Travelers' Tales Paris (19 page)

A
N ISLAND PRIME, AN ISLAND AT THE SECRET HEART OF
P
ARIS
, floating in time and space across a footbridge on the shady side of the Cathedral of Notre Dame de Paris, the Ile St-Louis may also be the most ambiguous orphan island there is—city and not a city, village and metropolis, provincial and centrally urban, serene and hyped by hundreds of years of noisy lovers of solitude.

Unique it is, possessed of itself, even self-congratulatory, yet available to all who choose to stroll from the population sink of contemporary Paris to a place that has no Métro stop or depressed highway. One could live there forever and do it in a short span of time, and I did.

Just after World War II, I came to study philosophy amid the existentialists of St-Germain-des-Prés. The first winter was bitter cold, with food rationing and no heat, and we philosophers—that is, admirers of Juliette Greco with her long nose, hoarse voice, black jeans and sweaters—had to find cafés to do our deep thinking in.

In existential pursuit of the largest café au lait and most tooth-rotting but warming chocolate, I bought a bicycle to widen my field of operations, showing a certain Cleveland shrewdness by
paying $8 for the rustiest, most battered bicycle I could find so that I could leave it unlocked.

Behind Notre-Dame, across the narrow footbridge of the Pont St-Louis, on the tranquil Ile St-Louis, which did little business and did it negligently, I leaned my bike against a café that served large coffees, rich chocolate and few customers. I remember it as Aux Alsaciennes, because it served Alsatian sausage, corned beef and cabbage,
choucroute garnie
at lunchtime; but for many years, now that the place had been discovered, it has been called the Brasserie de St-Louis-en-l'Ile.

Somehow, here I couldn't think about Bergson and Diderot and the hyphen between them, a little-known idea-smith named Maine de Biran, my thesis. Maybe it was the action of pumping a rusty bicycle; maybe it was the red-faced waiters, the black-dressed postwar girls with bruised eyes; but on the Ile St-Louis I graciously allowed the history of philosophy to continue on its way without me.

My bike had no carrier for books; instead, I could stick a note-book under the seat. While warming myself at Aux Alsaciennes, I began to write a novel.

Nearly two years later, when the stationery store lady wrapped the package for mailing to Viking Press, she figured out what it was and gave it a sharp slap, crying out, “
Merde!
” I was startled because I thought I knew what that word meant and took it as a judgment of my coffee-and-
choucroute
-fueled eighteen-month creative frenzy, but she explained that it meant good luck!

(The book,
Birth of a Hero
, about a Resistance hero who happened to be stuck all his life in Cleveland, was published. I went home to Cleveland to buy the three-cent stamp with my picture on it but they were still using George Washington. I like that first novel now mostly because it instructed me that I had the right to do it.)

At some point in the creative process, I left a GI overcoat—the vestmental equivalent of my bicycle—on a rack at the
brasserie
. The waiters kept asking when I would take it again, but spring came, the birds sang on the Ile St-Louis and other birds allowed me to buy them hot chocolate; I was too overwrought.

Later, I decided to see how long the coat would live on the coat rack. As the years went by, I committed more novels, visited Paris as a tourist, and came to the Ile St-Louis to check on my coat. It was still there. “Soon,” I promised the waiters.

One May in the early '60s, I noticed that the narrow, swaying footbridge across which I used to wheel my rustmobile had been replaced by a wider, stabler cement product, although it was still blocked to automobiles. And my coat was gone from the café, which had changed its name to the Brasserie de St-Louis-en-l'Ile. And that
tout Paris
had discovered the happy place that in my secret mustard-loving heart will always be Aux Alsaciennes.

Anciently, the Ile St-Louis was two islands, Ile Notre-Dame and
Ile-aux-Vaches
(Cow Island). You can buy old maps that show the walls of medieval Paris and this tiny pasture in the Seine, from which cows and milk were brought by dinghy into the city. In the 17th century the places were joined, and in a burst of elegant speculation, bankruptcies and re-speculation, a dense web of
hôtels
(fine mansions) were spun.

The Hôtel Lambert and the Hôtel de Lauzun are two noble examples, but the entire island, its narrow pre-Detroit and even pre-Citroën streets, its encircling quays for strolling and breeze-taking by the Seine, has a comfortingly unified classical pattern.

The decoration and architecture date from a single period of French elegance and are protected by fanatic preservationists, among whom was former president Georges Pompidou, who helped stuff other districts of Paris with freeways and skyscrapers. (Pompidou lived on the Ile St-Louis.)

There is an ice cream shop, Berthillon, with perhaps the best and certainly the most chic sherbets in France. Usually the lines stretch out onto the street—people waiting for their
glace café, sorbet, crème
—as others in other places wait in line to pay taxes or to see if their portrait is on the three-cent stamp.

There is but one church on the island, St-Louis-en-l'Ile—lovely, tranquil, softly flowing, with devout deacons scrubbing the stone with straw brooms from a stock that seems to have been purchased by some 17th-century financial genius of a priest who feared inflation in the straw-broom market.

Contemporary Paris discovered it could find quadruple use for the Ile St-Louis: as an elegant residential quarter of the 4th
arrondissement;
as a strolling museum neighborhood, a sort of Tricolorland with no parking meters, no movie house or cemetery (if people die, they have to be taken to the Continent); as a quiet corner for small restaurants, antiquaries, bars, book shops, hotels, Mme. Blanvillain's 160-year-old olive shop (she was not the founder), and a pheasant-plucker named Turpin in case you need your pheasant plucked; and the fourth use is optional.

