Read Online Paris, Paris: Journey Into the City of Light by David Downie - Free Book Online
Authors: David Downie
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had this park built. It struck me that none of those happy children had lived through Mitterrand’s murky reign, and probably not a one would recognize his name.
Island in the Seine: Île Saint-Louis
If you walk along the streets of the Île Saint-Louis, do not ask why you feel gripped by a sort of nervous sadness. For its cause you have only to look at the solitude of the place, at the gloomy aspect of its houses and its large empty mansions …
—H ONORÉ DE B ALZAC
spectacular stone gangplank leaps across five arches to link Paris’ Right Bank with an unsinkable luxury liner midstream in the Seine. The gangplank is the Pont Marie, an early 1600s bridge. The ship is the Île Saint-Louis, an island measuring less than half a mile from tip to storied tip but packed with history, mystery, and atmosphere. Peopled primarily by rich, retiring islanders, its narrow streets are lined by dozens of landmark townhouses and ringed at water level by cobbled quays stippled with poplars. The cathedral of Notre-Dame on the noisy Île de la Cité squats within shouting distance, across a wide footbridge that doubles most of the year as a stage for mimes, fire-eaters, and stand-up comedians. On the isle’s opposite side, beyond the Pont Marie, the Marais spreads its fashion boutiques, art galleries, and mansions, fanning eastward to Place des Vosges and the Bastille.
At first glance the physical distance isolating Île Saint-Louis from mainland Paris may seem negligible, yet the island manages to preserve a peculiar identity, defined more often than not by mixed metaphor. To some it’s Mount Olympus, where writers and artists from Voltaire and Restif de la Bretonne to Théophile Gautier, Charles Baudelaire, Camille Claudel, Dos Passos, and the inevitable Hemingway have lived, worked, and loved. The envious call it a self-contained, self-satisfied biosphere for native bluebloods and transplanted plutocrats. Property values and rents are among the city’s highest. The Rothschilds long lorded it over the island’s upstream end from the gilded salons of the Hôtel Lambert, built in the early 1640s by royal architect Louis Le Vau and, as befits such a manse, surrounded by high walls few mortals ever breach.
To most Parisians, though, the isle has long been perceived as a cruise ship in both shape and spirit, floating free between the Right Bank–Left Bank political divide, so much so that in 1935 cosmetics queen Helena Rubinstein knocked down a 1640s mansion to build herself a vaguely Art Déco pile with a giant transatlantic porthole window at 24 Quai de Béthune. Former French president Georges Pompidou and his fashion-plate wife Claude, alias “the godmother of French art,” also lived in the building, perhaps to be close to their friends the Rothschilds. Nancy Cunard, of the shipping fortune, occupied number 2 Rue Le Regrattier, and Ford Maddox Ford’s Transatlantic Review published Pound, Conrad, Cummings, Stein, Joyce, and others at 29 Quai d’Anjou.
Rejecting nautical references, my wife thinks of the island as an open-air cloister, its sunny side facing south to the Latin Quarter, its northern side lichen-frosted, cool, and shady. That makes sense: like a cloister, much of the time the isle is quieter and moodier, its quays more secluded, than just about anywhere else in town, the result of the locals’ political muscle, which has helped maintain an ingenious system of one-way streets and bridges designed to thwart all but the savviest of cabbies.
Habitués saunter over seeking not bustle and must-see monuments but an eddying, slow Seine churned by riverboats and dotted with seagulls, ducks, and the occasional lost Canadian goose. There are benches shaded by sycamores and weeping willows, lazy anglers of uneatable bottom fish, sunbathers and moon gazers, picnickers and pairs of lovers tangled atop the parapets.
Quiet? Perhaps not in hot weather, when partying youngsters and overexcited bongo drummers beseige the
Island in the Seine: Île Saint-Louis
If you walk along the streets of the Île Saint-Louis, do not ask why you feel gripped by a sort of nervous sadness. For its cause you have only to look at the solitude of the place, at the gloomy aspect of its houses and its large empty mansions …
—H ONORÉ DE B ALZAC
spectacular stone gangplank leaps across five arches to link Paris’ Right Bank with an unsinkable luxury liner midstream in the Seine. The gangplank is the Pont Marie, an early 1600s bridge. The ship is the Île Saint-Louis, an island measuring less than half a mile from tip to storied tip but packed with history, mystery, and atmosphere. Peopled primarily by rich, retiring islanders, its narrow streets are lined by dozens of landmark townhouses and ringed at water level by cobbled quays stippled with poplars. The cathedral of Notre-Dame on the noisy Île de la Cité squats within shouting distance, across a wide footbridge that doubles most of the year as a stage for mimes, fire-eaters, and stand-up comedians. On the isle’s opposite side, beyond the Pont Marie, the Marais spreads its fashion boutiques, art galleries, and mansions, fanning eastward to Place des Vosges and the Bastille.
At first glance the physical distance isolating Île Saint-Louis from mainland Paris may seem negligible, yet the island manages to preserve a peculiar identity, defined more often than not by mixed metaphor. To some it’s Mount Olympus, where writers and artists from Voltaire and Restif de la Bretonne to Théophile Gautier, Charles Baudelaire, Camille Claudel, Dos Passos, and the inevitable Hemingway have lived, worked, and loved. The envious call it a self-contained, self-satisfied biosphere for native bluebloods and transplanted plutocrats. Property values and rents are among the city’s highest. The Rothschilds long lorded it over the island’s upstream end from the gilded salons of the Hôtel Lambert, built in the early 1640s by royal architect Louis Le Vau and, as befits such a manse, surrounded by high walls few mortals ever breach.
To most Parisians, though, the isle has long been perceived as a cruise ship in both shape and spirit, floating free between the Right Bank–Left Bank political divide, so much so that in 1935 cosmetics queen Helena Rubinstein knocked down a 1640s mansion to build herself a vaguely Art Déco pile with a giant transatlantic porthole window at 24 Quai de Béthune. Former French president Georges Pompidou and his fashion-plate wife Claude, alias “the godmother of French art,” also lived in the building, perhaps to be close to their friends the Rothschilds. Nancy Cunard, of the shipping fortune, occupied number 2 Rue Le Regrattier, and Ford Maddox Ford’s Transatlantic Review published Pound, Conrad, Cummings, Stein, Joyce, and others at 29 Quai d’Anjou.
Rejecting nautical references, my wife thinks of the island as an open-air cloister, its sunny side facing south to the Latin Quarter, its northern side lichen-frosted, cool, and shady. That makes sense: like a cloister, much of the time the isle is quieter and moodier, its quays more secluded, than just about anywhere else in town, the result of the locals’ political muscle, which has helped maintain an ingenious system of one-way streets and bridges designed to thwart all but the savviest of cabbies.
Habitués saunter over seeking not bustle and must-see monuments but an eddying, slow Seine churned by riverboats and dotted with seagulls, ducks, and the occasional lost Canadian goose. There are benches shaded by sycamores and weeping willows, lazy anglers of uneatable bottom fish, sunbathers and moon gazers, picnickers and pairs of lovers tangled atop the parapets.
Quiet? Perhaps not in hot weather, when partying youngsters and overexcited bongo drummers beseige the
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