Paris_ The Collected Traveler - Barrie Kerper [40]
Visitors might welcome a few bits of information that a born Parisian is assumed to have learned at his or her mother’s knee. For example, none of Paris’s popular plans explains the disarmingly simple formula according to which buildings are numbered—a formula that can orient one in the most unfamiliar neighborhood. Since February 4, 1805, Parisian houses have been numbered serially, with odd numbers on one side and evens on the opposite. On streets running at right or oblique angles to the Seine the numbers rise from the river; on streets running parallel to the river the numbers start from the upstream, or eastern, side.
Nor do map books alert visitors to bear in mind that their street indices are alphabetized by the streets’ full names. Thus the rue Édith-Piaf is found under E not P. But the rue Washington is called just that, so it is listed under W. Equally, a title is in some cases part and parcel of a street’s name, as in the case of the avenue du Général-Leclerc, and is therefore alphabetized under G. Streets named for saints demand special attention as well: in some rosters the rue Saint-Yves is listed before the rue Sainte-Anne; in others all the saints are heaped willy-nilly at the end of the S entries. Know your map—and, until you do, practice lateral thinking.
And don’t try to make do with a dated map. Existing street names can no longer be changed, but an average of twenty-five additions appear each year, if only to honor deceased local worthies with tree-shaded crossroads. In a busy year Paris has been known to gain as many as forty-two new streets—and Murphy’s Law decrees that the address you are seeking will be among the parvenus.
All of the maps here recommended rely on an arrondissement-to-the-double-page format that is both practical and culturally informative. The snail curl of the arrondissements is easily grasped, but the character of each quartier must then be mastered. By focusing the map reader’s attention on the individuality of each arrondissement—the haughty, established style of the 7ème, still known by its denizens as the Faubourg Saint-Germain; the louche air of much of the 9ème; the gritty charms of the 20ème, which set one to wondering how it came to be called Belleville; and the interminable turn-of-the-century sculpted masonry of the 16ème, largest of all the arrondissements—the maps offer a painless history lesson, for in Paris geography and history are inseparably entwined.
Geography provides Frenchmen another field in which to exercise their Cartesian heritage: their earliest lessons teach them to call their republic the hexagone because the French landmass conveniently corresponds to that shape. This uncanny adherence to geometry applies to the capital as well, for Paris has managed to maintain a near-circular shape for more than two millennia. Settled on a damp island in the Seine, Lutetia initially relied on the river for defense. As Paris expanded along the adjacent banks, its citizens realized that topography offered little protection; where it failed, geology came to the rescue, providing abundant local limestone for walls.
The Romans built the first wall; the early Capetians are thought to have built a second. These seemed inadequate to King Philippe-Auguste on the eve of his departure for the Third Crusade, so in 1190 he began to girdle his capital’s 625 acres with a thirty-foot rampart. It took twenty-three years to build but was very solid; vestiges still dot the older portions of the city.
A century and a half later the fortifications along the Right Bank were extended by Charles V to shield the city from the English; some three hundred years later additional works extended them to encompass more than twenty-five hundred acres until, in 1670, Louis XIV concluded that his victories were sufficient to guarantee Paris’s security and ordered Charles V’s walls demolished. The land thus freed was