On my most recent visit, the spirit of the place was expressed by the aforementioned Berthillon, the studio for ice cream masterpieces with the 17th century aspect. It was early July. A cheerful sign said: “Open Wednesday, 14 September.” Where else would an ice cream shop close for the hot months?

I was relieved by this assurance of little change in the weekend-maddened, vacation-crazed spirit of the French
commerçant
. No matter how greedy he might seem to mere mortals, plucking money from the air and sewing it into his mattress, the flight to seaside or country cottage remains sacred.

Throwing duffel on bed, not even glancing at the exchange rate, I seized a notebook in jet-lagged claws and made a quick tour
of the few streets and circumnavigating quays of the island, trying to find what had changed, what had remained the same, and what might persuade my body that it was time to sleep. The fact that I had cleverly scheduled my visit to come near the July 14 celebration, when France dances and drinks and makes new friends in the street till dawn—all because their ancestors tore down the Bastille—did not induce thoughts of prudent shut-eye.

(In my student days, when an American friend studying in Belgium bicycled into Paris for the first time, he happened to arrive on Bastille Day and found colorful lights strung from everywhere, accordions, embraces, a fierce festival glitter in every eye. He fell upon my little room crying, “Oh, I always knew Paris would be like this!”)

A street sweeper with the timid face of a peasant come to the metropolis was scrubbing down the stones in front of the St-Louis-en-l'Ile. No change here.

Libella, the Polish bookstore on the rue St-Louis-en-l'Ile, reminded me that Paris has always been everyone's other home. The wall above Libella bears a stone plaque telling us that in 1799 the engineer Philippe Lebon discovered, in this building, the principle of lighting and heating with gas—the word “principle” and past experience suggest that the French did not actually get around to doing it for a while.

The island is crowded with such notices—tributes to poets, advisers to kings, soldier heroes, men of God, and even a film critic immortalized on a plaque affixed to the place where he analyzed Jerry Lewis as
auteur
.

There is also a plaque on the wall of the Ferdinand Halphep Foundation in the rue des Deux-Ponts:

No island is entire of itself, exempt from history. Across the street, in the ice cream shops, bistros, the Bateau Bar—50 brands of beer from all nations—gratification proceeds on its necessary course.

It was time to sit at a café table for the island equivalent of my typical San Francisco after-racquetball vitamin and health hi-pro yogurt shake; in this case, a coffee with “yak”—cognac.

Two helmeted Vespa people came skidding to a stop in front of me. Like space warriors, they were encased in huge plastic headgear. Evidently they knew each other, because they fell to kissing, their helmets thudding together. I peeked at their faces when they came apart. They were both about 60 years old and hadn't seen each other in hours.

A fisherman nearby, when I asked what he caught with all his equipment, assured me that trout hover near the fresh underground springs at the head of the island.

“And what else?”

“A moment of meditation. A view of Notre-Dame. There are gargoyles, sir. At this season, there are roses.”

During the morning, a fisherman was catching roses; that night in front of the footbridge leading to Aux Alsaciennes, the Communist Party sponsored a rock celebration of Bastille Day. A girl in a “Wichita University Long Island” t-shirt danced to a French knockoff of “Lady Jane” and other Rolling Stones' hits. Instead of a male partner, she held a contribution box for
Humanité
, the party newspaper.

The little park at the end of the island where the Pont de Sully links the left and right banks of Paris—leading to the workers' quarter of Bastille in one direction, the Quartier Latin in the other—has a grand stone monument to “Barye 1795-1875” at its entrance. The sculptor seems to be telling a busy story, including naked lads, heroes, a foot on a screaming animal, a sword, a staff, a few less boyish youths. Who the heck was Barye 1795-1875?

He may be there to provide a little relaxation from all the really famous people who lived and live on the Ile St-Louis. (He turns out to have been a watercolorist.)

The Square Barye, surrounded by the Seine on three sides, is quiet, peaceful, scholarly, artistic, with occasional summer concerts; kids sleeping on their backpacks, workmen with bottles of
rouge;
Swedish
au pair
girls watching the babies and sunning themselves with that passionate solar intensity only Swedish girls achieve—happy sunbathers when it's hot and moonbathing when it's not; haggard widows in black, wincing with their memories; birds chirping and barbered bushes and peeling-bark trees and neat cinder paths: all honor to Barye 1795-1875!

Three small hotels on the island located on the rue St-Louisen-l'Ile, a few steps from each other, have been converted from 17th-century houses: the Lutece, the Deux-Iles and the St-Louis.

When I telephoned the Lutece from San Francisco for a reservation, the place was booked, but the good madame leaned out the window and yelled next door to the Deux-Iles to ask if they had a place. Also booked. So was the St-Louis. But on my arrival, I managed to persuade the daughter of the proprietor of the St-Louis to find me a corner room.

On the short walk home—saying “home” comes quickly in this island universe—I noticed that Hippolyte Taine and Georges Sandoul did their work in the same building. Marc Chagall and Charles Baudelaire, Voltaire and Mme. Pompidou, dukes and barons, and
chanteurs de charme
, plus a stray prince or princess, and inventor or hero—who didn't have a connection with the Ile St-Louis?