Paris, Paris: Journey Into the City of Light (37 page)

On my first visit to Paris, in 1976, I walked across the Marais blissfully unawares. It struck me, if memory serves, as a kind of landlocked Marseilles, Genoa, or Naples—without the wharves and longshoremen, naturally. The seedy edginess thrilled me. There were greasy-spoon restaurants where unshaved louts swilled cheap red and smoked corn-paper Gauloises, and hives of shady traders in courtyards stuffed with cubbyhole stores, factories and crafts shops. It was
The French Connection, The Day of the Jackal
, and Simenon’s
Ombre Chinoise
rolled into one.

In 1986 I moved from a maid’s room in the stultifyingly symmetrical 17th arrondissement, near Place des Ternes, to a two-room apartment above a lampshade factory in a courtyard behind Sainte-Marie, the cupola-topped Reformation church designed by seventeenth-architect François Mansard. Not that I cared two francs about Mansard at the time. The Bastille district and its ramshackle movie theaters and provincial Auvergnat restaurants was only two hundred yards away. From Sainte-Marie I eased a year or so later into my wife’s apartment near the church of Saint Paul, where we live to this day.

Headquartered in our building was a packaging materials manufacturer called Relda. The courtyard doubled as a parking lot and loading dock. Trucks came and went merrily from dawn onward in clouds of murderous diesel smoke. Workers wearing blue outfits, the badge of the working class, pushed carts or hand trucks across the scarred, oil-stained cobbles, and seemed to revel in the deafening thunder. Our outwardly fierce, full-throated concierge Madame Gambaro kept the peace, directing traffic with mop in hand, as if plucked from a 1950s movie, or a still photo by Robert Doisneau. Meanwhile the plaster of Paris with which our building is held together turned back into gypsum powder and rained from the cornices framing the courtyard’s seventeenth-century carriage entrance. The timbers holding up our stairwell sagged. Drop by drop our cellar filled with water from leaky pipes, some of them feeding the communal toilets on each landing. The last major documented remodel turned out to have been done in 1784.

Today the cobbles of our courtyard are sparkling clean, scrubbed daily by Madame Gambaro’s affable successor Maurice. The factory and cars are gone. Tour groups file in, admiring the award-winning, beautifully restored cream-colored façades, the trellised honeysuckle, flowering shrubs, and leafy paulownia tree with its snap-dragon-like mauve-and-white blossoms. Gone are our wonderfully useful old gray shutters, too: the architects in charge of beautifying the Marais claimed there had been no shutters here originally, in 1640, and that ours had been added only in the 1840s. They had to go. The building is eerily quiet by day. By night, however, when the new Marais’s cafés and restaurants get into swing on the pedestrian-only square we overlook, it’s bobo-a-go-go—a bohemian bourgeois playground. The bunker-buster noise of merrymaking makes the cruddy old Relda packing factory seem benign.

The story of our building is worth telling for the simple reason that it’s typical of dozens of other spots in the Marais—and elsewhere in Paris. The seedy neighborhood I discovered in Simenon, and stumbled across entranced in the 1970s, has undergone a basement-to-eaves remake. Museums, libraries, and administrative offices fill landmark mansions. Postcard perfect, it’s a fictional place lined wall-to-wall by designer boutiques and eateries devised to please shoppers and tourists. Organ grinders and faux Dixieland bands delight visitors—and peripatetic journalists—while inciting inhabitants to homicide. So renowned had the neighborhood become by the turn of the millennium that
National Geographic
felt moved to dispatch a reporter to chronicle Paris’s great “Bohemian Rhapsody.”

Why the transformation? Easy: real estate speculation and necessity. What would you do with hundreds of acres of prime property in central Paris, stuffed with storied townhouses, most of them imploding like our building? You’d probably demolish or restore everything. The Marais got a dose of each.

Besotted by my adopted home, for years I pored over every book I could find about its history. I interviewed local experts and longtime residents not just to write articles. Mainly I was trying to come to grips with what was happening, a fascinating, in some ways horrifying, process.

In the beginning, the Marais was a swamp fed by the seasonal swellings of the Seine. Its past is therefore understandably murky. The area’s pre-Roman inhabitants paddled across it in canoes netting fish and swatting mosquitoes (whose descendants entertain us to this day). The Romans engineered a raised roadway—nowadays called Rue Saint-Antoine—through the bogs, and some time around
AD
700 monks started building the church of Saint-Gervais, which happened to be on a natural mound. They also reclaimed abutting land. The city walls of Philippe Auguste and Charles V eventually embraced these monastic islands.

