Into A Paris Quartier Read online

  ALSO BY DIANE JOHNSON

  L’Affaire

  Le Mariage

  Le Divorce

  Natural Opium: Some Travelers’ Tales

  Health and Happiness

  Persian Nights

  Dashiell Hammett: A Life

  Lying Low

  The Shadow Knows

  Lesser Lives: The True History of the First Mrs. Meredith

  Burning

  Loving Hands at Home

  Fair Game

  INTO A PARIS QUARTIER

  INTO A PARIS QUARTIER

  REINE MARGOT’S CHAPEL AND OTHER HAUNTS of ST.-GERMAIN

  DIANE JOHNSON

  NATIONAL GEOGRAPHIC DIRECTIONS

  NATIONAL GEOGRAPHIC

  Washington, D.C.

  Published by the National Geographic Society

  1145 17th Street, N.W., Washington, D.C. 20036-4688

  Text copyright © 2005 Diane Johnson

  Map copyright © 2005 National Geographic Society

  Photography credits: Courtesy of the author; Monica Ekman; Anne Randerson; David Scherman/Getty Images

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, without permission in writing from the National Geographic Society.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data:

  Johnson, Diane, 1934-

  Into a Paris quartier : Reine Margot’s Chapel and other haunts of St.-Germain / Diane Johnson

  p. cm. — (National Geographic directions)

  ISBN-13: 978-1-4262-0183-7

  ISBN-10: 1-4262-0183-4

  1.Saint-Germain-des-Prés (Paris, France : Quarter)—History. 2. Saint-Germain-des-Prés (Paris, France : Quarter)—Intellectual life. 3. Saint-Germain-des-Prés (Paris, France : Quarter)—Description and travel. 4. Paris (France)—History. 5. Paris (France)—Intellectual life. I. Title. II. Series.

  DC752.S25J64 2005

  944’.361—dc22

  2005041514

  Founded in 1888, the National Geographic Society is one of the largest nonprofit scientific and educational organizations in the world. It reaches more than 285 million people worldwide each month through its official journal, NATIONAL GEOGRAPHIC, and its four other magazines; the National Geographic Channel; television documentaries; radio programs; films; books; videos and DVDs; maps; and interactive media. National Geographic has funded more than 8,000 scientific research projects and supports an education program combating geographic illiteracy.

  For more information, please call 1-800-NGS LINE (647-5463), write to the Society at the above address, or visit us online at www.nationalgeographic.com

  For John Murray, as ever

  CONTENTS

  Introduction

  Part One:

  St.-Germain-des-Prés

  The Time of the Three Musketeers

  D’Artagnan

  The Chapel

  Rue Bonaparte

  Arrondissements

  Queen Margot

  St.-Bartholomew’s Day

  Huguenots

  Le Divorce

  D’Artagnan’s Paris

  End of the Great Century

  The Century of Voltaire

  Part Two:

  École des Beaux-Arts

  The Arch

  Académie Française

  Some Neighbors

  The Mysteries of French History

  Details

  The Material World

  A Nod to the Belle Époque

  Nos Jours

  Real Life

  Apologia

  Acknowledgments

  INTO A PARIS QUARTIER

  INTRODUCTION

  The world’s quintessential expatriate city, Paris has long held a special fascination for Americans. Offering an incomparable urban setting, a rich cultural legacy and a deep-rooted respect for artistic pursuits and individual freedom, the French capital has provided a stimulating environment for successive waves of celebrated American émigrés.

  GUIDE MICHELIN, PARIS

  As the traveler’s bible, the Guide Michelin, suggests, maybe the feeling Americans have for Paris is unlike that of other visitors. Maybe we need it more. The English, it seems, can take the city or leave it, full as it is of French people: “Many an Englishman has harboured a secret admiration for Paris—if it were not for the Parisians,” as the editor acknowledges. The Spanish, the Swedish are seldom seen here; these nations have beautiful places of their own. But the City of Light has haunted the American imagination from the days of Benjamin Franklin and Thomas Jefferson, the reflex of our aspirations, and, some might say, feelings of cultural inferiority or at least of newness. Paris has also occupied a significant place in our literature, from Henry James’s bemused innocents to Hemingway’s worldly pub-crawling expatriates.

