Paris_ The Collected Traveler - Barrie Kerper [167]
None of the residents, however, had any doubt that they belonged at the center of the universe. They were prickly, caustic, arrogant, querulous, spiteful, frivolous, urbane, and, above all things, as self-centered as they ultimately turned out to be self-hating. Like the square itself, this world was so turned in on itself that if it was consumed by artifice, it was just as driven by the most corrosive and disquieting forms of introspection. No society, not even the ancient Greeks, had ever sliced itself open so neatly, so squarely, to peek into the mouth of the volcano, and then stood there frozen, gaping at its worst chimeras. They may have frolicked in public, but most were pessimists through and through. The irony that they shot at the world was nothing compared with that which they saved for themselves.
La Rochefoucauld, who wrote in the most chiseled sentences known to history, expressed this better than any of his contemporaries. His maxims are short, penetrating, and damning. “Our virtues are most frequently nothing but vices disguised.” “We always like those who admire us; we do not always like those whom we admire.” “If we had no faults, we would not take so much pleasure in noticing them in others.” “We only confess our little faults to conceal our larger ones.” “In the misfortune of our best friends, we find something that is not unpleasing.”
It is hard to hear the echo of so much pessimism or intrigue on the square today. Art galleries, shops, restaurants, and even a tiny synagogue and a nursery school line the arcades. Access to the Place des Vosges is no longer restricted to those who possess a key—which used to be the case. Now, on a warm summer afternoon, one of the four manicured lawns—French gardens are always divided into four parts—is made available to the public, and here, lovers and parents with strollers can lounge about on the green in a manner that is still not quite characteristically Parisian. The Place lies at the heart of cultural activity in the Marais. Two blocks away is the Bastille Opéra; a few blocks west is the Musée Carnavalet; to the north, the Jewish Museum and the Picasso Museum. The rue Vieille-du-Temple, one of the most picturesque streets in the Marais, crosses what is still a Jewish neighborhood.
In the evening, the square teems with people who remind me that the SoHo look is either originally French or the latest export from New York. In either case, it suggests that everything is instantly globalized in today’s world. And yet, scratch the surface … and it’s still all there.
Which is why I wait until night. For then, sitting at one of the tables at the restaurant Coconnas, under the quiet arcades of the Pavillon du Roi, one can watch the whole square slip back a few centuries. Everyone comes alive—all the great men and women who walked the same pavement: Marion Delorme, Cardinal de Retz, the Duchesse de Longueville, and especially La Rochefoucauld, who would arrive at the Place des Vosges in the evening, his gouty body trundling ever so cautiously under the arcades as he headed toward no. 5 to visit Madame de Sablé. No doubt his gaze wandered to no. 18, where more than a decade earlier his former mistress, the Duchesse de Longueville, had watched from her window as Coligny championed her cause and then died for it. He and Cardinal de Retz and the Duchesse de Longueville had joined the Fronde in their younger days, only to end up writing lacerating character assassinations of one another. Now the most defeated and disenchanted man in the world—putting up a front, calling his mask a mask, which is how he hid his sorrows in love, in politics, and in everything else—La Rochefoucauld would arrive here to try to put a less sinister spin on his tragic view of life by chiseling maxim after maxim in the company of friends. “True love is like ghosts, which everybody talks about and few have seen.” “If we judge love by the majority of its consequences, it is more like hatred than