Paris, Paris: Journey Into the City of Light (15 page)

The smell of the charcuterie, of Les Halles themselves, becomes intolerable, however. Florent develops chronic indigestion from the stench. The book’s “belly” is no mere organ—it’s a metaphor for the mouth, stomach, and burgeoning bowels of the Second Empire’s nouveaux riches, for bodily functions, for the disquieting alimentary realities of bourgeois existence. As the novel closes the tormented Florent battles nightmare images of “giant vats, the vile rendering cauldrons where the fat of a nation was melted down.”

Sit amid scores of contemporary tobacco freaks on a café terrace at Les Halles and you will soon feel you’ve been smoked like one of Florent’s hams. Zola’s words seem to ring in the air like the bells of Saint-Eustache. Was it perhaps the kind of unsentimental view Zola expressed that animated Pompidou and his speculator-sanitizers? From the 1940s on, succeeding administrations had threatened to remove the wholesale market, decried as unsanitary, overcrowded, rat-infested, the cause of traffic jams, and a drag on the economy. Some officials openly regretted the fact that central Paris—Les Halles in particular—had not been destroyed in World War II. The first official eviction notice was issued in 1958. More than a decade later, the lure of potential profits derived from building the new market at Rungis, the RER, and the Forum, not to mention the thrill of seeing a bright new Pompidou Center rise from a remade neighborhood, became irresistible. Reread Zola and you might suddenly realize why Baltard’s pavilions had to go, and why Pompidou exiled the one survivor to a Belle Époque theme park far away. The pavilions were a threat: had they been preserved on site they might indeed have become a rallying point for the “rioters,” “communists,” and “hippies” Pompidou feared.

Luckily, on this bright spring day in the second decade of the twenty-first century, I opted to skip Au Père Tranquille and have coffee at the counter of unsung Le Bon Pêcheur across the street. I also left Zola at home, and riffled instead my talismanic copy of
The Human Comedy
. It was a natural leaven, as it had been when I first read it in sunny California forty years ago. Try as I might, though, I couldn’t make the connection between Saroyan’s classic and Les Halles. Why? A confession is in order: I’m even more shortsighted than Zola was, and I’d meant to bring along an episode of Honoré de Balzac’s
La Comédie humaine
, parts of which are set in and around Les Halles. But I’d grabbed the wrong book, an all-American human comedy. Same name, different setting.

As I sipped my coffee at Le Bon Pêcheur a disconcertingly friendly gentleman of advanced years ran his index finger over his pencil-thin Clark Gable mustache, tipped back his handsome felt cap, and asked if I wasn’t, perhaps, an export product from the United States of America. When he heard an affirmative, he thrust out his hand. He said his name was Marcel, and he thanked my forebears for sacrificing so many of their “boys,” as he put it, on the beaches of Normandy. Their deaths had allowed him to live free. He came from Normandy, he added amiably, though he’d been in Paris for the past fifty years, and was a neighborhood regular. I wondered aloud if he missed Les Halles of old. Marcel shook his head. “My philosophy is simple,” he declared, “look forward, do not look back. I don’t even see those buildings anymore.” He waved at the mirrored pavilions. Startling me again, he broke into song—he was an entertainer, he said. I recognized the old standard “C’est Magnifique,” from the musical
Can-Can
. “Cole Porter,” Marcel quipped. “I first heard it here in 1953. I love American music.”

In a state of mild shock, I left Le Bon Pêcheur enchanted, and no longer recoiled at the view of Jean Willerval’s corollas, or the piles of garbage from the golden-arched eatery by the Fontaine des Innocents. Trolling slowly home down alleys lined by architectural antiques, I had a reprise of my comforting thought of years past, a thought I often have when leaving Les Halles’s neighborhood. It ushered me home to a premodern part of town spared Pompidou’s attentions. Based on past performance, I reminded myself, whatever Les Halles’s next version is, it could not be much worse than what’s there today, and it will be a long time coming. In the meantime, I will be re-reading Zola, and diving into Balzac’s many-volume
La Comédie humaine
. I might even watch
Irma La Douce
again—at “Rue du Cinéma” this time around—and eat a gross of popcorn.

Hit the Road Jacques

Id est oppidum parisiorum positum in insula fluminis Sequanae
. (It is a town of the Parisii situated on an island of the river Seine.)

—J
ULIUS
C
AESAR
,
The Gallic Wars

ne afternoon on the rooftop terrace of the Pompidou Center I gazed beyond the Plexiglas tubes and primary-colored pipes at the people beetling along Rue Saint-Martin. It’s the straightaway edging the center’s sunken plaza. How many of those pedestrians, I wondered with something like an epiphany, realized they were walking on Paris’s oldest thoroughfare, the north-south axis the Romans called
cardo-maximus
—as in cardinal points? This particular
cardo
is older even than Rome, archaeologists agree. It lies atop the trade route that in the Bronze Age linked northern Europe via the Celtic settlement of the Parisii tribe to the Mediterranean.

All roads may well lead to Rome but some, including Rue Saint-Martin, are more direct than others. Entering Paris from the north at what is now the suburb of Saint-Denis, this ancestor of the city’s roadways runs underneath Rue Philippe de Girard, changes names half a dozen times, and leaves town heading south past the Cité Universitaire campus. Well, it did leave town once upon a time, until president Georges Pompidou had the Boulevard Périphérique built. Now the road dead-ends into the beltway—and metaphorically goes underground, emerging many miles later in the blighted
banlieue
.

Ever practical, the ancient Romans straightened and paved the beaten Bronze Age path. In the Middle Ages pilgrims adopted it, renaming the Left Bank portion in honor of Saint-Jacques-le-Majeur—Saint James the Greater. Starting in the ninth century, his sanctuary in Compostela, near Spain’s Atlantic coast, became Christendom’s third-most popular pilgrimage destination after Rome and Jerusalem. Thousands of questers for more than a thousand years caressed The Way of Saint James with their clogs or bare feet. It’s hard to imagine how many blisters this road has engendered.