  And, like Jefferson’s, like Gertrude Stein’s, the American imagination has tended to fasten on a particular part of Paris: the Left Bank around the church of St.-Germain-des-Prés. Jefferson lived on Rue Bonaparte, just a few doors away on the street where I am living more than two hundred years later, and Franklin was around the corner on the Rue Jacob. The novelist Henry Miller, staying up the street in the Hotel St.-Germain—where Janet Flanner, the venerable New Yorker correspondent, also lived during part of her long sojourn in Paris—wrote a friend, “I love it here, I want to stay forever…each day I will see a little more of Paris, study it, learn it as I would a book. It is worth the effort…. The streets sing, the stones talk. The houses drip history, glory, romance.” I feel the same.

  Paris has always been a refuge and escape for foreigners, somewhere better in some sense or another than where they were, whether politically, artistically, or psychologically; whether for the fashionable lesbians of the twenties, American drunks during Prohibition, political exiles like Milan Kundera, social exiles like Oscar Wilde, worldly writers like Edith Wharton, down-and-out English travelers like George Orwell, Russians like Ivan Turgenev and, after 1917, Vladimir Nabokov, or African Americans like James Baldwin, Josephine Baker, or Chester Himes. For these and countless others, Paris has always represented freedom and a superior grasp of things, an exemplary set of priorities that places living before other concerns, a sea of calm except when it boils up; but even during its upheavals the stranger is curiously spared, like the publisher Sylvia Beach, or Edith Wharton’s lover William Morton Fullerton, an old man staying on in Paris during the Second World War.

  I recently wrote an introduction to a collection of selected short stories about Paris by American writers from Hemingway’s day to today (Americans in Paris: Great Short Stories of the City of Light, edited by Steven Gilbar), each story testifying to this special relationship between Americans and Paris. What struck me was that many of these stories were in fact about personal defeat. In most of them, the American finds he is not able to live up to the cultural demands, the Gallic eroticism (whether experienced or merely hoped for, and possibly somewhat apocryphal), the conflicting demands of home versus foreign temptation. The Americans in almost all these stories go home, like Chad Newsome in Henry James’s The Ambassadors, to face real life in the States, and will think wistfully forever after about what might have been, if only they had stayed, or had learned how to stay, in Paris. We are moved to ask: What is it about Paris? And what is eluding us at home?

  PART ONE

  Studying the Métro map

  ST.-GERMAIN-DES-PRÉS

  St.-Germain-des-Prés. This old quarter on the Left Bank is known for its beautiful church as well as for its narrow streets, antique shops, restaurants, cafés and cellars. The church, the oldest in Paris, and the abbatial palace are all that remain of the famous Benedictine
abbey.

  GUIDE MICHELIN

  The quarter of St.-Germain-des-Prés may be the most visited and written about of all Parisian neighborhoods, and at first it seemed to me that there was little to add about these oft-trodden precincts—the coffeehouses Les Deux Magots and Café de Flore, the church of St. Germain-des-Prés itself, the Luxembourg gardens, Brasserie Lipp…The ghosts of Sartre and de Beauvoir and Hemingway are surely tired of being invoked, the echo of Edith Piaf faintly but audibly protesting.

  All these belonged to the recent past, the heyday that comes to people’s minds when you say “St.-Germain-des-Prés,” the era from the forties through the sixties, famous for jazz and existentialism. In many ways, those were not easy decades. France was liberated but damaged, rancorous, and poor, yet it seems to have been a time of excessive gaiety, camaraderie, artistic achievement, erotic freedom, and political change, the haunt of so many of the talented, beautiful, or merely energetic people whose names have come to be associated with it now—Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir to be sure, but also the writers Boris Vian, Albert Camus, the model Bettina, African Americans like Richard Wright.

