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.
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