Paris, Paris: Journey Into the City of Light (12 page)

Place des Vosges

Sitting among old armor, and old tapestry, and old coffers, and grim old chairs and tables, and old canopies of state from old palaces, and old golden lions going to play at skittles with ponderous old golden balls, they made a most romantic show, and looked like a chapter out of one of his own books
.

—C
HARLES
D
ICKENS
after meeting Victor Hugo in his Place-des-Vosges apartment, 1847

he Marais’s centerpiece Place des Vosges isn’t the biggest or the grandest of Paris squares, but it seems to me the most alluring. Under its arcades the noise of traffic fades—well, on three of four sides anyway—replaced by the splashing of fountains. Pigeons and sparrows duel over the steep slate roofs of the square’s thirty-six identical pavilions. Their brick and stone façades, never shaded by other buildings, catch the shifting light of the Paris sky. People stroll by, peering into shop windows. Waiters weave among café tables set out under the vaults. In the square’s center, safe behind iron grillwork, children oblivious to the backdrop play in sandboxes while au pairs chat on double-sided benches.

Place des Vosges draws me in at least once a day and in all seasons, for the simple reason that Alison and I live about two hundred yards west of it. Sometimes, especially on a rainy night, the square feels like our cloister, a place of reflection and meditation. Sit in summer under the scented linden trees as the sun goes down and the street lamps flicker into life and you’ll feel not only the linden blossoms’ sticky weeping, but also your sensibilities tingling. Or, on a winter’s day, wander from shop to well-lit shop under the arches while the rain pours down on the rest of the world, and ponder the ephemera of consumerism.

Architects and art historians will assure you that Place des Vosges offers France’s best example of early seventeenth-century urbanism. Essentially it’s a cross between Italianate Mannerism and late-Renaissance Dutch styles, neatly combining a gracious piazza and four sets of row houses. The proportions are on a human scale, with four stories raked skyward, a succession, from ground level up, of arches in rhythmic rows, tall French windows, and rectangular dormers or porthole-shaped
oeils-de-boeuf
on the roof. Time and the elements have conspired with the foibles and fantasies of man to round the square’s hard edges and skew what had been intended as perfect symmetry.

Unlike the bustling, coldly beautiful Place Vendôme or Place de la Concorde, famed for their hotels, clubs, and ritzy jewelry shops, Place des Vosges has always been animated and lived in, and ultimately that is what makes it a likeable spot. Madame de Sévigné, the seventeenth-century queen of epistolary literature and high-society gossip (now read exclusively by French high schoolers), was born on the square’s south side. Across the way, Marion de Lorme, the courtesan of kings, distributed her favors, if we must be polite. On Place des Vosges’s northern flank the pious Armand Jean de Vignerot du Plessis, Deuxième Maréchal-Duc de Richelieu, seduced a catalog of lovers that reportedly included every noble lady then resident in the square’s pavilions. Piety and licentiousness walked arm-in-arm, just as it does today.

The duelists, the gamblers, and the glittering Grand-Siècle pomp of the place—originally named La Place Royale—inspired Pierre Corneille’s now unreadable comic play, also named, somewhat predictably,
La Place Royale
. Even when the square hit its nadir just after World War II, its badly lit arcades and grubby backcourts provided the setting for Georges Simenon’s murder mystery,
L’Ombre Chinoise
(later turned into a cult movie).

“It was Montgomery’s lance that created Place des Vosges,” wrote Victor Hugo with typical aplomb. From 1832 to 1848 Hugo lived at number six and his apartment is now an embalmed house-museum. Decrypted, Hugo’s line means that Gabriel de Lorges de Montgomery, captain of the French sovereign’s Scottish Guards, accidentally killed King Henri II here in 1559. The two were jousting in front of the Hôtel Royal des Tournelles, which stood more or less where Place des Vosges stands today. Montgomery’s lance pierced the king’s visor, eye, and brain. Understandably, Henri II’s widowed queen, Catherine de Médicis, came to hate the royal residence, and eventually had it demolished. For decades the former main courtyard did service as a horse market. It was populist King Henri IV (famous for coining the expression “a chicken in every pot,” and for sleeping in a different damsel’s bed every night), flanked by his minister the Duc de Sully, who in 1605 hit upon the idea of turning the horse market into a piazza—an Italian novelty unknown in Paris at the time—lined by money-spinning weavers’ works and boutiques. Here the court could stroll and make merry far from the Machiavellian intrigues of the Louvre (or so Henri IV thought). About two centuries later, during the French Revolution, the name was changed from Place Royale to Place des Vosges, to reward the first administrative
département
—Les Vosges—that paid taxes, thereby recognizing the revolutionary regime.

Heavy carriage doors, nowadays often locked, hide courtyards, some groomed into pocket-size formal gardens, others dotted with statues. In several there are workshops, art galleries, or fashion boutiques, and these are the easiest to breach. Since this is a particularly toney address, you’re likely to encounter well-fed movie stars, politicos, and other nouveaux on the threshold of L’Ambroisie, among France’s most expensive and pretentious multiple-starred restaurants, located at number nine. Starveling models saunter out of Issey Miyake’s fief of fashion headquartered nearby at number five.

Like any poor little rich boy, the square has its problems, though none seems life-threatening. Locals complain about the rush-hour traffic on the north side, a through street, and about the ever-swelling number of tourists on weekends. Some years ago one long-time resident I met, a dealer in antique Japanese art, closed her boutique and retreated to a by-appointment-only showroom in a rear court. Too many visitors were handling her fragile collections, she told me with a shiver of disgust. The square’s bête noire for decades was a self-styled antique dealer who spilled his ragbag of merchandise under the arcades (but that was nothing new—the first ban on flea market–style displays dates to 1758).

