Paris_ The Collected Traveler - Barrie Kerper [85]
He may be there to provide a little relaxation from all the really famous people who lived and live on the Île Saint-Louis. (He turns out to have been a watercolorist.)
The square Barye, surrounded by the Seine on three sides, is quiet, peaceful, scholarly, artistic, with occasional summer concerts; kids sleeping on their backpacks, workmen with bottles of rouge; Swedish au pair girls watching the babies and sunning themselves with that passionate solar intensity only Swedish girls achieve—happy sunbathers when it’s hot and moonbathing when it’s not; haggard widows in black, wincing with their memories; birds chirping and barbered bushes and peeling-bark trees and neat cinder paths: all honor to Barye 1795–1875!
Three small hotels on the island located on the rue Saint-Louis-en-l’Île, a few steps from each other, have been converted from seventeenth-century houses: the Lutèce, the Deux-Îles, and the Saint-Louis.
When I telephoned the Lutèce from San Francisco for a reservation, the place was booked, but the good madame leaned out the window and yelled next door to the Deux-Îles to ask if they had a place. Also booked. So was the Saint-Louis. But on my arrival, I managed to persuade the daughter of the proprietor of the Saint-Louis to find me a corner room.
On the short walk home—saying “home” comes quickly in this island universe—I noticed that Hippolyte Taine and Georges Sadoul did their work in the same building. Marc Chagall and Charles Baudelaire, Voltaire and Mme Pompidou, dukes and barons, and chanteurs de charme, plus a stray prince or princess, an inventor or hero—who didn’t have a connection with the Île Saint-Louis?
The Île Saint-Louis is like France itself—an ideal of grace and proportion—but it differs from the rest of France in that it lives up to itself. Under constant repair and renovation, it remains intact. It is a small place derived from long experience. It has strength enough, and isolation enough, to endure with a certain smugness the troubles of the city and the world at whose center it rests.
The self-love is mitigated partly by success at guarding itself and partly by the ironic shrugs of its inhabitants, who, despite whatever aristocratic names or glamorous professions, live among broken-veined clochards (hoboes) with unbagged bottles, tourists with unbagged guidebooks, Bohemians with bagged eyes.
The actual troubles of the world do not miss the Île Saint-Louis—one doesn’t string hammocks between the plane trees here—but the air seems to contain fewer mites and less nefarious Paris ozone.
The lack of buses, the narrow streets, the breeze down the Seine help. And as to perhaps the most dangerous variety of Paris smog, the Île Saint-Louis seems to have discovered the unanswerable French reply to babble, noise, advice, and theory—silence.
One can, of course, easily get off this island, either by walking on the water of the Seine or, in a less saintly way, by taking a stroll of about two minutes across the slim bridges to the Left Bank, the Right Bank, or the bustling and official neighbor, the Île de la Cité.
Island fever is not a great danger, despite the insular pleasures of neatness, shape, control. Some people even say they never go to “Paris.” (In 1924, there was an attempt to secede from Paris and France, and Île Saint-Louis passports were issued.) Monsieur Filleui, the fishmonger, used to advertise: “Deliveries on the Island and on the Continent.”
The Île Saint-Louis, an elsewhere village universe, happens also to be an island by the merest accident of being surrounded by water. Its bridges reach inward to shadow worlds of history and dream, and outward toward the furor of contemporary Paris.
Shaded and sunny, surrounded by the waters of the Seine like a moat, it remains a kind of castle keep that is powerful enough in its own identity to hold Paris at bridge