Paris_ The Collected Traveler - Barrie Kerper [82]
—Mireille Guiliano, author of French Women Don’t Get Fat
On the Île Saint-Louis
HERBERT GOLD
THIS IS MY FAVORITE piece written about the lovely Île Saint-Louis.
HERBERT GOLD is the author of more than twenty books, including the memoir Still Alive: A Temporary Condition (Arcade, 2008), Best Nightmare on Earth: A Life in Haiti (Prentice Hall, 1991), Fathers (Random House, 1967), Daughter Mine (St. Martin’s, 2000), and my favorite, Bohemia: Where Art, Angst, Love, and Strong Coffee Meet (Simon & Schuster, 1993). I share the following passage from Bohemia that I particularly love not because it is about the Île Saint-Louis but because of the singular Parisian spirit it portrays, which residents of the Île would appreciate:
A fellow Fulbright scholar, studying in Belgium, happened to arrive for his first visit to Paris on July 14, Bastille Day, when the entire city was strung with colored lights. Bands played on every corner, or at least flutes and musettes; people were dancing, singing, embracing, inviting us and anyone else nearby to join them for their wine and food. It recalled the soupers fraternels of revolutionary times, when the people of Paris set their tables outside, lay extra places for hungry or convivial passersby who wished to share bread, wine, and cheese. This Bastille Day mood, after war and Nazi occupation, was one of spiritual orgy, a festival nourished by deep griefs. My friend saw only the gaiety. He looked about at the hubbub, sighed, and said, “I always knew Paris would be like this.” Paris, of course, is not really like this. But we know it must be, therefore it is; the Paris of our dreams is a required course.
AN ISLAND PRIME, an island at the secret heart of Paris, floating in time and space across a footbridge on the shady side of the cathedral of Notre-Dame de Paris, the Île Saint- Louis may also be the most ambiguous orphan island there is—city and not a city, village and metropolis, provincial and centrally urban, serene and hyped by hundreds of years of noisy lovers of solitude.
Unique it is, possessed of itself, even self-congratulatory, yet available to all who choose to stroll from the population sink of contemporary Paris to a place that has no Métro stop or depressed highway. One could live there forever and do it in a short span of time, and I did.
Just after World War II, I came to study philosophy amid the existentialists of Saint-Germain-des-Prés. The first winter was bitter cold, with food rationing and no heat, and we philosophers—that is, admirers of Juliette Greco with her long nose, hoarse voice, black jeans, and sweaters—had to find cafés to do our deep thinking in.
In existential pursuit of the largest café au lait and most tooth-rotting but warming chocolate, I bought a bicycle to widen my field of operations, showing a certain Cleveland shrewdness by paying eight dollars for the rustiest, most battered bicycle I could find so that I could leave it unlocked.
Behind Notre-Dame, across the narrow footbridge of the Pont Saint-Louis, on the tranquil Île Saint-Louis, which did little business and did it negligently, I leaned my bike against a café that served large coffees, rich chocolate, and few customers. I remember it as Aux Alsaciennes, because it served Alsatian sausage, corned beef and cabbage, choucroute garnie at lunchtime; but for many years, now that the place has been discovered, it has been called the Brasserie de Saint-Louis-en-l’Île.
Somehow, here I couldn’t think about Bergson and Diderot and the hyphen between them, a little-known idea-smith named Maine de Biran, my thesis. Maybe it was the action of pumping a rusty bicycle; maybe it was the red-faced waiters, the black-dressed postwar girls with bruised eyes; but on the Île Saint-Louis I graciously allowed the history of philosophy to continue on its way without me.
My bike had no carrier for books; instead, I could