Where I Walk in Paris, continued
SATURDAY
Many visitors who find themselves in Paris on Saturdays like to go to Clignancourt or one of the other so-called ‘flea markets.’ Clingancourt is in fact a huge indoor/outdoor compilation of art galleries and ‘antique’ dealers, many of dubious respectability. Tourists who come here for a bargain are competing with professionals from all over the world; the fauteuils and paintings which they covet are often extravagantly high-priced and frequently faked, often so skillfully that no amateur can tell the difference. Many knowledgeable buyers avoid Clignancourt, preferring the Marché de Vanves, at the opposite (southern) end of the city. (For really fine furniture and furnishings, try Les Galeries du Louvre, facing the Louvre.)
My own experience is that Vanves is indeed a better place to shop than Clignancourt because it is smaller and more manageable. Many people, including me, also think that it has more reasonable prices. But in recent years the prices in Vavnes have also increased dramatically, and it is no longer easy to find that little treasure at 1965 prices. Yes, there are trouvailles; but wading through the mountains of overpriced junk to find them sometimes seems more like work than fun. (But I confess that I’m kind of a junkie for flea markets. I keep on going to Vanves, and I keep on finding something special almost every time I go.)
Even more fun than Vanves is the French version of yard sales, which are called vide greniers, or attic-emptying. Yard sales in France are conducted by neighborhoods rather than individuals, almost every Saturday during the Spring and Fall. Several Paris neighborhoods have their own vide greniers, which are advertised, just like yard sales in the US, by signs on utility poles or convenient walls. I can flâne for an hour or two at these neighborhood yard sales, and if I do find something I like – which I often do – the prices are likely to be super-cheap.
I recently found a hand-colored engraving, dated 1854, of a group of splendidly dashing and mustachioed French soldiers cheering on a colleague in a boxing match ($5); a set of a dozen never-used linen dishtowels ($6); and a strange, Van-Gogh-like self-portrait of a peasant, for $40. The handsomely framed peasant now glares at me distractedly from over the sofa in my living room. His ear is still in place; but his expression suggests that it may not be there for long.
WEEKDAYS
There are almost as many places to flâner in Paris during the week as there are cheeses in M. Longlet’s cheese shop in the Aligre Market, and it is almost as hard to pick one single walk as it would be to pick one single cheese. But if I were forced to select just one route for a saunter through Paris on a weekday or a Saturday (but not on a Monday, when many shops are closed), I would probably walk west along the rue Etienne Marcel from the Blvd. Sebastopol to the Place des Victoires. I would then continue on the opposite side of the Place des Victoires along the rue des Petits Champs to the Ave. de l’Opera.
I love this walk because it allows me, in the space of a single day, or even a single morning or afternoon, to experience the tremendous diversity which makes life in Paris so exciting. My walk forms a straight line through the heart of right-bank Paris, but I feel in no way constrained by the confines of the street: I can, and regularly do, wander off this straight line to explore the charms of many nearby streets and neighborhoods.
The pleasures of my walk begin immediately after I cross the Blvd. Sebastopol, heading west. One of Paris’ most elegant wine shops, Le Comptoir du Terroir, is located at 5 rue Etienne Marcel, and the suggestions of M. Claude, the slightly melancholy proprietor with the shoulder-length white hair, are as dependable as the popping of a champagne cork. (He also speaks excellent English.)
If you happen, after you leave the wine shop, to develop a sudden urge for a prostitute or a dirty book, you can turn either right into the rue St. Denis, a street known for generations as a (pretty seamy) ‘adult entertainment’ district. But if your mood is more attuned to women’s fashion than to fashions in women, you will be pleased to discover, on the corner of the rue Turbigo, the lovely face of French haute couture in a shop called Nulle Part Ailleurs (‘Nowhere Else’), a store that describes itself as ‘Design Archi-Mode’, which might be translated as Trendy to the Nth. Next door is the Colosse de Sacha, a very Archi-Mode ladies’ shoe store (do real women really wear those 6” high spike heels?), and that’s just the beginning of Fashion on the Right Bank.
