Place des Vosges

Even today, after many years, there are moments when your eyes could almost be fooled—when they’ll still believe that however you wandered into this huge quadrangle called the Place des Vosges, you’ll never find your way out. Wherever you turn your gaze, this mini-Paris in the heart of old Paris, and perhaps the most beautiful urban spot in the world, seems to turn its back not just on the rest of the world but on the rest of Paris as well. You step in—and time stops.

At night, when the Place des Vosges grows quiet and traffic comes to a halt, the arched entrances under the Pavillons du Roi and de la Reine blend into the darkness, as do the two narrow side streets tucked to the northeast and northwest of the Place, the rue des Francs-Bourgeois and the rue du Pas-de-la-Mule. With no apparent means out, it is impossible not to feel that you are indeed back in this self-contained, self-sufficient seventeenth-century enclave, just as the original founders of the square, four hundred years ago, wished to be locked in a Paris of their own devising—a Paris that had the very best of Paris, a Paris that hadn’t quite been invented yet and of which this was a promise. Recent restoration has been so successful that the Place looks better today than it has in three centuries and gives a very good picture of the Paris its ancien régime founders envisioned.

On the Place des Vosges, you can almost touch old Paris. At midnight, upon leaving L’Ambroisie (at no. 9)—among the best and most expensive restaurants in Paris, in the building where Louis XIII stayed during the 1612 inauguration of the square—you don’t just step into seventeenth-century Paris but into a Paris where the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries are superimposed over earlier and later times no less beguilingly than Atget’s vieux Paris photos can still cast albuminous sepia tones over today’s Paris. The footsteps heard along the dark arcades may not even belong to a living soul but to shadows from the past—say, Victor Hugo, who lived at 6 Place des Vosges between 1832 and 1848, or Cardinal Richelieu, who two centuries earlier lived diagonally across the square (at no. 21), or the occasional ruffian who would turn up in this affluent enclave and terrorize the ladies. Turn around and you might just as easily spot the fleeting silhouette of the notorious seventeenth-century courtesan Marion Delorme (at no. 11), heading home under the cover of the arcades; or of France’s most illustrious preacher, Bossuet (at no. 17); or of Madame de Rambouillet (at no. 15), whose salon was a who’s who of seventeenth-century France. Delorme had been Cardinal Richelieu’s mistress once but was now accompanied by Cardinal de Retz, one of France’s most devoted ladies’ men. A habitué of the Place des Vosges, Retz, the turbulent antimonarchist, had been the lover of both Marie-Charlotte de Balzac d’Entragues (at no. 23) and the Princesse de Guéméné (at no. 6).

Many aristocratic ladies who lived on the square and around the Marais were known as précieuses: women who adopted an overrefined, highly conceited form of speech that, despite their cultivated delicacy in attitude and taste, by no means entailed an equally cultivated sense of morality. They frequently had several lovers, and the Princesse de Guéméné was no exception. She loved the unruly Count of Montmorency-Boutteville, who had also been the lover of Madame de Sablé (at no. 5) and who, following a terrible duel à six in 1627 in front of the home of Cardinal Richelieu (who had made dueling a capital offense in France), was subsequently captured and beheaded. Such would be the fate of two of the Princesse’s other lovers.

Nothing better illustrates these crisscrossed, overlapping, and at times simultaneous passions than the loves of another précieuse, Marguerite de Béthune (at no. 18). She was the daughter of the Duc de Sully, King Henry IV’s superintendent of finances, who was instrumental in planning the Place des Vosges (his Hôtel de Sully still feeds into the Place through a tiny, near-inconspicuous door at no. 7). Marguerite had been the mistress of both the Duc de Candale (at no. 12) and the Marquis d’Aumont (at no. 13). Since the even numbers on the Place des Vosges are located to the east of the Pavillon du Roi, and the odd to the west, it is possible to suppose that when she was with one she could easily manage to think of, if not spy on, the other.