Here’s something most visitors don’t know: to build the
hôtels particuliers
—the grand townhouses—of the Renaissance and seventeenth-century Grand Siècle for which the Marais is known, many medieval buildings were razed. The 1590 Maison d’Ourscamps in Rue François Miron near city hall, for instance, and plenty of other landmark mansions, rise atop monasteries and residences that probably looked a lot like the turreted, fortified Hôtel de Sens in Rue de l’Hôtel de Ville. It’s one of Paris’s remaining pair of “medieval” townhouses, completely rebuilt in the mid-1800s by zealous restoration architect Viollet le Duc. Several of the grandest Marais properties, including the Carnavalet (the Paris Historical Museum) and Lamoignon (the Paris Historical Library) are from the 1500s. They predate Place Royale, a square known nowadays as Place des Vosges. It was a revolutionary urban redevelopment scheme, initiated in 1600 by King Henri IV and still considered the Marais’s centerpiece. The square itself was laid out atop the fourteenth-century foundations of the Hôtel des Tournelles, abandoned in 1559 after Henri II’s accidental death there, and demolished soon after.

“If you come back to Paris in two years,” wrote a certain Monsieur Malherbe to his friend Peiresc on October 3, 1608, referring to the Marais’s new royal square, “you won’t recognize it.” You could say the same thing today to someone who hasn’t seen Place des Vosges or the Marais in a few decades.

One of the lessons those dusty history books teach is that periodic change isn’t the exception, it’s the norm. With his proverbial panache, Henri IV did to the former marsh what Napoléon III’s prefect Baron Haussmann would do to inner Paris some three hundred fifty years later: he flattened the medieval snarl to erect a comfortable modern city in its place. Suddenly the new, improved Marais was the rage. The Duc de Sully and Cardinal Richelieu commissioned townhouses near Henri IV’s pavilion. Scores of sycophants followed suit. By the time epistolary queen Madame de Sévigné began penning her famous
Lettres
from the Carnavalet, the royal square and its surroundings were synonymous with riotous parties, debauchery, and the pursuit of grandeur.

The climax, so to speak, came when a spirited sixteen-year-old Louis XIV lost his virginity to the famously light-legged Catherine Bellier, ambitious wife of wealthy Baron de Beauvais. Bellier was a middle-aged, one-eyed, utterly unglamorous lady-in-waiting to Anne of Austria, Louis XIV’s mother. Soon the vigorous young king was eating out of Catherine’s hand. The queen-regent, glad to be in homely company, was particularly fond of her, and listened carefully to her advice. Consequently many bags of gold began pouring into the Bellier-Beauvais coffers: anyone who wanted to approach Anne or Louis wisely applied to them. By 1660 the astute lady-in-waiting and her happy cuckold husband had knocked down four medieval houses and built one of the neighborhood’s more sumptuous residences, the Hôtel de Beauvais, also in Rue François Miron.

Changing fashions, the shift of the court to Versailles, and the Revolution of 1789 started the Marais’s decline. The industrialization that followed changed the silk and affluence of old to soot and effluence. Townhouses were divided into tenements and factories. Workers poured in from the provinces. The Marais became a teeming swamp of the great unwashed. By the early 1900s this quagmire seemed to be standing in the way of progress. Out came the steam-rollers. On came World War I and the slamming of brakes. In the early 1920s boom, Le Corbusier teamed up with a carmaker named Voisin and devised an ingenious plan to bulldoze the Marais (and abutting Beaubourg neighborhood) and replace its buildings with a freeway a hundred yards wide flanked by eighteen high-rise towers. Inertia and the Second World War shelved the scheme until the 1950s, when postwar developers re-floated it and brought in the heavy equipment. Seventy percent of the Marais was condemned as unfit for human habitation. Some of the best townhouses would be saved, according to planners, by dismantling and regrouping them near the Seine in a Marais Village theme park. Some homeowners fearing expropriation or anticipating speculation allowed already deteriorated buildings to crumble. A white knight finally arrived in 1962, when the Marais as a whole was declared a historic monument under the so-called Loi Malraux, a law named for then-minister of culture André Malraux. “An isolated architectural masterpiece,” Malraux proclaimed, “is a dead masterpiece.”

