Read Online Paris, Paris: Journey Into the City of Light by David Downie - Free Book Online Page A

quays. This newfound animation might be catching: the once-dusty Polish library, with Chopin memorabilia, has been given a lick of paint, but its operating hours are relaxed and, frankly, few set foot in it. The church of Saint Louis en l’Île used to be remarkable only for its gilt clock. Now it has a functioning three-thousand-pipe organ specially designed for baroque music. You practically have to beg to get into the Hôtel de Lauzun, a townhouse owned by the city, for a view from on high. Add in a handful of cafés with outdoor terraces facing Notre-Dame or Saint-Gervais, a travel bookshop run by a colorful woman who seems to love to turn away customers, an unusual fishing and fly-tying establishment called La Maison de la Mouche (“the fly house”), a few cozily pricey hotels and undistinguished restaurants that cater to the compatriots Hemingway disdained, and that’s about it. Except, naturally, for Berthillon ice cream, and the chocolate shops, bakeries, butcher shops, and sellers of “antiques,” gadgets, and junky souvenirs—all on the downstream end of the island’s spinal-column street, now the haunt of sports-shoppers, those marathon inspectors of window displays.
    Admittedly, in this street, in 2003, former three-star chef Antoine Westermann of Strasbourg’s Buerehiesel opened a chic restaurant, Mon Vieil Ami. It and it alone has managed to regild the island’s culinary reputation. The famous, some might say notorious, Nos Ancêtres les Gaulois, the archetype of pseudo-Gallic kitsch, is a block away and serves fare whose operative descriptor is “Gaul.”
    It’s precisely the unrushed, backwater-ish quality of the island’s residential perimeter and crossroads that make l’Île appealing. A stroll around this metaphorical luxury liner’s deck is often the twilight highlight of my day, and not simply because I live a few hundred yards east of the Pont Marie and its mainland Métro station—no grubby subway has ever sullied the Île Saint-Louis itself. For one thing this is big-sky country with low buildings, a wide river, and sea breezes blowing up from Le Havre. The best views in town of Notre-Dame’s buttressed back, and the Pantheon’s massive dome, are through the leaves of the trees lining the Quai d’Orléans. There are architectural details galore: carved keystones, masks, rusty mooring rings, stone garlands. The Right Bank’s turreted, statue-encrusted Hôtel de Ville, alias city hall, seems much more than an 1870s fake when glimpsed at dusk from the island’s Quai de Bourbon, named not for sour mash but for the royal dynasty that produced the bigwig pre-Revolutionary series of kings named Louis, including number XIII (1601 to 1643).
    It was this otherwise unremarkable monarch who, in 1614, gave developer Christophe Marie and his partners the go-ahead to build the Pont Marie and transform the island from cow pasture to aristocratic playground. Marie devised the novel grid of streets girded by stone embankments. As I do my daily shuffle around this early masterpiece of real estate speculation, hands clasped behind my back, I spot the same regulars, pedigrees on each end of the leash, circling slowly, lifting their eyes or legs to the mossy old mansions. They weave warily among the hordes of ice-cream pilgrims slurping cones on the island’s busiest cross streets, Rue des Deux Ponts and Rue Saint-Louis-en-l’Île. Among gastronomes and guidebook authors the Île Saint-Louis is celebrated today more for its luscious Berthillon glaces et sorbets than for its architectural or literary past, much to the chagrin of islanders with genealogical trees as complex as the spreading old sycamores knotted around my favorite spot, the isle’s downstream prow.
    That past is written in stone, made easy to read for nonspecialists by plaques mounted on about half the landmark townhouses, nearly all of them designed in the mid 1600s for royal tax collectors and others with a license to steal. The