Throughout its history, the very thought of the Place des Vosges has instantly conjured images of grand passion and grand intrigue. The importance that the Place des Vosges has in the French imagination, like that of Versailles, may explain why French literature, from the seventeenth century on, has never quite been able to disentangle love from its surrogate, double-dealing, or courtship from diplomacy, underscored as they all are by the cruelest and crudest form of self-interest. Such irony escaped no one, and certainly not the disabused courtiers of précieux society.

Few of them had anything kind to say about love or about the women they loved. Cardinal de Retz’s racy and tempestuous Mémoires were most exquisitely vicious in this regard. (Of his ex-mistress Madame de Montbazon, he wrote, “I have never known anyone who, in her vices, managed to have so little regard for virtue.”) And yet his Mémoires are dedicated to one of the précieux world’s busiest writers, his good friend Madame de Sévigné, born at 1 bis Place des Vosges. Sévigné was herself a very close friend of the Duchesse de Longueville, Madame de Sablé, the Duc de La Rochefoucauld, and Madame de La Fayette, the author of Europe’s first modern novel, La Princesse de Clèves. To show how intricately interwoven this world was, one has only to recall that La Rochefoucauld may have had a platonic relationship with La Fayette but he most certainly did not with the Duchesse de Longueville, with whom he had a son and for whom the disillusioned and embittered La Rochefoucauld probably continued to ache until the very end of his days. Known as one of the most beautiful women of the period, the fair-haired Duchesse led as blustery a life as Cardinal de Retz—first as a lover, then as a warrior, and finally as a religious woman. It was because of her bitter feud with her rival, Madame de Montbazon, that another duel took place on the square, between descendants of the Guise and the Coligny families. Each man may have gallantly taken the side of one of the two women, but after about a century of feuding between the Catholic Guises and the Protestant Colignys there was enough gall for another duel. It took Coligny almost five months to die of his wounds. It is said that the Duchesse de Longueville watched the duel from the windows of 18 Place des Vosges, the home of Marguerite de Béthune, the woman whose lovers’ pavilions faced each other. The quarrel between the Duchesse de Longueville and Madame de Montbazon reads like a novel filled with slander, malice, jealousy, and spite.

Scandalmongering was a favorite occupation, and the preferred weapon was not so much the sword as the letter: dropped, intercepted, recopied, falsely attributed, and purloined letters were ferried back and forth, leaving a trail that invariably led to the loss of reputations and, just as frequently, of life—Coligny’s in this instance—and ultimately to civil unrest. At the risk of oversimplifying, tensions mounted to such a pitch that many of those who had anything to do with the Place des Vosges before the middle of the seventeenth century eventually joined the Fronde, the antimonarchist aristocratic campaign of 1648–53. It was the last aristocratic revolt against the monarchy, and Louis XIV, the Sun King, never forgot it. To ensure that the aristocracy never again rose against him, he made certain that almost every one of its members moved to Versailles.

Like its storied residents, the Place des Vosges remains a tangle of the most capricious twists in urban memory. Known initially as the Place Royale in 1605, it became the Place des Fédérés after the Revolution in 1792; the Place de l’Indivisibilité in 1793; and then the Place des Vosges in 1800, under Napoléon. It resumed its first name in 1814, after the restoration of the monarchy, and lost it once more to the Place des Vosges in 1831. After yet another revolution, it became once again the Place Royale in 1852, and finally the Place des Vosges in 1870. The Place teemed with intellectuals, writers, aristocrats, salons, and courtesans. It witnessed generations of schemes, rivalries, and duels, the most famous of these being the duel of 1614, known as “the night of the torches,” between the Marquis de Rouillac and Philippe Hurault, each flanked by his second, everyone wielding a sword in one hand and a blazing torch in the other. Three were killed; Rouillac alone survived, and lived thereafter at 2 Place des Vosges.

