Paris_ The Collected Traveler - Barrie Kerper [162]
The best ways to enjoy the place are to walk all around it under the arcades and to sit for a while on one of the benches—both methods are, in fact, essential to grasping the rhythm of the space, as each reveals different aspects. After you’ve strolled and sat, then you may eat, shop, and browse. I have enjoyed many happy hours at Ma Bourgogne under the arcades (no credit cards accepted; ma-bourgogne.fr), I love the Maison de Victor Hugo (at 6 place des Vosges, and there is never anyone else there), and I have parted with many euros at the Librairie du Patrimoine in the Hôtel de Sully (reached from the southwest corner of the place and filled with unique items, cards, and books about Paris, France, and beyond).
ANDRÉ ACIMAN is a professor of literature and the author of many books, including the novels Eight White Nights (2010) and Call Me by Your Name (2007), the memoir Out of Egypt (1994), and False Papers: Essays on Exile and Memory (2000), all published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux. He edited Letters of Transit: Reflections on Exile, Identity, Language, and Loss (New Press, 1999) and contributed to Condé Nast Traveler’s Room with a View (Assouline, 2010).
EVEN TODAY, AFTER many years, there are moments when your eyes could almost be fooled—when they’ll still believe that however you wandered into this huge quadrangle called the Place des Vosges, you’ll never find your way out. Wherever you turn your gaze, this mini-Paris in the heart of old Paris, and perhaps the most beautiful urban spot in the world, seems to turn its back not just on the rest of the world but on the rest of Paris as well. You step in—and time stops.
At night, when the Place des Vosges grows quiet and traffic comes to a halt, the arched entrances under the Pavillons du Roi and de la Reine blend into the darkness, as do the two narrow side streets tucked to the northeast and northwest of the Place, the rue des Francs-Bourgeois and the rue du Pas-de-la-Mule. With no apparent means out, it is impossible not to feel that you are indeed back in this self-contained, self-sufficient seventeenth-century enclave, just as the original founders of the square, four hundred years ago, wished to be locked in a Paris of their own devising—a Paris that had the very best of Paris, a Paris that hadn’t quite been invented yet and of which this was a promise. Recent restoration has been so successful that the Place looks better today than it has in three centuries and gives a very good picture of the Paris its ancien régime founders envisioned.
On the Place des Vosges, you can almost touch old Paris. At midnight, upon leaving L’Ambroisie (at no. 9)—among the best and most expensive restaurants in Paris, in the building where Louis XIII stayed during the 1612 inauguration of the square—you don’t just step into seventeenth-century Paris but into a Paris where the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries are superimposed over earlier and later times no less beguilingly than Atget’s vieux Paris photos can still cast albuminous sepia tones over Y2K Paris. The footsteps heard along the dark arcades may not even belong to a living soul but to shadows from the past—say, Victor Hugo, who lived at 6 place des Vosges between 1832 and 1848, or Cardinal Richelieu, who two centuries earlier lived diagonally across the square (at no. 21), or the occasional ruffian who would turn up in this affluent enclave and terrorize the ladies. Turn around and you might just as easily spot the fleeting silhouette of the notorious seventeenth-century courtesan Marion Delorme (at no. 11), heading home under the cover of the arcades; or of France’s most illustrious preacher, Bossuet (at no. 17); or of Madame de Rambouillet (at no. 15), whose salon was a who