Paris – des heures exquises

After a two-hour rest in one of Hotel des 2 Continent‘s single person rooms, I venture back to the streets of Paris in the gentle sun of late afternoon. I walk along the river, passing the Institut de France and Pont Neuf, strolling from one bouquinist to another, browsing from one covered cart of books and drawings overlooking the Seine far below to the next. Slow to purchase, I consider an old Asterix comic book, deciding that it’s wiser to wait until the end of the trip rather than carrying it now.

Back in the second century BC, a Celtic tribe called the Parisii first established a little settlement of commerce on what is now the Île de la Cité. The gold coins they minted are quite beautiful. In 53 BC, Julius Caesar made a visit. What did he see then and why did he decide to fight? Caesar wrote a book called Gallic War that gives his third person account. The Romans defeated the Parisii in 52 BC, destroying the Celtic settlement and building their own called Lutetia. 

Lutetia had only two bridges back in Roman times and they were made of wood. Petit Pont, crossing from the left bank to the Île de la Cité, and continuing across the island to Grand Pont (now Pont Notre-Dame), crossing from Île de la Cité to the right bank. Thanks to King Philippe II, the once foul-smelling bridges have been paved since around 1200. 

I cross both bridges and approach the park surrounding the only thing that remains of L’Eglise Saint-Jacques, its tower, Tour Saint-Jacques. On occasion, a guide takes people up to the top of the tower. Looking back at the island across the river, I see what remains of the old palace, Palais de la Cité, its enchanting coned towers stretching shadows across the Seine River.

I turn back to the Tour Saint-Jacques and think of the man who is buried somewhere underneath, Nicolas Flamel, alchemist and scribe. The house he built in 1407 as a hostel for the poor still stands and is a restaurant today. It is the oldest house remaining in Paris on 51 rue de Montemorency just a bit north of the Tour Saint-Jacques, the remains of Nicolas Flamel’s parish church. 

I continue east to the Hotel de Ville, the city hall built between 1535-1551 by King François I during the Renaissance. It was destroyed and rebuilt since the original. Le Marais is a part of Paris I haven’t visited before. It’s where the merchants lived in old Paris and it carries that tradition today with store after store. Christian Dior, Chanel, Anthropologie. People team and swarm busily, paper-handled shopping bags swing from hand after hand. The stores intersperse with ancient buildings and walls, so although a shopping district is not my area, I can enjoy the architecture and sense of history. It’s the people’s place.

I wind the streets for a bit before returning to the calmer Île de la Cité where I sit in front of a café at a table big enough for two and order a coffee. 2 euros 50. There’s an expectation of exact change that I’ll have to prepare for next time. School girls weave in and out at two tiny tables, chattering importantly nearby. I gaze up at the top of the building across the street in front of me and see the spiked top of the steeple of Sainte-Chapelle peeking into the blue sky. 

Saint-Louis IX, the only canonized king of France, built Sainte-Chapelle between 1238-1248.

A royal chapel for the palace, it is the most beautiful display of stained glass I’ve ever seen. The entire story of the Bible is told in detailed color and light. When the sun shines through the glass there is a stunning crossing of bouncing of colors unseen anywhere else. It is exquisite.I cross the bridges once again, walk through the parvis of Notre-Dame, and cross to the left bank and go up Montagne Sainte-Geneviève. 

One thousand years before Jeanne d’Arc convinced the young Good King René, a man with many crowns but no kingdoms, to ride with her to Paris, there was another threat to Paris and another woman acting as savior.

Attila the Hun had taken Treves, Metz and Reims. Paris, quivering with fear, decided to resign and abandon the city. Sainte-Geneviève convinced the people to resist and join together in prayer. Attila the Hun bypassed Paris and sacked Orleans. 

Ten years later, in 461, the Salian Franks led by Childeric I seiged Paris. Sainte-Geneviève organized the defense, setting up a way for food to be brought in from neighboring cities. 

Although by 481, Childeric I’s son Clovis I defeated the Romans and took over France, making Paris his capital and becoming the first official King of France, he converted to Christianity and revered Sainte-Geneviève. 

Sainte-Geneviève built Saint-Denys de la Chapelle in honor of the Bishop of the Parisii who was martyred in 250 AD on what the Romans called Mount Mercury and became Mount of the Martyrs or Montmartre. The head of Saint Denis was cut off because he refused to renounce Christianity. Legend tells that he picked up his head and walked six miles north before collapsing on the site that became the Basilica of Saint-Denis, a place of pilgrimage and the burial site of most of the French monarchs. It was the birthplace of Gothic design in 1140 thanks to Abbot Sugar’s fascination with light, and where Jeanne d’Arc made an offering of her armor in the manner of knights at that time, hanging it in the cathedral before going to war in 1429.

Sainte-Geneviève is one of the three patron saints of Paris, the other two are Saint Denis and Saint-Marcel. Sainte-Jeanne d’Arc is one of the patron saints of France. Both women had a complete devotion to their country and its people in a way that defied any boundaries, especially gender. 

