pick up a fresh baguette on my way back to my apartment.  Fresh bread, after all, is one of the true glories of France.

Wednesday, October 20, 2010

Boules Players in the Luxembourg Gardens

OK, I'll make a confession here.  I had a goal.  I was actually going to see something, or rather, to see if I could see something.  But I decided to take my time getting there.  The weather was lovely.  The sun was out, so I took the great Paris Metro (still have to blog about that!) to Odeon on the Left Bank in the heart of what is still called the Latin Quarter.  It really ought to be called the university quarter, but this is Paris, and old names often stick, so even though nobody much studies Latin anymore in the universities, the quarter still takes its name from the fact that they used to...a couple hundred years ago!  It's a lively place as is anyplace where students congregate, and I come out of the metro right by one of my favorite statues, the one of Georges Danton, the great revolutionary leader (and martyr) in a heroic pose.  It's where students traditionally gather to start demonstrations and marches.  Danton would have liked that.  I take a quick appreciative look at old Georges, then head up the rue de l'Odeon past some very cool shops, including Sandreme Ganem which sells colorful teapots that are fired and kiln dried right there.  I head past the Odeon Theatre, one of Paris's older ones and there in front of me are the gates to the Luxembourg Palace and its beautiful gardens.

The palace was originally built for Marie de Medici, yes, THAT family.  She was the wife of King Henri IV and mother of Louis XIII, and she had the palace designed to look like the Pitti Palace in her native Florence.  Today it houses the upper house of the French Legislature, which they also call the Senate.  Nice digs.  I was entering an end I hadn't entered before, strolling along, when I came to a lovely fountain, called, not too originally, the Medici Fountain.  I stopped to take in the view and read the little plaque (in French) that explained to me that it used to be a much longer lawn, but that Haussmann, who redesigned the entire city in the 1860s, wanted to cut a new boulevard through it, so he moved it in closer, and had the pool designed to make it look longer.  Clever fellow Haussmann.  It's a peaceful green space, and there were people lolling about.  The Luxembourg always has people in it because it's one of the few large green spaces on the Left Bank.  But I continued on to the large circular pool that sits in the center of the gardens.  Around it were large numbers of the little metal chairs that are a sort of minor landmark of the city.  There were a number of people sitting about, taking the sun, and, of course, the usual number of couples sitting side by side taking in each other--a recurring theme in this unquenchably romantic city.  I sat down to watch people stroll by.  The Luxembourg is a remarkably democratic kind of place.  Every kind of person wonders through--older couples and younger ones, French people and people from every imaginable nationality.  There was a Russian couple, and a family with large numbers of kids whose ethnicity I couldn't quite identify--eastern European by the sound of the language.  I sat for a while until two men sat in back of me and lit up cigarettes.  If I hadn't been downwind, I would have stayed, but I was, so I left.  Lots of people outside the United States smoke.  Lots inside do too, but fewer.  France passed a law a few years ago banning it indoors, and remarkably, French people decided to obey that one, but that means they all smoke outdoors.  So it was time to move on.

I left and walked toward the corner of the gardens where only those in the know go.  They go to watch the Boules players.  Boules, or Petanque (or Bocci Balls for those of Italian extraction, though in that version the balls are larger, ceramic instead of metal, and brightly colored) is a *very* traditional game in France.  Many people play it, but mostly it's older men, often retired, and it is the most French of games.  I was pretty sure there would be boules players at the courts in the corner of the gardens, and I was rewarded with a fair number of them.  The game isn't too complex.  You throw a small "target" ball about fifteen feet out, then each team tries to get its balls as close to the target as possible.  The first players aim for accuracy, then there are "strikers" (well, that's what I call them), who try to target the enemy's balls and knock them away.  The balls all look remarkably similar, and I often wonder how the players tell them apart, but they do.  Real old-timers have little magnets on the end of strings that they swing down to pick up their balls without having to bend over.  It's a social game.  People talk, measure the distance between balls, laugh, and enjoy the weather.  Family members are often there.  In this case, there were several wives sitting to watch.  One was knitting.  Acquaintances would show up, shake hands with the men, do the little kiss on both cheeks (the real ones, not the fake ones you see on TV) with the women, talk about this and that.  It's said that France is a nation of villages, and certainly Paris is a city of them.  When I sit and watch the Boules players, I feel a part of the village.

