Paris_ The Collected Traveler - Barrie Kerper [249]
La Mère de Famille (35 rue du Faubourg-Montmartre/ lameredefamille.com) is Paris’s oldest candy shop (confiserie) in its original location. The boutique’s windows change with the seasons: giant chocolate bells at Easter, candied muguet (lily) for the first of May, mushroom-shaped pâte d’amande in the fall. All beautiful and delicious! Pricey, though. The same commercial cookies can be found at the local Franprix. Only locals go to Restaurant Petrelle (34 rue Petrelle, 9ème / +33 01 42 82 11 02/ petrelle.fr). Food is bought daily at market according to the chef/owner’s whim. It’s totally magic at night and haunted mostly by actors filming in nearby studios. But there are only a few tables; you must reserve!
Q: Lastly, what do you find most rewarding about your work?
A: Welcoming the dealers from around the world, clinching the deal, la chine (the hunt, the pursuit), getting up at four a.m. to land a treasure out a truck’s back end, and just being with our family, the thousands of people that make up the puces. Also, being surrounded daily by a world of beauty—a magic one where objects from the past bring joy.
L’Atelier Brancusi
Sculptor Constantin Brancusi was originally from Bucharest, but the majority of his works were created in his Paris studio. He bequeathed his studio and all its contents to the French government on one condition: that the Centre Georges Pompidou reconstruct the studio as it had been in its original Montparnasse location. The museum brought in architect Renzo Piano, who also designed the Pompidou, et voilà: the world’s largest Brancusi collection—consisting of sculptures, drawings, tools, and more than fifteen hundred photographs—in a great, light-filled space on Piazza Beaubourg in front of the museum. It is firmly on my short list of favorites. (www.centrepompidou.fr)
Au Nom de le Rose
This mini chain of shops dedicated to roses—a favorite of mine for over a dozen years—carries bouquets and loose-cut roses in a great variety of colors as well as lots of other things having to do with the flower: candles, extrait de parfum to refresh potpourri, culinary items, soap, and rose petals—which I’ve scattered on a white tablecloth set for dinner, to great effect. There are several Paris locations (aunomdelarose.fr); it’s a great place for picking up a small bouquet for your hotel room at a good price.
B
Le Bateau-Lavoir
Poet Max Jacob gave the name Le Bateau-Lavoir to a group of artists’ studios in Montmartre, at the top of the steps leading to 13 rue Ravignan. By all accounts, the studios themselves were dark, dreary, and dirty; as to the origin of the name, accounts differ. Some have it that on stormy days the wooden planks of the studios swayed in the wind and creaked dangerously, resembling the laundresses’ boats that used to float on the Seine—this seems reasonably plausible to me. The original building, which was destroyed by fire in the 1970s, is also reported to have been either an old piano factory or a manufacturing facility of some kind. Whatever it once was, in the late 1800s and early 1900s it was home and gathering place for a veritable hit parade of artists and writers, including Maxime Maufra, Juan Gris, Modigliani, Kees van Dongen, Apollinaire, Georges Braque, Henri Matisse, André Derain, Marie Laurencin, Maurice Utrillo, Jacques Lipchitz, Cocteau, Gertrude Stein, Ambroise Vollard, Daniel-Henry Kahnweiler, and Picasso. Picasso painted one of his most legendary works here, Les Demoiselles d’Avignon (Avignon refers not to the Provençal town of Avignon, as many people assume, but to a street in Barcelona, where he lived for some years when he was younger; whether or not the women in the painting may be prostitutes I will leave to art historians.) Picasso left the Bateau-Lavoir in 1911, and by the time World War I ended, everyone had left, migrating mostly to Montparnasse. Today there is a reconstructed display of the Bateau-Lavoir in Place Émile-Goudeau; for art history buffs it’s worth stopping by while you