Paris, Paris: Journey Into the City of Light (2 page)

Couple and graffiti face
, 1993

Jardin des Plantes
, 1997

Reflection of merry-go-round, Tuileries
, 1999

Cobblestones, Marais
, 1989

Statue, Tuileries
, 1994

Shadow, Haussmann-era litter basket and wire fence
, 1995

Dog at a bistro table
, 2004

View from Marais window, footprints in the snow
, 2005

Tango by the Seine
, 2004

Ballerina shoes and wreath, Montmartre cemetery
, 2010

Train Bleu restaurant
, 2005

Marais café
, 2010

Foreword

Of all the books about Paris published each year, not one that I can remember tells you where to find the famous Art Nouveau public toilets in Place de la Madeleine, let alone telling you what to look for in the cemetery of Père-Lachaise. David Downie has a delightful sensibility and the most delighted eye, the most perseverance, and the perfect French,
bien sûr
, and these allow him to uncover secrets. Uncover them he has, the secrets of this fascinating city, and not the ones you’ll read about anywhere else. Did you know those ugly brown posts that keep Parisians from parking on the sidewalks are
bittes
, which is slang for what I guess we would call “pricks”? To take this book as a guidebook, walk out with it as he did and follow his path, is to have adventures, and to see a side of Paris anyone could see, but hardly anyone does.

Suppose you aren’t in Paris? Or you’re in Paris on a rainy day? Just to sit inside and read this book will transport you, for Downie is above all a wonderful, and wonderfully well-read, writer. The essays are delightful as essays, but come fine weather I also recommend following his programs to the letter—a day of looking at the Paris of 1900, for instance. It’s still here. You’ll eat at Julien, have a coffee at Angelina, go to the movies at LaPagode, look at the Palais des Mirages at the Musée Grévin, the wax museum, where he counsels skipping the wax statues to admire this wonder rescued from the 1900 Exposition Universelle.

Or if 1900 is too recent, try the Paris of Beaumarchais, the playwright who invented Figaro, in the days of Louis XV and XVI. Downie tells you how to get into his historic Hôtel Amelot de Bisseuil, little changed since Beaumarchais’s day, to get a glimpse of the remarkable sculpture of the courtyard before the concierge throws you out. You’ll learn about the topography of the Buttes-Chaumont, the gorgeous park in the 19th arrondissement, far from the tourist track; it has a bridge by Eiffel and cliffs built to emulate the famous cliffs of Étretat.

What of the man who has served up this delicious array of treats? Something of a gourmet, for one thing, and a fabled cook. I was familiar with his cookbook,
Cooking the Roman Way
, but now I see that the same qualities that make someone love cookery make him love the odd bit of information, the smorgasbord of observations, the taste of the something curious in the scenes before him. Beside a scholar and a gifted
flâneur
, you always want a food-lover to be your guide when possible, and Downie is all three.

And the photographs. Paris must be the most photographed place in the world, from Doisneau to Cartier-Bresson. These beautiful studies by Alison Harris extend that literature with a powerful formal talent. Her camera’s loving dissection of details that the busy traveler might not notice makes of this book a splendid object in itself, a sort of bibliophilic gem.

Diane Johnson, Paris

By Way of Introduction

Paris is the kind of city butterfly catchers have trouble netting, tacking down, and studying. Like all great cities and yet unlike any other, Paris is alive and fluttering. It changes with the light, buffeted by Seine-basin breezes. This place called Paris is at once the city of literature and film, an imagined land, a distant view through shifting, misty lenses, and the leftover tang of Jean-Paul Sartre’s cigarettes clinging to the mirrored walls of a Saint-Germain-des-Prés café. It’s also the city where I and more than two million others pay taxes, re-heel shoes, and shop for cabbages or cleaning fluids.

The tourist brochures and winking websites, the breathless conspiracy thrillers, cinematic fables, and confessional chronicles set in Paris, each offer a view of the city’s districts that someone will recognize. Nearly all such views neglect the burgeoning, un-expurgated Paris of last century’s housing projects built within and beyond the beltway. For twenty years, my office was in the unfashionable 20th arrondissement. Its windows offered a kaleidoscopic vision of that Paris—a city of Asians, Africans, and Eastern Europeans. I gazed upon their city, walked through it, worked in their midst, but could not know them or it with anything approaching intimacy. The same applies to the gilded 7th arrondissement—a world of old money, old families, old furniture, old objets d’art, and very old, very heavy leather-bound cultural baggage.

The Paris of this book is not a product of the 7th or 20th arrondissements. In its irreverent, erratic way it flutters from one place, person, or phenomenon to the next, touching on aspects of history, alighting on the contemporary, choosing flowers both perfumed and evil-smelling.

The book’s emphatic title refers to the Paris of the English speaker, and, in italics, the
Paris
of Parisians. They are cities apart. For a Frenchman, “Paris,
Paris
” sets words at play:
paris
is the plural of
pari
, meaning bet, challenge, risk, wager. Elevate the “p” to upper case and you get a city that’s a roll of the dice, a life-wager, a challenge as formidable to meet as Manhattan is to a Mongolian or Miamian.

