Travelers' Tales Paris (20 page)

The Ile St-Louis is like France itself—an ideal of grace and proportion—but it differs from the rest of France in that it lives up to itself. Under constant repair and renovation, it remains intact. It is a small place derived from long experience. It has strength enough, and isolation enough, to endure with a certain smugness the troubles of the city and the world at whose center it rests.

The self-love is mitigated partly by success at guarding itself and partly by the ironic shrugs of its inhabitants, who, despite whatever aristocratic names of glamorous professions, live among
broken-veined
clochards
(hobos) with unbagged bottles, tourists with unbagged guidebooks, Bohemians with bagged eyes.

The actual troubles of the world do not miss the Ile St-Louis—one doesn't string hammocks between the plane trees here—but the air seems to contain fewer mites and less nefarious Paris ozone.

The lack of buses, the narrow streets, the breeze down the Seine help. And as to perhaps the most dangerous variety of Paris smog, the Ile St-Louis seems to have discovered the unanswerable French reply to babble, noise, advice, and theory—
silence
.

One can, of course, easily get off this island, either by walking on the water of the Seine or, in a less saintly way, by taking a stroll of about two minutes across the slim bridges to the Left Bank, the Right Bank or the bustling and official neighbor, the Ile de la Cité.

Island fever is not a great danger, despite the insular pleasures of neatness, shape, control. Some people even say they never go to “Paris.” (In 1924, there was an attempt to secede from Paris and France, and Ile St-Louis passports were issued.) Monsieur Filleui, the fishmonger, used to advertise: “Deliveries on the Island and on the Continent.”

The Ile St-Louis, an elsewhere village universe, happens also to be an island by the merest accident of being surrounded by water. Its bridges reach inward to shadow worlds of history and dream; and outward toward the furor of contemporary Paris.

Shaded and sunny, surrounded by the waters of the Seine like a moat, it remains a kind of castle keep that is powerful enough in its own identity to hold Paris at bridge's length, a breath away. Amazingly, it has occurred to no one powerful enough to do anything about it that this place, too, could be high-rised, filthied, thoroughfared, developed. There is no Métro station. The breezes down the Seine keep busy, sweeping and caressing.

Despite the claims of metropolis on all sides, the Ile St-Louis still expresses the shadow presence of the Ile Notre-Dame and the Ile-aux-Vaches. The ancestor islands make a claim to be remembered because they have been forgotten, and both the aristocratic and the chic who live here, and the
gratteurs de guitare
, who occasionally come to serenade the ghosts of counts and courtesans, know that they tread in a palimpsest of footsteps, including ancient Gauls, Romans and now, chirping and clicking beneath the willows, the occasional polyester-clad, camera-breasted tourist.

A more characteristic sight is that of the professional anguish of a French intellectual walking his dog. The rich tend to live like Bohemians here. (Only the poor, as Anatole France said, are forbidden to beg.)

The Ile St-Louis is one of the places where a postwar generation of Americans in Paris loosened its military discipline—if we happened to have any—studied peace and art and history and depravity (called it freedom, called it fulfilling ourselves), lived in awe before our fantasy of France (still do just a little).

We bought old bicycles and new notebooks. We pretended to be students, artists, philosophers, and lovers, and, out of our pretensions, sometimes learned to be a little of these things.

Remarks are not literature, Gertrude Stein said, and islands are not the world. But some remarks can tell us what literature is about, some islands can tell us what a sweeter, more defined world might be. In Spinoza's view, freedom consists of knowing what the
limits are. I came to Paris as a philosophy student but left it as a novelist. On the Ile St-Louis, I am still home free, watching the Seine flow and eddy and flow again.

I walked outside, planning to stroll around in search of a last image to match that picture in my mind of a wonderful old man offering me the first waters of the Seine cupped in his hands. The moon mugged me. I mean, this was a moon, so huge and round it looked like an orange. I watched until it was no longer startling, just an unbelievably lovely source of light that splashed gold over the estuary. Its human face seemed animated, but this was no man. I swear to God, Sequana [goddess of the Seine] was talking to me.

—Mort Rosenblum,
Secret Life of the Seine

DAVID ROBERTS

I
AM NO LOVER OF FORESTS, THE BIRCH MAZES OF THE
Adirondacks, the hideous brush-choked ravines of the Cascades, the gauntlet of squat taiga enfilading the Alaska Highway—such woods have always seemed to me landscapes of gloom, brewed up by Darwin's mutative riot at its most careless. Even the open lodgepole and ponderosa stands of my boyhood Colorado served only as glades of passage, gateways to the bursting promise that timberline laid bare.