His radical strategy was to free the Marais of “parasite constructions” and “pustules,” an original way to describe the often handsome extensions and glass-and-iron workshops grafted onto historic buildings or dropped into their courtyards. The problem with delousing the neighborhood proved to be that people lived in the parasites and worked in the pustules. Eight thousand apartments and ten thousand jobs hung in the balance. The search began for a compromise to keep the Marais lively, with a balance of well-off and working-class residents. But the laws of the market prevailed. Between 1962 and 1982 the neighborhood’s population halved to thirty-five thousand. Light industry and crafts headed to cheaper quarters. When the City of Paris and the French government began converting restored Marais townhouses into museums or administrative office buildings, the rents and real estate values took wing. In the eighties the gay community and
bobo
DINKs began arriving. The fashion boutiques, nightspots, and tourist traps followed in what’s now a familiar process worldwide.

The boosters of gentrification have a rejoinder for anyone affected by what they regard as “poisonous nostalgia” for the shabby old Marais. “The neighborhood has come full circle” they say. “It is once more an enclave of the rich just is as it was under Henri IV, Louis XIII, and Louis XIV in the Grand Siècle, France’s greatest historical moment.”

History tells a more nuanced tale, full of inconvenient truths. I once spent several days under the painted timbers of the Paris Historical Library, tangling with curmudgeonly curators while sifting through dusty documents, many judged too fragile to handle. What I discovered is, practical-minded Henri IV, in his 1605 letters of patent, wanted rental apartments, workshops, and boutiques in his Place Royale. He wasn’t creating an enclave for the rich. Henri was merely trying to enrich himself. Another telling tidbit is that before the Revolution, most Marais townhouses had a storefront on the ground floor to generate income. Rich nobles’ apartments were on the floor above, the so-called
étage noble
, while the bourgeois or less affluent nobles lived above them. Servants or the poor occupied the uppermost stories, which were less desirable in pre-elevator days. Flanking the townhouses were purpose-built craftsmen’s lodgings. This organic style of urbanism meant that all classes lived and (some) worked side by side.

The French have a wonderful expression for window shoppers:
lèche-vitrines
. It means, literally, “window lickers.” Wearing my hair-shirt I went out on one of my masochistic reconnaissance missions not long ago on a car-free Sunday and, as usual, found myself three-deep in
lèche-vitrines
, their tongues out. Together we cruised narrow Rue du Roi-de-Sicile, Rue des Écouffes, Rue des Rosiers, Rue Mahler, Rue Pavée, and a few short blocks of Rue des Francs-Bourgeois—the Marais’s drunken parallelogram of a heartland. This time around I counted nearly 150 fashion boutiques for grown-ups, and several for children (those for dogs lie farther afield), up again from my last unscientific survey.

Much loved, the mock nineteenth-century, pre-aged storefronts beckon. Erstwhile bakeries smell not of baguettes but of another kind of dough. Many of the kosher delis and grocery stores in the century-old Rue des Rosiers Jewish district (distinctly less Jewish by the hour) some years ago began swapping their pickles for bangles and sequined belts. Longtime residents have cashed in and moved out. With enviable panache, some self-styled “pioneer” boutiques from the 1980s and the “second-generation” places from the 1990s or early 2000s now grumble that their image is being tarnished by new commercial settlers. Mass-market clothing shops, chain stores, and discounters have planted their tills in the last square yards of the Marais’s fertile floor space. Who can blame them?

Paris’s gay community began colonizing vibrant Rue Vieille-du-Temple and surrounding streets a quarter-century ago. Now gay bookstores, bars, restaurants, bakeries, hotels, cabarets, cafés, and clubs do a brisk trade day and night. Estimates are the Marais has more than four hundred gay businesses. Many gay shop owners and their patrons earnestly believe they created, and now maintain, the neighborhood’s perpetual “animation,” as if it had been on a respirator before they arrived. Residents interested in something as banal as shut-eye, particularly those few remaining souls who work office hours, are hemorrhaging. But sleep deprivation and real estate speculation are hard to fight, especially when the powers that be are on the side of the merrymakers.

Ironically I washed up here with the first wave of proto-bobos. When I lived behind Sainte-Marie on Rue Saint-Antoine, half a dozen greengrocers still sold their fruit and vegetables from battered wooden wagons on the sidewalks. The last wagon concessionaire, a wizened woman named Madame Jaïs, boasted when she retired that she was a thirty-five-year veteran. Her day started at three a.m. and she stayed out, selling cabbages or melons, until eight p.m., six days a week. Who could be surprised to see her go, with no one to follow? Conveniently, the local authorities transformed the grocery stalls into parking places, and actively discouraged tradespeople from carrying on their businesses.