Read Online Paris, Paris: Journey Into the City of Light by David Downie - Free Book Online Page B
Authors: David Downie
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plaques provide names and birth dates, followed by a few pithy words that can lead you a merry romp through the history books. Here’s what you find at number 22 Quai de Béthune, facing the Latin Quarter: Hôtel Lefebvre de la Malmaison, conseiller au Parlement, 1645. Baudelaire y vécut 1842–43 . Deciphered, the plaque tells you the mansion’s name (Hôtel Lefebvre de la Malmaison), the owner’s occupation as councillor at Parlement, the construction date, and the fact that poet Charles Les-Fleurs-du-Mal Baudelaire lived here in the mid-nineteenth century. The façade doesn’t stir the imagination, exception made for the curious bat-like creature with a female, human head, poised over the main door. Yet you can’t help wondering if it was within these walls or at Baudelaire’s other island abode, among the hashish-smokers of the Hôtel de Lauzun, that the tormented genius penned the lines Luxe, calme et volupté —luxury, peace and sensuous indulgence—so often associated with the paintings of Matisse. Is it a coincidence, you might ask, that while here, or perhaps while remembering his time on the Île Saint-Louis, Baudelaire wrote of the mythical island Cythère, sad and bleak, an “Eldorado of all the old fools”?
Baudelaire wasn’t talking about a Cadillac but rather referring to Voltaire’s imaginary golden paradise in Candide . It’s a two-fold reference: Voltaire also lived on the island, in the 1740s, ensconced with his lady friend the Marquise du Châtelet in the longtime Rothschild residence, the Hôtel de Lambert. There’s no plaque to this effect on the palatial, 43,000-square-foot townhouse. Nor is there anything to indicate that from 1949 until his death in 2004, the once-flamboyant and later reclusive Alexis von Rosenberg, Baron de Redé, lover of the wealthy Arturo Lopez-Willshaw and soul mate of the Baroness Marie-Hélène Rothschild, lived in the mansion’s magnificent second-floor apartment, among precious antiques and artworks. Le baron would famously flit along the “Gallery of Hercules,” whose priceless paintings of the scantily clad hero had been done by royal artist Charles Le Brun. Meanwhile the other baron—Marie-Hélène’s husband, Guy—was often absent, and Lopez-Willshaw’s wife-of-convenience, Patricia, was busy, as one reporter put it, with “her own romantic distractions.”
In keeping with its Thousand-and-One-Nights ambience, the latest chapter of the hôtel ’s history features a Qatari prince. In 2007, Abdullah Bin Abdullah Al Thani bought the landmark, gift-wrapped in red tape, for the equivalent of eighty-eight million dollars, planning to spend nearly as much again on restorations and improvements. It was the “improvements” that led him into a legal labyrinth from which he only began to emerge in 2010, much enlightened.
Baudelaire’s own romantic distractions included installing his mulatto mistress and muse Jeanne Duval, alias the Black Venus, nearby at 6 Rue Le Regrattier. Scratch the surface and seamy stories well up all over the island.
At number 15 Quai de Bourbon, facing the church of Saint-Gervais, the painter and poet Émile Bernard (1868–1941) lived and worked. He founded the Pont-Aven Group of Symbolists. The plaque doesn’t tell you that in his studio, under the gilt beams, court painter Philippe de Champaigne labored in the mid-1600s, his official residence two doors upstream at number 11.
Sculptor Camille Claudel, Rodin’s protégée and mercurial lover, had a ground-floor studio from 1899 to 1913 at number 19 Quai de Bourbon. Islanders still grimace when recalling that, for several months after the movie Camille Claudel came out, the sidewalks were impassable because of the mobs paying homage to the mad artist, who died in an asylum. You can’t get into the studio, but you can see one of the sculptures she made here, Maturity , an allegory of human mortality, at the Musée d’Orsay.
Another curiosity exhumed from the history
Baudelaire wasn’t talking about a Cadillac but rather referring to Voltaire’s imaginary golden paradise in Candide . It’s a two-fold reference: Voltaire also lived on the island, in the 1740s, ensconced with his lady friend the Marquise du Châtelet in the longtime Rothschild residence, the Hôtel de Lambert. There’s no plaque to this effect on the palatial, 43,000-square-foot townhouse. Nor is there anything to indicate that from 1949 until his death in 2004, the once-flamboyant and later reclusive Alexis von Rosenberg, Baron de Redé, lover of the wealthy Arturo Lopez-Willshaw and soul mate of the Baroness Marie-Hélène Rothschild, lived in the mansion’s magnificent second-floor apartment, among precious antiques and artworks. Le baron would famously flit along the “Gallery of Hercules,” whose priceless paintings of the scantily clad hero had been done by royal artist Charles Le Brun. Meanwhile the other baron—Marie-Hélène’s husband, Guy—was often absent, and Lopez-Willshaw’s wife-of-convenience, Patricia, was busy, as one reporter put it, with “her own romantic distractions.”
In keeping with its Thousand-and-One-Nights ambience, the latest chapter of the hôtel ’s history features a Qatari prince. In 2007, Abdullah Bin Abdullah Al Thani bought the landmark, gift-wrapped in red tape, for the equivalent of eighty-eight million dollars, planning to spend nearly as much again on restorations and improvements. It was the “improvements” that led him into a legal labyrinth from which he only began to emerge in 2010, much enlightened.
Baudelaire’s own romantic distractions included installing his mulatto mistress and muse Jeanne Duval, alias the Black Venus, nearby at 6 Rue Le Regrattier. Scratch the surface and seamy stories well up all over the island.
At number 15 Quai de Bourbon, facing the church of Saint-Gervais, the painter and poet Émile Bernard (1868–1941) lived and worked. He founded the Pont-Aven Group of Symbolists. The plaque doesn’t tell you that in his studio, under the gilt beams, court painter Philippe de Champaigne labored in the mid-1600s, his official residence two doors upstream at number 11.
Sculptor Camille Claudel, Rodin’s protégée and mercurial lover, had a ground-floor studio from 1899 to 1913 at number 19 Quai de Bourbon. Islanders still grimace when recalling that, for several months after the movie Camille Claudel came out, the sidewalks were impassable because of the mobs paying homage to the mad artist, who died in an asylum. You can’t get into the studio, but you can see one of the sculptures she made here, Maturity , an allegory of human mortality, at the Musée d’Orsay.
Another curiosity exhumed from the history
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