Travelers' Tales Paris (48 page)

This could be the spot where Dante knelt, between these green-stained walls that look as if an ocean has draped them with
its algae; this was where the visionary hailed the invisible, and he later recalled the narrow Paris street where his meditation had enjoyed a moment's respite on its journey towards the abysses of the inner world.

It is hard to imagine the sumptuous past of St-Julian the Poor today. The church appears to have waited for our sad modern age in order fully to deserve its name. We catch only a feeble glimpse of the way it was when a priory adjoined it and 50 monks filled its vaults with the sound of their chanting, and it is difficult for us to appreciate that one of the loveliest ceremonies of the Middle Ages was held in a place that our spiritual poverty has brought so low. Yet this is where the
rector magnificus
of the Sorbonne handed over the ermine cloak and the velvet bag containing the seal of the university to the person who was to succeed him. It was here, too, that on June 11 each year the teaching staff gathered with great pomp before proceeding to the annual fair in St. Denis Fields to purchase their parchment requirement. The rue Galande, the rue du Fouarre, the rue Saint-Séverin, and the rue Saint-Jacques would be roused at dawn by the drums and trumpets of the students, many of whom brandished spears, swords, or sticks for no other reason than that they were young and loved a rumpus. Of all that full, strong, joyous life that belonged to an age we cannot match, what is left in this quarter, apart from one name? It is that of the rue du Fouarre, which reminds me of when Pope Urban V enjoined students to sit not on benches but actually at the feet of their masters. The ground being hard to sit on, the lads would go running to the street vendors who sold straw for stuffing in the shadow of St-Julian. There is nothing to stop us picturing Dante doing as everyone else did and coming here for his bundle of straw before attending the lessons of his excellent master Brunetto Latini, whom he subsequently pitched into hell, though he did in a way make up for it by slipping the name of the little rue du Fouarre into a tercet of the
Paradiso
.

The 17th century shook its ignorant wig at the venerable church and pronounced it barbaric. No doubt it was not thought significant enough for wholesale modernization; probably, too,
St-Julian, situated on the very edge of the Romanesque, though already subject to the first stretchings of the new style, did not strike Mansart's contemporaries as possessing the Gothic character that so got their goat and that they did their best to obliterate in the choir of St. Séverin, St-Julian's less fortunate neighbour. But it was the prior of St-Julian himself who shortened the nave and replaced the Romanesque portico with a façade that that tonsured ass believed to be Doric. Latterly, in a final metamorphosis, a wide iconostasis put in by Eastern Orthodox priests bisects what is left of one of the loveliest and most ancient churches in Paris.

Even so, St-Julian the Poor has kept its sturdy grace and mysterious youthfulness. You can imagine it surrounded by fields, for it has the charm of a country church. Its solid, artless countenance is so different from the fevered flights of St. Séverin, which withdraws into itself behind great tatters of shadow. St-Julian embraces the day and holds the light in its walls until dusk; it is as four-square, firm, and placid as a Scholastic argument. Neither doubt nor distressing visions will ever disturb its pensive, serene solitude. It is a simple-hearted divine, sitting in his white robe on the bank of the Gallic river.

You used to be able to push open the little side door inside the church and find yourself in a delightful piece of waste ground, covered with vegetation, where your feet might stumble against some of the oldest stones in Paris. Hard by the chevet of St-Julian one of the last vestiges of “Philippe Auguste's Wall” stuck up abruptly out of the long grass like a rock emerging from the sea, and a twisted tree, slowly dying beneath the weight of several centuries, still sprouted leaves that quivered overhead. Who remembers that place, so attuned to daydreaming? In the distance the towers of Notre Dame, white in stormy weather, looked black against the July sky, and the occasional tugboat on the Seine would utter a long-drawn-out, melancholy cry, the misty note lingering and fading into the blue beyond. Yet the hubbub of Paris seemed to die at the edges of that small solitude where I loved to come and think. The silence around me was like a dwelling in which the past had sought refuge; that inner peace seemed to me to hold a
real feeling of Romanesque France, of which St-Julian's ancient stones offered a tangible image. That was what so attracted me in my sixteenth year or thereabouts. Having come across the little church by accident on one of my walks, I went back there again and again.

Sometimes we do things, without thinking, that make no sense to us until much later and yet appear to have been prompted by the most alert part of our being. In the spring of 1940, which ended so tragically for civilised Europe, I instinctively visited those places in Paris where I had most memories, and certain churches detained me at length, though I did not then imagine I should be deprived of them so soon. St-Julian was the one I found hardest to leave: having crossed the threshold on my way out, I recrossed it a moment later, touched by a misgiving too vague to find expression in words, and took one last look at those columns, which the setting sun had invested with a melancholy glow.

We hope
Travelers' Tales Paris
has inspired you to read on. A good place to start is the books from which we've made selections, and we have listed them below. Many general guidebooks are also worth reading and the best ones have annotated bibliographies or sections on recommended books and maps.

Applefield, David.
Paris Inside-Out: The Insider's Guide for Visitors, Residents, Professionals & Students on Living in Paris
. New York: Houghton Mifflin Company, Inc., 1995.

Ardagh, John.
Cultural Atlas of France
. Oxfordshire, England: Andromeda, 1991.

Baldwin, James.
No Name in the Street
. New York: Dell Publishing, a division of Bantam Doubleday Dell Publishing Group, Inc., 1986.