I sat for a half hour or so and admired the skills.  It's a lazy game, but it fits the culture somehow, and one can easily imagine everybody repairing off to the cafe afterward for a little glass of wine or beer, or maybe a coffee.  Time to go.  Out I went by another gate and headed for the church of Saint Sulpice.  I hadn't been there in many years, so I decided to take in the famous Delacroix paintings that grace one of the chapels.  I found the church being restored, with scaffolding in front of it, but the entry was clear.  Saint-Sulpice was once the seat of the most important seminary in France where most of its great bishops were educated.  That's moved on, of course.  A few years ago, the church drew the bizarre attention of Da Vinci Code tourists because there's a meridian line in it.  It was actually put there to figure out when Easter would be, but Dan Brown invented all kinds of nonsense about it in a book packed with nonsense, and so for a while, mobs of tourists came to gawk at it.  I hope they left some money.  Maybe that's what's paying for the restoration of the front!
Anyway, I'm not there to look for the body of the Virgin Mary or any weird albino priest murderers.  I'm there to look at art.  In the first bay to the right as you enter are the last three great masterpieces of the 19th century painter Eugene Delacroix.  He moved near to the church to paint them, and that house, where he also died, also houses a lovely little museum dedicated to his work.  I go into the chapel, and sit on the bench and admire the work.  It's not well presented because it's not well lit, but if you sit there long enough, you can see the remarkable liveliness of it.  I particularly like the fight between Jacob and the Angel, which seems to me to be far more passionate than the usual bit of church art. 

Anyway, I wander 'round the church (which is also renowned for having one of the finest pipe organs in France) and realize that, like so many late baroque churches, it's not really that interesting...well...unless you're looking for secret code stuff!

I head out of the church and back to the Odeon, say a final little farewell to Danton, and head down into the metro network.  It's been a great walk, but I'm looking forward to dinner with my friend Gordon in one of our favorite restaurants, and nothing will keep me from that!



Monday, October 18, 2010

From Montmartre to Pigalle--what a place to start

Usually, I work on my research and writing in the morning, exercise a bit, and take the afternoon to do my wandering about, but today I worked longer because I had an atrocious cold this weekend and didn't get the work done I wanted to do.  So, I decided to eat early and wander a bit at night.  Where to go?  It was a pleasant evening, and thinking the weather might soon turn damp, I decided to go up to Montmartre and meander down from there.  Montmartre is a very touristy place, both because it offers a great free view of the city, and because there's a huge church up there which looks like it was transplanted from medieval Byzantium.  Sacre Coeur Cathedral (translated as the Cathedral of the Sacred Heart) is made of white limestone which, rather bizarrely, only gets whiter when it rains, and it rains a lot.  So it's pretty white.  I don't like the church much.  It was built by the Third Republic in 1871 after it crushed the Socialist Paris Commune explicitly to ask heavenly forgiveness for that particular sin--the socialism, not the crushing.  Old leftists like me are therefore put off by it.  Right now, for some reason, it makes me think of Sarah Palin. It's also kind of ugly inside, but maybe that's just my bias at work.  I don't go in unless someone who's visiting me drags me in there.  Then I sit and stew.

Anyway, I didn't go up to Montmartre for the church.  I came for the view, which is stunning, even with lots of empty beer bottles and cigarette butts littering the stairs in front of the church.  There were tourists there, of course, a relatively loud group of young Germans on this occasion, but they moved along, and I contemplated the city I adore.  What strikes one from that vantage point is how level the buildings are.  The city passed laws and regulations decades ago controlling the height of its buildings.  Builders cheat now and then, but not by much, and the lack of the sort of canyons that mark many other cities helps give Paris its character, the sense of a city that one can live in and breathe in, even if too often, the air smells of cigarette smoke.