A few years after glimpsing the Roman road from the Pompidou’s rooftop, I was seized by a fit of inspired madness. Alison and I set out from Paris to cross France on foot following Roman roads and the Way of Saint James, a three-month, 750-mile romp. It wasn’t a religious pilgrimage, but rather a maverick journey of self-discovery and physical regeneration (chronicled in the upcoming book, to be called
Hit the Road Jacques
). Before leaving Paris, we broke in our boots on the
cardo-maximus
, a friendly nod to our Roman forebears and Saint James. Happily the Parisian prelude to our journey proved a pleasant, day-long, six-mile saunter down the city’s longest memory lane.

Ours started as all good hikes start, with coffee and croissants. The setting—the Gare de l’Est—was unusual. But this train station sits astride the Roman highway, its rails teasing out the lay-lines of old. North of it there’s nothing much to see, ancient or modern. From the station south, however, the cityscape becomes increasingly intriguing.

We made our first stop across the street at 148 Rue du Faubourg-Saint-Martin. In the early 1600s, Queen Marie de Médicis waved her wand and created the Récollets convent here. It was ransacked by the requisite Revolutionaries, and went from barracks to weaving-works, hospice to military hospital before becoming a squatters’ stronghold. Part of the cloister disappeared in 1926. Other chunks were swallowed by the expanding Gare de l’Est. Long a moody place we actively avoided, nowadays it houses the Maison de l’architecture, with working spaces and apartments for visiting architects. Beyond the freshly restored colonnaded front, in a quiet courtyard we discovered Café de la Maison. Had we known of it, we would have skipped the station’s paper cups and bitter brew.

In 1844 and 1852, when the Grand Boulevards and train stations were being built, road workers unearthed the northern bed of the
cardo
, from the Seine to the Square Saint-Laurent. Like the layer-cake of stratified roads, Paris’s churches also commonly sit atop ancient sites—temples to stone-age Earth goddesses, Celtic deities, and of course Roman gods. About fourteen hundred years ago Grégoire de Tours mentioned a Saint-Laurent chapel on the ancient highway, and here, we discovered, it was, much altered.

The Renaissance nave of Saint-Laurent is part of the hodgepodge whose homely façade and neo-Gothic bell tower date to 1862. Candles flickered, a symbolic link, perhaps, to the Merovingian monks buried beneath the church circa AD 550. Their tombs were uncovered in 1680. Lower strata are older—much older, say experts.

In
Conquest of Gaul
, better known as
The Gallic Wars
, Caesar mentions the country’s fine roads. That the Gauls had their own highway network is news to most contemporary readers, and was news to me. Rome demanded standardized straightaways. They were precisely 4.5 meters wide—fourteen feet. This allowed chariots to pass side-by-side unimpeded. Roman roads are the ancestors of our dual carriageways and Interstates. Roman engineers improved what they found as they conquered territory and built cities.

It’s not surprising then that Rue du Faubourg-Saint-Martin runs straight and true from Square Saint-Laurent through the three-arched Porte Saint-Martin, a Roman-style triumphal gateway built in 1674 to celebrate French victories in Besançon and Limburg. It’s said Louis XIV fancied himself the divine-right heir of the emperors. Here, sculpted on the north entablature, he appears in Roman garb. We walked through and stared up: on the south side the Sun King is portrayed as Hercules, wearing little other than a big wig.

As Rue Saint-Martin runs south the concentration of historic sites along its route multiplies. The Arts et Métiers museum, housed in the former Saint-Martin-des-Champs priory, tempted us to investigate. Martin reportedly worked miracles here in
AD
385. The handsome, airy library is in a reconverted thirteenth-century refectory designed by the same architect who created the Sainte-Chapelle. We wandered through it and several atmospheric courtyards, but knew we would need hours to absorb the history and enjoy the displays. They range from steam engines and scientific instruments to Foucault’s pendulum—the real one.

We ambled out to the church next door, Saint-Nicolas-des-Champs. It lies just south of Rue de Turbigo. This unprepossessing sanctuary surprised us with a spacious deambulatory for Saint-Jacques pilgrims. We deambulated as quietly as we could in our boots, passing behind the altar. A handful of faithful prayed. Clearly, we were the only outsiders.

It’s challenging to keep on the
cardo
’s straight and narrow. Nearby streets beckon. For instance, three blocks farther southeast at 51 Rue de Montmorency stands Paris’s oldest house, from 1407. It’s raked backward from sculpted stone foundations, and has been remodeled too many times to count. Somehow it maintains the endearing quality of things ancient, those ever-rarer time capsules that survive.

In it lived Nicolas and Pernelle Flamel, wealthy booksellers. It’s said they were alchemists, able to turn base metals into gold. To cover their diabolical activities, the couple underwrote part of Saint-Jacques-de-la-Boucherie, or so conspiracy theorists claim. Like the Flamels, the church is no longer, though the tower stands. We could see its summit over the roofs half a mile south.

Former French president François Mitterrand obsessed about the east-west “Power Axis,” an imaginary line from the Arc de Triomphe to the Louvre. Pompidou, a classical scholar before he entered politics, preferred the Celtic-Roman-Pilgrim’s axis we were on. The buildings on Rue Saint-Martin that still front the Pompidou Center are a mere four hundred years old, and Pompidou clearly felt many others nearby were dispensible. He had them demolished, to make way for his temple of contemporary art. If the center lasts another four hundred years, will it no longer house contemporary art as we know it today? When does contemporary become antique or ancient?