Across the street from these boutiques is one of my favorite Paris hangouts, the Bar/Tabac Bistro St. Amour (19 rue Etienne Marcel; 01 42 33 15 95). Open only for lunch and closed on Sunday, the St. Amour has only about 10 tables; Eric LeNoir, the chef, waiter, owner, cigarette vendor and busboy, has a regular clientele who fill up the restaurant every day at lunch (he closes at 8:00pm, too early for dinner in Paris). By the time the place really starts to jump, around 1:30, Eric is necessarily in 20 places at once and in all of them he is laughing and cracking jokes with the crowd, most of whom work in the fashion houses surrounding the restaurant. He cajoles one customer to try the white burgundy (‘The perfect complement for the filet of sole, which is spectacular!’); he tells an American visitor with mock severity that the empty shells from the mussels are supposed to be put on the place mat next to the plate, not on the table; he swirls past another customer and tells her that she must, she absolutely must, try the home-made paté, it is un triomphe. All of this in high good humor, with responsive jokes and comments from the customers, whom I almost called the audience, because the luncheon is like a performance, or perhaps like having lunch with Mom, if your Mom were a really terrific cook with a jovial personality and twenty or thirty grown-up kids to feed.
As you leave the St. Amour, look across the street at the Tour de Jean sans Peur, the Tower of Duke Fearless John. This is the site of Paris’s first (15th century) public latrine (aren’t you glad to know!). Continuing down the south side of Etienne Marcel, you pass the trendy café Barbara Bui, a place in which gorgeous customers pose elegantly in plate glass windows while eating minuscule portions of exquisitely presented Thai food. (The prices, like the girls, are breathtaking.)
The next cross street is the rue Montorgueil, a center of trendy Paris. Montorgueil has a small but lively daily market which I sometimes patronize on Sunday (its best day): I go because it is near my apartment and I like the vendors, but the real reason to visit Montorgueil is the passing scene, which is perhaps the most varied and colorful in Paris. The street is regularly cruised by women of all ages, dressed in clothes that to ordinary mortals – or at least ordinary non-Parisian mortals – seem breathtakingly outrageous.
Feathers and rags mix with purple hair and mini skirts, or sometimes with combat boots or toothpick high-heels (perhaps from the Colosse de Sacha back on the rue Turbigo?) or high-heeled, bright orange sneakers. For reasons that utterly escape me, the street is regularly cruised by teenage girls who look like Madonna and have made themselves up to look like Cruella de Ville: these exotic fauna share Montorgueil with frumpy street people and the occasional professional femme fatale from the nearby rue St. Denis. All of these rara avis are accompanied by miscellaneous oiseaux de passage of lesser plumage. This exotic aviary flutters through the rue Montorgeuil throughout the day, every day (Monday excluded), visibly preening, visibly reveling at the pleasure in seeing and being seen.
Being a voyeur or vu is definitely the Montorgueil mystic. Indeed there are a dozen or so cafés on both sides of the street that serve as observation posts for those whose tenu inclines them more to the voyeur than the vu side of this equation. You can choose your café according to your mood, and as in a bullfight, you can pick a seat in the sun or shade. There are cafés for the young and trendy; cafés for the frumpy; cafés that serve organic breads and veggies; and cafés that serve modest lunches to any and all comers, including the occasional American tourist.
If you were to turn left on Montorgueil instead of right, at no. 38 you would pass a famous restaurant named l’Escargot Montorgueil. This Paris landmark first opened its doors in 1838; in its hey-day it welcomed Sarah Bernhardt, Marcel Proust, Dali, Charlie Chaplin and Cocteau. It is now more popular with tourists, who come to sop up the atmosphere along with their garlic butter. The French regard it as passé and overpriced: they prefer Aux Tonneaux des Halles, two doors down the street at no. 28, which has simple, unpretentious, reasonably-priced food in an authentic, old fashioned bistro atmosphere.
If you walk south down Montorgueil, you might stop for a coffee at one of the two cafés at the bottom of the street, facing the green space of the Forum des Halles and the back of the Eglise St. Eustace. These two cafés, l’Esplanade and La Pointe des Halles, face due south and are not blocked by any buildings; they are on a kind of cul-de-sac with hardly any automobile traffic. Not surprisingly, every table is occupied when the sun is shining, but the site is so bright, lively and traffic-free that I sometimes decide that it’s worth the wait for a table.
