Paris_ The Collected Traveler - Barrie Kerper [175]
“Here’s a book you’d like. You can keep this one—I have another copy.”
Although published in 1953, the book looked older, with yellowed, brittle pages. Too bulky to be a guidebook, it was the second volume (Les Faubourgs) of a three-volume set. But leafing through it, I found myself mentally walking through Paris, street by street and house by house, looking at it through the eyes of a historian who seemed to know not just every building, but every balcony, courtyard, and doorknocker.
I couldn’t wait to get back to Paris and start walking with Hillairet as my guide. Now, many years later, I’ve walked most of Paris with him. I found an abridged one-volume edition called Connaissance du vieux Paris in a secondhand bookstore, and although it’s even heavier, I happily lug it with me as I explore unfamiliar streets and learn new stories about old favorites.
Anyone who’s been to Paris knows that it’s possible to fall in love with a street. It may be a tiny impasse or a spacious boulevard, but it’s so full of history, beauty, sweet memories, or pure Parisian charm that it becomes “your” street. It’s the one you head for first when you arrive, the one you dream about when you’re away from the city too long, the one you imagine yourself living on when you let your fantasies run wild. These are a few of mine.
RUE MOUFFETARD
I first walked down the rue Mouffetard just before Christmas when Paris was mostly unknown to me. It was early evening, dark and cold, but festive shop windows and groups of scurrying pedestrians enticed me all the way to the end of the street where a brightly lit market spilled into the street. Suddenly hungry, I was overwhelmed by the aroma of spit-roasted chickens stuffed with rosemary and the sight of a hundred cheeses with names new to me, vegetables arranged like Byzantine mosaics, and heaps of glittering fish so fresh they still smelled of the sea. The pièce de résistance was lying in state on a table in front of the boucherie: a huge bearlike animal that was, I was told, a sanglier, or wild boar.
Since that first eye-opening walk, I must have strolled down the Mouffe’ hundreds of times, always finding it the very essence of Paris. This is at once the youngest and oldest of streets. Youngest because, close to the Sorbonne, it’s full of students who make a cheap dinner from the panini or crêpes sold on the street, and linger with their friends for hours of discussion over one beer in the Place de la Contrescarpe. Oldest because the street itself goes back to Roman times.
Once the start of the main road that led from Paris to Italy, the rue Mouffetard was also the main street of the village of Saint-Médard, clustered around the church that still stands near the rue Censier. From the bank of the Bièvre River, the village grew until it reached the walls of Paris in the fourteenth century and was annexed in 1724.
The Bièvre was eventually polluted by wastes dumped by the weavers and tanners who lined its banks, and some historians claim that the name Mouffetard came from the stench that lingered here—mouffette means skunk.
The Bièvre now runs underground and the smell is history, but relics of the past remain. At the top of the street, the Place de la Contrescarpe has been a popular meeting place since Rabelais and his friends frequented the Pomme de Pin cabaret, whose carved sign remains, now above a butcher shop. Today the place is ringed with cafés like the Delmas, once La Chope, a favorite of Hemingway, who lived around the corner.
The street is lined with mansard-roofed houses, one of which contained a real buried treasure. When a house at no. 53 was demolished in 1938, workmen found over three thousand gold coins stamped with the image of Louis XV, along with a note stating that Louis Nivelle, a royal counselor,