Paris_ The Collected Traveler - Barrie Kerper [182]
Future generations of Parisian artists will continue to keep the past greats in mind, too, but the good ones will always try to capture what defines their moment.
Passages
CATHARINE REYNOLDS
IF THE REMAINING few passages in Paris are said to be predecessors of our shopping malls of today, we have much to be thankful for in that there are at least some left, but much to lament in that their modern versions are such poor imitations.
I find it fascinating to visit these old passages, beautiful shopping arcades built of iron and glass in the mid-1800s. Each one has its own character—no two are alike—and I’ve found some of the contemporary shops in them to be among the most enticing in Paris. (Visitors may also recognize the passage known as the Galerie Vivienne from Luis Buñuel’s film That Obscure Object of Desire.) Try to include a walk through at least one passage as you explore Paris—we really do not have the architectural equivalent in North America. Some of the places mentioned in this article may no longer exist; as always, if you have your heart set on visiting a particular restaurant or shop, check ahead of time that it is still open.
CATHARINE REYNOLDS, introduced previously, went to live in Paris as a student in 1964 and has lived and traveled there off and on ever since. This piece appeared in the January 1988 issue of Gourmet.
“WINTER WILL COME, and then Paris is the devil,” lamented the Irish poet Thomas Moore in 1820. His moan remains relevant: last winter brought ample evidence of just how filthy January weather in Paris could get—it took the army, equipped with trench spades, to dig the city out of the snow. Yet for visitors and residents all is not forlorn if the weather turns nasty. No need to lock oneself in, deprived of the city’s pleasures. Clearly Moore didn’t, for he went on to write:
Where shall I begin with the endless delights
Of this Eden of milliners, monkies and sights—
This dear busy place, where there’s nothing transacting
But dressing and dinnering, dancing and acting?
Together with affluent Parisians of his time, Moore would have taken refuge from the weather in the passages that were lacing together Restoration Paris. The Petit Larousse tells us that a passage is “a covered walkway where only pedestrians go,” a definition that disregards the narrow boutiques that have traditionally lined the passages of Paris and excludes the glazed roofs that were and are essential to the enchantment of Paris’s passages.
Paris is hardly alone in possessing such glassed-in commercial walkways. Milan and Naples have their gallerie, London has its arcades, Brussels has its galeries; so do Leningrad and Moscow. All are the ancestors of our modern shopping malls, but Paris’s nineteenth-century passages possess bags more charm.
The origins of the passages are not clear. The commercial success of Philippe-Égalité’s late-eighteenth-century wooden arcades in the Palais Royal no doubt attracted the attention of speculators. Inspiration may have come from descriptions of Oriental bazaars by veterans returning from Napoléon’s Egyptian campaign. Demand coincided with technology, for engineers had perfected systems that permitted economical overhead glazing of large, long areas.
The money-spinning appeals of the passages were obvious: post-Napoleonic France was reveling in the fruits of her belated industrial revolution. Her citizens were all too delighted to be able to spend their money in the dry warmth of the passages, sheltered from the hurly-burly of unwieldy carriages,