The street between the two cafés is the rue Montmartre, one of the most interesting streets in Paris. You could, if the fancy struck you, walk all the way to the top of Montmartre on this street; and you would enjoy every minute of your walk, because the street is home to dozens of little shops and cafés, each one of which seems irresistible in its own way. (Or you could simply file this street away for another walking day in Paris.)
Like Etienne Marcel, the rue Montmartre is captivating even in its first block, as you will see as you walk up; for it has two shops that sell some of the best foie gras in Paris, all vacuum packed and prepared for shipping. The most interesting of these shops is the Comptoir de la Gastronomie, at no. 34, which has an enchanting art nouveau facade as well as a generous stock of patés, foie gras, cognac, dried mushrooms and smoked salmon. The shop has recently expanded into the space next door: it now offers light lunches, often incorporating these same ingredients.
On the opposite side of the rue Montmartre, at no. 15, is Le Cochon a L’Oreille, a tiny place (it has only seven or eight tables) with an inconspicuous sign on its awning. If I happen to be feeling hungry at this stage in my peregrinations, I find the Cochon hard to resist, for it is one of the great Paris experiences. An authentic café left over from the huge food market which once spread over this entire area (Les Halles), it has floor to ceiling art-deco tiles depicting turn-of-the-century scenes from the former market; it also has an ancient and authentic ‘zinc’, a tin-covered bar on which the barman totes up the prices of the customers’ drinks in chalk. Best of all, it has a garrulous owner (check out the painted plaster statute on the counter and ask him why the place is called ‘The Pig at The Ear) and very good food. The Cochon is no longer, as it was for many years, dirt cheap, and it is now open evenings; but the best time is still lunch, when you share the bar with the local butchers and tradesman who take their lunch standing up, and who always are game for a few laughs. (One of the best afternoons I have ever spent in Paris was in the Cochon on December 31, 1998. The customers were all in holiday spirits, and pretty soon someone at the bar started singing old French songs. My friends and I joined in the party: it was nearly 6:00am when we finally stumbled out of the little café, slapping each other cordially on the back and vowing eternal friendship. We embraced as we parted, as if to seal a lifetime bond; then we swept out, radiantly happy, into the passionate Parisian night.)
At the corner of the rue Montmartre and Etienne Marcel is yet another trendy café decorated with slick modern furnishings and the beautiful young. Simply called Etienne Marcel, its tiny tables and white plastic chairs are set out on a corner in the midst of endless, noisy city traffic. In spite of the noise and fumes, there is never a free table; I feel obliged to conclude that to be young and beautiful in Paris apparently means never having to worry about the stench of diesel fuel.
If you turn right at the restaurant Etienne Marcel and head back towards Sebastopol along the rue Tiquetonne, you will find yourself on one of THE trendy streets of Paris. The one-block long section of Tiquetonne between the rue Montmartre and the rue Montorgueil is home to a handful of avant-garde clothes shops (and a great boutique for men’s or women’s hats); mostly, it has yet more cafés filled with the young, the thin and the beautiful. There seems to be an unwritten law here that says Never Serve Anyone Over 30; in any case, as I am distinctly over 30, I walk down Tiquetonne filled with admiration but I have never dared try for a table.
Once you resume your stroll west down the rue Etienne Marcel, the tone of the neighborhood again changes dramatically. Small boutiques are suddenly out; large stores selling big brand fashion names are in. You are about to enter the Place des Victoires, a circle of 17th century buildings that is home to some of the great names of fashion, including Kenzo, Esprit, etc.
The Place des Victoires is one of the most beautiful squares in Paris. It is also the epicenter of one part of Paris’s fashion empire, and it is crowded with boutiques that feature high-style clothes for the celery-stalk and designer-water set. In the middle of the square is the magnificently pretentious statue of Louis XIV, the king whose battlefield victories were celebrated by the construction of this square in 1686. The king is done up like a Roman Emperor astride his horse; he is facing the handsome facade of the Banque de France, perhaps hoping for a loan, for his regime was notoriously short of cash.As you leave the Place des Victoires it’s a bit tricky to continue walking in a straight line, because the rue Etienne Marcel terminates abruptly at the king’s horse’s rear end. The many streets leading out of the square are confusing, but the best way out is to take the tiny rue La Feuillade, which quickly becomes the rue des Petits Champs. You are now back on the straight line from Sebastopol to the Ave. de l’Opera; and you are once again in a completely different neighborhood.
