Paris_ The Collected Traveler - Barrie Kerper [83]
Nearly two years later, when the stationery store lady wrapped the package for mailing to Viking Press, she figured out what it was and gave it a sharp slap, crying out, “Merde!” I was startled because I thought I knew what that word meant and took it as a judgment of my coffee-and-choucroute-fueled, eighteen-month creative frenzy, but she explained that it meant “Good luck!”
(The book, Birth of a Hero, about a Resistance hero who happened to be stuck all his life in Cleveland, was published. I went home to Cleveland to buy the three-cent stamp with my picture on it but they were still using George Washington. I like that first novel now mostly because it instructed me that I had the right to do it.)
At some point in the creative process, I left a GI overcoat—the vestmental equivalent of my bicycle—on a rack at the brasserie. The waiters kept asking when I would take it again, but spring came, the birds sang on the Île Saint-Louis, and other birds allowed me to buy them hot chocolate; I was too overwrought.
Later, I decided to see how long the coat would live on the coatrack. As the years went by, I committed more novels, visited Paris as a tourist, and came to the Île Saint-Louis to check on my coat. It was still there. “Soon,” I promised the waiters.
One May in the early sixties, I noticed that the narrow, swaying footbridge across which I used to wheel my rustmobile had been replaced by a wider, stabler cement product, although it was still blocked to automobiles. And my coat was gone from the café, which had changed its name to the Brasserie de Saint-Louis-en-l’Île. And that tout Paris had discovered the happy place that in my secret mustard-loving heart will always be Aux Alsaciennes.
Anciently, the Île Saint-Louis was two islands, Île Notre-Dame and Île-aux-Vaches (Cow Island). You can buy old maps that show the walls of medieval Paris and this tiny pasture in the Seine, from which cows and milk were brought by dinghy into the city. In the seventeenth century the places were joined, and in a burst of elegant speculation, bankruptcies, and respeculation, a dense web of hôtels (fine mansions) were spun.
The Hôtel Lambert and the Hôtel de Lauzun are two noble examples, but the entire island, its narrow pre-Detroit and even pre-Citroën streets, its encircling quays for strolling and breeze-taking by the Seine, has a comfortingly unified classical pattern.
The decoration and architecture date from a single period of French elegance and are protected by fanatic preservationists, among whom was former president Georges Pompidou, who helped stuff other districts of Paris with freeways and skyscrapers. (Pompidou lived on the Île Saint-Louis.)
There is an ice cream shop, Berthillon, with perhaps the best and certainly the most chic sherbets in France. Usually the lines stretch out onto the street—people waiting for their glace café, sorbet, crème—as others in other places wait in line to pay taxes or to see if their portrait is on the three-cent stamp.
There is but one church on the island, Saint-Louis-en-l’Île—lovely, tranquil, softly flowing, with devout deacons scrubbing the stone with straw brooms from a stock that seems to have been purchased by some seventeenth-century financial genius of a priest who feared inflation in the straw-broom market.
Contemporary Paris discovered it could find quadruple use for the Île Saint-Louis: as an elegant residential quarter of the fourth arrondissement; as a strolling museum neighborhood, a sort of Tricolorland with no parking meters, no movie house, or cemetery (if people die, they have to be taken to the Continent); as a quiet corner for small restaurants, antiquaries, bars, bookshops, hotels, Mme Blanvillain’s 160-year-old olive shop (she was not the founder), and a pheasant-plucker named Turpin in case you need your pheasant plucked; and the fourth use is optional.
On my most recent visit, the spirit of the place was expressed by the aforementioned Berthillon, the studio