  I have a friend, a painter now in her seventies who was one of the most beautiful and energetic members of the “golden age” of St.-Germain-des-Prés (others have told me; she wouldn’t say that of herself), who describes the life: You went every night not to just one but three or more fashionable night clubs, a certain regular itinerary that never changed, until tourists (mostly French) turned out to view the beautiful people at play, thereby spoiling it. No one had any money, so you drank very little, usually whiskey, but you ordered a “baby,” a mere drop, all you could afford. You danced—the music was jazz, often American jazz and often played by American musicians. There were dinner shows at the Club St. Germain, the Vieux Colombier…

  It looks in photos of young women flying through the air, their New Look skirts ballooning, swung by skinny guys, as if the dance was the jitterbug. So much smoking! It almost hurts to imagine what the air was like in the Tabou, one of the most popular and famous nightclubs. At the Café de Flore, Sartre held forth, drinking and writing. He and de Beauvoir would stay there all day, especially in cold weather, and it is said they had their own telephone line. Those two, while appearing sociable, were working seriously at their philosophical writings—establishing the prevailing philosophy, existentialism, an elaboration of what in the less reflective partygoers was just nihilism and a devil-may-care attitude. The politics was communist—this was the gauche caviar, as well-heeled leftists would come to be called in Mitterand’s time.

  It is hard now, in the glossy consumer paradise St. Germain has become, to imagine that frenetic life, and above all the intellectual spirit then. I suppose Greenwich Village, or Berkeley, or North Beach in San Francisco during the sixties, might have been equivalents nearer to home: a time of excitement, changing mores, political dissent. In Paris, people went to the Nuages bar—“That’s just where you went,” says my friend Marie-Claude, “you” meaning “everyone” but everyone could not mean all of Paris—it must have only meant the fashionable world of intellectuals and artists, welded into a kind of milieu that, looking back, seems to the outsider a milieu that would never have let “one” in, rather as in all those American short stories I have mentioned.

  The famous Café de Flore

  Alas, while the glamorous people were at the Tabou, someone had to be home cooking dinner. That was me during the sixties in California, a woman with small children, completely missing the zeitgeist, and it would have been me—and most of us, surely, during the reign of Sartre in Paris. What would one say to Jean-Paul Sartre anyway? It’s me now, frankly, still marginal, contentedly mooning around the side streets, communing with seventeenth-century Parisian architecture and buying groceries for dinner, instead of hanging out at the Café de Flore. People do hang out there, though, and also at the Café Bonaparte and Les Deux Magots, crowded with people drinking coffee or wine at any hour. They are mainly tourists, but they may have always been tourists, for above all this is the haven of the foreigner, the stranger, the escapee.

  Sometimes I arrange to meet a friend at one of these cafés at the end of the day for tea or a kir royale, often enough to get a glimpse of this public, sociable French custom, and of these cafés where so much of politics and art got started, and now continue the very long traditions of this quartier. The Café de Flore and Les Deux Magots have been here since the nineteenth century.

  The café life is partly a function of Paris being a “walking city.” Is this the place for a diatribe about the automobile? I didn’t realize until I came to Paris, and I’m convinced that most Californians (Americans in general?) don’t realize, because they don’t have an opportunity to enjoy, the richness of a life that allows them to walk everywhere, to learn how much more fascinating and more amusing it is to walk, stopping to stare into store windows, sitting down at a sidewalk café for a coffee, meeting someone you know by chance or by rendezvous. New Yorkers have this privilege, but do the rest of us? In most of our cities, where would you walk to? Would you be safe?

  THE TIME OF THE THREE MUSKETEERS

  La Place Saint-Germain-des-Prés. On a demoli pour la former un superb portail et des batîments conventuels du XVIIème siècle.

  VIE ET HISTOIRE DU VIE ARRONDISSEMENT

  Modern St.-Germain is lively and prosperous, yet it is the seventeenth century, still strangely present here, that establishes its character, and I find that to understand the way it is now, it’s necessary to try to see it as it was four hundred years ago. Since I have come to live on the Rue Bonaparte, the street that lies between Les Deux Magots—Hemingway’s hangout—and the church of St. Germain-des-Prés, I find that, beside the shades of Sartre and Piaf, there is another crowd of resident ghosts who urge themselves forward for recognition through four centuries. They include the Musketeers—d’Artagnan, Aramis, Athos, and Porthos; four queens—Catherine de Médicis, Marguerite de Valois (or “de Navarre” after her marriage to Henri de Navarre, later King Henri IV), Anne of Austria, and Marie de Médicis; the sinister Cardinals Mazarin and Richelieu; Kings Louis XIII to XVI, many Henris; and numberless other misty figures in plumed hats whose fortunes and passions were enacted among the beautiful, imposing buildings of the seventeenth century still in this neighborhood. Theirs is the spirit that prevails today, and that moves me most.