The rue des Petits Champs is no longer a street of high fashion: it is a street of boutiques, restaurants and cafés. And stretching out at right angles from the rue des Petits Champs, on both sides of the street, are a series of Galeries, which are narrow, covered streets lined with shops. To mention merely two, the Galerie Vivienne, on the right as you head west from the Place des Victoires, is an elegant venue with a charming 19th century mosaic floor and several starchy white-tablecloth restaurants. More off-beat is the Galerie de Choiseul, which has art galleries and affordable shops and (how could I forget?) Sam’s Bagels.
Even before you reach the Galerie de Choiseul, however, you have another possibility. You can turn right on the rue Vivienne, and at least glance into one of the great restaurants of Paris, Le Grand Colbert, a turn of the century brasserie which has recently been restored to its full belle époque splendor. Everything here recalls the glory days of Paris: the 20 foot ceilings, the potted palms and mirrored walls, the waiters in tuxedos, the polished brass railings: everything, including the food, is perfect, and perfectly evocative. I half expect to see Lillian Russell or Diagliev himself make an entrance through that etched-glass front door; I almost feel undressed without a top hat and walking stick.
In France, brasseries serve sauerkraut (pickled cabbage with a mountain of steamed sausages and pork chops), towering platters of fresh shellfish, Alsatian sausages and veal cutlets. Brasseries do not serve the coq au vin found in bistros or the elaborate sauces and preparations found in restaurants. These distinctions have certainly faded in recent years, but even today, you can be quite sure of finding sauerkraut in a Parisian brasserie; and the sauerkraut at Le Grand Colbert, like everything else here, is excellent.
Because the place is so beautiful and the food is so good (although perhaps uneven), The Grand Colbert is often crowded. At lunch it caters to local businesspeople; in the evenings, it is popular with theater people and le beau monde. For many Parisians as well as tourists, Le Grand Colbert is a must. (Pronounced, a la française, as ‘le moost’.) I might add that this is the place where Diane Keaton had her Parisian birthday dinner with her doctor boyfriend in Something’s Gotta Give.
In order to get to Le Grand Colbert from the rue des Petits Champs, you have to turn right. But if you decide instead to turn left from the rue des Petits Champs, you might notice a tiny sign that says ‘Passage de Perron.’ When you enter this inconspicuous little passage you may feel a bit like Alice in the rabbit hole, for Le Passage de Perron takes you from a banal commercial side-street adjacent to the rue des Petits Champs directly into the gardens of Le Palais Royal, one of the most perfect urban spaces in the world.
This is not the place for a description of the Palais Royal, a place about which whole volumes have been written. I note merely that this magnificent monument has been central to the life of Paris since Roman times, and that Louis XIV lived here in his childhood and Colette lived here in her dotage. Fragonard died here “eating an ice cream” and I come here every June 21, the longest day of the year, to have dinner with friends on the terrace of Restaurant du Palais Royal, because I love the quiet (there are no cars); the sunlight finally fading over the fountain (at 11:00 pm!); the extensive gardens; and sometimes even the window shopping (which the French call lèche vitrine, or ‘window-pane-licking’). The shops in the dark recesses under the arches once harbored cutthroats and ladies of easy virtue; they now are home to a collection of elegant, highly Parisian boutiques. At least one of these boutiques, Les Drapeaux de France, features Paris’s finest collection of lead soldiers, huge squadrons of them, from every age and period, plus tiny dioramas of almost everything else, including a 3’ long, bare-breasted semi-porn Cleopatra, stinging herself with an asp (for a modest $500). Not surprisingly, groups of gaping tourists can often be seen standing in front of the windows, shaking their heads in a kind of ‘what would they think of that back in Topeka?’ bewilderment, but they rarely dare to cross the threshold.
If you like to garden, France’s (perhaps the world’s?) most elegant garden shop is in the Palais Royal. Le Prince Jardinier (‘the Prince Gardener’) which is run by a real Prince who likes to garden, features such items as a velvet gardening apron, a cotton smock for $300 and a reproduction Louis XIV watering can for $75.