Barry, Joseph.
The People of Paris
. New York: Doubleday, a division of Bantam Doubleday Dell Publishing Group, Inc., 1966.

Beauvoir, Simone de.
Witness to my Life: Letters of Jean-Paul Sartre to Simone de Beauvoir, 1926–1939
. Translated by Lee Fahnestock and Norman McAfee. New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1992.

Bernstein, Richard.
Fragile Glory: A Portrait of France and the French
. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, Inc., 1990.

Buzzi, Aldo.
Journey to the Land of the Flies & Other Travels
. Translated from the Italian by Ann Goldstein. New York: Random House, 1996.

Campbell, James.
Exiled in Paris: Richard Wright, James Baldwin, Samuel Beckett, and Others on the Left Bank
. New York: Scribner, 1995.

Camus, Albert.
Notebooks 1942-1951
. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, Inc., 1965.

Caro, Ina.
The Road from the Past: Traveling Through History in France
. New York: Doubleday, a division of Bantam Doubleday Dell Publishing Group, Inc., 1994.

Carroll, Raymonde.
Cultural Misunderstandings: The French-American Experience
. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1988.

Daley, Robert.
Portraits of France
. London: Hutchinson, Random House, 1991.

D'Arnoux, Alexandra, Bruno De Laubadere, Gilles De Chabaneix (photographer).
Secret Gardens of Paris
. New York: Thames and Hudson, 2002.

Desmons, Gilles.
Walking Paris: Thirty Original Walks In and Around Paris
. New York: Contemporary Books, 1999.

Durrell, Lawrence.
Spirit of Place: Letters and Essays on Travel
. New Haven, Connecticut: Leete's Island Books, Inc., 1969.

Feldkamp, Phyllis and Fred.
The Good Life...or What's Left of It
. New York: Harper & Row Publishers, Inc., 1972.

Fitch, Noel Riley.
Walks in Hemingway's Paris: A Guide to Paris for the Literary Traveler
. New York: St. Martin's Press, 1992.

Flaubert, Gustave.
Early Writings
. Translated by Robert Berry Griffin. Lincoln, Nebraska: University of Nebraska Press, 1991.

Gentleman, David.
David Gentleman's Paris
. London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1991.

Gold, Herbert.
Bohemia: Where Art, Angst, Love and Strong Coffee Meet
. New York: Simon & Schuster, Inc., 1993.

Gopnik, Adam.
Paris to the Moon
. New York: Random House, 2001.

Green, Julian.
Paris
. Translated by J. A. Underwood. New York: Marion Boyers, 1991.

Guppy, Shusha.
A Girl in Paris
. London: William Heinemann Ltd., 1991.

Heath, Gordon.
Deep Are the Roots: Memoirs of a Black Expatriate
. Amherst, Massachusetts: The University of Massachusetts Press, 1992.

Jordan, David P.
Transforming Paris: The Life and Labors of Baron Haussmann
. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1995.

Landes, Alison and Sonia.
Pariswalks
. New York: Henry Holt and Company, Inc., 1991.

Loftus, Simon.
Puligny-Montrachet: Journal of a Village in Burgundy
. London: Ebury Press, New York: Alfred A. Knopf, Inc., 1993.

Maspero, François.
Roissy Express: A Journey Through the Paris Suburbs
. London: Verso, 1994.

Miller, Stuart.
Understanding Europeans
. Santa Fe, New Mexico: John Muir Publications, 1990.

Morris, Jan.
Locations
. Oxford, England: Oxford University Press, 1992.

Nossiter, Adam.
The Algeria Hotel: France, Memory, and the Second World War
. New York: Houghton Mifflin, 2001.

Osborne, Lawrence.
Paris Dreambook: An Unconventional Guide to the Splendor and Squalor of the City
. London: Bloomsbury Publishing Ltd., 1990.

Paris Notes
. The newsletter for people who love Paris. Published by Mark Eversman. To subscribe send check or money order ($39.00 for 1 year, 10 issues) to
Paris Notes
, P. O. Box 3668, Manhattan Beach, California 90266 or call 310/545-2735.

Paul, Jim.
What's Called Love: A Real Romance
. New York: Villard Books, a division of Random House, Inc., 1993.

Reuss, Henry S. and Margaret M.
The Unknown South of France: A History Buff's Guide
. Boston: The Harvard Common Press, 1991.

Rochefort, Harriet Welty.
French Toast: An American in Paris Celebrates the Maddening Mysteries of the French
. New York: St. Martin's Press, 1999.

Rosenblum, Mort.
Secret Life of the Seine
. Reading, Massachusetts: Addison-Wesley, 1994.

Weiss. Andrea.
Paris Was a Woman: Portraits from the Left Bank
. San Francisco: Harper San Francisco, an imprint of HarperCollins Publishers, London, 1995.

Wells, Patricia.
The Food Lover's Guide to Paris
. New York: Workman Publishing, 1987.

White, Edmund.
Our Paris: Sketches from Memory
. New York: Ecco Press, 2002.

Williams, Ellen.
The Historic Restaurants of Paris: A Guide to Century-Old Cafes, Bistros, and Gourmet Food Shops
. New York: Little Bookroom, 2001.

Yee, Chiang.
The Silent Traveller in Paris
. New York: W. W. Norton & Company, Inc., 1956.