Read Online Travelers' Tales Paris by James O'Reilly - Free Book Online

the development of our routine—Sandra’s work begins in the morning and lasts through the day and earlyevening. My services as porter, traffic-diverter, and location spotter are appreciated, but mostly after dusk when tripod and complex equipment—and my company—become more essential. Otherwise, from morning to mid-afternoon, my assistance is dispensable. I am therefore free to wander the arrondissement du mois with the intelligent and diligent companion to whom I dedicate these pages.
    There are twenty arrondissements in Paris and each is the subject of a twenty-volume encyclopedia called Vie et Histoire —one for each. They are handsome, beautifully illustrated volumes dealing, as they each proclaim, with “ Histoire, Anecdotes, Célébrités, Curiosités, Promenades, Monuments, Musées, Jardins .”
    For good measure, they contain Dictionnaires des rues and, being French, Vie pratique . They are written (in French) with that precise scholarship and ironic sense of French history which reflects the serious but affectionate view which the French take of their history, their milieu and what they consider to be their somewhat eccentric but profound national character.
    For each visit, I pick one of the arrondissement volumes. Even in the more obscure sections I have picked, I have never been disappointed. The avenue-by-avenue, sometimes building-by-building promenades which the demanding scholars have laid out in these volumes are long and physically tiring. But visiting the Place St-Georges in the IXe, la rue Mouffe in the Ve, the Bibliotheque d’Arsenal in the IVe or the Church of St. Vincent de Paul in the Xe—to take four happy surprises—are all the revival one needs. And there is always the sidewalk café restorative where no one cares how little you order or how long you stay.
    The volumes usually begin with “ Découvertes archéologiques ” (a Parisian obsession tending to prove the continuity of the French persona); they then move to the medieval bishops and religious orders who built the churches, convents, and monasteries which fixed the original sectors, lanes, and lines of Paris (obliterated now, as the text mourns, by some depredation of the modern city). The authors gamely try to make the arrondissement ’s Middle Ages as distinctive and fascinating as possible. Then we accelerate to thosebloody outbreaks of the Parisian spirit—the feudal rivalries and broken heads of the holy orders in the VIe, Le Tumulte de Saint-Medard in 1557 as the Reformation advanced, St. Bartholomew as it declined, the Revolution, the Commune, the effects of wars and sieges on the city. All of this turbulent history is described in these volumes with scholarly neutrality. The events themselves come alive on the carefully planned promenades as one walks by and into the ancient buildings of Paris, explores its streets and alleys, or reads the historical markers which might be hidden from the casual passer-by.
    As all of this architecture, carefully planned open space, statuary and buildings with their decorative alcoves gradually seep in to the now-weary walker, he begins to sense the underlying harmony of the city. Even the more prosaic, more modern buildings—anything after Napoleon III is modern—are built with a feeling for their place in the whole. It is not accidental. The French live and regulate their public lives by establishing what they consider to be exclusively French standards—the various Academies in their dictatorial prescriptions over the centuries have long been a source of amusement, especially in their often blind and stubborn adherence to tradition. But that tradition tends to achieve a harmony of thought and esthetic—and architecture—which the French, at any rate, consider a necessary form of discipline against their occasionally anarchic tendencies. The flow of the city expresses that discipline and that harmony.
    But on