Several years ago this same Prince purchased the venerable Deyrolle, a Paris left bank institution since 1831. Located at no. 46 rue du Bac, as it has been since 1870, Deyrolle is an essential part of any flâneur’s visit to Paris, for it is one of the city’s most sublimely odd locales. (Forgive me for this detour: Deyrolle is on the other side of the Seine and is technically not a part of this walk at all, except as a kind of adjunct to Le Prince Jardiner in the Palais Royale, but it is most distinctly a three-star stop for Parisian flâneurs.)
Deyrolle might be described as a ‘nature shop,’ but calling it a nature shop is a bit like calling Marilyn Monroe a rather pretty girl. Deyrolle is a magnificent nature shop, the nature shop to end all nature shops. It greets you at the door with a stuffed horse or cow, or a polar bear, or a pet Siamese cat, or all of the above; as you walk up the stairs to the display rooms on the second floor, you encounter dusty cases filled with shells and minerals, or animal skins or feather necklaces. Mounted on stark black slabs of painted wood are exquisitely delicate, pure white skeletons of crouching frogs or curling snakes; objects so beautiful that they are in themselves works of art, as indeed are many other objects in this treasure trove. Look up at the original and reproduction 19th and 20th century posters, including a particular charmer, written in Arabic, that explains, or at least I think it explains, in words and drawings, the production of honey. There is also a collection of posters showing the parts and the life of various plants; my favorite is a graceful 4’ high poppy, its various parts scattered carelessly about like pieces of a deconstructed automobile engine. And there is also a collection of old-school posters that were designed to teach kids the names of body parts, of farm objects and the risks of falling into a brook.
In the room farthest from the front door, you will find books and bugs and butterflies. Last time I was in Deyrolle, I agonized about whether I really needed a black box containing an astonishing mantis-like creature from some tropical jungle, its lacy wings and immensely long legs and antennae all spread-eagled about 12” above the black velvet background. The creature was about 6” wide and 15” long from the tip of his (her?) front toes to the tip of his (her?) back toes; he (or she) was a pale, iridescent green with colors fading to pinkish and yellow. The visual effect of this pastel creature in a violently black box was stunning; only a major effort of will prevented me from snapping up my mantis and taking it home, an act that would doubtless have earned me a badge of honor in the world of Parisian décorateurs, many of whom regularly ransack Deyrolle for objets charmants for the homes of their trendy clients. (I also yearned for a set of immense – 4’ long, 2’ high – beetles, as black as coal and as ferocious as medieval warriors. The bugs seemed to be threatening each other with instant death by impalement; I thought they might be an amusing accouterment in my living room, which now contains nothing more menacing than a stuffed leather pig.)
The Prince de Broglie, the real-life Prince Jardinier from the Palais Royal, has now purchased Deyrolle, and he is doing at least some remodeling; he has now opened a branch of his Palais Royal gardening store downstairs.
Our walking tour of the right bank and the Palais Royal was interrupted by our detour to Deyrolle. But in fact our mini-tour of Paris had almost come to a close, for after the Palais Royal, the rest of the rue des Petits Champs is necessarily anti-climactic. There is a wonderful knife store on the corner of the rue Mehul, with a map of France in the window that shows about 30 different knives and the places in France where each of them is made; and the rue des Petits Champs does cross the rue Ste. Anne, which, if taken to the right, will lead you into a kind of French Japantown, an amazing series of Japanese restaurants and shops.
But shortly after the Palais Royal, the rue des Petits Champs comes to a quiet end, expiring politely into the bustling traffic of the avenue de l’Opera. And that is a whole different story.
I love walking on the rue des Petits Champs and the rue Etienne Marcel because those streets give me a sampling of the incredible diversity that makes life in Paris so exciting. I love to flâner in the Aligre market, and I love to watch the young and the gaunt strut their stuff in and around the rue Montorgueil.
But the truth is that I love to flâner almost everywhere in Paris. My best advice to anyone planning to visit the city is, go to the center of town and turn left. Wherever you go, you will discover your own miracles and magic places.
In Paris, there is no such a thing as a wrong turn.Copyright
© M Padnos
