Paris_ The Collected Traveler - Barrie Kerper [87]
At least until recently. The narrow streets—many of them named after the provinces of France—are still lined with handsome seventeenth- and eighteenth-century hôtels particuliers, not all of which have been restored. The generous spaces and sleepy, very Parisian aura here have attracted artists, young professionals, in-the-know foreigners, and a burgeoning gay community. Most of these new arrivals come armed with more panache than cash, and today they share the sidewalks with the artisans who have long sustained the area.
The quartier remains identified with a building that is no longer there: the Temple, a priory whose name derived from that of the Knights Templars, a military and religious order founded during the First Crusade. The organization once controlled a walled city covering much of both the third and fourth arrondissements. Midway through the Revolution, the Temple became a prison, and en route to the guillotine, Louis XVI and his family were some of its first inmates. In an effort to erase memories of the pitiful child king, Louis XVII, who died there, Napoléon demolished the tower where the family had been held.
Today, this peaceful area is one of the most forward-looking in Paris. The young lovers who wheel their firstborn around the duck pond in the Square du Temple are likely as not dues-paid members of the Net set who flock to the ultracool Web Bar to surf and salsa. This neighborhood invites the pedestrian: the one-way system discourages through traffic, so you can zigzag back and forth, here admiring an ivy-hung courtyard, there sizing up a produce display. Shops and galleries are gradually displacing the ateliers of wholesale jewelers, who have populated the quartier for centuries, but the newcomers are somehow more low-key than those who have taken over the streets adjacent to the Place des Vosges.
Perhaps this is because the Temple remains a vibrant residential neighborhood. Afternoons see youngsters, testing the limits of their trottinettes (scooters)—and of their parents’ patience—just avoiding collision with dealers shuttling fifties furniture into their boutiques and graphic artists piloting portfolios into taxis. And households supply their tables along the rue de Bretagne, where butchers, fishmongers, and greengrocers compete with merchants in the newly restored Marché des Enfants Rouges, the capital’s oldest market.
IN THE THIRTEENTH
In the Parisian lexicon, stressé is the all-purpose adjective. And for many young urban professionals, the human scale of neighborhood life in the villagy quartiers on the city’s periphery is the sovereign antidote. Originally hamlets in their own right that were annexed wholesale to Paris on January 1, 1860, these enclaves come by their bucolic manners honestly.
Just a few short years ago, an address aux Cailles, as the Butte-aux-Cailles is lovingly called, would have taken some explaining. These days, however, it excites raw envy, as more and more people discover this pocket of intimacy deep in the western section of the thirteenth, only a short Métro ride from the humming heart of the city. Butte means “knoll,” and in Paris is more commonly applied to the Butte Montmartre. The Butte-aux-Cailles has Montmartre’s charm, but, being less publicized, it is less visited. And its residents are determined to keep it that way, trumpeting that the Cailles has no attractions—perhaps forgetting that this is precisely what explains its appeal. This forgotten part of Paris, with its cobbled streets and old-fashioned streetlamps, exudes a provincial atmosphere of permanence.
The Butte-aux-Cailles earned a place in history in 1783, when the world’s first hot-air balloon landed there after a twenty-five-minute journey from the western side of the city. The area remained sparsely populated until the middle of the nineteenth century, when the poorest of Parisians, dispossessed by Baron Haussmann’s slum clearances, took refuge there. Ragpickers soon joined them, but infrastructure was slow in coming.
Today, the area tempts