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I come to the Place des Vosges to make believe that I belong, that this could easily become my home. Paris is too large a city, and time is too scarce for me to ever become a full resident—but this square is just right. After a few days, I am at home. I know every corner, every restaurant, and every grocer and bookstore beyond the square. Even faces grow familiar, as does the repertoire of the high-end street entertainers and singers who come to perform under the arcades every Saturday: the pair singing duets by Mozart, the tango and fox-trot dancers, the Baroque ensembles, the pseudo-Django jazz guitarist, and the eeriest countertenor–mock castrato bel canto singer I’ve ever heard, each standing behind stacks of their own CDs.

For lunch, I’ve grown to like La Mule du Pape on the rue du Pas-de-la-Mule, scarcely off the square: light fare, fresh salads, excellent desserts. And early in the morning, I like to come to Ma Bourgogne, on the northwest corner of the square, and have breakfast outside, under the arcades. I’ve been here three times already, and I am always among the first to sit down. I think I have my table now, and the waiter knows I like café crème and a buttered baguette with today’s jam. I even get here before the bread arrives from the baker’s. I sit at the corner of this empty square and watch schoolboys plod their way diagonally across the park, one after the other, sometimes in pairs or clusters, each carrying a heavy satchel or a briefcase strapped around his shoulders. I can easily see my sons doing this. Yes, it does feel right. Then, just as I am getting used to the square and am busily making it my home—tarts, salads, fresh produce, baguette, jam, coffee—I look up, spot the imposing row of redbrick pavilions with their large French windows and slate roofs, and realize that this, as I always knew but had managed to forget, is the most beautiful spot in the civilized world.

Parisians, of course, have always known this, and during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries routinely overwhelmed foreign dignitaries by escorting them to the Place before returning them to the business of their visit. What must have struck these foreigners was something perhaps more dazzling and arresting than French magnificence or French architecture. For the Place des Vosges is not magnificent in the way that, say, Versailles or the Louvre or the Palais-Royal is magnificent. And the thirty-six cloned, slate-roofed, redbrick, and limestone “row house” pavilions—with the interconnecting arcades, or promenoirs, running the length of all four sidewalks of a square no larger than the size of a Manhattan city block—can by no stretch of the imagination be called a miracle of seventeenth-century architecture. As with any cour carrée, what is striking is not necessarily each unit but the repetition thirty-six times of the same unit, many of which already boast a small square courtyard within. It is the symmetry of the square that casts a spell, not each segment—except that here the symmetry is projected on so grand a scale that it ends up being as disorienting and as humbling as quadratic symmetry is in Descartes or contrapuntal harmonies in Bach. If the French have nursed an unflagging fondness for Cartesian models, it is not because they thought nature was framed in quadrants but, rather, because their desire to fathom it, to harness it, and ultimately to explain it as best they could led them to chop up everything into pairs and units of two. Drawing and quartering may have been one of the worst forms of execution, but the French mania for symmetry has also given us palaces and gardens and the most spectacular urban planning imaginable, the way it gave us something that the French have treasured since long before the Enlightenment and of which they are still unable to divest themselves even when they pretend to try: a passion for clarity.

It is hard to think of anyone who lived on or around the Place des Vosges during the first half of the seventeenth century who didn’t treasure this one passion above all others. Even in their loves—hapless and tumultuous and so profoundly tragic as they almost always turned out to be—the French displayed intense levelheadedness when they came to write about them. They had to dissect what they felt, or what they remembered feeling, or what they feared others thought about their feelings. They were intellectuals in the purest—and perhaps coarsest—sense of the word. It was not what they saw that was clear; human passions seldom are. It was how they expressed what they saw that was so fiercely lucid. In the end, they preferred dissecting human foibles to doing anything about them. They chatted their way from one salon to the next, and on the Place des Vosges this was not difficult to do. Almost every pavilion on the square had a précieuse eager to host her little salon, or ruelle, in her bedroom. It is difficult to know whether there was more action than talk in these intimate ruelles. What is known is that everyone excelled at turning everything into talk. They intellectualized everything.

