John Baxter - The most beautiful walk in the world: A pedestrian in Paris

The Most Beautiful Walk in the World

A Pedestrian in Paris

John Baxter

FOR

M arie -D ominique

AND

L ouise ,

WORTH WALKING FOR .

We cannot tarry here,
We must march my darlings

WALT WHITMAN, PIONEERS, O PIONEERS

Contents

C AFS AND R ESTAURANTS

1. La Coupole

2. La Rotonde

3. Le Dme

4. Les Deux Magots

5. Caf Flore

6. Brasserie Lipp

7. The Ritz Hotel

8. Dingo Bar (now Auberge de Venise)

9. Harrys Bar

10. Les Editeurs

11. Closerie des Lilas

12. Le Balzar

13. Au Lapin Agile

14. La Fe Verte

M ARKETS

15. Porte de Vanves (antiques)

16. Rue Brancion (old books)

17. Porte de Clignancourt (antiques)

18. March dAligre (food)

A RT AND P AINTING

19. Rue Mazarine

20. The Louvre

21. Le Grand Palais

22. Centre Pompidou

S IGHTS

23. The Catacombs

24. The Passages (arcades)

25. Luxembourg Gardens

26. The Opera Garnier

27. La Sant Prison

28. Sacr-Coeur Cathedral

29. Notre Dame Cathedral

30. Cour de Commerce St. Andre

31. Place de la Bastille

L ITERARY S ITES

32. Ernest Hemingways apartment (74 Rue Cardinal Lemoine)

33. Ernest Hemingways apartment (#6 Rue Ferou)

34. Gertrude Steins apartment

35. Rue de lOdon (Sylvia Beachs apartment)

36. Old Shakespeare and Company bookshop

37. New Shakespeare and Company bookshop

38. The Panthon (burial site of Voltaire, Rousseau, and Zola)

Chapter 1
To Walk the Walk

Nobody has yet found a better way to travel slowly than to walk. It requires two legs; nothing more. Want to go faster? Dont bother walkingroll, slide or fly: dont walk. But once you are walking, its not performance that counts but the intensity of the sky, the splendour of the landscape. Walking is not a sport.

CHARLES GROS, Walking: A Philosophy

E very day, heading down rue de lOdon toward Caf Danton on the corner of boulevard Saint-Germain or toward the market on rue Buci, I pass them.

The walkers.

Not all are walking, however. Theyd like to bebut their stroll around Paris isnt working out as they hoped.

Uncertain, they loiter at the foot of our street, at the corner of boulevard Saint-Germain, one of the busiest on this side of the Seine. Couples, usually, theyre dressed in the seasonal variation of what is almost a uniformbeige raincoat or jacket, cotton or corduroy pants, and sensible shoes. Huddling over a folded map or guidebook, they look up and around every few seconds, hopeful that the street signs and architecture will have transformed themselves into something more like Brooklyn or Brentwood or Birmingham.

Sometimes they appear in groups. We see a lot of these because our street, rue de lOdon, is to literature what Yankee Stadium is to baseball and Lords is to cricket. At no. 12, Sylvia Beach ran Shakespeare and Company, the English-language bookshop that published James Joyces Ulysses. Sylvia and her companion, Adrienne Monnier, lived in our building at no. 18. Joyce visited them there often. So did Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald, Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas, and of course Ernest Hemingway.

Most days, when I step out of the building, a group stands on the opposite sidewalk while someone lectures them in any one of a dozen languages about the history of our street. They regard me with curiosity, even respect. But often I feel like a fraud. Instead of thinking lofty literary thoughts, Im compiling my shopping list. Eggs, onions, a baguette...

After that, they set off again, a straggling column, following the guides flag or, in bad weather, her umbrella. Few take their eyes off this object. Theyve learned that Paris for the pedestrian is both fascinating and deceptive. What if they did pauseto browse that basket of books outside une librairie, or take a closer look at a dress in the window of a boutique? The tour might turn a corner, disappearing from sight, casting them adrift in this baffling town. They would be forced to buttonhole a passing Parisian and stammer, Excusez-moi, monsieur, mais... parlez-vous Anglais? Or worse, surrender to the mysteries of le mtro . A few lost souls are always hovering at the entrance to the Odon station. Staring up at the green serpentine art nouveau curlicues of Hector Guimards cast-iron archway, they may read Metropolitain but they see what Dante saw over the gate to hell: Abandon hope all ye who enter here.

What most frustrates the visitor walking in Paris is the presence all around of others who share none of their hesitation. Confident, casual, the locals breeze past, as careless as birds in a tree. For them, the mtro holds no terrors. They know exactly when to pause as a bus roars by on what appears to be the wrong side of the road. They make abrupt turns into alleys, at the foot of which one glimpses the most interesting-looking little market...

How do they know ?

Well, this is their habitat, their quartier, as familiar to them as their own living room. Because thats how Parisians regard the cityas an extension of their homes. The concept of public space doesnt exist here. People dont step out of their front door into their car, then drive across town to the office or some air-conditioned mall. No Parisian drives around Paris. A few cycle. Others take the mtro or a bus, but most walk. Paris belongs to its pitons the pedestrians. One goes naturally pied on foot. And its only on foot that you discover its richness and variety. As another out-of-town Paris lover, the writer Edmund White, says in his elegant little book The Flaneur , Paris is a world meant to be seen by the walker alone, for only the pace of strolling can take in all the rich (if muted) detail.

Another writer, Adam Gopnik, calls a stroll down rue de Seine, just around the corner from our apartment, the most beautiful walk in the world. And so it isfor him. But every Parisian, and everyone who comes to know Paris, discovers his or her own most beautiful walk. A walk is not a parade or a race. Its a succession of instants, any one of which can illuminate a lifetime. What about the glance, the scent, the glimpse, the way the light just falls... the beautiful part ? No tour guide or guidebook tells you that. Prepared itineraries remind me of those PHOTO POINT signs at Disneyland. Yes, that angle gives you an attractive picture. But why not just buy a postcard?

Nor is there a single Paris. The city exists as a blank page on which each person scribbles what the French call a griffe literally a claw but more precisely a signature; a choice of favorite cafs, shops, parks, and the routes that link them. I discovered that Paris did not exist, wrote Colette on her arrival from the country. It was no more than a cluster of provinces held together by the most tenuous of threads. There was nothing to prevent me from reconstructing my own province or any other my imagination should choose to fix in outline.

In a way that isnt possible with London or New York or Berlin, one can speak of Colettes Paris or Hemingways Paris or Scott Fitzgeralds Paris, or your own Paris. We all go through a similar process: finding the only caf, the perfect park, the loveliest view, the most beautiful walk.

Nobody can say precisely which they will be. But maybe my experiences of a year of walking in Paris will suggest how and where you might start to find the succession of arrivals and departures that leaves one with memories that can never be erased, the moments one recounts all ones life, prefaced by the words, I remember... once... in Paris...