  In a way, I had been prepared for them. My particular connection to this Parisian neighborhood started in childhood, thousands of miles away; I was over thirty before I ever actually saw it, but when I did, I knew it well. Not that I was one of those good little French majors that had grown up dreaming of France, not at all. I am here by accident.

  It was a Francophile librarian at the Carnegie Library in my hometown of Moline, Illinois, who placed in my hands, when I was nine or ten, the works of Alexandre Dumas. I read all the ones we had, in translation of course, and that is where Paris and I start, with my childhood reading of The Count of Monte Cristo, La Reine Margot, and, above all, The Three Musketeers. Was it this early passion for Dumas that preordained that I would someday live five minutes’ walk from where the real d’Artagnan lived, almost on the spot where the Musketeers fought their duels, and, above all, where the romantic queens of legend, Marguerite de Valois, then Navarre, and Anne of Austria actually trod, four centuries ago?

  If only we could recapture how we read when we were children, burning with interest, with breathless excitement, unwilling to put down our book to eat or sleep. Often we can remember the actual circumstances of where we were sitting, the injunctions of our parents to come to the table, or go to bed. My memory of my childhood literary enthusiasms is still vivid. I read The Three Musketeers on a visit to my beloved maiden Aunt Henrietta, in Watseka, Illinois, the time I nearly died.

  I had come down with polio, or at least that’s what doctors now say in retrospect it probably was. I don’t know where my parents had gone, or where my little brother wa
s, and I can’t remember if the doctor was called. My childless aunt had not had much experience with childhood illness so was less, rather than more, concerned than she probably ought to have been; I had never been so sick and never have been since, with a raging fever, and a headache so horrible I can almost still feel it, an unusual thing, for pain is usually impossible to remember.

  So my recollection of burning with reading fervor has a certain explicable component. Literally feverish, I lay on the sofa in the Victorian parlor or in bed for days with the enthralling story of d’Artagnan, Athos (my favorite), Porthos, and Aramis. They were alive for me—the Musketeers, their leader M. de Treville, the wicked Milady, the handsome Duke of Buckingham, and the beautiful Anne of Austria, she whose reputation was saved by the frantic voyage of d’Artagnan to England to replace her missing diamond studs before her husband Louis XIII could find out that she had given them to France’s enemy, Buckingham. Would she get them back in time to wear them to the ball where she had been commanded to appear in them?

  Hindsight changes one’s reading of Dumas. I see now that I must have been given an expurgated children’s edition. In Dumas’s original versions, both Anne of Austria and La Reine Margot were free with their favors, but I got none of those innuendos as a child, and was surprised when rereading these books as a grown-up to find how rather explicit they are. I had never understood, for instance, that the villainess Milady de Winter seduces d’Artagnan and takes him to bed. Rereading The Three Musketeers, it is bound to seem today that the seventeenth-century ideas of masculine behavior—touchy honor, always being insulted, challenging each other and dueling mindlessly, rather like the young bulls in the children’s book Ferdinand the Bull, seem, in truth, rather silly, and we should hope that men have evolved, mostly, at least in some societies. In many other places, it seems, they are still going through their Musketeer phase. Still, who would change the swash-buckling movie versions? Even though I could not accept Gene Kelly in the role of d’Artagnan, (the earlier Douglas Fairbanks was better), Lana Turner entirely suited my view of Milady, and Van Heflin, Keenan Wynn, and Gig Young made a handsome trio of Musketeers. I would see all the films over and over. Meantime, I believe I was saved from serious complications of polio by my determination to remain conscious and finish Dumas’s wonderful novel.