But Fontainebleau is a forest I can love. Thirty miles southeast of Paris, bisected by the roaring Autoroute du Soleil, Bleau—as the climbers call it—should not be confused with wilderness. From about 1130 to 1840, the forest was the hunting ground for the rulers of France. The palace of Fontainebleau, exceeded in magnificence only by Versailles, served for centuries as the swankiest hunting lodge in the world; thus the 62,000 acres of surrounding woods are crisscrossed with hand-cobbled carriage roads that meet in puzzling
carrefours
in the middle of nowhere.

Despite its name—an antique contraction of
fontaine de belle eau
—the forest is all but waterless, a desert out of which pines,
oaks, beeches, and wild cherry trees somehow connive to spring. Aeons flooded the plain with limestone; millennial rains wore this softer stuff away, leaving woods strewn with grotesque sandstone monuments up to 50 feet high. The homely taxonomy of English calls such an assemblage a “boulder pile”; in French, it forms a
chaos
.

During the last hundred years, many of the best mountaineers in the world, from Pierre Allan to Guido Magnone to Catherine Destivelle, found in Bleau a nursery for their youth and a Sorbonne for their maturity. Today Parisian office workers routinely shut off their word processors at 5:30 and careen down the
autoroute
for an evening's sport at Bleau. No major city in the world has a more genial rock garden so close at hand.

On my last visit to Fontainebleau I discovered the ideal way to apprehend the place. Shunning the thronged cafés that edge toward the palace, I alighted in the one-street town of Barbizon, at the Hôtellerie du Bas-Bréau [formerly the Hôtel Siron]. The very same inn had, in the 19th century, sheltered the salon of a lively gang of painters who trooped daily into the forest, armed with canvas and easel.

No group of artists has fallen into a moldier neglect than the Barbizon School: Corot, Millet, Theodore Rousseau, and their lesser-known cronies. Often they are damned with the faint praise of serving as “precursors to the Impressionists.” To my mind, however, the savage woodland epiphanies of Corot are far more powerful than Seurat's picnics. Sleeping at the Bas-Bréu, visiting the small museums housed in the ateliers of Millet and Rousseau, venturing into the forest, I began
to see Fontainebleau through the painters' eyes, to recover the revolutionary fervor with which their landscapes teem.

These were the first Europeans who dared to paint for nature's sake, rather than as a backdrop for mythology or history. Trees, rocks, light, and shade—these made as noble a subject as the martyrdoms of saints, declared Rousseau. The Barbizon paintings seize upon the disorder of nature: ancient oaks are tortured by the twisting agonies of arboreal thirst; even a restful clearing brims with fathomless mysteries. So dark are their canvasses that the artists' detractors accused them of painting with prune juice.

Yet what a raucous, hedonistic band the Barbizon School was! Coyly, the painters posted a sign in the salon declaring, “Under pain of fine, visitors are forbidden to excite the artists.” Yet by moonlight, they marched with their admirers into the forest to the tread of trumpets, built campfires in caves, drank flagons of wine, and made love all night. Their number included Lazare Bruandet, gentle as a lamb while he painted but a great brawler when drunk, who accosted strangers at the Siron and once threw his wife out the window; Stamati Bulgari, the eccentric military hero who held a parasol while he painted; and Rousseau, the nervous insomniac, whose passion for the forest amounted to a private religion. When King Louis Philippe ordered 15 million pines, not native to Fontainebleau, to be planted there in regimental rows, Rousseau organized expeditions into the woods to tear the trees up by the roots.

Steeped in these 19th-century glimmerings, I set out into the woods each day on my own excursions. In my pack I stuffed a loaf of hearty bread, cheese, and a bottle of wine. For many a lazy hour I followed the blue dots of the old Denecourt trails, named after Claude-François Denecourt, who had been a soldier under Napoleon before he settled near Fontainebleau in 1832 and set out to handcraft
sentiers
that eschewed the rectangular logic of the king's roads in favor of winding tours.

Denecourt's paths seek out every
chaos
in the forest: they deliberately scuttle through natural tunnels, or corkscrew around a
handsome boulder, or linger on a ledge with a view of acres and acres of sand. Coming upon caves in which outlaws and hermits and society's castoffs once lived, I recaptured the medieval fear of the forest as a dangerous, alien place.