As Descartes had done in The Passions of the Soul, they charted the progress of love on a geometrical plane that is so frightfully balanced that one suspects they needed these models the better to dispel the chaos within them. Love maps such as Mademoiselle de Scudéry’s carte de Tendre are still found in many poster shops in Paris. Ironic and obscene versions of Scudéry’s somewhat righteous map were not slow to crop up. One of them makes Place Royale the very capital of coquettish love. Yet another was penned by Bussy-Rabutin, Madame de Sévigné’s cousin. Nothing could better spell the difference between the French and the British than the fact that while the French were busily charting out their version of Vanity Fair, across the channel a puritan by the name of John Bunyan was busily mapping out a journey of an entirely different order. Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress appeared in the same year as did Madame de La Fayette’s Princesse de Clèves. One saw the world as good and evil; the other saw it as a series of psychological twists and turns that brings to mind the analytical mania that became fashionable in the many, many salons on the Place des Vosges.

The French had a name for this. They called it préciosité. It was their way of giving their best quality a bad name. Eventually, they thought better of themselves and called it Classicism. Either way, they had caught the bug, and never again would the French resist digging out doubts and calling each one by its full name: je ne sais quoi—literally: I-don’t-know-what. Nothing delighted them more than smoking out truth with a je ne sais quoi. The mixing of Descartes and Mannerism yielded sumptuous results.

Charles Le Brun, an ardent disciple of Descartes, remains one of the principal decorators of the Place des Vosges. His style is frequently considered Baroque; yet few would argue that if anything was alien to the Baroque sensibility it was Cartesian thinking. On the Place des Vosges, the dominance of intellect over excess is never hard to detect. Yet there are still telltale signs of sublimated trouble. The street level and first and second floors of every pavilion may have been the picture of architectural harmony and built according to very strict specification—there were to be no deviations from the model supplied by King Henry IV’s designers (often thought to be Androuet du Cerceau and Claude Chastillion)—but the dormer windows on the top floors do not always match: they are each builder’s tiny insurrection against the master plan.

Henry IV, who favored the building of the Place, remains the most beloved French king: le bon roi or le vert galant (the ladies’ man), as he is traditionally called, famous for his wit, good cheer, sound judgment, and all-around hearty appetite. Every French peasant, he said, would have a chicken in his pot each Sunday. When told that he could become a French king provided he converted from Protestantism to Catholicism he did not bat an eyelash. Paris, he declared, was well worth a Mass. Like the Place Dauphine, the square’s cousin on the Île de la Cité, the Place des Vosges is built in a style that is recognizably Henry IV: all brick-and-stone facings, brick being, like the personality of Henry IV, down-to-earth, practical, basic, made for all times and all seasons. Though the Place des Vosges is elegant and posh, and is hardly spare, there is nothing palatial here. It also reflects the spirit of the high-ranking officials, entrepreneurs, and financiers to whom the king and his finance minister, Sully, had parceled out the land in 1605 on condition that each build a home at his own expense, according to a predetermined design. Some of them were born rich; others had made vast fortunes and, no doubt, intended both to keep them and to flaunt them. But like their king, they were neither garish nor gaudy: wealth hadn’t gone to their heads, just as power hadn’t gone to their king’s. Both forms of intoxication were due to happen, of course, but in another generation and under a very different monarch: Henry’s grandson Louis XIV.

