Paris, Paris: Journey Into the City of Light (8 page)

My explorations of Mitterrand’s megalomania had a surprisingly happy ending in the 19th arrondissement at La Villette, four Grands Projets in one. Three times the size of the Pompidou Center, the old meatpacking plant west of the Ourcq Canal has been the world’s biggest science museum since it opened in 1986. No beef here, I reflected as I hoofed through this Emerald City of high tech. Cast as the Wizard of Oz, Mitterrand hijacked but couldn’t completely reconfigure the project after drubbing Giscard d’Estaing at the polls, and it is Mitterrand’s name that you see writ large on a bronze plaque in the cavernous main hall full of electronic gizmos.

I crossed the canal and found the doors open to the reconverted 1860s glass-and-ironwork cattle auction hall. Now an expo and concert venue, the Grande Halle evokes Victor Baltard’s dearly departed Les Halles, and, as with Giscard d’Estaing’s equally successful Musée d’Orsay and Institut du Monde Arabe, try as he might not even Mitterrand could spoil it.

Not content with surrogate fatherhood at La Villette, Tonton commissioned the Cité de la Musique, a silly name for the national music conservatory and instrument museum. Architect Christian de Portzamparc subsequently won the prestigious Pritzker Prize and is perhaps the sole Frenchman to have fulfilled Mitterrand’s hope of global glory. (Flamboyant, fashionable Jean Nouvel is well known nowadays, and also won the Pritzker, but how many serious scholars of architecture would place him in the Hall of Fame is a question worth asking.) De Portzamparc also designed classy Café Beaubourg facing the Pompidou; its counterpart here felt like a grand piano turned inside out. Like the other Grands Projets, De Portzamparc’s buildings show precocious signs of gritty wear. The superfluous metal superstructures that metaphorically “bridge” the abutting Péripherique beltway and the bathroom-tile façades seem hopelessly mired in a postmodernist aesthetic. Yet the curving indoor “street” playfully evokes an inner ear, and the museum’s displays and live music are a harmonious delight.

Before heading home I took a turn around the Parc de la Villette, a deconstructionist’s dream its Swiss-born American architect Bernard Tschumi termed “an urban park for the twenty-first century,” meaning it rejects the notion of a refuge. Tschumi’s quintessentially twentieth-century, misguided idea is itself now widely rejected, but his “discontinuous building,” a sequence of twenty-six whimsical “garden follies” painted fire-engine red and set along cobbled footpaths, lawns, and the Ourcq Canal, are intriguing. In this Tschumi’s success is unquestionable: a refuge from the city the park isn’t. Cars and trucks thunder by on the abutting beltway, and riverboats chuff past. The follies merge jungle gym, firehouse, and lifeguard station. Despite “keep off” signs, kids gleefully scaled the wheel rims of Claes Oldenburg’s outsized
Buried Bicycle
, a sculpture seemingly meant to be appropriated. Others hunted frogs in a bamboo-stippled marsh, unaware of their prey’s resemblance to a certain former president, the man who had this park built. It struck me that none of those happy children had lived through Mitterrand’s murky reign, and probably not a one would recognize his name.

Island in the Seine: Île Saint-Louis

If you walk along the streets of the Île Saint-Louis, do not ask why you feel gripped by a sort of nervous sadness. For its cause you have only to look at the solitude of the place, at the gloomy aspect of its houses and its large empty mansions …

—H
ONORÉ DE
B
ALZAC

spectacular stone gangplank leaps across five arches to link Paris’ Right Bank with an unsinkable luxury liner midstream in the Seine. The gangplank is the Pont Marie, an early 1600s bridge. The ship is the Île Saint-Louis, an island measuring less than half a mile from tip to storied tip but packed with history, mystery, and atmosphere. Peopled primarily by rich, retiring islanders, its narrow streets are lined by dozens of landmark townhouses and ringed at water level by cobbled quays stippled with poplars. The cathedral of Notre-Dame on the noisy Île de la Cité squats within shouting distance, across a wide footbridge that doubles most of the year as a stage for mimes, fire-eaters, and stand-up comedians. On the isle’s opposite side, beyond the Pont Marie, the Marais spreads its fashion boutiques, art galleries, and mansions, fanning eastward to Place des Vosges and the Bastille.

At first glance the physical distance isolating Île Saint-Louis from mainland Paris may seem negligible, yet the island manages to preserve a peculiar identity, defined more often than not by mixed metaphor. To some it’s Mount Olympus, where writers and artists from Voltaire and Restif de la Bretonne to Théophile Gautier, Charles Baudelaire, Camille Claudel, Dos Passos, and the inevitable Hemingway have lived, worked, and loved. The envious call it a self-contained, self-satisfied biosphere for native bluebloods and transplanted plutocrats. Property values and rents are among the city’s highest. The Rothschilds long lorded it over the island’s upstream end from the gilded salons of the Hôtel Lambert, built in the early 1640s by royal architect Louis Le Vau and, as befits such a manse, surrounded by high walls few mortals ever breach.

