Paris_ The Collected Traveler - Barrie Kerper [86]
Despite the claims of metropolis on all sides, the Île Saint-Louis still expresses the shadow presence of the Île Notre-Dame and the Île-aux-Vaches. The ancestor islands make a claim to be remembered because they have been forgotten, and both the aristocratic and the chic who live here, and the gratteurs de guitare, who occasionally come to serenade the ghosts of counts and courtesans, know that they tread in a palimpsest of footsteps, including ancient Gauls, Romans, and now, chirping and clicking beneath the willows, the occasional polyester-clad, camera-breasted tourist.
A more characteristic sight is that of the professional anguish of a French intellectual walking his dog. The rich tend to live like Bohemians here. (Only the poor, as Anatole France said, are forbidden to beg.)
The Île Saint-Louis is one of the places where a postwar generation of Americans in Paris loosened its military discipline—if we happened to have any—studied peace and art and history and depravity (called it freedom, called it fulfilling ourselves), lived in awe before our fantasy of France (still do just a little).
We bought old bicycles and new notebooks. We pretended to be students, artists, philosophers, and lovers, and, out of our pretensions, sometimes learned to be a little of these things.
Remarks are not literature, Gertrude Stein said, and islands are not the world. But some remarks can tell us what literature is about, some islands can tell us what a sweeter, more defined world might be. In Spinoza’s view, freedom consists of knowing what the limits are. I came to Paris as a philosophy student but left it as a novelist. On the Île Saint-Louis, I am still home free, watching the Seine flow and eddy and flow again.
The Paris of Parisians
CATHARINE REYNOLDS
IT HAS BEEN noted by many observers of Paris that the city is essentially a collection of villages. The five quartiers featured here—in the third, sixth, twelfth, thirteenth, and seventeenth arrondissements—have still retained their neighborhood feel, and a visit to any one of them will reveal dimensions of Paris well beyond its more famous grands boulevards, rues, and places.
CATHARINE REYNOLDS, introduced previously, was a contributing editor at Gourmet, where this piece originally appeared in 2001.
YOU’VE PROBABLY CLIMBED the Eiffel Tower and checked out the stained glass at the Sainte-Chapelle. But have you really seen Paris? Beyond its set-piece monuments and cultural icons, the Paris of Parisians is a collage of villages. And visitors who venture outside the Eiffel–Concorde–Notre-Dame triangle to explore these enclaves will discover another dimension of the city.
It’s something of a miracle that so many distinct neighborhoods survive. And it’s Baron Haussmann, often condemned for the uniformity he imposed on Paris and for the broad boulevards he cut through medieval areas in the mid-nineteenth century, who may, ironically, be indirectly responsible. Today, the boulevards carry the worst of the city’s traffic, leaving the byways to the locals. Nor can you discount the role of what might be called the tyranny of the baguette. This staple goes stale quickly, making daily provisioning essential and thus encouraging the survival of local food shops along with the street life they promote.
The five quartiers featured here, many of them recent additions to Parisians’ “hot” list, have all retained that neighborhood feel. They are as varied as their inhabitants—and seem to us perfect examples of what makes the city one of the world’s liveliest and most livable.
IN THE THIRD
In spite of its location in this central arrondissement, Temple, a tangled skein of streets north of the Picasso Museum and south of the Place de la République, has been largely overlooked in the dramatic gentrification that