Where I Walk in Paris
Anyone who has ever been to Paris could make a list of his or her own favorite streets, shops or neighborhoods. My own favorite parts of Paris change according to the season or the day of the week, but there are two or three walks that I take again and again because they are constantly fresh and captivating. One of those walks necessarily takes place on Sunday, one is on Saturday and the third can take place any day of the week except Sunday or Monday.
SUNDAY
Suppose it’s Sunday and you wake up with nothing more pressing on your mind than having a good time. If you’re like many tourists, particularly tourists from England or the US, your first thought is likely to be the Louvre, because you may assume that in Paris, as in English or American cities on Sunday, only the churches and museums are open.
But cities in Latin countries do not close down on Sunday. Indeed many travelers discover to their surprise that Sunday was the day on which they had the most fun in Paris.
When I have a free Sunday in Paris, I never go to a museum, because Sunday is the only day available to many French people to grab a little culture. The Sunday crowds in museums are horrendous; I avoid museums on Sunday as I would avoid swarms of angry bees.
Anyway, on Sundays, I have a better idea. I always go to an outdoor market.
The outdoor markets in France are a proud reminder of quieter times, an expression of individualism in a world increasingly dominated by one-size-fits-all, American-style suburban shopping centers. They are a showplace for people who take pride in their own handwork or cooking or farming or baking; they are street theater and improvisation, a zap of cayenne in the bland contemporary soup called ‘shopping’.
The most interesting outdoor markets in Paris are held on Saturday or Sunday. My experience is that the crème de la crème are the markets held on Sunday.
I select my Sunday market depending on my mood. Often I go to the market on the rue Montorgeuil because it is close to my apartment and offers a fine range of products. (More about Montorgueuil a little later.) But if I’m in the mood for the purest, most authentic tang of Paris, for Paris straight up, I hop on the Metro and head for the Sunday market just below the Place de la Bastille, in the Place Aligre.
If you get off the metro at Ledru-Rollin and walk towards the market along the rue du Faubourg St. Antoine, you will to hear the vendors’ cries long before you actually reach the market. “Un euro un euro un euro” chants an Algerian holding up a handful of plums.
“Special for the ladies, get your pineapples here,” cries another, and “Peppers, peppers, peppers we’re giving them away, these are the best, peppers peppers peppers!”
In the Aligre market, the crowd is dense and splendidly varied. French Yuppies and elegant Parisiennes vie with caftaned Moroccan matrons, their hands and faces tattooed with henna, for the freshest green beans; old Algerian men with skull caps, terrible teeth and twisted canes heave themselves heavily from stall to stall seeking exotic spices; picky French grandmothers delicately select one stalk of celery and one carrot for a mini pot-au-feu, a Sunday supper for a single person living alone in a fourth-floor walk-up a block from the market.
Everyone is here: men and women, young and old, Chinese and black African, Arab and French, all races and ages, all tastes and predilections. A ravishing young Algerian girl, her long black hair frizzed and perfumed, is selecting peaches from the stand of an admiring produce vendor who is suddenly silenced by the girl’s beauty; an elderly, crippled dwarf, standing on tip-toe, reaches up painfully to select the freshest bunch of scallions; an extremely tall and skinny French teenager, dressed in high-top sneakers and an electric-blue nylon American sports jacket with matching electric-blue pants, is buying two kilos of potatoes; and a dignified older gentlemen, fully outfitted with fedora, doeskin vest, watch-chain and a meticulously pressed suit that was fashion’s dernier cri circa 1956, proceeds with impeccable propriety from one fish-stand to another, seeking out the cheapest mackerel. At one stand he gallantly steps back from the glistening fish to give first choice to a magnificent African queen, a superb Amazon swathed in yards of swirling purple, green and gold topped with a matching turban. The Queen smiles regally to acknowledge his gallantry and reveals a set of the most brilliantly white teeth on earth; then she points a long, elegant finger at a mound of filets and announces, as if announcing the name of her next prime minister, “un kilo de saumon, s’il vous plait.” Jessye Norman herself could not have bought a fish more operatically.
The customers at the Aligre market are fascinating, but so is the produce, which is often as beautifully presented as the African queen. The market includes dozens, perhaps as many as 100 different vegetable stands. That means that if you are not satisfied with one vendor’s papaya (to name merely one product that is rarely available elsewhere in Paris, and almost never as perfectly fresh and ripe), you have merely to walk a few yards and you’ll probably find a better one.