To most Parisians, though, the isle has long been perceived as a cruise ship in both shape and spirit, floating free between the Right Bank–Left Bank political divide, so much so that in 1935 cosmetics queen Helena Rubinstein knocked down a 1640s mansion to build herself a vaguely Art Déco pile with a giant transatlantic porthole window at 24 Quai de Béthune. Former French president Georges Pompidou and his fashion-plate wife Claude, alias “the godmother of French art,” also lived in the building, perhaps to be close to their friends the Rothschilds. Nancy Cunard, of the shipping fortune, occupied number 2 Rue Le Regrattier, and Ford Maddox Ford’s
Transatlantic Review
published Pound, Conrad, Cummings, Stein, Joyce, and others at 29 Quai d’Anjou.

Rejecting nautical references, my wife thinks of the island as an open-air cloister, its sunny side facing south to the Latin Quarter, its northern side lichen-frosted, cool, and shady. That makes sense: like a cloister, much of the time the isle is quieter and moodier, its quays more secluded, than just about anywhere else in town, the result of the locals’ political muscle, which has helped maintain an ingenious system of one-way streets and bridges designed to thwart all but the savviest of cabbies.

Habitués saunter over seeking not bustle and must-see monuments but an eddying, slow Seine churned by riverboats and dotted with seagulls, ducks, and the occasional lost Canadian goose. There are benches shaded by sycamores and weeping willows, lazy anglers of uneatable bottom fish, sunbathers and moon gazers, picnickers and pairs of lovers tangled atop the parapets.

Quiet? Perhaps not in hot weather, when partying youngsters and overexcited bongo drummers beseige the quays. This newfound animation might be catching: the once-dusty Polish library, with Chopin memorabilia, has been given a lick of paint, but its operating hours are relaxed and, frankly, few set foot in it. The church of Saint Louis en l’Île used to be remarkable only for its gilt clock. Now it has a functioning three-thousand-pipe organ specially designed for baroque music. You practically have to beg to get into the Hôtel de Lauzun, a townhouse owned by the city, for a view from on high. Add in a handful of cafés with outdoor terraces facing Notre-Dame or Saint-Gervais, a travel bookshop run by a colorful woman who seems to love to turn away customers, an unusual fishing and fly-tying establishment called La Maison de la Mouche (“the fly house”), a few cozily pricey hotels and undistinguished restaurants that cater to the compatriots Hemingway disdained, and that’s about it. Except, naturally, for Berthillon ice cream, and the chocolate shops, bakeries, butcher shops, and sellers of “antiques,” gadgets, and junky souvenirs—all on the downstream end of the island’s spinal-column street, now the haunt of sports-shoppers, those marathon inspectors of window displays.

Admittedly, in this street, in 2003, former three-star chef Antoine Westermann of Strasbourg’s Buerehiesel opened a chic restaurant, Mon Vieil Ami. It and it alone has managed to regild the island’s culinary reputation. The famous, some might say notorious, Nos Ancêtres les Gaulois, the archetype of pseudo-Gallic kitsch, is a block away and serves fare whose operative descriptor is “Gaul.”

It’s precisely the unrushed, backwater-ish quality of the island’s residential perimeter and crossroads that make l’Île appealing. A stroll around this metaphorical luxury liner’s deck is often the twilight highlight of my day, and not simply because I live a few hundred yards east of the Pont Marie and its mainland Métro station—no grubby subway has ever sullied the Île Saint-Louis itself. For one thing this is big-sky country with low buildings, a wide river, and sea breezes blowing up from Le Havre. The best views in town of Notre-Dame’s buttressed back, and the Pantheon’s massive dome, are through the leaves of the trees lining the Quai d’Orléans. There are architectural details galore: carved keystones, masks, rusty mooring rings, stone garlands. The Right Bank’s turreted, statue-encrusted Hôtel de Ville, alias city hall, seems much more than an 1870s fake when glimpsed at dusk from the island’s Quai de Bourbon, named not for sour mash but for the royal dynasty that produced the bigwig pre-Revolutionary series of kings named Louis, including number XIII (1601 to 1643).

It was this otherwise unremarkable monarch who, in 1614, gave developer Christophe Marie and his partners the go-ahead to build the Pont Marie and transform the island from cow pasture to aristocratic playground. Marie devised the novel grid of streets girded by stone embankments. As I do my daily shuffle around this early masterpiece of real estate speculation, hands clasped behind my back, I spot the same regulars, pedigrees on each end of the leash, circling slowly, lifting their eyes or legs to the mossy old mansions. They weave warily among the hordes of ice-cream pilgrims slurping cones on the island’s busiest cross streets, Rue des Deux Ponts and Rue Saint-Louis-en-l’Île. Among gastronomes and guidebook authors the Île Saint-Louis is celebrated today more for its luscious Berthillon
glaces et sorbets
than for its architectural or literary past, much to the chagrin of islanders with genealogical trees as complex as the spreading old sycamores knotted around my favorite spot, the isle’s downstream prow.

That past is written in stone, made easy to read for nonspecialists by plaques mounted on about half the landmark townhouses, nearly all of them designed in the mid 1600s for royal tax collectors and others with a license to steal. The 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.”