Paris_ The Collected Traveler - Barrie Kerper [184]
A few blocks to the northeast a pair of linked passages runs off the rue des Petits-Champs. The Galerie Vivienne and the Galerie Colbert are perhaps the best-restored and most lively of Paris’s passages. They share neoclassical decors, though in fact the Vivienne was built in 1823, three years before the Colbert. Goddesses and nymphs disport themselves under the Vivienne’s arched roof and around its rotunda, while young models people its length below. They wander across the swirling pastel mosaics from shops like Catherine Vernoux, run by a former casting director with a penchant for colorful geometric knits; to Yuki Torii, a bold Japanese designer who seems to have broken away from the somber palette of most of his countrymen; to Camille Blin, a lady given to shapely jersey dresses and daring jewelry; to Jean-Paul Gaultier, whose clothes an exhibitionist can wear with confidence. The more domestic then tuck into Casa Lopez to ogle its splendid custom-made rugs or Si Tu Veux for a magician’s hat or an old-fashioned wooden pull toy for a godchild. Then they collapse into one of the wicker chairs spread before À Priori Thé, a tea shop started by three Americans, which explains the superiority of the brownies and pecan pie.
The more pensive can stop at the Librairie Petit-Siroux, founded in 1826 and still redolent of the provincial, timeless atmosphere that has long drawn writers to the passages. Surrealist Louis Aragon was a regular there and a great champion of the outright louche and secret aura of the passages, eloquently limning their spell in Le Paysan de Paris. Small wonder that this bookshop does a good business in volumes about Paris.
A door leads into the glittering rotunda of the Galerie Colbert, which has just undergone a total face-lift. The Bibliothèque Nationale owns the Colbert and has installed its comely Musée des Arts du Spectacle and the Musée Charles Cros between the faux marbre columns, along with the winning boutique Colbert, selling well-reproduced postcards and posters drawn from the library’s collection. The museums mount changing exhibits of posters and costumes related to theater, opera, and dance, and a dazzling collection of antique phonographs.
The Passage Choiseul stands five blocks down the rue des Petits-Champs. Restoration is more of an intention than a reality there, yet the Choiseul merits a visit. Betwixt the neon bedizenments, general sleaze, and shops selling unlabeled clothes purported to come from leading manufacturers, one can enjoy the graceful tribune supported on Ionic columns and savor what Paul Verlaine called “les passages Choiseul aux odeurs de jadis …”
This is the most literary of the passages, for here Alphonse Lemerre, the publishing genie of the Parnassiens, had his offices at nos. 27–31 from the 1860s onward. Paul Verlaine, Sully Prudhomme, Leconte de Lisle, and José-Maria de Heredia met in his shop regularly. Louis-Ferdinand Céline, author of Mort à crédit, lived there also. His mother kept a lace shop over which he spent sixteen years inhabiting “three rooms linked by a corkscrew.” The nineteenth-century atmosphere is extended by the captivating office and artists’ suppliers Lavrut, whose oaken drawers overflow with pastels and a bounteous selection of my favorite Clairefontaine notebooks with ultrasmooth paper designed for those who appreciate the pleasures of writing with a fountain