Beyond its linguistic ambiguity the name “Paris” has a peculiar, pleasing resonance. I often hear it in my head even when I don’t actually hear it with my ears, for instance when I ride in the Plexiglas nose cone of the Météor high-speed subway, line number fourteen. I enjoy the subway’s swooshing headlong rush down dark tunnels, and the verbal massage the PA system provides.

If you take the Météor from, say, Place de la Madeleine to the Gare de Lyon train station, at each stop you’ll hear an unmistakable female voice sing out the stops not once, but twice, with a variation in tone and emphasis. “Pyramides,” says the voice of Paris, smooth with self-assurance, before the train pulls into the station.
“Pyramides,”
the voice repeats as the doors slide open, impatient now, a disembodied Catherine Deneuve riding crop in hand.

The change is subtle, not so much marking an accent as a shift to those ambiguous italics. Up and down the futuristic subway’s line, the names sing out modulated and
slightly
reformulated. For months, perhaps years, this peculiar duotone subway refrain played in my head without my knowing it, an earworm whispering not station stops but the words “Paris,
Paris
”—words that to me came to signify the great wager,
the
subway stop of my life, where I got off the train I’d been riding aimlessly, and made my stand.

Perhaps because I came to Paris expecting no favors, with few illusions, and with a generous dose of curiosity, I have yet to feel the betrayal some visitors and transitory residents distill into vague resentment. Paris has no monopoly on grumpy waiters, horizontal pollution, or enraged drivers, nor, in my experience, do the elusive, mythical Parisians focus their supposed disdain on any one nationality. I’ve been privileged to hunt for Paris in many places, with many people, including the occasional Parisian, for more than a quarter of a century. These essays are part of my catch. My vision of the city still blurs from Paris to
Paris
in my daily pursuit of fluttering wings. Happily, I don’t want to pin them down, and anyway, Paris always manages to fly away.

It’s the Water: The Seine

The time-worn stones were cold and the ever-flowing stream beneath the bridges seemed to have carried away something of their selves …

—É
MILE
Z
OLA
, L’Oeuvre
(1886)

o single element of Paris evokes the city’s ambiguous allure more poignantly than the Seine. A slow arcing gray-green curve, the river reflects the raked tin rooftops arrayed along its embankments, and the temperamental skies of the Île-de-France. Sea breezes sweep fresh Atlantic air up it into the city. Each day when I step out for my constitutional around the Île Saint-Louis—a ten-minute walk from where my wife, Alison, and I live—I ask myself what Paris would be without the Seine. The answer is simple: it wouldn’t.

At once water source and sewer, lifeline, moat, and swelling menace, the Seine suckled nascent French civilization. It made the founding of Paris possible, transforming a settlement of mud huts into a capital city whose symbol since the year 1210 is a ship, with the catchy device
Fluctuat nec mergitur:
“It is tossed upon the waves without being submerged” (and it sounds better in Latin). For centuries this murky waterway has filled Parisians’ hearts, minds, and noses with equal measures of inspiration or despair.

Back in the mid-1970s, the low point of Paris urbanism, I visited the city for the first time and was taken aback by the river’s chemical stench and the flying suds from its filthy waves quivering over the cars on the just-built riverside expressways. A decade later I willfully forgot such details when I engineered my move here. I was tantalized by the scenes—of dancers on the Seine’s cobbled quays, bridges compressed by a telephoto lens—in what might possibly be the worst movie ever made,
Tango
. Never able to tango despite lessons, and aware from the start that I’d duped myself into imagining such a dreamy place could exist, I’ve been stalking the photogenic quays of Paris ever since. Although I’ve sometimes felt my passion for Paris ebb, the Seine has flowed along, in its indifference seducing me, a knowing victim, time and again.

Not long ago, after a failed research mission to the National Library on Paris’s extreme eastern edge, I glanced down at the river from the Pont de Tolbiac and realized that, despite my wanderings, I’d never actually followed the Seine downstream across the city to the quays of the 15th arrondissement. How long a walk could it be? Without real conviction or particularly comfortable shoes I set off to see how far I could get.

Judging by the smokestacks upstream, the glassy National Library towers, and the floating nightclubs moored in front of them, not to mention the cars dueling on the Pompidou Expressway, it struck me as hard to believe the Seine ever had been a wild river edged by marshlands, where the area’s Celtic inhabitants lived. Five thousand years ago that benign river provided France’s mythicized forebears—
Nos Ancêtres les Gaulois
—with food, potables, and the protection they needed to build their island-city, which the Romans eventually called Lutetia. Until the 1980s no trace of the Seine Basin’s early fisherfolk had been found, but while reconfiguring the formerly industrial Bercy area’s warehouses, workmen turned up several Neolithic canoes. The hallowed site is recalled by Rue des Pirogues de Bercy, a street sandwiched between a multiplex cinema and a convention center. City officials quickly latched onto the canoes, seeing in them a symbol of pre-Roman civilization and the solution to an etymological mystery. The canoes jibe with the Celtic-language hypothesis of the origin of “Lutetia”:
luh
(river) +
touez
(in the middle) +
y
(house), meaning “houses midstream,” an apparent reference to what is now the Île de la Cité and Île Saint-Louis.