The choice is extraordinary. You can find grapes from Sicily, pineapples from the Ivory Coast, at least two, and sometimes three or four, different kinds of fresh dates sold on the stem (golden from Algeria, blood-red from Egypt), citrus fruit from Israel, almonds from California, bananas from Martinique. There are about twenty fishmongers, each selling as many as twenty or thirty different species of fish and shellfish. At one stand I counted seven kinds of shellfish, including three or four different clams, and my count didn’t even include the mussels or oysters, of which there were three different kinds in three different sizes. (I opted for tellines, a creamy white clam no bigger than a lady’s fingernail and as sweet as sugar. Tellines are eaten, at least in Italy and the south of France, with a toothpick, after being sauteed in parsley, olive oil and garlic. They are – let’s tell the truth – sublime.)
The Aligre market is the only market in Paris with both an outdoor and an indoor section. The pleasure of the outdoor market is found in its noise and smells, its driving vitality, its astounding richness of choice. The pleasure of the inside market, which is called Beauvau, is very different: a visitor to the inner market can revel in the pleasure of unadulterated, old-fashioned bourgeois respectability.
Outside, you are likely to be familiarly addressed by the vendors as “tu”. Inside, you will certainly be addressed formally as “Monsieur” or “Madame”.
Outside you are likely be waited on by an Algerian or a Moroccan. Inside, you will be served by a Frenchman.
Outside, the prices tend to be lower and the customers younger, or perhaps North African; inside, the customers are usually older and “well-dressed” (that is, jackets and ties for the gents, a suit or a nice dress, often elaborately accessorized, for the ladies).
Outside, shoppers need to keep their wits about them: that smiling vendor holding up an apparently perfect melon may in fact be concealing the melon’s cruelly bruised backside. Inside, the respectable vendors view such practices with horreur.
Even a perfect stranger to the market can sense the difference between the two worlds instantaneously. If you enter the Beauvau from the main entrance, for example, the first stand on your right is the cheese stand run by M. Longlet, a long-established market vendor. With help from a bevy of young assistants he dispenses Camemberts and Roqueforts from a stall that contains nearly 50 running feet of 3-foot deep cheese counters, one of the most extraordinary cheese displays in all of Paris. M. Longlet and his employees bow and scrape as they suggest the perfect cheese to follow your roast pork; here the ‘oui Monsieur, certainement monsieur’ is sprinkled throughout the conversation like salt on a steak. In Beauvau, no one yells or screams; in Beauvau almost no one speaks in Arabic.
The inside market is not “better” than the outside; it is simply different. It is foie gras rather than country sausage; vin de pays rather than mis en bouteille au chateau. And the fun of Aligre is that, in a single morning at the market, a visitor can enjoy both styles: an elegant cheese from M. Longlet and a succulent papaya at a low low price from an outdoor vendor with a grin as fat as a ham.
By the time you have completed your tour of the inside market you may be in the mood for a cup of tea. When you leave Beauvau and are walking back towards the rue du Faubourg St. Antoine, you will find a teashop on your left, facing into the market, called La Ruche de Miel, The Honey Hive, which is an authentic Algerian café in the heart of Paris. When you enter it you feel as if you have been transported across the Mediterranean to a land of sand and baking sun. La Ruche has Arab music; low, gleaming tables of embossed bronze; hanging bronze lanterns whose colored glass panels bathe the room in a dreamy, golden-pinkish light; low benches and tabourets upholstered in Moroccan textiles. And it has a clientele of Algerian men in skullcaps who drink their mint tea from tiny, hand-decorated tea-glasses as they nibble on syrupy, honeyed pastries. The visiting tourist who steps into this oasis sinks into one of the little cushioned benches as into the embrace of a houri; sipping mint tea and munching on a baklava, he experiences oriental sensuality that seems as sweet, rich and perfumed as a walk through the Kasbah.
Just down the street from La Ruche de Miel is a shop called Savours d’Europe, a yuppified boutique where sophisticated Parisians can buy tea and marmalade from England, kirschwasser from Switzerland, mineral water from Germany, vinegar pickles from Portugal and a Swedish beer called Crocodile, which bills itself as “The Best Beer in the World’. Savours d’Europe is as different from La Ruche de Miel as wine is from water; and yet the two places happily co-exist, Algeria and Europe, here in the heart of Aligre.
I can usually spend two or three hours at the Aligre market before I begin to experience sensory overload. Fortunately there is a perfect spot for a respite just up the street in a handsome park named Square Trousseau, which faces on the rue du Faubourg St. Antoine. The Square Trousseau is benignly watched over by the south-facing apartments of Parisians with comfortable incomes; it is filled with stately shade trees, well-tended little flower gardens and comfortable benches. It is a perfect place to collect your thoughts as you contemplate the next stage of your wanderings.