The grounds on which Henry IV decided to build the new square had once been the site of the Hôtel des Tournelles, famous for its turrets, and where King Henry II had died in l559 as a result of a wound inflicted during a friendly joust with a man bearing the rather foreign-sounding name of Gabriel de Montgomery. Following Henry II’s death, his wife, Catherine de Médicis, had the Hôtel des Tournelles razed. To this day, Catherine is regarded as a mean, cunning, and vindictive queen, whose ugliest deed was the St. Bartholomew’s Day Massacre of 1572, during which hundreds of French Protestants were put to the sword. It is another one of those ironies of history that the Protestant Henry IV, who had hoped to placate French Catholics by marrying Catherine and Henry II’s daughter Queen Margot, was not only unable to forestall the massacre, which erupted immediately after his wedding, but would himself be felled by a religious fanatic forty years later a few blocks from where Henry II had died. He thus did not live to see his square completed.

Henry IV and Sully were far too practical to be called visionaries, but surely there must have been something of the visionary in each. They had originally intended the arcades to house common tradesmen, cloth manufacturers, and skilled foreign workers, most likely subsidized by the government. The idea was a good one, since Sully, like France’s other finance ministers, had had the wisdom to attract foreign workers to help France produce domestically and ultimately export what it would otherwise have had to purchase abroad. But in this case it proved too impractical. This, after all, was prime real estate. It was so exclusive an area that, rather than design a square whose buildings would boast façades looking out on the rest of Paris, the planners turned these elegant storefronts in on themselves—as though the enjoyment of façades were reserved not for the passerby, who might never even suspect the existence of this secluded Place, but strictly for the happy few.

The Place des Vosges has all the makings of a luxurious courtyard turned outside in, which is exactly what Corneille saw in his comedy La Place royale. Everyone lives close together, everyone moves in the same circles, and everyone knows everyone else’s business. Look out your window and you’ll spy everyone’s dirty laundry. And yet don’t be so sure, either: as Madame de Lafayette said of life at court, here nothing is ever as it seems. The Place des Vosges was, as Corneille had instantly guessed, not just the ideal gold coast but also the ideal stage.

None of the residents, however, had any doubt that they belonged at the center of the universe. They were prickly, caustic, arrogant, querulous, spiteful, frivolous, urbane, and, above all things, as self-centered as they ultimately turned out to be self-hating. Like the square itself, this world was so turned in on itself that if it was consumed by artifice, it was just as driven by the most corrosive and disquieting forms of introspection. No society, not even the ancient Greeks, had ever sliced itself open so neatly, so squarely, to peek into the mouth of the volcano, and then stood there frozen, gaping at its worst chimeras. They may have frolicked in public, but most were pessimists through and through. The irony that they shot at the world was nothing compared with that which they saved for themselves.

La Rochefoucauld, who wrote in the most chiseled sentences known to history, expressed this better than any of his contemporaries. His maxims are short, penetrating, and damning. “Our virtues are most frequently nothing but vices disguised.” “We always like those who admire us: we do not always like those whom we admire.” “If we had no faults, we would not take so much pleasure in noticing them in others.” “We confess our little faults only to conceal our larger ones.” “In the misfortune of our best friends, we find something that is not unpleasing.”

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It is hard to hear the echo of so much pessimism or intrigue on the square today. Art galleries, shops, restaurants, and even a tiny synagogue and a nursery school line the arcades. Access to the Place des Vosges is no longer restricted to those who possess a key—which used to be the case. Now, on a warm summer afternoon, one of the four manicured lawns—French gardens are always divided into four parts—is made available to the public, and here, lovers and parents with strollers can lounge about on the green in a manner that is still not quite characteristically Parisian. The Place lies at the heart of cultural activity in the Marais. Two blocks away is the Bastille Opera House; a few blocks west is the Musée Carnavalet; to the north, the Jewish Museum and the Picasso Museum. The rue Vieille-du-Temple, one of the most picturesque streets in the Marais, crosses what is still a Jewish neighborhood.

In the evening, the square teems with people who remind me that the SoHo look is either originally French or the latest export from New York. In either case, it suggests that everything is instantly globalized in today’s world. And yet, scratch the surface … and it’s still all there.

