Authors: John Baxter
B004MMEIOG EBOK
The Most Beautiful Walk in the World
A Pedestrian in Paris
John Baxter
Contents
C
AFÉS AND
R
ESTAURANTS
1. La Coupole
2. La Rotonde
3. Le Dôme
4. Les Deux Magots
5. Café Flore
6. Brasserie Lipp
7. The Ritz Hotel
8. Dingo Bar (now Auberge de Venise)
9. Harry’s Bar
10. Les Editeurs
11. Closerie des Lilas
12. Le Balzar
13. Au Lapin Agile
14. La Fée Verte
M
ARKETS
15. Porte de Vanves (antiques)
16. Rue Brancion (old books)
17. Porte de Clignancourt (antiques)
18. Marché d’Aligre (food)
A
RT AND
P
AINTING
19. Rue Mazarine
20. The Louvre
21. Le Grand Palais
22. Centre Pompidou
S
IGHTS
23. The Catacombs
24. The Passages (arcades)
25. Luxembourg Gardens
26. The Opera Garnier
27. La Santé Prison
28. Sacré-Coeur Cathedral
29. Notre Dame Cathedral
30. Cour de Commerce St. Andre
31. Place de la Bastille
L
ITERARY
S
ITES
32. Ernest Hemingway’s apartment (74 Rue Cardinal Lemoine)
33. Ernest Hemingway’s apartment (#6 Rue Ferou)
34. Gertrude Stein’s apartment
35. Rue de l’Odéon (Sylvia Beach’s apartment)
36. Old Shakespeare and Company bookshop
37. New Shakespeare and Company bookshop
38. The Panthéon (burial site of Voltaire, Rousseau, and Zola)
Nobody has yet found a better way to travel slowly than to walk. It requires two legs; nothing more. Want to go faster? Don’t bother walking—roll, slide or fly: don’t walk. But once you are walking, it’s not performance that counts but the intensity of the sky, the splendour of the landscape. Walking is not a sport.
CHARLES GROS,
Walking: A Philosophy
E
very day, heading down rue de l’Odéon toward Café Danton on the corner of boulevard Saint-Germain or toward the market on rue Buci, I pass them.
The walkers.
Not all are walking, however. They’d
like
to be—but their stroll around Paris isn’t working out as they hoped.
Uncertain, they loiter at the foot of our street, at the corner of boulevard Saint-Germain, one of the busiest on this side of the Seine. Couples, usually, they’re dressed in the seasonal variation of what is almost a uniform—beige raincoat or jacket, cotton or corduroy pants, and sensible shoes. Huddling over a folded map or guidebook, they look up and around every few seconds, hopeful that the street signs and architecture will have transformed themselves into something more like Brooklyn or Brentwood or Birmingham.
Sometimes they appear in groups. We see a lot of these because our street, rue de l’Odéon, is to literature what Yankee Stadium is to baseball and Lord’s is to cricket. At no. 12, Sylvia Beach ran Shakespeare and Company, the English-language bookshop that published James Joyce’s
Ulysses.
Sylvia and her companion, Adrienne Monnier, lived in our building at no. 18. Joyce visited them there often. So did Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald, Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas, and of course Ernest Hemingway.
Most days, when I step out of the building, a group stands on the opposite sidewalk while someone lectures them in any one of a dozen languages about the history of our street. They regard me with curiosity, even respect. But often I feel like a fraud. Instead of thinking lofty literary thoughts, I’m compiling my shopping list.
Eggs, onions, a baguette. . .
After that, they set off again, a straggling column, following the guide’s flag or, in bad weather, her umbrella. Few take their eyes off this object. They’ve learned that Paris for the pedestrian is both fascinating and deceptive. What if they did pause—to browse that basket of books outside
une librairie,
or take a closer look at a dress in the window of a boutique? The tour might turn a corner, disappearing from sight, casting them adrift in this baffling town. They would be forced to buttonhole a passing Parisian and stammer, “Excusez-moi, monsieur, mais . . . parlez-vous Anglais?” Or worse, surrender to the mysteries of
le métro
. A few lost souls are always hovering at the entrance to the Odéon station. Staring up at the green serpentine art nouveau curlicues of Hector Guimard’s cast-iron archway, they may read
Metropolitain
but they
see
what Dante saw over the gate to hell: “Abandon hope all ye who enter here.”
What most frustrates the visitor walking in Paris is the presence all around of others who share none of their hesitation. Confident, casual, the locals breeze past, as careless as birds in a tree. For them, the métro holds no terrors. They know exactly when to pause as a bus roars by on what appears to be the wrong side of the road. They make abrupt turns into alleys, at the foot of which one glimpses the most interesting-looking little market. . .
How do they
know
?
Well, this is their habitat, their
quartier,
as familiar to them as their own living room. Because that’s how Parisians regard the city—as an extension of their homes. The concept of public space doesn’t exist here. People don’t step out of their front door into their car, then drive across town to the office or some air-conditioned mall. No Parisian drives around Paris. A few cycle. Others take the métro or a bus, but most walk. Paris belongs to its
piétons—
the pedestrians. One goes naturally
à pied
—on foot. And it’s only on foot that you discover its richness and variety. As another out-of-town Paris lover, the writer Edmund White, says in his elegant little book
The Flaneur
, “Paris is a world meant to be seen by the walker alone, for only the pace of strolling can take in all the rich (if muted) detail.”
Another writer, Adam Gopnik, calls a stroll down rue de Seine, just around the corner from our apartment, “the most beautiful walk in the world.” And so it is—for him. But every Parisian, and everyone who comes to know Paris, discovers his or her own “most beautiful walk.” A walk is not a parade or a race. It’s a succession of instants, any one of which can illuminate a lifetime. What about the glance, the scent, the glimpse, the way the light just falls . . . the “beautiful” part ? No tour guide or guidebook tells you that. Prepared itineraries remind me of those
PHOTO POINT
signs at Disneyland. Yes, that angle gives you an attractive picture. But why not just buy a postcard?
Nor is there a single Paris. The city exists as a blank page on which each person scribbles what the French call a
griffe
—literally “a claw” but more precisely a signature; a choice of favorite cafés, shops, parks, and the routes that link them. “I discovered that Paris did not exist,” wrote Colette on her arrival from the country. “It was no more than a cluster of provinces held together by the most tenuous of threads. There was nothing to prevent me from reconstructing my own province or any other my imagination should choose to fix in outline.”
In a way that isn’t possible with London or New York or Berlin, one can speak of “Colette’s Paris” or “Hemingway’s Paris” or “Scott Fitzgerald’s Paris,” or your own Paris. We all go through a similar process: finding the only café, the perfect park, the loveliest view, the most beautiful walk.
Nobody can say precisely which they will be. But maybe my experiences of a year of walking in Paris will suggest how and where you might start to find the succession of arrivals and departures that leaves one with memories that can never be erased, the moments one recounts all one’s life, prefaced by the words, “I remember . . . once . . . in Paris . . .”
Walk with me.