As I walk up the hill, I wonder if Sainte-Geneviève walked on the twisting, turning streets where I am walking.

The top of the hill is now the Panthéon. Originally intended to be a newly designed church in honor of Sainte-Geneviève built on the remains of the Abbey Sainte-Geneviève originally constructed by King Clovis I in 502 and the burial site of the first French kings, the French revolution halted its construction until it was completed during Napoleon’s time. The design is very much like the original. 

The Tour Clovis remains from the Abbey Sainte-Geneviève and is now part of a school. 

Sainte-Genevieve was buried at the abbey and her remains are in the church I am looking at right now and have grown to love. L’Église Saint-Étienne-du-Mont. It’s right next to the Panthéon.

I first saw this church several years ago and was taken by its intriguing clock tower and beauty. Stepping inside, everything is white. There are many white winding staircases near the altar, something I haven’t seen in a church before. I read that this is called a “rood screen,” an ornate partition between the chancel and the nave common in Medieval architecture, and is the only surviving example in Paris. 

I like to visit historic churches when they are having services. It’s L’Église Saint-Étienne-du-Mont’s Saturday evening service, so I enter and pick up a paper pamphlet with printed lyrics. Eagerly, I sing the French words along with the congregation and the cantor who sounds so much like Josh Groban that an extensive career is not out of the question.

It is dark when I return to the street. I follow rue Clovis and turn left on rue Descartes and right away there is a beautiful blue painted tree as long as three men and beside it a poem to the passerby written by Yves Bonnefoy. After pausing to read the poem, I continue to the place where the French poet Paul Verlaine and the American prose writer Ernest Hemingway both lived at different times. 

The restaurant is just before rue Descartes becomes rue Mouffetard, one of the most beautiful streets in Paris. There is a market further down the street and so many lovely specialty shops along the winding, narrow, cobbled way. When I first came to Paris more than thirty years ago, my friend and I stayed on the second floor of the Young and Happy Youth Hostel that is still there after all these years. 

At the restaurant, La Maison de Verlaine, I ask for a table for dinner and I’m seated in the corner of the outside terrace. While I look at the menu, a young man scuttles behind me to scale the stairs to his apartment. I wonder if his apartment is the same one Hemingway lived in. Possible.

The traditional French restaurant dinner has three courses: entrée, plat, dessert. There are five choices for each course. I choose a fish soup, duck breast with honey sauce, and an apple tart. And I order a glass of rich red Burgundy wine. 

A lamp-lit stone plaque on the street says that the poet Paul Verlaine died in this house on January 8, 1896. He was born March 30, 1844 in Metz, France, 330 kilometers east, just south of Luxembourg. 

Just under it, another stone plaque says that Ernest Hemingway lived in the building from 1921 to 1925.

And then there are photographs of Verlaine and Hemingway and other people. 

The waiter is a nice young man. He hands me a bookmark with one of Verlaine’s poems on the back: L’heure exquise. It’s a beautiful, simple poem. Reynaldo Hahn set it to music and I would like to learn to sing it.

The exquisite hour

The white moon
shines in the woods
from each branch
departs a voice
beneath the bower…

O beloved.

The pond reflects, 
deep mirror,
the silhouette
of the black willow
where the wind cries…

We dream, it is the hour.

A vast and tender
appeasement
seems to descend
from the heavens
that the stars illume…

It is the exquisite hour.

(translated by Kat Bernhardt)

I’m not sure exactly how it happens, but two young girls from China approach the posted menu on the street, eyes full of hope, and without hesitating, seeing that the tables are full, I invite them to join me. 

They are friendly, polite girls. Unpolished. People you immediately trust.

They are from Guangzhou, China where the food is very good and where they work for an animation company. In Paris for business, their American names are the unlikely Magic and Maybe. 

Struggling with the menu, they just want a single dish each. I help them figure it out and when the waiter comes, I help again. It turns out the waiters are from Greece.  I know more English than the Greek gentlemen and more French than the Chinese women, so I act as a linguistic bridge. I’ve dreamed of this moment all my life.

Conversation with dinner is of great cultural importance to the French, and, for a solo traveler, it is a welcome luxury. Afterward, I walk along the cobblestones of rue Mouffetard and head slowly past the Panthéon and rue Saint-Jacques and toward the hotel, along the way sitting at an outside table for a glass of wine and enjoying the peace and beauty of the Latin Quarter. So many layers of history under my feet, so many stories whispered just softly enough that I can’t hear their details, just the muffled shapes of stories, all around me. 

I was seventeen when I first visited Paris and I didn’t like it. It was July and the city stank. There was so much city with so many zipping cars and the dark fringes of drink and cigarettes and theft. 

Somehow, over a lifetime, I’ve found a way to savor Paris like the rich, red wine I taste from the round glass cradled in my hands while the light dances across the cobblestones of St. Germain des Pres and I take my time, savor des heures exquises, and slowly walk the short distance to the hotel. 

More about Hemingway in Paris.

And another article about Hemingway in Paris.

A peek into the life of Paul Verlaine.

Next France for Two Months: Train to Thonon-les-Bains