Anyway, I wandered away from the view and toward the supremely touristy Place du Tertre, where blizzards of tourists get their sketches made by "artists" who demand outrageous prices and get them.  It's full of restaurants French people never visit, but if you can manage to look past that--and it's tough--the buildings are still lovely, and you can still get some sense of what the village of Montmartre was once like, the one where real artists used to live, people like Utrillo and Dali, especially if you get out of the Place du Tertre, which I do with dispatch.  Freed from the crowds, I start downhill on a deserted street and find the lovely little Place Goudeau, a verticle little tree-lined park with benches and one of those marvelous little Wallace Fountains in the middle.  These were placed around Paris in the 1870s by an English philanthropist bothered by the fact that poor people had to pay for water.  They're still a great place to get a drink of pure water.  This photo shows the one I saw, though it was made in the daytime.  As I sit on a bench, I observe a young couple on another bench.  Since I'm a flaneur and not a voyeur, I don't watch too closely.  Not that they care.  Couples in Paris never do.  It's a stereotype of the city that it lends itself to lovers.  Sometimes stereotypes are true.  That one certainly is.

I leave the Place, head down one of the pretty stairways for which this district is famed and find myself on the tiny one-lane rue Andre Antoine.  It's very quiet here--the shops are all closed and people seem to have gone to bed early.  I decide to go wherever this little street takes me, and pretty soon I know exactly where it's going.  I've been dropped rather unceremoniously into the middle of the red light district of Pigalle.

Pig Alley as some American servicemen once rather aptly mispronounced it, is one of the oldest red light districts in Europe, and that's saying something.  I try not to come to Pigalle on purpose, especially at night, when it is at its tacky worst, but, here is where my feet have led me.  The neon signs are bright, in lurid reds, purples, and pinks.  "Sex Shop!" and "Sex Toys" and "Live Girls" blare at me as I wander down the street.  There are touts out front of some places trying hard to get my attention.  This is the only place in Paris where I ignore people who want to say hello, and I think about how sad that is.  In the middle of it all, of course, is the famous, or infamous Moulin Rouge, its huge electric windmill circling overhead, a line of people always at the door ready to pay 150 euros per person--that's $210 at present exchange rates--for a third-rate meal with second-rate champagne to watch a fourth-rate girlie show.  The place is always sold out.

In among the sex shops and tacky peep shows are those Turkish kebab places that seem to have sprouted everywhere in Paris like some kind of culinary Canadian thistle.  They're busy too.  I pass a small bar with men talking on telephones and wonder if they're pimps, and it strikes me that there really is no more lonely or desolate place in a city than a crowded red light district.  Every city has one, and this one is more famous than most.  And it's busy, swallowing up yen and euros and rubles and dollars.  I decide I've had enough for the evening.  I didn't come to Paris to get depressed, it's misting a little, and I don't want to get wet, so I pop into the Pigalle metro station, and the city's wondrous subway system--the subject all by itself of a future post--sweeps me back toward my apartment atop the sixth floor on the northeast side of the city.  I'll wander somewhere else tomorrow, but not in Pigalle again...not if I can help it.

So, what's a Flaneur?

If I were a woman, I'd be a Flaneuse.  But, I suffer from an inferior gender identity, being male, so I'm a Flaneur.  My on-line dictionary defines a flaneur as a "stroller, idler, loafer, lounger."  I like all those, and I enjoy doing all four, often at the same time, but the problem is they don't fit the word.  "Flaneur" is not only a French word, it's a very Parisian one.  It applies to that person who likes to wander the streets of this particular city, preferably with no visible, conceptual, or even imaginary object in view.  The Flaneur goes where his feet take him, nosing around this most beautiful and individual of cities, observing the local flora and fauna, dodging its sometimes chaotic traffic, smelling its smells, tasting its tastes.  Tourists are not Flaneurs because the definition of a tourist is someone who sees what s/he has come to see.  I'm sometimes a tourist, and I have nothing against tourists.  I think they get a bad rap, but I've been to this city many times over the last thirty years, lived in it for months at a time, and now, having visited most of the places one would come here to see, I sometimes just start some place and wander.  As I wander, I make comments to myself, and because several people have--with more kindness than common sense, I think--suggested I write some of these comments down, I've decided to do it.  I hope they won't regret suggesting it once they read it.  I take some comfort in the knowledge that I may at least cure readers of insomnia.  That's a public service of a kind.  I don't promise that my impressions of this city I've come to love so much will be particularly original, but they will be true, or at least, as true as I can make them.  Feel free to comment.