Which is why I wait until night. For then, sitting at one of the tables at the restaurant Coconnas, under the quiet arcades of the Pavillon du Roi, one can watch the whole square slip back a few centuries. Everyone comes alive—all the great men and women who walked the same pavement: Marion Delorme, Cardinal de Retz, the Duchesse de Longueville, and especially La Rochefoucauld, who would arrive at the Place des Vosges in the evening, his gouty body trundling ever so cautiously under the arcades as he headed toward no. 5 to visit Madame de Sablé. No doubt, his gaze wandered to no. 18, where more than a decade earlier his former mistress, the Duchesse de Longueville, had watched from her window as Coligny had championed her cause and then died for it. He and the Cardinal de Retz and the Duchesse had joined the Fronde in their younger days, only to end up writing lacerating character assassinations of one another. Now the most defeated and disenchanted man in the world—putting up a front, calling his mask a mask, which is how he hid his sorrows in love, in politics, and in everything else—La Rochefoucauld would arrive here to try to put a less sinister spin on his tragic view of life by chiseling maxim after maxim in the company of friends. “True love is like ghosts, which everybody talks about and few have seen.” “If we judge love by the majority of its consequences, it is more like hatred than like friendship.” “No disguise can forever hide love when it exists, or simulate it when it doesn’t.”

I think I hear the clatter of horses’ hooves bringing salon guests in their carriage, the brawling and catcalling of hooligans wandering into the square, the yelp of stray dogs, the squeak of doors opened halfway and then just as swiftly shut. I can see lights behind the French windows. Then I must imagine these lights going out, one by one, followed by the sound of doors and of footsteps and carriage wheels on the cobblestones again, not everyone eager to run into anyone else, yet everyone forced to exchange perfunctory pleasantries under the arcades, as some head home two or three doors away or pretend to head home but head elsewhere instead.

An hour later the square is quiet.

On my last evening in Paris, I drop by L’Ambroisie. It’s almost closing time. I have come to inquire about the name of the dessert whiskey they had offered us at the end of our previous evening’s meal. The waiter does not recall.

He summons the sommelier, who appears, like an actor, from behind a thick curtain. The man seems pleased by the question. The whiskey’s name is Poit Dhubh, aged twenty-one years. Before I know it he brings out two bottles, pours a generous amount from one, and then asks me to sample the other. These, it occurs to me, are the best things I’ve drunk during a week in France. I find it strange, I say, that I should end my visit by discovering something Scottish and not French. One of the waiters standing nearby comes forward and says it is not entirely surprising. “Why so?” I ask. “Had it not been for the Scotsman Montgomery, who by accident killed Henry II during a joust, the Hôtel des Tournelles would never have been leveled and therefore the Place des Vosges would never have been built!”

I leave the restaurant. There are people awaiting taxis outside. Everyone is speaking English. Suddenly, from nowhere, four youths appear on skateboards, speeding along the gallery, yelling at one another amid the deafening rattle of their wheels, mindless of everyone and everything in their path as they course through the arcades. As though on cue, all bend their knees at the same time and, with their palms outstretched like surfers about to take a dangerously high wave, they tip their skateboards, jumping over the curb and onto the street, riding all the way past the cruel Rouillac’s house, past the bend around Victor Hugo’s, finally disappearing into the night.

Only then can I imagine the sound of another group of young men. They are shouting—some cursing, some urging one another on, still others hastily ganging up for the kill. I can hear the ring of rapiers being drawn, the yells of the frightened, everyone on the Place suddenly alert, peering out their windows, petrified. I look out and try to imagine how the torches of the four swordsmen must have swung in pitch darkness on that cold night in January 1614. How very, very long ago it all seems, and yet—as I look at the lights across the park—it feels like yesterday. And like all visitors to the Place des Vosges, I wonder whether this is an instance of the present intruding on the past or of the past forever repeated in the present. But then, it occurs to me, this is also why one comes to stay here for a week: not to forget the present, or to restore the past, but to forget that they are so profoundly different.