Table of Contents
Guide
Table of Contents
For my wife, the marvelous Joanne
Introduction
A MAGNET, a Mecca, an incubator, a hothouse for writersall these things Paris has been called, and rightly so. No other city has attracted so much literary talent, launched so many illustrious careers, or produced such a wealth of enduring literature.
From the medieval poet-thief Franois Villon to his twentieth-century counterpart Jean Genet, from Rabelais to Henry Miller, from Molire to Samuel Beckett, from Madame de La Fayette to George Sand, from Colette and Gertrude Stein to Simone de Beauvoir and Marguerite Duras, Paris has nurtured countless poets, novelists, and playwrights who were among the finest writers and most intriguing personalities of their times.
In the eighteenth century Dr. Johnson noted the uncommon regard paid in France to persons eminent in literature. For evidence of that, all we need do is take a stroll, and we are practically sure to come upon some of the more than four hundred streets, squares, or promenades honoring them. Even the naughty boys and girls of French literature have one: Theres a Rue Franois-Villon, Rue Charles-Baudelaire, Place Paul-Verlaine, Alle Arthur-Rimbaud, and a Place Colette. Foreigners, too, are celebrated: Dante (Italian); Jean-Jacques Rousseau (Swiss); Heinrich Heine (German); Lord Byron and Charles Dickens (English); George Bernard Shaw, James Joyce, and Samuel Beckett (Irish); Edgar Allen Poe and Ernest Hemingway (American). Compare that to any other city in the world.
French adulation of literary talent has surely been part of the attraction, but writers really came to Paris for excitement, for stimulation, and for the promisebased on ever-growing evidenceof creative inspiration. Goethe raved about the Paris of the nineteenth century, which, after three generations of men like Molire, Voltaire, Diderot and others, has kept up such a current of intellect as cannot be found twice in a single spot in the whole world.
The mystique of Paris as the navel of literary and artistic creation emerged in the Romantic era of the 1820s and 1830s and grew as the century went on, embellished by Henri Mrgers Scnes de la vie de bohme, George du Mauriers Trilby, and other works glamorizing the life of the struggling young artist on the Left Bank. Hemingway was still mining that mother lode in the 1950s with A Moveable Feast.
The University of Paris, founded in the thirteenth century, has long been an important attraction for French writers, and in the seventeenth centuryle grand sicle, when literature became a passionresidence in Paris became de rigueur. Sartre and Beauvoir, teaching in provincial lyces in the 1930s, could not wait to get back to Paris to pursue their true callings. The intellectual stimulation, the competition, the business of literature, the life of the cafseverything was in la capitale.
Just as our writers were enriched by living in Paris, our appreciation of their lives and their workand indeed of the city itselfis heightened by following them from place to place in our imaginations or, even better, in our walking shoes.
The Literary Left Bank
A Birds-Eye View
WHEN we think of Rive Gauche, images of youth, art, and la vie de bohme leap to mind. These are hardly what Philippe Auguste envisioned at the start of the thirteenth century when he extended the city wall to the south bank of the Seine. His aim was to lure industrious burghers to settle this undeveloped area. Instead, rebel scholars from the cathedral school of Notre-Dame moved in and created the University of Paris. Within a century it was the most illustrious school of theology in Europe, the oven in which the intellectual bread of the Church was baked, as one medieval Pope called it. The hoi polloi nicknamed the district the Latin Quarter, after the language the scholars spoke.
The university gave the Latin Quarter its raison dtre, but it was the freethinkersincluding the mavericks, the subversives, the spectacularly politically incorrectwho gave it its verve. Take Franois Villon, for example: poet, thief, priest-killer, and Master of Arts in Theology. Or the scatological monk Rabelais: he could have been burned at the stake for ridiculing the universitys teachings. Four hundred years later, Simone de Beauvoir was a dutiful daughter until she fell under the spell of the squat future guru of existentialism while they were studying for an exam.
Foreigners also made their markyoung Rilke, young Hemingway, young Orwellattracted by rents they could afford.
Between Molieres first theater, Racine, Mme de La Fayette, and the founding of the Comdie-Franaise, Saint Germain-des-Prs finally saw the literary light in the seventeenth century, supplanting the Latin Quarter as the Left Banks premier literary terrain. It reached its apogee during the fervent years after World War II, when figures like Jean Genet, Marguerite Duras, Richard Wright,James Baldwin, and the trio of Sartre-Beauvoir-Camus made it the intellectual capital of the western world.
Next-door Faubourg Saint-Germain went literary in the eighteenth century and remained so to the end of the belle poque. This aristocratic district was especially prized by writers as a setting in novels, including Sternes A Sentimental Journey, Jamess The American, and Prousts The Guermantes Way.
For Montparnasse, apotheosis arrived in the twentieth century, when, as editor Samuel Putnam put it, for a decade or more, Paris was a good deal nearer than New York or Chicago to being the literary capital of the United States, as far as earnest and significant writing was concerned. This was the Lost Generation era of Gertrude Stein, who coined the label. Her protg Ernest Hemingway and many other writers, lost or not, spent earnest and significant time in the district. F. Scott Fitzgerald, Djuna Barnes, Ezra Pound, Ford Madox Ford, and Jean Rhys were among them. In the 1930s Samuel Beckett decided to settle in Paris for good, and the failed forty-year-old novelist Henry Miller made his miraculous breakthrough with
Tropic of Cancer, inspired by the constant army of artists he saw all around him:
This is what makes Paris, the vast group of men and women devoted to the things of the spirit. This is what animates the city, makes it the magnet of the cultural world.
THE LATIN QUARTER
THE CHURCH OF SAINT-JULIEN-LE-PAUVRE
Consecrated in 1220, Saint-Julien-le-Pauvre was just nearing completion when the newly established University of Paris began setting up shop next door. And as the university had no buildings, this little gem of a church became its chapel and assembly hall. Over the centuries, its where Petrarch, Franois Villon, and Rabelais prayed and attended gatherings. But in the 1520s students rioted and trashed the church. The clergy banned further assemblies.