Then there are the itinerant bangle-hawkers, organ grinders, and sour-mash Dixieland bands that besiege the square daily to the delight of some locals and the horror of most others. Pierre Balmès, the expert on antique timepieces who opened his shop here in 1949, had observed the remake. “Sometimes I miss the old, run-down Place des Vosges,” he told me one busy Saturday. “It was so peaceful and quiet.” Alas, the gentle Balmès’ hour tolled, and his magical time-tunnel shop is now yet another gallery selling merchandise that falls under the much-abused rubric, “art.”

The one blight against which all residents united back in the 1990s is the tour bus. After many an administrative battle, buses were limited to disgorging their hordes on the north side of the square before moving to less scenic quarters. There’s talk every few years of creating a car-free zone here and in the surrounding Marais; on Sundays many streets are now off-limits to the vehicles of nonresidents. A permanent pedestrian island might not be a bad idea, as long as a Montmartre-style elephant train isn’t part of the deal and the car-free area is big enough to thin merrymakers to acoustically acceptable levels.

“I’d like this to be my kingdom,” a thirty-year resident told me several years ago as we stood on his second-floor
étage noble
balcony. The square’s original aristocratic residents always lived on the
étage noble
, and my host, perhaps unwittingly, emphasized how privileged I was to enter the hallowed halls of his multimillion-euro apartment and enjoy a glimpse of how the other half lives. “In an ideal world no one else could live here or come in but me,” he confessed unself-consciously, “and that just goes to show you how attached one becomes.” He reminisced about how, in the early 1990s, he and other property owners had asked the powers-that-be to lock up the park and hand out keys to residents only—a scheme that had provoked public outrage (including my own) and much wringing of hands. The square seems to breed such undemocratic sentiments, inspired, perhaps, by the dramatic views from on high. It’s as if the architects had drawn their plans with condescension in mind.

There are several public entrances (five to be precise), but there is only one proper way to approach Place des Vosges the first time around: take Rue de Birague. An unremarkable street, narrow by modern standards, it used to be called Rue Royale. Kings, courtiers, and countless red-blooded parvenus have rolled up it in the past four hundred years. What I do to get the right perspective is sidestep the occasional passing car and take regal strides up the middle of the street. Framing its northern end is the Pavillon du Roi, built by Henri IV for his own use and therefore considerably larger than the square’s other pavilions. Through two of the three arches supporting it (the third was made into a stairwell hundreds of years ago) you get a keyhole view of the square beyond. If, like me, you’re shortsighted, as you near the king’s pavilion its fluted stone pilasters, lacy ironwork balconies, and the crossed swords, lyre, and sculpted “H” of Henri IV will come swimming into focus. Luckless old horny Henri, immortalized in bas-relief, gazes out from the far side of the archway onto the square he didn’t live to see completed.

An assassin killed the king as he left the Louvre, in 1610. Two years later the stammering eleven-year-old Louis XIII, a king whose renown rests largely on his subservience to the powerful Cardinal Richelieu, inaugurated the square instead of Henri IV. By then Richelieu had built his own corner pavilion at what is now number twenty-one. Louis XIII promptly retreated to the Louvre and never lived in the Pavillon du Roi. But his court did indeed take over Place Royale. The Duc de Sully, Henri IV’s right-hand minister, saw how the wind was blowing and eventually moved into a residence on Rue Saint-Antoine. He lavishly remodeled and expanded it, which is why it’s been known ever since as the Hôtel de Sully. The gorgeous groomed garden and
orangerie
are accessible from 5 Place des Vosges.

Overnight, the Marais mushroomed with townhouses, a vogue that lasted until the end of the seventeenth century (when the Saint-Germain and Saint-Honoré neighborhoods became the rage). It’s for this reason that Place des Vosges’s creation has long been attributed erroneously to Louis XIII. The park in the square’s center is named after him, and so too is the architectural style of the square’s buildings. Even its centerpiece equestrian statue represents a smiling Louis, his whiskbroom moustaches erect. Poor Henri IV has only a banal boulevard in the Marais to glorify his name, and a fine equestrian statue elsewhere, on the Pont-Neuf, which he also had built.

Some history-mad locals get worked up about such perceived injustices. Not a few are thankful for the screen of century-old horse-chestnut trees that hide the hated Louis XIII’s statue. Stendhal, with a slash of his quill, called the king’s mount an overgrown mule, not a horse. Truth be told, what enraptured visitors see today is an artless nineteenth-century copy of the original bronze, which was melted down during the Revolution. If you ask me, the second-rate statue is one of the square’s endearing imperfections, like the clunky nineteenth-century bird-bath fountains, or the weathered “brickwork” that on closer inspection turns out to be cheap trompe-l’oeil plaster applied to wood. A generous admirer might describe this old harlot of a square as a study in layered eclecticism.

Every few years, in the name of architectural purity, some pious perfectionist lobbies the city to get rid of the statue and the fountains, uproot the trees, and knock down the Louis Philippe–period grilles and shepherd’s-crook street lamps—none was around in the early 1600s, after all. These militant purists would restore the square to death in order to bring back its original unimpeded architectural perspectives. They’re unlikely to succeed. In Paris, tampering with living layers of history is a tricky business. Here it would involve destroying one remarkable stratum to get at another. Up to now restoration and repair work have been cosmetic. About forty years ago the park’s ailing elms were replaced with linden trees that are carefully pruned to preserve perspectives and views. More recently, the lawns were reshaped and the fountains replumbed and equipped for nighttime illumination. Since the early 1960s the French government has paid for two-thirds of the cost of mandatory repairs to façades and roofs. In exchange a few residents have been made to close up unsightly skylights, or remove recent dormers and gables that saw nary a Henri or Louis, nor Napoléon for that matter. So the pavilions’ exteriors now look much as they did in 1612.