On the fifth in the fifth

Back in Paris with a new camera, a new laptop, and a heart in much better working order than last time. The country’s leadership has changed from blue to red since last time, so hopefully France also has a heart in much better working order. (After the weekend’s elections the Parti Socialiste now controls the Senate, the National Assembly and the Presidency. It’s nice to know there’s a place on earth where you can tell people you’re leftwing without a little embarrassment.)

When we arrived it didn’t feel like we were in an alien land where they speak a strange tongue. We are and they do, but it didn’t feel like that. Concorde is still parked at Charles de Gaulle airport, and they’re still building the housing development behind Montmartre. We were back in familiar surroundings, driving in a cab down the Champs-Elysées and saying things like, ‘I didn’t realize Laduree was so far down the hill’, ticking off the landmarks (the Orangerie, the Tuileries, the Louvre, the Pont Neuf, etc).

We were to meet the apartment manager at 10am, but arrived at Rue du Fouarre at 9.25, so we wheeled our bags into the park next door. There was a soft breeze, shadows and sunlight dappled the paths, and it was just the right temperature. Very pleasant.

Our flat is on the fifth floor in the fifth arrondissement. It is in the Rue du Fouarre, one of the oldest streets in Paris. Abelard started the Sorbonne in this street in the 11th century; the town fathers thought he was teaching heresy, so he removed himself from the Ile de la Cité across the river because he didn’t want to enjoy their attentions a second time. (Not that he had anything to lose, boom tish.) Our garret overlooks the oldest church in Paris, St Julien le Pauvre, is next to a park with the oldest tree in Paris (a 300 year old locust tree in Square Rene Viviani), and a couple of minutes stroll from the narrowest street in Paris (Rue du Chat qui Pêche, literally Street of the Cat who fishes, 29m long and 1.8m wide.) Lots of superlatives around here.

The picture shows our building; actually what you see is the whole Rue du Fouarre, it’s not very long. You can’t see our windows, because they are set too far back from the parapet. The building is seventeenth-century, as you can tell from the roughly-hewn beams exposed throughout the flat, which hurt when you bump your head against them.

The view from our garret is spectacular. Looking northeast from our loungeroom you can see St Julien  (lower left); above it the spire of Sainte Chapelle on the Ile de la Cité. Through the tree in the middle (which if it isn’t the oldest tree is located very near it) you can see the Seine; last night at ten o’clock I watched the river glow gold in the last of the sunset. Above the tree is the Hôtel Dieu (a hospital) and on the right are the towers of Nôtre Dame de Paris.

Our main challenge, when we arrived on Sunday, was to stay awake as long as possible to beat the jetlag. We lunched in the restaurant at the bottom of our building, a salon du thé called La Fourmi Ailée (The Flying Ant), established in what was once a feminist bookshop. The food is French french, not tourist french, and the locals eat there. In an area that has more restaurants than Crows Nest you never have to eat in the same place twice, but we intend to go back.

After lunch we strolled through the laneways to the Boulevard Saint Michel, the stones of which were taken up and thrown at the gendarmes by the students in ’68, an event which hastened a major roadworks project throughout the city – they asphalted all the cobbled streets so there were no more stones to throw. Seriously! In the land of liberté, égalité and fraternité, de Gaulle had de gall (sorry) to use civic improvements to hamper the exercise of the right to dissent.

We emerged onto the Boul’Mich (what the locals call it) directly opposite a place I had planned to hunt down, but it found me instead. In the Place St André des Arts you can still see the house in which was born Charles Baudelaire, author of Les fleurs du mal. The ground floor houses a restaurant that Jack Kerouac used to frequent, so obviously its power to inspire good writing has waned over the years. Incidentally, in our flat Béatrix Beck, the secretary of André Gide, wrote Leon Morin, prêtre (The Passionate Heart) which won the 1952 Prix Goncourt. This district reeks with literary history (if history could be said to stink, which as a PhD student in the discipline I can confirm, regularly).

A couple of hundred metres up the Boul’Mich (see, I’m a local) is the Musée de Cluny, the Museum of the Middle Ages. Wow. The complex takes in the ruins of the Roman baths (massive – and the Frigidarium is frigid) and the abbey of Cluny, at one time the largest ecclesiastical building north of the alps. The most famous objects in the museum are the tapestries of the Lady and the Unicorn, six tapestries created in Flanders in the fifteenth century, depicting a lady and a unicorn (and the odd lion and bunny rabbit) in actions representing the five senses. They are fragile and decaying – one of the six, Hearing, was away for restoration – and they are displayed in very, very low light, but you can still see the colours and the workmanship.

In one of the galleries a flute and viola da gamba duo was rehearsing for a concert of medieval music. Paris is like that – at St Julien’s in the afternoon a soprano gave a concert of Mozart and other sacred works, which we could hear through our window. There are concerts in churches all over the city. For a short time we considered going to a 6pm performance of Bach’s Goldberg Variations in a church up near the Panthéon, but decided the temptation to fall asleep would be too dangerous, as much as I love the work. Instead we strolled through the park to another old haunt, the Café Nôtre Dame, for dinner, and afterwards were disappointed by the book barrows on the quais and Shakespeare & Co, which seems to have changed subtly but for the worse since the proprietor, George Whitman, died in December. Megan made it to 9.30, I couldn’t read any more after about ten. Was woken by a thunderstorm after 4am, and got up to close the windows and watch the rain fall on the street. It feels good to be back in Paris.